Friday, May 28, 2010

Day Twelve: Internet Explorer - Outcast

"Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference."


Winston Churchill


Before leaping into this project, we attended an industry seminar on blogging. The presenters one and all basically advised: "To understand blogging, you must blog."

So we did.

At this same event, some bright spark asked about browsers; apparently the majority of peeps these days use Mozilla's Firefox (yes, even on PCs)...not good ol' Internet Explorer. One presenter put us all on the spot and asked disdainfully..."Is anyone still using Internet Explorer?"
One brave lass put up her hand. The audience chortled under their collective breath. (We sat on our hands, rather than walk into the trap.)

Days later, we switched to Firefox; obviously the cool people use that. Weeks later, have to admit, still not enamoured of Firefox, but continue to use because the "cool" people use it. (We promised our kids not to use that "C" word under any circumstance...apparently we're too old to peddle that term, along with "dude" and other such favorites.)

We digress.

Having learned another browser, it was disconcerting to find out that the coolest of cool browsers these days is TweetDeck. Heaven forbid. It's heavy going keeping abreast of all this newfangled technology, but TweetDeck is mesmerising...

We've fallen for it hook, line and sinker.

TweetDeck looks like the control panel in a jumbo jet. It's a giant four-columned dashboard which manages all your social media. Twitter itself is a little Disney-esque for our liking and you have to move between screens to read incoming news alerts and then post a message, for example. TweetDeck is clever because you can see everything at a glance, deleting, cutting and pasting, clicking through, tracking people or companies. The program links you to apps like Flickr, FourSquare as well as the obvious -- Twitter. It's like Winston Churchill's war room.

Best feature we've found so far is the facility to autoshrink tweets and translate them into one of any of the world's most popular languages. (I started with Afrikaans, and stopped myself at Cantonese...could spend all day doing this.) More to the point there is an option to schedule posts to multiple social media. Haven't quite figured out how to do this yet, but before the day is over we plan to do so.


Dare you to translate this sentence into Galician and tweet to us from TweetDeck! I'll c u when u get there:







Coolio...(sorry kids).

Posted by: Claire

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