Last night I was at the bar and had an idea for a ringtone. We were chatting about how someone should do a side-by-side test between iPhone 3G in NYC and a dialup modem. From that I got the idea to make a ringtone with the screeches and clicks of dialup in action (remember that?).

Anyway, after checking in with some folks and finding out making a ringtone was as easy as opening GarageBand and exporting to iTunes, I made one for myself. So without any further ado: iPhone dialup ringtone . Enjoy.

COMMENTS OPEN

Okay, sorry about this, but it’s still quite exciting for me when people ask to talk to me. Anyway, PR Week did an incredibly flattering profile of me this week (which I think is in the magazine as well) and Anjali did a super nice interview with me over at her blog One Size Fits One .

There’s one quote of mine I especially like in the PR Week piece: “It’s exciting that people find things I’ve put on the Internet.” I can’t say that enough. I realized recently I had actually missed the four year anniversary of this blog. I usually take the opportunity to thank everyone for making it happen. This year I was just too busy with everything else and didn’t even notice the occasion until about a month later. Needless to say, I believe that I have all you to thank for my success. Every time I get an email via the site or someone signs up for the likemind mailing list I’m a little bit amazed that this stuff works. I hope that never goes away.

COMMENTS OPEN

A little site we put together at work the other day.

COMMENTS OPEN

I just sent out an email to the brand tags list and posted it to the blog over there as well , but I figured I’d update everyone here.

First off, in case you forgot, I launched battle mode a couple months ago, which pits two random brands against each other. Check the leaderboard to see who’s winning (basically who you might expect). Also, just recently launched a Brazilian version to go along with UK and Hispanic . Finally, I ran some numbers and the average age of brand tags users (self reported of course) is 34.4 years old. Interesting stuff.

COMMENTS OPEN

Today I got some Facebook spam. It’s the first time it’s happened, it came from a friend and it ended up on my wall. After Twittering about it , Ray pointed me towards these posts on the Facebook blog . So it looks like the problem lies in people giving their username/passwords out to random sites with promises of apps (or something). These sites then take control of a user’s account and send out a barrage of spam.

Okay, now for the rant. The reason this is happening in part is Facebook’s own fault (as well as a lot of other parties). Part of the way these sites have expanded at the speed they have is by asking people to enter their email username/password and then crawling their contact list and showing users/sending out invites appropriately. By encouraging this kind of behavior, Facebook makes it seem okay to give a site (even one you trust) your username and password, which it shouldn’t be. Ever. Period.

OAuth attempts to solve this problem by bouncing you over to the other site for approval, rather than asking for the login info. Google has implemented a version of this, but it’s still not being used by many sites (the only integration I’ve seen is Dopplr ).

Now Facebook isn’t alone in this one. Every social site has a feature like this where they ask for email usernames and passwords. This is bad for business.

COMMENTS OPEN

Whoa, this is awesome: Telegraph presents 5 best iPhone tricks . My two favorites are screenshots (hold down home key and press the sleep button … goes straight into your photos) and additional domain name endings (just hold down the .com in Safari and it will pop up .edu and .org).

COMMENTS OPEN

I just posted this on Facebook and figured I’d post it here as well. Anyhow, me and some of my Barbarian brethren are doing a drinks thing tonight. As always, feel free to invite others, the more the merrier.

Where : House of Shields, 39 New Montgomery, San Francisco, CA ( Google Maps of Shields, 39 New Montgomery, San Francisco, CA&fb=1&cid=0,0,10731864753251939177&sa=X&oi=local_result&resnum=1&ct=image )
When : Tonight (8/18/08), 8:30pm – Whenever

COMMENTS OPEN

After watching this awesome sketch on why predictive text blocks swearing (via Daring Fireball ) I was inspired to figure out how to get my iPhone to stop sending emails with the word “duck.” A quick Google search duck fuck&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a landed me on a Twitter that suggested if you type swears out and then just press the x when the phone tries to correct it , eventually it will learn the word. Not only did it work, but it will start to predict you’re trying to swear even when you spell it wrong.

Anyway, I decided to set up a little site/email called duckingiphone.com where I figure I’ll collect people’s swearmail. So send your swear training to duckyou@duckingiphone.com

COMMENTS OPEN