Another fantastic product: YouMail. Manage your voice mail through this website. I thought it was a dumb idea at first, but then again I thoguht YouTube was silly when they first launched (originally as a video dating site, I must note.) I signed up for YouMail today, and I gotta say it’s easy, clear, simple to use, and free. You can check your voicemail, see the caller’s ID (even if the caller isn’t in your address book), read a text transcript of the voicemail (in beta), set personal greetings for specific numbers, and receive MP3 emails for each voicemail message.

Once in a while I come across simple tools that just make sense. GrabUp is a tool that does one thing only, and does it well. I’m hooked!

Bust Out Solutions is looking for standards-based XHTML and CSS developers who have a good sense of search engine optimization and JavaScript. We are a full service web design and development shop located in Minneapolis, but are willing to work with good talent from anywhere.

No formal resume needed! Just email us the URL to your online portfolio or a list of sites that you’ve coded with a description of your responsibilities (i.e. CSS, XHTML, Javascript, IA, design, UX, etc.).

Matt Mullenweg and the WordPress community announced the release of WordPress 2.5 today. It continues to be Bust Out Solutions’s publishing platform of choice, and probably will be for a while as it keeps getting better! Way to go Matt, and the rest of the code contributors.

Webstandards, SEO, and CSS in 3 minutes 22 seconds.

Interesting article from A List Apart about the misuse of sign-up forms. The bottom line: engage new users in your site BEFORE you ask them to enter their personal information.

I gotta think the Cringely is a bit off in his article about the death of social networking. I think what he means to say, is the death of 95% of social websites as natural selection weeds out sites that don’t drive traffic. The big ones will turn a profit as the advertising model takes hold and revenue is generated.

I can’t tell you how many times a friend as come up to me and said, “I finally got a Facebook [MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn] accout. The whole thing is pretty dumb. What’s all the hype about?”

Next think I know, they’re throwing sheep at me every day, sending me super hero challenges every 10 minutes, and tweeting about their lunch break soup. I hope they realized they just answered their own question.

In Bob Cringely’s recent blog posting, “Social Networking is Just Another CB Radio,” he describes why he believes social websites are destined to crash and burn. His basic argument: there’s no business model, or at least not a very good one. If you have loads of traffic, you have a business model - advertising or acquisition. If you don’t have loads of traffic, your site will fail. Most social sites don’t have loads of traffic, because all the surf time is sucked up by the giants such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace, so they fail.

Thought it was interesting to see the number of followers and followings the presidential candidates had. I’m loosely following the candidates’ use of the internet in their campaigns. In general, Obama does seem to have a much stronger online presence than any other candidate, twitter stats aside.

I couldn’t find what appeared to be the official twitter sites of McCain or Huckabee. If you find them, please let me know!

Twitter Profile	Candidate	Followers	Following	Updates
	Obama	13,467	12,796	74
	Clinton	1,565	0	56
	Ron Paul	1016	0	85
	John McCain	N/A	N/A	N/A
	Mike Huckabee	N/A	N/A	N/A

(All data current as of March 3, 2008)