This is the fourth web 2.0 company I’m talking about. If you haven’t already, read the introduction post here, or about the other services: flickr (for pictures) or last.fm (for music), del.icio.us (for bookmarks).
Twitter is a virtually useless and odd site. It just is a place where people send and receive micro-updates. Seriously, thats it. You can just IM a bot, and it updates your current status to be whatever you just IMed. Also, you can get updates from your friends/contacts IMed back to you. The website extends into the cellphoneland because you can get / send messages from your cellphone, but I have never used this feature.
It actually is a pretty interesting site. I have subscribed to very few people (really only bots that give updates on woot.com), but it is kinda nifty. It is just like facebooks “current status” feature. The only difference is that this can be sent from IM / cellphones (and this came first). Honestly if facebook offered the same functionality I’d probably ditch this, but then I don’t really know if I want to broadcast the information to my entire social network on facebook. I’d much rather the random strangers who might happen to come across my website.
That is really the only reason I use the service. See that “Currently” thing in the top right corner of the webpage? Well, that is my “current” twitter message. I like it because it means that to put a message on my website, all I have to do is IM something. Again it contributes to the illusion of content and updates on my website.
Sure view my page on twitter. See if I care. Username = hypn0toad
This is the third web 2.0 company I’m talking about. If you haven’t already, read the introduction post here, or about the other services: flickr (for pictures) or last.fm (for music).
Del.icio.us is probably one of the weirdest website addresses you have ever seen. It is a “social” bookmarking site. You can use it to keep track of your bookmarks and can have it so that all of your bookmarks are nicely tagged (another web 2.0 term.. tagging is everywhere now, and del.icio.us was one of the first sites where I had ever heard it used.. tagging something is associating certain words with the thing, so it will show up in search results even if that word doesn’t appear in the description or title).
Anyways, you probably already have bookmarks. Yeah, they just show up in firefox and internet explorer. What makes these better? Not too much actually. I use it all of the time to keep track of websites that I want to look at or might want to look at later. I find a lot of random stuff both at work and at home, and while I might not want to read it or use it immediately, I might want it later. I use del.icio.us to keep track of these bookmarks. The stuff that I want to look at later is untagged (shows up as system:unfiled) and you can see that it backs up a lot. I try to keep my firefox bookmarks more restricted to tools and useful websites, and del.icio.us for points of interest along with everything else. The del.icio.us toolbar for firefox makes everything easier, and shows at the top the most recent things that I have bookmarked.
I used to have all of my del.icio.us bookmarks integrated into this site, but then the plugin broke (and the author never fixed it). I still have something where you can see the most recent things that I have bookmarked. While this is mildly entertaining, it just shows that I’m still alive I guess. It is probably the most updated part of my website, and also is probably the least viewed.
If you want to see my bookmarks, i’m nmcbean over there.
This is the second web 2.0 company I’m talking about. If you haven’t already, read the introduction post here, or about the other service, flickr, here.
I have music. I have iTunes and hate it, but I also have an ipod, so I have to use this horrible software. I admit that it is good for a mac, but I don’t have and hopefully will never have a mac. Anyways, I have been getting by just using iTunes to manage my music. Anyways, I just got distracted on a rant. The point is that I have music, yay! I like finding new music but I tend to find it through friends and the radio. There are a number of websites that look at your music and then try to play music they think you will like (pandora and last.fm are the biggest competitors so far). Anyways, I don’t care about this service. I tried it out, but it seemed to end up playing too much music that I hated.
Why do I list last.fm do I hear you asking? Well, Last.fm also can keep track of what you are listening. I really seem to get interested in information. iTunes is great and all with tracking how many times I’ve played a song, but I hunger for more. Last.fm (which even syncs with songs you play on your ipod) can keep track of everything you are listening to. It then can make lots of pretty graphs and give you lots of information. Just take a look at my page. Now if you ask me what music I like I don’t have to scramble for random artists, you can just look at what I have and have listened to.
The interesting part is that I can use this information in other ways. I’ll probably add a little widget to the side of the front page at some time that just displays the last 3 songs i’ve listened to or something. More useless information, but I find it kinda.. web 2.0esque.
If you decide to use last.fm, or just are curious about my habits, check me out there. Username: farnsw0rth (I recently made the farnsw0rth account after being frustrated that hypn0toad was taken. Then I later realized that i had made the hypn0toad account a long time ago. Oops. Since I had more information on farnw0rth I deleted the hypn0taod)
