Web, Phone, Text and Facebook On Your Phone!
This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Boost Mobile. All opinions are 100% mine.
I’ve mentioned before that I love taking internet with me when I go. I use my Blackberry all the time when I am out and I’ve got a USB modem that I use with my laptop when I am out and there is no hotspot available. I like being able to catch up on Facebook, Twitter and even the real news when I am out.
I just found a cheaper way to keep connected out and about and that is with Boost Mobile. They’ve got great phones to go along with great services to keep you connected to all of your favorite social media when you are out and about, or even on your couch at home.
As I said, they’ve got some great phones available. One is the Motorola i1. If you follow me very much you know that I got a penchant for Motorola phones and the i1 is high on my list. It’s Android, WiFi, all web, and it’s even got the Boost Walkie Talkie feature. With just $50 a month for unlimited web, email, IM, text and even nationwide calling you know it’s a great deal.
They’ve also got a Blackberry 8330 available. I love my Blackberry, it’s easy to keep in contact and the features you get with a Blackberry are worth it. If you go with Boost, that’s $60 a month for their unlimited Blackberry Plan. Just check out their Blackberry to see for yourself. Let me tell you, the $60 they charge is a lot less than what I am paying right now.
How about paying your bill with them? They call their payment info Re-Boost, as in refill. They’ve got several ways to load up your phone with more boost including online, over the phone and even in person. In other words, it’s as easy as can be. I like how you can set it up with your debit card and automatically replenish your account. That’s so simple.
Face it, you need a mobile phone and if you haven’t used the mobile web then you’re really missing out. Whether you get a Blackberry plan or the i1 unlimited plan, it’s less than a couple of bucks a day to have all of your calling, texts and mobile checkins taken care. It’s indispensable.
Reading about the i1 makes me want to get it right now. I just have to convince my wife…that shouldn’t be hard.
What Features Would Improve Facebook Messages?
I just realized today that I send most of my messages to friends and family via Facebook and not via email anymore. I used to send so much email but I go days without sending an email anymore.
I really think that many people check their Facebook more often than they check their regular email. This means that a Facebook message will get to them quicker. I also can see if they had a chance to read it or not based on their Facebook activity.
I just wish Facebook messages had more features. A better list of features would sure make it more usable for sending messages.
What kind of changes would you make to the Facebook Messaging System in order to make it work better?
MySpace Is Dead
I was just reading an article on Fortune Magazine about MySpace and it hit me how much the online world has changed in just a few short years. In 2006, MySpace was the number 1 site. It was the cool hangout for the younger generation, but now it’s on the slide.
I used MySpace on and off during that time period but haven’t logged in a maybe 2 years. I find that there is no point in it and I don’t even think I can remember my login. I stopped using MySpace primarily because of the fact that people themed out their pages to the point of making them ridiculous but I think I might be the only one who left because of that reason.
This last school year I witnessed my students going from all on MySpace to all one Facebook over the period of about 3 or 4 months. For them it was the Facebook games and then it all snowballed. The kids wanted to be where the other kids where. Pretty much everyone had moved over to Facebook by the end of the year.
I don’t know if MySpace can get that back. Facebook’s now a place where families hang out, where kids meets other kids, where parents meet other parents, where people play games, join in political discussions, and just about anything else you can imagine. It’s the modern day equivalent of a town square. That’s something that MySpace never was. If they change then they need to be a better town square, but even that might make people make the switch.
Why? People don’t like going back to something they abandoned. They made a choice to leave it behind so they need a good reason to head back. I just don’t see that happening.
Making A Custom Facebook URL For The Rest Us
I never intended this to be a two part post, but I notice that many people have benefited from my previous post on Making A Custom Facebook Profile Address. Unfortunately, it was a method really only suited for those with their own hosting and willing to hack their .htaccess. While it’s pretty simple to do, I realized that not everyone could do it. The good news is that I figured out another way to get a custom Facebook URL that is easy enough for anyone to do.
URL Shortening Services To The Rescue
An easy way to get a more customized Facebook URL is by using URL shortening services like tinyurl.com. Normally, they work by creating a link like http://tinyurl.com/cur6q6 but they can just as easily create a link like http://tinyurl.com/jackwoodsfacebook.
Nitty Gritty Details
How do you do it? Just visit tinyurl.com. On their page, put in the link to your Facebook profile address. If you have any problem finding it, check out the part 1 post and the directions are there. Mine is http://www.facebook.com/people/Jack-Woods/1022785814. There is a little box below that says “Custom alias (optional):.” That’s where you will put in your custom name. In my case, I tried first jackfacebook and that was already taken so I tried jackwoodsfacebook and it gave me the link http://tinyurl.com/jackwoodsfacebook. Easy, right?
Other URL Shortening Services
You are also not limited to just tinyurl.com. Many of the URL shortening services let you shorten the URL to a custom name or alias. Bit.ly allowed me to shorten my long Facebook url to http://bit.ly/jackwoods.
Pretty cool, huh? Granted it’s better to use a redirect from your own domain, but these URL shortening services do really help you get a better, more customized Facebook address and are an acceptable substitute.
Create Your Own Custom Facebook Profile Address
I love using Facebook. It’s a great place to keep in touch with friends as well as network with new potential employers, contacts, and clients. The uses you can find for Facebook are limitless. If it involves any kind of networking, Facebook is the place where it can happen.
To take full advantage of Facebook’s networking benefits, you need to get as many people to your Facebook profile as possible. One way is to put a link to your Facebook profile on your business cards. While Facebook does have a public search page for every user, the link on it is very cumbersome and there is no way, within Facebook, to change it to something more usable. For example, my public search page is http://www.facebook.com/people/Jack-Maderas/1022785814 . Not exactly svelte on my business card.
Fortunately, if you’ve got your own hosting, you can create your own custom Facebook profile address with a little .htaccess magic. The .htaccess file resides in your root html directory and it’s responsible for passing commands to your web server, including URL rewrites and redirects. For our purposes, we are interested in the redirects.
Note: If you don’t feel comfortable hacking your .htaccess or if you don’t have your own hosting, check out Making A Custom Facebook URL For The Rest Us
How I did it
My Facebook profile is located at http://unfq.com/facebook . It’s an easy to remember address that I can stick on my business card or quickly jot down on any scrap of paper I can find. To create this link, all I had to do was open up the .htaccess file on my server and drop in this code:
redirect 301 /facebook http://www.facebook.com/people/Jack-Maderas/1022785814
What does the code do? It does a redirect from the /facebook and redirects it to my public Facebook search listing.
Try It Yourself!
Ready to try it yourself? First decide what you want to call the link on your server. You can make it /myfacebook, /notmyspace, /facebook or anything else you want. Replace /facebook in my example with whatever you have chosen for your link.
Next, go to your Facebook profile and click on Setting-Privacy Settings-Search. On the search page, go down to the Public Search Listing and right click-copy link location to get the URL of your public search listing. Replace my search listing in the example code with yours.
Next, open up the .htaccess file on your hosting and add the code that you create from my example to the bottom of the file. Make sure it all shows on one line. Save the file to your server and you are set. Go ahead and test your custom Facebook profile address.
Problems or Comments?
If there are any issues, it’s probably because you didn’t make sure the pasted code was all on one line. Double check that and try again.
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