The newest social network trying to take a “bite” out of the MySpace craze is MyDogSpace. Instead of creating a profile for yourself, you create one for your oh so special fury friend. Who is MyDogSpace for?! I’m almost sure your dog is not “hounding” you to make them a profile, but you do anyways. The only people I could see this become popular with is senior citizens. Unfortunately, most elderly people don’t know how to turn on a computer. Maybe MyDogSpace is ahead of its time (maybe not).

Social networks like MyDogSpace are just the beginning of what is to become a wave of spam social networks that try to appeal to a niche audience (which for the most part is bad) and then bombard them with advertisements to make money. What ever happened to meeting people in the park while walking your dog? I think you and your dog will be much happier.

I realized that MyDogSpace is exclusive to dogs, so I tried MyCatSpace.com and it’s coming soon and made by the same wonderful people who made MyDogSpace. I could see MyCatSpace becoming a hit, seeing how many creepy cat owners are out there.

Google has become more than just a search engine, it’s become an email, Microsoft Office, and an online video competitor. What has kind of perplexed me is why Google hasn’t bought into or created a web browser. It’s not as if Google doesn’t have the money, they could easily buy Opera or even Mozilla Firefox and make it their own.

What would make the Google browser a killer application would be the addition of an offline Google Doc’s & Spreadsheets. At the moment Google has introduced Google Gears which enables online applications to work offline, but it’s still in beta and has some work before it becomes mainstream. Microsoft would be hurting if Google were to create an offline office application that was free.
Read the rest of this entry »

After adding the Spotback widget I noticed a problem with my sidebar loading. I am unsure if the widget is something I will want long term because of the load times it has brought to my website. I am going to look into finding a different way have the widget on my site because the Wordpress plugin is really hogging the load times.

On my previous blog, Voonu, I had added a Spotback rating widget to the bottom of each blog post. After adding the widget to the old blog, the traffic tripled because all of my posts were being “fed” to Spotback.com and it’s users. In hopes for the same success, I have added Spotback to R3FRESH.

Rating with Spotback is easy, a username (and password) aren’t required, so anyone can rate. The rating widgets are customizable, but if your skills in coding are zero to none don’t worry because there is a steadily growing widget gallery for you to chose from. I have taken a liking to the “slider” widget. The widget itself is full of goodies including tags, being able to see other Spotback users who rated your post, and other rated posts. There is also I sidebar widget you can add, but it seems repetitive when you already have the rating widget at the bottom of each post. A new Wordpress plug-in to make adding your widget even easier is also available.

The Spotback community, for me, has been very helpful with the few problems I have had. I would especially like to thank Dana Reich for being helpful (and prompt) in solving my problems. Spotback is more that just a rating system, it’s a way to publicize your blog/website.

BTW- Rate Me!

I received an invitation to Spock.com this morning and I decided to try it out. Spock presents itself as being the people search engine, but it has a lot of work before it reaches that feat. Search results are created by the users you are searching for and consists of some tags, a couple of websites, and a picture (yeah, that’s pretty much it).

The most prevalent problem with Spock is speed. Navigating around the site leads to multiple timeouts and errors, which makes Spock almost unusable.

For Spock.com to become more popular it will need to add features that traditional search engines don’t have because at the moment Google does a better job (and it’s much faster).

Those who are still interested in Spock, especially after such a negative post, can email me (at mail@r3fresh.com, including your name) to get an invite. I have two invites left, first come, first serve! Read the rest of this entry »

A big time waster for me has been flash games. There are websites chalked full of games, but Kongregate is different. At first look, Kongregate looks as if it were another social network (like we need anymore) and it is, but it’s a social network based on flash games. Just create a profile and then your ready to leave your mark (in the form of comments, scores, and ratings) on a near thousand flash games Kongregate currently houses.

Kongregate distances itself from other flash game sites because it relies on people to create, upload, and play the games. YouTube of games, anyone!? Since it relies on people, the games are much higher quality than the games you’ll find on AddictingGames and/or Hallpass and you’ll end up actually playing them for more than the typical thirty seconds.
Read the rest of this entry »

If you have a mac, then you have probably messed around with the application Photo Booth. Cameroid is the same idea as Photo Booth, except it’s on the web so everyone with a web-cam or camera can use it. Cameroid offers three tabs of different effects, (color, morph, and scene) many of them are the same as the application equivalent. The site still has some empty boxes so expect more cool effects.

Go look as stupid as me at www.cameroid.com

Thanks, LadyBanana

I switch between two different computers depending on what I am doing. I use my Macbook for editing media, listening to music, and email and I use my Dell desktop mainly for writing blog posts and school work. I have Firefox downloaded on both computers and it used to be my favorite browser, until now.

When using Firefox on my (Vista) Dell PC it can barely make it ten minutes with out freezing up. My Dell is only a couple of months old and it has plenty or RAM and processor power to run Firefox. I then thought it might be from the extensions and themes I had downloaded, so I delete the five extensions and the three themes I had downloaded in hopes for success, but like my athletic ability, it wasn’t found. Internet Explorer started looking good.

Read the rest of this entry »