“What is normally a charged — but fun — environment for our users and editors has become mean, ugly, pointless, and frankly threatening in some situations… and that’s just not acceptable. Some of you out there in the world of anonymous grandstanding have gotten the impression that you run the place, but that’s simply not the case.”

Goooo Engadget! [via Jamey]

They just released all of their charts for free (which is something I’m surprised wasn’t free before…) so you can go back and see the music charts for whatever date in the past.

The COOL new thing that’s going to keep me coming back though is the music that you can listen to for free.  You can browse their top 100 list and listen to “every” song on it (I noticed that lots of the songs play buttons were missing – not sure why, but this sort of irritating).

The only blatant downfall right now is the implementation of the player, and the layout – which is sort of sloppy.  Things overlap funny, and if you’re playing music and you click the back button the music starts all over again.  I’m sure they’ll fix these bugs, but they were noticeable to me.

Nice job Billboard for giving me a reason to visit your site.

Super easy steps to enable this feature:

1. Close Safari
2. Open Terminal
3. type in defaults write com.apple.safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true and press enter

Tada!  You’re done.  Quick and painless.

And for all of you that have unibody MacBooks and love the new trackpad, Safari 4 does use the three finger swipe gestures for navigating forward and backward (though not for going to the top and bottom of the page like firefox does).

I’ve been using firefox for a long time and was a huge fan, but I’m finally making the switch and I’m feeling pretty happy about it.

I’m not sure what others have been saying about Microsoft’s new Bing search engine, but I just noticed that it was starting to make an appearance on my Google Analytics stats.  It’s referring the third most visits out of the 11 search engines that have made an impression on my blog in the past 30 days.   At the top of the list sits Google… then Yahoo… then Bing.  What’s interesting to me is that it’s almost as effective as Yahoo and it’s brand new.

Here are the stats:

1. Google is bring in just over 95% all my search engine traffic.
2. Yahoo brings in 2.3%
3. Bing brings in 1.3%
4. All the others (aol, ask, live, search, msn, altavista, cnn, etc…) bring in about 1.6%

Unfortunately when the weekend came I didn’t find much comfort in relaxation.  Instead I spent money on buying Twittersort.com.  I’ve proceeded to spend almost my entire weekend coding the website – we’ll see if I can get it up and running tonight.

It’s been a lot of work, but I’ve got all the major hurdles jumped over already.  Twitter API – check.  Website database communication – check.  Proxies for Twitter API and Website database communication – check.  Silverlight front end – piece of cake.

I’m not going to spoil what the idea is, but I’ll be sure to post all about it once I go live, so come back soon so you can check it out.

The first thing I love about Twitter is that it has different uses.  Some use it as a place to congregate with their friends or connect with new people.  Others want to promote their business or blog.  Some just want to share all the cool stuff they find around the net.  Then of course there are those that don’t share  just want to read what others are sharing.

I use Twitter for three reasons: To connect with people, find interesting news, and promote my blog.

Connecting with people
There are lots of reasons why people want to be connected with other people.  By nature I think that most of us want to be connected.  Twitter is no exception.

Find interesting news
Most of us have configured ourselves to search for information in a specific way: every day we check the CNN headlines, maybe check Digg, browse through the 100 RSS feeds you’re subscribed to (you should subscribe to my RSS feed too, btw) and check other favorite sites.  We do this everyday.  We get sucked into this pattern.  Twitter refreshes my browsing habits and lets me explore again.  My favorite reason for using Twitter is that it’s a great source of unique information. I’m connected to a whole bunch of people that don’t have the same browsing habits as me – they frequent different sites and have other avenues for information.  Then they post the most interesting things that they find, leaving me with the cream of the crop.

“Great, so now I’m following 10,000 people, and they’ve all posted cool stuff.  How on earth am I going to read everything from all these people?”

Sit back.  Relax.  You don’t have to.

I open up twitter when I’m bored with my usual news sources.  You don’t have to worry about catching everything.  Just read the latest tweets, or read what your friend’s have been up to.  It’s like plugging in to the conversation highway for a few minutes just to see what people are talking about.  If something is really exciting there will be lots of people talking about the same thing.

Promoting my blog
Twitter can be used as a tool.  I find the “Twitter=tool” analogy to be the key to making Twitter useful for me.  At first Twitter felt like a very personal experience – that there were rules in the Twitter world: only follow people that you really care about, don’t follow strangers, keep in touch with all your followers.  I quickly realized that in this sense Twitter was very small for me, and not very useful.  Then I saw somebody describe Twitter as a tool.  I began thinking: well wait a minute, why not add a whole bunch of strangers that twitter about things I’m interested in?  Maybe they have something interesting to say, and maybe they’ll be interested in what I have to say.  Sure enough – I started adding people and they started adding me back. More followers equals more blog exposure. This also led to me to realize how much cool stuff everybody is posting…

For those that do check out my blog via Twitter – thanks for reading   You’re posts are equally appreciated.

I saw this first over at NetGenDesign.