Andy Wood

What do you think about Facebook?  If you are looking for a way to archive your data on Facebook so that you can keep it for all time.  Thankfully, there’s a Firefox addon that will archive this all for you!

The ArchiveFacebook addon from the folks at Mozilla makes it exceedingly simple for you to forever archive all of your Facebook material. Archive your photos, messages, activity stream, friends list, notes, events and groups – right to your hard drive.

Thanks for Chris Pirillo for pointing this out.

TechCrunch and others are saying that Microsoft’s Bing search engine is adding Tweets soon.

Microsoft has finally figured out the strategy to compete with Google. Cut Google where they are weak. Keep cutting. Bing!

This strategy is winning. It would seem that Google is losing market share and hasn’t yet figured out how to respond.

Thanks AT&T – No really!

I got the shop at 9.15a today, everything was fine.  Got through about 95% of “before we open” tasks and all of sudden I wasn’t able to access email, no web, nada!

After an hour of nothing, I went to the backup plan and used the cell phone as wireless Internet connection.

Easy to do too.

Now the Internet is back (it wasn’t just me either, the whole plaza was out), we are back on-line and playing a little catch up before New Comics Day.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Google is seeking to blur the line between the telephone and the computer even further with the introduction of Google Voice on Thursday.

The new service weaves traditional phone features with Google’s Gmail email product, allowing a person to store transcripts of voicemail phone messages in their email inbox and to find a specific nugget of information within a phone message as if trawling through a sea of emails.

The move comes as Google increasingly branches out from its stronghold in Internet search, as it seeks to carve out a role in everything from cell phones to personal productivity software.

And it demonstrates the company’s ability to fuse various technologies — home-grown and acquired — into new products, even as the economic recession puts the future of certain Google projects in question.

Google Voice is based on the technology of Grand Central Communications, a company that Google acquired in July 2007. After Grand Central remained silent for nearly two years under the Google flag, some observers wondered whether it had met the same fate as Dodgeball, a Google acquisition that was formally shut down this year.

Google Voice represents the first major update to Grand Central since the acquisition. Like the original Grand Central product, Google Voice offers consumers a single phone number that can route incoming calls to home, office and cell phones.

The new version uses speech-recognition technology that Google developed for its Goog-411 telephone directory service, automatically transcribing voicemails into text. The transcribed messages can be forwarded as an email or SMS text message to a person’s email inbox.

It is unclear how Google Voice will fit into Google’s business model, which relies on advertisers to provide 97 percent of the company’s revenue. The company has also ventured into the mobile software market, launching last year the Android mobile operating system.

Other than a feature that bills Google Voice users when they make long-distance phone calls, the product has no immediate means of generating revenue, said Craig Walker, group product manager for Real Time Communications at Google.

He said that Google Voice, which will be available to existing Grand Central users on Thursday and to the general public in the following weeks, provides another reason for people to spend more time on Google’s various online properties, which benefits the company.

Google also makes money from selling enterprise versions of its applications to corporations. But Walker said the current priority is to make Google Voice a success as a free consumer product.

Does anybody remember the good ol’ days, where dial-up was the norm, social networking was that red-headed stepchild nobody liked, and status updates were simply non-existent?

I know I do, and to be honest, I miss them.

Many companies these days are finding new ways of letting others know what you’re doing; Twitter being a relatively recent (albeit successful) one, and a lot of mobile devices produced support the services.

From Facebook to MySpace, nearly everybody today is, as some people put it, ‘connected’.

It would seem that 2009 is going to be the year of twitter.

#1 Update Your Twitter Profile

Under settings you can add a url, make sure this link is your blog address. This means that when you get new followers and they view your profile they’ll have a direct link to your blog.

#2 Twitter is the new RSS

When you visit any established blog you will see the orange RSS feed in the top right hand corner. Now most people won’t check their RSS feed everyday, but most twitter users will, hence I think twitter will be the new RSS. At the moment a standard button for twitter hasn’t been established, but you should be adding an image next to the RSS link that points to your twitter page.

#3 Follow The Leaders In Your Industry

When you first start out you’ll probably know a few people you want to follow, but it’s quite daunting to figure out who the movers & shakers are in the Twitersvere. If you Follow MrTweet you will be given a list of people who you should be following. If you’ve posted a few updates and a good bio then some of these people will follow you back, so let the networking begin.

#4 Install TweetDeck

Once you install this software onto your computer it opens up a whole new twitter experience.

When someone your following updates it will ping and let you know someone has tweeted. It allows you instantly reply to updates, and it will monitor for anyone who replies to one of your tweets. No more frantically refreshing the homepage to get that twitterfix!

#5 The TweetMyBlog Plugin

This nifty plugin allows me to have my twitterfeed in the sidebar of my blog.

It will also automatically update my twitter account everytime I make a new post, and if you have established good relationships then you should see instant traffic.

#6 The Sociable Plugin

Once installed this plugin makes it easy for readers to share your content. Be sure to tick the “TweetThis” function so that people can tweet about your blog post in seconds. Providing you produce good Pillar Content the amount of extra traffic could be huge.

#7 Use Search To Get Found

Have you seen people post updates with a #nerdpickuplines or similar? If you use the search function then you will this is a way of trending and picking out what is popular. By tweeting about popular topics not only will you have topics to chat about at the watercooler but you’re being part of the community, which will bring more traffic back to your blog.

#8 Use ViralTweets instead of E-mail Capture

The thinking about offering a free report in exchange for your readers email is that you can follow-up and email them about new blog posts. Whilst email lists are fantastic the chances of ytour reader telling all their friends about the free report are pretty slim. If you study the offer on my sidebar you’ll see that anyone who tweets the message automatically follows me, and posts a link to my main website – long term much more valuable than an individual address.

#9 Be Yourself

Twitter is a big social network that works on the basis of “What Are You Doing?”

If all you’re doing is blasting adverts over the twitter network then you’re not going to make any friends, and you’re wasting your time. Conversly if you use it a “Micro Blogging” site and post things that aren’t worth whole blog posts it will work fantastically well for you, and help establish a relationship with the readers of your blog.

#10 The Power Of The Retweet

This final point is probably the most important for traffic generation.

When someone you’re following posts a link to a blog post and you like the content you go to tweetdeck and hit the little arrow button. This automatically retweets the link to the content, and shows your followers you’ve found an article you think they would like to read. By retweeting great content you will gain the respect of your followers, and get on the radar of the person who wrote the content.

Finally if do write a hot topic article then be sure to make sure to tell people that you want it retweeted.
With that in mind if you found this post helpfull then copy this into tweetdeck and hit enter

Delayed news will no longer be acceptable for early adopters, who will gravitate to the quickest sources of news, wherever they may be. As tools like Twitter Search and FriendFeed real-time offer people to rapidly broadcast their updates, reactions and news with true immediacy, a segment of the population will adopt these real-time sources and favor them ahead of delayed or filtered engines, including RSS, and of course, edited mass media.

At the same time, while many of us early adopters may be fairly noisy about this development, they will remain in the significant minority, even as the mainstream becomes more aware of these options.

The RIAA has decided to cease prosecution of file sharers directly, and instead force ISP’s to become the new copyright police.

The RIAA wasn’t even able to truly determine if people were sharing music, so you ISP is supposed to be able to figure it out?

Is ATT, my ISP, going to know I’m using BitTorrent legitimately, or are they going to assume that because my music library also exists on the same computer that is running BitTorrent, that I must be an illegal music file-sharer?

This isn’t helping anyone; the RIAA is just trying to find more effective means to catch people doing what may be legitimate work. It just gets scarier, doesn’t it? My BitTorrent machine is offline right now, not because of this, but because we are having new flooring put in the room where it resides.

I’m playing around with Windows Live Writer, here’s their blog where you can download it from.

First of all I must say: Yes, I am still waiting for my AT&T Tilt rebate. When I purchased the phone about 6 months ago, I am expecting to get one of those $150 visa rebate cards.

You might find this happening again, as Florida based Continental Promotion Group (CPG) filled for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy protection on Nov 14th. Since Canon uses CPG for rebates, they alerted their dealers a few days ago of the possible rebate issues. Canon also issued a statement saying they will cover rebates.

CPG offers many different items like rebates, Pre-Paid and Gift Cards, Sales rewards and Sweepstakes. They work with companies like Canon, Home Depot, Bed, Bath and Beyond, WOOT!, Costco, Fujitsu, Logitech, Motorola, Pricegrabber, Samsung, Staples, Westinghouse and XM Satellite. Their list goes on from there, with other companies in 120 countries.

CPG will borrow from some of the companies to get the rebates sent out. You might be a little more weary, though if you are going out on Black Friday for the Doorbuster Days.