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Jan 21
Personal No Comments
Twitter, windows phone 7, wp7, zune
This was posted to Twitter after my comment in the last All About Windows Phone Insight podcast
@davidgilson‘s comment on drag-and-drop vs Zune is epic “The whole idea of a desktop suite being less geeky than drag n drop is utter tosh!”
— Alvin Wong (@alv1nW) January 21, 2012
Aug 21
Cloud Services No Comments
facebook, google, networks, plus, social, socialnetworking, Twitter
I’ve been trying Google Plus for a few weeks, and I think it has promise. It gets right all the things that Facebook got wrong, in terms of controlling which groups of people you interact with and share content with. Add to that the awesome Hangout feature which gives easy access to video conferencing.
My gripes with it is the +1 system, which seems to be a confused mix between the Facebook like button and the Twitter favourite function. I’m still trying to work out exactly the benefit of the +1 one button in terms of interaction on Google Plus. Of course, the +1 button serves to tailor search results for you, based on your social graph. Whether that is a good thing or an evil thing is a debate for another day!
The thing I’m really missing from Google Plus is an easy way to share content with my Plus followers. At the moment, if I want to share a link with my Google Plus circles, I have to go to the site and manually post the link. Instead, I want to have sharing buttons (or at least a browser plugin) to have a one-click share, like we have with Facebook and Twitter.
The only social buttons for Google that are appearing on blogs are the +1 buttons, which do not send content to your Google Plus feed! Of course, the +1 button can’t do this because you have to tell Plus which circles each of your posts are going to. Therein lies the rub.
Still though, if you’d like to try out Google Plus for yourself, I have 150 invites. All you need to do is click this link. If you’ve read this far, a Flattr wouldn’t go amiss either 
Apr 7
Cloud Services No Comments
blogging, brower, buffer, google, plug-ins, reader, schedule, social media, Twitter
Buffer, a new way to schedule tweets
Allow me to introduce you to Leo Widrich, co-founder of a new cloud service, called Buffer. It’s a Twitter scheduling service that I’ve been making much use of lately. You’ll also notice that I’m sporting a Buffer button at the bottom of each post. The idea is that using services such as Twitterfeed or Feedly can inadvertently cause you to flood your followers with more tweets than they can keep up with. This can in turn can annoy your followers, and maybe cause them to unfollow you.
Therefore, for non-time sensitive links, using a scheduler allows you to get all of your content out at a steady rate, without overwhelming your followers in the process.
Introduction over, I’ll hand over to Leo now, so he can explain to you about the service in his own words!
Apr 9
How-To Guides 13 Comments
bookmarking, bookmarks, google, links, reader, RSS, Twitter
Unite Twitter & Google Reader with a click of the star
For writers, most links come from either Google Reader or Twitter these days. In the case of Google Reader, one can easily save things for later by adding a star. However, saving links from your Twitter timeline requires some sort of bookmarking system (e.g. Delicious, Instapaper or Packrati.us). This gives the writer two sets of links to keep up with, wouldn’t it be better if everything were in one place?
Feb 15
How-To Guides 2 Comments
buzz, e-mail, email, filtering, gmail, google, privacy, socialnetworking, Twitter
Google Buzz
Google Buzz was released last week, and a positive spin on it would be that it could succeed where FriendFeed didn’t quite succeed, because of Google’s ready-made user base. A negative spin would be - we don’t need this. Certainly, I personally think that it’s naive to try replacing Twitter at this point. Twitter is not perfect, but we’re stuck with it, and there’s a great ecosystem of web services built up around it.
Sure, Google Buzz can take posts from Twitter and therefore work along side it, just like Facebook can. Although, Google Buzz is just going to be another place for replication of links. E.g. my blog posts updates to Twitter, and my Buzz account takes updates from both – I can see that it wouldn’t take many more steps to create a painful recursion here. To be fair, this is what the mute button is for, but why should we have to start playing whack-a-mole with all this? Duplication is also going to happen for committed Google users, who are likely to see the same updates appearing in their Google Reader as they are on their Buzz feed; unless they’re very strict about who they follow. Which reminds me, I had better unfollow most of those people Google automatically made me follow on day one …
In the interests of fairness, I should report that Google have responded, saying that they have replaced auto-follow with auto-suggestions. They’ll also make it easier to hide who you’re following, and to opt-out of Buzz completely; all via your GMail settings. At the time the writing though, none of these options were available in my GMail settings. Fortunately, there are other ways to get to these options, so here’s a round up of blog posts showing you how to protect yourself with Google Buzz.
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