Ha. I lovelovelove Chris Pirillo's20 Reasons I'm not getting an iPhone today. Granted, I'm not an Apple disciple, but I don't get the hype for the iPhone. Maybe I'm too much of a mobile phone techie to buy in? Maybe it's my displeasure with my video iPod? In my opinion, the only thing great about the iPod is 1)the streamlined aesthetic and 2)the memory. Beyond that, I don't love the product. I hatehatehate the click-wheel. I'm on my third unit (under warrenty, thankfully!) because of unit malfunctions. Apple customer service has been the worst of my life and that's coming from someone who formerly repped a wireless handset manufacturer that required me to switch carriers to activate and test large numbers of new phones for at least two years; I've probably had more than the average person's experience with customer service AND I've worked with just about every carrier in the US. I would NEVER give up my Verizon service.

I guess the other issue is that I don't have a landline. I doubt I ever will again. And I live alone. I can't risk my phone dying or malfunctioning and have to mail it in for a replacement. I don't have that luxury.

It's funny, because I'm a mobile phone junkie. I upgrade ALL the time. I have so many friends in the mobile industry that they may send me a review unit to play with or I'll just see one that looks interesting and upgrade on my own. My friends & family accuse me of having a new wireless unit every two weeks and sometimes they are right.

However, while I admire the design of the iPhone from afar, I have to say, it's unlikely I'd purchase one now with AT&T service. Their coverage blows.

But I'm sure many people out there will snap them up and love that status it gives me. Me, I'd rather have the function and service;)

Someone pass the codeine - I just gave birth. The labor involved may set a new world record, but we did it for YOU.

Now hurry up and register, if you haven't already. Just one week left to sign up!

All this talk about the iPhone, enough already! Sometimes I get frustrated with the consumerism element of social media. We in America and the western world continually scramble to buy the next big "thing," but what happens to all of those old-next-big-things as we continually upgrade?? I saw a Twitter today with an awesome link to a blog that recycles the old Merlin Calculator into an MP3 player. How AWESOME is that?!? Man, I always wanted that Merlin, but I went to Catholic school and we weren't allowed to use calculators. We even had to SHOW OUR WORK in math - even in the high grades and more advanced math. I'm still convinced that if I hadn't been DEPRIVED (no bitterness here, folks) of the Merlin I would be a much better math person today.

In other, equally, exciting news, BlogOrlando registration is live! Wooohooo! I can't wait! Hurry up and register everyone, it's going to be AWESOME!

Enough with the Facebook talk already! Many of my social media friends are now leaping on the site since the all-ages floodgates opened and I can't understand the wonderment. The best thing about Facebook was that it was a private community. Now it's MySpace. Think of this way - remember how hanging out in the student center at college was cool because parents and younger brothers and sisters weren't there? It was you, Joe and Jane College, and the university community. Your peers in a (somewhat) gated and therefore (somewhat) safe community. Now imagine if your lounge in the student center invited the senior citizens center and the PTA and the teen leagues to come and use the lounge.

That sucks. The novelty shall wear off, I suppose.
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You know what I need? I need my Moto Q to 1)Charge when it's connected to a PC and 2)Have better battery life. Love the product, hate the battery life. It's almost as bad as my video iPod. Grrrr.

Ok, I can't really update right now because I am obsessively hacking my Windows PDA device into an iPhone. That's right. You heard me. My existing Windows unit is going to function much like the iPhone, but not at the iPhone price.

You can download the hacking software right here. Have I mentioned how much I love hackers? Because I do. Mostly white hat hackers because I do believe in using your superpowers for good.

Apparently, I pressed a hot button when I commented on Mediapost's story last week deconstructing the "new" Facebook. Max Kalehoff took my comment to his personal blog and opined that while he doesn't think that Facebook is "over," he wonders what Facebook will do to retain their loyal base. Lynda Radosevich wonders the same thing. Don Park doesn't have any answers either.

Facebook is in a tricky spot and I'm very interested to see how they navigate this expansion. They cornered a hot market for advertisers with college and then high school kids, and I can understand the temptation they must have to compete with goliath, MySpace. I can also understand that it must suck to have your core userbase turnover annually and have to continually rebuild.

That said, Facebook sits on a dangerous sinkhole. Expansion brings bigger numbers to increase traffic/google juice and consquently increase ad rates, but may repel that core demo that makes them so appealing to the very same advertisers.

I'll be watching closely.
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Last, here's an overdue personal plug. Check out the podcast IncPlace whom were nice enough to have me on their podcast

I love that right after I publish a bot post, AIM adds 3 awesome bots to their client.
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Hey, anyone out there an expert on widgets? Building them, where to find new plug-in's, different applications for them, etc? We need a widget guru to speak at BlogPhiladelphia. Give me a shout and if you have any demo's I can see - even better!

So I'm sitting here at home, doing more work (but at home it's so much more pleasant, isn't it?), when I started to look at my AIM buddy list. I have a whole section there for Bots

I realized I haven't used any of my bots in ages and was curious to see if they were still active, so I clicked on the SmarterChild bot. I remember when it came out in 2000 or 2001 and I thought it was so novel. I used it for two months and then forgot about it. I played a few rounds of hangman and then wondered to myself, is the novelty and functionality of bots over?

Has social media like myspace and event sites and small business domains become so prevalent and accessible and that we no longer need Bots for quick searches or answers?

Let me know what you think.

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One more thing: tres cool pic here. You click and drag your mouse up and down and will find yourself Alice in a virtual wonderland;)

BREAKING NEWS! More than a year of tinkering with skype and my headset/mic, I finally figured it out! So you can call me at AnnieHeckenberger from now on.

Infortunately, only on my laptop at the moment. I need to download it on my work PC.

As a social media "specialist," I spend a lot of time looking at a wide variety of web sites. As a former PR media expert (and forever a media junky at heart), I spend an even larger amount of time on MSM and CGM news sites. Like a lot of people my age (and younger...and older, too, I bet!) the internet is my default news source.

Here's where I think the news media are going wrong online. Too many bells and whistles. Yes, give me digital video on your site. Do not try to make your site into myspace. I don't need another hub. I don't need to social network on a news site. I just want the news. I want it in real time, I want links to wire stories, I want celebrity gossip, I may want to leave a comment but I don't want to stay and do a mashup. I don't want to shop on my news site. I don't want to auction something off there. And frankly, should news entities be offering services like this that are actually news makers? God knows there are enough Ebay stories out there about crazy items for sale - how ethical is it for news entities to now offer services that may *become* news? Selling local artists or designers' wears and also reviewing them? Who will now fairly report consumer interest stories? Will it be citizen journalists crashing the party and now conducting embarrassing investigations on mainstream media personalities?

Sounds fishy to me.

Maybe I'm old fashioned. Maybe this is what the next generation wants from news entities? But the way I see it, citizen journalism gained audience and credibility as traditional media took a beating for unethical practices like airing VNR's without disclosure that the news segment was a PR tool, paid spokespeople shilling on news and morning shows and more and more reporters like the infamous Jayson Blair who fabricated sources and filed fiction.

Shouldn't traditional media be more carefully drawing the line rather than help blur it?