An original post by Keith! I think it’s one of the best guide to someone who doesn’t know what Twitter is!

Twitter is hard to explain to those that aren’t using it.  For a long time I have avoided sites like MySpace and Facebook but I’ve always had a blog, a cell phone, and email.  Those three items made me feel connected.  If I had something to say, I’d blog it.  If someone wanted to reach me electronically they could send a text message or email.  Lastly they could just call me.  Little did I realize how disconnected I was until later on.  It took Twitter to really show me how disconnected I was.  After becoming a Twitter fan I started to spread the word.  Some people I convinced to start using it.  Others are still holding out.  Maybe this will be enough to put them over the edge.

Not Until They Use It

I remember when I first told Alan Stevens about Twitter.Com.  He reluctantly joined and said "oh great, another social networking site".  It wasn’t long until he started to see Twitter’s potential though.  Alan’s first tweet was on Oct. 25th at 11:04 PM.  About a day later he said this and as we can see he was starting to get it and work his way through it.

I met Alan at the TechEd conference in Orlando, FL earlier in in June.  We met up again at DevLink in Nashville, TN and we talked a lot in the speaker’s room as a matter of fact.  After Alan joined Twitter I started to get to know him better.  I think his major break through with Twitter came about a month later. 

By the way, for those of you that aren’t computer programmers, TDD stands for test driven development.  It is a methodology that developers should use to test their code, but a lot don’t.  Alan’s point is that until people use it, they won’t get it.  I guess he was doing some self retrospection at that moment.

The Twitter Battle

A few weeks ago I found myself in a battle of sorts.  It was a Friday night and several of us were hanging out the night before a conference.  Twitter kept dominating the conversation.  It was amazing at how much more stuff I knew that was going on around me just because of Twitter.  During the conversation I picked my phone up and tweeted (the action for posting to twitter) that I was down the street from the hotel hanging with a few fellow speakers.  In literally 1-2 minutes later my phone rang.  It was Alan Stevens who was also speaking at the conference.  "Dude where are you guys at?", he said.  I told him and within a few minutes later Alan and another speaker Michael Neel showed up to join us.  Wow.  Name me another medium that connects people that way so quickly.

Once Alan and Michael got there (both twitterholics), the conversation was twitter, twitter, twitter.  Doug Turnure finally caved and said he would give it another go.  A few days ago he posted this to his blog:

After a lengthy discussion, and Keith’s *value prop* on it, I’m twittering again. I haven’t decided whether to thank Keith or yell at him about it. But it’s a lot of fun, especially when you’re at an event and trying to find people.

Doug was at Mix08, a large Microsoft conference in Vegas, when he wrote that.  Are you starting to see the connections now?  Twitter is about "What you are doing".  For me Twitter is about what I am thinking, or what I am reading, or what I think about given a certain topic.  Sometimes I post links I find interesting.  Sometimes Twitter is conversational if someone posts something that is controversial.  Sometimes it is about replying to friends with one liners (cough cough, @RossCode and @mjeaton).  It is what you make out of it in a sense. 

How Twitter Has Changed

My Twitterversary (the anniversary date you joined Twitter) will be on May 18th of this year.  I can’t believe it has been almost a year.  Since I joined Twitter it has evolved into a lot of things.  There are desktop applications like Witty Twitter which is an open source project several of us contribute to.  I even made a simple one click install of it so anyone that wants to install it can. Click the link below (it will install Witty Twitter and keep itself up to date on your machine).

http://keithelder.net/software/witty/witty.application (requires .Net 3.0 BTW!)

Having a single URL people can go to to use Twitter has proven very handy in getting people to adopt it.  There are also mobile applications like Tiny Twitter for Windows Mobile and even spin off sites like http://tffratio.com which allows users to track their friend-follower ratio.  A couple of my Tweeps (friends you follow on twitter) came up with it and started it.  We haven’t seen the end yet, more sites and ideas are popping up everywhere.

Tagging

Recently at the Mix 08 conference (which I didn’t attend) I was following key notes as they happened and knew where friends were hanging out and which sessions they were going to.  How?  Hashtags.org.  A Twitter hash tag is a pound sign in front of a noun.  Like #mix08 or #food and so on.  Hastags.Org organizes all the things people twitter about into one place.  I doubt we see many more #mix08 tags since #mix08 is now a thing of the past.  What is interesting about the Mix08 tags is how it spiked and then disappeared a few days later.

Not Enough Reasons?

I’ve already given anyone with a sense of curiosity enough reasons to give Twitter a try.  However, I know there are those of you that are holding out.  For those of you, I give you the best video I have found that explains Twitter.  Just remember that no matter how much stuff you read about it, you won’t get it UNTIL you start using it. 

Source: The Elder

Other notable tech companies that made the top 10 in this years most valuable brands list were IBM (no. 4, valuation: $66.6B), Apple (no. 6, Valuation: $63.1B), China Mobile (no. 7, Valuation: $61.2B), and Vodafone (no. 9, valuation: $53.7B). Ten of the top 25 brands are technology brands. Amazon is no. 26, AT&T is no. 28, Cisco is no. 30, eBay is no. 54 and Yahoo is no. 81, falling from no. 62 last year. Yahoo’s brand value went from $11.5B to $7.9B.

Here’s Top 20:

1. Google ($100 B)
2. Microsoft ($76.2 B)
3. Coca-Cola ($67.6 B)
4. IBM ($66.6 B)
5. McDonalds ($66.5 B)
6. Apple ($66.1 B)
7. China Mobile ($61.2 B)
8. GE ($59.7 B)
9. Vodafone ($53.7 B)
10. Marlboro ($49.4 B)
11. Walmart ($41 B)
12. ICBC ($35 B)
13. Nokia ($35.1 B)
14. Toyota ($29.9 B)
15. UPS ($27.8 B)
16. Blackberry ($27.4 B)
17. HP ($26.7 B)
18. BMW ($23.9 B)
19. SAP ($23.6 B)
20. Disney ($23.1 B)
21. Tesco ($22.9 B)
22. Gillete ($22.9 B)
23. Intel ($22.8 B)
24. China Construction Bank ($22.8 B)
25. Oracle ($21.4 B)

Source: TechCrunch

Moniker made more than $2 million in domain names at the TRAFFIC auction, with Ad.com taking the highest bid. Bottledwater.com took the no. 2 spot at $45,000 and Athletic.com received the third highest amount, selling for $40,000.

$1.4 million may sound like a lot to spend on a domain, especially given the current state of the economy. But Ad.com is a two-letter domain that is easily pronouncable and actually means something, so it’s definitely valuable in the domain market. And a recession doesn’t seem to be stopping companies from spending the big bucks for desirable domain names so Turakhia may be able to flip Ad.com for a profit. Travelzoo bought Fly.com for $1.8 million in January. Vibrators.com was sold for $1 million a back in November and A&T’s YellowPages.com paid $3.85 million for YP.com in December.

Source: TechCrunch

What is POP3? It is a protocol that allows retrieval of your emails in almost any email program that you’ve installed on your mobile phone or PC. Here’s all the information you might need when setting this up in your email program:

POP server: pop3.live.com (Port 995)  
POP SSL required? Yes
User name: Your Windows Live ID, for example yourname@hotmail.com
Password: The password you usually use to sign in to Hotmail or Windows Live
SMTP server: smtp.live.com (Port 25 or 587)  
Authentication required? Yes (this matches your POP username and password)
TLS/SSL required? Yes

In addition to POP3, Microsoft offers additional technologies that can provide you with an even richer experience of your E-mail. Try viewing your Hotmail using Windows Live Mail, Microsoft Office Outlook via the Outlook Connector, or Windows Live for Windows Mobile phone.

Looking for help with Hotmail? Visit the Windows Live Hotmail Solution Center! The Solution Center has instructions on how to set up your e-mail software to send and receive Windows Live Hotmail messages using POP3. You’ll also find instructions on how to set up Hotmail on the web to give you POP3 access to a non-Windows Live e-mail account. If you have problems using POP3 access, Windows Live Hotmail Solution Center also has links to report a problem with Hotmail.

Source: LiveSide

Learn how to read the latest issues of top international magazines for free on your PC. Here is a nifty service, courtesy of Zinio. Apple iPhone users can browse full versions of 20 different magazines for free. Titles include Macworld, Lonely Planet, Popular Photography, Playboy and Penthouse.

But here is what makes it cooler; if you trick your browser into thinking it’s an iPhone, you can actually read these magazines for free on your desktop/laptop (PC or Mac).

You’ll need to change the "user agent" on your browser, which is easy to do in Safari or Firefox. In Safari just follow these instructions, and on Firefox you can add this extension and add the following iPhone user agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A102 Safari/419 (United States)

After that, simply point your desktop browser to this link and enjoy these free quality publications. If you are really smart, you can even download them locally to your computer to read on the flight.

Source: BoardingArea

YouTube also led the large growth in online video watching, accounting for 91 percent of the incremental gain in the number of videos viewed compared to December. Fox’s MySpace also experienced large growth: from 444 million videos viewed in December 2008 to 552 million in January 2009, with Yahoo, Viacom and Microsoft’s properties following in places three to five.

The alleged YouTube killer, Hulu, is also growing, but at a much slower rate: from 240 million videos viewed in December 2008 to 250 million in January 2009. Hulu is still closed for most international viewers, and the lack of global buzz around the service might ultimately hamper its overall growth. If we compare the number of videos viewed, in just one month, YouTube has grown nearly two Hulus in size, so there’s a lot of catching up to do for Hulu.

Source: Mashable

A U.N. report published today states that six in ten people (60%) of the world’s population has a cell phone subscription. The driving growth trend is coming from poor, developing countries. This 60% figure is up from just under 15% in 2002.

Internet use has more than doubled to 23% in 2008 up from 11% in 2002. Only 1 in 20 people in the same poor countries have Internet access, however in rich countries the fixed broadband services increased to almost 20% market penetration, while on average only 1 in 20 worldwide have high speed Internet. Mobile broadband has also shown its fastest increase, with 3% of people worldwide having it on average, compared to 14% in rich countries. Fixed line subscriptions (home phones) have increased at a slower rate, from 1 billion in 2002 to 1.27 billion in 2009, meaning cellular phones outnumber direct-wired phones in excess of 3:1.

The 106-page U.N. report also ranked countries by how advanced their information and communications technology (ICT) is. The order went as follows:

1) Sweden
2) South Korea (getting nation-wide Gigabit broadband by 2012)
3) Denmark
4) Netherlands
5) Iceland
6) Norway

The United States came in at #17, with Hong Kong at #11, China at #73 and India at #118, both of which have a high technology base but whose ranking was affected by their large populations and poor, rural areas. Myanmar’s militaristic government gave that country the only cited decline over the same period, with Internet bandwidth dropping 90%. This came following the Internet being shut down at times, along with several bloggers being jailed for published content.

Source: TG Daily

Google announced the launch of its browser yesterday. Today, it available for download to all. You can download the Google Chrome Beta for Windows Operating System from here. I thought it was a small application like the Google Talk as the download was just 474 KB but it’s not. It was just the initial setup file the full application comes to around 46.50 MB on my Windows Vista. Yes, it’s cool indeed.

Source: Official Google Blog

Have you ever noticed a feature in Orkut called "add to crush-list" (go to someone else’s profile and point the mouse to the more » link in the left sidebar)? I’m pretty sure that even if you noticed the same you would be scared to add someone to the crush-list because of the fear that he/she would get a notification about the same from Orkut.

YES, you are right indeed they will get a notification that you have added him/her on your Orkut crush list. But that happens ONLY if they did the same. It means if you add a person to your crush-list then nothing happens at all. But if you are already on their crush list or that same person adds you some day then you BOTH will receive a message from Orkut that you have a crush on each other! The rest is certainly up to you!

orkut has unmasked a shared affection and shown twinned wounds from Cupid’s darts. But while we aid in love’s detection, Its future path lies twixt your hearts.

Isn’t an amazing feature of Orkut? I think this piece of information must be passed to each and every Orkuter. So spread the knowledge and help your friends to discover their love.

Happy Orkuting!!!