I was IM'ing last night with the head of Live Sino (LiveSide China) and PicturePan2 mentioned that was using WL Messenger on Blackberry.  Even though I'm a Windows Mobile user, I was intrigued as I have a bunch of friends (mostly from outside the tech industry) who use Blackberries and it would be great to IM with them. 

Conveniently, LiveSino just posted screenshots of the Blackberry experience and I've included a few below.  Check out the full post for the rest.  Cheers--
--Rob

P.S. If you've used functionality like this in the USA, please let me know what you think.

P.P.S. If you're on the team that makes this application, leave a comment (or send a message) and I can try to get you the list of codes for the I'm making a difference campaign for *komen, *red+u, etc. 

I've been wondering why my 40 GB hard drive on my laptop was nearly full when I only have ~27 GB of system files, pictures, and documents. 

Then Outlook hit an issue that helped me to figure out the problem.  One of my Outlook files got corrupted and I got this message:

This led me to open the C:\Users\robdolin\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\ folder and find that I had an outlook.ost file that was nearly 10 GB.  I guest that's the 27 GB --> 37 GB difference :)

I ended-up deleting this file and in the process of re-sync'ing my email with the Exchange server, I deleted a few GB of old email. 

The laptop feels like it's running a bit faster, I've got more free room on the hard drive, and the Outlook file corruption is resolved.  I guess I'm sort of glad the file got corrupted.  :)

We both Like Dare's blog entry that "Giving Sh*t Away is not a Business Strategy."

My colleague Dare Obasanjo has an interesting post on The GOOG -> MSFT Exodus that I think uncovers some interesting issues with Google's system of tons of individual contributor developers and extremely flat organization hierarchies. 

I'm not the biggest fan of a ton of career levels (it's nine promotions from starting individual contributor (59) to partner (68) at Microsoft); but having levels and offering opportunities for advancement is nice when you're actually planning to stay at a company for more than a few years.

Earlier this evening, I got a twitter from one of the founding members of the Spaces team that George Carlin just died.  I was surprised that the MSNBC article did not link to an actual transcript of the routine and thanks to Live Search and Justin R. Erenkrantz: http://www.erenkrantz.com/Humor/SevenDirtyWords.shtml. 

Carlin, like Lenny Bruce, pushed the boundaries of comedy and free speech.  To this twentysomething, in addition to hearing and reading the "seven dirty words," my two key memories of Carlin are as Rufus in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and as the Cardinal (right) in Dogma. 

You may have heard that Facebook surpassed MySpace as the largest Social Network in the world.  If your political organization or non-profit does not have an outpost on Facebook, now is a great time to get started. 

Two of the biggest reasons to use Facebook (or other Social Networks) to promote your organization are:

• Virality features - features like the "news feed" and "status updates" provide mechanisms for passive sharing so when user A joins your group, (some of) the friends of user A get a news item
• Contacts built-in - many users already have hundreds of contacts in the social network so it's easy for them to invite those contacts to your group or event (rather than having to look-up emails or phone numbers for those contacts.)

So what should you do?  It depends on the scope of your organization or event:

A) One-time Event - If you're just doing a one-time event:
    1. Create the Event
    2. Update your Status with a link to the Event
    3. Invite Friends to the Event (see right)
    4. (Wait a few days then) Ask attendees to Invite their Friends

Note: Be sure to make your Event Global so anyone can participate.

B) Local Group (<1,000)- If you're building a local group that you expect to be less than 1,000 folks, you can use a "Group" in Facebook.  Similar to above:
    1. Create the Group
    2. Update your Status with a link to the Group
    3. Invite Friends to the Group
    4. (Wait a few days then) Ask members to Invite their Friends

If your group is likely going to have many events that you would want to invite people to, these two suggestions may be useful:
    a) Create a Friends List for your friends potentially interested in the Group for easy invites
    b) Create Events for the Group as opposed to stand-alone Events

C) Large Group - If you expect a massive group (ex: targetted Congressional race), you will likely want to use a Page instead of a Group.  Pages cannot message their members using the standard private messages, but they can push "Updates" that their members see.  Most of the same suggestions as B) apply to Pages.

I hope folks found this helpful.  Please leave a comment if you have other suggestions.  Thanks much--
--Rob

P.S. Kevin Bondelli has a great related article on how to find potential members for your Facebook Group.

Kudos to my colleague Chris who compiled this lengthy FAQ: Windows Live Spaces - Frequently Asked Questions

It looks like the first 1,000 people who post a YouTube video with Sprint's new Instinct phone will get $20 for "product placement" in their movie.  IMHO, this seems like a great long tail play by Sprint; and for $20,000 it's probably a drop in the bucket for both the movie and the phone's marketing budget.  I'd be interested to see if the marketers find this promotion to have a strong return on investment.