WordPress Social Sharing

How can I post to Google Plus, Twitter, and Facebook at the Same Time?

a.k.a. Why are the social networks so anti-social towards each other?

a.k.a. Yet another diatribe on the dichotomy of Google.

We’ve all been in this situation: we’ve got a bunch of friends on Facebook; another bunch on Twitter, and a couple on Google+ (but if you’ve still got friends using MySpaceOrkut, or AOL I’m afraid I can’t help you). Now how do you share your words of wisdom, pithy commentary on life, and hilarious snap-shots with all your friends? You don’t want to neglect anyone but it’s a lot of effort post and re-post.

TL, DR; Use WordPress! Either WordPress.com or install your own from WordPress.org. You can link to all your social networks and the world (wide web) is your stage. Tumblr is a close second, and so is Flickr quite frankly (just use Ctrl+Enter to split your paragraphs)! Continue reading

Google+ Auto-Awesome Year End

Holiday Memories and Other Thoughts on Google+ Photo Sharing

By now anyone who uses Google+ and regularly uploads photos – in particular auto-backups from your smartphone – has seen their Auto Awesome Year-in-Review video. Not withstanding your personal feelings about this you’ve got to admit this is a pretty incredible feat of technology to parse millions (billions?) of photos and videos and assemble them into personal time lines. It’s the democratization of technology, bringing the power to the little people!

Continue reading

What’s the next Google service to be closed down?

Many people are still reeling from the closing of Google Reader. Personally, I lost my innocence when they scrapped iGoogle. So the question is which one of their essential, life-sustaining services are they going kick off the island next?

Google offers so many services and I doubt there is anyone who uses all of them all the time. So my predictions are based on the services I do use and what I see happening in that realm at the moment. Currently I’ve been poking around a few development tools and javascript libraries, and the thing I noticed was that for newer projects Google is using Github rather than Google’s own Project Hosting to share open source code.

So my prediction for the next Google service to go to the big server farm in the sky is . . . Project Hosting on Google Code!

Besides the projects that they’ve started hosting on Github, there’s also the fact they’ve split-off a lot of content that used to be code.google.com to developers.google.com.

Closing down their project hosting service will be more significant than closing down iGoogle or Reader, since it’s not just an end-point but rather a distribution channel for many open source projects (although none of any significance from outside Google – apart from Eclipse Labs and Apache Extras but even they’re in a separate sub-domain).

Although it is not a creation point, so all the data that is there is created apart from Project Hosting and transferring to new service should be almost seamless (for the creator). Even issues created for a project can already be exported quite easily.

It would be disappointing to see Google Project Hosting close down, they offer more features than almost any other hosting service (with the exception of Source Forge). It’s not the prettiest code hosting site on the internet but it has a clean interface and they support multiple version control systems, binary file distribution, and seamless integration with other Google services (like Blogger and Groups).

And of course, you are never being pushed towards a paid version, or restricted because you aren’t paying. Big or small, sucessful veteran or new upstart, all projects are treated equally.

So if we’re going to play Google Service Roulette, I’m betting the next one to go down is Google Project Hosting. They’ll start by no-longer creating new projects, then no longer accepting updates to existing projects, and then they’ll strongly encourage everyone to migrate (probably to Github) as they announce the end date.

Cross-posted on 2FatDads