The NetCircle – Now hiring PHP Developer in Shanghai

As I keep signing up to new services on a regular basis, I’d like to share my opinion with you. This week I tried Kwippy, Pixelpipe and Aviary (on a scale from 1 to 6, 1 is the best, according to German school grades)

Kwippy: 5 Like Twitter and Identica. It gets your Gtalk and Yahoo messenger status and let’s people comment on them. You can also share bookmarks and write short posts. Nothing new and for me it’s pretty useless. I’ll delete my account there now.

Pixelpipe: 2 Yeah I like that. Works great as far as I’ve tested it. Still there is space for improvement. The uploader I used was not so cool and not suitable for larger amounts of photos but maybe they provide something like that. I’d like to pic photos and then pick where to post them with checkboxes. You can change that but it’s not as easy as it should be, especially as I post different stuff on flickr and on twitter. Still a useful tool, cause you can see what you’ve already uploaded. Go ahead guys. It’s a great start and I’m curious where this projects goes. My last post was a pixlepipe test upload.

Aviary: 1 Pretty cool online photoshop, where you can collabotare with others upload, change, view sources and so on. Looks like a lot of fun, if you manage to get really into it. This might take some time because it’s complex but on the other hand that’s what makes it so interesting. I hope I will have the time to play around with this.

Red lantern in Longshen

Posted via Pixelpipe.

You managed to have the same Username everywhere?

Cool, than you did a much better job than me. I ended up with 3 user names. Actually 4 but I guess most of the services I used the 4th for are already dead.

So my first one I use for “serious” services like Xing. It refers to my “offline name” and is always available. But then there are the two other ones which accompany me for most of my “online life”. It’s “reisesteiss” and HerrBert/ Herr_Bert. For example my private Blog is called reisesteiss.blog.de and my name on the Blog is HerrBert. But HerrBert is pretty often already taken. In these cases I’ll use reisesteiss.

This solution doesn’t make me happy and I envy the people who managed to get a consistent name.

So what are the possible solutions?

Come up with a new name which is totally unique, easy to remember and stick to that one. Ok you might not want to change all the accounts you already have and reconnect with the people, but as I already have several different names one more to which I’ll stick to for hopefully the rest of my life wouldn’t kill me. But how do you find out if your name is unique enough to serve for that purpose? Try usernamecheck.com.

I found this on Techcrunch and in their article it looks like mostly everybody already found their consistent name and use the service to look up where they are already registered. Well it works both ways. So it will hopefully help me to find my unique name too.

Here we go new name: Herr_Berta (my normal username makes it pretty hard to guess that I’m female anyway). Damn. It’s already taken in the following networks: Blogger, Etsy, Gmail, Livejournal, Technorati, Vimeo and Youtube. Hm this won’t work. So I’ll try reisesteiss which should be uncommon enough. Hm I think when it is taken it was me who took it so that’s fine. BUT! is this name easy to remember? “Reise” German for “travel” and “steiss” which is my surname? If I’ll use my real name it would be tinesteiss so I think it will work good enough for me. Still I’m not very happ with the whole thing. Thats why I like flickr. I still have to remember my login, but I can always change my screenname if necessary. I will keep thinking about this problem.

This might not be the place to talk about gadgets you don’t need – let me think about it – no! it’s exactly the right place! Aren’t you totally into gadgets too? You started as a kid, fantasizing about your father having a strawberry favoured tank to pick you up at school (which can fly and be invisible – but you didn’t needed to mention that because that’s standard equipment).

Well here we are 20 years later still getting totally excited about extra features you don’t need to survive or even to live comfortably. Let’s call them the “cherry on top features/ gadgets”. Besides the childhood memories these “cherries” are exactly what you need to be sucessful. You can make people want whatever you have to offer because of the price, the quality or the extra “cherry”. The magic gift of the cherry: It can make you ignore the voice of reason. You could call the “cherry” USP, but that would totally take the fun out of it and make it sound like there is a reason. For the Jetsons generation strawberry flavour (or camouflage pattern for the boys) sometimes is enough.

Here are some examples of what is a cherry to me:

- I’ve already posted a pic of my iPod with the cherry sticker

- Luminodot: I still hope to get it for Christmas, but if not I’ll buy it with the money I’ll get for Christmas. (found on Creativecloseup.com)

- Nohohon by Tomy: I already have 4 of them, but I’ll keep buying these cute moving things as they come in different colours, styles and move differently.

- Motorcycle suit: Do I need to say more?

- Zombie garden sculpture: I might need a garden first.

I’ll stop here. Otherwise I’ll spend the rest of my life with this list…

Unfortunately the “cherries” don’t always keep their promise. My iDog for example made me crazy within one day and had to disappear.

The party is over

You are on Twitter and instead of being productive your time gets consumed by watching others being productive, staying informed and following links? Pretty bad but friendfeed now offers a possibility to make it worse: friendfeed realtime! You could simply sit there and watch friendfeed update itself. I love the tool but I won’t use it.

After all the communication, aggregation, collaboration I’m seriously waiting for the contemplation application.

Writing that I’m off to a 4 day photoshoot holiday in Guilin. I’ll be offline all the time, to see how bad my online addiction already is.