Marcus Hamaker is The Sleepy Geek

I have been thinking this for a while but didn’t want to offend anyone. Well it looks like people are starting to really be outspoken about their opinion and why they themselves fall into one of these categories so too bad for them. Here is the way that it lies.

1 – Signed up because everyone else did and never logged in again.

We all know this friend. 33% of our friend list is made up of this person. They were a high school buddy or even a neighbour but because they couldn’t be bothered with computers or the ‘internets’ they check it out to see why they were talking about it on CNN but never come back.

2 – Signed up but never logs in because the only reason they are there is so that their boyfriend/girlfriend can put “in a relationship with…”.

This is a much less common person. I have a good friend that is this exact user (don’t be pissed at me dude). Most of the time they are really closet #7 users but their favorite person in their life managed to twist their arm into signing up.

3 – Signed up because they wanted to play Mafia Wars or Farmville.

People that spend way too much time playing these things. We all know who they are because all we saw were Farmville updates coming from their account until we figured out how to ignore them. They aren’t here to interact with us. They like to have our names on their list but we only ever see how much their cow sold for (really, I can’t even really make fun of Farmville very well because I never managed to read a who update).

4 – Keeps up to date with friends and colleagues with regular updates and interaction.

I think a lot of us are this user. We use it for letting our buds know what’s happening. Just don’t post too many ‘I ate this for lunch’ type things.

5 – Makes a useless comment on every single post that anyone who befriended them ever puts on Facebook.

You have already taken this friend off your Facebook. I don’t need to explain.

6 – I quit

The Facebooker that feels they have been screwed too many times by Mark Zuckerberg and his privacy setting changes. It’s beginning to feel like a spouse that has been dishonest 3 times in a row and they are damned if it’s going to happen again.

7 – Screw you – I hate Facebook, you’re all losers!

Doesn’t get it… doesn’t care. We are all just playing around on here and should get a life!

Who am I? I am a 4 that could be leaning towards a 6 that really hopes the people on the other end never think of me as a 5.

Where do you fit in?

Geek on!

Google has just release Buzz. This is a new service for sharing things and it’s built right into Gmail. The first thing that I looked for was how long it would be before they would roll this out in Google Apps for people who have hosted email for their own domain. Answer – a few months. From their enterprise blog:

Today the Gmail team introduced Google Buzz, a new feature that lets individuals share links, photos, and other updates with their network of contacts – or with the whole world – right within Gmail. Google Buzz helps people kick off conversations around information that people find mutually interesting.

Within a few months, we also plan to make Google Buzz available to businesses and schools using Google Apps, with added features for sharing within your organization. Stay tuned, and for more information about using Google Buzz with your personal Gmail account, head over to the Gmail blog or visit buzz.google.com.

The service itself looks really cool. They have done something far more simple than Facebook and their typical simpler approach to things quite often works well in the real world. Time will tell.

I like this video they put together to show how it works -

Geek on!

In an article posted from on their blog, the Facebook developers put their new homepage online for us all to see. I actually noticed the change before I saw the post in my reader and my first impressions are good. Some of the things they have done in the past have taken away functionality and in tern made the experience a little less fluid. This change moves things around on the screen and seems to make navigation more intuitive.

The now have moved notifications to the top bar and cleaned them up. Notifications, messages and requests are now 3 spearate icons as seen here.

A revision to the left menu didn’t actually catch my eye at first. They have centralized more there now for easier access.

The left menu has been organized to make it easier for you to communicate with and discover content from your friends. You can now access your messages and other core features all in one place, to the left of your News Feed.

And the last major change is how you interact with games and applications. Now a dashboard with everything centralized. This may be important to some, but the games don’t really catch me at all. If you do play games or connect to a lot of apps, a dashboard idea like this is great.

Have fun with the new changes!

Geek on!

source

Facebook has rolled out a new feature that I actually will use (Yay!). I get an e-mail ever time someone comments on one of my updates or on something that I commented on. This is a handy feature as long as you aren’t bothered by it – I know that some people could spend their whole day on Facebook responding to things.

The feature they are running now is the ability to respond to those notifications straight from your email. The Facebook engine is intelligent enough to sort out the garbage and post only the intended text into the comment section like you would have done it from the website.

As stated in their blog post this afternoon:

One of the easiest ways to stay updated on relevant conversations happening on Facebook is through email notifications, which inform you about comments made on the posts you’ve created or commented on. These notifications—for comments on such content as status updates, photos, videos and Wall posts—allow you to stay informed about your Facebook friends’ activities without being logged in when you’re on the go, on your phone or at work.

Today, we’re launching the ability for you to participate in these conversations by replying directly to these email notifications. When you receive an email notification about comments, you can just click “Reply” and start typing a comment at the top of the email. Then hit “Send” from your email and your reply will automatically be added as a comment on Facebook without you having to even log in.

Good work Facebook! In the last year they have committed so many blunders with their home page – it’s nice to see a win. This one is simple, if you don’t use it or won’t find it handy… DON’T USE IT! The page isn’t affected so they can’t screw it up for all of us at once :)

Geek on!

I am one of those procrastinators when it comes to integrating Facebook to my blog. Hopefully I have it installed and running here and I am going to share with you what I did.

First I took down all up links to other services in my WordPress setup. I had a link going to Ping.fm and that published my blog posts to a myriad of locations including Facebook. The problem with this was the poor visual on the Facebook page with a lack of information for the readers.

I took the opportunity while planning this to open a Facebook fan page. This is a good idea and will allow you to post things to a page where you don’t necessarily have all your personal stuff with your buddies. Mine is located at

and I have also made a http://facebook.thesleepygeek.com sub-domain that I can publish.

To integrate my blog posts with my new fan page and my main Facebook account I installed a Facebook app called NetworkedBlogs. This will take your blog posts and put them up on your Facebook page or Facebook fan page (both if you like).  So now Facebook through NetworkedBlogs is pulling the information from my site and they do a very good job of formatting the post.

Having the publication of the posts working was a great step but I also wanted some way for people to share my posts with their friends directly from the page. I installed the FaceBook Share (New) plugin. This puts the link on the each post allowing you as readers to share my post with your friends. This is a new plugin that works with the Facebook Share feature that Facebook built into their own system. Using the plugin simplifies the installation process… and I mean really simple.

I use a theme in WordPress called WicketPixie made by Chris Pirillo. The them has a lot of added features in it one of which is notifier that can link to ping.fm or twitter.com. I decided to stick with ping.fm still as they will update to a log of social media sites including Twitter. Easier to manage one account here than many. I made sure to remove my Facebook account from the ping.fm setup to avoid duplicate posts.

Now for a real test! I didn’t want to post garbage in here to see what would show up on Facebook, I would hate to see that in my RSS reader. After posting this I am going to see how everything looks. I have tested as much as I can without an actual post so this is the real deal.

Geek on!

Here’s one that is just plain entertaining. If you are on Facebook like 98% of the people I know are, then this is for you. A friend of mine posted a status message letting us all know about a beta feature on Facebook, a new language called English (Pirate).

That’s correct folks – now you can Facebook like a pirate. Simply scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on your current language (in this case it is English US for me).

A pop up window will show up with all the possible languages you can choose, just click on English (Pirate) and you’re set!

Arrrr! Tis time to shoot ye all a note. Be it time to go now!

On a side note – I have to say that Facebook’s list of available languages is awesome, no? Kudos to them!

I just spent about an hour on Facebook updating statuses, uploading a couple of pictures and looking around to see what others are up to. Maybe it’s just me, but in 2009 I expect more from a UI. It seems that when I log in I end up on a page with updates from my friends but it is never clear if all my friends updates are there.

In the past week I have been trying to spend less time worrying about the blog and just posting when something comes to mind. I am trying not to strategize as much and just post what I am thinking of when I feel like it. That has allowed me to followup on Facebook and Twitter a little more. So I have been watching for the better part of a week. What I have seen is that after some digging today, there have been a dozen pictures that I have missed from a friend because it never showed on the main screen. Facebook seems more inclined to let me know when everyone changes their profile picture instead.

So not to bitch and then run around without a solution… I think they need to allow us as the user to choose what we would like to see on our main page. I don’t need to see profile picture updates, however when someone uploads an album it would be nice to see it. Don’t think that I didn’t check the screen that is supposed to do this. I have all the features turned on and some of them just seem to get missed.

This weeks news is that Facebook reached 175 million users. The idea is amazing, don’t get me wrong. But there is no way that there are 175 million active users and I wonder how many people feel like I do.

I was poking around and noticed on twitter a mention from ponzarelli about a new IM client called Digsby. I am always looking for something since the promises of Trillian kept falling short. I don’t even know if they have released Trillian Astra which would be the predecessor to v2.x.

So I downloaded Digsby, fairly small download and very easy installation. The setup wizard is very easy. If first will prompt you to choose a username for their service and then ask for a couple of personal details. Once done, then it’s as simple as adding all your IM accounts to the interface. This process is also very easy through their main account window.

What is amazing about this IM client is that it is so much more than simple IM. It is a client for e-mail, twitter, facebook, myspace and a number of other things. It allows you to link to more than just your IM accounts in a sort of ‘social utility’. I think I need to coin the phrase *wink – wink*. We have so many social links and they are in varying forms that a utility like this is going to be critical.

I really like the user interface once you are in the program. It is clean and user friendly. The lists can be organized as most other IM programs allow and you are able to use most of their features.

I suggest that you head over to the website and take a look at their product. Unfortunately there is only a Windows version, but they have plans to release for Mac and Linux. They seem to have started something that I think will take off with other programs. We will see integration a lot more in the future. People are starting to need to bundle all their external connections together because they are becoming too many and thus segmented.