Scott Magdalein

If you were watching the Super Bowl (#44) last night, you might have seen Google's search commercial. It was understated, but the significance of the ad wasn't in it's production value. It was a big deal because:

• Google doesn't advertise on TV.
• when it does spend ad-money, Google rarely advertises its search product, opting to market other products like Google Apps.
• Google's search ad is telling of how they view Bing as a competitor and automatically lends credibility to the claims of Microsoft's rising search star as well as the mode with which they touted their newest creation.

The Spirit serves believers in many ways. Comfort, encouragement, conviction, inspiration, etc. He also provides an invisible tie that binds all believers, although unity is sadly not synonymous with a bound-together people.

This happened over a year ago, but I thought I'd post it here again because it still cracks me up. Sean is my friend and he's also in the navy. He's very knowledgeable about guns, which is why this video is funny.

It's easy to fall into a rut of only thinking about Jesus in a single capacity. Usually, we like to think of him in a way that meets our needs. If we need a companion, we think of Jesus as human, but if we need healing, we think of Jesus as God. But Paul exemplifies how we ought to think of Jesus in his letter to the Roman believers.

Organizing people's personal information is a big business. The latest trend (last few years) has been to consolidate all the personal information management software into one application. Among the many that offer this kind of service are two of the leaders, Backpack and Google Sites. In this article, I compare the two apps based on the four most important aspects of choosing any type of software.

Seth Godin describes the single app that would make it worth buying an iPad. For him, it's a presentation tool that's more flexible than Powerpoint or Keynote. From the sound of it, it would be a mix between a football announcers digital scratch pad and swiss-army presenter tool with the ability to quick-launch companion apps like a calculator or embedded web browser.

YouVersion got some press coverage tonight from NewsOK, the online face of the Oklahoman. The news article discusses LifeChurch.tv, YouVersion's growth, YouVersion Live, our expansion to include more mobile Bible apps, and it includes a video interview with Bobby Gruenewald, the Pastor of Innovation at LifeChurch.tv.

Online prayer walls are all the rage with the kids nowadays. Well, not really, but if you insist on having one, you should check this out first: http://goo.gl/EIPL

I'm attempting to move as much of my computing to the web as possible. Ever since I started using Chrome (at the strong recommendation of the Architect), web apps feel really natural. Plus, I'm rooting for the Chrome OS in the battle between good and do-no-evil, so I'm throwing my (light) weight behind the cloud.

So far I've moved 90% of my "daily use" apps to the cloud. Of course, I'm still using a native browser (duh) and Skype (which our team now uses exclusively for chat), but I'm also still stuck with iTunes (although I only open it for iPhone app research or to rent a movie that's not on Netflix) . Here's proof: http://goo.gl/6c2K.

So when I decided to get rid of Tweetie for Mac (great native app) a couple weeks ago, I adopted Twitter.com as my replacement. What's impressive is that their own website is pretty powerful. It does everything I need with the exception of multiple accounts. This isn't an especially big deal since I only need to manage my personal Twitter account (@scottmagdalein) and the YouVersion Twitter account (@youversion).

But I think I'm becoming increasingly more persnickety about my Twitter app of choice. So, I asked my fellow Twitter users to help me out. Here are their answers:

• HootSuite
• CoTweet
• TweetFunnel
• SplitTweet
• Tweet3
• Brizzly

I looked at each, but ended up sticking with Brizzly because it's got a fun look, resembles the Twitter.com layout, and still gets the job done efficiently. Of course, I'm pretty tough on my apps and I tend to be fickle, so we'll see how long this one lasts.

(Postscript: All of the apps above are good. I don't think you'll be disappointed with any of them.)

If you aren't necessarily very techie, the title may sound off to you. Here's an explanation:

• Multi-touch is a phrase that describes how a human can interact with a touch sensitive computer, like an iPhone. It allows a user to use more than one finger at a time to manipulate what you see on the screen. For example, multi-touch allows iPhone users to pinch-to-zoom on a photo.
• Nexus One is the latest phone powered by Google's mobile operating system, Android. I bought one last month.