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Besides being an excellent tool for all the stalkers out there, I’m hoping it will prove to be an easy way to share all the cool stuff I find and possibly do around the interwebs. It does not get sent through the RSS feed for this site, so you don’t have to be worried about being overloaded with information. However, if you do want to keep a more watchful eye on it you can subscribe to me on FriendFeed or keep a watch on this feed (or just randomly check the page–some things are just more fun the old-fashioned way).

The code is very easy to set up for any account (really only requires changing one variable), so it may also get a public release in the near future.

What other ways have you seen or used for controlling the fragmentation of online presences due to the social web? Do lifestreams interest you?

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Is it time to drop IE6 support?

Believe me, I’d love to respond with a resounding “yes.” The browser is 7 years old, it has all sorts of security issues, and it will most likely be the cause of me going bald by age 25. For my personal projects, I really don’t think about IE6 much because my target audience shouldn’t be using it. This blog hasn’t been debugged for it, and TweetRemote was on Mashable before I had even opened it in IE6.

I figure anybody using Twitter and setting up their own blog really shouldn’t be using IE6 for their daily browsing.

However, the market share for IE6 is still enormous–W3Schools reported 24.5% of their visitors last month were on IE6. It’s market share has been steadily decreasing, and that’s definitely encouraging to see. But it’s still huge.

How many of those users will be lost if support for IE6 is dropped?

For my personal projects, I have no problem losing a few visitors for the sake of faster development and possibly convincing a couple people to upgrade their browsers. But that’s because it benefits me, and I’m not ready to use my clients in order to make a statement and make my job a little bit easier. Chances are some of them are still using IE6–imagine explaining that one.

Perhaps in the near future I’ll change my mind, but I don’t think it’s time yet. I realize the hope is that people will see that they need to upgrade their browser in order to view a site correctly and will do so, but let’s get real–the average commercial website that your client is building isn’t important enough for that amount of user investment. Facebook (who apparently is dropping support for IE6 with their new design) perhaps is, however, and that does look promising.

Looking ahead: Meanwhile, Google launched their own attempt at a new browser, Google Chrome (incase you haven’t seen Twitter recently). Stay tuned for my thoughts on that one.

Many of you have noticed that I’ve been using it here and have asked about it. Here’s your chance to have at it. Check it out, play around with it, and please leave your comments here to let me know what you think. Note that in order to successfully install this on a blog, you’ll also need to set up an RSS aggregator such as FeedWordPress.

As another side note, I have not even opened tweetremote.com in IE and know for certain it’ll look awful in IE6 (thanks to my wonderful .pngs), and I’m OK with that. It now works in IE6 as well thanks to the genius little script Unit PNG Fix