Earthquakes and Twitter
I'm sure everyone has heard about the earthquake that was felt yesterday on the east coast and in Boston. It was the first one I've ever felt, thankfully it was over before I realized what was happening (and not that I was dizzy and about to faint as I sat in my chair at my desk). What amazed me most about this experience was how I immediately reacted to this event. I didn't call or text someone, I didn't use Google, and I didn't use Boston.com as I may have done in the past. Within 10 seconds of the earthquake I had opened up my browser, went to Twitter, and searched for earthquake. Instantly I realized that no, it wasn't just my building randomly shaking (which it is strangely prone to doing on occasion), but that something had clearly happened as within the past 20 seconds folks from Philly, DC, and NY had all tweeted that the just felt exactly the same thing I did. It took CNN, Google, Boston.com and I'm sure many other news sites at least a few minutes to respond, but I know that if I want immediate information (albeit "unofficial"), Twitter is best suited.
Firefox 5 - some cool new features
One of the best features in a browser I've found in a while was introduced recently in Firefox 5. It's called "App Tabs", and it allows you to pin sites that you always use into your browser so that every time you open it the sites are automatically loaded. It also makes the tab much smaller. So handy for sites I always leave open like Gmail, Facebook, etc.. Read more here and then download here. I also just started to experiment with the Firefox Synch feature, which allows bookmarks and open tabs to be constantly in synch between my desktop, netbook, and my iPhone. Seems to work pretty well so far, so long Xmarks plugin.
Firefox (and other browsers as well) are starting to ramp up their release schedule for new versions. This is great for consumers, but man does it suck as a product manager for a web app when you have to spend half of your life regression testing if you wish to support various browsers.