Howefitz Blog

Waay back in 2008, I blogged about the dangers of Twitter. In that blog, I made the case that it’s possible to pollute your favorite social media sites with compelling entries such as “I’m eating a burrito.” I thought that this could be off-putting to the people you could be trying to attract to your blog/online business by tweeting.

Today, I watched this video on johnchow.com:

Wow, this video makes a compelling case that “I’m drinking a cup of coffee.” Is something people might actually want to know!

Hmmm….

There’s only one conclusion.

Lately I’ve been doing some soul searching about my responsibility to the online community. I recently became a fairly heavy Twitter user. Any time I am at my computer, Tweetdeck is running. At work, I have Tiny Twitter running on my phone.

Interested in monetizing wesites and blogs, I decided to give Magpie a try. I decided to have them post an ad in my tweet stream after every five tweets. I then tweeted things like what I had for breakfast, the weather outside, whatever was on my mind. I literally started to think in 140 characters or less. (‘This just happened, how would I tweet that?’) I was trying to earn some cash from Magpie!

It seems like any blog you look at these days raves about Twitter. Well, let me join the crowd! Twitter is a social networking tool that allows users to quickly send out messages to keep in touch, communicate, pimp their blog, or whatever else they feel like selling/doing. I have blogged previously about how a tweet got one of my favorite Star Trek novel writers to comment on my blog. Today, I used it as a form of text support. Using Tweetdeck I sent out a cry for help.

What my plea for assistance looks like on tweetdeck

Today was really crappy. Super crappy. I mean, it couldn’t have gotten worse if Murphy himself showed up, slapped me around a bit and screamed his law in my face. It was seriously that bad. I was so depressed and mopey when I got home that my wife, empathic soul that she is, immediately felt depressed and mopey too. A few minutes before Heroes started, my wife got a phone call and left the room. Not wanting to watch one of my favorite shows without my favorite companion, I hit record, changed the channel on the T.V., and sulked some more.

After taking some down time from the ol’ laptop, I decided to check out some new developments I had heard about, starting with the new Gmail themes.

GMail Themes

If you’re a user of Gmail, you may have noticed it looks a little different. That’s because they just added themes! If you go to your settings panel, you’ll notice a new tab called, you guessed it, ‘themes’. If you’re the more condervative type, there are several different color schemes to choose from. If you like to have a little more fun, there are themes such as Bus Stop (similar to the bus stop theme in iGoogle). My two personal faves are Ninja and Planets.

I just noticed that yesterday I got mentioned on Michael Wayne’s Twitter Question of the Day! He asked: Do newsletter subscribe popups bother you? You can see people’s answers, as well as yours’ truly here: Michael-wayne.com

-Justin

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