Bob Caswell

Michael Arrington discusses what he thinks is a fantastic idea in his latest post “Paid Twitter Streams Are Here: Super Chirp.” So Super Chirp is this new third party service that allows Twitter users the ability to charge others for access to their direct messages (Twitter’s private messaging system). The idea is that celebrities could say their extra special stuff to people who pay for it!

Here’s what I said in a comment on the TechCrunch post:

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Microsoft’s new search engine (or “decision engine” as the Bing team calls it via their Twitter profile) is now live at Bing.com. Early adopters already had a chance to preview/review Bing last week. So this launch has left bloggers coming up with more creative ways of covering the release.

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I’ve been lurking on Redfin for quite some time now. What is Redfin? It’s an online real estate company with an easy-to-use website that lets you search/filter/find real estate for sale. It also provides some cool analytics for looking at market trends. It’s nice and web2.0-like, what with custom RSS feeds and other pretty robust tools to make your real estate hunting super easy.

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So after reading TechCrunch’s latest [lack of] news about Twitter, it hit me: Twitter is the new Digg. Remember Digg? Of course you do. It was such a simple concept. A “power to the people” take on news with user-submitted stories that anyone can share/discover/submit with the most popular stuff getting promoted to the frontpage. Once upon a time, before Twitter, it was the best thing since sliced bread.

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Back when I originally reviewed Twitter (over a year ago), I asked the question: Is it a waste of time or extremely valuable? At the time, I had no idea it would take off like it has today. But now that it has, it seems to moving more toward “extremely valuable” and further away from “waste of time” (though I still think it’s kind of both).

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Warner Brothers had come up with a slick promotion to get some much needed buzz around Blu-ray. My consensus: great idea but flawed execution. Here’s how it works (and why it won’t work):

You send in the cover art sleeve (keep the disc) and the UPC from your HD DVD movies. And for $4.95 per movie, plus $6.95 S&H per order, you’ll be sent back brand new Blu-ray copies of any movies you have in HD DVD. There are a few restrictions (only 1 copy per movie and only up to 25 movies per household) but nothing really that prohibitive.

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The Microsoft Games for Windows team working with the SideWinder (gaming hardware) team put together a fun event a few days ago. Of course, I may be saying it was fun because I won third place in one tournament and first place in another.

Winnings included everything I needed for a lazy weekend: Fallout 3, 007: Quantum of Solace, SideWinder Mouse, SideWinder X6 Keyboard (won two!), and a LifeChat LX-3000 headset (see picture above or see an unboxing video here by a fellow winner).

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Check out the email (below) I got from the Hotmail team. Much has changed in the last 10 years, but somehow I’ve managed to hang on to my original Hotmail email address. (I opened my account the end of 1998.)

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