Android App Review: Tweetdeck Beta

Publisher: Tweetdeck.com
Platform: Android (2.0 or higher)
Cost: Free!
[Signup Link]
Release Date: August 12, 2010
Version Reviewed: 0.9.3

With great fanfare, Tweetdeck announced the release of the public beta for their Tweetdeck Android app.  Tweetdeck has been working on the application for several months, and promised to “push the boundaries” of the Android app experience.  Have they delivered?  Read on to find out. Continue reading Android App Review: Tweetdeck Beta

National De-Lurking Day!

They say that 87% of all statistics are made up on the spot, and 63% of all those crazy holidays you hear about completely don’t exist. It may not actually be National De-Lurking Day, but we here at Hijinks Inc. are choosing to celebrate it today.

I ran across an article on this website and thought that we ought to have a day to de-lurk and get to know some of you who frequent our website, not only to make us feel better about ourselves, but because we’d like to continue to write about the stuff that interests you.

So here’s what we’d like you to do, we’d appreciate it if you would take some time and leave us a comment or two. We’d love it if you’d look over a few of our articles and comment on all of them. In fact, over the course of the next 30 days, each comment you leave (worthwhile comments only, don’t break a single comment into 2 or 3 just to up your total) will qualify you to win a $25 iTunes gift card. The more comments you leave, the more you’ll be qualified to win!

If you choose to add a comment below, don’t think of it as a favor to me but as a favor to everyone else. See, as much as I enjoy reading a comment, I can assure you many comments are added just because other comments preceded them.

In this vein, if you choose to de-lurk and leave a comment, here’s what to do:

  1. Whether you are reading this in a feed reader, an email message, or a syndicated blog post somewhere, click here to visit the actual post.
  2. Scroll to the bottom of the page and follow the directions to add a comment, or jump straight to this page to register for an account.
  3. Type in your email address so I can email you privately, thanking you for de-lurking.
  4. Type in your blog address, or your corporate website, or maybe your Facebook page. Somewhere where I and others can click your name (your web link will be linked to your name) and read more about you.
  5. Want to take a step further? Become our fan on Facebook for an extra shot at winning.

Please don’t be shy. Care to de-lurk now?

Google Me

Google Me - A Facebook Killer?The internet has been abuzz ever since Kevin Rose drunkenly tweeted that Google was launching a Facebook competitor and was going to call it Google Me, though still no confirmation from Google, but that’s not really very surprising.

My knee-jerk reaction to this “announcement” was something along the lines of “WTH, Google?!”. Have they so quickly forgotten just how successful their Twitter killer, Google Buzz was? Seriously,  hasn’t Google already made enough failed attempts at social networking? Let’s review… Orkut (fail), Google Profiles (meh), the afore mentioned Google Buzz (eh), and to a degree Google Wave (blah). Name one of those products that’s successful by any stretch of the imagination. And no, just because Leo Laporte uses Buzz does not make it successful.

Currently Google does one thing well in the social scene, and that’s aggregate your social content. For example, Social Circle (beta) is a nice feature added to the results page which displays your friends tweets and blog posts that might be related to your search, they also have fairly robust support for importing your content from various sources into Buzz, though that’s still not enough to get me to actually use Buzz.

There’s also some speculation that Google Me will just be a more robust version of Google Profiles, building off the existing profiles that users have setup and expanding their functionality, which would make sense. But at that point why bother renaming it. And would really compete with Facebook?

Bottom line here, I agree Facebook needs to die and Google might seem to be the best company for the job, but I don’t think given their track record of late that they’ll be able to pull it off.

Shame On Facebook

After posting on how to run Facebook Chat from your Firefox sidebar, I got to thinking about the other potential usages of popout.php. More specifically, using it as a browser based chat client on the iPhone. Sadly though, Facebook has neglected to allow iPhone/iPod touch users the ability to run Facebook Chat from Mobile Safari. Lame!

Anyhow, with my limited programming skills I’m toying with a way around this, but don’t expect any miracles since I don’t really plan on using Facebook Chat all that often.