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Technology - 5. page

NetworkedBlogs App on Facebook

This is a very smart move for Facebook. Although I’ve subscribed to Facebook since it was just a college network, I quickly lost interest once they started allowing all kinds of stupid games and useless applications. But now you can follow blogs from Facebook, which is a very useful and productive tool.

Blog reading on Facebook is becoming a popular activity. One of the top applications for following blogs through the social networking site is NetworkedBlogs, an app which launched last year bringing the blog community to the Facebook platform. Half MyBlogLog, half RSS reader, the application lets users add their blog, favorite the blogs of their friends, and click through the latest headlines. Most importantly, the app brings blogs to the more mainstream Facebook audience.

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Twitter Tweets

Twitters popularity is growing quickly. The site’s membership has increased by 900% in one year! It is being used not only to stay up-to-date with friends, it is also being used for marketing, as a news source and as a way to get just about any information instantly; short and tweet…

I just read a tweet stating that twitter received another $35 million in venture capital. This money is added to $20 million from past investments. Yet twitter currently makes no money at all! They don’t sell advertising and their service is free to users. Interesting.

But investors obviously see money-making potential in twitter. It will be interesting to see how they will make a profit for their investors. Hopefully the inevitable changes will be positive for users.

Sorry to long;-)

And happy Friday the 13th!

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WhiteHouse.gov

As soon as Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States, his new WhiteHouse.gov site went public.  One of the first signs that this “Change” will be good.  This tech-savvy president understands the importance of the internet in our new globel society.  If you’ve ever visited the old site, you will immediately see improvement as the first “wired president” takes advantage of the technology that helped to get him elected.

The new site is interactive and includes a blog.  Obama plans to use this new site to stay connected with citizens through the blog and also email and video updates.

A couple of things that struck me on my first visit was that you can email the president from the site and subscribe to email updates.

On the contact us page it states:  “President Obama is committed to creating the most open and accessible administration in American history.”

Under agenda and disabilities, I found the following quote:

“We must build a world free of unnecessary barriers, stereotypes, and discrimination…. policies must be developed, attitudes must be shaped, and buildings and organizations must be designed to ensure that everyone has a chance to get the education they need and live independently as full citizens in their communities.”
— Barack Obama, April 11, 2008

p.s.  Remember it’s whitehouse.gov, not to be confused with whitehouse.org, which is a spoof site.  Got to love the Internet!

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Inauguration Day on Twitter

According to twitter’s blog, they received 5 times the normal tweets per second which peaked as Obama was being sworn in as the 44th president of the United States.

Other social-networking sites also reported surges.  Facebook received more than one million status updates with an average of over 4,000 updates per hour, which peaked during Obama’s inaugural speech.  This was a record for Facebook, one of the Internets most popular social networks.

My tweets and updates were among the millions who watched the days events and followed the news on-line.  The internet sure can bring people together and it makes the world a much smaller place.  I thought Barack’s speech was excellent and right for the times.  The world has changed and we need to adapt.  It is such a relief to have a competent leader in the White House during these difficult times.

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twitter

It’s tough keeping up with all the latest trends in technology, especially on the web. So many sites and so little time… and now with the explosion of social networking sites it’s just about impossible to keep up. I try as many new sites as I can and stick with the ones I like, until I get tired of them or until they disappear.

Aside from my therapy (disability-related listservs and message boards), my first real web addiction was TextAmerica (TA), which unfortunately died in 2007. TA was a moblogging site, which focused on uploading camera phone photos. The IT guru from TA has started a new site called fragmob, which I use, but not nearly as much as I used TA. I basically just upload my camera photos to fragmob. After TA went under, I moved my online photos to Flickr, which I like. Most of my TA friends also moved to Flickr, but still it’s not the same as the old TA. I enjoy taking and sharing photos, which is the main draw to Flickr.

For social networking, I’m currently on FaceBook. It is definitely a class above MySpace (which I don’t like at all). I don’t spend a whole lot of time on FaceBook. But these days, having a FaceBook page is almost as necessary as having an email address. And it is a great way to network and reconnect with old friends.

For blogging, I like WordPress. The nice thing about WordPress – in addition to wordpress.com – is that the program that powers the blog is an open source program that can be downloaded and installed on any domain. When I first set up my personal blog back in 2006, the fun for me was figuring out how to install and set up a self-hosted blog. It was a bit of a learning curve, as it involved some PHP, CSS and MYSQL stuff. Once my blog was actually up and running, I really didn’t have much to say. Although when the presidential primaries started heating up, I seemed to find plenty to talk about.

I’m getting way off track. I wanted to talk a bit about Twitter. I’ve been hearing a lot of twitter about Twitter. This service is unlike other social networks, because it limits posts to just 140 characters. Short and tweet!

Why only 140 characters? Because that is the limit for cell phone SMS and the service started more as a way to post text messages to the web.

What can you say in 140 characters? Often times, not much.

The idea is to answer the basic question “What are you doing?” in 140 characters or less. The cool thing about twitter is that you can send your “tweets” right from your cell phone, from your desk top or from twitter.com. Your messages are then sent to people who subscribe to your tweets. Another cool thing is that you can have your tweets automatically forwarded to your FaceBook wall or your blog via widgets. My tweets (or brain farts, as I call them) are in the sidebar to the right of this blog.

Is anyone really interested in my daily activities or random thoughts? It doesn’t really matter to me, as long as it’s fun. Will I become a twitterholic? We shall see…

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