Think that The_Real_Shaq is good on Twitter? Then you obviously aren’t following LeVar Burton. Comedy gold from Mr Geordi La Forge himself.
Adding AIM contacts to GChat? Don’t mind if I do! Is there seriously anything that Gmail can’t do? I want it to have my babies.
I’m a big fan of consolidating as much as possible when it comes to pretty much everything, and this is right up my alley. I’ve got Gmail (and therefore Gchat) open all day while at work, which now includes AIM too.
At home, I use Pidgin, which logs into my Gchat, AIM and MSN accounts, all in one handy program. It even checks my email too, so I don’t have to keep a browser tab open. And it is an IRC client to boot, which I dip into every so often.
Plus, I just installed an add-on which brings Facebook Chat into the Pidgin fold too. It’s just so easy.
My friends are split across all these networks courtesy of geography. My American friends are split between AIM and Gchat, whereas the Brits and European people tend to be on MSN.
I don’t want to be a service snob, so just use all of them in one easy place. Currently, that’s Pidgin, and Gmail/chat as a daytime substitute. It’s these kinds of cross-platform services that make everyone’s lives easier, and I’m a big fan.
Cool, I’ve just passed the 20,000 songs mark on last.fm. It’s taken me just over 3 years, which is relatively surprising. I think it’s because I’ve only figured out how to put my iPod listening stats on there in the last six months.
I do most of my listening on the move, so there’s a good chunk of my listening history missing. But I tend to just put the iPod on random anyway, so I doubt that there’s much skewing of the statistics.
The 20,000th song itself? Cowboy Junkies - Sweet Jane. I was listening to the Natural Born Killers soundtrack, which is plain awesome.
Damn.
Oooh, by the way, I’m on Facebook now. I did it all by myself too, on the computer! It’s quite good, isn’t it? It’s like email, right? I just put her name in, and the list comes up. You just click it, but you can’t see their page or anything, because they haven’t said ‘Yes’ yet.
My mum, on the phone earlier.
I think today could be the day on which I finally delete my Facebook account for good.
I made the switch to Gmail the other day, and after a few days of getting used to it, I have to say that I’m probably hooked. Previously, I used Thunderbird at home and my .com hosting’s webmail services while at work. I love Thunderbird, but the latter was a bit more unwieldy.
The chief problem was it’s utter inability to work without javascript and pop-ups, which made it pretty useless on my blackberry and/or mobile. Not that I want to be 100% addicted to my personal email 24/7 (it’s bad enough having work emails to deal with all the time), but it’d be handy to be able to access it a bit more easily.
Gmail was a piece of piss to set up, including connecting to my .com hosting’s POP and IMAP servers. I can still send from my gooneruk.com address through Gmail, which was the most important thing for me. I’ve had that address for years, and didn’t want to change at all.
It’s odd becoming accustomed to the whole threaded replies concept, but it’s growing on me. My favourite aspect is labels, which are incredibly useful. My inbox is like a multi-coloured palette today, which makes for simple organisation and spotting relevant emails.
Is Gchat a big thing? I’m rob.gooneruk on there, I think. Oh, and importing my address book from Thunderbird took a bit of work, but I got there in the end!
My main reason for moving is that I’m due a new mobile soon, and am thinking of changing my contract to add some more data allowance. Gmail seems to be very accessible on the move (I’ve already installed the app on my work Blackberry), and it’ll probably make me a more frequent emailer if I can use it remotely too, on my own phone.
Forget How You Read News Online
Via butterflyeffect
I just had a little play with this, and it is amazing. Incredibly clever and infinitely customisable, it really is a completely new way of looking at news.
One minor flaw: to read an actual story, it opens a new tab, rather than incorporating it into the main window. For ads, etc?
Once it becomes possible to import your own RSS feeds (a la Netvibes), it will be even better. For now, we’re stuck with MSNBC.
I think Adocu.com has died, to all intents and purposes. I wrote about it when it first came out and was all over TechCrunch, etc, and at the time I said it needed extra features, like an API and so on.
An API was released, as were RSS feeds, but it was limited at best. I tried to go through all manner of hoops on Yahoo Pipes to create an embeddable HTML widget, but couldn’t get anywhere. Twitter has this down to a tee, which is why you see Twitter statuses on many blogs nowadays.
Adocu just never grabbed the public imagination, and you can see an illustration of this in the Public Feed. Bearing in mind that this is supposed to be the activity of every user, it’s a little worrying that two of my updates crop up, 25 hours apart.
Can it really be that only 7 people have used Adocu in that period? Yikes. That’s not a massive base of returning users, and nowhere near a critical mass.
I think we can officially consign Adocu to the “nice idea, but it didn’t work” pile.
"It's fun enacting the D.M.C.A!"
Ever wanted to know whether the lyrics to YMCA could be redone to commemorate the passing of the DMCA? Well, they can. Kudos to croooner at reddit.
Lfarm’s posts reminded me that I hadn’t been to see the Telectroscope yet here in London. I’ve got nothing on after work, so will pop along for a gander.
I reckon I’ll be there about 6.30 our time, which I believe is 1.30 in New York. See you there?
