Social Media’s Trojan Horse for the E… June 27, 2008
Posted by Doriano "Paisano" Carta in Enterprise, social networks.Tags: Enterprise 2.0
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Don’t look now but social media and social networking tools have begun its assault on the enterprise! They have successfully penetrated company firewalls and have started to infiltrate corporate email systems without anyone noticing yet!
How have they accomplished this impressive task despite all of the security measures that anti-social media administrators have set in place? Well, very simply and quietly via plug-ins such as the clever Outlook email service called XOBNI which has been covered on here previously.
The latest version of Xobni (inbox spelled backwards by the way) includes a hook into LinkedIn which means whenever you are viewing an email in Outlook you can now see their LinkedIn profile and information! This includes their photo, title, current emplorer details and much more! It might not look or sound like a big deal but trust me, this is a game-changer folks!
This is a major breakthrough for the future of the enterprise and incorporating the best of social media into the workplace. It is the shot heard round the world wide web. Ok, maybe it’s more of a small ripple in the ocean which ultimately becomes a tidal wave down the stream!
The concept of sneaking social media into the enterprise has been covered on here before but that process was far more obvious than this new stealth method. Talk about sneaky! Xobni has established a blueprint for all other web 2.0 services that want to go to work with corporate America and world wide for that matter. They just need to figure out how to present their service in a similar subtle and useful manner. Sometimes a whisper is far more powerful than a shout.
For the record, Xobni isn’t the first service to attempt this invasion of the enterprise, but they have come up with the best and most useful service. Some others have managed to scale the walls of IT defense. Here are a couple that come to mind that I used a great deal:
Breaking & Entering Innovators
Plaxo was actually the first service that I can recall that plugged into your Outlook client and connected you to your online account and all your contacts and friends. When they added their Pulse technology you then had your entire social network in your Outlook toolbar! Think FriendFeed for your email client. Here’s the Outlook plugin for Plaxo.
Outwit was another Outlook plugin that allowed you to read and post Twitter messages. It didn’t have all the bells and whistles of other Twitter clients such as Thwirl but it was and still is a very clever way to sneak in a web service that blended well with your existing business communication tool, in this case your email client.
Utterz 2.0 June 25, 2008
Posted by Doriano "Paisano" Carta in Blogs, Mobile, Online Services, Social Media, social networks.Tags: utterz
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Utterz 2.0 is now LIVE! The biggest change is the user interface of the home page. It is much cleaner, less cluttered and easier to use! Check it out here:
New Profile URL
User profile pages are also vastly improved and easier to remember. The URL is no longer this long and hideously cryptic address! Instead, it’s as simple as Pai. http://www.utterz.com/Paisano
Mobile Utterz
Using utterz on your mobile device is even better than ever! Call: 1-712-432-6666 *record, listen AND reply.
- Video, pics, text:
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-public: go@utterz.com
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-private: private@utterz.com
- Title your last utter:
- title@utterz.com
Look at all the new options available from your cell phone’s keypad! http://www.utterz.com/u/cli_doc.php
Go to m.utterz.com from your handset to browse and reply to friends’ messages
Sending a message to go@utterz.com or private@utterz.com within 10 minutes of recording matches up your photo, video, or text with the recording.
New Personal Email Address
Members now get their own personal email address for easier direct communication.
For example, send a message to paisano@utterz.com and it will get routed to me instantly.
Also, taking a queue from Twitter, You can now send an utter to someone’s inbox by including ‘@username’ anywhere in the text of your message!
Finding Friends
Adding your friends from your address book or other services such as Twitter has also become much better! Just login to your service and Utterz will show you which friends already belong to Utterz. Just click follow and you will be linked to them on Utterz. http://www.utterz.com/u/find_friends/network-twitter
Come check it out!
I.T. Happens No. 12 June 19, 2008
Posted by Doriano "Paisano" Carta in Comic Strips, IT Happens.Tags: Comics, IT Happens, toons
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Is your doctor web savvy and into the whole social media and web 2.0 thing?
Listen carefully for keywords he/she might use.
Here’s the entire “I.T. Happens Series“
Groups 2.0 June 17, 2008
Posted by Doriano "Paisano" Carta in Google, Web 2.0, Yahoo.Tags: Aggregators, Google Groups, Grouply, Groups, Yahoo Groups
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Grouply strives to become the Friendfeed of online groups by aggregating all of the different groups you belong to on sites such Yahoo Groups and Google Groups. The concept is excellent because it saves a great deal of time and effort by allowing you to keep up with all of your messages and groups from a single centralized place. See image below.
The Grouply Smart Digesttm delivers a daily personalized email summarizing new messages across all your groups. It highlights messages of interest and intelligently summarizes message conversations
Centralized Group Calendar
One of the best features is the way Grouply manages all of the different calendars and appointments that you have spread out across your different groups and services.
Global Search
Grouply provides fast, easy-to-use search of messages across all your groups. Quickly refine your results by group, message type, tags (topics), and rating. And you can save your search to create your own custom lists and trigger alerts. You can quickly search, browse, and bookmark messages across all your groups.
Final Thoughts
In our ever-increasing volume of data in the information age, an aggregator for groups is an excellent tool to have available to us. Hopefully Grouply will provide support for other group services out there and perhaps for message forums as well.
Never Miss another Tweet June 13, 2008
Posted by Doriano "Paisano" Carta in Blogs, twitter.Tags: twitter
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One of the downsides of having a large group of friends on Twitter is the difficulty in following all of the tweets directed at you. In most cases, it’s impossible to catch all of the messages that normally would interest you.
Thus, most of us are relegated to using twitter search engines such as Summize or TweetScan. While both are fine services, they are manual processes that take time that we don’t normally have.
Enter TweetBeep which can send you email alerts whenever someone mentions you, your blog or any other keyword you want to track. For example, whenever someone mentions your name with or without the @ sign it will be captured and a email will be sent with all of the tweets every hour or once a day (your choice). If you want to be alerted for any mention of your websites or blogs then those alerts will take place instantly because the searches are performed live on twitter. The nice thing is that this works even when people use URL shortening services.
Final Thoughts
Search alert tools such as TweetBeep and SM2 (covered in “What About Me“) allow us to keep tabs on everything that’s important to us on the ever expanding information super-highway (Thank you Al Gore!). It’s like having our very own private investigators combing the web for us.
These time-savers are much appreciated as we become increasingly busy. Thanks to these types of services we never have to miss anything again.
Twhirl’s Firehose Filter June 11, 2008
Posted by Doriano "Paisano" Carta in Blogs, twitter.Tags: Friendfeed, Twhirl, twitter
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The new Twhirl update (0.8.2) has included a much needed new feature for everyone who has ever wanted to create groups for twitter. They now support Rooms on FriendFeed which means you can now filter your firehose of information to whatever you want according to the room you join or create.
For example, you can create a room for your favorite sports team and see only updates on that topic from the people who join that room. Likewise for any other topic such as Social Media, Stamp Collecting, or whatever the case may be. Here’s the room filter option on the bottom right of the FriendFeed client window (the pound sign #): I’ve created a room for Utterz which is selected in the following image.
The beauty is that you can quickly and easily jump from room to room without impacting your other Twhirl window which contains all of your twitter messages. Thus, the digital age’s equivalent of walking and chewing gum at the same time!
Yes, Twitter should’ve done this type of thing long ago, but that’s all right. Just be glad this is here now. We finally have a useful tool that will help us drink from that firehose without getting soaking wet!
iRevolution: Breaking the chains from Apple and AT&T June 10, 2008
Posted by Doriano "Paisano" Carta in Apple, Gadgets, Mobile, Uncategorized.Tags: Apple, at&t, iphone, ziphone
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While everyone is excited about the new 3G iphone (as I am), I feel compelled to complain about the exclusive distribution deal that Apple and AT&T have in place for this beautiful little gadget! I don’t like exclusive deals like this and hope that more of us complain about it so that it doesn’t become a common business practice.
Choice
This is the United States of America and we believe in our freedom of choice! In this day and age I find it appalling that we are forced to purchase a mobile device from one specific carrier! How did this happen? There’s no way that we should stand for this.
We should be allowed to use whatever carrier we want to use: T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon, whatever! Shame on Apple and AT&T for this blatant money grub maneuver. Our best interests were not considered one iota! They only thing they focused on was the bottom line which was profit and revenue.
The iRevolution Has Begun!
What can we do about this? Well, a revolution has begun already. People are going with other phones such as the Blackberry. Others are waiting for the GPhone from Google slated for release this fall. Another thing that many frustrated consumers are doing is unlocking the iPhone so that they can use the carrier of their choice! Yes, it’s totally legal, easy to do and get this, it’s free!
Unleashing the Beast
http://www.ziphone.org is the best place to start. It’s been around a long time and has been very successful even for the most novice of users. They’re already working on the 3G version so that will be available very soon. Once you do this, then you will be able to use the carrier that YOU, not Apple or AT&T wants you to use! What a concept, huh?
So Easy Even a Caveman can do it!
Final Thoughts
Look, I like Apple and AT&T and can’t wait to get my hands on the 3G iPhone someday. I just don’t like what they’ve done here with their exclusive deal that has totally taken away our freedom of choice. If they want to establish a system with different levels of preferred vendors as Microsoft and others have done, then fine. Apple could’ve made AT&T their premiere or preferred vendor of the iPhone with greater quantities and preferred product shipment and support, but they should not have closed the door on all of the other carriers!
You’ve Got Milk June 5, 2008
Posted by Doriano "Paisano" Carta in Blogs, rss.Tags: rss, Snackr, utterz
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Thanks to an excellent Adobe Air application called Snackr, you can now view the posts on Utterz from your circle of friends on your desktop! The good news is that it works on Windows, the Mac and even Linux and best of all it’s FREE!
Here’s how easy it is to setup:
Go to Utterz and copy the URL to your circle of friends (sometimes referred to as your Herd). Tip: It will be in this format: http://www.utterz.com/~h-Paisano/v-circle/r-1/rss.php (replace Paisano with your Utterz name, of course).
Go to http://snackr.net to download and install their cool RSS ticker. If you’ve never installed Adobe Air before (used by other services such as Twhirl, Snitter, AlertThingy and many others) then you will need to install it first. Go here to install Adobe Air.
Once Snackr is installed it will ask you what you want to do. Select the manually add feeds. Then click the plus sign on the bottom leftside of your screen and paste the URL of the RSS feed for your circle of friends on Utterz.
Within seconds all of your friends’ utterz including your own will begin scrolling across your screen and look like this:
Note: You can add all kinds of other RSS feeds to Snackr as well. This was just a way to show utterz members how to add their feed to their desktop.
Want a Personal MilkShake?
By the way, you can add your own Utterz RSS feed to services like GoogleReader and FriendFeed. Just add your own RSS feed from Utterz just as you would for any other RSS feed. (On FriendFeed click the add Blog feed option) Here’s the format:
http://www.utterz.com/~h-Paisano/list.php (again, replace my name with your Utterz user name). Bada Bing, Bada Boom! You’ve Got Milk!
What About Me? June 2, 2008
Posted by Doriano "Paisano" Carta in Blogs, Marketing, Search.Tags: Analysis, Blogs, Search
3 comments
Techrigy’s SM2 is an excellent search tool that will scour the vast world wide web for any mention of your name or any of your websites or blogs. They offer a free account that allows you to search for up to five keywords or phrases and stores up to 1,000 search results which is excellent. The results are can even be sent to your email account on a daily basis if that’s what you want.
How to clean your dirty windows June 1, 2008
Posted by Doriano "Paisano" Carta in Freeware, Microsoft, Uncategorized.Tags: autoruns, free tools, Microsoft, vista, Windows
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Ever notice how much faster Microsoft Windows seems to run when it’s fresh new computer or a reinstalled system?
There are many reasons why performance degrades over time, such as defragmentation of the hard drive and a bloated registry but we will focus on a lessor known reason for sluggish windows and how to fix it.
First, let’s explain what the windows operating system is before we reveal what slows it down so much. Windows is not a single program or application but a complex system of processes that run together in a massive symphony of bits and bytes. Want to take a quick peak at this matrix of mahem and mischef? Press your Ctrl-Alt-Del keys and select your task manager, then select processes. You will see dozens of processes going on, even if you have no applications open. This is what keeps windows running.
The Dirt on Dirt
As you know, windows lives on memory so the more RAM it has the better it performs. Thus, the more programs/applications that you run at any given time, the less memory the operating system will have available for all of those necessary processes and threads it needs to run. So, the goal is naturally to only keep those things open that you need, but most of the time that doesn’t seem to make a difference. Why is that? Well, even though you “think” nothing’s running, the chances are high that there are several memory hogging programs running in the background.
The Windows Detectives
The task manager is pathetic when it comes to revealing the whole truth about what’s really going on inside windows behind the scenes. That’s why you will need a few free tools from Microsoft that are incredibly useful when it comes to spying on your system. Best of all, they are all free, small and easy to use!
The first one to get is called AutoRuns , which is the best utility there is when it comes to showing you everything that runs automatically when you start your windows (hence the name). One of the best features is the ability to hide all Microsoft processes that need to run for windows which lets you focus on all of the non-windows processes and programs that runs.
You can then disable or delete them for startup, thus freeing up a great deal of memory which will in turn make windows run much better. Download it here.
Sometimes it’s difficult to tell what a process or thread really is or what owns it.
No need to take dangerous wild guesses thanks to the following two tools.
Process explorer exposes everything you’ll ever need to know about any process that is running in windows. It will reveal which program owns the process and its path and location.
Process Monitor is like the task manager on steroids and more! It’s an advanced windows monitoring system that displays real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity.
Final Curtain Call
Obviously, this is merely one simple method for cleaning your windows. There are many other things you can do to improve your performance but cleaning up your startup procedure is an excellent start.
