Review of Best and Worst Techo Twitter Posts week ending 26 Sep

Welcome to my review of the week in tech – each week I’m picking out the things that I liked the most that I submitted via Twitter for you all to read.  If you haven’t already seen my Twitter feed of tech tips add me @aholesgrove or have a look at http://twitter.com/aholesgrove and subscribe to the RSS feed of my tweets.

I found myself tweeting a significant amount this week – there was a Game Show in Tokyo where a lot of companies were showing off a lot of cool upcoming gadgets.  In addition to that, it seems that all the tech titans were stabbing each other in the throat to take advantage of a high news week – Google for example were announcing a new feature each day of the week, some of which were pretty bad actually (as I’ve outlined below).  Microsoft on the other hand were the reoccuring theme in the majority of my good posts this week, who would have thought?  Our friends in Redmond are actually bringing out a lot of cool stuff over the next 12 months and there well be plenty more to talk about as they keep making announcements (and other things “leak” to the press, yeah right – rumours are the new advertising).

THE GOOD

• This is really cool – XPize Polishes Windows XP’s Interface [Downloads] http://bit.ly/1dsvM8

I installed this little app on my netbook last night and I was really impressed.  Whilst I mostly focus on suggesting apps that are productivity related, I found that this really did give a nice, glossed and polished touch to Windows XP – considering my main workstation is a Windows 7 machine this was welcomed eye candy for my little guy.  There are different choices for what icons and themes you want to change in XP and you can even change the welcome screen to something more glossy looking to, and I’m glad I put it on.

• The evidence keeps mounting, you can’t ignore social media – Social Networking Use Triples from Only a Year Ago http://bit.ly/oynUF

We continually communitcate via our company Twitter account @makinglifeezy and this blog the importance of social media as the new most important advertising platform for your business.  This article is just some of the supporting evidence you’ll continue to find on the net regarding the rapidly growing community in the social media space and the amazing opportunities social networking provides for your business as a way to comminicate to your potential and existing customers like never before.

• WOW! This is a fantastic idea – TechTracker Scans Your Computer for Outdated Software [Downloads] http://bit.ly/6wvcx #Lifehacker

Frankly, I’m surprised that someone hasn’t thought to do this earlier.  One of the biggest problems in computer security is that people just don’t keep their software up-to-date even as vulnerabilities and the like are discovered in these older editions.  It’s understandable that people don’t have the time to be scouring the web looking to see if their software has been updated, and now they don’t have to.  I ran this on my own computer and it found updates for software that I had forgotten I had even installed let alone a few programs that I didn’t think would have been updated.  Really handy tool.

• Good read, the best about WordPress I’ve seen – The Beginner’s Guide to Tricking Out Your WordPress Blog [WordPress] http://bit.ly/TNH9Z

We here at Making Life Ezy are VERY big fans of WordPress (this blog is a WordPress blog, in fact), so much so that we recommend to all of our HireEzy.com customers to create their own WordPress blogs as a pivital part of good Seach Engine Optimisation techniques and for creating link backs to their own website content.  This article really dumbed down the concept of setting one up, summarised the really awesome themes there are out there and recommended some of the really good plugins.  I found it really useful even though we’ve already set up our blog.  Of course, HireEzy.com customers can get a WordPress blog set up for them by our technicians for free as part of our web optimisation pack we sell with HireEzy.

• Highly recommended plugin for #IE, I like it! – Printee Enables Selective Printing in Internet Explorer [Downloads] http://bit.ly/s8QNK

This plugin addresses one of the major problems with the web browser, being that people like to print web pages and they find that the text is split up over multiple pages in an unreadable format.  This plugin addresses this problem by smartly reading the text on the page and creating a printer friendly version of it before sending off the print request to your printer.  Voila, your printing out text all nice and formatted for simple reading off of paper.  Best of all, this plugin is free!

• OH MAN!! This might just be the most amazing handheld gadget I’ve seen – Announcing the Microsoft Newton [Digital Daily] http://bit.ly/6E4kB

Being a tech person I can’t help but add a gadget to this list, but this device is seriously awesome. There is a video you can view which demonstrates the potential of the device – basically the Microsoft Newton/Courier (there seems to be different codenames used for this device at this stage) is a dual screen device held like a notebook and has iPhone like multi-touch capabilities for treating the device like a real notepad, complete with realistic writing recognition (having come a long way since the original Palm Pilot-style handwriting input) and with instant integration with your calendar, mail and tasks to become the ultimate companion.  I see this device and I imagine the possibilities afforded to software developers and their customers – we LOVE the idea of putting customer’s information immediately in their hands when they want it.  I’ll be watching the evolution of this project with great interest.

THE BAD

• Shocker! Power Twitter can protect you from this though – Video Demonstrates the Danger of Shortened URLs [Security] http://bit.ly/31b3qA

URL shortening services have become a really handy tool but this demonstration video makes a good point – URL shortening services don’t show to you what website you are being redirected to.  The article basically says that you should only open a shortened URL from a person that you trust, as you can potentially be tricked into going to a malicious website (a technique referred to as “phishing”).  Of course, there are ways around this – firstly, if you are a Windows user, Internet Explorer 8 has excellent anti-phishing technology built into it so even if you opened one of these webpages, IE would warn you that you are going to an untrusted website in the first place and help you beat a problem before it happens.  Also, if you are a Twitter user (this is where a lot of people are being targeted), consider using Power Twitter which scans your Twitter posts for shortened URL’s and auto converts them into their long addresses when showing you your posts on screen so you can see where the link will really take you – this is a really good idea and predictibly other Twitter clients (and perhaps Twitter themselves) will follow suit and offer the same solution as this problem continues to happen.

• ‘Nuff said right there #FAIL – Gmail More and More Like Late ’90s-Era Hotmail Every Day [Digital Daily] http://bit.ly/cnbmG

You know, I’m really not a fan of Gmail AT ALL.  What I really resent is the fact that Google indexes your mail, trawling your messages for the things that you talk about to people to optimise their targeted advertising and this alone disgusts me and leads me to NEVER recommend its use to anyone.  What this article delves into descibing though is the recent failures of Gmail’s servers, leading to downtime and people not being able to get into their mail.  The comparison to Hotmail from the late ’90s stems from the fact that it took Microsoft three years to figure out how to convert Hotmail’s servers to a Windows NT based platform (it was Unix based at time of purchase back in 1997) and there was a lot of downtime from the service as Microsoft tried and failed multiple times to make the conversion.  Of course, they figured it out eventually and Hotmail continues to be the market leader in web based email – plus you keep your privacy in the meantime.

• ROFL! It’s open warfare now – Microsoft blasts Google over Chrome Frame plug-in http://bit.ly/tBeub

At first, when I read about this being released I reacted enthusiastically to the idea – old versions of Internet Explorer are slow, a security risk (read: bugs/vulnerabilities) and lack in offering the goodies afforded to people with updated browsers such as fast AJAX rendering for truly software-like browsing experiences, for example.  The problem here is that Google are beginning to try and exclude IE users from their web solutions – the upcoming Google Wave will stop you in your tracks and recommend you use anything other than IE, or install this Chrome Frame plugin for IE before continuing and this is appalling.  Furthermore, There is a new tag that web developers can include in their site which makes IE use the Google Chrome Frame plugin to render their website if a user has the plugin installed – what’s next?  Will Google start punishing websites in their search rankings who don’t have this tag in their website to force people to use Google’s plugin for IE?  Google are already well known for doctoring their search results to spruke their other own online offerings over others in the search results.  If Google did this, secretly or intentionally, I would image there would be an anti-trust suit from the US government for sure.  We really need greater competition in the search market.  Personally, I use Microsoft Bing for this exact reason.

• Mega Lame – Google launches new commenting tool http://bit.ly/mRHmH

You know, Google just want you to throw all information via them to continue to grow their database of information, as I’ve touched on earlier.  What I don’t like about this tool, whilst a good idea, is the fact that a website administrator has no control over what comments are being attached to their website.  I mean, if you have a website trying to project a positive image of your products and people are posting malicious messages about your company and its services, this can totally ruin your online image.  There might be companies that deserve it, but there will be plenty more that don’t.  Most frighteningly, your competitor could comment against your site that you’re crap and they (fakely) experienced bad service/offerings from you.  What then?  You can’t even program anything into your website to block its use against your site so you’re stuck with praying for the mercy of the internet’s community.  Yeah right.  All the tech websites are bagging this idea and it’s likely that no one will use this service and it will die a deservedly painful death over at Google HQ.

• ROFL! RT @alleyinsider: Google Can’t Handle iPhone Demand For Push Gmail $GOOG $AAPL by @fromedome http://bit.ly/ZnhUY

I’ve already touched on the failures of Google’s GMail service but this article touches on the fact that Google are trying desperately to pitch their mail service to corpratations and launched this tool to trick Outlook and mobile devices that can sync with Microsoft Exchange to make them thing that you are adding an Exchange account for instant email notification (known as “push services”), when really it’s a GMail account.  This would be particularly handy for iPhone users.  What happened after launch was a whole bunch of people tried to use the feature and GMail went tits up and no one could download their mail.  Just another example of why GMail has no place in the workplace and why you shouldn’t use it at all anyways.

in Google, Internet Explorer, IPhone, Microsoft, On the Web, RSS, Windows XP, WordPress