Wavyx

I use Firefox as my main browser and as anyone I need a quick way to find webpages. Long ago, I used to have altavista, yahoo or google as homepage. So every time I launched my browser or open a tab, I could type in my search. BUT now I mainly use the Firefox address bar as search engine. And I mean the address bar not the search bar ! Why so ? Because it’s easier and it have a pretty convenient feature for lazy geek: the good enough automatic redirection. Let me explain Read the rest of this entry »

Last friday, I was looking for an easy way to generate small website screenshots or webshot. I only had 3000 thousands webshots to generate (which is pretty low compared to web2.0 news sites).

Moreover, this is a one shot generation so any “quick and dirty” solution would have satisfied me Here are the possible solutions I found:

Read the rest of this entry »

Long time, no post !

Last months I wasn’t really active (at all), despite my good 2009 resolutions
But isn’t that a rule ? To NOT follow your new year’s resolutions…

Anyway, I have a pretty good reason: I was getting married !
So now things are slowing a bit, I would like to share a few “wedding resources” as a first come back post.

These are mainly DIY shops for decoration, invitation cards, … (I know this does not sounds so geek, but in some case it’s kinda like soldering :

• http://www.ava.be/FR/default.aspx
• http://www.creacorner.be/
• http://www.schleiper.com/
• http://www.lamaisondupapier.be/
• http://www.creatine.be/ with 2 shops: http://www.creatinestockel.be/creatine/ and http://www.creatinewavre.be/
• http://www.maison-lefebvre.be/

IMHO, you should definitely  check AVA and creacorner as a starting point.

Here are a couple of extra links: http://www.parcleopold.com/, http://www.artegra.be/, http://www.cordslafourmi.com/, http://www.nias.be/, http://pagesdor.truvo.be/Papeteries_-_D%C3%A9t./Papeterie_d%27Ixelles/Ixelles/fr_BE_YP_FREE_2659166_0000_1665077_6470_00000, http://www.creascrap.be/

It’s kind of interesting how theses though times make Web 2.0 companies run towards economic reality. Twitter makes no exception, and after a couple of months (if not years), Twitter finally unveiled their “Business Model”. Too bad it’s FAKE (see update)…

You can refer to the article if you’re interested in their estimated pricing details. I’m more interested by the elements retained in this attempt of business model:

• Message Length: First you define a new online SMS service limited to 140 characters. Then you ask your users to pay for 5 to 360 extra characters.
• New Followers: You can now pay to get new random followers. This will probably up your natural web charisma, but for how long? If you discover you’re following some new stranger premium twitter account, what would be you reaction? I know mine… I’ll probably clean this new following users (the same way I maintain my own list to keep a good noise-to-signal ratio).
• Celebrity Followers: assuming celebrity check their accounts themselves, this could be interesting. As for private users, I’m concerned about being forced to follow new people. So who want to be read by Barack Obama ?
• Auto-Spell check: “free” features are always welcome except when you’ve got to pay for… Moreover what’s the point of spell check when you try to compress your ideas. Or if you have an “eagle account”, which means 250$/month,  I hope you check your tweet before hit the send button.
• Hours on recommended list: This is kind of obscure for me…and since I think people choose followers among friends, friends of friends, celebrities or specific blog writers. It is still nice to have advertising on “recommended lists” but what does it really worth?
• Twitter concierge: This means “you” are no more really talking to your community. However this can be really handy if you’ve got many tweets to handle. For 250$, I guess you’d probably find more than 5 hours in some outsourcing services.

This new Business Model from Twitter is definitely an interesting move to follow. But I have to confess I’m pretty skeptical since these enhancements come to a relatively high price, without mentioning the intrusion in your private followers. So let’s see how the Twitterers are reacting…

UPDATE:

This was a cool blog post joke, and I’m really busted   Anyway a couple of elements are really interesting like the one you pay to get new followers (even if not really viable). You can also see how people are waiting for some Twitter move. Anyway, IMHO, Twitter could propose increased message length for a small price. And I would definitely never pay to follow “celebrities”.

Last but not least, I think Twitter has a classic option to make money: insert random ads, or adtweets between your tweets with respect to your content/subject. Marketers would maybe pleased by such way to get intouch with customers. The only question is weither this adtweet would identified from you or from twitter service…

So If you read till this, just check “take me to the twittersphere” a real funny video about our Twitter deviance I really LOVE these twitter zombie addicts

I guess you’ve heard the negative buzz about Facebook and it’s new policy concerning your data (or their, who knows?). Marc Zuckerberg reacted to the “All your data are belong to us” rumor. You can read the original post here.

In a few words, he says “blah blah blah… it’s complicated”. No surprise! But reading the TechCrunch post about this new explanation to calm down the Facebook generation, I was a bit surprized by the metaphore used:

When you share your data with someone else, whether it be an email or a photo, it becomes their data as well. You cannot normally rescind data you share with other people in an e-mail. So why should a social network be any different

It sounds a bit easy of a comparison to me.
I send a photo to a friend, it’s right that my friend can keep this photo…  BUT

• Facebook itself is NOT my friend !
• Facebook is not 1 person I share something, it’s more about a company sharing with third parties.
• A friend is somewhat a local storage of this information. After I publish something on Facebook, who the hell knows where it can be…

IMHO, this is not a question about “let’s be more permissive, because it’s online media“, it is now time to define a basic rules set about online privacy. Facebook already benefited a lot of this ‘empty’ juridical place.

Tough times call for tough measures, and even if I understand Facebook need to secure it’s value, I think we should not tolerate such deviation in the use of personal data shared among friends.

As we are Friday 13th 2009, I thought it would be nice to give 13 advices on how to use Twitter. So here are 13 DO’s and DON’Ts to get the best from Read the rest of this entry »