Personal Technology Tips in Plain English
Posts tagged social media
A Buzz Which Can’t Be Ignored
Feb 10th
Logged into my Gmail account today (which I do rarely since I manage my Gmail email account through pop access both on my Windows Mobile phone and with Outlook on my laptop) and was pleasantly greeted with this:
It’s Google’s latest push back regarding social media is now integrated into Gmail: Google Buzz.
And of course nothing is buzz worthy if you can’t use your cell phone to pass stuff along:
The big question is if Google Buzz will become a turbo booster for Gmail or will it become another Orkut or Wave?
Twitter 201: What Can You Do With Twitter?
Feb 10th
Once you get past the initial learning curve required to really understand that Twitter is not just knowing what everyone eats for breakfast, lunch and dinner, you start to ask, what else can I do with Twitter?
There’s actually a TON of stuff for which Twitter is useful. That’s why there’s a social media revolution afterall. But the Twitterverse isn’t so easy for newbies to get on what seems like a speeding bullet train at times.
The best place to start for most is to understand that you can control what you get out of Twitter. It is not just a continuous moving feed of random tweets from all that you follow. Once you find Twitter Search, your imagination starts to open up for what you can do with Twitter.
Here’s a quick video that explains just a few practical things you can do with Twitter beyond monitoring your network’s latest moves and ponderings:
Virtual Insanity: Facebook Edition
Feb 5th
The march goes on.
Social networks are continuously trying to climb the social ladder by upping the ante almost weekly. Any regular user has experienced the social media sites’ constant redesigning of their interfaces in hopes of getting us users to use their sites more than the competitor sites as well as just use them more often period.
For example, Twitter recently tweaked their retweeting feature, have added personal lists features, hover pop-ups and other small updates they push out continuously time goes on.
Facebook is no different. They just changed the “news feed” display by adding the “live” option (which no one I know has ever fully understood). Â FB has also changed navigation and various other things along the way as expected.
But I just logged into my Facebook account today and was pleasantly surprised to see the new welcome message on my Facebook homepage:
“Welcome to your new, simplified home page.” [EMPHASIS MINE]
I nearly had a heart attack when I saw that “new, simplified home page” on Facebook. Â It was just plain scary!!
Why they do things like this? Doesn’t anyone over there do any sort of user testing before they push out new features and functionality to the entire world?
I’m sitting here wondering, just where in the world on this page do you want me to look first?
Ironically, there’s a “Facebook Lite” promo link at the top of the page trying to push a “fast and simple” version of Facebook.
I know, I know, these changes are happening because Facebook wants to compete with Gmail and email in general. The Google generation doesn’t email their friends anymore anyway. . .unless you want to attach and send a file (hint to FB coders, this is one new feature which would make sense).
But in the meantime, is it time to create a “I wish Facebook would stop messing with Facebook” Facebook group? Will you join? 
Are You A Facebook Spammer?
Jul 7th
Ever since I started to Twitter, I’ve used the Twitter-To-Facebook application which basically takes my Twitter updates and then automatically syncs them to Facebook.
The net result is that my Facebook status updates are updated more often than how many times my Facebook friends update theirs. I guess whenever they log into FB, a good portion of their friendfeeds are MINE! 
People who are on both Facebook and Twitter understand.
People who aren’t on Twitter get confused.
Some people think I LIVE on Facebook.
Others think I’m out there just spamming their Facebook accounts with useful (and some useless) information. It’s all about the WIIFM syndrome.
Am I alone in this? Have you been accused of spamming their Facebook pages?
BTW: If you want to know how I do this, all you have to do is sync your Twitter account to Facebook and it’s “set-it and forget-it!”
I love tech, gadgets and the web. Hope you pick-up a useful tip or two here today that helps you use technology to your advantage! Better yet, why not share your own expertise in a comment on a post today to help the other readers that land here for answers!