Matt’s Journal

Much to the dismay of my wife, I have been playing Gears of War 2 quite full on for the past week. Last night I finished the campaign mode on Hardcore difficulty, signalling the popup of a number of achievements and also the ending credits. Not being able to skip these credits, I left them on and set about tidying the house.

As I came back to them, the Microsoft copyrights ran through the screen and a Gears of War 2 loading screen came on. What happened there was something you would have expected from the end of a Cloverfield type movie.

A man’s voice kicks in (I won’t divulge as to ruin the ending for people playing it), tells us that the grand plan was a huge mistake. I’m left thinking, “I just spent countless hours sinking Jacinto, how is that a huge mistake?!“. What is does signal is that we are in for a third Gears of War instalment (I can hear the collective sighs of the Xbox widows around the world).

Interested on what other people thought of the ending, I searched Twitter for the phrase: “Gears of War 2 Ending”. Here are the results:

View the rest of the search results here.

As you can see, for some it’s a stroke of genius, for others it’s a similar feeling of: “Is this Halo 2 all over again?!”

For those of you who don’t know what the hell I am talking about, I have embedded the ending below, so if you don’t want to spoil it for yourself, this is a massive SPOILER ALERT!

Have you finished the game? What are your thoughts on the ending? Have you got an idea of what the (insinuated) third instalment will deliver? Hit me up in the comments.

I am quite heavily engaged in this social media hype machine, I profess to use a multitude of services that people will probably tell you you don’t need to use. Examples of these services are in my sidebar, which hosts a list of all the Web2.0 type sites I belong to.

The truth is though, the sites I do use are extraordinarily useful. Twitter and Plurk allow me to keep in contact with people across the world but also with my wife, who uses Twitter from her IM client on her laptop. I am kept upto date with the latest news by using sites such as Mixx, Digg and Delicious.

What I am trying to point out here is that social media has brought the internet forward decades from what it used to be. Gone are the days where you used the internet for just research and Napster, you are now able to update your webpage from your iPhone, interact with people who you have never met and build professional relationships that you previously wouldn’t have had any chance of initialising.

The main reason I have embedded the sites I use on my sidebar is so that you can interact and join similar networks should you wish to. I have an iPhone, on which 90% of the applications are communication tools, namely Facebook, Twitter and Plurk.

Wanting to boost my activity and share my knowledge and ideas of the internet, I put forward the writing on this blog as my application to one of the most popular technology websites; Makeuseof.com. Within a couple of days I was contacted by the chief editor saying I was successful in my application, I was to be added to their team of writers.

Fast forward two weeks, I have just completed my second article for them and I have many others waiting in the wings. It’s proving to be a very good way to slowly but surely move away from your typical 9-5 workday and move towards a career that would involve me working for myself.

I have a number of projects simmering at the moment that are only days maybe weeks from launch. I am hoping that I can get a second revenue stream coming in, meaning I can apply for bigger and better positions in the future.

Wish me luck.

You may have noticed over the past few days, I have been adding a few different buttons to the blog so you can interact with me around the web, not just on this blog. If you haven’t noticed, by all means cast your eyes right to the ten social media icons that will point you to some of my various social website hangouts.

I have also decided to head back to FriendFeed and synchronise all my information into one centralised feed. I have ported this information over to the sidebar of my blog using the very useful FriendFeed Activity Widget created by a talented designer by the name of Evan Sims. This plugin will collate activity and let you know what I have been interested in lately (yes, it could be considered stalkerish!).

If you are like me and a purveyor of social media websites, add me on Twitter, Friendfeed or even subscribe to the RSS feed to regular updates, it’s so easy your mother could do it!

Having just signed up at Plurk and getting into the swing of things, I can safely say that I will not be needing my Twitter account anymore. Conversation flows much easier on Plurk and most of the friends I had on Twitter are already present on it’s rival service.

This morning I tried to delete my account, Twitter did want any of it. I was presented with the following message:

I understand that they are having problems but disabling the ability to delete accounts? That’s not cricket. I have spoken to a few people who have tried to do the same but have had the same notice appear, are Twitter really that desperate to hold onto users?

Yesterday I was viewing my Twitter feed and catching up on any Tweets I had missed when I came across a few people mentioning a new service named Plurk. Thinking it was another social media aggregator, I scrolled on to read the rest of my feeds.

But then my curiosity got the better of me. Clicking into the search bar at the top of my browser, thinking that I was about to discover and online version of the board game “Kerplunk”, I typed in the name and swiftly hit enter.

Firstly Plurk’s meta-description of their site is as follows:

Plurk is a social journal that let’s you publish, share your thoughts, emo-ness, “!%#%”#” and loves. What is up, my friend? See what other people are doing …

OK, so it’s a social platform that can take the piss out of itself, I like that. Looking at the front page, it sells itself as a very similar service to Twitter, one that boasts a few extra features and a much nicer user interface. It also has a logo which is a Headless Dog…..The screenshot below demonstrates the layout:

Having befriended a few friends from Twitter on Plurk, I set to work trying out the service. First impressions are that the timeline is a very good idea, it shows you who posted and when and allows you to be able to reply to their message with a click to open a dropdown reply form (shown again below):

Word on the internet is that Plurk don’t want user’s developing third party applications for this service, although I have seen no official word on this. Twitter’s real plus is that it allows you to post and receive via SMS, browser, addon or client. So far only Gtalk is supported by Plurk.

There is however a clever sidebar addition for Firefox which utilises the mobile version of the site. You can download this addon by clicking here.

Have I sold Plurk and you think you want to try it? Sign up via this link and you will automatically be added to my friends list.

I have been reading Techcrunch and various Web2.0 blogs recently bemoaning the fact that Twitter has been down so much since it’s popularity sky-rocketed. You have Michael Arrington single-handedly charting their ups and downs, telling us how Twitter can change their ways to maximise their cluster computing from Amazon.

The problem is that people are building this service up on a pedestal, making its very existence essential for them to live their lives.

I happen to have Twitter, Gmail, MSN, Yahoo and my blog as other communication mediums. When certain services are down (there have been times I am unable to connect to Gtalk and I bet they have better server management than Twitter), I have just switched to another service.

I’m stuck for things to do this Sunday afternoon and have been bombarded on Twitter and Google Reader with anti-Twitter propaganda and wanted to sound off.

Just for the record, Friendfeed is a useless service and I have no idea why people are singing its praises so much.