This is the New Facebook

Facebook is doing its best to blow the minds of developers and users today at their F8 conference. Of course, over the last few days, all they have really accomplished was upsetting their user base with dramatic and seemingly unnecessary changes to the Facebook user experience.

Today they unleashed the future of a Facebook profile. It looks slick, fun, interesting and very narcissistic. The new Facebook is the old Myspace.

Next is a screen capture of what an entire profile will look like. Continue reading

The Other Justin and Pine 22

I am always excited when the opportunity to meet a Twitter friend during one of my trips comes up. On my trip to Orlando I got to meet two of my Twitter friends in real life (IRL) for the first time. The first was a Twitter friend of my namesake, Justin, followed by Skylor at another downtown Orlando restaurant.

Corey and I met Justin aka @TheJustins86 at a gourmet burger restaurant called Pine Twenty 2 in downtown Orlando. Pine Twenty2 was the recommendation of Justin and what a great one it was.

Pine 22

How we actually came about Pine Twenty2 is even more interesting. Corey was showing to me the menu of a restaurant downtown. I kept saying “wow that sounds awesome” and thinking, “I want to go there!” Then I say to Corey, “The other Justin wants to go to some place called ‘Pine Twenty2’…”

Meanwhile, Corey was showing me the menu to Pine Twenty2 the entire time. If that isn’t a sign, I don’t know what is. Continue reading

Night Light

What an awesome night tonight turned out to be. Twitter buddies @Airrun, @JHolman23, @jasetrevino and @Marris_Returns came over for wine, bread, cheese, and fun.

It was my first pseudo tweetup since moving back to San Francisco, the first time I had seen Jimmy since he moved here from Missouri and the first time I had the pleasure of meeting Jason or Aaron. We listened to music, watched some hilarious YouTube videos, talked about everything and nothing at the same time.

It was a pretty awesome night. Even Ryan got to join in on the fun which was such a pleasant surprise. Seems any other time we do something like this, his hectic work schedule gets in the way. Now I just can’t wait for the next time I have friends over for wine and a great time.

The photo of the day, way up there, is yet another one from the roof of our apartment shooting into the neighboring backyard. There is something about this particular apartment and their 6000 watt light that shines light pollution across the common grassy space between the buildings that is so romantic to me. It’s what I imagine a Gregory Crewdson photo would look like if he had a crew of one and a budget of none.

Phoebe’s Birthday

I’ve never known someone that could turn what would be an ordinary birthday into the multi-day even with the grace and poise of Phoebe (@fotofobe).  Twitter messages, text messages, Facebook events… It all built up to one hell of a birthday celebration.

From a night of drinking at McNally’s, to a fun birthday breakfast at Cafe Berlin (@cafeberlin) to managing to take advantage of every possible “free on your birthday” promotion to an amazing, FedEx’d cake from her mom.  What a fun birthday, even for those not turning a year older!
The highlights for me were the birthday breakfast at Cafe Berlin where they gave her a Birthday Bear pancake in leu of the usual Birthday Red Pepper and the cake her mom mailed to her.  Wow, it was delish!

I can’t wait for Phoebe’s next birthday celebration, I just might have to fly to wherever she is next year for the festivities.

What a fun birthday, even for those not turning a year older!


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Quick Google Wave Tips

Google Wave's logo
Image via Wikipedia

Seems anyone who visits my social media landing page, That’s Justin, asks me, how they hell do you manage it all.  Honestly, I don’t know.  It’s a bit distressing at time but I wouldn’t give it up for the world.  I’ve made so many wonderful connections, received job offers, sold prints, purchased goods, gotten better service and more all simply by using social media sites.

Here’s one of the newest.  Google Wave.  It seems the biggest question around Google Wave is, what is it, followed by, how do you use it.

Google Wave is essentially online collaboration, email, bulletin board, instant messaging and more all wrapped into one.  Right now I think we’re all still figuring out how to best use the service but I have a handful of ideas in my head!

I admit the service is pretty overwhelming but here are a few tips that make it usable for me.

The first thing you might want to do create a few saved searches, these are three I couldn’t live without.

creator:me -is:note:

This search shows all the notes/waves I created

onlyto :me is:unread:

This search shows all the notes/waves that are to me and are still unread.

with:me is:unread:

This search shows all the notes/waves that I am a direct participant in and are unread

Another quick tip, to end an input session, instead of clicking the “Done” button, try this keyboard shortcut

Shift + Enter

You can use the same shortcut to enter a reply to the last post in the wave.

Control + E will edit a post.

Save a lot of time, speed up collaboration!

That’s about it for now.  As I come across really helpful Google Wave tricks/tips, I’ll share them.  Maybe I’ll just embed a wave into my blog, that sounds like a great idea!

Right now, the de-facto Google Wave guide is, in fact, The Complete Guide to Google Wave by Gina Trapani.

What are your thoughts/tips/tricks/etc? Leave ’em in the comments!

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Why I’m Quitting Disqus in 48 Hours

I tried Disqus a few years ago.  Didn’t work out for me.  So when @LeoLaporte talked it up on This Week in Tech while discussing blogs vs Twitter I decided to give it another try, even though he was actually recommending JS-Kit Echo.

A few weeks earlier I tried out IntenseDebate, which was buggy as all hell so the idea of a fresh start with a more established system was a great feeling.

The switch wasn’t so easy.  ZERO of my comments imported into Disqus, despite increasing my MySQL memory.  Disqus is pretty good about checking on things through Twitter however.  I tweeted my frustration and posted a formal complaint on their customer service system and within a few hours I had a response.

But over a week passed and nothing was resolved.  Eventually, @giannii was able to take my emailed WordPress database and upload it to Disqus for whatever they had to do at that point.

But only a handful of nearly 1,700 comments actually imported! All added up over the past year or two, only 14 comments made it in!  And that is still the case (beyond what have been added since October 21 by way of new comments to the blog).

I got a tweet from @Giannii that @Disqus would take a look at the problem last week. But another problem sprung up!  Missing old comments was one thing but missing comments that were new?

Unacceptable.  One person commented on my blog about being blacklisted by Disqus.  Hello, what?! I’m sorry but did I hear that someone can be permanently blacklisted? I can understand this for robot spammers but this was a human with a cogent argument. Their comment can show up in my WordPress comments through the dashboard but not actually on my site?  Even if what he/she is posting is relavent, which in this case it certainly was?

What about someone that posted a comment earlier in the day, which was given the “thumbs up”, and when he comes back to post a reply his comment disappears?  This was the case for @Vortex_Bits.  He left a reply to my reply on his comment.  I value his opinion greatly and considering the fact that this was a sort of debate between the two of us, not posting his comment makes ME appear as childish, sending his comment to the abyss.

On my WordPress Dashboard his comment shows up, I can even view the comment in WordPress’s editor.

So WordPress says it’s approved.  It shows up in the dashboard but it’s missing from Disqus and the blog entirely?! Doesn’t Disqus advertise the sociability of their service to create conversation within your site and the internet?  A conversation that permeates through what we typically understand as individual networks?

Unless Disqus can actually fix this by this time Saturday I’m quitting Disqus, recommending to all my friends, readers and followers that they do the same and trying out the third player in the game, JS-Kit Echo.  I love the idea of Disqus.  They have been really nice and helpful and even as late as early this week promised to look into fixing my problems. However, in the end, it is the results that matter.  You can be super nice over email, twitter and the like but if your service can’t deliver the results, I’ve gotta say see-ya-later.

If Disqus is able to fix this, and I have my nearly 1,700 old comments imported into the service and the ignored new comments published, I will sing their worthy praises.  I’m one of those people who is actually willing to pay for a service.  I’d pay for Disqus but not if it is this buggy, as bad or worse than IntenseDebate.  At least ID managed to show all my comments.  JS-Kit Echo is only $12/year, that’s looking awfully tempting.

I’d love to get your thoughts on this.  Horror stories or success stories.  Though, good luck getting them to actually post.  :-\

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