Blue Chi’s

Popular Omani tweetp @muscati experimented with connecting his Macbook to an external display to view HD content and it turns contrary to what I posted in my previous post that you can in fact watch HD content on an external display through your Macbook if you connect it to a screen that supports HDCP through a supported connection (HDMI or DVI). I connect my PS3 to my external monitor so I really can’t be bothered to try to get a mini-display port to DVI adaptor that connects to an HDMI adaptor that connects to an HDMI switch to get this work, but I checked my monitor’s manual and it seems that it supports HDCP through DVI, too! So all I need to do is get a mini-display port to DVI adaptor to watch HD content I buy from iTunes on this screen.

I tried looking for the adaptor I need at the new Apple reseller store in QCC, but they don’t seem to have it, might have to hunt around a little bit to get this to eventually work.

When we all joined Facebook a long while ago we were not really experienced with social networks and we did not realize how it easy it would be for it to get out of control, we all have hundreds of friends – many of them are people we never interact with because we are not very interested in interacting with them, but they are on our friends list because Facebook forces you to “accept” a friend’s request for that person to be able to follow your updates. We also follow a lot of people because of some social obligation or another – like be friends with your family members, a distant relative, or some work colleagues.

Almost everyone now has a Facebook account and all of those coming to Google+ are coing to it with existing experience from Facebook, Twitter, and other social services. Google+ might seem confusing at the start because it gives the impression that it is identical to Facebook in requiring a friendship to be mutual, but in reality the mechanics of it are more similar to Twitter as you are not required to follow someone back for that person to follow you.

What is really great about Google+ is that it forces you to put people in a specific sharing ‘Circle’ at the get go, you can now already add all your family members to your family circle, your colleagues in your colleagues circle, and your friends in your friends circle.  While the same thing is possible to do in Facebook, it is not as intuitive and does not have this requirement, plus it is difficult for us to go back now and filter our long list of friends into different categories.

As much as Google+ will benefit from being able to see what Facebook has done right or wrong and build on it, we could find using Google+ beneficial as it will provide us with the opportunity to re-build our social circles after learning from the mistakes we made on Facebook.

I have been using a lot of social networks these days all at the same time, it sounds a little bit silly to have a social network for each different activity you do, but sometimes having a new social network provides you with the opportunity to have a fresh start and share different things with different people. Facebook seems to be the place where you are friends with every single person you know whether or not you really care about them and whether or not you are interested in or willing to share things with them. Even though you are technically “Friends” with everyone, I think that the majority of people we are ‘friends with’ on Facebook are not really our real friends who we hang out with day in and day out.

My primary most active social network account is my Twitter account, I sync everything with Twitter. If I upload a picture on Instagram it gets tweeted, if I check-in into a location on Foursquare that gets tweeted, and if I indicate that I’m watching a show on GetGlue that gets tweeted too. My Twitter account is public so anybody can follow me. My Facebook account on the other hand is private and I try my best not to befriend people I do not know. I tweet my Foursquare checkins, but I am also trying not to befriend people on Foursquare who I do not know (that doesn’t make sense, but that’s what I’m doing).

I recently started using GetGlue, it is pretty fun to use and a great way to check what other people are watching or reading, I find it a little bit ridiculous that you can check in ‘when you think of a celebrity or a topic’ – that’s really weird.

I also recently got my invite for Google+, the UI is pretty and it looks nice, but I don’t know if it will have a place in my ‘online-social-life’ because it seems to want to be my next Facebook, but if none of my friends are on it, I can’t see how it’ll fly. All the people I have on twitter are on it, but I communicate with these people on Twitter, and not on Google+.

I find Google+ a bit hard to get because it is technically more like Twitter than Facebook because you don’t need to follow people in order for them to follow you, but when you share an item or make a status update you can specify whether to make that item public or share it only with people in your circles. I don’t really update my Facebook much, so I can’t see myself update my Google+, but I guess we’ll just have to wait and see if it catches on.