Firefly

Just dropped by TWiTLive.TV and came across something new: Firefly. It seems to be an overlayer for your site that lets people click anywhere on the page and type messages to other people who are viewing the site at that moment. The messages pop up, then fade away after a few seconds. Interesting idea…

The Facebook Virus

Lets get it out of the way right off: NO There is, to my knowledge, no actual computer virus on Facebook.

What I refer to is those abominable Facebook Apps.

I used to like Facebook as a place to keep up to date contace information for a number of friends and aquaintences from college. It was easy to use and very clean (even sparse).

But then the apps came.

Thats like saying: and then the giant, man-eating fungus came over for dinner.

Oh, I use a couple of apps. Catbook is minorly cute. And I like having a lightsabre on the side of my page. But it seems that every page I go to now is chock full of stupid “grow a plant” and “what color are your teeth” and “my top ten AND top five AND overall bestest friends ever (except that each list is different)” apps.

And the worst thing is that they are viral.

Example: You go to take a simple quiz (because you, like me, have a minor adiction to dumb online quizzes, which was only minorly lessened by leaving Livejournal)… but then a page pops up informing you that the results of your quiz are locked until you invite 12 freinds.

HA!

No thank you.

-otto

Free Book

Just a quick note to point you in the direction of Neil Gaiman’s blog where, in honor of its 7th anniversary, he intends to post the entire text of one of his novels… for free! Full details are available on the site. This week he is holding a vote to determine which novel will be released. Personally, I am rooting for Anansi Boys or Neverwhere… but right now it looks like American Gods might win out.

Go. Vote. And get yourself a free book.

-otto

Self-Referential

I must say that I was quite surprised to check my page statistics this evening and discover that Jay Lake has read, and apparently appreciated, my review of Mainspring. Oh what a wonderful place this internet is, where author, reader, and self-styled critic are all just a few mouse clicks away from one another.

Cheerio,
-otto

Flocking

I have decided to try out Flock, a variant on Firefox that focuses on blogging and social networking.
Not sure about it yet… While I like the built-in blogging and think that the RSS support is equal to that in Safari (and far better than in Firefox), we’ll have to see if I stick with it.

Three things stand against Flock from the outset:

1. Built on Firefox.
   Now don’t get me wrong: I love Firefox. Back in the Beta and 1.5 days, Firefox was my favorite browser, mainly because it was so fast. Sadly, ever since Firefox2 came out the memory leak “feature” makes the whole browser run so darn slow and bog down the whole system after about 2 hours or when I have about a dozen tabs open.
2. Social Networking.
   Frankly, I don’t do much “social networking.” I do not like myspace at all, only use Facebook to track college friends, and don’t share photos or videos on public sites.
3. Not Safari.
   OK, this is both good and bad. I really like the speed of Safari, and with the Inquisitor
   plugin, it has the best search of all web browsers. That said, I am looking around because Safari and WordPress do not get along well.

I’ll let you know how things go.

EDIT: OK, issue number 1 found… the “tags” link to technorati, not the wordpress tagging system.