I’m not going to talk about the specifics, but you can consult the image above for some more facts regarding the benefits you receive. Let’s instead look at two iPhone and iPod apps that you can download that’ll augment your Starbucks enjoyment and visit. You can do a lot with your mobile phone and internet enabled devices. Here are two things that you can do with your mobile and have some Starbuck’s fun:

Starbucks: The official Starbucks coffee application for the iPhone and iPod touch. It’s everything that you need to know about Starbucks. Absolutely everything minus the products that they sell. Let’s break it down. With the Starbucks application, you can find the location of a Starbucks around you and view the services provided. See which locations have free wifi connections and which ones have drive-thrus. You’ll even be able to check if the branch is still open at the time you’re searching this up. Get directions to the coffee shop, invite a friend to come with you, share your location on your social networks, and add it to “myStarbucks”, which are you favorite stores. Searching for a Starbucks location that fits your needs has never been easier. You can filter the locations by amenity, which can come in very useful, especially if you want to take advantage of the “Mobile Payment” option that we’ll talk about later.

Under the drinks tab, you can have a look at their menu, discover new drinks, and create your own from scratch. Save your created drinks to “myStarbucks” and even share them with friends. Everything is customizable and all you have to do is take your custom drink over to the Starbuck’s you’re visiting. Under the coffees tab, browse all the different coffees, their descriptions, photos, and similar coffees. Don’t forget you can add your favorites to “myStarbucks”. You can even use the “explore” mode and pick a characteristic from a list that you want in your coffee and the application will find one for you! It’s a coffee chooser!

The food tab is pretty versatile. You can search for food by filtering by calories or filtering by the lack of a certain ingredient. It’s pretty self-explanatory once you start using it. In the food tab, you can view pictures, view nutrition information, view allergens, get drink pairings, and add to “myStarbucks”.

Starbuck’s Mobile Card: Have a Starbucks card that you’ve registered online? Or maybe you have a couple? If you have one buck haven’t registered it, go register it for some free goodies. With the Starbuck’s Mobile Card application, you can enter the information from your card into the application and check your balance from the app. You can even reload your card, set up auto-reload, and view your recent transactions. Also, after you’ve registered your card, you can track the number of stars you’ve earned and what level you’re on.

Then there’s a cool feature called Payment Trial, where you can pay for Starbucks locations in Target Stores just by using your iPhone and iPod touch. You don’t even have to take your card out. Your iPhone and iPod will generate a code that can be scanned for charging your account. Neat feature!

The good fun in using stickrs is the ability to share what you find online with other users. Users can also comment on other user’s stickrs and even rate them. It’s a truly social experience of link sharing with an element of Twitter attached. I love what they’ve done aesthetically with their site logo and their widgets. The only problem I have with their site is their translations. They need a little bit of help with the English translations since they’re generally lacking. It makes navigation and understanding a little bit of a hassle. Other than that, everything works well and it’s really fun to use and share. If the word about stickr got out, it might become an instant hit.

It’s a free service and it’s great for leaving notes and commenting on the web. This platform looks like it might open a wide realm of possibilities, since they’ve already got Twitter, Google, and Facebook interconnectivity all figured out. I wonder what the next step of the stickr development team will be. One obstacle that may get in the way seems to be spamming and overuse of these stickrs. On most of the sites that I’ve been to, there are either no stickrs, just one or two stickrs, or a whole mess of stickrs (an example is Google.com). What is in place to prevent spamming and the overflow of stickrs? Having so many overlapping stickrs displayed on top of each other is hard to read, but luckily they’ve made a widget that can display all the stickrs of a page on a sidebar. Unfortunately, if the page doesn’t have the widget installed, there’s not much to be done.
Using stickr is easy and intuitive. While there are still improvements to be made as with most products, they’ve really delved into something new. Ready to get started? Just follow these steps and you’ll be on your way:

1. Go to stickr.com and sign up for their services.
2. Set up your profile and customize your settings.
3. Install the plugin for your browser to view stickrs.
4. Start putting your stickrs on the web and sharing with the community.

If you take a look at the right hand side you’ll se my stickr widget for this site. If you don’t see it, you might have to refresh the page until you see the I <3 Stickr widget floating on the right hand side. Have a look at it just for kicks. I’ve made a stickr for my blog. Get on your way to looking at the web in a whole new way.

On the topic of social networks, I’ve added a plug-in for WordPress called the fixed social bar. It’s pretty useful for sharing blog posts and aesthetically it looks amazing. I’ve also added two other plug-ins for the blog. The stickr widget shows recent stickrs and the stickrs that have been posted on this blog. I’ll explain a little more about stickr in another post soon. Lastly, I’ve added a "follow me" plug-in that links to Twitter. I’m pretty fond of floating sidebar widgets because they look nice and they’re functional.
That’s all I have for site updates, but stay tuned for some new stuff (at least new to me). Then again, I haven’t been writing about a lot of these new thing I’ve been checking out. The plugins I’ve added are linked below:

1. Fixed social bar plugin for WordPress
2. Stickr widget for websites
3. Follow me plugin for WordPress

1 . Twistori: Have a look at some tags based off of Twitter.

2 . Music Visualization: Awesome artist linking.

3 . Infographic on Infographics: The title says it all: it’s an infographic on the data visualizations on the web.

4 . Life vs. Death: In the major struggles and battles of wars, this is a representation of those who lived vs. those who died.

5 . Opinion Space 2.0: Designed to let citizens express their opinions. Opinions show up as dots on a map.

6 . Risks Interconnection Map (RIM) 2010: A network diagram that shows all global risks and their connections.

7 . Flight Patterns in USA: Air traffic over North America.

8 . Britain from Above: A look at Britain from above using GPS and satellites.

9 . Walmart and Sam’s Club: An animation of the growth of Walmart and Sam’s club (it’s exponential growth!)

10 . So You Need A Typeface: A neat flowchart that helps you choose a font to use.

11 . 100 Pixar Characters: 100 Pixar animation characters drawn to scale.

I currently subscribe to Netflix for all my video viewing pleasures and I use Hulu and the CBS website incessantly. I actually check Hulu several times a day, hoping that they’ll have new episodes of my favorite TV shows up and running. With a combination of these three websites, I can keep myself entertained and keep up with the plot lines of my favs.

Rentals cost anywhere from $0.99 to $3.99 and the periods of rental vary from 24 hours to 72 hours. Even after a couple of months, the YouTube store doesn’t have too much to offer. They do have some popular options now, but not many. The store doesn’t compare to anything that Netflix, Amazon, or iTunes currently carries. Ah, alas the YouTube store only allows for rentals and not purchases like Amazon or iTunes.

You’ll be paying through Google Checkout. I haven’t actually tried the store out, so I don’t know about the video or audio quality. If any of you have tried it, let me know how it is. I would think that the quality is at the least, tolerable. The store has a clean layout, too. I’m just concerned about their competitive edge, with such a limited selection. No doubt they’ll be expanding ,but are you willing to pay higher prices for just a rental? I’m gonna stick with Netflix, Hulu, and CBS for now. Don’t forget to check out the store.

Already I’ve seen two tidbits on Kim Kardashian. PETA got on her case about a picture that she tweeted of herself holding a baby kitten by the scruff. In a statement, PETA said “Kim Kardashian isn’t the only person who mistakenly thinks that because a mother cat picks up her kittens by the scruff of the neck that a supportive hand under the rump isn’t needed.” Wait a second PETA, do you even comprehend what you just said? If a mother picks up her kittens by the scruff of the neck and nature made it this way, why can’t humans pick kittens up by the scruff? You never see mother cats put a “supportive hand” under the rump do you? After all cats don’t have hands. Kim K’s response? She said that the kitty wasn’t hurt and I side with her on that one. It’s a pretty hot picture, too. Take a look.

Shall we go on? What about what happened in Australia? Kimmy K got groped in the butt. It turns out that she has a pretty dang “juicy” butt. Alright. As if we didn’t know that just by looking at it. I think it’s real and boy it looks good. Pictures to follow. That’s pretty much all I have to say on this topic.

FINIS.

1 . Their First Words: Presidential inaugural address search! Search for key words and see who said what!

2 . Browser Statistics: A visualization of browser statistics going back to 2002. Very cool! Looks a bit like the Firefox logo…

3 . Quakes: A visualization of 2.5+ earthquakes recorded in the past seven days.

4 . Circles of Friends: A look at your Last.fm friends.

5 . Flight and Expulsion: Refugees forced to leave their countries. This is a global view.

6 . Web Trends 2007: 200 popular sites put onto a map of the Japanese subway.

7 . Digg’s Bigspy: Digg.com’s most popular articles shown in a scrolling fashion.

8 . Amaztype: A typographic book search.

9 . This is Where We Live: A look at population density in America

TO BE CONTINUED…

Artifacts from the Future (FOUND brought to you by Wired.com):

1 . VoteStation (Predicted year 2012)

2 .  Barf Bag (Predicted year 2047)

3 . Tastetester (2009)

4 . Bumper Sticker (2012)

5 . Antivirus (2022)

6 . Space Elevator (2032)

7 . Diaper (2024)

8 . Mood Ring (2009)

9 . Contact Lens (2020)

10 . Diet Cola (2019)

11 . Speeding Ticket (2054)

12 . Medicine Cabinet (2013)

13 . Birthday (2079)

14 . Responsibeer (2012)

15 . Windshield (2013)

Find more interesting future concepts by clicking here.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Here is some fun stuff. I ran across this while on Google Reader and I’m loving this site. Their content is visually stimulating, hilarious, and just plain old facts. I have to hand it to them. They have some very nice, interesting, and entertaining topics for review. Humans are very curious and their topics appeal to every ounce of your curiosity.

Here are three nice examples of the education you can get on various topics at Onlineschools.org:

The stats behind prostitution:

PETA:

15 Things You Should Know About Breasts:

The end. I like it!

When you are creating a new post, the Grooveshark plugin in convenient and easy to use. Just type in your keywords and then click search:

A list of results will be displayed. You can then listen to them to make sure they are correct and then select them for embedding into a playlist:

The Grooveshark plugin also allows you to sign in with your username and password and retrieve your favorite songs as well as your playlists. It’ll give you the option to choose songs, so you don’t have to embed the entire playlist. My playlists are over 100 songs in length, so embedding them in their entirety isn’t the way to go.

After unzipping the Grooveshark plugin into my WordPress and activating the plugin, configuring was a breeze, as with most WordPress plugins. The problem came as I was customizing the option for guests to comment and add music to the blog. When I set out to test the plugin, I found that the field background was white and the text results also showed up as white. I also had some problems with the search button appearing all funky. After some tinkering, I was able to get the text colors figured out and got the button to match my blog’s style.

However, another problem presented itself during testing. As an administrator going in and posting comments, I can use certain HTML tags like SCRIPTS and OBJECTS, but by default, guests and even registered users are not allowed to use such powerful tags for security reasons. Plugins have been developed as work-arounds, but I couldn’t find one that suited my needs. Eventually, I had to mess around with some of the core files in my WordPress installation, which I was very reluctant about. It’s only temporary, but after getting every sorted out, I’m really beginning to enjoy the add-on. This is one of the reasons I chose WordPress as my platform for blogging. It’s surprisingly easy to customize and there are so many unique plugins that just WORK. Grooveshark’s plugin works well with WordPress and the idea behind it is awesome. I’ve posted a song in the comments to show you how it looks when readers leave music in the comments. Anyway, feel free to comment on this and any other posts on my blog and try the new feature out. It’s pretty self-explanatory. If you’re having and troubles getting your plugin to work with your WordPress installation, feel free to email me or drop a comment and I’ll help out as best I can.

Coming up is a post on Buddypress. I experimented with Buddypress on WordPress MU, but since then, Buddypress is now available for standard installations of WordPress. Let’s give it a shot!