Trey Connell

I love funny t-shirts, and the fact that I wear so many t-shirts (working at home!) guarantees that I’m going to wear them out quickly and need to refresh the collection. I found a great new online store to get funny t-shirts called Rizzo Tees.

Chris – the owner – runs the company out of his basement for now, but you’d never know it when it comes to his customer service. I’ve placed multiple orders with Rizzo Tees, and communication regarding my orders has always been top-notch. Chris also interacts with his customers over Twitter which gives everything a real personal service touch.

I really think Rizzo Tees is an example of a company who has it right – leverage social media, provide a simple online storefront with great products, and provide stellar customer service. When you combine those three things, you truly have something special.

Now go buy some t-shirts!

I have a lot of books and video games that I won’t ever read or play again. For books, I had ventured out to my local used book store a couple of times, but the way the credit works usually makes me not want to go back and actually use that credit. For video games, I either sell them on e-bay for anywhere from $5 to $20 or trade them in at the local Gamestop.

I figured there had to be a better way of recycling these items so I went looking around and found swaptree.com. Swaptree allows you to trade books, video games, music and movies with others for free. After signing up, you enter in UPC and ISBN numbers to populate the list of things you have and are willing to trade. You can also search for and select things that you want in return.  These are your “have” and “want” lists.

Swaptree finds matches with other people and sends you both an email to setup the trade, and both parties can either accept or reject the trade.  Swaptree will also not propose a trade for two items of unequal value (like a book for a recently released video game). If both parties accept, you’re then given a link to print a shipping label. The shipping cost is then charged to your credit card.  So far it looks like normal shipping costs range from $2.50 to $3.50. But it just depends on the weight of the item.  I’m sure shipping an encyclopedia would be more expensive than $3.50.

I’ve accepted 5 trades so far and shipping out all my items this morning. I have 3 new books and 2 new video games coming in, and I’ve spent about $15. Not bad considering the books and games I traded were sitting on the shelf for months collecting dust.

Do you know of any other sites out there where you can trade these kinds of items? How do they stack up against Swaptree.com?

Mafia Wars gives you the opportunity to buy “Limited Time Offers” in the form of weapons and vehicles. They cost $10,000 each and you have to add two mafia members for each one you buy. It’s very tempting to snatch up all you can get. You mean I can get a Punch Knife with 21 attack and 11 defense for only $10K? Great! Well, not really…

The problem is that eventually you CANNOT GIFT these items. There is no way to get rid of them at all. You’ll eventually start collecting more powerful weapons, but you won’t use those in fightts because these limited time offers are stuck in the way.

Here’s an example of how I could improve my combat score but can’t. I bought 23 Punch Knives when they were made available. Later, I started looting and finding Cane Knives with 18 attack and 28 defense. The problem is that Mafia Wars uses the weapon with the higher attack score – in this case, the Punch Knife. But your combat score goes up when you use weapons, armor, and vehicles with the highest COMBINED score (attack + defense). So the Cane Knife is better (46 total) than the Punch Knife (32 total), but the only way to make Mafia Wars use the Cane Knife is to get rid of the Punch Knives. Since you can’t gift those limited time offers, you’re stuck. As a result, I have 41 Cane Knives that are doing me no good whatsoever.

So learn from my mistake and don’t be overly anxious to go buy limited time offers that you can’t gift later. Be patient and wait for the good stuff.

Mafia Wars is currently offering a Hearse. Don't buy it!

A lot of people think you have to complete job levels in order, but you can actually jump around however you wish. One of the best things you can do is completely skip the underboss level and concentrate on Boss. The Boss level takes forever, but once you complete it you get a Golden Throne (big yellow toilet). The Golden Throne gives you two experience points every 4.5 minutes instead of only one experience point. Now you’re gaining energy twice as fast and can go back and knock out the Underboss level FAST.

Zynga did a great job building Mafia Wars, but the sometimes the integration between the game and Facebook limits how efficiently you can do things.  In order to make some of the more mundane tasks easier, use Bobby Heartrate’s Mafia Tools.  They are a collection of bookmarklets that you can drag and drop onto your Firefox or Internet Explorer toolbar. They give you the ability to do things like switching quickly between someone’s Facebook and Mafia Wars profiles. Another handy bookmarklet allows you to add someone to your mafia while viewing their Facebook profile page.

Go get Bobby Heartrate’s Mafia Tools. Note: these only work in the Facebook version of Mafia Wars. You MySpace losers are S.O.L.

I’ve been waiting for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 ever since I completed the original Modern Warfare well over a year ago. Developed by Infinity Ward, Modern Warfare took the success and evolution of the previous Call of Duty games set in World War II and gave gamers an updated, more polished experience that put more modern weaponry, strategy and tactics in our hands.

Now Infinity Ward is using social media to solicit feedback for Modern Warfare 2. Robert Bowling has setup a Twitter feed where you can reply with your suggestions and requests for the game. Activision has said that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 will be released near the end of this year so go on over and let Robert know what you want for Christmas! I’ve already asked for a bigger sniper rifle with an even longer kill shot mission.  

At first, BudURL.com looks like yet another URL shrinking site, but it has another feature that really makes it valuable: BudURL tracks the clicks for each URL you setup and lets you run reports that include the Timestamp, Referrer, IP address, Keywords, and IP Host that clicked on your link.

I see lots of people using this service on twitter.com so you can setup a special promotion URL and then track how many people respond to it. You can also use it for any regular link on a web site. 

BudURL lets you setup 250 URLs under the free plan but also includes premium plans ranging from $4 to $49 per month with more URLs and reporting capabilities (including clickstreams).

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So far I’ve only setup 2 URLs to test out the service, but it looks really promising and very valuable. What’s your experience with BudURL or other similar sites?

One of the challenges when dealing with Twitter is finding people to follow (and who will hopefully follow you) who are relevant to you and your interests. You can use Twitter’s search and spend hours looking through the masses only to find just a few people you find interesting.

Mr. Tweet changes all that by analyzing your tweets and network of people you follow and making suggestions for people you might want to check out and follow.  It will also recommend you to others that might want to follow you as well.

If you’re having trouble finding valuable people to add to your fellow tweeters then check out Mr. Tweet. Do you know of any other tools for finding people on Twitter that will be relevant and interesting to you?

I’m not sure “unfollowing” is a real world – or “unfollow” for that matter. Scrabble anyone?

Anyway, I’ve noticed one of the major PITA tasks you have to do in Twitter is to constantly go through the list of people that you’re following and unfollow those that are no longer following you. That happens for various reasons, and I’ve found the two most common to be:

They were unsuccessful in selling you whatever they were hawking on Twitter.

You simply had nothing in common with them, and they figured it out and took action before you.

As the list of people I follow grew, I really needed to find something to help me automate this process. As a result, I found SocialToo. You can register for free on socialtoo.com and setup unfollowing preferences for your Twitter account.

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Another great feature are the email alerts you can receive each day.  These detail all your new followers and everyone who unfollowed you and come in very handy as another way from preventing you from having to wade through your followers list every day.

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So if you’re looking to make your Twitterverse a bit more manageable, check out SocialToo.  Remember – automation is sweet. Manual tasks are lame.

I’m relatively new on Twitter, and so far it’s been a lot of fun watching people interact with each other, getting answers to questions, seeing updates and new information that I wouldn’t hear about till days later, and in general keeping up with friends and their activities. Unfortunately that seems to comprise about 10% of the micro-babble I witness. The other 90% is made up of people who I’m convinced don’t have real jobs and walk around in a bath robe all day.

For the first month, it was funny to see people – seemingly out of nowhere – shout things like “make love not war!” or “find your inner peace and project it to the world”. I even had passing thoughts that it was kinda cool to see positive declarations from complete strangers.  Kind of like that Dave Matthews video for “Everyday” where Judah Friedlander walks around and simply gives hugs out to random people that he meets on the street.  If you don’t have a warm fuzzy feeling at the end of that video then go see a therapist because you have some issues and you should work through them with a professional.

After about a month the constant flow of positive and uplifting projectiles fired at the Twitterverse became downright annoying. I had to start sifting through the massive amount of verbal refuse that was hitting my twitter client every minute like clockwork. Then curiosity got the best of me, and I started really digging in to the profiles of those folks sending these verbal gems. I started to see a pattern in their bios as terms like these kept jumping out at me:

• self improvement consultant
• life coach
• success guru
• spiritual wellness advisor
• relationship expert
• provoker of brilliance (people, I can’t make this shit up)

And what’s more, clicking to the web site they listed in their bio usually takes me to a place on the web that ranks right up there with pyramid schemes and $8 cups of coffee.  They’re rip-offs.

I should say that I don’t feel as though every person on Twitter that spouts positive and uplifting messages is full of shit. Some appear to genuinely care and pay attention to their followers and what they’re going through.  One such person is @MimiFeelGood. Just this week I announced I was shutting down 360matches.com. MimiFeelGood immediately replied and asked if I was OK – probably because she assumed I was another victim of the economic times we’re living in. I explained that it was simply a personal site that I no longer had time to run due to my new daughter and the demands of my real job. She laughingly replied, and it was nice to know that someone seemingly cared.

But believe me when I say people like MimiFeelGood are a drop of goodness in a sea of disingenious, late-night infomercial style bad acting. Only by constantly looking at those you initially choose to follow and weeding out this kind of junk, will you ever find any real value in Twitter.

A friend of mine turned me onto a new web site called goodreads.com. It allows you to group books you have read or want to read onto shelves and share reviews and discussions with friends. I signed up today, and it looks pretty good so far. I think the hardest and most time consuming part is just trying to enter a lot of books to fill your shelves and start writing about what you’ve read.  Kind of time consuming, but useful to someone nontheless.

I have no idea how useful or fun this is going to be, but I finally broke down and joined Twitter – basically for the helluvit. If I’m being honest, I may have joined simply so I’d have an excuse to use another application on my iPhone. In this case, I use Twitterfic to easily post “tweets” to my Twitter account. I can’t promise it’s going to be as exciting as reality TV, but you’re welcome to go on over and follow me if that’s what you’re in to.