Electronic Communication

Does anyone remember the days of AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger, or Yahoo! Messenger? How about ICQ? It seems almost as if today everyone has forgotten those in favor of a rather primitive (if only the chat feature is looked at) version of the once dominant instant messengers?

That's right, I am talking about Facebook Chat. Facebook Chat reminds me a lot about the early days of IM where everyone would be having some issue, back when I was on BigBlueBall.com. However now it seems the only problems you hear about are from Facebook, and really the only problems you experience are on Facebook's Chat. Recently(ish) they have switched over to an XMPP protocol for their chat which improved the experience seven-fold. XMPP is also known as Jabber which Google Talk uses, for those of you who have seen it in Gmail.

Why care about Facebook Chat? Quite simply: People see that as the only instant messenger now. I can not remember the last time I had a conversation on AIM or MSN. It is a shame really as I prefer client based instant messengers, not web based. I like that notification on my desktop and not having to always have that browser window open.

AIM solved this for me as in their latest stuff, as I have probably said before now lets you connect to Facebook Chat. You can also do this with Pidgin, Trillian, and Digsby, although I have had less of a success rate with those.

But is it just me or do you miss the days of AIM/MSN/Y! and desktop IMing?

Twitter: The Social Resource

My experiences with Twitter since beginning the blog have been very interesting. I have gotten more and more followers on Twitter simply based on what I have in my blog. Some might think that this is just, "Well you said 'iPhone' in the blog title so a small tech blog will follow you."

For some of my followers it is that, however today I got a notification that The Yosemite Blog was following me. This was interesting as I never posted anything about Yosemite in my blog titles, however I did talk about the place in my posts. And what does this mean? People are actually reading my blog.

Twitter is a semi-decent tool to measure this with. If people reply, retweet, or follow you then you know someone is actually paying attention, assuming that it isn't one of the Twitter spam accounts. What you get with Twitter isn't the typical "You got x number from US, y from Canada, most visited page was z," no, what you get content specific highlighting.

Content specific highlighting is a great way to get the opinion of what people enjoy based on what key words you can grab from their Twitter account and the connections you can make to your own blog, site, service, etc. I had always thought of Twitter as simply s social network, but it could even be a greater resource then one at first thought.

Just another neat way to figure out what the hits and misses are.

Blog Kindle-Compatible!

With the new Kindle Software Update 2.5 it got me messing around with my Kindle again. Let me tell you how handy the new features of the PDF reader are. You can actually zoom in on your content and span across it. I do not know why this wasn't first included but now that it is reading PDFs will be much easier. I tried this out with a Latin Glossary, worked out pretty well. Everything scaled very nicely.

Other features which sounded more neat on screen then in use was the Twitter and Facebook integration.

How I Understood It:
Full integration with Twitter and Facebook. Update your statuses wherever you go with a nice UI and read friends' posts.

What It Actually Is:
You can select/highlight text and then tweet that passage plus other notes to your friends on Twitter and Facebook. You could simply just give status updates and select like a space or something, but it just isn't what I thought it was at all. Also it took a long time to send the update out, which I wasn't too pleased with, then it gives you this long URL. You can check out my tweet from Kindle here.

A horse of course. Kindle testing http://amzn.com/k/2UTMI7BCLAZIY #Kindle

While playing with my Kindle, I found out that my blog is fully Kindle Compatible, if using Basic Mode. It works okay in Advanced but looks a little weird.

By the way, those of you who clicked on the World Cup link for my blog, you can check out that service and make any web page musically beautiful. 

And to those who didn't see the World Cup link for my blog, well here you go.

Ubuntu - It is actually all right.

Ubuntu, most "geeks" know about it. It is a quite popular Linux distribution that has the single aim of becoming user friendly, yet still letting the "geeks" have fun with developing and customization, and well every reason in the past as to why you would get Linux.

I got the Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.04, and at first, simply not having much Linux experience at all, I removed it. I then went back to Windows 7. However when I woke up the next day I felt I just had to give it another chance. I went and did that and haven't looked back. Now note, I wouldn't use this as a main OS on my main computer, but it is pretty fun once you get into it.

Ubuntu has a few neat features such as a single notification area icon for all of your social needs. Now this is pretty cool and it is customizable. If any of those applications where people are talking to you need your attention the color of the icon changes and you can see who needs you and where. Social networking is very integrated into the OS, which really is a neat way to go. 

Then linked with your login is all of your instant messaging information, kind of like the Windows Live Passport being linked to your Windows account, as well as a service to let other Ubuntu users find you if you are on the same network. 

Anyway, there are bunches of neat things in which just about someone has made an app for it and it is different from Windows so you won't feel this is just a copy. Also, on the Netbook version they have this whole interface geared towards the mobile desktop and works pretty decently. Every application is put into a group such as Office, Accessories, System, WINE, etc. These groups are lined up along the side and it is just a simplified way of getting to what you want quicker. 

I have fell in somewhat of a computer love with Ubuntu.

Social Network Fiend

I have recently realized that social networks have completely changed how I use the internet and how I collaborate with people. After Digsby stopped working with Facebook chat for me I looked elsewhere. During this searching I found, yes I know but bear with me, AIM. The latest version of AIM had two major components integrated with it: Facebook Chat and this service called "Lifestream", which is all of your social networks in one place.

It worked. Getting AIM set up for Facebook was simple and so was Lifestream, everything was good except that I still had to run Digsby for all of my mail accounts, and the built in version of Lifestream didn't work quite as well I wanted, so I had to stick to Digsby for these services.

After realizing that Digsby wasn't working properly with MSN/WLM, I just decided to drop the program entirely. On Neowin there is a thread about "Apps For Windows 7 In Mind." These basically show notifications and support jumplists, something at first I thought was a novelty but really ended up being quite interesting. I downloaded "Gmail Notifier Plus" and it works fantastically. You can preview your messages, go to your inbox, even has support for Google Apps.

So I was set for mail, but what about everything else? AIM's built in lifestream didn't work as I needed it to so I went off searching for a Facebook/Twitter client with Windows 7 in mind. What did I come up with? MetroTwit and Fishbowl. MetroTwit uses the "Metro" look and feel and provides a pretty nice Twitter client, has Windows 7 integration such as notifications, it was great. However no Facebook support, which is where Fishbowl comes in. I really liked the Fishbowl application, it was essentially a more user-friendly version of Facebook built with Silverlight. Only problem is that the notifications in the taskbar didn't show all updates and there were no options to change this.

Back at square one, I decide to download the Official AOL Lifestream client. It is an Adobe AIR application, but this one works much better than the built in one with AIM. When you get new messages it blinks the taskbar icon. Not exactly Windows 7 integration but it at least did what I wanted it too and told me when new items came in.

Somewhat tempted to come up with my own application, I doubt with all of the many programs it is that difficult anyway. We'll see.

Links:
MetroTwit
AIM
Lifestream
Fishbowl
"Apps With Windows 7 In Mind"

My Electric Security Blanket

After talking with a friend, yeah I have those, today it helped me realize just why I, and I am sure many others may dislike the general society but enjoy IRC or Social networking.

Basically, the computer is a place where you have total control. You get to choose who sees you, what people can post about you on your pages, and in my case, you know a bit more than lots of the common folk on there. Essentially, you are "king." This power is what draws me to the electric world.

Behind my desk if I don't like a person, I can ban them and never have to talk to them again. Or, if they end up annoying me with lots of status updates, simply 'Remove Friend'. They don't realize this for a while and you can just sit back and read about the people you actually care to listen to.

Not to mention, you are in a comfortable environment, and even if you are on the road you still have your flash drive, a few key apps, and the gateway to your kingdom.

"It is sometimes preferred when people are no more than an avatar and some text."