Shakespeare is rolling in his grave again.  My English teacher in high school is breaking his red pencils.  ”Unfriend” has entered the New Oxford American Dictionary.  It beat out words “netbook”, “hashtag” and “sexting” to take this year’s annual honor.

To “unfriend” is “To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.”  And yes, they said Facebook.

There has been a trend over the last few years of picking words and phrases that are prevalent in our digital word. It all started with Merriam Webster adding “blog” to their dictionary back in 2004.

I am of two minds bout this.  The part of me who graduated with an English degree from college is rolling her eyes and wishing for a magic digital red pencil so I can edit this one out of our language.  The other is glad to see the world embracing technology at many levels and allowing our language and culture to grow with the times.

It makes you wonder what will be added next?  Do you have any suggestions?

For a little more information on the selection process, go to CNN.

Games on Social Networking sites such as Facebook are all the rage – when I check in on Facebook my home page is filled with information at how my various friends are progressing in things like Mafia Wars or Farmville. Similarly, there are plenty of fun games that folks play on MySpace, others that are Flash-based Web games, and still others that folks play on their iPhone. The problem – leaving one social network means leaving that game behind. But now that has changed – read on to find out! Continue Reading

Most people are familiar with the social networking site Twiiter which allows you to post updates to your followers about what you’re doing.  Twitter limits these update messages to only 140 characters.

SMS Messaging is another popular form of communicating quickly with friends and family.  It also places a limit on the number of characters you can use for your message.  A text message is limited to 160 characters.

Today I learned of a web site “12-Seconds” which allows you to record video updates to your friends and family but the catch is like the other methods of communication I’ve mentioned, 12-Seconds places a time limit on how long your video message can be.  You guessed it, each message must be under 12 seconds long.

Here’s why 12-Seconds limits your messages.

Because anything longer is boring. The scientists here at the 12 seconds dodecaplex have conducted countless hours of research to determine the precise amount of time it takes for boredom or apathy to set in during typical Internet video viewing. Our patent pending Electro-Tear-Duct Prongers have determined that exactly 12 seconds of video is the ideal amount of time to keep anything interesting.

You record your 12-second messages directly on the 12-Seconds web site or via your mobile phone (you then e-mail it your special e-mail address.)

Check out 12-Seconds here, and see what you can record in only 12 seconds.

If you’re into social networking chances are you visit several of the more popular sites.  Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and more.  On your computer at home it’s easy to do on your web browser.  On your iPhone it can be done as well but most of us choose to have an individual application installed on our phone for each of the social networking sites we’re subscribed to.

Socialize, from Anthony Geranio, seeks to combine multiple social networking sites into one compact, easy to navigate iPhone application.

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With all of the ups and downs of today’s economy, wouldn’t it be nice if we could get some help from the professionals?  Ways to save, invest and budget our money?  How about loans and investing strategies?  Now how about being able to get it via Twitter?

Mint.com, the popular online personal finance site has partnered with Twitter to provide Money Tweets.  Money Tweets are a way to receive advice and education on finances, as well as current news that can impact our financial future, all via the Twittersphere.

Mint.com’s Money Tweets includes five categories, allowing people to read whatever content most interests them:

• Topics – Collects information relating to budgets, saving, investment, loans, and retirement feeds.  These tweets are from the experts, such as the Wall Street Journal.
• Tweets about Mint.com – Tracks, in real-time, what people are saying about Mint.com in Twitter.
• Tweets from Mint.com - Updates followers on the latest from Mint.com.
• Questions – A question of the day.  A way to bring about discussion and brainstorming on a relevant topic.  Kind of a twitter whiteboard-like discussion.
• Popular – Keeps followers on top of hot financial topics.

To find out more, go to the Mint.com site.

I just signed into the GearDiarySite Twitter account to find that it’s been added to Twitter’s new Retweet to Share Tweets beta group. What does that mean exactly? It’s actually a pretty cool new feature.

As explained in the Twitter Blog:

We’re still working out the final details, but this sketch gives you the basic idea. Let’s say you follow @jessverr, @biz (that’s me), and @gregpass but you don’t follow @ev. However, I do follow @ev and the birth of his baby boy was so momentous that I retweeted it to all my followers.

Note “retweeted by” attribution and “retweet” option.

Imagine that my simple sketch is your Twitter timeline. You’d see @ev’s tweet even though you don’t follow him because you follow me and I really wanted you to have the information that I have. (The star, reply, and retweet options only show up when you hover over a row on Twitter.com which is why you don’t see them all the time.) Also, if you find my retweets annoying, then you’ll be able to turn them off.

Now if I could just get this feature on my personal account – that’s where I do most of my retweeting!

Are you in the beta? Have you tried it? Do you like it?

I love Boxee.  I’ve use it off and on, and I am anxious to get a HDTV so I can get a Neuros Link connected and use Boxee even more.  Boxee is almost ready to unveil their Beta in New York on December 7th at the Music Hall of Williamsburg.  I am really looking forward to seeing what is in this Beta.  Boxee has been the same for me for a while so it would be nice to see a few new things.  Maybe integration with Hulu Desktop??  Who knows!  We’ll just have to wait another month.  In the meantime, I am gorkon on Boxee, so feel free to friend me!

Sooner or later it was inevitable.  I’ve started seeing fishing emails posing as Facebook communications.  Simply “click” to update your password.

After that, they use a Bot to get into your account, and push out spam messages to all those that follow you, friends, family etc.

As always, no matter how legitamate looking an email is, assume  it is a phishing expedition.    Most email programs and sites have a way to check the links.  In Microsoft Outlook, simply hover over the linke (The underlined “here” above) and you’ll see the full link.  Most scammers will put the legitimate name within the domain such as http://facebook.com.slkjsdf.eu  in hopes that somebody will see the facebook and not realize the only thing that really matters is the characters before the final period in the URL.  In this case, slkjsdf which is, obviously, not facebook.

By now you’ve probably heard that both Bing and Google will integrate real time Twitter feeds into their search results. The Bing page appears to be live already at http://www.bing.com/twitter and Google say’s their results will be coming soon. Unknown is how both search engines will filter through what probably will be an enormous uptick in Twitter spam sent in an attempt to game search results. It seems likely that Twitter will be forced to create some type of trust system to assign to individual Twitter accounts or it would seem to be a field day for automated script (or a billion) to pump out tweets about cheap mortgage loans and v1a9ra.

via Bing and Google

There’s been a lot of talk lately about how Twitter has changed the corporate culture for Comcast.  In  fact, the chatter first started back in January with a big to-do in Business Week. So, is Twitter actually helping provide real customer service?  Is this just a Public Relations gimick, or is it truly — um — Comcastic?

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Twitter has started to offer the ability to create lists of contacts within your Twitter account. This feature is being rolled out to a few users right now so if you don’t see the feature in your account when you log in then you’ll likely have to wait for it to be added. What do Twitter lists add? Well for one it’s an opportunity to quickly view similar types of contacts. For example I’ve set one list to display my company contacts and another list displays all the Gear Diary team writers.

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I am used to getting random spam instant messages through my Live Messenger account, but today has been a banner day, and I say that with total sarcasm. Today I have received at least five random IMs from a different address (which I immediately block after the message arrives), and each one has been completely trashy.

I’m posting the least offensive here, and the truly offensive ones after the break. Bear in mind that I have my Live account set so that I am not supposed to get any messages from people who aren’t contacts, and yet…they keep coming, and I can’t make them stop.

Once again, I am warning you that the IMs posted are completely offensive, so no freaking out when you see them. Okay? Okay.

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Just in case you missed it two exciting new applications hit the iTunes App Store a few days ago.

Tweetie 2 and Adobe Photoshop Mobile have both only been out a few days but have both been receiving high praise from iPhone users everywhere.

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Twitter, the social networking site which allows individuals to update their followers with short 140 characters messages on what they’re up to seems to be experiencing some sort of outage.

Many users across Twitter are reporting their Twitter feeds not being updated over the last few hours.  I’m seeing all my own tweets (messages) post to my time line but none of the tweets from the people I’m following appear.

Tweets are getting posted to the Twitter servers though.  Just check out the time line of one of the people you follow and you’ll see their recent tweets, they just don’t show in your personal time line.  The problem seems to be related to followers.  I’ve read a few reports of people seeing their list of followers disappear and then come back and same for the list of people they’re following.

Let’s hope Twitter hasn’t fallen victim to another DOS attack and that this is just a temporary glitch.

UPDATE:  The phrase “Twitter is Frozen” is number 2 on the list of trends.  Twitter says The Twitter status blog has been updated to reflect a known issue with time line delays.

UPDATE:  Twitter is back.   All is right in the world again.

One of my favorite YouTubers, “AppStoreReviewer” launched his very own iPhone OS application a few weeks ago.  And best of all it’s now free in the iTunes App Store.

ChillTwit is a simple and elegant Twitter client for the iPhone and iPod Touch.  The application has two features which seem to separate it from the other Twitter clients in the App Store.

First, you have the ability to change the background the appears behind tweets  and second, you can change the bubble colors from nine different options.

It may not be the most robust Twitter client around, but it includes all the basic features and functions you’d expect from a free Twitter client.  The layout makes Tweets very easy to read and the colors are a nice way to customize your viewing experience.

You can watch a video demo of the application here.

ChillTwit is available in the iTunes App Store.  Get it now while it’s still free.