We want to have the Twitter account be relevant and beneficial to our customers. Brad Coy sent me a DM this morning that included a link to a new Screencasting site that is built around sharing via Twitter and I think it will become an important part of how we eventually use our company Twitter account.

Screenr is the name of the service and it does one thing very well and very simply. It records what you’re doing on your computer screen and saves it to be shared via Twitter. Here is an example below:

As you can see, the quality is excellent. It works on both a PC and a Mac and can be viewed on iPhones. Additionally, you can download the resulting MP4 file and with the click of a button, share on YouTube as well. With very little training, our customer service staff will be able to publicly address customer service questions with simple demonstrations and share them with all of our clients via Twitter.

I like it.

When Google purchased GrandCentral in July, 2007, I replaced my regular phone number with my GrandCentral number. Today, that decision was validated by Google’s launch of Google Voice. The new feature list is impressive. You can read them there for yourself.

A Few Hiccups.

Like a kid on Christmas morning, I couldn’t wait to try one of the new features, conference calling. So, I sent out a twitter message to see how many people I could get on one call – using the same number I’ve had for the last two years. The first test was solid, except for my own error in hitting a couple of wrong keys. At one point I had five others on the line with me. The only failure, attempts to record the conference call all failed.

Undaunted I attempted another call later in the day, this time in a more controlled test. I reached out to three friends using Facebook chat, Stacy Lang, Ines Hegedus-Garcia and Nicole Nicolay. Stacy, on a Verizon cell phone, had no issue getting through, but both Ines and Nicole could not get through on their AT&T cell phones. When they both switched to land lines we were able to have our four way conference call without issue, but still unable to record. I was also unable to record any one-on-one conversations today.

The Great Promise

I sent a text message a few moments ago to someone who called me during dinner. I didn’t listen to their message. I just read the transcription and sent a text message to let them know I’d call them in the morning – without ever leaving Google Voice. I copied and pasted a portion of the transcription in to my Google Calendar to remind me in the AM to make the phone call. Life is good.

The transcription is not perfect, but it’s good enough to get a sense of what is being said. Here is a sample that came as a result of my pushing the wrong buttons on the first conference call. This is the exact transcription: “hey jeff ken montvale saw your we don’t we’re about testing this out thought i’d give it a shot and got this recording talk to you later bye.” And here is the actual message:

The new interface is a vast improvement over the old GrandCentral interface. It’s easier to navigate, cleaner, more feature packed. Google Voice lets me create multiple widget configurations too. GrandCentral didn’t. If you click on this one, for example, you will only get my voicemail.

I think I’m in love again.

TweetGrid – A Quick “How To” from respres on Vimeo.

Mobile post sent by ResPres using Utterz. Replies. mp3

PicLens “transforms your browser into a full-screen, 3D experience for viewing photos and videos across the web. With one click, PicLens makes online media come to life via an immersive presentation that goes beyond the confines of the traditional browser.”

I’ll never look at Flickr the same way again!

Here’s an example: http://linkbun.ch/cf3 If you’ve ever tried to get more than one link into a text message or over on Twitter, you’ll understand why this will be a useful little tool. And because it does one thing, it’s painfully simple.

Go to LinkBun.ch. Type the links you want to link to into the field provided, one link per line.

Click on “Bunch” and get your link.

Enjoy.

Anxious to test some applications, I quickly downloaded Twinkle, featured by Installer, and MobileTwitter. I like Twinkle’s “Near Me” feature and the “feel” of each of the native applications. They were certainly responsive, but neither gave me the ease of use features that my favorite web based twitter client gave me. So, I went back to using Hahlo 2 on the iPhone, even after the jailbreak.

The Hahlo 3 Beta

Then I caught wind that Dean Robinson, the creator of Hahlo, was looking to test the beta of Hahlo 3. Of course, I jumped at the chance. I liked the old version of Hahlo for how simple it was to reply. Here’s a screencap of the Hahlo 2 timeline with the menu exposed. As you can see, it’s simple to sort your timeline by replies, directs and to respond using the touch screen.

The new Hahlo 3 adds a very simple feature to the timeline that I love, the “in reply to” thread. It gives a quick indicator of what motivated the response. If you’ve used Twitter much at all, you know how useful this can be. In addition, if you tap the “more” link, you will see the full chain of the conversation, similar to Quotably.com. See below.

A direct message bug in Hahlo 2 that forced users to select the recipient from the followers list has been fixed in Hahlo 3. In addition, the menu options now pop down from the menu bar and reveal in full, making it easier to navigate the site. Another nice feature is the ability to set a specific page to load as your home screen and options to have inline replies and direct messages if you choose.

Considering Hahlo 3 is still in beta, I couldn’t be happier with what Dean has done so far. For the curious, a few more screen captures are included in the gallery below, but the best way to experience Hahlo 3 is to actually get an invite to the beta.

Thanks to Joel Burslem over at FOREM for pointing this one out via Twitter last night. It does one thing, track packages sent via UPS, FedEx, DHL and USPS. That’s it. And it has a Google like simplicity. You won’t have a hard time figuring out how to use TrackThePack.com. If you do, there are other issues you need to be paying attention to.

And, TrackThePack offers branded versions for companies who would like to take advantage of the simplicity of their design. TrackThePack will create a version of their service with your company colors and logo. Love it.

Time Machine backs up your Mac’s hard drive every hour. On it’s face that seems like a good idea. A lot can change in an hour.

For the casual user, this may not be a problem. In fact, it may be the best backup solution I’ve ever seen for the casual user.

But I do a lot of how to videos using Ambrosia’s Snap Pro X, which I love. To get the highest quality, I save these files without compression, then do all of my editing. When I’m done, I delete the uncompressed files. 60 seconds of uncompressed video at 480 x 360 is close to 500 MB of data. So, depending on the timing, I could have two or three of these files sitting on my hard drive at any given time. And I sometimes save to new names without deleting the source files. None of these need to be archived. Over the course of several hours, those files could be edited several times, resulting in gigabytes worth of saved changes, since the modification times will make them appear “new.”

It appears that Time Machine backs up every single file… whether I like it or not.

Time Machine does not allow me to change the default backup times. Time Machine does not allow me to exclude a folder from the backup (Edit: this is not true. Time Machine does allow folder and file exclusion. This was not immediately obvious on set up. See first comment below). Time Machine does not allow me to go into the hard drive where the backup data is stored to delete the files and recapture the storage space. (I have tried to do so numerous ways.) Time Machine also does not allow me to backup to an Airport disk, for shared storage. So, in three days of using Time Machine, my Macintosh HD hard drive space available has actually grown, since I’ve deleted some of those video files. But the Time Machine hard drive space available has decreased in size by nearly 10 gigabytes!

At this rate, I will run out of room on my Porsche designed 250 GB Time Machine hard drive in less than three weeks. I could start over and point Time Machine to my MyBook 1 TB drive, but even that will run out of space in a couple of months. Of course, I can always erase the drive each time it fills and start all over again, but that seems like a tremendous waste of time. (Edit: Time Machine will make it’s own decisions about what to delete when the drive is close to being full.) I don’t want to create a special work flow just to please Time Machine.

What am I missing? (Apparently something obvious!)

Is there a control panel somewhere that allows me to change the Time Machine default settings? (Yes! See comments below.)

There’s a lot to do to get this blog ready for prime time, but we’ve chosen a magazine template we like and our editing it to make it work for our needs.

There’s also still a great deal of work to be done to establish the right focus for the content that will come. The goal is a technology blog for the average real estate agent. But it should be appealing to the novice and the expert in equal measure.

It will be a tough line to walk.