Technology | education | technology | ai & NOT A.I. | design

Do you use Facebook, Gmail AND Hotmail?

I bet you do. I bet you also use them similarly to how I use them. These days I use Facebook for daily communication, Gmail for important stuff and Hotmail or Yahoo for junk mail. Why is that?

Facebook has come out on top as the daily most used website. It’s due to feeds from friends, ease of use, and non-clunkiness. This is the place to be if you enjoy knowing what many of your friends are doing, most of the time. Because of this, you probably will write quick emails to them to comment about their activities.

Hotmail and Yahoo, however, may have been one of the first email clients you started using. You were probably not thinking too much about the silliness of your “handle” when you created the account. Therefore, you don’t share this information with people you want to think of you professionally. The account is still active and since you need a certain area to send email confirmations to this is your likely choice. Also, you remember the email password.

And then comes Gmail. It hasn’t been around as long as the former two and if you were born around the time I was (1976) or even sooner you started to think about how people are viewing you online. You needed to apply to a college, or job, or start a company and to do so you didn’t want somebody emailing you at fluffy123@hotmail.com or cheezeslick69@yahoo.com. It just didn’t cut it. You probably went out and tried to get a variation of your name – figure that, and now you have the third or fourth email account that you consider professional.

It could be the Outlook/Yahoo/Facebook combo, or the Webmail/Hotmail/LinkedIn combo, but when all is said and done, I bet you have something along these lines.

Whatever happened to the days before email? “Page me.” “Call me on my home (rotary) phone” I hardly remember them. Do you?

Hotmail’s new throw away Email accounts (headros.wordpress.com)

2 Comments

Posted by Dr. Thomas Johnson | ict-design.org on May 8, 2011 in Technology

Tags: Email, Email client, Facebook, Gmail, Google, Hotmail, Online, Social media, Technology, Yahoo

If you don’t consider “The Cutoff” you’ll hate yourself later

07 May

This is important if you are a blogger and you use Facebook to publish. After the Headline of your article, the next most important characters you write are the following 280. This is the “Facebook Cutoff”. Without getting people interested in your article in this amount of time they are not going to click on the link to see the rest of your article and hopefully peruse (read intensely) through your blog.

So, how do you do it?

Put the important information up front. Newspapers have been doing this for a long time, you can too. Look back at an article to see how they are doing it.

Don’t tell people something they already know. Why do they need to read the rest of the article if everything they are seeing is something they have already read before or is something they concluded about themselves.

Now, here is the interesting part: Test to see the sentence getting cut off at 280 characters is leaving someone yearning for more. Test the length in Facebook. Have you done so well that you have put ALL the important information in the first 280 characters that readers do not feel they need to read any further to gain insight? If so, rework the article.

Finally, do something I didn’t do in this articles headline, and ask a question. It might generate people commenting on the article, as they have thought about their response since they read the title.

1 Comment

Posted by Dr. Thomas Johnson | ict-design.org on May 7, 2011 in Design, Technology

Tags: Blogging, Facebook, Social Networking, Writing

This changes everything.

05 May

@Wii – “Eat your heart out!” I remember going to Disney World back when I was seven or eight and going to Innoventions in EPCOT center. I was amazed at so many things, but one thing that still is embedded vividly in my mind was the virtual 3D head-mounted camera. Well, the Kinect, which is a consumer product seems to blow that out of the water.

Watch the video for full, cool, awesome details.

1 Comment

Posted by Dr. Thomas Johnson | ict-design.org on May 5, 2011 in Design, Technology

Tags: Games, Technology, Xbox

Make Videos like a Pro

04 May

You want the easy way out, right? You want something that you made that makes it look like you are a pro? You want people to look at what you did and think to themselves, “That must have taken forever.” Now you can. You can make something like the video below in about 2 minutes from logging in until completion.

CLICK HERE

Sign up for free at Animoto.com

You can grant access to your Facebook pics as well. Neat and Easy! The drawbacks are that you have to pay at least $39.00 if you would like to have a video that is longer than 30 seconds and doesn’t have the advertising from Animoto on it. But it could be worth it.

Also, it seems to have educational licensing, which is good for teachers. Worth checking out.