In this week’s TWiT #243, Kara Swisher of AllThingsD.com talks about how Google has often missed the mark in their social networking because they hold off releasing products form the Labs until they are completely satisfied that it can be automated 100%. Whereas, most of the successful social networking start-ups have heavily focused and even relied on what essentially makes up a social network: The Human Factor. When there is a key piece missing, newcomers like Foursquare and Twitter through some new bodies on the problem and in some cases even open up the front door, create some Super Users from folks on the street and roll with it.
Continue reading Google Announces GMail Buzz
|
||||||
|
|
Today we are announcing the 2FatDads.com ShortURL service, this is the first product or service that 2FatDads has ever launched. And it is very much in pre-beta form right now. In fact this post should be the first link to actually use the service itself, and the only people who will have access to it for the time being are the Fat Dads. If it goes well, we will make it available to all of our readers and listeners.  Original photo by Flckr's sludgeulper Why are we doing this? We’re not trying to create a “me too” service or even claim any ownership of anyone else’s content. We always give full credit to any source we use and use full links to the original source in our all our posts as well, always striving to avoid any kind of link digging on your behalf. We use open source technologies like WordPress.org, PHP, MySQL to build the site and try to publish it with other standards compliant protocols like RSS and the media enclosures that allow us to send the DadCasts into iTunes. Over the years we have bolted on neat-o plug-ins to either modify the format of the site or allow us to use our arsenal of Google Tools like Analytics for web stats and Adsense for serving up the Ads you might see to the left and at the bottom of some of our posts, well that is if you are not if you’re not blocking ads with a browser extension (more on that another time). All we want to do is make sure our posts and interesting links get to you faster. If we post a new article before lunch, you can bet that we want it to be tweeted twittered in front of your eyes at the same time. And because we’re busy Fat Dads with a bit of a programming background, we HAVE to find some kind of automated service to do this for us. In the beginning we were using some pretty cool services that would use popular shortURL services. But this opened up a few problems along the way, let me explain what the issues are and why you should actually care about this too.
A while back, YULBlogger, Laurent Lasalle posted an excellent heads up guide to getting Digital and HDTV Over The Air. The Brits call it Free to View or Free to Air and the Americans still don’t know what to do with it even though their cut over deadline came and went, but got pushed over a bit by the Big O in Office. One thing is for sure is that my recent issues with my Bell TV == FAILED service pushed my conversion plan a little forward.
I have had a tumultuous relationship with Bell Express-Vu since day one. In fact, my relationship with Express-Vu is not all indifferent from my overall relationship with Bell. A company that is so out of touch with it’s core user base that it openly engages in practices that drive users away in droves, until at least the users realise that Bell has locked them into all kinds of unfair and anti-competitive long term contracts. Sure no one has to sign the long contract but often there is no way to get any kind of competitive pricing without doing so. And at the end of the day, who are they really competing with. Most Canadian markets are broken up into “Duopolies”, if you forgive the expression. In Montreal, the only legal television alternatives are ExpressVu and Videotron, I am not even sure if StarChoice is grey market or completely illegal like DirectTV. |
Follow @2FatDads on Twitter...
 |
||||
|
Copyright © 2004 - 2010 2 Fat Dads - All Rights Reserved |
||||||
mtl_steve : @nantel has Montreal also discontinued use of buggy whips? Viva west island!
claurin : @JohnnyCanuck The Hymus will be added to the tour schedule.
JohnnyCanuck : @claurin lol Sure but we can't leave the Hymus off of the community centre tour. Maybe we can even get @scorbett22 to sit on a bouclier
schultzter : I just had to "break up a fight" between my daughter's two feet - she insists it was not her fault but they're keeping her awake!
What’s Being Said