On 9 April 2009, a South African IT company, The Unlimited, conducted a race to see which was faster–sending a carrier pigeon with a 4 GB memory stick 50 miles or sending the data on South African carrier Telekom. The pigeon took two hours; Telekom had only transferred 4% of the data in that time.
Ok, not really, but their "Photos from your contacts" algorithm does. I've started getting around it by just plugging people I want to watch into my RSS aggregator, or feed reader. I've always just used it for blogs, but this is also a great way to get all the photos I was missing. There's lots out there, but I like Bloglines. You can just click the "add" button and enter in the address of whomever you want to watch. In my case, it's just:
It's sort of like Sim City, but with a collaborative aspect--when you visit my town, more people come to live there. Please to be clicking, 'cause right now I'm just above AIDStown and I don't wanna catch it. (You can get it just by looking at someone, right?)
Google Alerts are a good way of tracking things on the internet. Set up a watch on a word and google will tell you whenever it finds a new page using the word. I have some set up for "Sillysoft", "Lux Delux", etc.
Here is my feature requests to google to make their alerts even better: - Let me set domains for my alerts to ignore (to avoid Sillysoft alerts whenever a new sillysoft.net page goes up). - Give me a link in the alert email to report the page as spam or phishing or content theft.
If you're ever buying something on the internet and you see a Coupon Code or similar field on the checkout page, take a moment to look around for a coupon that you can use.
RetailMeNot.com is one site that is dedicated to collecting coupon codes. I searched it for godaddy.com and got 10% off a couple of domains using digg as the code. Nice.
Google is another option, running a search for XYZ coupon can turn up results that Retail Me Not doesn't have. I just checked and it works for Sillysoft.
The new Nintendo (the Wii) will allow people to surf the Internet on the TV. I thought this was kind of a useless feature. But this interview between the CEO of Nintendo and his R&D team presented an interesting philosophy behind the decision...
Bearing all this in mind, the potential I see in the Internet Channel lies in the fact that the internet, which has until now been viewed alone, can now be viewed by everyone. With a computer, even if you have people peering over your shoulder to see the screen, the limit is pretty much two, with four or more people looking at the same screen being totally out of the question. With the Wii, which is connected to the living room TV, families will be able to enjoy the internet together. I don't know what lies ahead, but I think this has the potential to change the way we live.
