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Chris Thomson

Hi, I'm Chris Thomson. I'm a blogger, and social media dude.

Macworld San Francisco ‘09 PredictionsDecember 22 2008

Macworld San Francisco 2009 is fast approaching, and everyone has their two cents on what’s going to happen at the SteveSchillernote.

This year, I have two main predictions for the keynote: Snow Leopard and desktops.

Desktops, Desktops, and More Desktops.

Mac desktops are extremely overdue for updates.1 All of the Mac desktops — Mac Pro, iMac, and the Mac Mini — are over 230 days since their previous updates, with the Mac Mini rolling in with over 500 days since its last upgrade!

Since Apple put out major notebook updates back in October, it only makes sense for this Macworld to be for something big — not iPhone big, but still big — like Mac desktop upgrades. If Apple was to put out major desktop upgrades at Macworld, all of their Macs would be full of new technology goodness.

Over the last few days, MacRumors put out a story revealing that in a configuration file, on the new MacBooks, contains some strings that suggest that the next release of the iMac and Mac Mini will use the NVIDIA MCP79 chipset, which must mean that the release of new desktops isn’t too far off.

Lastly, since Apple p

Save Yourself From Even More Twitter NoiseNovember 8 2008

Back in September, I recommended some tips on how to turn down the noise and distractions of the social web.

Up until very recently, I’ve had Twitter displaying all tweets from everyone I follow. And while I was at my computer, I’d read them — all of them.

As you could imagine, this really effected my productivity because whenever a tweet came in that way directed to a Twitter user that I don’t follow, I’d go visit their twitter profile to see what was being responded to.

Preventing The @reply Noise

A few days ago, I rediscovered an amazing feature of Twitter, which is setting which replies you want to see in your friends’ timeline. Changing this setting to either “@ replies to the people I’m following” or to “no @ replies” will certainly boost your productivity, even if it’s just the tiniest bit.

I’ve set this to “@ replies to the people I’m following”, since I want to see the conversation, I just don’t want to waste my time visiting all of those Twitter pages to follow t

Do We Have Too Many OpenIDs?September 30 2008

Yesterday, @webmacster87 sent me an @reply on Twitter, stating that the OpenID technology “has a backwards effect,” because we have so many OpenIDs. I agree on some level, but not on another level. Let me explain.

Geeks Can Have One Constant OpenID, and Switch Providers.

There’s a lot of OpenID providers, and some of them are doing some very unique things with the technology, which causes me to switch to them as my OpenID provider. There’s also many services that give you an OpenID when you signup for their services — like Flickr, Yahoo and WordPress.com. There’s a problem, though: when we have this many OpenIDs, you might forget which one you used for which service. That’s where the geeks get the advantage.

If you have a website (it doesn’t matter if you maintain it or not), all you need to do is add a couple of meta tags to the head section of your website. 1 Then, whenever you visit a website that requires you to enter in your OpenID, simply enter in your website address (in my case, chris24.ca). You’ll get redirected to your current OpenID provider to authorize the request.

If you’d like to swi

Turning Down The NoiseSeptember 15 2008

This weekend has really made me reconsider a lot of what I do on the web. I read tweets, I (try) to keep up-to-date with my RSS subscriptions, I keep up with emails, and I do a lot of things just for fun. There’s way too much noise in my online life, and not enough productivity. I have to turn down that noise, and turn up my productivity.

Twitter: Non-Stop Noise

I am a Twitter addict. It’s not the amount of tweets that makes me an addict — I’ve toned that down quite a bit lately — but more about the number of tweets I read.

Most of the tweets I read aren’t necessary, but I read them because I know the person writing them. However, I’ve also added a number of people that I don’t know at all, and that’s where the problem starts.

I will add people I don’t know if I genuinely enjoy their tweets, but if there tweets are something like “Pizza for lunch,” then there isn’t much of a point to following them because I don’t know them. They’re random people. On the other hand, if that was someone I’d consider a friend that had tweeted that, I’d read it without any problem because I care about little details, but only if I know the person in some way.

Five Ways to Find More People to Follow on TwitterSeptember 3 2008

I don’t know about you, but every once in a while I want to find some new people to follow on Twitter. Here are some of the best ways to find new people to follow on twitter, without spending too much time searching for them.

One: Twubble

Twubble is a free service that searches your friends’ friend lists for people that many of your friends follow, but you don’t. This is effective to find popular people among your friends.

However, if you’re looking people within a specific niche, this service isn’t for you. For example, let’s say I want to find people that talk about food, but I follow lots of social media types. I wouldn’t be able to find those food people unless a lot of my current friends follow them, which is unlikely.

Twubble is a fast service, assuming you don’t follow thousands and thousands of people. But even if you do follow that many people, this is an automatic process that you can leave running in a separate ta