shawnw

Raise your hand if you’re a gadget junkie.

Yeah, me too.

Remember when you got that awesome new gadget that you just couldn’t get enough of? You know the one. You ran the battery down by noon every day because you just couldn’t put it down.

Everyone you knew heard about (and probably saw) your new gadget. How many times did you say, "dude (or dudette), you gotta get one of these?" Too many times to count, right?

It didn’t take long before everyone you knew – friends, family members, coworkers – heard about your new favorite toy.

Why is it, then, that we can share all about our newest little obsession but we can’t share about the saving power of Jesus? Isn’t he more valuable than anything we can own or hold in this world?

From the Twitter blog:

When we tweet what’s happening around us, we share not only our thoughts, but also web pages, photos, videos, location…anything. Mobile phones are increasingly part of our lives, and we seem to be doing everything but making phone calls. Reading the news, watching a YouTube video, and taking photos at events like the World Cup are things we expect to do on mobile phones – sharing our experiences on these little screens should be just as easy and fast as on big ones.

When apps work well with each other, sharing becomes as second nature on machines as it does in person. The Android platform is really good at that, and we’ve worked with the Android team to make it super easy to share what’s happening. Today we are excited to announce that Twitter for Android is available in Android Market!

I’ve been using this off and on over the course of the evening and I must say, it’s very polished. It doesn’t support multiple accounts but other than that, it’s fast, seems to use few resources, and looks great.

Scan the QR code on your left there to get it free from the Android Market now.

Click the app name to be taken to a page with the QR code for easy download. Here we go:

• YouVersion – the best Bible app for Android
• Seesmic – for Twitter. Free, fast and easy to use.
• Vignette – the best photo app out there, period.
• Barcode Scanner – for scanning product information and QR codes
• Listen – integrates with Google Reader to pull in podcasts to your phone automagically
• bTunes – duplicates the iTunes on iPhone music player experience. Yes, Apple got this right.
• Pandora – quality streaming radio
• Advanced Task Killer – kills those tasks that eat up battery life
• 360 Live – for keeping track of my friends on Xbox Live
• Bedside – the best alarm clock app out there
• redbox Codes – use it to find codes for free rentals at redbox kiosks
• EasyTether Lite – free tethering app, get online anywhere you have 3G!
• Not Call Log – sends you back to the home screen or the dialer after a call instead of the call log (where it’s easy to accidentally call someone)
• Simple last.fm Scrobbler – so you can scrobble what you listen to in bTunes
• SugarSync – keeps my files synced between my computers and my phone

What are your “can’t do without” apps? Tell me here!

What is Google Buzz?

Think Twitter and Facebook updates sprinkled with goodness from such sites as Picasa, Flickr, Gowalla and Foursquare.

If you have an iPhone or Android phone go to http://buzz.google.com on your phone’s browser to get started.

Otherwise you can connect to Buzz right inside Gmail.

Don’t have Gmail? You should fix that.

Can Buzz kill the others to reign supreme? We’ll see.

It took you guys, the readers of this blog, some of whom I’m friends with (in reality and virtually) and some I’ve never even heard from before, just under a week to put together the funds to buy a computer for a pastor in India who couldn’t afford one.

I am in awe. And you guys are my heroes.