Friday Five – April 1, 2011
Welcome to the fool-free edition of Friday Five!
#1 – REDACTED
I write Friday Five for my internal Praxair blog, and this post was just too specific to something internal to be worth sharing here. Instead, here’s the worst song in the universe.
#2 – Amazon Cloud Player goes live, streams music on your computer and Android [Engadget]
Amazon rolled out its very own music streaming service which is conveniently dubbed the Amazon Cloud Player. Existing Amazon customers in the US can now upload their MP3 purchases to their 5GB cloud space — upgradable to a one-year 20GB plan for free upon purchasing an MP3 album, with additional plans starting at $20 a year — and then start streaming on their computers or Android devices. Oh, and did we mention that this service is free of charge as well?
First To Market, even for free apps, is important in today’s tech world. If you can include “cloud” in the title of the product, it’s 10x more important! So Amazon got to market first with this online hosted music storage/playback system. Which, of course, makes music labels mad (what doesn’t?) – especially the ones who were working on their own systems. Why Amazon would need a license to allow you to listen to music you already purchased is indicative of just how screwed up the music industry is, but it does keep many a lawyer employed.
The service itself is quite useful – upload music you already own, or if you buy from Amazon they’ll automatically add those songs to your Cloud Player for you and won’t count the megabytes against your 5GB quota. Since Amazon is not Apple or Google and doesn’t have its own mp3 player or mobile platform, getting this out ahead of the giants may be necessary to ensure its success.
#3 – The Google +1 Button [Google]
The +1 button is shorthand for “this is pretty cool” or “you should check this out.”
Click +1 to publicly give something your stamp of approval. Your +1’s can help friends, contacts, and others on the web find the best stuff when they search.
Social capital has actual value. Some companies are studying to determine the actual cash value of a Tweet, a Facebook Like, a LinkedIn Share, etc. Google, not to be outdone in this arena, has invented its own social weight – the +1 button. Of course, as with most things Google, this ties back into search and advertising. Your +1 can help influence search rankings and help tailor advertising to your interests. This isn’t the first time Google has tried to integrate social influence with their search business, but with Facebook looking to take “Like” on the road, social influence is turning into a netwide currency.
The Google +1 experiment (more beta-y then beta?) can be a bit tricky to get enabled, but watch their video and follow the links to get started.
#4 – Set Up an Automated, Bulletproof File Back Up Solution [lifehacker]
More and more, the fragments of your life exist as particles on a disk mounted inside your computer—disks susceptible to temperature changes, power surges, fire, theft, static, and just plain wear and tear. Hard drives fail. It’s a fact of computing life. It’s not a matter of whether your computer’s disk will stop working; it’s a matter of when. The question is how much it will disrupt your life—and it won’t, if you have a backup copy.
Thursday was World Backup Day – love the tagline: “Don’t be an April Fool. Backup your data. Check your restores.” This lifehacker article walks through the benefits of using CrashPlan as your online backup tool. Back in February, I wrote about the discontinuation of my then-current backup provider and that I was piloting CrashPlan. So far, I couldn’t be happier with the change. It’s cheaper, it’s faster, and it’s far more flexible. If you’re still not backing up your data online (to the cloud!) take a good look at what CrashPlan has to offer.
#5 – Angry Birds Pork Rinds [ThinkGeek]
Succulent. Winning. Explosive.
Angry Birds Pork Rinds are the ultimate in high protein snacking. Since the only other green meat we’ve encountered has been a breakfast meat paired with green eggs, we’re calling these “The Other Green Meat.” Much like green ham, you can eat Angry Birds Pork Rinds here or there. You can eat them anywhere.
Nerd merchandiser extraordinaire ThinkGeek always likes to slip in a couple not-quite-available products into their lineup on the first of April. This one was my favorite (watch the video, too!). Apple aficionados may prefer the PLAYMOBIL Apple Store Playset, however. If you’ve never been to ThinkGeek before, you may be surprised at the merchandise they actually DO carry. I recommend the Bacon Salt.
Happy April!