Aggregate This! Feedly and Flipboard Concisely Consolidate Content

I may be a bit of a creature of habit; I tend to do about three things when I use my smartphone—email, then over to Facebook and then maybe check stocks or an ESPN app to check scores, but that sadly feels like the extent of it. Oh, I’m sure I do other things here and there that make smartphone ownership great; I use maps when I’m lost, Yelp when I’m hungry, Google Voice for texting and Evernote. Yet, rarely do I go out of the way to read news and fun content on my phone because it usually requires a lot of slow loading, phone turning, pinching and zooming.

Bookmarking and notebooking has changed. Have you?

As you’re surfing the Internet you see a fantastic article about how to make the perfect cat video. You also want to save some photos from Google Image Search and store them somewhere you can access on the go.  What about recipes? Do you have a recipe box gathering dust because you search the Internet now for recipes? Where do you keep all this stuff so you can easily reference it later?

Do You Google Play?

Users of Gmail, iGoogle, Google Voice, and the like may be familiar with Google Play, but as with the rollout of most Google offerings, this one has been flying under the radar. For the uninformed, it’s Google’s answer to competitors like Apple’s iTunes, iBooks and App Store, and Amazon’s catalog of videos, TV, music, books, apps and more. In this post, I’lll cover some pros and cons.

Video — A Usability Option

We all like to think other people use a website the same way we do; however, this simply isn’t true. Some people only scan or search sites, some dig deep into sections while others do both—everyone uses a site differently. These interactions are also affected by how usable your site is. People often think usability comes down to one thing—how easy your website is to navigate. But an often-overlooked aspect revolves around how easy it is for users to consume, interact or appreciate what you have to offer.

You might think video is an easy way to make your site more usable, especially since it has become increasingly easy to include on the web. But just putting video up on your site doesn’t automatically make it better or easier to use.

TeuxDeux for To Do’s

I’m horrible at sticking with an online to-do list. I’ve tried quite a few; Remember the Milk, the Gmail to-do list and numerous others. It seems that within a week or two, I forget that it exists and go back to chicken scratches on Post-It notes when I remember to do so. Enter TeuxDeux. Tagline, “What deux yeux have teux deux teuxday?“

Adding Social to Everything

Google and Apple have both implemented social networking into their marketing leading apps –  iTunes and Gmail – instantly reaching an enormous user base. On the surface, this seems like a great idea. The users are already signed in, and this provides them the ability to connect with friends through a platform with which they are already comfortable.

Yet, the adoption rate of these new social features is relatively small. Apple Ping is very new, so it could be argued that people are not necessarily aware of it yet. Google Buzz, on the other hand, seems to have a limited community base even after a year since its launch. Will these apps succeed in making our live more social?

Is PingChat! for you? I hope so…

Could you live with only 200 Instant messages a month? My wife and I have been and when she went over a few months ago, it cost us $22 for her to tell me stuff like: Be home soon! Love you! What should we do for dinner? and of course a few LOL’s!

The “Love you” text is arguably worth any price, however is skating by on our $5 a month texting plans vs. the $15 for 1500 or $20 for unlimited texts worth our going over every once in a while?

I personally don’t text enough to justify $10-15 extra a month, but we don’t want the extremely high overage costs to pop up unexpectedly either.

Enter: PingChat!

Embracing Targeted Marketing

The reach of marketing continues to evolve as our everyday online behaviors are followed in more ways than we can possibly imagine. Every click, site opening, login and purchase can be tracked, recorded, consolidated, processed, sold, and in the end, used to capture our already overloaded eye balls. All of this for the possibility that we might linger on a site longer, click a banner ad, and most importantly, spend money while doing so. Now with applications like Foursquare and Facebook Places, our online behaviors have become more usable as market research than ever.