For the past few weeks I’ve been experimenting with social media. If you notice on the right hand side, there are little icons for the networks I’m currently in.

Facebook is nice for connecting with friends.  Especially ones from high school and college.

Twitter is good for thoughts.

LinkedIn is pure business.

Steam is gaming goodness.  Love my TF2 as you can tell by my achievements.

Probably one of the more interesting aspects of all of this is how you can link them together.  For instance what I’m doing.  I have my “tweets” or Twitter updates posting to Facebook as my status.  Then I have a WordPress plugin called LifeStream that reads my Twitter and Steam feeds and presents them in my blog on that LifeStream tab above plus it makes a daily digest post of what’s going on.

LifeStream is pretty good for integrating multiple social media networks into your blog.  It can work with Facebook, but because of how I have twitter pushing to Facebook, it results it duplicate status updates.  Oh well.  I may send that into the developers to see if they can filter or I may try to hack it myself.  With their next version they are fixing their Games for Windows / XBox Live support so I’ll be able to add my Fallout 3 achievements along with my Steam TF2 ones. 

If I start to feel really brave with this, I may start doing some photo blogging too.  Everyone might want to duck and cover when I start doing that one.  It will probably be very scary.

Last week I upgraded for the latest and greatest from the Mozilla Foundation, Firefox 3.  Oveall I’ve been very impressed with the increase in the loading speed.  Before 3 it would take a good 20 to 30 seconds to load and now it’s down to about 10 to 15.  As far as the browsing experience goes, I have noticed that it’s a little more snappy than the 2 series so it’s a good thing.

So to add to this, I though I would list out some of my favorite Firefox extensions.  Some of these are good for everyone, some are mainly for web developers.

• All-in-One Sidebar – This add-on merges several Firefox option windows into a easy to access sidebar, things like Bookmarks, History, and Add-ons now just pop open on the side instead of in a window.
• BugMeNot – This is a goodie if you visit a site that requires you to do a free registration to read a simple article.  It usualy has entries for smaller sites too like local news papers.
• ColorfulTabs – This one makes all of your tabs different colors.  I find that it makes the tab bar more “glanceable” to go where you need.
• Extended Statusbar – This one is for webdevelopers and uptight surfers.  It adds 4 panels to the status bar that gives you progress and statistics on your page load.
• Firebug – This is the big daddy of web debugging tools.  Pop this add-on open and the entire page is there for you to examine, debug, tweak and adjust in realtime.
• ForcastFox – Adds the current weather and links to sat and radar maps to your status bar.
• Google Toolbar – Access your favoite search engine and many of it’s features from one toolbar.
• IE Tab – This allows you to switch a tab in Firefox from the Mozilla engine to the IE engine.  Good for IE only sites.  It also allows you to setup rules to switch for sites automaticly.
• Image Zoom – This is a great tool for images on web sites.  You can hold down your right mouse button on a image and roll your scroll wheel to zoom or unzoom a image.
• PicLens – Another good image tool.  This one is for searching images or YouTube.  It uses a very visual and fast method for browsing your results. Check it out.
• ScrapBook – This one allows you to save entire pages, images and all, then go back and highlight and clip them.  It’s great for keeping things for research or reference purposes.
• Tab Mix Plus – Currently in beta for Firefox 3, so you have to get a development build. This is the ultimate tab and session tweaking tool for Firefox.

Now you know why it took 30 seconds to load Firefox 2.