I was invited to join the beta testing of social thing yesterday. As you can imagine I was more than a little excited, having recently posted about this new social networking service. The aim of social thing in simple terms is to collect all your social networking services in one place and allow you to post to them all (or individually) from one place. As far as I know it is the only service of its kind just now.
After signing up yesterday there are seven services available so far, Twitter, Pownce, Flickr are services that I signed up for (others available include Vimeo and Facebook). It does exactly as it says on the tin, it went to these services and brought back the things that had been going on recently in these services. I was also able to post to the services that I wanted without any trouble. You can set the ‘Lifestream’ up in a time-line, by service or by person. There is also a voting section on what services you would like to see, Wordpress being high up in the list as is QIK. They also tell you exactly what they are working on right now, it is good to know what to expect over the next couple of months. The only down point I found (and it is really minor and normally I wouldn’t care) was that it doesn’t run on Internet Explorer. I would like to clarify this before people start questioning my sanity for using Explorer. Where I currently work I have a locked desktop which allows nothing to be installed, so I am locked into IE6 (yes, 6).
I honestly think social thing is going to be massive and I would like to thank them for inviting me to help test it out, I hope I can provide them with useful feedback and that it gets released to everyone soon!
I also downloaded twibble desktop last night. I have been using twibble on my mobile phone for a while now, this is a service that allows me to post straight to twitter with my location taken from the GPS built into my phone. The mobile service also lets you see your twitter line. The desktop twibble desktop service sets up your twitter line in a neat small window, it allows for three accounts to be running and can pick up your tweets 60 times per hour, or once per minute if you prefer. Twibble also has location awareness, you can see where your twitter contacts are in Google maps. I don’t know why but I think this is a really cool feature. The twibble twitter desktop client is built on top of the Adobe Air platform. I have to say that I was really impressed with twibble desktop and I am looking forward to ‘twibble web’. Their website says that ‘twibble web is a fancy interactive mash-up that integrates your virtual social life’, perhaps something to rival social thing in the future? Hopefully it will be available soon…
The main task of my evening was actually to PDF my PhD thesis. My supervisor (PGK) has been looking for a copy to send to another of his students. Normally this wouldn’t be a hard task, however, last night it turned into a massive headache. I have Adobe Acrobat 7 and I have never had trouble with it until yesterday. It turns out that I couldn’t get a word 2007 document to become a PDF with acrobat 7 as Word 2007 is newer than Acrobat 7 and at the time I installed Acrobat 7 Word 2007 wasn’t available. Now, if there is a fix for this I really don’t want to know now, but tell me anyway! I dug out an old Dell Inspiron Laptop that weighs roughly the same as me (especially with the two batteries in it) and booted it up. I was pretty sure that Word 2003 was on this and had the bright idea of installing Acrobat 7 onto it. The installation onto the laptop took 30 mins… I honestly couldn’t believe it. I then got the documents that made my thesis up and set up Acrobat to PDF it into one document. Well, that was interesting. I set it going last night around 9pm and went to bed at 12:30am with it 30% through PDF’ing the document. It was finished when I got up this morning! It’s just under 50 mb in size! The laptop was wheezing and coughing after a hard nights work!
Although this old laptop is mainly used as a paper weight or doorstop nowadays I am glad that it was there!
