Another Firefox Extension I can’t live without

It may be easier to list the Firefox extensions I can live without. It might be a shorter list. Not much shorter, but shorter no less. I might exaggerate a wee bit.

Taboo is another must have. I use To Read Later to keep track of things I’d like to read during a browsing session. On many occasions I have found that I have more web pages I want to review than I have time in a session. I am writing this post at 12:30 in the morning. I have a class at 5:30 in the morning. The 25+ web pages with white papers and in-depth articles are not going to get read by the time I read this post, get any sleep, get ready for class, and teach tomorrow later today.

That is where Taboo comes in and saves the day (er night or whatever the case may be). I just go through all the tabs I have opened and click the Taboo button. Now I have a pictorial graph of all the sites I want to visit, comment on, add as research and write articles about. If I am judicious enough to Taboo those pages and close the tabs I might even help Firefox run better.

I had not intended this blog to be a commentary on Firefox extensions. Firefox has become the central tool of my life. I use it more than I use a word processor. Between ScribeFire and Google Docs I don’t need a word processor or open office or much of anything else. With a couple more extensions and a web connection all I would need a computer for is to power up Firefox.

Well. Ok. I still need Second Life, IMVU, Visio, Wink, Adobe Professional, VMWare workstation, Phrase Express…

Nah, some one needs to write some new Firefox extensions!

RE: Twitter, Tina Fey, and the Future of Micro-Blogging

This is a post I wrote in response to some comments made in Bernard Moon’s article on Mashable: “Twitter, Tina Fey, and the Future of Micro-Blogging.”

“Twitter hasn’t gone mainstream? Did I miss something?

I may use twitter differently than others. I use twitter as a means to keep up all of the web tools /sites I use. I use it to keep my Facebook page up to date. I use it in my blog to make short points that don’t add up to a full-length post. I use it to keep up with ideas including mine as well as others. I use it as an advanced RSS reader, a research tool, to stay in touch with what my friends feel the need to say, to share what I think is interesting with people that are interested in what I have to say, to keep up with the websites I recommend, and it’s archive feature to keep up with what I have said. In short I use twitter as a lifestreaming service.

I would like to hear what people say when they tell others about twitter unsuccessfully. To call twitter a micro-blogging service is like calling Firefox a web browser. At its core Twitter is a micro-blogging service just as Firefox is a web browser. I have over 37 extensions (and growing) in my Firefox “internet toolkit”. Couple that with Google Docs, Facebook, and a sprinkling of Web 2.0 apps (including twitter) and it is difficult to find another tool on my computer I use even half as often as my “Web Browser”.

Trust me. If I can find 4 or 5 ways to use a micro-browser then there are others thinking of 40 or 50 ways.

Twitter is no Firefox yet. Keep in mind that Firefox is a relative newcomer to the browser wars. Twitter is in it’s infancy but it’s a big baby.

Speaking of other ways people are thinking about Twitter, I like the idea of channels. Now I am using Digsby and multiple twitter accounts to cut back on the noise. I am sure that someone will have that figured out soon.”