Sociosophy

On-time, on-point, on-now… Mashable.com is a great source for all things happening in the bubble of Internet stuffs. When put side-by-side, TechCrunch, Mashable and Techmeme (for example), Mashable gives you that human-feeling with their presence and writing style. Maybe we just see it that way since Pete’s a cool guy to grab drinks with, and we have yet to hang out with Arrington or the like. Who knows! We enjoy Pete’s company and site, so should you!

The site covers a list of all sorts, social media news, start-up news, how-to’s, etc, etc. They even sometimes write things about the Tangibleverse and how it affects us online. For example their recent write-up on the music industry and how it will soon sodomize fans and artists (again). Pretty tangible, but also seeing as NO ONE buys actual CDs anymore, and it’s pretty much an online market… well, ok that’s a tangent for another time.

Chances are if you’ve been to any sort of tech-related event, you’ve seen the guy behind the mash (Pete there on the left over there, obviously):

Oh, and that other familiar face is the Ezarik they call Justine of tastyblogsnack.com, photo courtesy of Dan Tentler (@viss). That party was one helluva evening, the Digg unicorn was there, and I believe that was the 2nd party during the Web 2.0 Expo that was at wherever that was in San Francisco. There I go again. Writer’s A.D.D.

Read Mashable, you won’t hate yourself for it. You might even learn something.

We realize that we neglected the Social Network attached to Mashable, we’ll review that seperately, but in the meantime it’s at http://my.mashable.com

Hello, worker-bee. Ever wonder what it’d be like if you had a system in place to track everything you did at work? ididwork.com is your site. Here you can record what you’re doing and send it to your boss. Sure, you’d probably want to introduce this to them as an idea for tracking what’s going on in your day-to-day before you randomly spam their inbox with your brag-art doings at work, so work that out first.

This Twitter-like site is lightweight, not a lot of pretty, no AJAX, no public timeline, no direct messages… just “this is what I’m doing”, to the point. I think that’s why I like it for this. Though I see an application like this being over thrown by a ticketing system like Request Tracker, or anything with a work log in it, but that’s if you have those systems in place.

So, worker-bee, if you need something like this – give it a shot. It’s simple, quick and effective. Communication on the job is important, trust me on that one. Here’s to ididwork.

I don’t think I’ve ever done a review on a URL shortening service. Frankly, I think they’re useful, and they’re fun (if you’re hiding weird Internet URL’s in them and spreading the horrors of the Web to your friends), but outside of that, most of them don’t have much of a value, and by that I mean – a way to measure how that link you create is used. Cligs has introduced “short URLs with analytics”, says so right there in their tagline.

What’s this do? Well, it lets you at least see if what you’re spreading is effectively being spread, that’s for one. The other? I can think of applications where analytics for a shortened URL could come in handy. Heck, if you don’t want to take the time to stand up an email service, you could effectively build an entire email campaign using cligs and measure how it’s doing based on their charting.

Perhaps that’s a bit much, but it’s possible to run little URLs from cli.gs and get their successes and failures in a report. Pretty neat, I like.

Sometimes, Twhirl just isn’t something I want open and the Twitter interface… even though it’s new and pretty, really lacks things like easy-view profiles (in-timeline), auto-refresh, and other awesome features that I get in Twhirl. If this is ever the case, check out iTweet.

This handy application is a little rough around the edges in some aspects, but in features, it’s stronger than Twitter. It’s still captive to Twitter’s restrictive API rules, but it’s rather handy.

Who’s this for:

• People who don’t like AIR applications
• People who want Auto-refresh on Twitter in a browser
• People who want to have hashtags hot-linked in their timeline
• People who want to review profile info, easily

There’s other quick access goodies in iTweet as well. I like it, it’s function over form for the most part, but somedays, function is all the more important than the pretty.

I’ve tried a few times to write a clever post about Yotify, but in all honesty? The site’s simply a great idea, and an awesome tool.

Day-in, day-out I’m in front of a computer, and scouring the web, working on the web, contributing and consuming to my heart’s content, and I miss stuff all the time. Important stuff too – like – well… I dunno, things that aren’t on the radar of normally neat, rather… “Important”. Ramble, ramble, here’s an example:

Say you’re looking for a 3 bedroom house for rent in Sin City. You go to sincity.craigslist.com and you either see a posting that’s a bit dated, or you don’t see one just yet. What do you do? Hit “Refresh” all day so you can see when one’s posted? Be the first to call?… No. You go to Yotify.

1. Select the site
2. Select the terms
3. Activate the “Scout”
4. Wait for the notifications

It’s that easy. I’ll be using this, believe you me. Oh, and you can share your “Scouts” with others, or keep’m private. Yotify is super simple to use, and it’s open (no invite required). So check it out! Now! Go!