Looking for an easy way to connect with readers on your website? I was – then I found Google Talk: Chatback.

Do you have a blog, online profile, or some other personal web page? Would you like to communicate more with your visitors? Today we’re launching a new Google Talk feature that lets visitors to your web site chat with you. We call it “chatback” because instead of you doing all the talking on your blog, your visitors can talk back to you. Sure, they could leave comments, but those are public and hard to use for a real conversation. With chatback, it’s a real instant message session.

To use chatback, you must have a Google Talk account … but your visitors don’t have to! They don’t even need to have an email address, or to have ever used instant messaging.

This solution works for me because I am the only person at my company that a website visitor would need to chat with. This may not work if you have a “team” of people who you want your visitors to connect with.

Of course, being a free tool, bells and whistles are eliminated – such as gathering (even the most basic)information about the chatter. But its benefit lies within its simplicity.

If you want to try this out for yourself – visit my personal website and start a chat with me!

Enjoy!

This afternoon I was able to successfully upgrade my Lenovo ThinkPad T60 to Windows 7 Beta (build 7000).

The upgrade took forever (about 2 hours). This was contrary to my experience installing a clean copy of Windows 7 on a virtual machine.

My ThinkPad T60 is my production laptop. I use it about 30% of the time during any given week – mostly at when I am away from the office.

So far, all of my applications that I had installed previously are working. All of the drivers I had installed previously are also working (no red X’s in device manager).

I decided to do an in-place upgrade to save me the trouble of downloading and installing drivers. I may try a clean install in the coming weeks if I feel that my system is acting up because of the upgrade.

For the record – I never recommend doing an in place upgrade of an OS – clean installs are the way to go. But I am making an exception here simply because things like driver compatibility with a beta is sketchy at best. If there were published Windows 7 drivers – I would have gone directly to a clean install.

As I have more time to play with this I’ll keep you updated.

Yesterday I met with Bill Lambert at ArcSpecs. He asked how my experience with the Storm has been and I thought I would share my comments with all of you.

Three or so weeks into using the Blackberry I’d have to say that I am about 70% happy with it. If Verizon released a new windows mobile phone today, I would probably run out and buy it.

Since my last update – attachments are now working on my phone. I am not sure how this problem was solved as the only changes I’ve made to the phone is that I removed the BES Mailbox and HTML Email Viewer applications (they expired and I was not sure I wanted to pay the asking price for them ($20 for BES Mailbox, $10 for HTML Viewer).

The reason that Windows Mobile OS is so appealing to me is that it is a breeze to setup and administer. ActiveSync is THE best mobile sync platform out right now – hands down. In addition, although I have gotten better at using the touch screen/keyboard of the storm I still prefer the standard keyboard. I discovered that the touch screen on the storm does not respond when you have leather gloves on. I need to use my phone in the cold! I wonder if iPhone users have this same problem.

So for now, I will limp along with the Storm. I love the screen, it has a nice camera. I think that the “click” screen is nicer then a touch only screen (like the one on the iPhone). At CES 2009 Microsoft talked about mobile devices being a focus for them in the coming year (I’ve heard that before). I hope that means more phones, specifically, phones that will work on Verizon’s CDMA network.
 
In a perfect world – I would like the Treo Pro to work with Verizon. Or the Storm (form factor) with a pull out keyboard and running Windows OS.

Here are my other Blackberry Stom posts:

A week with the BlackBerry Storm: Day 1
A week with the Blackberry Storm: Day 2
A week with the Blackberry Storm: Day 3
A week with the Blackberry Storm: Day 4
A Week with the Blackberry Storm: Wrap Up