The first item has been around for quite some time, but I am relatively new to: FeedBurner. This service takes any news feed, and dresses it up so you can do more with it. I've been trying for some time to get my "blogs to be" list attached to the sidebar of this blog, to keep me on track with everything I want to write about and give you a preview of what's to come. I found out that Blogger has a little problem grabbing items from Remember The Milk, and was left with Blogger showing items that had already been completed in addition to the ones not yet done. I did a little looking around and found FeedBurner, a product purchased by (who else?) Google a while back. I found that by pointing FeedBurner at my "blogs to be" list at Remember The Milk, then pointing the Blogger sidebar gadget to the resulting Feedburner feed, everything worked fine! I know it isn't ideal, but I won't have to worry about it again, and I'm happy for that.
Next up is FuelFrog. This is a simple service that offers functions I've been chasing for some time. I've been a long-time believer that keeping track of your car's gas mileage can be a handy way to gauge the relative health of your car. The hard part has always been getting myself to consistently log my fuel usage, or was it doing something with that data later on? In any case, FuelFrog makes it simple to do both. What would make it even better would be to use the mileage entries to integrate service reminders.Now, I have to rant and rave a little more about
.Raves first: Since blogging about the uses of Twitter, my tweets have gone from private to public so I could (once again) add something else to my sidebar and demonstrate some of the goodness behind Twitter. I'm sure somebody has to be doing this already, but I think there are some really fun games that could be played between friends via Twitter. I originally started thinking poetry would be fun to post one stanza at a time (either ascending or descending order), which evolved into playing "Whose Line Is It Anyway" games. This could be fun. Anybody want to play Scenes from a Hat?
Rants last: For all the mixed opinions about Twitter, it sure has some big issues to overcome. One of them is growth. As it's number of users grow, and the numbers of followings and followers blossom, it seems to be having more problems keeping up. I hope they can find an operational framework that will allow them to grow without taking the service down (willingly or unwillingly).
The drawback to adding my tweets to the public time line is being discovered by the Collectors. This is the term I have coined to refer to those individuals that have bought into the thought that you have real influence over the people that follow you, and that by following complete strangers they will follow you in return. I've been found by a number of these people, and while I have allowed a few of them to receive my updates, I have blocked a few more. I see no use for such efforts, when it does nothing for me but to make it harder for me to handle my own lists of genuine "followers".
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