My camera mysteriously stopped working a few weeks ago.  After sending it back to Casio and having them not honor my warranty (I won’t get into it here, but if you want the details, I’ll tell you), I have decided that I’ll probably have to buy a new camera.  My hand feels lost without one.

With all this social media at my finger tips, I decided to get some feedback from friends (Facebook) and followers (Twitter).  I put the message below out to both the networks and as you can see in the Facebook example, I had some quality feedback almost immediately!

This is very interesting because instead of going to some camera site and reading reviews from random editors/consumers, I am getting great recommendations from people I know and respect. It’s safe to say I’m leaning towards a Canon. They must be doing something right. Word of mouth is still the strongest advertising…

Thanks for all the advice!

Mozilla, the same company that brought you the phenomenal Firefox web browser, has just announced their Ubiquity prototype today. It’s a technology that lets you bring aspects of the web together without opening different sites. For example, if you’re typing an email to a friend about dinner plans at a restaurant, you can use Ubiquity to insert a map without ever leaving your email application.

The technology looks promising… This video says it all

Everyday we’re getting slammed with information from every angle, so I’m always looking for better, more efficient ways to make sense of it all. Last week I found myself deleting dozens of email alerts and notifications from Facebook, Twitter, and various banks.  While this information is arguably important, I’ve decided that it’s clogging up my inbox and making me slower to respond to emails from friends and family.  I’ve devised a scheme to solve this problem.

Since I’m increasingly mobile, like a lot of people, I chose to use the iPhone as the centerpiece of my “Communication Segmentation” plan (note: term originally coined by Tad Johnson).  iPhone makes it extremely easy to add new Gmail accounts to your email application, so I decided to make multiple Gmail accounts – one for each of these communication types.  I registered all five accounts in one day, so it would appear that Google doesn’t care if you do this.

1. Personal Gmail: I get all my regular email here from friends and family.  I tend to filter out any kind of advertising, etc. and send those emails directly to the archives.

2. ActionsTalk Gmail: I have a few things routed here now.  Since I set up a Twitter account for ActionsTalk (my startup spotlight website), I’ve got all the alerts for that account going here.  Any new comment alert coming from the site (ActionsTalk.com), and emails from sponsors or startups are also sent here.  Lastly, I used search.twitter.com to set up an RSS feed for any time someone mentions “@ActionsTalk” on Twitter.  I pump that RSS feed through xFruits using their RSS to Email generator and voila… I get an email any time we’re mentioned.

3.  Twitter Gmail: I do all the same stuff with this email account that I did with #2, but this time I have all the alerts for my personal Twitter account fed in.

4.  Facebook Gmail: I’ve got all my alerts from Facebook here like new friend requests, notifications of wall posts, photo tags, etc.

5.  Finance Gmail: I now have all my email from any of my bank accounts sent to this email address.  This includes bill pay reminders, spending threshold alerts, etc.

Bottom line: This system took about 30 minutes to set up.  After about a week of using it, I can say that it has made me much better at reading and responding to emails.  I can clearly see how many of each type I have, and I can deal with them at my leisure. Give it a shot, and let me know what you think in the comments.

Two new applications I’ve been impressed with are Piclens and Animoto.

Piclens is a plugin for Firefox that lets you view photos on the web in a new, completely immersive way. Once you have it installed, it integrates with all the major photo sharing sites: Flickr, Facebook, Google Images, Smugmug, etc. With Piclens you can view sets of photos on a virtual wall, and fly through them with a drag of the mouse.  It can make the most boring Facebook album seem interesting.

Watch the demo here, then download it — Trust me.

Animoto is a new site that lets you create amazing videos by combining a group of your photos with some music. I’ve never seen an auto-generated slide show come out so well! You can make the videos for free if you go with a length of 30 seconds, and it’s cheap to make a longer one (~$4). After your video is complete, you can embed it on your website, Facebook, etc. As I sift through 1000’s of pictures from my time in Europe and try to put a video together, I’m thinking it makes a lot more sense to have Animoto do it for me. I would be very surprised if Animoto doesn’t get bought up by Google or Yahoo (think Flickr integration…) in the near future.

Here is my first crack at an Animoto video

Here they are. These are the best and brightest web sites out there right now. What do they win? Nothing… but maybe they’ll get a few new visitors when this hits the presses. Check them out, and leave comments!

Netvibes has become my homepage of choice as of late. It competes with iGoogle and PageFlakes in the personalized homepage space. Netvibes wins out because it looks cooler (I’m into visuals) and it has a ton of useful widgets to choose from. Some of my favorites are Google Calendar, Facebook, Weather, Twitter, and Gmail. You will begin to see that everything is connected on the web these days… netvibes does a pretty good job of pulling it all together.

Facebook is a major game changer. Never has a social network been so useful or prolific. Everyone shook their heads in amazement (including me) when Mark Zuckerberg was reportedly turning down $2 Billion offers to sell. Now the company has a valuation of $15 Billion!! It’s worth so much because it has so many users. It has so many users because it’s so addicting and useful. Yes, it will waste your time – a lot of your time. But it will also allow you to stay connected (even if minimally) with many, many people (which can be bad too). It’s become a one stop shop for checking in on everyone, and letting your friends see what you’ve been up to.

Say what you will about Wikipedia. It’s an encyclopedia that literally anyone can edit. The results could be disastrous right? Poor information could get spread all over the web… I look at it like this. Even though there’s a high probability that everything on there isn’t correct, it gets me a hell of a lot closer to the truth than I’d be without it (and quickly too). If nothing else, it points me in the right direction. One thing I always keep in mind when searching Wikipedia is how polarizing is the topic? If you’re looking up Hillary Clinton, or the Iraq War for example, who the heck knows what you’re going to get… This is a case where you’ve got passionate people on two sides of a topic (conservative and liberal), and they’ll be constantly overwriting each other on Wikipedia.

I’ve been a huge fan of Flickr for about two years now. I use Flickr so much, that some of my friends even call me Flickr. There are plenty of photo sharing sites out there and people often ask me what makes Flickr the best. I think if you love, photography (and I do), the community is what makes Flickr so good. You get to see amazing photos by people from all around the world. You can ask them what they did to get the shot. You can even see what camera they took the picture with in most cases. Flickr is the gold standard right now if you’re interested in photography.

Google knows what’s up when it comes to web applications. They either build the best or buy the best. I’m pretty sure they built Gmail from the ground up. Gmail is so smooth and easy to use, I almost hate using it because I have to use an alternative at work. It’s easy to search (Google is pretty good at that by now), and it’s easy to set up automatic rules. Even though it’s the best, they are still rolling out improvements. Google probably knows everything about me by now (since their computers are crawling my email)…should I be worried? I’m not.

Meebo is a problem solver. I’ve got friends that use multiple instant messaging clients, and it would be a huge pain to sign into all of them at once. That’s where Meebo comes in. It let’s me sign into Google Talk, AIM, and MSN all from one spot. It’s also completely web based, which means I don’t need to download anything to use it. They’ve even announced video chat for up to 6 people at once. I’ll probably never use that…but I could.

Popurls is where I go daily to find Interesting stuff on the web. I used to go to Digg for this, but I’m not impressed with the quality of info on Digg lately. Popurls (think popular urls) brings in the top stories from a ton of sources (like Google New, Del.icio.us, Digg…). I get to see it all in one place and the interface is very clean.

I wasn’t sold on the value of del.icio.us when it first came out a couple years ago. It’s a website that lets you store your bookmarks online. Now I use it as my repository for anything new and interesting. Every time I find a new site that I like, I plug it into del.icio.us and tag it with meaningful key words — this makes it easy to find later with a simple search. I’m also a big fan of the way it can separate your tags into different RSS feeds/pages. For example, here are all of my bookmarks that have been tagged “Belgium”

Simple GTD is all about Getting Things Done. And that’s what I like. It’s an online To-do list tool with everything you need and nothing you don’t. You can easily create multiple lists and drag items from list to list. I usually have this open all day at work and it keeps me on track. If you want something a little more robust, try basecamp. If you want something a little less robust, try pen and paper.

Google Reader is, hands-down the best RSS reader I’ve ever used. If you don’t know what RSS is, or why it’s important, click here for an explanation. Google reader lets me quickly browse top stories from all of my favorite sites in one place. If I find something good, I can “star it” and it becomes easy to find at a later date. It also has a slick e-mail sharing feature that lets me send stories to people quickly. The interface with my Gmail account automatically brings in my contacts, so I only need to type the first few letters of someone’s name and it finds their email address. I also really like the shared RSS feed feature. This allows me to share my favorite stories with whoever wants to subscribe to them.

Honorable Mention:
Mint is a great tool for managing your finances in one place. It would be a top site if it was better at categorizing my expenditures.

Deezer let’s you make music playlists that you can post all over the web (like this one).

Meetup is a great tool for finding people with common interests around you. It helps you find events in your area, and it will even export the even calendar automatically to Google Calendar, iCal, etc.

Mango offers a ton of free foreign language courses on the Internet. Nothing beats learning a language one on one with another person, but this is about as good as it gets on the web.

Geni is a great Family tree building site. It let’s you post photos of family members and will send you email reminders when someone’s birthday is coming up.

Sketchcast is a tool that let’s you draw out diagrams and record your voice at the same time. It’s great for creating lessons on something, or explaining material over the web. After you create a sketchcast, you can post it on your blog, etc.