There’s only a few days until the elections. Here is your chance to be heard! Pic Your President is an engaging, visual mock poll that allows users to vote for their Presidential candidate and state why they are voting for him or her. A user can vote only once using their Facebook account, but has the option to agree or disagree about others’ votes and opinions. Looks like Dick Gordon is making a killing as I write this, he has 817 votes so far! Gibo Teodoro is second with 333 votes. Noynoy fans where are you?!?

Piclyf is a pet project of my startup company, Twidl Inc. Help spread the word!

I got 5 Chi.mp invitations to give away. If you want one, express your desire in the comments section below. Please include your name and email address.

What is Chi.mp? Quoting from their website:

Chi.mp’s service lets you register your own .mp domain and gives you a free Web site that serves as a hub for your content across the Web. Your chi.mp site also gives you one place to bring together and manage all your contacts in one “Ultimate Black Book”. Chi.mp lets you own and define “digital you” and to share different versions of “digital you” with your selected contacts. More than a life-stream or an aggregator, chimp allows you to take control of how you share your self with the world.

Although you get your own .mp domain, it won’t be like a regular domain where you can set nameservers and mx records. Your .mp domain will simply serve as your online identity’s jumping point. I picked davao.mp for mine.

In other news… Reinvigorate.net has once again opened its doors for beta registration. I’ve been using their service to track my live traffic for about a year now and I wonder why they’re still in beta. Anyway, I love their service and from the looks of their homepage they’re cooking up some really awesome stuff. Visit their website and sign up for beta.

My corner of the Twitterverse is waging an online revolt against, well, Twitter itself. Twitter has been the most inaccessible, inconsistent, downtrodden Web 2.0 application on the face of the Internet, and yet we put up with it. Why? Because old habits are difficult to break. Yes, if that weirds you out, try my other friends on Twitter.

As I opened my browser this morning, I was pleasantly greeted with Happy Birthday to you’s and Haba Birdie’s and talks of Twitter folks planning a mass exodus to Plurk. No wait, what? Yes, Plurk. Apparently, everyone’s gotten sick of Twitter and finally found a worthy place to tell the world what silly little things we’re up to. Pownce and Jaiku tried but failed — despite the Internet heavyweights backing them up. What makes Plurk special? It’s cute, quirky and different. The timeline interface is nice and makes it easy for me to browse through updates without clicking to another page. Replying to updates is even easier. I simply click on an update and type away. Replies are grouped together exactly like a forum thread. Sweet!

I’m in a state of cautious enthusiasm about Plurk. Cautious because Plurk is a new service and the real test is whether it could hold enough interest into it and withstand hundreds of thousands of ‘plurkers’ plurking at the same time. I would also love to see a SMS aspect attached to it and a developer API. I’m cutting them some slack because they’re new, but the people behind Plurk should leverage on the attention it’s getting now or suffer the same fate as all the other Twitter wannabes.

Plurk has a mobile version here. I’d like to see a browser extension done first so I can get rid of Twitterfox asap. Be sure to check out their blog for new developments. They’re looking for someone to help out with a Filipino/Tagalog interface too.

Powerset enters the search engine realm with an offering of tools for users to search Wikipedia more effectively. Instead of keywords, Powerset’s technology harnesses the power of human conversation that serves as the backbone of their engine’s algorithm. That removes the need for users to always know the exact terms related to what they’re searching. Powerset does all the dirty work for you. The search results can be a bit daunting to digest if you’re used to Google. But for hardcore researchers, it’s easy to tell that Powerset leaves no stone unturned.

Apart from Wikipedia, Powerset plans to partner with other wiki-like sites to expand their database. Already, it is showing what the future of web search might be. A Google killer? Who knows? I’d dare say Microsoft would be better off buying them rather than play hide-and-seek with Yahoo. My bet is Powerset is already on Wikimedia’s Christmas shopping list by now.

One of the downsides of blogging is not knowing whether or not your readers are “getting it”.

Sure, you know what Gas tungsten arc welding is, but for us mere mortals, that sounds like a bad lab experiment back in college that we’d rather forget about. If you’re familiar with Snap Shots (see sample), Apture should feel right at home except that it gives you full control over your “info bubbles” and you have the power to assign bubbles only to the content that you choose right on your blog (unlike the arbitrary way that Snap does it). One great example we can use is Christine Gambito. Remember who she is? If not, click on her name (now na hahaha). I added Wikipedia, images and video to the info bubble to help jog your memory. Ok, done? You can add info bubbles to any text on your blog to give your users a rich multimedia experience, if not a lesson in history. The service is currently in beta and is accepting registrations.

Some bugs still need to be worked out, such as conflicts with flash objects and the inability to detect the same content on the main page and post page (meaning if you add bubbles from the main page, you’d have to do it again on the blog post).

Lovd By Less is a new open source application lovingly written on Ruby that allows you to start your own social network. Checking the demo, I reckon the company, smartly named “Less Everything“, put a lot of (or less?) thought into this. Definitely not just one of those run-of-the-mill php scripts we uninstall everyday. Any Ruby programmers out there willing to give it a test? (If only I was one)

I got an invitation from Leah Plaxton, Marketing Manager for a new online collaboration app called Projjex, to try out their service. In a nutshell, this is what Projjex is:

Projjex is a web-based collaborative task manager that helps small teams share their work. Teams can share tasks, documents, notes, meetings and time. It’s easy to use, runs completely in a browser, and has a fully functional free version.

I signed up at their site and it does look promising. Check it out!

I must say, I’ve become addicted to Twitter. Twitter has become my daily tabloid, where all the news, gossips and blind items are fed. All you gotta do is follow the right people (like me, wink2x). Sometimes I find myself spending too much time refreshing my browser tab, waiting for new twits to show up. I don’t recommend that though, unless you’re that bored. If you’re using Firefox, there’s an excellent, unobtrusive plugin called Twitterfox that keeps you updated on what your fellow twitter-ers are up to while you’re actually doing something productive.

With all the Internet ‘wars’ currently going on (which I sense are slowly subsiding), Twitter has certainly given me an idea on where people stand on each issue. It’s funny because it’s become some sort of a delayed instant messenger conference on steroids. Indeed, it’s a hell lot easier to say something tactless on Twitter than in a live chat window. People are gutsier in non-real-time situations. The lesson is if you follow someone on Twitter, it doesn’t necessarily require you to be in good terms. That’s what democracy is about. Twitter has taken gossip and catfights to a whole new playing field.

Care to join?

Despite my sparse travel record, I still got a C-. I think Eugene made the algo more forgiving only recently because the first time I took the test I got an F!! Anyway, if you’re Pinoy, you have got to check this out.

Lakbayan: How much of the Philippines have you visited?

On the righthand menu of your web panel, click on change or add emails.

Under Managing email addresses, enter the mobile email address corresponding to your cellular phone carrier:

Verizon: 10digitphonenumber@vtext.com
Former AT&T customers: 10digitphonenumber@mmode.com
Sprint: 10digitphonenumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com
T-Mobile: 10digitphonenumber@tmomail.net
Nextel: 10digitphonenumber@messaging.nextel.com
Cingular: 10digitphonenumber@cingularme.com
Virgin Mobile: 10digitphonenumber@vmobl.com
Alltel: 10digitphonenumber@alltelmessage.com OR
10digitphonenumber@message.alltel.com
CellularOne: 10digitphonenumber@mobile.celloneusa.com
Omnipoint: 10digitphonenumber@omnipointpcs.com
Qwest: 10digitphonenumber@qwestmp.com

Click Save to add the email address to your profile.

Montastic claims to check your site every 10 minutes “at the minimum”, which is better than other free services I have checked out. So far, they have been doing their jobs properly. By adding this SMS feature, you can immediately act on a problem when it arises, whether you are at your computer or not.

Thanks to Republic of Geektronica for the list of carriers.