Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure I have more than one account on both Myspace and Facebook, all of which I use to say ridiculously nonsensical things to a bunch of people I don’t know.  Sort of like my blog, except Myspace and Facebook don’t allow me to run google adsense, or really do anything I might want to do that they don’t approve of. Including, if you’re on Facebook, spamming a hundred of my closest contacts.  What the deuce?

This isn’t about me, surprisingly.  This is about the Facebook’s spammer-fighting system.  If you slip up by emailing too many of your friends, adding people too quickly, or giving a poke too many, then you’re likely to have your account automatically disabled.  It’s a fun little game.  “stay in touch, but not too in touch, and not too quickly, and definitely not with too many people at one time.”  Well, that doesn’t make any sense.  Does it?

On the other hand, we have Myspace, and I’m not even sure I can say anything about it because I don’t have anything nice to say.  Which is to say you’re just as likely to find stupid people on either of the two social networking platforms.

Ultimately, the comparison is stupid because both are essentially the same thing with the exception of their user base.  I won’t make a bunch of stereotypes, but Facebook did a good thing in limiting its early users to a very specific group of people.  However, if you’re going to generate content on the Internet, do it in your own space.  Use web 2.0 services to market your own brand and product, which in most cases is yourself.

In an effort to support the efforts of th@talldude (Shawn Kirsch), I’m taking another moment to share with you the really cool Firefox addon known as SocialBrowse which allows you to easily follow the liked web pages of peers who are also active SocialBrowse fans.

Shawn’s intent is to expose other active page taggists, the people who don’t make the leaderboards but still enjoy sharing when they have time or find something worthwhile.  (I’ll admit, I click through a lot more SB links than I share.)  And after seeing Shawn’s post, I decided to be more active in supporting a service I enjoy.

One of my favorite features is seeing which links on a page have already been tagged by fellow SocialBrowsers.  That’s pretty cool, and saves me a bunch of time because I am more likely to follow page links that have already been tagged by people I’ve decided are worth following.

But let’s wrap this up.  I’m a fan of the service.  I have a few invites left.  I’m recommending you give it a try.

It’s true, it’s true.  All anyone has been talking about today is the latest and greatest from the online Interweb beast we call Google.  Of course, it’s only being talked about online and not so much because we’re actually interested, but because it’s the thing to do.

Chrome is Google’s newest piece of potential greatness and it’s coming in the form of a top notch web browser, but we’re mostly left saying “so what?”.  Even if Chrome wasn’t going to be the fastest most secure browser on the market (which it will be), people like us would still take it for a spin and be in awe of its features because that’s the type of fanfolk we are — we love new tech and we really love it from Google.

The truth of the matter is, Chrome is likely to take market share from Firefox than Internet Explorer.  As it is now, more than half the Internet surfers are still using some crippled version of IE, which is to say, “if Firefox is clearly the superior browser then why aren’t more people using it?”  I’m guessing it has something to do with regular people being less than bothered by their current default browser. And this upsets me because we’re on the verge of having really awesome web browsers, except most people are a long way from using them.  THAT drives me crazy.

Except, thankfully, Google isn’t interested in entering the web browser world so much as it is interested with ensuring a high-quality platform for its many cloud service products (smartly so.)  So they’ve written and tested loads of code, including the very important V8 javascript engine, to help along the current scene. Regardless of whether or not Chrome catches on and is adopted by everyone, the source is Open so that both Firefox and IE can take the highlights from Chrome and improve their browsers.  At least they will if they know what’s good for them.

For quite some time I’ve been looking for another/better way to maintain the list of folks I write to regularly on a group mail basis.  Then a few weeks ago that guy Josh said something in an email that really got me moving on the idea, because I needed a better way for the recipients to control whether or not they were part of the emailing nonsense.  So I set out on my path to investigate Dada Mail , Mailman , and PHPList .  That  same week, Jason Calacanis says he’s no longer going to blog, but he’s going to maintain an email list.  So, I signed up for his emails and noticed he was using Mailman.  This was a great place to start, but I wasn’t ready to commit.  Figured I should give a few of them a trial-run before committing to one specific list-serving software.  So that’s what I did.

I spent a few nights going back and forth between the few that seemed to be the most popular on the scene, and were also free to use.  Those being Dada Mail, Mailman, and PHPList.  PHPList did not last very long.  While it was relatively easy to install through my web hosts cPanel, it was not the most intuitive to maintain.  (I used four of my own email accounts to test each software.)  PHPList did have the coolest-looking logo, but that wasn’t a big enough selling point.

From there it was almost a tossup between Dada Mail and Mailman.  These two essentially accomplish the same tasks, and do so pretty well, so it comes down to just a few quirks.  (Mine or the software’s, I don’t know.)  I must have switched my mind three or four times after I’d thought for sure I’d settled on one or the other.  Ultimately, what irked me about Mailman was the difficulty in removing messages from the archive.  There is no web interface, that I could find, for doing what seems like should be a relatively simple enough task for a high-level piece of software.  Dada Mail had no problems with this task from its web panel.  However, the way that I was intending to use Dada Mail required a separate Perl script to run as a cron job that accessed a POP3 mail account.  I eventually decided this was a bad idea, as it was cubersome and slowed things down just a bit too much.

It could have gone either way, but I eventually loaded and launched with Mailman.  My first list post scheduled for August 1st.  And let’s be honest, if it’s good enough for Calacanis, it’s got to be good enough for everyone else, right?

(I know.  I know.  Google Search is the _most_ useful.)

This isn’t anything new, as it’s been out for a long while, but here we have probably the only tool from Google that actually saves more time than it helps to waste when it comes to scouring the net for the interesting information you seek.

From the Google Alerts FAQ :  "1. Google Alerts are emails automatically sent to  you when there are new Google results for your search terms."

Because Google is always crawling the web, it usually knows about new information before you do, so it compares what it finds with what you want to know and emails you accordingly. (The one downside being that it will email you the same information more than once if it finds it on more than one web page.  So it’s best, for busier topics, to receive updates no more than once per day, to eliminate the spam effect.)

This seems like the Google tool that goes most unnoticed, and I’m baffled as to why.  I can only think that maybe people don’t know about it.  But it’s easy to use (as you can see from the picture,) you fill in your regularly searched terms, select the type (I usually go with Comprehensive, but you can get more specific,) tell it how often you want to hear about new results, and where you want those results emailed.  It’s too good to be true, but it is true.

I have a handful of terms I want to know about as soon as Google finds them.  Here are my top two:  1) Most important to me is my name.  I want to know where and why my name is on the Internet, in case it’s somewhere it shouldn’t be;  2) I want any and all news having to do with the ship my brother is currently calling home.  (He doesn’t really call it home, but he’s living on it for quite a while.)  He’s in the Navy and I want to know as much as I can about anything having to do with his ship’s status.

If you’re not already using it, check it out.  Google Alerts — Enjoy it with your breakfast!