Sc@-tt3r-ed Thoughts

In the past few days, I’ve been seeing quite a buzz on the TweeterGetter site. There’s also been a lot of talk about its existence, and whether it is a good idea to subscribe to. I have thought about it for a while, and finally decided not to sign up for it, and here are my reasons: ..Continue reading..

I’m so excited! Finally, Better Gmail 2 support HTML Signatures. there’s a couple steps to it, but once it’s setup, it’s beautiful, and gets seamlessly inserted in new messages. I can now send email from web-based gmail, as well as outlook/Mac Mail, and have my outgoing mail look the same! Yippeee!!

Also, as a side note, if you download this version of Better Gmail 2 (0.5.1) , check out the redesigned skin, it’s on a black background, and it looks amazing!

I was browsing today, and I stumbled upon a new site — at least to me — which is very similar to some of the sites that I used to use to upload files to friends, like dropload and YouSendIt. 

Sometimes I find the need to get a friend to see what I’m doing, or show them a section on a website, or guide through purchasing a product, and it would be nice if we could see the same screen and go through the steps. 

Here’s the problem I always see: any solution that may be possible usually requires a lengthy signup, email confirmation, and the works. Of course, there’s sites like… http://www.bugmenot.com which removes the pain from some of these processes, but it’s still a lot of setup instructions. 

Well yesterday, when I was stumbling around, I found a pretty cool site, which is, still in public beta (meaning, still has its quirks) … but is promising. The best part about this one, is that no signup is required, you can go to it, start a session, as an anonymous user, and invite as many other users into it to share the session. The result is just a url that takes the user straight to the session. Granted, this session is public, so anyone may join it if they know the URL. If privacy is required, you would have to sign up for an account, and create a private session. 

Here’s one issue that I didn’t like, though I certainly understand:

• You can only share sites that are outside of an authentication realm. I tried to login to gmail, or my bank account, and non of them worked. Which is ok I guess, but just something I noticed. 
• For obvious reasons, you cannot guide someone through an intranet site (company website, etc …) because the connections are actually made from the twiddla servers to the site, therefore not giving them access to your intranet. 

This is a fairly obvious point, but given the benefit of such a site, I could see people wanting to use it for intranet, and authenticated session. 

Overall, Twiddla is a pretty cool site. I would just give it some more time before they have some of their tools within the whiteboard working correctly. 

For today, we have 2 sites that have been in competition for me over the past week …
MUSICOVERY and PANDORA.

They are similar where they can taylor music to your taste. the interface of musicovery is definitely sexier than pandora, as you can see below. you can have a visual of any songs that are within your genre list selected on the left, and jump straight to the song of choice. from what I could tell, Pandora does not have that same option, however it does have another option that makes up for the lack of musicovery-like features in that you can input a “Radio station” which is the name of an artist or band that you like, and it automatically taylors the radio station to the music style that is very similar to that artist. I say that’s pretty slick.

You can sign it to both of these sites. Registration is free for the basic membership, and costs a pretty reasonable amount for the hi-def version, and a few more features available. To me, the free version has been working fine. Maybe it will for you as well. Give it a shot, and post which you prefer, and maybe even suggest some of your favorite sites for streaming music?