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

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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Disqus the Disappointment

UPDATE: And just like that, Gianni at Disqus has my comments imported and everything works.  Fantastic.  A testament to Disqus and their support staff.  Resolved the problem less than an hour after I blogged about it! – Turns out not so lucky, click here to learn why.


Yesterday I shared my ultimately negative experience with the blog comment system, IntenseDebate.  The system was at first promising, before it fell flat on it’s face with a beautiful front end but clunky backend, inability to properly manage logins and artificially limiting features.  You can read more about why, just click back to that post.

So I switched back to Disqus, the commenting system I tried out a couple of years ago before ultimately abandoning it.  The early versions of Disqus wouldn’t synchronize comments with the WordPress database.  If Disqus ever went away, so did your comments.

I installed the latest Disqus as a plugin for the latest version of WordPress.  I rand the installation, followed the directions to import my comments and this is what happened and continues to happen.

No comments are imported! I went to Twitter and talked to @Disqus a few weeks ago.  I even emailed them about the problem and they said they’d take care of it.

And yet, still, there are no comments from my previous posts.  They all still exist in my blog, you can see there are over 1,600 of them.

If I go to Disqus to see my comments, only five show up!

There is certainly no way I can really review Disqus until I get it to actually work.  I really want to like the system and the people behind it.  They have been so quick to send help my way, even on this blog, but sadly the help never fixes the problem.

For right now though, Disqus is just a disappointment.  Even more so than IntenseDebate.  At least that would import my comments…

So why not discuss this Disqus problem but logging your comments on the form below.  See, any new post and any new comments show up just fine. It’s those pesky historical comments and conversations that never showed up to the party.

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