The concept is simple.  You need to update your status or send a quick tweet.  You find an interesting link or article you want to post.  No time to catch up on what is going on in the Twitterverse or the 300 tweets you are behind on.  Just need to post an update.  That’s TweetNow! TweetNow is a simple WPF application designed to allow for posting quick updates to a Twitter account.  It is currently in development and is actively being tested by our staff of testers.  Well, not really staff.  Just me.  And a few friends. Initial Release Features – Secure authentication via oAuth – Multiple account support – Automatic URL shortening Future Release Features – Minimize to system tray – Hotkey activation – Post photos to TwitPic

In my previous post, I talked about the difficulty keeping all your social networking sites up to date. When I was trying out Blogo tonight, I came across Ping.fm.The premise of Ping.fm is that “Ping.fm is a simple service that makes updating your social networks a snap.”Exactly what I need. Once you create your free account at Ping.fm, the dashboard allows you to add a number of social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Flickr, and lots more. That means that you update from one spot, and the update gets pushed to the rest of those services automatically. Pretty neat stuff.

Although primarily I’m a PC, I do like to see what options are available outside my virtualized environment and available on the Mac.Mac has a whole array of blogging applications available with a variety of features, but I’ve never been a fan of any of them. I’ve stayed pretty close to Windows Live Writer and have done most of my blogging from that platform. That being said, it’s been a couple of months and I thought I’d do a another search for some good blogging tools for the Mac. I came across two of them tonight, one of which I am using for this entry. First of all is ScribeFire. This is a nice little blogging tool that integrates directly into the Firefox browser. No separate application installation required, just a small plug-in for the browser. Full editor with a lot of the features that most bloggers would be looking…

I’m still trying to understand the premise behind Twitter.  It’s one of those projects that really caught on.  Twitter’s claim to fame is that they offer a way for people all over cyberspace to see what everybody else is up to.  The question is simple: what are you doing right now? You can post a response (known as a “tweet”) to your Twitter page via the Twitter website, instant message, or third-party applications which support the Twitter API.  It seems like such a simple concept that who would really care to use this? You’d be surprised.  Twitter went live in March 2006, and though its tough to find exact numbers around their user base, it grew substantially in the first half of 2007.  But why is it so interesting to hear that “I’m painting my bedroom” or “watching Friends re-runs” and sharing that with the entire world?  Who knows, but…

Some time ago I made the switch to using WordPress as my primary blogging engine.  I hosted it myself and had mySQL and PHP for the infrastructure. WordPress is a tried and true blogging engine so I was very impressed at its stability and performance.  One thing I didn’t like, which wasn’t really shortfall of the application, was my inability to customize and build my own themes.  The platform was PHP which made it very difficult for me since I really have no background in PHP.  I was “stuck” with off the shelf themes and the inability to customize the engine to my needs. The other night I came across an open-source app called BlogEngine.net.  This is available for free from CodePlex and is developed by a community of dotnet junkies.  They leverage things like user controls, master pages, and other features of the .NET Framework.  Exactly what I was…