Moving on up!

I've moved everything on over to Amander.com. I've owned the domain since 2001 I think and I just start WAY too many blogs. Over there, I'm pulling in all my Mequoda, Mashable, StuperSocial and new posts. So check check check it out.

Article in InPublishing

Apparently all I have this blog for is to gloat these days :) But hey, I just got an article published in the UK mag InPublishing (formerly InCirculation). It's on page 48 + 49 and is called Mobile Publishing & Usability Strategies.


I'm trying to find the web version, but it may not be uploaded to their archive just yet. Will post it when it's available.

front page o' digg.

So another one of my mashable articles hit the front page of Digg today: 18 iPhone Drinking Apps to Get the Party Started.

This stuff will never get old to me, and I finally caught it in time for a screenshot (before I just missed it and only caught it on it's respective category page).

Writing an article on the iPhone is kind of challenging mentally. You get a slew of iPhone haters, everyone who doesn't have an iPhone HATES, I mean HATES iPhone articles. And until it picks up, I ask myself if I should really write another one.

But yet, every time I write one, it ends up on the front page of Digg. So, yeah it's worth it to take the crap of a couple haters I think.

I have a few new topics to write about for mashable that I'm working on. So far I've covered a couple different topics, twitter, roadtrip tools, viewzi, and of course a bunch of iPhone apps. You can see all the ones I've written here.

I like writing for mashable, it's my outlet for fun social media and techy stuff.

do we expect too much from google?

It’s starting to get to the point where Google is either underperforming, or we’re just expecting them to be invincible. Yesterday and the day before when Gmail went down for a couple hours, the Twitter streams were acting like it was the end of the world. Because, if Google can’t keep up, who can?

Expectations are obviously high for the company who devours small companies and makes them their own, usually favorably; but is Google spreading itself too thin? On their job website, they say “Google's founders often state that the company is not serious about anything but search.” I know they’re talking about their foozeball-playing work environment, but it kind of says a lot about what their real focus is, doesn’t it?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a Google fangirl all the way, but is anyone else concerned? Should Google be taken seriously when they’re gobbling up all of these media companies, or is it just a fun multi-billion dollar entity that we should be happy to play with?

While I’m talking about this, I feel like I should give credit to the other motherload of content, Yahoo! Yahoo! is still down with eating up web 2.0 companies, but they don’t conquer and destroy. How much has the functionality on Flickr or MyBlogLog really changed since Yahoo! took over? You need a new log-in which is admittedly annoying if you aren’t already a Yahoo member, but that’s pretty much the end of it.

On the other hand, Google took an amazing wiki platform—Jotspot—and literally destroyed it. I still have a Jotspot account which Google has left functional (for now), but anyone else who ever wanted a Jotspot account now has the option of using Google Sites instead. Jotspot was a great platform, I used it myself for an intranet at my company. Now if I wanted to move everyone over to Google Sites, I’d have to ask them all to sign up for Google and teach them how to use Google Docs, Google Calendar etc. It’s just not the same, and that’s my point: conquer and destroy.

Actually, I don't love Google Sites, thankyouverymuch.

And Feedburner? Well they were doing pretty well until they decided to ditch the Feedburner Ad Network and roll out AdSense instead.

But back to expecting too much: let’s talk about the Google Knol for a second. Here’s a good example of us expecting too much from Google. They never said they were setting out to destroy Wikipedia, they even said that their pages wouldn’t get preferential treatment in Google search. But as an audience, we expected to see a “Wikipedia 10.0!” Not to say the Google Knol flopped, but we expected too much and thus were disappointed.

Another example is the iPhone version of Google Translate that they released on the 7th of August. In their blog, Allen Hutchison, software engineer at Google talked about how he was planning a trip when he noticed that Google Translate didn’t work well on the iPhone. So they developed an iPhone worthy counterpart that shows up if you point to the site on your iPhone. My first thought was about why the service doesn’t actually speak the translation. On a normal site for the iPhone, I’d just be happy that it existed and thatit’s a pretty cool feature for traveling and talking to cab drivers in foreign countries. But I mean, this is Google for pete’s sake!

With this mindset, we’ll eventually expect Google to start making flying cars, cleaning products and cola drinks. If Google spreads itself too thin, they can’t be great at everything. After all, they’re just a search company. Right?

So do we expect too much from Google, or just enough? You tell me.

myspace apps are lame.

I'm more of a MySpace user rather than a Facebook user, and I know that makes me uncool but I don't really care; you go where your friends are.

Anyhow, I'd pretty much ignored the MySpace apps until tonight when I was bored. I hate Facebook apps, so I didn't really think I'd like MySpace apps.

Well it turns out that MySpace apps are even more useless than Facebook apps. There isn't a single RSS feed reader that works correctly. The openNetflix app takes so long to load I don't even want to use it, and I can't even find a decent widget that will list all of the social networks I'm on.

So the search goes on for any of those three apps if you have any recommendations other than "use Facebook".