Currently the best source of birthday information is Facebook and the easiest way to get it is through the iPhone application (I don’t know about Facebook applications on other platforms). However, I still felt that there was room for improvement, I do check my Facebook feed daily from my iPhone, but having to navigate to the birthdays page was a chore ensuring that I don’t check it.

Enter fbCal. With a few easy steps (you’ll need to log into Facebook), you can do what they say on their website:

With fbCal get your events and friend’s birthdays in Apple iCal, Mozilla Sunbird, Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook or in your RSS reader! The process can be done in less than a minute, and it’s free!

At first, I wanted to pull birthdays into my Google Calendar which fbCal supports, but since I’m using Google Apps, I had a little trouble getting it to show up. My usual trick of pasting the query string into the Google Apps calender URL didn’t work.

Therefore, I settled for the next best thing, which is the RSS feed. So hooray for that, I’ll be updated everyday on upcoming birthdays and that’s as in-your-face as it gets. I check Google Reader a thousand times a day and I’m gonna go check it now.

I stay up to date on the latest happenings in my world via Google Reader. If you aren’t using it already (or some other RSS aggregator), then you must be spending a lot of time visiting websites one by one and I strongly suggest that you please start doing so. I said please by the way.

But Google Reader isn’t just for getting feeds from news sites like TechCrunch. I’m subscribed to activity feeds from Dropbox, Unfuddle as well as Google Alerts, so I really just have to go to a single site to monitor multiple kinds of activity. If I could replace all those emails that various websites send to me with an RSS feed, I would.

However, one thing that irked me was keeping up to date with stuff from my Twitter feed. I could add that feed to Google Reader, but I really wouldn’t want all those tweets in my reader. Right now, I read tweets on TweetDeck (both on my iPhone and desktop) and I often favorite tweets that link to interesting content so that I could read them later. I never did. Who checks the favorites list anyway?

So, I went to hunt around on just how to add my Twitter favorites to Google Reader; my favorite tweets would come to me instead of having to go to them. I had some trouble at first but I think it was due to the social meltdown that started yesterday. Enough talk now, I assume you are already in Google Reader and ready to add that feed in.

Behold your Twitter favorites in RSS!

http://twitter.com/favorites/jaryl.rss

Do replace my name with yours and do follow me on Twitter.

It remains to be seen how these companies can leverage on the undeniable power of social, as most of those interviewed are in the early stages of establishing footholds in their 3-5 year timelines.

Hello world indeed, I wrote my first hello world program in C++ in secondary school when I started learning programming. What a different world it was back then though.

WordPress has been really easy to set up; they weren’t kidding at all when they said it was easy. I’ve actually set it up a few times myself, but never really got down to writing stuff on the blog. This changes today.

So I guess, this is where I introduce myself and my vendetta for this blog. I will set up the about page soon enough but right now, let’s have some quick information.

I am currently pursuing my degree at the Singapore Management University. Actually it’s more like it’s pursuing me; no matter how I run, I tell you, work always catches up. I also run a small time web development consultancy at Tinkerbox Solutions.

I have many interests, but this blog will cover technology and small businesses (that’s the title of the blog btw). More importantly, technology has enabled small businesses to compete with mega corporations and lots of startups these days aren’t afraid to take them on. It makes for interesting times (interesting, at least to me).