Tweets are the new quotes. However, screen shots of tweets are a pretty limited way to share. You can send links to an individual tweet by directly clicking the timestamp and copying that, but it’s not pretty. So now along comes Blackbird Pie. Embed your tweets like the following and they retain their interactivity.

Ten years ago I bought a personal 800 number. Then I forwarded the number to wherever I was – cell phone, office, home. It worked pretty well, provided I didn’t screw up and leave the forwarding to the wrong number. Voice mail was a bit of an issue too.

You’d think in the intervening ten years someone would have come up with a solution to the issue of having three numbers on your business card and three disjointed voicemail systems, but there’s nothing widespread. Now Google has.

I’ve been using Google Voice for close to six months now. Here’s what it’s like. Someone calls your Google Voice number. All the phones you’ve set up ring simultaneously. You pick one of them up and you get told the name of the person calling. You have choice of answering, sending to voicemail, or sending to voicemail while you listen. Voicemails get transcribed to text and sent to your email and SMS. Plus everything shows up on the Google Voice website which is set up like Gmail.

There are some other cool features. SMS is the same way – comes to your phone and shows up on the website. You can SMS by typing on the website (easier than a cellphone) and the history shows up on the website. Want to make an outbound call? You can pick the number out of your address book and tell Google Voice which phone to use. Press the button, the phone rings, and you’re connected to the person your calling.

Want more? Check out the widget on this website. You can use it to call me right now. You can set the times different phones ring…set different greetings…go crazy. It’s free. It doesn’t seem to be rolled out to everyone yet, so if you want a pass, email me. Google may rule the world.

My new sig

OK interconnected world, I’ve got a couple cool new tools. First, let’s start with a social signature. How many emails do you send each day? If you’re like me, it’s a lot. Why not use that as a way to link back to your social networking sites, blog and twitter updates?

WiseStamp does a great job at this. As you can see from the image at the top, my sig includes links back to my main social networks as well as the latest blog entry. WiseStamp lets you you add a personalized signature on any webmail service such as Gmail, Yahoo, AOL mail, and Hotmail.  The main feature is the ability to add icons and links to profiles on most of the popular social networks and instant messenger services. This allows you to create dynamic Internet-ready signatures that connect to all of your online accounts.  The ability to connect signatures to social network profiles is an  excellent addition to our email experience. WiseStamp is a FireFox extension. Additional features are that you can configure both a personal and a business signature.

Next up is a little trick that I will give credit to my buddy Brad Pendergraph, social media evangelist extraordinaire. How about if you could give out a URL that easily connected the recipient with your main social presence? Does is sound compelling? It is. For instance if you click on NetworkWithMark.com it takes you to the about page of my blog where many of my main social links are listed. Typing ILikeMark.com into your browser takes you to my Facebook page. Cool huh? It makes an impact when you give it out. Brad says it isn’t his original idea, but the Internet is pay it forward medium. So now I’ve given the tip to you. Put it to work for $10 a year and a simple redirect.

We live in an amazing age as far as online customer service goes. You can book your flight online and get your ticket in minutes. Zappos can get shoes to your doorstep seemingly as soon as you press the enter key.

Adobe is one of the oldest and most venerable software companies. I have a long list of programs, utilities and fonts I’ve bought from them – Illustrator, Photoshop, Acrobat, etc. You’d think a company with such revolutionary products would be in the vanguard of customer service.

Apparently not.

In late April I bought a 24″ iMac (love it) to replace the aging Dell in my home office. As part of the upgrade, I decided I would move all the photographs and video over to this new machine. So, what should I use for photo editing and management? Photoshop, of course. The default program of the world for image editing. I wouldn’t have paid for a full version, but I had a fully licensed copy for Windows so I figured I could do a cross-platform upgrade.

I went on the Adobe website and, golly, it looked like I could do the upgrade right online. I paid my $199 and in a few moments was up and running with Photoshop and Adobe Bridge, which I’m starting to like. Hmm, but the program wouldn’t take my Windows serial number as part of the upgrade, which meant it would stop working in 10 days.

A couple of days later I went on live chat with Adobe to figure out what to do about the serial number. I hit a dead end because I was at work and they needed to have me be in front of the machine. Since customer service closed at 8PM EST, it was a bit of an issue to get home and in front of the Mac in order to call. When I finally did, on the third chat session, I was informed that I couldn’t upgrade cross-platform online, and that I had to call customer service. Back to the drawing board!

I got a rep on the phone who knew what to do. Big rigamarole. I had to pay another $199 and call back to another number to get my other $199 refunded. I had to complete a Letter of Destruction stating I’d destroyed the Windows version and would never use it again. (I guess these people take their copy-protection seriously.) I was told I couldn’t get a download, but would get the disk in 5 business days. I was anxious to get the new copy since my 10 day trial on the Mac had run out and I couldn’t use Photoshop anymore. It was May 21st – almost a month after I’d started.

On May 28th I went online to Adobe and asked where the software was. The said it was in processing. On June 22nd I still hadn’t gotten it and called and talked to a live human and was told they had a heavy order volume and it was still in processing. It was now over fours weeks since I had placed the order and handled all the bureaucracy.

On July 11th I got back from vacation and it still hadn’t arrived. I was now fuming and logged into Adobe customer support and wrote a very angry note. No response at all!

Things came to a head on July 29th. I was now ready to cancel the order and never use Photoshop again. Hello GIMP. I called Adobe one final time. I got a rep who told me the order had never been properly submitted! My fault, I’m sure. I really complained and said that I thought after waiting two full months for my order they ought to be able to give me an immediate download. The rep thought so too, but his supervisor didn’t. So, I had to wait for the slow wheels of Adobe to turn.

I finally got the disk in the mail July 31st, over two months from the order I placed and over 3 months since I had legitimately first tried to upgrade my licensed copy. Suppose this had been a critical situation for my small business? I think I deserve a free upgrade for Acrobat Pro for this ridiculous customer service, don’t you? Adobe, are you listening?

Like many of us, I’m using several computers – my work laptop, my home office machine, – and sometimes logging on to someone else’s at another location. Plus, my iPhone bookmarks are synced to my home office computer (now a Mac). I’m also switching between Internet Explorer and Firefox, with occasional forays on Safari.

I’d been exporting my Internet Explorer bookmarks (‘favorites’ on that application) and periodically replacing everything on my home office machine with those so I could make sure I had the bookmarks I wanted on my iPhone. Sounds like a minor pain, and it was.

Wouldn’t it be great if all my bookmarks were the same on all browsers and all operating systems? Well, I stumbled on to an easy solution that did just that.  I searched in Firefox’s wonderful extensions and found Foxmarks. About a day later it was renamed to Xmarks. Xmarks works on Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari. A change made anywhere is automatically synced everywhere. My two main computers and my iPhone are in perfect harmony. I’ve been using it several weeks without a hitch. As an added bonus, all the bookmarks area available at the Xmarks website if I’m somewhere else and need to access them – a nice bonus.

Now all I need to do if find something that will do the same for all my files. And my keys.

Ubuntu

No, it’s not a Zulu war cry. Ubuntu is a free Linux operating system for PCs. I just installed a copy on a USB drive and setup the office PC so it can easily boot into either Windows Vista or Ubuntu. The PC boots quickly and performance is snappy. It comes with a version of Firefox so it’s completely familiar. Also has OpenOffice versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It’s like having a new speedy PC!

So, why would I waste time doing such a geeky thing? Well, mainly because since upgrading to Vista two years ago the PC had gradually slooowwweed down substantially. You could cook eggs in the time it takes to boot. This does not happening with Macs in my experience. Ubuntu fixed this. I have the option  to boot into a quick speedy system (Ubuntu) for basic web surfing or to Windows when I need to do something there.

I’ve never understood why Windows gets clogged up from use over time, but it definitely does. There are a couple of solutions involving optimizing the disks, cleaning the registry, getting rid of all spyware, etc. I ran across a couple of good free tools so I’ll mention them here. Advanced System Care tunes your system and optimizes the registry. CCleaner removes unused and temporary files from your system and cleans the registry.

The only real solution to a Windows slow-down seems to be reinstalling the operating system and applications. When I did that to install Vista two years ago it took me just a couple of hours for Vista, but the apps took forever – even though I just did them pretty much when I needed them. I’d rather buy a new PC than do that again.

The whole open software movement is fascinating. Power to the people!