Do we really need another social media outlet? Probably not but before you make your decision give Buzz a look see like I did over the last 24 hours.
The rundown
If you tweet you will be used to the very basic method of getting your social point across but wait, there’s more! Buzz also allows you to comment and like the tweet ripoffs so it’s more like Facebook status and Tweets had a baby.
The little bit extra
What sets it apart from being utterly pointless like Twitter is that you can link your photo galleries, blogs, and pretty much any other RSS content you wish to share through these posts with relative ease. At the moment I have set up a profile at http://www.google.com/profiles/crazyspence and as you can see it has the usual profile picture, a comment associated with it and some location data, nothing too fancy but below it is a Photo strip. This photo strip is an RSS feed from my Gallery2 photo website which Buzz had no issue communicating with as it supports RSS. This impressed me because I don’t use Flickr or Picassa (the default options for photos) and Google was kind enough to add support for any photo service using RSS.
If you browse through my buzzes you’ll notice one is linked from this blog, heck you’ll probably see this post in there too because it picked up my website through my Webmaster Central settings with Google.
Downside
Ok great there is Twitter integration but no Facebook. I have beaten the system by adding my Facebook Feed to the links on my profile and also by adding it to Google reader but at the moment there is no Facebook Connect and hopefully if Google is serious about this that will change.
Summary
I prefer Facebook and hate Twitter but this is a good Twitter replacement if that’s your thing. If they add Facebook support that doesn’t require my cheats I will use this as a catchall for my Facebook, photo and blog posts. People who follow me will then only have to look one place to see what I’m up to but until then it will not be my primary tool for interaction.
Look at that little red number in the bottom right
Get excited “Oh joy! I’ve been included!!”
Open it up and….
BAM!
Add your relatives!
There are polls for you to answer!!
People claim that <insert random friend> is funnier than you! Take the quiz!!!
Or some other bullshit. We already get ads on the side of Facebook and surrounding the games we play inside Facebook are these phony notifications really necessary?
It’s a disappointment if anything because you are thinking “oh joy!” then you look at it and the reality sets it “aww shit, nobody likes me” and the downward spiral begins! That’s right, Facebook is why you’re depressed!
As a part of life, we all have to pump gas at some point to get somewhere. At least in today’s world we have gas terminals that take debit and they are great because you don’t have to face the angry person in the gas booth who is pissed you had the nerve to make them ring something in. However, there is one place that totally sucks for this in every way possible and that is Esso. Esso has the slowest and most annoying terminals of any gas station out there and to top it off some locations even make you suffer through some terrible commercials as you pump the gas
The pumps are too slow
I don’t know why they felt it was neccesary to make them so slow but have you ever noticed that it’ll be going along fine and then a dollar before the amount you pre entered it slows to a crawl and those last 100 cents take a minute! With it now being winter this is exceptionally annoying! New Sunoco and Petro Canada stations stop almost right on the amount or only 20 cents from the final tally which is way more acceptable!
The pump asks you 20 questions before you get to pump your gas
Do you have esso points? no
Do you want a carwash? no
Do you want a reciept? no
Do you want to fill up to $100? no
Then we get to the point finally….
Enter the amount you would like: 20
Account?
Pin?
Select grade
Lift nozzle
Then! 10 minutes later when it went from $19 to $20 it prints a receipt anyways even though you said no and beeps until you take it!
The commercials are awful
Ok so they have commercials playing to make money yet still charge the same amount as everyone else for gas while having crappier gas pumps then everyone else….AND THE COMMERIALS ARE TERRIBLE. You never see these super shit bottom of the budget commercials on real tv but when you use ESSO and be their customer here you go! Right where you can’t get away from them!
As we all know the FPS genre is pretty much everywhere you look these days and why not, it’s fun to blow the crap out of your friends with a shotgun right? Well I find most FPS’s of today are a bit too serious and are a little bit “function heavy” for my tastes where either half your keyboard is mapped to 100 things you need to do or on a console you have absolutely ridiculous button combos to get around.
Remember a simpler time?
My favourite shooter of all time had always been Quake/QuakeWorld it was simple and ridiculously fast paced. Quakeworld pretty much created online play we know today and the mods introduced the sub genres of class based (team fortress) , Clan Arena and Capture the flag to the world and you can find these in every FPS you look at today. Thanks id!
However getting a bunch of friends together to play an old game like this proves problematic and the people online still playing it are nuts.
There is another way and it is free…
id Software last year started a beta for a new quake game called QuakeLive. This is a totally in your browser skill match based quake game. It is based of the Quake 3 engine and is run by a plugin for your browser. It takes minutes to setup, few minutes to download the game data and bam, good to go! I started with this game a year ago in the closed beta. Back then they only supported Firefox and IE on windows so I had to play inside a virtual machine but man I was hooked. It is the same fast paced fragging I love except it doesn’t look like shit and people of today actually play it! 😀 Anyways the beta now is open and anyone can sign up AND as an added bonus it now supports linux and Mac OS X natively.
What kicks ass:
Supports all 3 major platforms, Wintendo, Linux and Mac
All the old goodies like Rocket jump and jump running are present
Skill matching so you arent totally pwned all the time (still most of the time though)
Offline mode for practice
Kick ass game modes like Clan Arena and CTF are present
Free! Just sign up and go!
All of your stats are recorded for you and trophies are awarded
So I’m sorry to say Quakeworld but I may finally have to retire you as QuakeLive offers everything you did plus more and it looks great!
Anyone catch idol last night? Well usually I do not as I don’t care for it but it happened to be on and the most hilarious thing occured when 62 year old General Larry Platt broke out into his original tune about people who wear their pants on the ground.
This song has been stuck in my head since last night and it is now all over youtube, there are a few videos of last nights broadcast that top the 50k view mark and 1 that is 100k+.
Anyways, this morning I try to share this amusing piece of now internet and tv history with my classmates at work and they all break out into labeling me a pansy for watching idol! Bastards! As punishment for their noncooperation I un muted my laptop and played it a few times in class and they now also cannot get it out of their heads.
