Official TechtalkRadio Blog

July 1, Virgin Mobile USA will launch a new $79.99 per month unlimited prepaid plan.

I noticed they also have a “pay as you go with roll forward” plan:  “As long as you buy another Minute Pack within 30 days, any unused minutes will roll forward for the next 30 days (up to 5000 minutes). If you don’t purchase another Minute Pack within 30 days, your unused minutes will expire at the end of the 30 days.”  For $20 per month, you get 200 minutes with additional calls at $.10 per minute.

To that, you can add unlimted text and messaging (“pix, email, and IM”) for $20 per month.

We have had discussions about social networking sites: which ones are best for types of networking, which ones are best for “adults”, etcetera…

Friendster was (and may be) the largest “global online social network…adults, 18 and up…”

Orkut, run by Google, has a lock on Brazil and also eats up a big portion of the market in India. Hi5 is big in Latin America…

From a 2006 report:
“MySpace.com has the broadest appeal across age ranges, Facebook.com has created a niche among the college crowd, Friendster.com attracts a higher percentage of adults, and Xanga.com is most popular among younger teens…”

“…Xanga.com has a younger user profile, with 20 percent of its users in the 12-17 age range, about twice as high as that age segment’s representation within the total Internet audience…More than one-third (34 percent) of visitors to Facebook.com are 18-24 years old…more than two-thirds of MySpace visitors are age 25 or older.”

In case you were hiding under a rock, today is the big day that Mozilla released then next version of the companies browser Firefox Version 3.0. Company officials are touting this release as faster then Internet Explorer 7 as well as more secure. We had no problem grabbing the new version which registered at a little over 7MB. After installing, we only had a couple of plug ins that were not compatible, one of them being the Cinema Now Manager for watching and downloading online movies. Everything else seemed to load fine and without hesitation, our flash videos on the TechtalkRadio Site loaded fine and again, we were pleased with the outcome.

Download it yourself here

A new game is to be released tomorrow (June 17): The Political Machine 2008…

“…a new PC game that puts players in control of the 2008 presidential campaign. Play as the campaign manager for a host of candidates including Barack Obama, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, historical candidates or design one from scratch.

“Players then choose their campaign battlegrounds and are off on the campaign trail to face a host of challenges including fundraising, talk show appearances, hiring spin doctors and winning endorsements. The game is won on Election Day by the player who gets the necessary electoral votes to become President.

“…all candidates are presented as ‘bobble heads’…The 2004 edition of the game…accurately predicted the 2004 election months in advance….
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Real-world scenarios are mirrored in the game. Players can choose what TV shows to be a guest on and will face tough questions from the hosts of shows like Colvert Report and the O’Malley Factor. In addition, players can choose to play out different historical scenarios as well as fantasy scenarios taking place in the future.

“Political junkies will appreciate many of the political consultants and strategies employed in the game such as the use of smear merchants, spin doctors, intimidators, cheer leaders, movie stars, etc. Strategy gamers will appreciate the balanced game mechanics that allow players to research new campaign tactics that even novice political observers can see from the current election.

“The Political Machine is both a single and a multiplayer game – players can either compete against the computer or against others online on www.politicalmachine.com. The website also provides an ideologically neutral location for users to discuss the current election.

The game will be released at retail…$19.95. It requires Windows XP or Windows Vista to run…