I have a small chapter in the book about how vesting can be good for the founders of a company which was inspired by my own experiences with IntenseDebate. There are also a bunch of other great bits of advice, though.  It’s definitely a great read and an easy way to learn from some great people all in one convenient book.

So go ahead and pre-order it now.   You’ll be glad you did.

If you use this link you can also get 25% off the regular price.  So check them out and give SendGrid a try.

1. First thing to do is head over to Dropbox, get an account, and install it on all the computers you’ll be syncing across. This is very straight forward and they have installation options for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
2. Pick which computer has your “master” profile (the one that will be the starting profile replicated across all your machines) and start there.
3. Close Firefox if it’s open.
4. Next, you need to find your Firefox profile folder. Details for this on all major platforms can be found here.
5. Once you have found your profile folder to sync, I STRONGLY recommend that you backup this folder somewhere.
6. Find your Dropbox folder (defaults to /Users/[username]/Dropbox on a Mac and C:\Users\[username]\Documents\My DropBox on Windows), create a new directory to store your Firefox profile in (I used firefox-profile).
7. Copy the contents of your Firefox profile folder (found in step 4) into the newly created Dropbox folder created in the previous step. It should start syncing immediately, I recommend waiting till it’s complete before continuing.
8. Store the name of the Firefox profile folder somewhere, and delete this folder.
9. Now we need to create a symbolic link between the Firefox profile folder (which you backed up, right?) and the Dropbox folder we just found in the last step. On Mac/Linux the command for a symlink uses the syntax ln -s target link_name – which you may need to run as root (On Windows, the command uses the syntax MKLINK /D link_name target – this should be run from the command prompt and you may need to run this as admin in order to complete this. You can run this as an admin by going to start, typing cmd, right click the command prompt option and choose “run as administrator”) where link_name is the original Firefox profile folder (found in step 4) and target should be the shared directory in Dropbox used to store the profile (I used firefox-profile in my Dropbox folder – be sure to use the full paths for simplicity).
10. Repeat steps 8 & 9 for each computer, finding the Dropbox and Firefox profile folders on each system. Also, be sure to close Firefox completely before modifying the profile folder – and back up if you’d like to keep that profile info.

And that’s it! When you reopen Firefox it should open using the shared Dropbox directory and sync all your plugins, bookmarks, session history, etc across all of the machines. There are a few things I should mention as well though. First, you’ll probably want to turn off Dropbox notifications, as these files change often while browsing and will be resynchronized with each update. Notifications for this can get annoying quickly. You also might notice some weirdness if you browse on multiple computers at the same time…both keep trying to save their session history (and everything else) to each other and will continuously overwrite each other. Shouldn’t do any permanent damage, but worth thinking about.

Let me know if you have any other suggestions of if you get this working for yourself in the comments below.

Some of the features include:

• Search right from your Twitter home page
• Including all replies (including tweets that your @username is in the middle of the tweet instead of just at the beginning) on the replies tab
• Expanding tinyurl style links to include the title of the page they link to
• Embedding media directly in the Twitter interface instead of only through links (like twitpic)
• Providing a mouseover on a user’s avatar to show their recent tweets (giving needed context sometimes)
• And a few other nice odds and ends…

I included a few screenshots of some of these features above.

Overall this has proven to be a really great plugin from my usage so far. I find a lot of it is stuff that I didn’t realize how much I would use until I have it. I think it’s great that the Twitter community is active enough to modify the Twitter interface using FireFox addons, but it does raise a few questions about why the Twitter team isn’t integrating this stuff themselves.

In any case, if you use Twitter from the interface at Twitter.com much (and you browse in FireFox) I’d definitely recommend giving this addon a try.

So far I really love the service. I’m an active Netflix user and love the “Instant Watch” section. I used to run this through a computer hooked up to my TV, which worked, but was extremely clunky to use. There are separate boxes you can buy to have this same functionality, but why pay for new hardware when the PS3 is already hooked up, network ready, and fully capable. I also really like having Hulu and other mainstream media sites built right in. It’s just one more step in moving to the on-demand, internet ready media systems that are starting to take off.

The only downside to the software is that it’s not free. I’m currently using the free trial, and I’m told that the software will be ~$30 when it’s out of beta and no longer a free trial. A bit of a road block for some, I’m sure, but more than worth it for me to be able to do this completely seamlessly without adding another box to my living room setup.

I’m also planning to give Boxee a try soon. As far as I know there’s no way to stream this to the PS3, but I’d be willing to use a PC for this if it worked well enough. I’d also like to find a nice way to watch video podcasts on my PS3…anyone out there doing this?

Overall a really great piece of software that is super simple to use. Definitely recommend it.