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Amazon.com has a deal on a SimpleTech 500GB external hard drive. $169. There’s also a Western Digital for the same price, but down from $329, if you like to get the best deal.

Well, after Leo and Merlin didn’t stop talking about it on MacBreak Weekly a few weeks ago, I decided to give Twitter a whirl. I have to say, it’s pretty fun. As Scoble said, it’s kind of like mini-blogging: just a short little blurb about what you’re doing.

What makes the service even better are all the different options you have for updating your status (and recieving your friends’ updates). You can use the website, of course; there’s a nice big text box to use. They also let you use Twitter from a mobile phone via SMS, which is great for keeping up with your friends on the go. If, like me, you’ve always got your IM program open, you can add Twitter to your AIM or Jabber (including Google Talk) list and keep up to date like you would with any other buddy. If all this wasn’t enough, there’s an extensive API which lets you do anything with your own aplications, using simple XML calls, which lets me keep the list of my last “tweets” on my status page. There are also a lot of programs available for all platforms that let you update straight from your desktop, including my current favorite, twitterrific from the icon factory.

So why not give twitter a try? There are tonnes of people on it (including Leo Laporte and Merlin Mann, and even Bill Clinton, Condeliza Rice and Borat) and you can get your friends to sign up, too. And why not see what I’m up to, while you’re at it?

Del.icio.us needs a mass importer. I recently switched from Google Reader (where I Stared things I liked) to NetNewsWire Lite, which has no such feature. It does, however, let me send things to del.icio.us. As such, I’ve been tagging all the funny things I find on Overheard in del.icio.us, because I want to have a publically accessible list of things I like.

And so, to do this, I need to open up every item from Google Reader in a new tab, select the text of the entry and hit the Tag button in my firefox toolbar. Once I tag them (with the overheard tag), they get submitted. However, since I had about 150 in Google Reader that needed to be imported, I’ve been doing this quickly. Very quickly, to the point that Delicious (punctuation be damned) has blocked me not once, but twice.

They are making it harder for me to use their service. Were they charging me, I could say they were denying themselves potential revenue, but they don’t. So I can only say that it is making me less happy to use their service. If they want people to switch from other sites, they should allow a mass import function, where you provide a link to an RSS feed that they scrape and add. It could make transfering bookmarks simple. Instead, they just lock users out of the system.

Mike

I’ve become really interested by Dave Winer’s weblog lately. I applaud his effort to re-start a community podcast directory. I think this is really important; directories shouldn’t be corporate owned and operated, especially not when they’re about a community-heavy topic (like podcasting).

I also appreciate that he put together the OPML of the New York Times podcasts. I really never realized that the Times had such an extensive list of podcasts. It makes them very easy to subscribe to them in any number of podcatchers. However, I think a lot of “regular” people just use the iTunes podcast directory. Would it be worth the effort to have, in Dave’s directory, links to the iTunes subscribe page for the podcasts?

Just a thought.

~mike

After seeing a post on Password Managers for OS X, I decided to share my technique. I’m not sure where I found this idea, but it isn’t something I could have thought of on my own.

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