There is a Groundswell going on with regard to Twitter and community building. Earlier today I read this on my Twitter Stream from @LoriLeavitEvans. She was ReTweeting something another local Twitter person had tweeted earlier:
RT @harmonymatters: This is nifty! DM orders for coffee, drinks, food.. why not? http://tinyurl.com/dgxe9g Retailers: great idea here!
about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck
I dug into this story and this points toward how Twitter is being used in a community and has created buzz not to mention increasing the business of a coffee shop.
Essentially a local coffee shop in Houston got into the Twittersphere and has been receiving a significant number of orders not to mention a significant local following via Twitter.
Check out the article, check out my Vlog above and let me know what you think.
Okay, I’ve been reading Groundswell and in it it talks about the fact that 28% of the U.S. population likes to watch user generated video which is more then the 25% of consumers who like to read blogs. My guess is that a significant portion of the audience who might read this blog will also watch video, so in looking at different video equipment I went out and bought a Insignia 720p Camera from Best Buy for $99.99. Add the 4 Gig memory chip for an additional $14.99, I now have a really cool set-up for recording video in my home office.
I’ve had a Playstation 3 for a little over a year. Shortly after I picked up a Samsung 1080p 63″ Plasma for our wall in the living room and wanted to play Blue Ray Discs on it for maximum resolution.
Shortly after that we signed up for Netflix which has a lot of Blue Ray disks and for the $18/month it seemed better then going down to the video store and finding out that movies that we wanted to watch were already checked out.
Netflix on the website talked about “Watch Instantly” but I don’t really like watching movies at my desk in the home office so I didn’t take advantage of the Watch Instantly option. A couple of months ago it started to dawn on me that maybe I could watch the movies through my Playstation 3. Well it turns out that Netflix isn’t compatible with Playstation 3, only the X-Box 360. Not to be deterred I continued to look for other options. Then I found PlayOn
http://www.themediamall.com/playon which claimed to work with Netflix. I installed the 15 day trial and in addition to Netflix I discovered a whole new way to watch video on demand.
Essentially PlayOn installs into the background of one of your ‘s and then processes the video from numerous sources on demand from the Playstation3. We have a wireless network so it then broadcasts the video to our Playstation 3 wirelessly and the Playstation 3 puts it to the Plasma.
Hulu is included with the PlayOn and once I signed up for a Hulu account I now have access to many of the latest episodes of tons of TV shows, movies ect with very limited commercial, It’s awesome. Looking at a lot of the redundant programming we had from Cable we have dropped all but limited basic cable and have saved around $80/month just by installing a $30 piece of software. Of course you do need high speed internet to be able to watch all these shows on Demand, so we still have a $50 bill per month for internet with our provider Comcast, however we would have that anyway.
Now I just need to figure out how to be able to add to my “Watch Instantly Queue” on Netflix from my iPhone.
