Orange County Web Design Blog

Are you a Twitter user? Are you a Poet? Well if you said yes to both of these or at least one, you’ll find TwitterMagnets.com a lot of fun and also addicting. Twitter magnets allows you to arrange a set of predefined words and letters on a board and makes them into a Poem that you can submit to your Twitter account or theirs.

They also play a nice relaxing melody as you work on your masterpiece. Give it a try and be sure to come back here and tell me what you think? You can also follow me on Twitter @fiswebdesign and send me a DM with your latest Magnet, I’m curious to see what people come up with.

Have Fun..!

This is cool and I didn’t even know it existed, boy Google seems to have their hands in just about everything. Google’s new Flu Trend Tracker, uses aggregated data to estimate flu activity up to two weeks in advance of the media and news agencies so you can stay ahead of any fast spreading bugs. They use their Powerful Google Analytics software for viewing the data and it’s all separated by Country, then State or Region, check it out, look up your area, here’s the link - http://google.org/flutrends.

Twitter is probably the fastest know way to get information these days, with Millions of users all over the World, so The World Health Organization (WHO) has created a Twitter account to update the public fast, here’s the Twitter ID, @w0rldhealthorg be sure to follow them, you never know when it may come in handy.

There’s also the Center for Disease Control (CDC) website to get more detailed information about possible alerts, but don’t expect them to be as fast and up to date as WHO’s Twitter feed or Google’s Trend Tracker, it is the Government after all.

Be sure to book mark this post or the links contained for future reference. I hope you found the info helpful.

If you’re an avid Mac user like me and you also use Gmail, then you’ll love Mailplane. Mailplane brings desktop, drag and drop capability within Google’s Gmail and so much more. You can drag and drop images right into Gmail, print documents to Mailplane and they’re attached to a new e-mail in Gmail. Here’s the Demo video from the Mailplane site.

If you would like to watch more Screencasts - click here.

Mailplane offers a 30 day free trial, otherwise it costs $24.95 for one license and an extra $15.00 to add the whole family, not bad considering you get the features of free Gmail combined with the power of the Mac UI as a Desktop App. If you have the Bodega App Store for your Mac Desktop, you can find Mailplane there as well. I blogged about Bodega back on August 3rd, here’s the link to my post.

While searching for an Angel Investor for a large internal project we’ve been working on, I ran into a site called Prosper. What Prosper does is lend money to average everyday Americans like you and me and they also allow someone interested in lending money to become an investor. So to simplify things, Prosper creates a connection between a person looking for money and a person willing to lend money.

It’s sort of setup similar to E-Bay, in that you create an account, tell your story, how much you want, what interest rate you’re willing to except and then the Investors on the site Bid on loaning you money by offering a lower rate, then another investor offers a better deal with a lower rate, and so on, and so on.

What I like about this is, that these are real everyday Americans in need of money and the Investors are real everyday Americans willing to take a risk on lending you money.

Here’s the link to their How It Works page on the Prosper site. They’re not currently offering Loans in all States yet, I assume they have to go through a State by State licensing approval process, but here’s a link from their Blog that shows the States they currently cover - Click here for State List.

Kevin Gillett writes a good Article about Funding for Small Business which is posted in the Prosper Blog.

Now for something up our alley, Prosper has a nice piece of Dynamic Flash on their home page which pulls in the Featured, Second Loans and Ending Soon using a nice visual transition, definitely going to find some cool uses for that.