Google Reader versus Twitter versus Facebook

Social networking has fast become the norm for millions of people. If you are reading this, chances are you are on Twitter or Facebook updating the interwebz with your current status and what you are doing.

With Facebook, I’ve reconnected with dozens of friends from high school and college. Of course, when I say I’ve reconnected it pretty much means I’ve added them to my Friend list.

With Twitter, I’ve had the pleasure of arguing with real honest to goodness comic book creators like Rob Liefeld on the merits of Marvel versus DC Comics movies. I’ve also met a bunch of new friends and acquaintances via Tweetups.

However, I spend most of my online life with Google Reader.

I rarely go to actual websites anymore. I just use RSS feeds to push content to my Google Reader page/folders. I don’t always read every post from every feed. When you follow over 100 sites/blogs it’s impossible. However, I can easily scan, delete and move on with Reader. I also save many posts to read later.

With Facebook, I only follow people who I actually know/knew with only a few exceptions. On Twitter, I follow lots of people, but only people who I care about. I don’t auto followback. My conversations though are almost totally with people I know. Although I have had a few conversations with people on Twitter who I don’t know and that’s sometimes lots of fun.

I subscribe and unsubscribe from Google Reader feeds all the time. Same goes with Twitter. If you bore me, freak me out or weird me out - you’re gone. I’ve already separated people on my Facebook account into categories and I’ve organized everything into folders for Google Reader. Eventually, I will start using lists with Twitter.

Google Reader is about INFORMATION. Twitter is about PEOPLE. Facebook is about FRIENDS. There’s certainly overlap, but for the most part that’s how I do social media.

How ‘bout you?

Google Reader versus Twitter versus Facebook

The Numbers Game


I've been on this planet for slightly over 41 years.

I've slept in the same bed, at least one night a year, for at least 30 of those 41 years.

I've been fall-down, out-of-my-mind drunk 3 times in my life. Once in college when I mixed beer with hard liquor, once right after grad school when I knocked on my ex-girlfriend’s apartment door and once with my friends when I drank about 15 Rum and Cokes.

I’ve thrown up because of alcohol consumption 1 time in my life. The mix night.

I've traveled to 1 country outside the United States. Oh, Canada.

I've been in 26 states. Adding Nevada in 2010.

I've luckily been in only 2 vehicle accidents in my life. The first, my then girlfriend was driving and I hit the windshield with my forhead. We weren’t going very fast, but I didn’t have my seatbelt on either. The second was in grad school when I rear-ended a car which had slammed on its brakes and I didn’t slow down quick enough. The later one ended up going to court. Pain in the ass.

I’ve owned exactly 5 vehicles. A Dodge, Honda, two Saturns and a Toyota.

I’ve owned exactly 4 computers. One crappy Gateway, two iMacs and a MacBook.

I’ve owned exactly 0 pets. None. Zip. Zilch. My brother has a dog.

I ran cross country for 8 years. 4 years in high school and 4 years in college. I was Most improved my sophomore year in high school, MVP my sophomore year in college and team captain my senior year in college. I was also the first four year letterwinner in cross country at Illinois College.

I’ve lived at the same address for almost 10 years.

I’ve slept with approximately 20,000 women… Whoops, how did this Wilt Chamberlain quote get in here!

I have 1 sibling, 2 parents, 3 televisions, 4 pairs of shoes and 5 windows in my apartment.

I own 12 long boxes of bagged and boarded comics., plus a few half boxes. My father bought Flash #123 and Adventure #247 at cover price.

This is post 618. Of course, I've deleted older, crappy posts so my real number is all wrong.

Inspired by MCF.

The Numbers Game

Lazy Sunday Links 11/15

Here's just ten of my favorite links of the week. You can find the whole list at my pix, flix, vox and linx site: Kaleidoscope Sky.

1. The LRO snapped a new picture of Apollo 11 landing site from its orbital perch 50km above the surface.
2. Summarize your sex life with a Star Wars quote. Redditors take the bait with hilarious results.
3. The Decade in Seven Minutes. Did all this stuff really happen since 2000?
4. The most elaborate marriage proposal I’ve ever seen took nine months and lots of money to pull off. Was it worth it? I think so.
5. Scenes from two alternate universes involving The Beatles: the band accepts Lorne Michaels' offer to play SNL in 1976, and an accident leads to the discovery of their album Everyday Chemistry.
6. Everyday, people all over the world encounter hundreds of things that they could easily masturbate to, and sometimes it’s difficult to determine if you should or shouldn’t jerk off to something.
7. Fonts Used In Popular Band Logos, or rather, logos that were later turned into fonts by fans.
8. The product designers over at MintPass have created these concept designs for real life calculators that look just like the calculators that pop up on a Windows or Mac OS screen. WANT!
9. Amazing Matt Meola video. The boy can surf.
10. Teaser trailer for Kick-Ass.

Lazy Sunday Links 11/15

It's A Hard Tech Life For Me

I always find it interesting to see what writers use to do their work. Stephen King writes on some antiquated Apple laptop. Warren Ellis writes on some funky contraption in a pub after consuming roughly 372 cans of Red Bull.  I do most of my best work in bed (cue the snare/cymbal) on my laptop.

So, I thought it would be interesting to list out what I use for writing and other tech related stuff.

Primary Computer: 13" MacBook I do not play video games on my computer or at least the ones that are all the rage if you have a nice PC system with a giant monitor to play them. I play games on my daughter's Wii, if I play video games at all. I am, however, on the internet seemingly 24 hours a day. I never worry about nasty computer viruses when I visit places I might not ought to visit.

Operating System: Leopard 10.5.8. There is nothing finer than the Macintosh Operating System. Tech geeks will say Unix. The sheep will say Windows 7. The ones that just want the fucking computer to work... we use Mac.

Browser: Firefox 3.5.5. Safari is super fast, but I like my Add Ons. Chrome might be a viable alternative, but I'm so comfortable with Firefox I can't imagine ever switching. I fucking hate IE. Fucking. Hate. It.

Mail: GMail. Just recently I moved over to the wonderful world of Google. For years, I had a paid Yahoo account. However, more and more I started using Google products and just took the plunge and jumped in feet first. Never going back. Although, I need to start playing more with Google Wave...

Word Processing: Pages/Word. I had a wild hair and decided to see if could actually write in Pages and not use Word. For the most part, I can pretty easily. However, I do like Word's thesaurus and dictionary better than Pages. I have Google Docs, but have never seriously done anything with them. I've got OpenOffice as well, but never really messed with it. One of my projects is turning my four issues of Slip Kid comic book script into a single pilot movie/television script and I'm going to use Scrivener.

Blogging Software: WordPress. I started out with Blogger, which I still like, but wanted a bit more on my website than what could get out of Blogger. So, I migrated to a paid server and found a WP template and probably will never look back. It's almost done. You are likely reading this on the new site.

RSS Feeds: Google Reader. Over time I figured out that visiting the various websites I like was a pain in the ass. So, I started using My Yahoo! then migrated to Netvibes then finally Google Reader. It's the best. It does make me want to go see what's actually on my old My Yahoo! and Netvibes pages. There are a bunch of other alternatives, but I can't see using anything besides GReader.

Photo Management: Flickr. I've had a free Flickr account forever and a day. I think at the beginning of the year, I'm going to buy a Pro account ($25 a year is pretty inexpensive). It will also force me to start archiving lots of photos. Right now I use iPhoto, but I'm thinking it might be fun to off site host all my pictures. I'll probably also move my Facebook pictures over to Flickr with the Pro account.

Twitter Client: Tweetie/Seesmic. On my Macbook I use Tweetie, which I've been advocating Apple just buy and use as the default Twitter application on all new computers. I like the ease of managing multiple accounts with Tweetie. At work, I use Seesmic. I like it better than Tweetdeck. I'm not dissing Tweetdeck, but it just never felt right for me.

Personal Music/Video Player: iPod Touch 3.1.2.Currently, I have 1,888 songs, 33 videos, 110 photos and 35 applications. It's the best audio/video/game system combo on the market. The only thing that would make it cooler was if it was also my phone.

Cell Phone: BlackBerry Storm: Do I like my BlackBerry Storm? I like it well enough. I like Verizon more and for far too long they had nothing but crap phones. So, I broke down a year ago and got a BlackBerry Storm. Now that Verizon has phones running Google's Android OS, I will likely move to one of those phones as soon as I can. It is my hope Verizon has the iPhone on their network by the time I'm able to upgrade.

It's A Hard Tech Life For Me