Pek Pongpaet

There are so many social networking sites right now that I can’t even keep track of them all. Not only that, but they all have adopted the status feature which lets you post a short message. Twitter’s whole service offering is just the status update. This is a great marketing tool that you can leverage to drive traffic to your site. However updating them all can be a huge pain. I for example have accounts for Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, and the list goes on and on. Different people in my different social circle interact with me only through certain social networks. If I wanted to share a link with them, I can choose to do it through all the services and waste tons of time or pick my battles and decide what social network I want to put my energy in.

This is where Ping.fm comes in. It’s a great service which consolidates the updating of all your social networks in one very easy to use site. With Ping.fm, I can update my status there once, and it blasts it to all my social networks I have set up in Ping.fm.

I’ve been using Ping.fm for a while now, and although it’s great, I still have to go to the site and log into it. With all that I have going on, that’s just not convenient enough.

Enter txtful. Txtful is a service that hooks your instant messenger account or phone to Web 2.0 services. To put it into concrete terms, I can hook Netflix to my txtful account and send an SMS to add movies to my queue. I can also do it from my IM account. I add do@txtful.com as a contact and then I can tell it to refill my prescription without having to talk to a pharmacist.

This brings me back to my post. Txtful has a shortcut to ping.fm. With that, I just send do@txtful.com a status update and it pipes the instructions to ping which blasts it to all my social networks. The reason I like txtful is because my IM client is ALWAYS on when I am on. I don’t need to go to another website; I just do it right from my IM client. It saves me an extra step.

ping.fm + txtful = uber efficient social media whore

Give these 2 services a shot.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Here’s a project that my friend Dan Greenblatt has been working on. DIYtraffic is a free community based traffic alert system. Traffic updates via mobile phones have been around a while, but some of the cost money and there hasn’t been any unified platform.

DIYtraffic is an easy-to-configure application that alerts you to traffic problems in a local area as they occur. The app, which is set up to pull from Yahoo’s traffic API and send to Twitter (but can be configured to pull/push from/to any service), will send SMS messages to your phone about traffic jams from accidents, street closures, etc, for the city you configure it for.

Here’s the twitter feed for Chicago. http://twitter.com/traffic_chicago

Popularity: 2% [?]

I just recently stumbled on this video on youtube. This video probably would never have been made 5 years ago. It’s got a very low budget homemade feel. It’s candid in its admission that Samsung hired them to showcase how awesome SSDs (solid state drive) are. But looking at the number of views (1.5M+) on youtube along, I’d say it’s a pretty successful campaign so far.

Being a geek, it was totally impressed by this video. It appealed to me. I could relate to it even though I would never hook up 24 SSDs in a RAID configuration.

I think we’ll start seeing more and more of these types of tactics done by big brands as they get more comfortable with the idea of putting themselves out there outside of traditional advertising.

Popularity: 1% [?]

I’ve known about Animoto since I first saw them at SXSW last year. I recall they had booth babes in short skirts and boots. Anywhoooo… I digress. These guys have an amazing product that is super easy to use. It’s a slideshow creator that generates a video slideshow of the photos of your choosing. You can upload your photos or import them from a variety of online sources.

Their slideshows are really cool. The number of awards they’ve won speaks volumes of the sleekness of their videos. Here’s one I made from one of my Flickr photosets.

What I like about Animoto as a company is that they have a REAL business model. You can create a free 30 second slideshow at low resolution. If you want a full length one in a higher resolution then you cough up some dough. Also, you can order a DVD of said slideshow for a fee. They have some other business models as well I’m sure.

This year while at SXSW, I got to meet Tom Clifton and Erik Bjornard from Animoto. They’re really cool guys so I thought I’d give them some link love and finally get around to blogging about their product.

Popularity: 1% [?]

A guest blog post by Kimberly Pongpaet.

Let’s face it. There are some places that just aren’t cool to have hair. I personally think women shouldn’t have it under their arms, and men shouldn’t have it growing out their nose. But more importantly, I don’t want it on my bedding. I dislike waking up in the morning coughing up hairballs because I’ve inhaled enough cat hair in my sleep to produce one.

I’m an obsessive compulsively clean person. This often creates frustration when it comes to my cat (whom I love dearly – though I think my husband believes her to be the anti-christ- LOL). I’ve bought endless lint/hair rollers to lift her little hairs from the bed. They’re often poorly made and never really remove any significant amount of hair (unless I use the whole roll). This has led me to dragging the vacuum into the bedroom with the brush attachment daily. The process is cumbersome and time consuming.

So what’s a woman to do about all this unwanted hair?????

FINALLY I’ve found a product that not only does the job, but I would endorse. Hell I would go door to door and demo it, just to show people how great it works. I’ve already bought one for my best friend as a gift and she loves it.

What could it be… this modern marvel of hair removal? It’s the Pledge Fabric Sweeper for Pet Hair. It’s under $5.00 and comes with two coupons in the box for $1 off the purchase of your next one. Oh, and there WILL be a next one I assure you. This thing works like magic! Just a few short side to side strokes and it pulls up all the pet hair. It’s neatly stored in the clear dome shaped attached holder ( so you can see just how much disgusting pet hair you had laying around). A real treat for someone with my OCD.

Here’s the catch. It’s not reusable. It would have be easy enough for them to make the plastic top to pop off and be emptied. But then…why buy more? Smart for them, sucks for the consumer. Oh well. It won’t stop me from buying more. They do soften the blow considerably with the $1 coupon, and when you see those removable paper rollers for $5 a pop it seems like a bargain.

I tip my hat to the R&D people at Pledge. Good job. Now I can ensure my hubby sleeping peacefully knowing the pet hair is where it should be (on the cat).

Popularity: 3% [?]