Social Media

Facebook Easter Egg: Magic Circles

Facebook easter egg
Image by $holydevil via Flickr

Thanks to Bob Levine and his friend Leon, we now know about a funky new Facebook Easter egg–magic circles!

While on Facebook, perform the following actions to activate the Easter egg.

Press UP, UP, DOWN, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT, B, A, ENTER key, right-click on the Facebook page (if a context sensitive menu appears, click away from it to hide the menu), and then press UP and DOWN.

Voila! Magic circles will appear!

If you don’t see the magic circles right away, try typing something into your status box. If they still don’t appear, refresh th…

17 November 2009 Posted in Social Media | No Comments »

Reply to ReTweets—Is Twitter Breaking Community Features

Following numerous reactions to Twitter’s announcement of officially making retweets a part of the Twitter system, but not retweets as we know them, my friend A.J. Wood posted to his blog a well thought out analysis of the retweet system might mean for users. In reply, I offer the below.

I had faith in Twitter’s people to make the community better–or at least to have their own (eventual) bottom line in mind–until they screwed up @ replies. Now, like many others, I miss out on so many interesting conversations and people I would follow simply because I can’t see c…

14 August 2009 Posted in Social Media | No Comments »

Twitter Down, World Stops

Today Twitter went down at 14:00 (2 PM) Pacific for scheduled maintenance. During that time, the world stopped for many Twitter users–and not just for the no-life, shut-in kind of Twitter users.

Users were alerted to the impending outage days before via tweet, and all day of the outage via the Twitter user interface. No one really thought it would be a big deal. But it is.

Chris Brogan:

I’m scanning blogs in Google Reader, and I find this article about giving good return on attention. I like it. I hit Shift+S to share it via Google reader, which pushes it along to FriendFeed, which connects…

08 May 2009 Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Social Media | 1 Comment »

My Interview on Inside Digital Design Radio

Recently I appeared on the wonderful radio program and podcast Inside Digital Design Radio, hosted by Scott Sheppard and Gene Gable. Gene shared a hilarious anecdote about the Secret Service confiscating his design work and filled us in on a little known concept called “property trademarks” wherein even photographs of a building or tree could infringe on someone else’s intellectual property. Gene asked me about some of my newer projects like Workflow:Freelance, Gurus Unleashed, and the InDesign plug-in I created, PageControl, as well my long-time publications Qu…

06 May 2009 Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Creative Pro, My Projects, Social Media | No Comments »

Don’t Dig Diigo

Diigo.com, the bookmarking service that this month suddenly gobbled up top-notch bookmarking service Furl (read about my search for Furl), offers a lot of features, but I can’t use most of them. I noted this recently on Twitter, which prompted an immediate reply from Diigo itself via Twitter. I provided an overview of my issues with the service–essentially Diigo won’t connect with any of my self-hosted WordPress blogs/CMSes, and some facet of its RSS feed prevents the popular TwitterFeed.com sharing service from access the content users create on Diigo.

Following th…

26 March 2009 Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Social Media, Technology | No Comments »

I Don’t Care How Many Twitter Followers I Have

Well, actually, I do care. I’m very proud of the fact that several hundred people follow me on Twitter (@iamPariah) and that a few dozen more follow me every month. I’m proud not of the number of followers but of the fact of followers, which is what sets me apart from a good percentage of the Twitter population.

Earlier today, mostly for fun, I created a FaceBook group called “Twitter is not a Popularity Contest,” subtitled “I don’t care how many followers I have on Twitter” (join it here). That act inspired the following question from my friend Anne…

28 February 2009 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Social Media, Technology | 3 Comments »

A Simple Bookmarking Service for Link Sharing

I’m looking for a bookmarking service to make it easier and faster for me to share interesting stories I find to my Twitter, FriendFeed, Plurk, and other followers. I use Ping.fm to post to those services, and I have TwitterFeed.com standing by to feed those links into Ping.fm, but I’m still missing the bookmarking service itself. So, today, in between editing an ebook and trying to figure out why chapters I edit in InCopy CS4 crash David Blatner’s copy of InCopy CS4, I’m going to be looking for a bookmark service.

I read a lot of good stories online, and find a lot of good…

07 February 2009 Posted in Blogging, Creative Pro, Social Media, Technology | No Comments »