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Google Chrome is one of those programs that has been around for a while, but when you first tried it, you weren’t that crazy about it. It was somewhat buggy, it didn’t have any type of customization available, and you couldn’t block ads. As much as I wanted to make the switch (being the Google nutjob that I am), I couldn’t do it without a few features that just weren’t available:
1. I needed ads blocked. Period. Even most of them would be sufficient.
2. Add-ons. I want to be able to customize it.
3. A way to integrate my Google Bookmarks so that I can use them like regular bookmarks.
Then one day a couple months ago, I heard that extensions were finally hitting the mainstream. Google Chrome Extensions were a great idea, but you needed to download Chromium, which was the “guinea pig” version of Chrome (which means it doesn’t always work properly), and you had to do a lot of nerdy command-line work to get it up and running. It wasn’t pretty. Once one-click extension support came around, it was time to dive back in.
Now, a few months later, I couldn’t be happier.
Hey, Firefox is a great product. Go ahead and download it if you’d like. It’s stable and it’s popular. But Firefox is very prone to bloatedness. After a while, it takes forever to load Firefox. Chrome just pops right up. It just feels light. Check out the screencast I took below of a comparison between a Firefox start and a Chrome start and you will see what I mean. The little box that pops up in the middle is Launchy, which is my application launcher. In layman’s terms, the box pops up and I start typing the name of the program. When the box disappears, that means I hit “enter” and the application is starting. First I try opening Firefox, then Chrome. Check it out:
If you time it, Firefox takes a full 7 seconds to load up for use, and Chrome takes about 1/2 a second – that means Chrome, in this situation, is 14 times faster loading!
Interested yet? Here are my full reasons why you should give Chrome a chance:
Okay, okay – enough gushing. Time to get into the nuts-and-bolts: how do you set this thing up? Remember – it needs to do all the stuff that my awesome Firefox setup could do.
This is easily the most complicated part of the process, but it’s not that hard, really. Without a true contender to the ad-blocking throne, the best way to do it, in my experience, has been through a program called Privoxy. There’s a 7-step process to it that is awesomely-simplified in this post by Lifehacker and Geekzone. Just follow it, step-by-step, and you’re done. Bada bing.
Remember from my Firefox setup, I make full use of bookmarklets – little bookmarks that can do some awesome things in your Bookmarks Toolbar. I’ve found the easiest way to do this is to open up a Firefox window next to your Chrome window and literally drag your bookmarklets from Firefox and drop them into the Chrome toolbar. If you don’t have that, here are links to my bookmarklets and what they do. Instead of clicking on the link, just drag it up to your Bookmarks Toolbar:
Like Firefox plugins, these add-ons help you further customize your browsing experience. There are plenty out there, so feel free to browse around. Here are mine:
No complicated Greasemonkey stuff. Just click “Install” on these bad boys:
Am I preaching to the choir? Do you already use Chrome? What are your favorite extensions/scripts? Why should we encourage more Chrome usage? If you’re a diehard Firefox user and you’re not convinced, tell us why. If you’re an Internet Explorer advocate, seek help immediately – we cannot help you here.
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When one thinks of Facebook, a lot can come to mind: college kids, embarrassing pictures, giant wastes of time, or – God help us all – FarmVille. But Facebook has become so much more than that, if used properly. Facebook is a platform for a lot of good things, but unfortunately, a lot of potential is wasted. For example:
Remember those stupid little Tamagotchi things? The video pets that people carried around a few years ago? Would you walk around with one of those things? Pressing buttons to feed it and clean up when it poops and all that? No? So why are we doing this on Facebook?
I love a good game, I really do. But it’s one thing to play a game on Facebook, and it’s another to be obsessed with one. Hop on, play for a few minutes, and then get on with your life.
“Hey, somebody poked you.” “Now what?” “Let’s poke him back.” Yay.
I’ve actually seen a Facebook page for fans of “Not Being on Fire”.
However, after all of this, I think Facebook is a very powerful platform, and can be one of the most useful tools for communication on the internet today. In fact, after I check my email, I do hop on Facebook for a few minutes. Here are some ways you can be involved in Facebook without being a “Facebook Stalker” or a flat-out geek:
Facebook is a great platform for games where you interact with people. It’s fun to play card games, bowling, and board games with people without having to lug around the actual game wherever you go and accidentally offending Ukranians.
Pictured: Why Facebook was invented.
Games are a great way to interact and have a good time. Plus, many of them involve using a little brain power, like Scrabble, which is good for you.
Nobody cares about your number. No one. You’ve got 782 Facebook Friends? Yippee. I’ve got real friends.
Be friends with people you at least kind of know. Nothing is lamer than people who are friends with everybody that Facebook suggests just because they want to look cool. Be friends with people you want to communicate with.
There was a time when you had to write a letter and hand it to a guy on a horse with a flask and hope that it made it to your friend. Now? All you have to do is click their name and start typing. I’ve got friends in Arizona, Green Bay (but she’s coming HOME!!), Chicago, Florida, Taiwan, California, and New Mexico. You get the idea.
If this were a past time period, I’d lose touch with these people. I’d run into them at high school reunions and we’d talk about old times and marvel at how old we look and how many kids we have. Now, I can still share my life with these people, even if they’re far, far away. It’s awesome, and it gives me chills when I think about it.
These are people you care about, right? So you want them to see photos from your latest trip! When I went on my first trip to Taiwan, I took a boatload of pictures, and then I had to take them to three different households and present them, retelling the same stories over and over again.
On my second trip, I stayed overnight in a hotel in Los Angeles, and I loaded up all the pictures into photo albums and captioned them that night. Now, they can look at them at their own leisure, and I don’t have to repeat myself over and over again. Moments that you want to remember forever are great to share with the people you love.
If you have an interesting story, anecdote, or joke, post it on your status. If you’re just hopping on to talk about how much your life sucks, why don’t you wait a minute? Nobody wants to hear about it. Save it for a conversation. And on that note…
The night my fiancé and I got engaged, we spent over two hours driving around while on the phone, notifying our closest friends and family that we were getting married. Why? We wanted to beat Facebook to the punch. We knew that, had we gone to bed that night without doing so, somebody important was going to find out via Facebook, and we didn’t want that.
That also goes for things like relationship problems and discussions, big job announcements, and pregnancies. Pick up the phone and call somebody first. Let that human touch shine through a little.
I stole the term “throbbing brain” from morning radio show guys Bob and Brian, here in Milwaukee on 102.9 FM. When they need an answer, they go to the “Throbbing Brain”, which basically means they ask the listeners to provide the answer.
Looking for a car? A killer Blackberry app? Opinions on wedding halls? Post the question to your status and watch the responses pour in. The beauty of it: these are people whose opinions actually matter to you.
Found something you like? Instead of emailing it to everyone you know and clogging up their inbox, just use the Share on Facebook button. Now, anybody you care about can see it, and the people who don’t want to read it won’t resent you so much.
It’s easy to get caught up in the time-suck qualities of Facebook. But use it to your advantage, and it can be one of the most important communication tools you will ever use.
The internet is awesome. There’s no denying it. What was once a breeding ground for dorks everywhere has turned into a social gathering place for millions of people of all ages. What happened? What caused those changes? What made the internet so gosh-darn inviting for so many people? Let’s start at the top.
The internet of the mid-‘90s was something else. Dominated by *shudder* America Online, the Web browser was the afterthought, because AOL wanted to be its own gathering place for people with common interests. If you wanted to hop on the internet, you likely went through AOL at the time (50 hours for FREE!). Here’s what you wound up getting:
Computers and servers weren’t as far along back then. We’re talking the days of processors in the MEGABYTES (and hey, if you don’t know what that means, just ignore it and move on to the next sentence. I’m trying to say “They were SLOW”). So as a result, once you got past the header of a web page, the rest was usually text. And I’m talking about all-the-same-font kinda text. Sure, they tried to mix it up with underlining some words or maybe making some words bold, but in the end, it was just flat-out boring. You were there to read, and pretty much nothing else. Graphic designers hadn’t started on the concept of “Web design” just yet.
If you wanted to interact with other people on the internet, you did it through forums and chat rooms.
Forums were, initially, the only thing on the internet. And they were called “bulletin boards”. You and other people that generally resembled the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons would go on there and wax intellectually about the latest episode of The X-Files or something. It was a place to share opinions with a bunch of people who won’t listen to you, not unlike many forums of today (I guess not everything’s changed).
Chat rooms were a whole ‘nother beast. They were real-time, and generally useless. You went into a chat room to really just insult each other and marvel at who you were talking with, or who they were pretending to be, anyway. You’d go into a chat room, type “hi everyone a/s/l”, and then get bombarded with people saying stuff like “hi there! 19/f/Honolulu”. Riveting. Regardless of the fact that the person was probably 29/m/Detroit, there was zero point in any conversation in chat rooms. You didn’t go there to communicate with people you knew. You were there to, again, talk about the latest episode of The X-Files, or watch people lob insults at other people.
When I was 12 years old, I thought it would be awesome to have a web page. With sites like GeoCities, Angelfire, and Tripod offering free web pages, I thought it would be the coolest thing ever. So I put together a web page about pro wrestling (I was cool), with some of the pre-loaded backgrounds and stuff from GeoCities, and I had myself a web page! I cannot stress to you enough how useless this web page was and what little value it had to other people. I was 12. I had nothing to talk about.
And I wasn’t alone. That was the bulk of the internet at the time – a bunch of kids who knew nothing about stuff like “graphic design”, “HTML”, or “being interesting”.
Thankfully for all of us, the internet changed for the better. But it wasn’t immediate:
The first CD I ever burned was through my oldest brother’s computer in late 1999, using music I found through his IRC client. Internet Relay Chat was the first way to get music, and it was the most tedious, mind-numbing process around. You went in to a music-sharing community, had to request a song, and wait for somebody to respond by sending you the file. It was clunky, slow, and generally awful. But I was able to put together a CD of my own mix. It was a huge moment!
Once Napster hit the scene in 1999, all bets were off. Napster was, at that time, easy to use and a lot quicker. You were still waiting 20 minutes to an hour per song, but the interface was something you could conceivably understand. You now had a logical reason to own a computer hooked up to the internet.
Ah, dial-up internet. When you wanted to hop online, you first had to sit through this (click "play" and then shudder a little). The biggest problem with sitting around on the internet? You were tying up the phone line! Unless you were rich and had a second phone line, you were paying per minute on dial-up, and you couldn’t make calls in the meantime.
Broadband changed all of that. First, it set up an entirely separate connection for your computer’s modem. Instead of paying per minute, you had a continuous connection to the internet at a flat rate. Then, it was about 87 billion times faster (approximately). Now you could sit on the phone with somebody and talk about the web page you’re looking at! Wicked!
The stage was set: file sharing, legal or not, was on the rise. Computers were getting faster. You had a continuous connection to the internet. It was time for things to boom. And boom it did. Here are the things that make the internet of today the most awesome thing since… um, the last awesome thing that happened:
It started with Yahoo!, and then Google perfected it. Heck, even Bing has it down pretty good. As more and more people were connecting to the internet, more information was being shared. For you to find that information, you need a search engine. While Google has become the Kleenex of search engines (how many people ask for a “tissue”, anyway?), several companies out there all make it dead simple to find whatever you need, and especially stuff you don’t need. Whenever somebody is looking for an answer to something, what do you tell them to do? “Google it.”
For example, I dropped my cell phone in the toilet yesterday. No, I wasn’t texting while doing my business. It literally flew out of my shorts pocket and square into the toilet – nothing but net. In the old days, I would worry that my phone was ruined forever, and that I needed to shell out another $200 to get another phone (phone insurance? peh.). But I hopped on Google and typed in “cell phone in toilet”, and got about 5-6 different strategies for drying out your phone, along with endless testimonials from people saying their phone works as good as new.
[Side note: if you ever drop your phone in the toilet, pull it out immediately, take out the battery, clean the thing, then throw it in the oven at 150 degrees for an hour or so. Dries the sucker right up and you’re back in business.]
So many people resisted it for so long out of fear for their credit card numbers, but as secure transactions rose, internet shopping became hotter. Amazon is the de facto place to get just about anything. Struggling to find whole, fresh rabbits for dinner at the supermarket? Amazon’s got it. Thinking about getting a little romantic on your next camping trip? Get your tips from this great book! She won’t get intimate because your back hair is thicker than Sasquatch fur? Amazon to the rescue!
On top of all that great stuff, sites like eBay and Craigslist make it easy for you to get top-dollar for that antique peach de-fuzzer that you’ve had in your family for generations. Instead of trying to unload it at a garage sale, you can snap a picture of it, put it on eBay, and get $475.24 for it. On the flip side, your search for antique peach de-fuzzers is over. [Note: here's what a search for "peach de-fuzzer" turns up.]
Peer-to-peer file sharing has certainly evolved since the days of Napster. Your Limewire, your Ares, your BearShare, KaZaa, and WinMX are almost all but dead at this point. BitTorrent allows you to not just download from the person who posted the file, but from everybody else who’s downloading it or has downloaded it before. You know what that means? That means the latest album to hit the shelves can be downloaded inside of a minute. The latest episode of The Office (premiering tonight!) can be on your computer within 20 minutes of it hitting the Web, and under 2-3 minutes the next morning.
This is not a discussion of the legalities of BitTorrent use. The point is, downloading from the Web has completely turned the corner and become near-instant. Add to that the legal methods like iTunes or my Zune Pass subscription (so awesome and so few people use it!), and music is everywhere these days.
We all know parents and grandparents who have no idea what they’re doing on the computer. You wonder why their computer is so slow, then you find a “Downloads” folder with over 350GB of videos that somebody emailed them ranging from a guy setting himself on fire while wearing a banana suit to that stupid dancing baby from Ally McBeal. You know why? Because in the old days, when you wanted to watch a video from the internet or listen to an audio clip, you had to download it. The first video I ever saw that was from the internet was the music video for “Buddy Holly” by Weezer.
Once YouTube rolled in, streaming video became easier than ever. In fact, you can even embed the stuff right into web pages, so now you can watch all those great videos I just mentioned quickly, without having to put anything on your hard drive. Observe:
[Warning: before you hit “play”, the first video is the banana one, then there are like, ten other examples, many of which are riddled with profanity, a naked butt, and hundreds of idiots whose parents were too busy to teach them not to do stupid stuff like this.]
And for cable TV becoming obsolete, I submit the following examples: Hulu, network television websites, and Surf The Channel. I rest my case.
I discovered Wikipedia as a giant time-suck a couple years ago, and I love it. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that is generated and monitored (for the most part) by its users. While it can be edited to reflect false information, it does cite most of its sources and also allows you to check out random information about little-known stuff. Wikipedia is one of the most influential sites when discussing the power of collaborative thinking. It also is really useful when you didn’t read the novel you were supposed to write a paper on for your class on 19th-century British Literature.
And if you are wondering about the reference to Small Wonder in the heading there, click here to check out Wikipedia’s entry on this ‘80s television series featuring a little robot girl.
Obviously The Practical Nerd would be an example of “for better”, but Wordpress made it insanely easy for anybody to start a real web site, and customize it in a way that people would actually want to look at it and read it. There are literally millions of blogs on the internet right now, and many – not all, but many – of them offer some interesting and useful advice. In the old days, you had to go get a book based on newspaper book reviews for this stuff. Now, you can just Google it and find a blog that caters to your interests. Done and done.
In addition, the development of Real Simple Syndication, or RSS, feeds offer a method of subscribing to a web site’s content without having to check in on it every day or every couple of hours. It saves many people time and energy.
Remember Netscape Navigator? Ugh. Ugly, slow, and clunky. Internet Explorer? A little better, but slow and behind the times. Enter Mozilla Firefox. Firefox lets you add plug-ins and install different “skins” for your Web browser. There are an infinite number of ways you can alter Firefox and make it work the way you want it to. As I previously wrote, plug-ins and add-ons make Firefox the best browser around, in my opinion. They let you create the experience you want for your internet surfing (do people still “surf” the internet, anyway?).
When I took my last trip to Taiwan, I took about 300 pictures over the course of two weeks. In the old days, if I had done that, I would have to get home, develop all that film, and then get together with everyone I wanted to show the pictures to. Instead, in a hotel room in Los Angeles on the way home, I plugged my camera into my laptop, uploaded all of the pictures to Facebook, added captions, and sent everybody an email with a link to the album. People saw my pictures before I even got home.
Facebook and MySpace let you keep in endless touch with your friends. Flickr and Google Picasa allow you the opportunity to bring pictures to anyone you want. YouTube makes showing people that video of your kid doped up on laughing gas a cinch. Twitter lets you do any of those things to anyone who’s on Twitter, as easy as possible. All these things are now going real-time, too. Scheduling with your family or friends can be easily done with a shared Google Calendar, and you can get reminders of anything sent to you via text or email from Google Calendar or Remember The Milk, or just about anything that helps you organize and schedule your life.
Knowledge that you want to share with others is easier, too. There are bookmarklets and plug-ins that make sharing as easy as clicking a button. If I find an interesting political article that I want my friends to see, I can click a button that says “Share on Facebook” that will do just that. If I see a cool game or blog post about personal finance that I think is useful for the general public, I can click “Tweet This” and it will go to all my Twitter followers. Knowledge and information is being spread quicker than it ever has in the history of the world. Word-of-mouth can go across states, countries, and the entire globe in seconds, instead of years.
Mobile computing is taking instant communication to unheard-of levels. And if that Bill Curtis guy from those “get the internet anywhere” commercials are any indication, you can send and receive anything at anytime, anywhere. You can snap a picture on your phone and send it to your Facebook account, or email it to your buddy, or send it directly to someone via MMS. Everybody is with everybody, all the time.
Mobile computing also has lots of business implications as well. Entrepreneurship continues to rise as people can take their laptops anywhere and log onto their Google Apps to write up a document or edit a spreadsheet. The big, envious symbol of a successful blogger is somebody with a laptop on the beach, sipping a drink with an umbrella in it. While that’s not every blogger (and certainly not me!), it can be done. Computers have gone from the size of warehouses to the something that fits in your pocket. All the coolest things you can do on the internet can be done on your phone.
The internet isn’t just a meeting place anymore. It’s a method of delivering an endless stream of content, knowledge, and anecdotes of your life to the people you care about. It’s no longer necessary to get emails with “Fwd: fwd: fwd: FWD: Fwd:” at the beginning of them. It’s no longer necessary to sit and wait for downloads. The internet has made computing easy and fun for anyone. It has a purpose now. That’s why it’s so awesome.
What makes the internet awesome for you? Share with us in the comments!
I’ve had it.
Mainstream media has long been a gigantic pet peeve of mine. Journalism is now about ratings and ad revenue. News is now about entertaining people, and that’s a big problem. Instead of a journalist standing by their principles to report the truth honestly, we see how behind-the-scenes politics run the major news media outlets.
In addition, we hear more about the entertainment world than anything else. Case in point: the Michael Jackson death. Now, I would be a hypocrite to sit here and complain about the news coverage entirely, because I was glued to a lot of it for the first few days, like many people. And rightfully so: his death was a big cultural moment in our generation, whether you liked him or not. But after the first day or two of his name dominating the headlines, coverage should have been exclusively to the “Entertainment” section of every news website. But it stayed on top – MSN.com and CNN.com continues to run “legacy” stories and headlines theorizing on the cause of death.
But it doesn’t stop there – headlines about Lindsay Lohan breaking up with her “girlfriend”, a DJ nobody knows dying of a drug overdose, a couple with 24 kids getting a divorce because of their TV show about them being a couple with 24 kids – the entertainment world continues to take over “news” and get everybody’s attention.
Pictured (L-R): Serious journalism, earth-shattering impacts, and life-changing information.
Now, relationships are something you should care about, and deaths should not be undermined. However: those are things that are incredibly important to the people involved, not you. Instead of studying the personal lives of everyone else, why not go out and enjoy your own personal life? Guess what – we each have one!
It spills over into the political world, too. Media is swarming around the wrong things, like the President getting a dog.
Pictured: The issues affecting our nation.
MSN.com has been my main news site for some time now. And I’m not alone – those who use Windows’ default Web browser (Internet Explorer) will see that page more than any other, as it is the default start page for IE. If you’re not technically savvy, you might think that this is the home page of the entire internet, or they don’t know how to change it. MSN was fine for what it was, but its latest creation has gotten on my last nerve: The Wonderwall.
Apparently those at MSN felt we needed a ridiculously confusing interface that slides you through news stories and endless pictures. Yup, this is great for people with halfway-average computers that take a bit to render all this garbage. I “love” having to decide whether I want to read more story or see more photos of the person in question. Give me a break! I finally got to the point where I deleted the MSN bookmark from my Google Bookmarks.
Why you should do the same:
So I’m not on MSN. I’m not on CNN. I’m actually not on any mainstream news website anymore. So how do I get late-breaking news of real importance? I’ve got a few approaches that, when working together, don’t allow me to miss a beat:
I subscribe to blogs based on my interests. That means that when big news hits that is covered by one of those topics, chances are somebody will blog about it. As long as I’m up-to-date in Google Reader, I’m up-to-date on most of the news that is actually relevant to me.
If something important happens, it’ll pop up on Twitter. In fact, in most cases, word is going to spread about the event on Twitter much faster than it would on MSN. Michael Jackson’s trip to the hospital and subsequent death? I learned about all of it on Twitter about 20 minutes before it hit any major news outlets. If something is shocking, people will talk about it. So I just watch for news from the people I’m following. Done and done.
So nobody I’m following is talking about anything on Twitter. Then I look at the “Trending Topics”. You’ll find this on Twitter’s search, or in my case (and the screenshot to the left), the search box in HootSuite.
Twitter tracks what people are talking about. All you have to do is click on the trend and you’ll see what everybody’s saying. Guaranteed that, if it’s news, you’ll find several links to news sources about whatever happened. Today, you can see people are talking about Jay-Z for his MTV outburst of jackassery, as well as the new trailer for New Moon. They are also discussing Tila Tequila’s altercation with Shawne Merriman.
These stories aren’t always going to be big-time events. It could just be entertainment news. But it’s easier to ignore the term rather than have to ignore a giant headline, stupid picture, and everything else hogging your space.
Patrick Swayze died yesterday. I didn’t hear about it on MSN. I didn’t even hear about it on Twitter. I got a text message from my brother. If you’ve got friends and family who know about what you are interested in, you’ll probably hear news from them. Heck, you could even just check out Facebook status updates, which would also clue you in to what’s going on.
Doggone it, Google! You keep getting cooler and cooler! I, like many others, am familiar with Google News for when I am looking for a certain topic. For example, when I heard rumblings that my old quarterback, Brett Favre, was going to sign with the hated rivals, the Minnesota Vikings, I typed “favre” into a Google search, and then clicked “News” at the top of the page and I could look through all the real developments from media outlets all over the nation. But I found Google News yesterday, and it looks to finally be a solid replacement for MSN to check out headlines. Here’s why:
This is what I see when I open Google News: top stories at the top. Plus, they are updated incredibly frequently. On the far left side, I can sort through my news topics. If I just want to see the latest entertainment headlines, I can click “Entertainment” and that’s all I’ll see. Or, I can scroll down, as the sections are laid out very clearly and simply. In the middle-left, I see the latest headlines and accompanying pictures. On the right side, I can view the most popular articles currently, and towards the bottom I can see what names are dominating headlines. It doesn’t take an hour and a half to render the page because, like everything Google, it’s simple and clean, optimized for any computer.
When you click “Edit this page”, a drop-down box appears that will allow you to organize your news topics in any order you’d like on the page, just by dragging and dropping. When I rearranged mine, I was able to put Entertainment news at the bottom, so I only have to look at it when I want to.
In addition, you can edit how many stories are shown in each section, and you can add and remove sections at will.
I like to see a news story once in a while, and any news story that has an accompanying video has a little YouTube icon in it. Clicking on it brings up the video right there in the page. It doesn’t interrupt, and you still get your news.
Underneath every news article, you see the option to drill down and read the news from specific, high-profile sites, or I can list all the news articles talking about it. This makes it easy to view the topic from different perspectives, allowing you to develop your own opinions, as well as gather every fact you can from every source you can.
If you have a Google account, you can tell Google News where you’re from, and they will add a tab related to your city’s news, with all the features that other topics get. This simplifies the news-gathering process for me. Plus, it can recommend news articles for me based on my search history. I could care less if Google wants to know about my searches about the Green Bay Packers and Wordpress templates. They can have that information.
Instead of copying-and-pasting the URL to the story into a new email to share with somebody, just click “Email this story”. Easy, and it encourages finding out news from friends rather than websites.
We all need to keep tabs on the news, but the newspeople aren’t interested in keeping us informed anymore. They want us entertained. Fight back – ditch your MSNs, your CNNs, and other corporate news sites. Get the news you want, when you want it, and when you need it. Do you have any tips for getting real news? Share them with us in the comments!
As many of you know, I’ve asked for your opinions a couple times over the last month or so. First, I asked you newsletter subscribers if you would enter a contest for a free giveaway from The Practical Nerd, and then I asked all of you readers if you thought email was getting obsolete, thanks to the efforts of services like Facebook and Twitter, as well as Google Docs. Here’s what you said:
Twenty of you chimed in and showed a strong support for the contest idea. This is great news, as I am itching to start branching out and trying some different ways to engage all of you and encourage interaction. This might be the way to do it, so stay tuned!
Well, shockingly few of you seemed to care about this topic. A full SEVEN of you wanted to be heard, and while the winner was “Not yet, but it will”, most of you seemed to think that it wouldn’t, and some of you were adamant that you’ll always be using email. I disagree with the notion that we will always be using email. I think there are ways that communication is continuing to evolve and grow, and email will eventually be replaced by something else. What, I’m not sure. Google seems to think that Google Wave will be the email killer. But if the mainstream isn’t using Google Wave, what good will it be? It’s kind of an “all-or-nothing” type approach. Non-Twitter users seem to use the service as something of a joke, but Mashable recently posted 13 things you can do on Twitter besides telling people what you are doing, and these things range from file sharing to payments to job hunting and games. Twitter is an extremely powerful platform, and I’m buying into it more and more every day. I do think that between Twitter, Facebook, and Google Docs, along with instant messaging like Skype, email is starting to get redundant. But time will tell.
Thanks to all of you who voted, and stay tuned for more down the line!
