Techgeist

Hey dedicated readers, if you haven’t noticed already, the blog has been dead lately. There are various reasons for this, we are all still in school and we have lives offline. While this has hindered our ability to consistently write posts for you readers who look to us for the latest tech news, it is not the main reason we are letting TechGeist go.

Alex Wilhelm, co-founder of TechGeist, is now writing for a top 100 technology blog, TheNextWeb. He was a core part of our team and wrote many of the posts you all read, severely cutting down on the content that made us a relevant and resourceful tech blog. We are happy to see him move on to bigger and better things and we are extremely glad that TechGeist has given him the platform to do so.

As for the rest of the team members, Michael Klurfeld is currently undecided about where he is going from TechGeist but we are sure his unique view-point on law and tech will find a home worthy of his writing.

As for me, I will be writing for Pages Are Social, a blog focused on businesses integrating social media tools. Also, expect various …

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Now that the tide of excitement has waned around Google Wave and the initial bombardment of users desperately trying to test the service, I have come to an astonishing conclusion. I really hate e-mail.

You have to understand why this is so significant to me. You see, I used to love e-mail. If I had it my way, everything I do would be through e-mail. So what about Wave has changed my love for e-mail?

Speed

It wasn’t until I started using Wave that I realized how slow e-mail really was. A few days after using Wave, Alex and I had a discussion that involved forwarding some e-mails. At times, I had to wait up to a minute to get an e-mail from the moment that Alex said, “sent” via IM. While this was accepted before Google Wave, I can no longer stand by idly.

Google Wave on the other hand is quick and I am just not talking about the fact you can see the person you are conversing with type character by character, I am talking about the ease of adding/copying waves. Want someone to join in/keep up on the conversation? Drag n’ Drop them in. Don’t want to include them in the …

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For all you techies that think Yahoo! is dead, think again. With over 130,000,00+ visitors a month, Yahoo! is still an attractive suitor, whether the valley believes it or not. Yahoo! is now using this as their selling point for developers to start making plug-ins for their new (and supposedly improved) homepage.

Using the proprietary Yahoo! Application platform (YAP) developers can easily create slightly more advanced widgets that users can “install” on their homepage. Currently there are 80+ apps that you can install on the Yahoo! homepage ranging from the standard weather apps to social media sites like Myspace and Facebook. In another words, there is sure to be an app you will enjoy on your homepage.

While this is a worthy attempt to make Yahoo! your destination site of choice I still have a feeling that Yahoo! isn’t quite doing enough to differentiate itself. Many personalized homepages do what Yahoo! does and I believe in iGoogle’s case, much better. Some of the apps also seem slightly buggy. When using the Wordpress Quickpost application it was not uncommon for me to run into some issues trying to load the application in …

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If you are an avid gamer and a social media nut then I am sure you have heard all about the future updates for Xbox Live that will integrate Twitter and Facebook. While no release date on the matter has been released, it definitely is in the works.

The tweet you see to the left is from Microsoft Xbox Live general manager, Marc Whitten. A few other tweets have also been spotted in the wild as well from various other members of the Xbox team.

This is ever-growing proof that Microsoft wants to be the hub of your entertainment experience. Tight integration with online video streaming service Netflix and future updates that will bring some of the biggest social networks to your big screen, it is hard to argue that any other system really can contend with Xbox 360’s feature set.

Thankfully, there exists a $29.99 messaging kit including a keyboard and a mic which will make typing out 140 characters a little less daunting of a task to do on the Xbox 360 controller. This will work out to Microsoft’s benefit as well since this will equate to more sales for accessories (where the real money …

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If you haven’t noticed it already, Gmail SMS is down once again. As you might already know Gmail SMS was pulled due to technical issues after going live once in October. While the official post said SMS would be back in about two weeks it turned out to be a lot longer wait and wasn’t officially re-released until early December. Since then Gmail SMS has been a pretty stable feature but it doesn’t seem like the Gmail team agrees.

According to a Google Spokesperson, Gmail SMS was disabled because it was once again causing issues for people. There is no set timeline as to when Gmail SMS will be back up and running so until then we are going to have to sit tight and wait it out. Keep in mind, Gmail SMS is a labs feature and the Gmail team has made it pretty clear that this could happen. Let’s just hope for the users who were dependant upon Gmail SMS on a regular basis that it gets back up and running.

One particular interesting thing to note is that SMS messages being sent from a mobile phone can still be retrieved in your …

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Usually I am not all that hopped up on Internet Explorer, it sucks, its slow, and I only boot it when I want to watch The Office on Netflix. Even then I hate the damn browser, it crashes and keeps popping up with “alerts” I do not care about. Plus, moving between Chrome and Internet Explorer is like experiencing culture shock. It just doesn’t work. Today though I discovered a little something about IE that actually got me a “little” excited about it for the first time in… forever.

Either you love them or you hate them, netbooks. While Microsoft bumps around in the dark trying to find the light with Windows 7 starter edition, Moblin is taking two steps forward. Developed by Intel, Moblin is a linux based operating system specifically designed for netbooks. What started out as a horrid looking proof of concept has now bloomed into a workable, and fairly awesome netbook based OS.

Facebook developers, rejoice! Facebook has begun testing a new payment feature for Facebook applications, called Pay With Facebook (creative, I know). Being first implemented on Facebook certified application Groupcard, you now have the option to pay via Pay With Facebook. By pre-purchasing credits, you can automatically have points deducted from your account when purchasing items or features within a Facebook application.

As far as I am aware Pay With Facebook has not yet been integrated with Facebook Connect and is only available to Facebook verified applications. I believe it is safe to assume that a future integration with Facebook Connect will be vital to Facebook’s plan to be an integral (and properiatary) part of the web.

This could have a very negative effect on other services that are attempting to monetize the web. Facebook already has significant reach with Facebook Connect and the userbase, 200 million strong and growing, to back up a widespread monetization service for web products. Services like Contenture, who are approaching monetization for content producers in a very innovative way, do not have such benefits. In effect, Facebook has a …

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My first taste of real time information was from our current analytic tracking program Clicky, with their amazing Spy feature. With Spy I could see who was visiting my site in real time and see where they were going. Stalkerish? A little bit. Friggin cool? You bet.

Soon after realizing how awesome real time statistics were I started seeing Robert Scoble gush over the new and improved real-time Friendfeed. Vaguely intrigued, I decided to go ahead and check out this new real-time phenomena. I dusted off my old account and logged in, I was impressed. Real-time actually worked, something I was not accustomed to coming from Twitter.

As I used Friendfeed more I began to realize the power of real-time and how useful it actually was. There began my epic impatience. I was growing accustomed to constant bouts of data thrown at me and getting instantaneous satisfaction. I was starting to expect real-time from every service I used, email , Feedburner, and even IM.

Maybe I am being a little over-zealous about real-time, but I want to see it everywhere. I no longer want to wait, I want to get up and go. Friendfeed has been able to do this …

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Finally Twitter has released integrated Twitter Search. A requested feature since the acquisition of Summize. It is very simple and is directly integrated into your Twitter stream.

The only issue I have with the update is with trending topics. Just seems to be randomly placed if you ask me. Otherwise nifty feature and I definitely love the integrated search in the Twitter stream. Anyone suppose this could be oddly related to Friendfeeds real time make over?