Steve Ballmer

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has always been known to be a bit overzealous when taking the stage, and usually his antics lead to some not so positive publicity for the company he represents.  His latest stunt may not take the cake as the most ridiculous thing he has ever done, but it certainly deserves some attention.

Yesterday Microsoft held a private company meeting at Seattle’s Safeco Field and while Ballmer was taking the stage, an employee decided to snap a picture with, you guessed it, an iPhone.  According to TechFlash via Engadget, Ballmer snatched the iPhone from his employee’s hands and began making “funny comments,” which were apparently met by boos and jeers from other Microsoft employees.  The fun didn’t stop there, however, as Ballmer took the show a step further and pretended to stomp on the competing device and then simply walked away from it.  Later during the presentation Ballmer let the Apple-loving employee know that he hadn’t forgotten about him by making further comments.

Of course, all of this was done in good fun, although we’re not sure how much fun said Apple-loving employee had while Ballmer manhandled his iPhone.  Let this be a lesson to all of you Microsoft employees out there: do not, I repeat, do not let Steve Ballmer see your iPhone.  No good can come of it.  Also, don’t forget, if you ever have the chance to enter the Gates’ home, you probably shouldn’t whip out your iPhone either.

via App Advice

Facebook

One of Twitter’s strongest features is the @reply, where you can direct a message to someone else on Twitter by typing @ and then their username. Facebook, which is trying to emulate some of Twitter’s best features, doesn’t have anything similar in the News Feed. In short, it’s not easy to have a public conversation.

Very soon, that will no longer be the case. Facebook just introduced the ability to tag your friends in status updates. What makes this really interesting though is how you tag people: Using the @ symbol. Facebook has just turned on their own version of Twitter’s @Mentions feature that will be rolled out over the next few weeks.

Here is Facebook engineer Tom Occhino’s explanation of the new feature:

Now, when you are writing a status update and want to add a friend’s name to something you are posting, just include the “@” symbol beforehand. As you type the name of what you would like to reference, a drop-down menu will appear that allows you to choose from your list of friends and other connections, including groups, events, applications and Pages. Soon, you’ll be able to tag friends from applications as well. The “@” symbol will not be displayed in the published status update or post after you’ve added your tags.

Friends you tag in your status updates will receive a notification and a Wall post linking them to your post. They also will have the option to remove tags of themselves from your posts. We hope that tagging your status updates and others posts from the Publisher will enable you to share in a more meaningful and engaging way, and connect with even more people. We’re rolling this feature out over the course of the next few weeks, so you may not see the new feature just yet.

Summary: The @ symbol now works just like Twitter, and not just for users, but for groups and fan pages as well.

Facebook has just stepped deep into Twitter’s territory. How long until you can see your @reply history? We’re betting not very long at all.

via BREAKING: Facebook Introduces @Mentions in Status Updates.

Hamachi

I’m not a fan of setting up Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). In fact, I’ve had so many issues with VPNs in the past that I now subcontract that work to a fellow geek who seems to have a knack for understanding the various settings. That’s why I have been following Hamachi with great interest for the past several years.

Hamachi is described in the Wikipedia as “a zero-configuration virtual private network (VPN) shareware application capable of establishing direct links between computers that are behind NAT firewalls without requiring reconfiguration (in most cases); in other words, it establishes a connection over the Internet that very closely emulates the connection that would exist if the computers were connected over a local area network.”

LogMeIn, a commercial firm that produces both free and subscription services for controlling other machines, sent out an email to customers on Thursday touting Hamachi², their implementation of Hamachi. LogMeIn has been deeply involved in Hamachi development, so the announcement was expected. What I didn’t expect to see was that they’ve left both Mac and Linux users out in the cold.

I quickly jotted off an email to LogMeIn and received this response: “Mac is not currently supported, we do plan on adding support for other platforms but do not have an ETA at this time.” For quite a while, there was an open source project called “Hamachi X,” but it’s no longer supported. Another developer took on the task of creating a Mac OS X and Linux Hamachi client called Hamachi Sidekick, which is a GUI to a command-line Hamachi tool. Unfortunately, LogMeIn also pulled the Mac OS X command-line interface (CLI) version of Hamachi, so there’s no way to even try the CLI tool or Hamachi Sidekick now.

LogMeIn may tout Hamachi² as “a VPN that just works,” but for Mac users, it just doesn’t work.

via TUAW

Google Voice Settings

A long requested feature of Google Voicewas a simple one: forward inbound text messages to email. Google Voice users get voicemails auto-transcribed and emailed to them, but text messages were not. Users can read and respond to them online in addition to their phones in the normal way, but email forwarding wasn’t an option.

Tonight that changed. Google Voice users now have the ability to forward inbound text messages to email. And even better, you can reply from email as well.

There are third party services (example) that have offered this, but they require users to give these services your Google Voice credentials, which is never a good idea. It’s great that Google launched this feature directly.

Since they seem to be taking requests, here’s my next one: launch an API. I can’t wait to see what developers come up with, and I’d love to use those non-Google services in a secure way without giving them my Google Voice credentials.

via TechCrunch.

HTC Touch HD

Fanboys the world over swooned over the HTC Touch HD when it launched last year, but word is that HTC’s planning on making a major change to its high-res handset for the sequel: it’s switching to Android. That’s at least the hot whisper ’round the tubes this afternoon, and while that would ordinarily be enough to make the ‘droidboys to go crazy, there’s even more — the CPU is reportedly a 628MHz Qualcomm chip, not the slightly overtaxed 528MHz number we’ve seen in every other Android handset to date. Sure, it’s just a measly 100MHz, but if that’s enough to make Sense and HD video on the 3.8-inch 480 x 800 display run smoothly we’ll be all grins. If any of this is true, that is.

[Via Engadget and BGR]

In July, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) embraced the stream in a new beta (for both Windows and Mac) and started moving beyond simple IMs. You can now see your Facebook and Twitter feeds, along with AIM buddy updates and feeds from other services.

The problem was that the Twitter and Facebook feeds were only one way. You could read them, but you couldn’t send updates from AIM to the other services. A few weeks ago that changed, and AIM status updates can now appear as updates in Facebook and Twitter as well. There also appears to be a way to comment, or respond, inline to other people’s messages, although I am having trouble getting that feature to work for some reason.

Going both ways turns AIM into a full-fledged Twitter/Facebook client. It is a big deal for AIM because now it can be used as both a private and public IM client. While stream readers such as TweetDeck and Seesmic already have two-way messaging capabilities with Twitter and Facebook, Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger are still stuck in Read-Only Land.

The AIM Beta doesn’t have the Twitter integration working perfectly yet. Some updates and comments seem to never get through, while others do just fine. On the Facebook side, it is working much smoother. But AIM is making the right moves in an attempt to become an all-in-one instant communications hub. AOL’s new communications chief, Brad Garlinghouse, should keep pushing in this direction.

via AIM Now Goes Both Ways (With Twitter And Facebook) .

This tip was found by “my favorite”, Chris_Ace2

Skype

With version 4.0, Skype has added a new switch for supporting multiple users on a single PC. The following steps would show how to create a new shortcut for starting a new Skype instance with a different Skype user account.

Open Windows Explorer and go to “C:\Program Files\Skype\Phone.”

Right click on the Skype icon and select “Create Shortcut.”

Right click on the new shortcut and select “Properties.”

Append ” /secondary” to “Target” to become ‘”C:\Program Files\Skype\Phone\Skype.exe” /secondary.’

Click OK to save the change.

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Starting next week, we are moving the show to Saturdays @ 3p PST (6p EST). Right in between Leo Laporte and Compute-Ability. This helps me out big time, by giving Fridays back to my clients. In testing yesterday we saw that we could get more traffic to the show by running on a weekend.

As some of you know now, yes Robert Basil has left the show. He will be missed and was great co-host. He is going on to bigger and better things at www.MySocialMediaGuy.com. We are greatful that he helped co-host the show for as long as be did.

Brandon Staggs will be helping with the show even more and even co-host from time to time. My wife is even getting involved and will be helping out in chat, and some of the background work.
So make sure you mark your calendars for Saturdays at 3p for CornDog Computers LIVE!

Gmail’s web interface had a widespread outage earlier today, lasting about 100 minutes. We know how many people rely on Gmail for personal and professional communications, and we take it very seriously when there’s a problem with the service. Thus, right up front, I’d like to apologize to all of you — today’s outage was a Big Deal, and we’re treating it as such. We’ve already thoroughly investigated what happened, and we’re currently compiling a list of things we intend to fix or improve as a result of the investigation.

Here’s what happened: This morning (Pacific Time) we took a small fraction of Gmail’s servers offline to perform routine upgrades. This isn’t in itself a problem — we do this all the time, and Gmail’s web interface runs in many locations and just sends traffic to other locations when one is offline.

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Slower Internet?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The biggest U.S. Internet service providers urged regulators to adopt a conservative definition of “broadband,” arguing for minimum speeds that were substantially below many other nations.

The submissions were filed with the Federal Communications Commission which had sought comments by August 31 on how the agency should define broadband for a report to be submitted to Congress early next year.

The Obama administration is seeking ways to extend broadband services to both unserved Americans living in rural areas and to make broadband affordable for those living in urban areas.

Some of the submissions from service providers argued for a definition that even undercut an international ranking of U.S. Internet speed.

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