Any of you have Angry Birds on your phone or ipod? Well I have and it is one of the most addictive games I have played on such a small screen. Unless you have an iPad, then I am jealous!  If you love it then you will love this! Nokia are using Angry Birds as a way to promote their new phone the N8.  This promotion is to add Angry Birds to your bookmarks, and whatever website you are on, you can play Angry Birds and take out the Webpage. It is such a simple idea yet shows us just how rapidly technology, and the way to communicate with your audience, has evolved and is constantly evolving. It is becoming a lot more playful and interactive with so many more companies now using apps to promote new products and brands.

Drag Angry birds onto your bookmarks here

As if recieving a settlement for millions of US dollars for a lawsuit against Facebook wasn’t enough, the Winklevoss twins Tyler and Cameron, have shown a sense of humor, and made a little extra cash presumably, by starring in an ad for Wonderful Pistachios poking fun at their notorious Facebook legal battle.

The twin brothers accused Zuckerberg of duping them by stealing their idea while they were students together at Harvard, a story recounted in the box office hit movie “The Social Network.”

They inked a settlement two years ago that got them $20 million in cash and $45 million worth of stock valued at $36 per share.

But the twins have sought to re-open the deal, arguing that Facebook held back information about the California-based social networking firm while reaching the $65 million settlement.

The pistachio nut makers have also recorded ads with a character from the Angry Birds video game, monkey actor Crystal, and Lucy and Charlie Brown from the “Peanuts” cartoon strip.

You can view all the ads here – http://getcrackin.com

Traditionally a lot of sites handle their own comments but this has some drawbacks which can prevent the communication you want to take place:

1. The barrier to entry is often having to create a new account on yet another website. If you see an article you’d like to comment on do you really want to have to sign up and validate your email address? This admittedly can be alleviated by allowing authentication via Facebook, Twitter or whoever logins.
2. If the site allows anonymous comments then you lose continuity. The chance of a proper conversation taking place is low since how can commenters be notified if their comment has a reply? It’s a dead end in terms of fostering conversations.
3. You have to set up your own spam prevention system.

What’s the alternative? Disqus is a cloud-based commenting system. Sign up and you can have a full commenting system on your site in practically no time at all. The advantages are many:

1. Login via a large number of different social media accounts or directly with the benefit of full social integration e.g. likes etc.
2. Notification and reply service. Comment on something and if another person replies to you then you are notified about it in real-time…allowing you to go back and respond if you wish. This actively fosters conversations and engages your target audience.
3. Allows full moderation if required.
4. Built in spam prevention.

Still not convinced? Disqus is becoming increasingly more prevalent on the web even on very large sites such as The Independent, The Daily Telegrah, CNN, Time, Fox News etc.

Give it a try and remove the headache of maintaining a commenting system.

If you are a web developer with any experience in making HTML emails you may laugh briefly at the picture above, as I did before remembering how you were banging your head against a wall trying to get your design to render correctly in all of the many mail clients.