“I @reply the finest birdies I know but we never met in real life so I look like a creeper…”

If your looking for a way to find some hot birdies on Twitter try out flirt140 – a site that helps Twitter-ers find each other for dates and more.

1. Company Website
2. Twitter Account (if they have one)
3. Web Chat (if available)
4. Email (if not time sensitive)
5. Pray
6. Telephone

Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

As you can see, I settle on using telephone customer support only after I’ve summoned the heavens for help – yes that’s how much I hate telephone support!  It involves having to answer 50 multiple choice questions so they can direct my call to the proper call center in India. Then, the company promises that I’m important to them and that a Customer Service representative will be with me soon. At this point, I am inevitably stuck listening to some music I don’t like. As far as I can tell the only innovation in call waiting that I have been able to pick up on are the systems that give you an estimated wait time. Beyond that innovation has been nonexistent – at least in my personal experience.

If companies out there are listening let’s start coming up with some innovation with your call waiting customer support systems. If I want to listen to music then fine but also give me an option to listen to my local weather forecast or the latest news headlines. If I choose news then ask me what type I want to hear – business, sports or entertainment.  If the company wants to use my time on hold to make money that’s fine too. But if you are going to up-sell me at least micro target the ads by associating my phone number with my purchase history.  The scenarios of what companies could do with call waiting systems are endless. In the end, all of the above ideas must be short form in nature (1-2 minutes).

So if any companies are listening, please differentiate yourselves and revamp your call waiting experience. If anyone has experienced an innovative call waiting system or has creative ways to get better customer service please let us know!

–

As an aside check out gethuman.com or dialahuman.com – they list a large number of companies and provide the exact sequence of numbers you need to press in order to get to an actual human. Very useful!

As the developer describes it:

“Here is my new way of watching feeds on FriendFeed. I call it SteroidFeed but it is also a “Multi-Talk” style interface … the file sits locally and allows me to view multiple topics. Feel free to modify the html but please leave attribution and share your changes. Leave a URL if on Internet.”

As the developer notes, anyone is invited to play with SteroidFeed and see what they can come up with. If you create something cool please send us a link and we will post it.

Of course the page is a set of iframes, and so to edit the searches simply edit the html and change the URL’s within each.

Although I just recently returned from Internet Week New York, I’m about to set foot on another exciting, new adventure. From July 5 to July 10, I’ll be traveling around London together with my Geeky friends. aka The Traveling Geeks. The TG’s are a small informal group of technology bloggers and influencers who like to travel to various regions around the world, collaborate with technology innovators and leaders on interesting projects and then share everything with the rest of the world via blogs, videos, podcasts and social networks.

On this trip, we’ll be on the hunt for innovative uses of new technologies in Great Britain, especially by lesser-known companies, and spotlight how those innovations may improve people’s lives. We’ll also compare the thought leadership in Great Britain’s tech industry and compare it with what’s taking place in Silicon Valley. The highlights of our UK agenda include events such as The Traveling Geeks TweetUp in Chelsea, podcast with the Guardian, and The Techcrunch Europa Awards with Mike Butcher. 

This exciting group of jet-setters consists of  myself, JD Lasica (co-founder of TG, founder of Socialmedia.biz& Socialbrite.org), Robert Scoble (former blogger for Microsoft, now works for Rackspace’s Building43), Craig Newmark (founder of Craigslist),  Sarah Lacy (Editor at Techcrunch, reporter for BusinessWeek and co-host of the Yahoo Tech Ticker show), Tom Foremski (founder of  Siliconvalleywatcher.com), Sky Schuyler (CTO of The Dalai Lama Foundation), Renee Blodgett. (marketing consultant and blogger), Jeff Saperstein (co-founder of TG, Author, teacher, consultant).Susan Bratton (co-founder of Personal Life Media), Sarah Austin (founder of Pop17.com), Meghan Asha(co-founder of Nonsociety.com) and Howard Rheingold (teaches at Stanford and UC Berkeley and author of  Tools for Thought, The Virtual Community and Smart Mobs).

Last year the Traveling Geeks came to Israel and I hosted them. This time we are going to be hosted by London locals. Should be very exciting. I’m thrilled to embark on this week long geek fest. I’m sure to meet some very interesting Brits along the way. In fact, if anyone is interested in meeting any of us for interviews, please email me at: press[at]blonde20.com and we’ll try to make it happen!

Photo Credit: bobby13

If you really pay attention to the details… you’ll see the amount of work that’s gone into this. It makes my head pound.

More info about the band here.

The core differences between the two conferences? Well DEMO charges companies for the privilege of attending (the fee is now more than $18,000), whist TC50 primarily charges its sponsors (as well as companies presenting in their ‘demo pit’). DEMO tends to have larger, well funded companies promoting their goods. TC50 is a less glitzy affair, bringing unfunded companies often with only first versions of their product available to show off their stuff.

Additionally, until now, it was only TC50 that offered a prize to the ‘winner’, an amount totalling a generous $50,000. Now organizer Matt Marshall of VentureBeat, who was recently recruited to organise the event, has announced that DEMO will be stepping up their game with a prize pool of $1 million dollars each for two top winners at DEMO. The prizes will be awarded to the best enterprise startup and the best consumer startup. The catch? The prizes come in the form of ad and marketing material.

According to the blog post on VentureBeat, Matt Marshall says:

“The campaign will include print advertisements, web banner placements, text link promotions, email newsletter promotions, and video ads. The package includes the development of creative content that is to be featured on IDG media properties – another huge value proposition to the winning companies.”

While competition in any industry is always good to see, I can’t help but feel each of these conferences can (if not already) corner their respective niche –  in what Center Networks editor Allen Stern calls – “startup-infomercial” conferences..

DEMO with primarily well backed/funded companies, often with established products and/or reputable founders. While TC50 can corner the market for innovative genuine startup companies who have had had little access to funding, little previous experience, but extraordinary ideas and concepts. The fact that Michael Arrington, Techcrunch’s founder, has organised TC50 to fall in the same week as DEMO seems rather pointless when both companies can have the opportunity establish themselves, their own dates AND create a foothold in their respective niches. That being said, its a very clever marketing ploy of Arrington’s to automatically get the media comparing the two…which is actually what we’ve just done here (doh!).

viaCenterNetworks

If you’re a reader of The Next Web, chances are the internet is an important part of your life. However, do you remember the first website you ever visited?

I do. I was 17, it was 1996 and I was at college. Rumour spread around campus that a computer in the library had been fitted with a modem. Suddenly, this mythical ‘internet’ thing we’d heard so much about was coming our little corner of England.

My Media Studies teacher managed to somehow arrange for my class to be the first students to try out this much-hyped, but still a little expensive, technology. Getting to the front of the queue I thought hard about what website I wanted to visit. I didn’t have long, the library’s phoneline was being tied up with the connection and the college was being charged by the second.

Eventually I chose Beck.com. I was (and still am) a huge fan of this American musician and I wanted to see what online wonderment would greet me at his website. I was hugely disappointed to discover that the website simply contained a splash image of the cover of his album ‘Mellow Gold’ and not much else. That site’s come a long way since then.

That was it for my experience of the internet for another 18 months until I arrived at university. The high-speed connection there (and the NME.com chatroom) had me hooked and I never looked back.

I asked the people of The Next Web Forum on FriendFeed what their first website was. Here are some of the responses:

• Yahoo of course (Atif)
• Telnet info.cern.ch 8080 (via www linemode in the spring of 1992) (ianf ⌘)
• CNN.com in ‘95 or ‘96. I was either 12 or 13 then (Baby Boomer parents who grew up in modest settings = NOT early adopters) (LANjackal)
• Probably one between altavista, lycos or excite – (Roberto (postoditacco))
• Hotmail. Just wanted to get my email id before anyone else. And it was in 1998. Now its been ages since I visited hotmail – (Sidharth Dassani)

Your answer may well show your age, of course. Some of you will be of the Telnet generation, some of you will be of the Google generation and maybe some of you were even surfing ARPANET back in the 1960s!

So, tell us – what was the first website you ever visited?

FriendFeed has completed its conversion to an entirely realtime service by launching Realtime search. As of now you can type in a search query and see results from right across FriendFeed come up in realtime.

When FriendFeed moved to a realtime feed in April some users resisted the change. Keeping track of incoming items can be much harder as they stream down your screen. Difficult, that is, until you get used to using the handy ‘Pause’ button.

However, few could fail to see the value of realtime search results. Want to monitor what people are saying about anything, as they say it across the whole Social Media landscape? FriendFeed can now do it quickly and stably.

That’s not all – they’ve added a widget to display realtime search results in your own webpage. For example, here’s what people are saying about “Love” right now:

FriendFeed has great plans for developing its search tool. In a blog post the company promises advancements “allowing you to subscribe to saved searches, add them to your friend lists, and even get notifications based on search keywords“.

Besides being a really awesome spectacle, realtime search will be a huge boon for businesses monitoring what people are saying about their products, journalists monitoring news and much, much, more.

The company are reportedly big fans of the Wired chief and his previous book, The Long Tail. Today however they help him market his new one, Free: The Future of a Radical Place, narrated by the man himself.

Chris Anderson struck up a bit of controversy recently when he was caught plagiarizing Wikipedia for a section of the book.

The plagiarism was discovered by Virginia Quarterly Review who found a number of passages that seemed to be copied from various Wikipedia entries, with no citations. To be fair on the man, he has since admitted and apologised…although I can’t see how he had any alternative.

For those that enjoy audio books, myself included, this is great news. The bad news however is that the audio book is only available to UK users and this is merely a trial period to see how much interest there actually is.

Now that the dust has settled and the rumours have been debunked, a Scottish blogger has stepped forward to confess that he was the one that ‘killed’ Jeff Goldblum.

In a lengthy ‘confession’, John Skelton details how the prank started.

“As rumours began to spread that (Michael Jackson) might be dead I saw the opportunity to prank two of my friends… The original idea of the prank was to use the Fake a Wish fake celebrity death generator to try and trick them into believing a beloved celebrity had passed away.”

After generating his fake news story, John tweeted “Looks like Jeff Goldblum is dead too”, accompanied by a link to the spoof news. In retrospect, it’s amazing that anyone believed it. The short ‘news’ piece has several grammatical errors and there’s even a disclaimer at the bottom of the page making clear that it’s not real.

John’s post goes on to chart the spread of the rumour via retweets, even making it on to Australian TV where it was reported as fact. Journalists may claim they’re more rigorous at fact-checking than bloggers are; that’s obviously not always the case! You can read the full story at John Skelton’s blog. While this is the only post on his blog (which may cause some to doubt the story’s veracity) his story checks out. He was the first to tweet about Jeff Goldblum’s death on the 25th of June.

This all goes to show just how easy it is to fool lots of people very quickly via Social Media. We’ll undoubtedly see many more examples of this in the future and some will undoubtedly be bigger and more widely spread. The potential for ‘Information Terrorism’ is vast. No need for a bomb, just feed people the right lie and watch their panic lead to mass confusion and disruption.

Fans bought a record-breaking 2.6 million Jackson solo recordings and Jackson Five songs, according to Nielsen SoundScan data for the week ending June 28.

Jackson also dominated Billboard’s “Comprehensive Album Chart,” which tracks both new albums and older catalog albums — the first time a catalog album has ever scanned more sales than any new album.

Jackson himself has a record eight out of the top 10, while a Jackson 5 compilation also finds its way into the chart. The King of Pop’s “Number Ones” leads the pack at No. 1.

Like Elvis, Jackson is likely to earn more in death than most living pop stars. Elvis earned a whopping $52 million in 2007 — $8 million more than living pop stars like Justin Timberlake ($44 million) and Madonna ($40 million).

The King of Pop is back where he belongs.

I wanted to mention a great monthly feature of one of my favorite design websites Smashing Magazine. The website, which is aimed at web designers and developers, has a monthly wallpaper series that seeks to offer creative wallpapers to spark the imagination and inspire.

If your like me your constantly searching for things in the world around you to inspire your designs and bring fresh perspectives to what your working on. Given how many hours a day your in front of your computer I feel that your desktop wallpaper shouldn’t be something that you overlook.

Check out Smashing Magazine’s July wallpapers – all are submitted to the site by the community and include a version with and without the current month’s calendar worked into the design. Fill out this form if your interested in submitting your design to the series.

Facebook has today announced a number of changes that you need to know about. The changes make it easier to share information publicly without getting bogged down in Facebook’s current complicated privacy controls.

Here they all in one simple-to-follow list.

- It’s now easier to control who sees what

Wherever you can share anything (photos, videos, personal information etc) you’ll be able to choose from multiple privacy levels; ‘Everyone’ (to make it completely public), ‘Friends and Networks’, ‘Friends of Friends’, ‘Share With Friends’ and ‘Customize’ (allowing you to choose specific people to share with.

- Privacy options have been simplified

Privacy options for your Facebook account currently span six pages. These have been consolodated into one page.

- Regional networks are being removed

These have always been an odd part of the Facebook experience. Some countries had many small networks while others had one network. Facebook says only 50% of users are in a regional network.

- Transition Tools are being introduced

To ensure that users are eased into Facebook’s new-found ability to share anything with anyone, Transition Tools are being introduced. This will allow you to change who can see different parts of your profile quickly and easily. Until you change anything here, your existing privacy settings will remain in place.

When do we get these changes?

The new privacy controls and the removal of regional networks will be rolled out to all users over the next few weeks.

Should I set up a Facebook Group to complain about all of this?

The good news is that if you like your profile to be private it will stay that way. If you want to operate more publicly you can do that too while still being sure that those embarrassing photos from your college years remain hidden from public view.

While it’s good that Facebook is simplifying its privacy options, there are still concerns. Facebook is considering allowing anything that’s shared with ‘Everyone’ to be indexed by search engines. This makes sense on one level, but what about if you want to change your mind and make it private later? Will those embarrassing photos remain cached by Google if you hide them from view on Facebook?

While previous Facebook changes have caused uproar, it’s unlikely there’ll be much to complain about here. It’s not like Facebook is sudenly opening your profile up for everyone to see (unless you want them to). Only the removal regional networks may cause a problem, but opening up parts of your profile to everyone should solve this problem for most people.

UPDATE: There’s a new iPhone app too!

Shortly after the above changes were announced, Techcrunch reported details of the new version of the Facebook iPhone app. An update is much needed; the current version is highly buggy and frequently crashes for some users.

The new version is to feature a revised UI, support for the recently introduced ‘Twitter-esque’ Activity Feed, support fr event invitations and improved Alerts. Push notifications aren’t supported unfortunately, but they’re promised in a later update. The new app is due “Very soon”.

The popular email app now lets you drag and drop your labels to see them act more like folders of sorts. They can be placed above your chat list and sit along side drafts, starred and the other core labels.

You can now also hide labels that you just generally don’t use. They’re not technically hidden of course, they’re simply placed in a “more” section, making them convenient to access when you might need them again.

You can edit labels in bulk in your settings panel too, but most excitingly (at least for me), you can now drag and drop messages into labels – making the app more desktop like than ever before.

The blog post announcing the update, highlights the fact that this will mean the end of one of Gmail’s first lab features – Right-Side Labels. Google say they always had aimed to make the most popular Gmail lab features an fully integrated part of gmail in the long term, and it appears that Right-Side Labels is the first to make the cut.

Disappointingly, I can’t see the new features enabled in Google Apps just yet. If anyone does, please do let us know.

All this for a disk that can store 50 times less data than a CD! A quick search online couldn’t find any conventional hard disk for more than $1000 now, and they have up to 1TB of storage. We look forward to picking up a 60,000 Terabyte drive for $250 in 20 years’ time.

[Via Einestages]

Three times as much growth and more unique visitors? Wow.

To me, that knowledge is similar to finding out that your little brother now makes more money than you. I mean, Pete Cashmore is 16, right? Okay, maybe 23. Or was that last year?

Either way, Techcrunch, with Michael Arrington at the helm, was THE big and powerful Techblog. Mashable was just this cute blog by a kid from the UK that was doing pretty well. Not bigger than Techcrunch, right!? When the hell did that happen?

According to Compete it happened in May. At the end of May Mashable came in at an estimated 1,899,380 pageviews versus Techcrunch’s 1,862,612 views. A difference of only 36,768 pageviews. But hey, it IS more.

Now before you point out that Compete is only guestimating and that Techcrunch probably has more traffic: sure, Compete might be off. But they are more likely underguessing Mashable’s traffic than the other way around. Mashable has always had a more global focus and, being founded in Scotland, strong ties to Europe. Compete tends to miss out on a lot of international traffic. The numbers for Mashable might even be higher. Compete will publish its numbers for June somewhere this week so then we will know whether Mashable grew even more or if this was just a fluke.

Traffic isn’t everything of course. Techcrunch probably has a lot more influence and reach. They still beat Mashable in RSS readers by a very large margin: 271k VS 3,3 million for Techcrunch. More than 10 times as much!

The king isn’t dead yet, but Mashable is clearly aiming for the throne, and growing bigger and stronger every day.

No sooner had a site appeared on the scene dedicated to ego-centric Tweets, another site launches devoted to people who share a little too much when tweeting, friendfeeding, status updating, blogging etc…

The site is stacked full of various shares all with with an element of TMI – but of course, all highly amusing.

To share some of your favorites, send the site a link using their submissions page or email them.

Ok, now for the moment you’ve been waiting for, a couple of my personal favorites:

The problem is that when you have that great idea your initial instinct is to keep it secret for a while why you think it through – you don’t want to tell your friends or anyone else who might steal the idea and leave you in the cold – regretting that you let your excitement get the best of you.

Well worry no more about the nefarious actions of your friends. Next time you think of the next Facebook or Twitter be sure to save valuable time and vet your idea with them immediately by sending them the FriendDA – an NDA (Non-disclosure agreement) for friends that’s “Slightly more than a hearty handshake”. As the Termination clause says,  “just don’t be a douche.”

Clearly the site needs to go back to the drawing board because as I write this, two stories with almost equal amount of Diggs, posted at similar times sit awkwardly underneath each other on the Digg front page.

To prove I’m not making this up, this is one story and this is the other and here is a screenshot of my browser:

Thanks to Adam Ostrow on Twitter for pointing this out.