Filed under: News, Social Software, web 2.0

Facebook is at it again, rolling out features in advance of the redesign we’ve been hearing so much about. The latest addition is comments in the mini-feed. Now when you find out that “Ashley changed her profile picture” you can click a tiny + icon next to that item and add a comment. This doesn’t go for all mini-feed items: it seems to be only for profile and status changes. At least you can’t comment on a mini-feed item about someone’s comment (yet.)

Well, ok. It’s one more way of communicating on Facebook, but what does it imply about the future of the wall? What used to be the main point of communication is now one of many, with photo comments, mini-feed comments and messages all in the mix. Will more places to comment make things easier for users? On the plus side for Facebook, users will stay on the site a few seconds longer to check one more place for comments, but is it a plus for you? Weigh in with your comments about comments.

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Filed under: Debt, Tax, Fraud

I’m all for the government cracking down on collecting child support payments, and taking the money directly out of IRS payment seems like a winning plan. But the $2 billion that the government has collected so far isn’t all from deadbeat fathers. I, for instance, am part of the 39% of those who had money withheld for an unpaid federal debt. And I still don’t know why.

I apparently owed the federal government $89.49 and they took it from my rebate check. I got a letter in the mail from the Department of the Treasury that told me, “As authorized by Federal law, we applied all or part of your Federal payment to a debt you owe.” Then it gave an address and phone number for a Birmingham, Ala. processing center.

I called, of course, and all they could tell me is that the Transportation Security Administration had taken my money. They stated they could give me their main number. They might as well have offered to give me the number for the White House to ask President Bush what was up with my payment. I didn’t figure you could just call a mammoth government agency and get any kind of response.

But I did call and I got somebody and explained my situation. The catch here is that I once worked for the TSA. I spent six weeks as a federal baggage screener at La Guardia back in the winter of 2003 when I was a nearly-broke freelance writer without health insurance. The job was too physically demanding for me, and the hours (5 am to 11 am) were too awful, so I quit. Like any good journalist, I then wrote a story about it.

Presented with my phone options, I picked payroll and eventually got a live person who looked me up by my social security number and told me that the only notation in the file was that the $89.49 was an overpayment in salary. I had never received any documentation of any kind about this, yet my debt had gone into collection.

I haven’t exactly been hiding from the government. I appeared on CNN, for one thing, talking about working for the TSA. Life just goes on. In the five years since I worked as a baggage screener, I got married, moved to Brooklyn and have had two kids. I asked to dispute the charge and the woman on the phone took my information. She stated it would take two weeks. That was nearly three months ago.

I’m usually tenacious in these situations, but there seems to be nothing much to do when the government decides you owe it money.

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Filed under: Internet, Productivity, Social Software

All of us could use a personal assistant every now and then, especially when it comes to planning your itinerary for a trip where you’ve to put together reservations for restaurants, entertainment, and rental cars into something you can follow once you reach your destination.

TripIt is a site designed to take confusion out of trying to organize all your reservations by doing it for you. The service takes all the plans you’ve made for your trip such as plane reservations, rental vehicles, and restaurant reservations and organizes them, adding important things like directions to get to where you’re going and a projected weather forecast for your trip. Your TripIt itinerary can then be printed out and taken with you as well as forwarded to friends in email, synced with your personal calender, or viewed on your mobile device.

TripIt grants you to add information to your trips manually or if you schedule events with one of TripIts supported websites you can just forward your reservations to the site via email and have them added to your itinerary for you. Currently TripIt supports a slew of airline websites, restaurant reservations through OpenTable.com, and they just added support for a variety of event sites such as Ticketmaster.

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Filed under: Internet, Productivity, Social Software

All of us could use a personal assistant each now and then, especially when it comes to planning your itinerary for a trip where you have to put together reservations for restaurants, entertainment, and rental vehicles into something you can follow once you reach your destination.

TripIt is a site designed to take confusion out of trying to organize all your reservations by doing it for you. The service takes all the plans you’ve made for your trip such as plane reservations, rental automobiles, and restaurant reservations and organizes them, adding important things like directions to get to where you’re going and a projected weather forecast for your trip. Your TripIt itinerary can then be printed out and taken with you as well as forwarded to friends in email, synced with your personal calender, or viewed on your mobile device.

TripIt allows you to add information to your trips manually or if you schedule events with one of TripIts supported websites you can just forward your reservations to the site via email and have them added to your itinerary for you. Currently TripIt supports a slew of airline websites, restaurant reservations through OpenTable.com, and they just added support for a variety of event sites such as Ticketmaster.

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Filed under: Audio, Fun, Video, Social Software

Let’s be honest here. How many of us have gotten on stage to do a bit of karaoke. Don’t worry no one is gonna laugh at you. Because when you did get up there, it was only for that moment never to be repeated again. Well that would be true unless you decided to sing it up at Red Karaoke.

Red Karaoke gives you the ability to sing your favorite songs and have it hosted on their site to share with others. Depending on how good you are at karaoke, this could be a good thing or a bad thing because members can comment and do vote on your performance.

The quality of the music reminds us of general midi files, but then again the accompaniment isn’t the star here you are. If you want to give your performance a tiny more pizazz connect your web cam for some video karaoke action! The service itself is fun and easy to use. And Red Karaoke does offer a decent selection of songs ranging from the 1950’s to the present in a variety of genres.

But try as we did, we couldn’t find any NKOTB.

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Filed under: Social Software, web 2.0

TwitterCounter has one simple purpose in life, to give you a counter to display the number of people that follow you, from Twitter, on your website.

Just enter your user name and TwitterCounter will display the number of people following you over a seven day period. To display the updating counter on your website simply copy the available code and paste it to your site for all to see.

If you’re really into your Twitter stats, enter your email address to receive daily updates. Because we all know you’re only a few followers short of that elusive number one spot!

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Filed under: Borrowing, Debt, Transportation, Bankruptcy

Nobody needs a home to fall on them (any more) to know that taking out a subprime mortgage is a lousy idea.

But car title loans — there doesn’t seem to be a lot of attention paid to these yet.

And so I just thought I’d mention that automobile title loans — which are illegal in some says like Florida — are a rotten idea. Sure, this is my thought, but if you know nothing about them, read on, and see what you think.

It can sound nice at first, because if you take out a vehicle title loan, you have open-ended credit, and credit, these days, is kind of hard to come by. At least for some people, it is. (You read enough articles about the economy, and it’s easy to forget that there are many Americans who are doing just fine, the price of gas notwithstanding.) Anyway, automobile title loans do offer you open-ended credit, yes, but that’s the only selling point, which is a good way to put it, I guess, since in a way you’re selling your automobile to these financial companies that issue them.

What happens is that a company will offer you a loan that you can pay back within 25 days and not owe any interest. So far, so good. But what if you don’t pay it in 25 days? What if you pay it in 26?

In theory, you can lose your vehicle. In reality, too.

But that’s not what happens. You don’t want to lose your car, so you’re talked into rolling over the loan, and so your interest gets higher. By law, you can roll over the debt six times, in which case the interest and payments are extremely high, and then since, of course, you still can’t pay, the repossession process begins. If you don’t want to lose your car, you generally stick your car in the garage, where it can’t legally be repossessed, provided the garage door is shut. Not that it does you much good. You’ll be afraid to drive your car, for fear that when it’s out of the garage, you’ll have it taken away. That’s the fate of 30-year-old Joseph Ledford, who gets by on disability payments and bravely told his story in last week’s Chicago Tribune.

According to that article in the Tribune, of 16 says that grant these loans, Illinois is the only one that doesn’t regulate the loans. They tried to back in 2001, putting rules in place that covered loans up to 60 days. But most lenders, the Tribune reports, shifted the loans to 61 days or longer to avoid the rules. Adorable. Meanwhile, the say hasn’t changed the law to reflect those changes.

The auto title lending process typically shakes down this way: You give your car’s title and a copy of the keys to a lender. They then give you a loan up to half the car’s wholesale value. The borrower then concurs to repay the loan plus a tiny extra for the trouble — generally 300% annual interest — as well as other fees. You often have to pay the loan back within a month or two, or in Illinois’s case, 61 days or a bit longer.

And, of course, in the end, almost always, you lose your car, and you’ve forgotten why you initially took out the loan in the first place.

So if you’re thinking of taking out a car title loan, don’t. Find another way. If you need the money that badly, you already have enough problems.

Geoff Williams is a business journalist and the author of C.C. Pyle’s Extraordinary Foot Race: The True Story of the 1928 Coast-to-Coast Run Across America (Rodale).

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Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Windows Mobile, Productivity, Web services, Social Software, iPhone

If you’re not one of the 125,000 people who got a opportunity to try out the cross-platform note capture app Evernote during its private beta, don’t despair. Evernote has launched an open beta, so now everyone can give it a try. If you were already in the beta, does this change anything for you? Yes, indeed it does: there are now two types of Evernote accounts, free and premium.

Free users keep all the features of the shut beta, with the caveat that you’re now limited to 40mb a month of uploaded notes. If you’re a power-user, or someone who’s really sold on the Evernote lifestyle, go premium for 5 bucks a month or $45/year and get rid of that cap. Premium also comes with the option of SSL for all your uploads (for all those pictures of the enemy base, we guess) and priority access to the queue for Evernote’s text-recognition features.

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Filed under: Text, Social Software, web 2.0

A mind map is a graphical representation of words or ideas that are linked around a central theme. Putting down your ideas on a mind map really helps to concentrate your efforts to ensure you stay focus. But while mind maps are generally helpful, assembling one on your computer might require a map of its own.

Instead of figuring out how to put one together yourself, text2mindmap has developed a site where you can enter in your ideas in an outline format and Text2mindmap will generate a fully interactive map. You can move the segments of the map around to see how each word or idea is connected to another.

The site is in beta and configuration options are limited to font, color and sizing. What would be nice for future updates, is the ability to download your map to some sort of self contained application that will allow you to retain all the interactive aspects of the map instead of the static image download option currently available.

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Filed under: Internet, Social Software, web 2.0, Browsers

Social web browsing plugin Yoono has emerged from private beta. The new version still wears a beta label, but it’s available to the public. Yoono is basically a utility that hangs out in the Firefox sidebar and gives you quick access to instant messenging services, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, FriendFeed, and Piczo.

The public beta adds support for Firefox. It also packs a few new features:

• Filter your friends activity by network, group, or names
• Add FriendFeed and Flickr comments
• Send Twitter direct messages and replies
• Upload pictures to Facebook or poke friends
• Browse Digg video

Yoono will also be adding Google Speak and MySpace soon. There does appear to be a bug that prevents Yoono from working properly on Firefox 3 in some cases. The problem seems to show up if you’ve installed some other browser plugins. Yoono is expected to release an updated version addressing this problem within the next few days.

[via Mashable]

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