A recent report showed that twitter has seen over a 1300%+  growth since February of last year. Apparently everyone wants to answer the question, “What are you doing?”. It is getting much more media buzz right now than facebook and that other site, My-Something-or-other. It has become an effective way to reach out to people faster than TV and newspaper.

I’ve found that the same RSS feeds I subscribe to are also some of the same folks I follow on twitter. I’ve also found that I read about something on twitter and see a feed in my reader later on. So much for digg bringing me breaking news.  If you are crafty enough, you can even have all your facebook updates pipe to twitter.  

As twitter’s popularity grows, so does its user base. Everyone in Hollywood has a twitter account and has apparently been the cause of the breakup of Jennifer Aniston and John Mayer. Some big name celebrities tweet regularly such as Shaq and Dane Cook.  Retailers are getting into the mix using twitter as another customer service touchpoint or to keep customers up to date.

But lets get real, take a look at how many people follow over a thousand people.  How can you keep up with everything?  You are sure to miss the hilarious tweet a co-worker posted or 75% savings at your favorite retailer.  This is becoming serious information overload.  

I have yet to figure out the perfect group of people to follow.  I have to admit, I get a kick out of updates from William Shatner and John Cleese, but I tend to miss some industry news.  How do you manage twitter?

Now that Google Chrome is available, IT departments everywhere are panicking with all their employees wanting to upgrade.  IT hesitant to install Google Chrome? Have a Thumb Drive?  Check out the link below for a portable Google Chrome solution

http://stadt-bremerhaven.de/2008/09/03/portable-chrome-021510/

Source: Lifehacker

How can something such as Really Simple Syndication be really difficult to explain? What is a simple concept for some can be a rather confusion concept for others. RSS is quickly becoming a web standard and is already being used a supplement for email marketers. I’ve tried to explain this to a few folks and the best way I have found to explain this to not-so-web-saavy folks is this…

Do you read the paper every morning? Do you turn on the tv, or visit a news website like MSNBC, or CNN to catch up on news? Are you a big sports fan who wants to be informed the instant your favorite player is traded? Do you have a list of websites or blogs you visit on a regular basis? Do you receive a large amount of emails from retail companies? If so, you may learn to love RSS.

Imagine waking up in the morning, opening up your web browser and have all fo this there waiting for you. By using a personalized homepage (available from google, yahoo, aol, msn) or a feed reader (google reader, Outlook 2007), you can set up your space so that all headlines, alerts, emails, etc… show as headlines on one page. Clicking on the headline will take you to the original article on the hosted website or with some readers, will display some or all of the article content without leaving the page. Best of all, this page is updated as new articles available. It is very similar to reading your email. Your page (inbox) displays new headlines (subject lines)

This approach seems to have worked with some of the less technical folks I am around. How do you explain RSS?

How many times have you created a website using CSS and driven yourself crazy with all the class names and attributes? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a simple tool with dropdowns that lets you choose the class, attributes, and values? Look no further. Matt over at Meta Titan has developed an easy to use tool that creates custom CSS code in a matter of minutes. Simply choose from a preset list of classes, choose the attributes you would like to customize and what values you want and select “build it”. Instantly you can copy and past the code into your stylesheet. Check it out here