I love a good blog thing. By thing I mean tool, widget, add-on, whatever. Disqus is a good tool thing indeed. With RSS readers being very available, and me using (my personal favorite) FriendFeed to check out blog and micro-blog RSS feeds from people I know… Disqus seemed like a natural adoption for me… Thus, I’ve installed it on both Sociosophy and my personal blog, and LOVE IT ALREADY!

Comment replies, little avatars, and feed feeding awesomes, all rolled up in to a super simple install. How can you go wrong?

Bloggers, especially those savvy in the world of FriendFeed (or SocialThing, or Tabber, or MyBlogLog, or… wherever else you aggregate) should grab this add-on, pet it, stroke it, make it happy… and it’ll return the favor in form of awesome all over your blog. It’s good times for sure… Here’s a poach from their About page:

Disqus launched into public beta on Halloween 2007. Since then, Disqus has grown to power the discussion on more than 4,000 blogs, newspapers, and websites.

I’ve always been a fan of early adoption, and though I’m well beyond “early”, by comparison with the gazillions of blogs that don’t have Disqus? I feel like one of the cool kids… You should too. Go get it.

Adobe is definitely flexing their awesome with their not-so-recently released Flex application, Photoshop Express. Ok, it’s no Photoshop CS3, that’s a “duh”, but it’s a full range photography touch-up application with a social network spin on it, that allows you to create galleries, share them with others, and adobe is even kind enough to give you a custom URL that’s easy to rattle off or remember to type.

Features include:

Importing photos from Facebook, Photobucket and Picasa… what?! NO FLICKR?
Create galleries and albums
Edit photos - Crop, touch-up, adjust brightness/saturation/hue, red eye correction
Tune photos -  Highlight, sharpen, soft focus (blur), etc
Apply effects - Pop color,  sketch, distort, etc
Browse the Photoshop Express world of other galleries
Check out your recently viewed
Save favorites,

The whole application is done in Flex, meaning, it has all sorts of neat bubbly feeling interface chunks in it. It’s fun to use, and fast to respond. Ready your RAM though, it does make my browser say “HELLO! I’M #1″.

Overall, Px is super useful, even for a guy with Photoshop CS3 readily available pretty much everywhere I go. If they give me flickr, I’ll be ALL over this like white on rice, lemme tell ya.

Finally a free service that only sucks a little for free mobile based IM. I’d much prefer an install app that clogs up the airwaves with a listening service like Agile Messenger, only their profit model it terrible! even though I have it on my PDA… I’m also not a huge fan of the interface of IM Plus, it’s bulky and the cost for what you get is… sub-good.

So, heysan! is a decent solution, but still not really what I’d like to see on a phone or mobile device for IM. It works for Yahoo!, MSN, AOL/ICQ, and GTalk, which is great - but it relies on browser refresh from the phone, which can be slow to respond, awkward to use (especially the refreshing screen while you’re reading), and the input window is kind of icky.

Complain, complain, complain…I know. Pardon me, I like using messenger’s they’re handy, and over the, the response time is better than SMS (and the character limit isn’t 160 characters)… no matter, I’ll be using heysan! until something better comes along, perhaps it’ll be the 2nd release of heysan! who knows.

Kyolo is a site that allows you to easily, hell damn near effortlessly, take a photo, throw a callout onto it, size it, fill it in with text and blam! You have yourself a photo of new awesome: Example.

I can see this site being successful just based on fun factor. Whether it’ll take or not will depend on how it can be integrated. The site has a few holes that should be addressed, like Flickr and Zoomr integration, an option to log in and save settings for Flickr, post to your tumblog, RSS it to your FriendFeed or Lifestream.fm account… I mean, really I think today’s sites that are pointed at fun really do need to be integrated with the useful tools others are using.

Besides all that, to keep this post from being too long about such a simple thing, check it out - upload a photo and make stuff happen. Post your example in the comments! Have fun with it. I say this about most things I review - but this is … awesomes.

If you’re anything like… most people, and have a tendency to be rather forgetful when it comes to just random stuff, perhaps you need a little help. If this is you, and you are that, than reQall should become your bitch, and rightfully so - you can man handle your reminders from email, phone, iPhone, web, etc… quickly and fun.

I forgot I had to do a few things other than write a post on this site, so I’m gonna cut this short. Cheers!