Stephanie Liu

Lose Weight With Web 2.0

It’s 2009 and you’ve made a couple of New Year’s resolutions. And if you’re like most “resolutioners” – your number one resolution is to lose weight (myself included šŸ™‚ ).

Great ā€” so what social media tools or communities are out there that can help us meet this goal?

Meet TheDailyPlate.com

The Daily Plate (TDP) allows you to search more than 502,000 food items for calorie counts, total carbs, fat, and protein so you can track what you’re eating. What’s great about this search function is that when you search for a certain food, TDP also provides healthy alternativesĀ  with fewer calories and reviews made by other members. You can even log what you’ve eaten in a free food diary that you can access online, through their mobile site, or via the LiveStrong iPhone application (my favorite iPhone app) which is available for free for a limited time.

Once you’ve registered at TDP, it’s easy to get started. Simply type a food item in the search box and add the item to your daily plate. TDP will calculate your daily calories automatically. You can even track your daily activites (i.e. running, walk, etc.) and log the calories you burn each day.

So if you’re serious about keeping your resolution to lose weight, check out The Daily Plate and see what they have to offer and don’t forget – it’s FREE.

What other web 2.0 tools are you using to meet your New Year’s resolutions?

Stephanie Liu

Share Scribbles and More On Springpad

Todayā€™s Guest Blogger is Alana from Good Girl Gone Blog. Alana is a college student and a member of Twenty Something Bloggers. She’s currently interning at a company called Springpad which looks pretty cool but I won’t spill the beans on what they’re all about. I’ll let Alana do that instead. šŸ˜‰

My name is Alana, but you can call me Good Girl Gone Blog. Iā€™m just a regular college student, stressing about classes, going to parties and doing some major blogging on the side. To tell you the truth, I never even read blogs until this summer, when a mentor of mine told me I couldnā€™t become a journalist until I started following blogs, and writing one of my own. From then on, I was hooked.

I wouldnā€™t call myself a social media expert, because Iā€™m definitely still learning. In that way, I’m kind of like Luke Skywalker, a paduan hoping to learn from the Jedi masters. Fortunately for me, I landed a fabulous internship working with a bunch of tech-savvy mac users. I like to think of my boss as my own personal Yoda, minus the

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confusing speech patterns. She’s taught me so much already about sites like Twitter, Delicious, and Bit.ly. Plus, she and her team have developed a really cool new product that I thought Iā€™d share with you, my fellow paduans and social media Jedis. (Perhaps I’ve taken this metaphor a little too far…)

Itā€™s called Springpad and itā€™s perfect for a busy girl like myself. Imagine a way to organize your entire life in a set of online notebooks! No more lost sticky notes, grocery lists written on the back of receipts or forgotten recipes, with Springpad, you can create the everyday lists with a little extra pizzazz from the Internet.

Check out this demo and see for yourself:

Whatā€™s even cooler about Springpad, is that itā€™s a great tool for bloggers. Suppose I enjoy the most amazing bagel of my life at a restaurant in Boston, and want to share that experience with my readers. With Springpad, I can write my blog post and then pull up a restaurant listing from ā€œYelpā€ that my readers can add to their Springpads. Whatā€™s even more awesome is that my brand name will appear alongside the restaurant listing. And yes, I did write a blog entry (complete with a SpringIt link, of course) about my favorite bagel.

Hereā€™s a video showing how you can engage your readers by incorporating Springpad into your blog:


There’s a lot more I could tell you about Springpad, but why not check out the Website for yourself? With all the craziness of the holiday season, you could use a little organization in your life! So hey, why not simplify it a bit?

Stephanie Liu

Splitweet Is Perfect For Twitter Power Users

Earlier this year, I wrote about Matt, a web application built by the Carsonified team, to solve the problem of posting to multiple Twitter accounts. Matt was useful in that I didn’t have to log into each of my accounts separately. However, if I wanted to view tweets from individuals I was following via both accounts, I would still have to log into each account individually. The same rule applies if I wanted to see who replied to my tweets.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could view all of your friend’s tweets and replies on multiple accounts on just one application?

Will was thinking the same thing as well and asked me earlier this year…

“Out of all the twitter clients Iā€™ve been browsing through, a lot of the same features of being able to post to multiple places at once for example. Nothing that Iā€™ve seen so far does this in combination with being able to see the tweets from multiple accounts; have you come across anything like this yet?”

At the time, I didn’t know of any application that did just that until now. Thanks to Problogger’s tweet this afternoon, I found out about Splitweet. It’s the perfect multi-account Twitter management and brand monitor for Twitter power users.

All your accounts, one place.

All you have to do is create an account then add your Twitter accounts. In a matter of seconds you’ll start to see tweets from the people that you’re following.

Follow your contacts’ tweets easily.

Each tweet is color coded to reflect which account you’re following them under.

Monitorize your brand & reply.

You can even monitor your brand with Splitweet. Simply enter the brand name on your profile settings and hit save, and you’ll start to see mentions of your brand pop up and you can reply directly from the UI.

Overall, it’s a great application for individuals that manage multiple accounts and want more features. It’d be even better if it tracked how many people clicked on a link you twittered like Tweetburner. I wonder how long that will take to develop.

In the meantime, have fun Twittering and donā€™t forget to add me as a friend if you havenā€™t done so already.

Stephanie Liu

Track Packages in Transit With Twitter

The holidays are just around the corner and soon the malls will be packed with eager shoppers and hopefully a lot of deals. Unfortunately, during this time of year, parking gets rough at the malls and the lines are ridiculous. If you’re not a big fan of the long lines like me, you’ll most likely be shopping online and taking advantage of free shipping from multiple online retailers.

For online shoppers, you can take advantage of TrackThis to receive updates on the location of your package(s) via Twitter, SMS, or email. In the event that your orders are being delivered by multiple delivery services, you can still count on TrackThis to have you coveredā€”TrackThis supports tracking codes for DHL, UPS, USPS, and FedEx.

To start tracking your packages on Twitter follow these simple steps:

1. Go to twitter.com/trackthis and click on the follow button. TrackThis will follow you automatically which will enable you to send direct messages.

2. Send a direct message to TrackThis with your package’s tracking code (must be a tracking code from FedEx/UPS/USPS/DHL) first then a short description or title of your package.

For example: 123456789987 Flip Ultra Video

3. Finally, an update on your package will be sent to you as a direct message within twenty minutes. Afterwards, you’ll continue to receive updates each time the location of your package changes.

Now wasn’t that easy?

What holiday shopping tips do you have?

Stephanie Liu

Avoiding a Business Card Hiccup

Last week I met up with my old colleagues at a Happy Hour 2.0 in La Jolla. It was the perfect opportunity to catch up with them since I recently started a new job and to mingle with other marketers, developers, and other web people. The only drawback was that I didn’t have my new business cards or any moo cards to hand out. Fortunately, HeyStephanie.com was easy for my new friends to remember and I was able to get by with giving my email address.

Meanwhile, I still don’t have any new business cards so in the interim, I had to find a solution to my business card dilemma. Luckily, I stumbled across MyDropcard.com which lets you easily share your contact info with your phoneā€”for free!

Once you’ve registered and entered all of your contact information at the site, you’re good to go. As if that wasn’t cool enough, you can create two separate profiles; one for business and the other for personal contacts.

When you meet someone new, simply text “drop” and their email address to “41411” and Dropcard will deliver your contact info directly to their email. You can even add your social network profiles on your dropcard (i.e. LinkedIn) or your blog.

Dropcard also has convenient text messaging shortcuts so you don’t have to waste so much time texting. For example, you can replace the “@” symbol when typing your friend’s email address with a space and Dropcard will know what you mean. And if your friend’s email is on Gmail, even better! Text “drop” and their email address without “@gmail.com” and you’re done. For more ways to cut your text time, check out more Dropcard shortcuts here.

Not only is this handy, it sure beats carrying 100+ business cards to hand out at a conference. On top of that, soon they’ll be offering users more features (i.e. personal logo, attachments, statistics, etc.) for $4.99 a month. That might be helpful for the hardcore networkers.

So what about you? Is there a different service that you use to send contact info to colleagues through your phone? What would you do in this type of situation?

Stephanie Liu

Save Time Post at Ping.fm

Ping.fm is the most effective way to update your status on multiple social networks. A single post to Ping.fm can update 16 popular social services at the same time so you don’t have to sign into each account individually. You can post a status update, a blog, or micro-blog through one platform and posting a link won’t be a problem at all – Ping.fm will automatically convert it to a shorter link before posting to your services.

This week my status updates to Facebook, LinkedIn, Mashable, Myspace, Plaxo Pulse, Plurk, and Twitter and took less than a minute to complete. If I signed into each account individually, it would have taken me even longer.

Ping.fm saves me time and it can save you time as well.Go to Ping.fm and sign up with the beta code “pingofpings”.

After you sign up, check out a quick-and-easy tutorial that Trevor at BordelineTheory.com put together. Or you can check out Bwana.tv’s video tutorial below.

(Photo Credit: Ping.fm)

(Video Credit: Bwana.tv)

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