Apple’s tablet is about to change the software development ecosystem and we mobile developers are rethinking existing and future projects. The tablet becomes the next app gold rush.

The App Store and the iPhone command a monstrous market share for mobile apps. There are a limited number of mobile app developers (20 million’ish) and a limited amount of devices any developer or team can target at one time. The first OS to target for any mobile product is logically the iPhone OS. That’s where the money is. After that, maybe Android or Blackberry or Pre. Maybe.

With Apple releasing a new device with new capabilities and resolution, the ecosystem changes. Teams who had completed an iPhone app and were planning to move on to an Android or Blackberry version would likely be more successful returning to the iPhone and optimizing for the tablet first.

Just as the first developers releasing apps on the iPhone had the least competition and greatest chance of success, the first optimized tablet apps will have the greatest odds. Competition amongst 10,000 apps is much lighter than 100,000.

There have been a growing number of Android starts and popularity of Android devices has steadily increased. Many of these app starts are by developers who completed an iPhone version and are now porting to Android.

The tablet changes one’s priority. Android starts will continue to grow because of handset market share growth, but will also take a hit due to the tablet. The priority of OS’s for developers to to target will likely be iPhone -> tablet optimization -> Android / Blackberry / Pre.

Related thoughts:

• Who wants to build Apple tablet apps? Not just game developers (survey) (venturebeat.com)
• If Apple Releases It, Will Developers Come? (bits.blogs.nytimes.com)

Apple is opening up the In-App purchase to free apps. This is going to change the App Store landscape drastically…

In App Purchase is being rapidly adopted by developers in their paid apps. Now you can use In App Purchase in your free apps to sell content, subscriptions, and digital services.

You can also simplify your development by creating a single version of your app that uses In App Purchase to unlock additional functionality, eliminating the need to create Lite versions of your app. Using In App Purchase in your app can also help combat some of the problems of software piracy by allowing you to verify In App Purchases.

Lite apps… Buh-bye. 2 (or more) copies of the same app but with different badges… Buh-bye. This is nothing but good.

AT&T confirms tethering is, “a matter of when and not if,” but the when is farther away than most of us would like.

As for tethering, by its nature, this function could exponentially increase traffic on the network, and we need to ensure that some of our current upgrades are in place before we can deliver the expanded functionality with the excellent performance that customers expect. We expect to offer tethering in the future.

While the iPhone has blown the doors off AT&T’s network capabilities, I don’t agree that tethering by an existing customer will exponentially increase traffic. The increased load from the iPhone has been due to mobile browsing and uploading of photos and videos.

Those who plug the iPhone in to a laptop are not significantly increasing consumed bandwidth (unless you’re watching Hulu?), and the number of users who tether will be far fewer than the number of iPhone-only users.

I could agree with the assumption of exponential increase based on an influx of customers from Sprint and Verizon. Those customers could migrate purely to acquire the world’s fastest VPN enabled USB modem (yes, the iPhone effectively becomes a wicked fast USB modem when plugged in – and faster/better than the USB versions available at Sprint and Verizon).

For the longest time, the Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi has been the most widely used camera on Flickr. With a 10.1 MP Lens, an image sensor vibration cleaning system, 9-point auto focus, and a mid-range price point, it’s easy to see why the Canon camera has been so popular with the photography enthusiasts on Yahoo’s photo-sharing website.

But while Canon has dominated, there’s another camera that’s been zipping up the Flickr charts. Actually, camera phone would be more precise, because we’re talking about the iPhone.

It takes a lot of iPhones to overtake the Canon franchise.

1. iRa Pro – $899.99 (or Direct – $499.99)
2. MATG – SAP BusinessOne – $449.99
3. PDR Quote – $349.99
4. Mobile Cam Viewer – $349.99
5. Lexi-Dental Complete – $299.99
6. iDcrm – $199.99
7. ROSIE Home Automation – $199.99
8. Nursing Constellation Plus – $179.99
9. Interpath – $179.99
10. XA1 – $179.99

We don’t need a full blown Google Voice application on the iPhone. A simple web app would do. In fact, it would probably be better for overall adoption because only a small percentage of people update their apps religiously.

Given Google’s API for GV, and the speed at which the native apps were developed, this isn’t a stretch. A couple decent web developers could get this launched by Monday… In time to save Arrington and the world from an unnecessary rant on the failings of Android.

I made the jump from the iPhone’s included mail application and may swap out the Phone app for a Google Voice web app later, too. The above image is my iPhone dock. Sean McKeever on Facebook asked how I get notifications for new mail being received. Here’s how I do that…

First off, with the iPhone Mail app I never used new mail notification. There’s just too much email every day and having notifications on would turn the phone in to a jumping bean. The little counter of unread messages is nice, of course.

That changes with Gmail and filters. One can receive customized notifications via SMS of new messages based on sender, subject, account, or any other attributes.

1. Create a filter for a desired message type.
2. Have the filter results be “Forward it to:” and set your_number@txt.att.net (it’ll cost you a text message if you’re not on an unlimited plan).

This nicely sets up important alerts if you need them. I use these for messages I need to know about immediately… Typically messages sent directly to me and sent from somebody important.

There’s a lot of noise about Apple rejecting the Google Voice application in the App Store. While a native app would be fantastic, I’d be fine with a good web app. The existing rev is little more than a WAP site and requires three clicks to dial a contact.

It would be incredibly simple to mimic the iPhone’s phone app interface in a web app. It’s just a list of favorites, list of recents, list and search of overall contacts, and voicemail. With HTML5, all of these features from a single web app are simple.

With HTML5 and SQLite the images and local databases can be cached, too. This would allow extremely fast load and minimize any network traffic for initiating a call. I’d probably even swap out the iPhone icon on the home screen for a GV web app shortcut.

Alternatively bluetooth can be used, but incurs the bluetooth bottleneck penalty like other mobile phone tethers. USB allows the full 3G. I’m also partial to leaving bluetooth and wi-fi off to conserve battery life.

So basically you plug in USB and immediately the network connection becomes active. Dead simple. No configuration and no dead phone battery.

Check your app updates today. Looks like Apple had a busy 4th of July weekend and approved a ton of 3.0 compatibility updates.

My last check for updates was on Saturday, the 4th at 9:00pm. Only the AOL Radio app had an update. The other dozen came in between then and this morning.

The phone trail: BlackBerry Pearl 8100 -> iPhone -> BlackBerry 8800 -> iPhone 3G -> BlackBerry Bold 9000 -> iPhone 3G S

I really like the iPhone 3G. I lasted almost a full year, but something was missing. The push, immediate arrival of email, when one can blast messages out and get responses like an instant messaging client, is what I’ve always come back to on a BlackBerry.

This time there’s something different. It wasn’t as impressive with the BlackBerry email. And that must really suck for RIM because I know I’m not the only one who has grown out of their email awesomeness.

Gmail + push based IMAP and Exchange on the iPhone made BlackBerry email much less exciting when I switched back. If RIM can’t own the messaging space, they’re in for some trouble.

The other reason is that my team is doing some great things with the iPhone at Ingram Content. Customers can transfer their downloads through iTunes quickly and seamlessly. I’m using our own product on a daily basis and enjoying it (yes, I’m biased, but it’s still a good sign that a developer wants to eat the comapny’s dog food).

This post was written on the BlackBerry Bold 9000 during my morning train commute. I’ve been listening to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance on the iPhone 3G. The upgrade to 3G S is this afternoon. You can download using our Ingram Media Manager for free through your public library.

- Apple’s download + 3.0 device sales stats = ~17%
- AdMob reports 44% of ads served are to 3.0
- WeightBot and ConvertBot app developers claim 79% are 3.0

This, to me, means:
- Apple’s stats are probably the most correct, overall, but that doesn’t mean a hill of beans to developers
- 44% of active web browsing users updated to 3.0
- 79% of app downloading owners updated 3.0
- Somewhere less than 56% of iPhone users don’t browse much web or download apps, or at lease not enough to splash these stats.

It’s not really an issue with skewed results, it’s an issue with understanding what these results really mean. As the leader of a team doing iPhone development, the world being around 79% adoption of 3.0 is fantastic. And for our future web apps, it’s very intersting (if it’s true) that less than 1/2 of iPhone users using the web are updated.

What’s really intersting is that 17% are on 3.0, or 7 million devices. If 79% of app users are 3.0, and if ALL of 3.0 users buy apps, there is a cap of 8,900,000′ish app buying iPhone owners out of 41 million (8.9 million times 79% is ~7 million).

The questions that come to my mind are:
- Does this mean 1 in 4.6 owners (41 million divided by the hypothetical 8.9 million) have purchased an app? They would have probably at least downloaded a free app. This is probably why Apple is pushing ads about app downloads… They’d like to increase this ratio.
- How many iPhone owners regularly use the web on the device? 1 in 2.5 (if 44% of web browsing owners are 3.0 versus 17% of overall device updates)?

RunKeeper Pro 1.5.0.7

Tweetie 1.3.2

WordPress 1.3

Downloading All…

+

It was April 6th, 2008 that I posted How to post images to Twitter and Flickr at the same time from an iPhone. It has been one of the more popular posts on this blog.

Flickr now makes it possible to post to Twitter directly via an emailed photo AND via Blog This. Their integration removes the need for TwitPic, and arguably SnapTweet too (though SnapTweet is faster than using Blog This and can be used for multiple images at once).

Images are posted to Twitter with Flickr’s new flic.kr URL shortener.

Here’s how to get set up:

1. Visit Flickr’s beta testing group’s page (actually, this step isn’t necessary, but if you run in to problems, their page is the best resource).
2. Associate your Twitter account with your Flickr account here. It leads you through the process and uses OAuth, a safer mechanism than providing your password.
3. You will be provided with a second special email address to send images to. If your main Flickr image email address is example42test@photos.flickr.com, your Flickr+Twitter email address will be example42test2twitter@photos.flickr.com.
4. Send away!

Photos sent to your primary Flickr image address will be processed as normal (not submitted to Twitter). Photos sent to your new 2twitter version will be processed and then immediately posted to Twitter. Your tweet will consist of [subject_line] [url], with the [url] being Flickr’s shortened flic.kr url.

Example.

After signing up for the Twitter integration you also get a new Blog This addition when viewing a single image. Clicking Blog This brings up the option to post an existing image directly to Twitter. You can post your own, as well as other Flickr users, images via this feature. Very powerful.

I’ve switched back to a BBerry instead of an iPhone. Again. This is the second time I’ve found I’m working less productively on the iPhone. This isn’t a switch because I enjoy working on a Blackberry. The Blackberry simply handles messaging more quickly and seamlessly, and that’s my impression even after using the iPhone 3.0 OS with copy/paste, etc, for the last couple months.

Don’t get me wrong, the iPhone is the best phone on the market for consuming information. Browsing, the many apps and games, media consumption, appearance, performance, etc, make it the best platform. Ever (imho).

But it still sucks for Gmail and IM and these are the two most important features for a lot of us web jockeys. The native Gmail client on Blackberry enables Gmail searching of multiple accounts instantly. This is a feature worth switching platforms for. The web based Gmail on the iPhone enables such search, but it is web based and takes a lot longer to navigate, even with 3G, and can’t run in the background and perform alerts for new messages.

Background processes enable IM and immediate text communication on Blackberry. I’d gotten by on the iPhone with AIM’s SMS features, which is a nice way to work IM on any phone, but it didn’t cover Jabber and other instant messaging services.

I keep the iPhone in my bag, and continue using it on wi-fi for development and testing. And I can’t wait to get to WWDC and attend the iPhone dev workshops. When the 3.0 OS is out of beta we’ll get to see how these services affect a transition for me, and many others, from Blackberry to the iPhone. Again.

“On March 17, Apple presented the blueprint for iPhone OS 3.0, the next version of the world’s most advanced mobile platform. In addition to previewing its innovative features, Apple gave members of the iPhone Developer Program immediate access to the iPhone OS 3.0 software beta and an updated Software Development Kit (SDK) with over 1,000 completely new APIs.”

The announcement page is here (C&P’d, too): http://www.apple.com/iphone/preview-iphone-os/

Newspapers aren’t dead here, but they’re definitely in decline. A check around me in this car has 8 people out of 120 reading a paper. Physical book reading is also down compared to my train rides three years ago.

Instead of books and newspapers I see iPhones and BlackBerry’s. There are tons of these devices, almost literally. But in three months I am yet to see a single Kindle.

Every seat one passes walking in or out has an occupant or two swishing their fingers across a touchscreen or wildly flailing thumbs on a keypad. Most people are reading on these devices, browsing web sites, consuming words.

Yesterday’s news about Kindle book downloads being 10% of amazon’s sales isn’t as surprising when looking at people’s device use, and is kind of a foreshadowing of what’s to come… If Kindle downloads were 10% of Amazon’s consumed books and the Kindle is <1% of the portable device market, what happens when iPhones, iPods, Sony eReader, and other media consumption devices cleanly support book and newspaper content?

Much like the tendrals, this was slightly dissappointing since I’d wanted to see double digits. The other interesting numbers…

• Mac up 9.63% to 9.93%
• iPhone almost half a percent, up 0.44% to 0.48%
• Linux down 0.85% to 0.83%, probably since there wasn’t much Linux activity over the holidays.
• Windows down 88.68% to 88.26% (though Windows 7 betas are picking up)

I was impressed to click a video headline and have QuickTime immediately launch and stream the video. Very clean implementation.

I described in December that Market Share for Apple would hit 9.5% at the end of December and break 10% in January. So far Apple exceeded expectations and reached 9.63% in December. That’s a 0.76% gain of the operating system market in one month!

Look for January to carry another increase and for AAPL to break 10%, probably diminishing the effect of Steve’s health-related absense a little bit.

In related news the iPhone browser share also grew.  It now holds 0.44% of the market, a move from 0.37% last month and the largest single month gain for the device. Windows dropped almost a full point from 89.62% to 88.68%. Pocket IE is no longer tracked, probably now <0.01% market share. Playstation remained at 0.04%.

For more in-depth detail of market share, visit http://marketshare.hitslink.com.

Found a funny little bug with Apple’s dashboard weather widget this week. It comes installed and running by default when you set up a new OS X installation or buy a new Mac. I just got a new MacBook Pro a month ago and have been using the weather widget religiously. As John Gruber of Daring Fireball described, it’s one of the favorite widgets (and he has a good old how-to on how to make it better).

But rather than validating by zip code, the weather widget validates by city name only. It grabs the first city name, alphabetically, and plugs that in as your local weather default.

There are five cities in the USA with the name Philadelphia. In alphabetical order, they are Philadelphia MO (Missouri), Philadelphia MS (Mississippi), Philadelphia NY (New York), Philadelphia PA (Pennsylvania), and Philadelphia TN (Tennessee).

Apple’s widget grabs Philadelphia, MO for Philadelphia, PA (and MS, NY, TN). Until this week the weather patterns for MO vs. PA were the same for precipitation and within a few degrees on temperature. It took a month before the cities were different enough to notice the discrepancy.

For all you’z Philadelphians buying Macs, remember to plug in your 191xx zip codes :) To see this in action if you’re in another city, add a weather widget to the dashboard and search for “Philadelphia”. The same occurs This does not occur on an iPhone’s weather app.

Population data on the Philadelphias:

• Philadelphia, MO: 643
• Philadelphia, MS: 22,606
• Philadelphia, NY: 2,349
• Philadelphia, PA: 1,517,550
• Philadelphia, TN: 4,407

Attending an Apple Tech Talk at the Millennium Hotel New York was a good use of time today. The evangelism team, despite evangelizing, is highly competent and I came away satisfied with decent knowledge consumption.

The event had a massively different feel than John Resig described last year.

There was a lot of JavaScript hate by attendees (“blah blah… GWT is the only thing we trust… blah blah JavaScript is a stupid language…”).

This year it was all about at least 50% about the web. Apple has exposed touch events, multi-touch events, gestures, location based services, and rotation to javascript both for polling and callbacks. Some of the credit for the newfound excitement around Safari and iPhone web apps should probably be shared with WebKit’s HTML5 (file caching and SQLite)… All of which are supported in the iPhone 2.2 OS release.

Over the next few days I’ll have more details on specific highlights. For now, here are my condensed raw notes.

iPhone Safari browser, starting with the basic stuff:

• If not specified, assumes a web page width of 980 pixels and scales to 360
• To override, add <meta name=”viewport” content=”width=720″ /> (where you would replace 720 with your pages width)
• Or, if you’ve optimized for the full screen of the iPhone, add <meta name=”viewport” content=”device-width” />
• Additionally, you can specify a width, height, initial-scale, minimum-scale, maximum-scale, and user-scalable. If width, height, or initial scale are set, Safari will auto-calculate the others (i.e. if width is set, height and initial-scale will be handled for you). user-scalable means the user can not scale via zoom-in or zoom-out.
• Optimize for cellular networks (duh!). Latency is often a bigger factor than bandwidth on Edge and 3G (duh!). Beat this by using fewer, slightly larger resources in a page load (i.e. use a single image and use CSS to display portions of it instead of loading multiple separate images for buttons, etc).
• A nice tool for simulating throttled bandwidth is ipfw (duh, but I’ll this to my blog for others)… Do the following to enable throttling (from terminal.app): 1) sudo su 2) ipfw add pipe 1 src-port http 3) ipfw pipe 1 config delay 200 bw 700kbit/s. Do the following to kill the throttling afterwards: 1) ipfw flush.
• Give the latest rev of Dashcode a try to get a feel for how various transforms, etc, work. See the source in the supplied samples.

Home screen icons, total beginner stuff, but necessary (mostly so I remember the filenames):

• For a custom, iPhone specific, icon from your site (a la favicon), place apple-touch-icon.png at the docroot (http://www.apple.com/apple-touch-icon.png).
• For a custom icon, without the shiny polish (not recommended unless you’ve made it shiny already), use apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png.

How to make a web app feel like a real app (no nav bar, custom status bar, control of rotation, rotation notification, etc).

• To hide the Safari UI: <meta name=”apple-mobile-web-app-capable” content=”yes” />
• To change the status bar (the top space with signal and battery indicators): <meta name=”apple-mobile-web-app-status-bar-style” content=”grey” /> (replace “grey” with “black” or “black translucent”)
• When the Safari UI is hidden you are locked to Portrait mode (maybe a good thing!)
• You can get notifications for rotation and can rotate your elements via callbacks with the following:

<body onorientationchange=”updateOrientation();”> …

function updateOrientation(degrees) {

case 0:

case -90:

case 90:

}

Touch and gestures via JavaScript:

• Use <div ontouchstart=”trackTouches(event)”… and you’ll need three arrays for your touch points: var allTouches = event.touches; var targetTouches = event.targetTouches; var changedTouches = event.changedTouches;
• When a touch occurs, you’ll receive a touchstart notification.
• When a touch moves, you receive a touchchange notification.
• When a finger is lifted, you’ll receive a touchend or touchcancel (if the finger was moved off the screen).
• For gestures (pinching and rotating), the same notifications will be sent, but as gesturestart, gesturechange, and gestureend (or gesturecancel).
• For pinch gestures, you have scale information. A scale less than 1.0 means zooming out (fingers moving closer together). A scale greater than 1.0 means zooming in (fingers spreading apart).
• For rotation gestures, notifications are sent in degrees. Negative numbers indicate counterclockwise and positive numbers are clockwise.
• Transforms specific to the iPhone are provided, such as calling “-wekit-transform: rotate(-20deg);” for an object you wish to rotate. Make this type of call from a touch or gesture callback and you have dragability from within a web app. Additional parameters can be used during rotation, such as “-webkit-transform: rotate(-20deg); -webkit-transform-origin: top left;” to make the rotation of the object hinge on the top left (default is the center).
• An example of rotating, scaling, and moving an object: “document.getElementById(‘myFlower’).style.webkitTransform = ‘rotate(360deg) scale(0.5) translate(600px, 50px)’;
• Transforms are usually given a period of time to perform the transform (i.e. -webkit-transition-duration: 2s;). During that time the transform can be modified so as to transform in a linear, ease, ease-in, ease-out, ease-in-out, or a cubic-bezier form.

Database support for SQLite and file caching (client side, duh):

• HTML5’s SQLite spec is supported by iPhone’s Safari
• The sample code in the presentation creates a 2.5 megabyte database. Not worth mentioning otherwise, but I was stoked with the thought of creating reasonably large DBs locally… Maybe we’ll see some radically enhanced Gmail and Google Reader web apps. Airplane mode will be a little nicer.
• filecache ability is in iPhone 2.2. This was too new and no slides were available… Still, another airplane friendly feature and would be great for flickr or other media intensive sites.

And that’s just on web apps. My notes on native apps are more sparse, partly because it was the end of the day and partly because it’s old news.

A nice finish for the day was a presentation on submitting one’s application to Apple. I’ll save those notes for later this week – too much commentary I want to include to just put it up raw ;)

Food and refreshments during the Tech Talk were top notch. They know how to take care of the folks that build their platform.

My dev team uses JIRA for bug tracking. It’s a flexible project management and defect tracking system. As with almost any bug tracking system out there (Bugzilla, Trac, etc), web based defect tracking from a mobile handset is not very user-friendly.

Enter JIRA Mate (formerly JIRA Buddy), written by Shaun Ervine, an application for iPhone and iPod Touch specifically for interfacing with your JIRA database. I was surprised by this application being available before a Bugzilla rev, let alone even being available at all. I’m not complaining. Bugzilla fans should get a move on for their own app.

JIRA Mate simply uses your saved filters allowing you to access your JIRA issues straight from your iPhone.

Since JIRA Mate is helping out your business I guess you could write it off as a tax deduction :)

The app is $8.99 and allows you to pull down issues organized in filters you’ve created in the standard web app, sorted by date (your filter sort setting is not utilized). It does not have issue creation or editing capabilities, but does pull comments and allow you to comment in kind. It’s perfect for keeping your finger on the pulse of your bug database and staying in communication via comments.

At first thought, there will be lots more app ratings and this will help Apple kull (my favorite word this week) poor applications. On second thought, why would you give a good rating to an app you wish to remove? And how about an app you never remove? There will be many bad ratings applied to apps, without getting an equal response from those who like the app and keep it… The users who love the app will never be prompted for their rating.

Besides an absolutely killer Aston Martin opening chase and an even better dog-fight and parachute scene later, two things stuck in my mind from the latest Bond movie, Quantum of Solace.

First, James Bond driving hybrids. Ford got lots of hybrid vehicle product placement (listen for the electric motor during takeoff and stopping).

Second, the Bolivian desert. I didn’t know there was a desert in Bolivia. That ignorance induced the whip-phone-from-pocket reflex to load up some Bolivian geography (sociological pressure kept me from lighting a bright screen in a theater). It wasn’t the movie’s doing, but the ability to supplement one’s experience with personalized metadata is finally here. I’ll remember this when future grandkids ask when we finally started wearing computers.

The movie was good. Not as good as Casino Royale, but I’m liking this style of Bond more than any of the others.

For those stumbling upon this post looking for more on the Bolivian desert try these blogs, photos, and maps:

• El Gringo y El Galio – Desert by 4×4
• The salt plains of Uyuni, Bolivia
• Claire Fenton’s fun in the Bolivian desert
• craigiest’s Flickr set of the High Bolivian Desert

View Larger Map

During the week I used the phone as my primary personal cell phone. Usually I carry an iPhone for work and a Nokia N82 for photography and personal calls. Having the iPhone and G1 on me for a week made for some great comparisons and a little benchmarking.

I do not recommend this phone. You should probably not buy this phone. BlackBerry and the iPhone are both superior in almost every aspect.

The Good

1. Great (for plastic) screen. Bright, smooth movement, and fairly durable. The Flashlight application is bright.
2. Terrific email client (see remarks about keypad below)
3. Market (aka Android App Store) describes exactly what systems (GPS, PIM, 3G, etc) an application requires before one installs it
4. Excellent USB implementation – The G1 reports as a removable drive when plugged in to a computer, and charges from the USB
5. 3G beats the heck out of EDGE – It’s about 75% of the speed of AT&T’s 3G here in Philadelphia, but it’s 4x faster than EDGE
6. Amazon MP3 store integration
7. 3 megapixel camera has better resolution than the iPhone or current BlackBerry units, but is still antiquated enough to generate smile fatigue
8. Hardware keypad is useful for customers who aren’t willing to type more quickly on a virtual keypad
9. “Chin” section reminds us of the 1995 Motorola phones – Great way to reminisce
10. Google logo on the back

Don’t mistake my statements as a knock on Android. Android is great. I love it. My statements in this post are not directed at Android. The G1 is an unfortunate first hardware release of that OS.

There are certain laws mobile manufacturers must follow: You may not offer a media device without a standard headset jack. You may not offer navigation with a week GPS. You may not double the actual required width soley to add a physical qwerty foldout keypad. Above all else, you may not offer a lifestyle device without style.

Now, I’ve said all this based on reading the spec, viewing the pictures, and palming it for 10 minutes. I’ve owned and reviewed many HTC made devices and this a completely obvious failure to me. Perhaps that’s not fair without real-world use though?

So I’m going to endure some pain and suffering so you don’t have to (not that you would buy a G1 – you wouldn’t). I’m going to replace my N82 for the rest of this week with a device I know has no hope. I’m going to use it side-by-side with my iPhone 3G. Wish me luck.

.

For WordPress bloggers with iPhones, the iPhone WordPress application is close to the best gift since receiving a Nintendo Entertainment System for Christmas in 1983. The application is solid, allows tags and categories, posts pictures direct from the phone, etc. Awesome!

But what if you want to post pics from your Flickr stream? What if you’re shooting with another camera and want to post high quality photos not taken with the iPhone crackerjack cam? Here’s the instructions, including detailed pictures, on how I get photos from Flickr in to an iPhone WordPress blog post:

note: you can ignore 1/2 of the steps if you already know how to use WordPress and Exposure on your iPhone.

1. Get the WordPress app (Utilities section of the App Store).

2. Get the Exposure app (Social Networking section of the App Store).

3. Open Exposure and locate the desired picture or pictures in your photostream, as seen below.

4. Click the small right-pointing arrow, you will now see the image below.

5. Click the small arrow in the top right corner to see your Share Photo options.

6. Open in Safari, and Safari will open, as seen below.

7. To save the image, press and hold your fingertip on the image. Selecting Save Image will save the image to your Camera Roll on the iPhone. You now have your image.

8. Open WordPress and create a new blog post.

9. Select the Photos tab and click the “+” button at the bottom right.

10. Choose to Add Photo from Library.

11. Click the Save button in the top right – When you post, your photo will be appended at the end of your post (below image was pulled from Exposure/Flickr/Camera Roll exactly as described above).

It’s a great new world when we can blog and participate, without limitation, from a pocketable handset.

The pic is a snap of my N82 here at a diner over lunch.

On June 28th, 2007 I waited in line for the iPhone (and spent 3 days talking to AT&T to get it activated). The experience was a good one… The stench of rotten trash from a nearby McDonalds dumpster and seeing a full-grown man get beaten by his girlfriend and her purse for spending the $500 are favorite memories.

Normally I’d be all over the line parties (seriously)… This year I slept in and am happy to wait for it to arrive in the mail. Maybe next year.

Most smartphones slated for release over the next 12-months include a GPS receiver, built in. After that, it will be a marked failure to not include a GPS in a phone. The functionality that comes with GPS is outstanding – mapping, directions, location based experiences, etc. We’re about to enter an age of advancement in technological capabilities that we’re just beginning to imagine.

Consumers are moving to smartphones. The hottest smartphones (iPhone 3G, BlackBerry Bold 9000, most of Nokia’s Symbian and HTC’s Windows Mobile offerings) all include GPS and an exposed API for developing applications utilizing their hardware. Anything people can conceive of for location based mashups will be coming (more on these mashups in later posts)…

Here’s a first application…

BlackBerry is a leader in mobile phone GPS. Recently a few services that announce the location of one’s phone emerged. Initially these were billed as a sort of low-jack for one’s phone, a security service for the insecure (or those who want to spy on their kids, etc).

I decided to try a few of these. Most felt slimy, like, “you always know where your phone is, and you could also know where your wife is!” … I don’t know about you, but my phone is loyal and doesn’t run off with strangers… And I trust my wife far more than a phone.

My goal with trying these services was to mash Twitter, Pownce, Facebook, and other social networking services with my location. Such a mashup will allow me to share my real-time location with all friends. I came across BlackberryTracker.com. Much like the others, the idea is to provide you with the location of your phone. However, they have something the other’s don’t… Facebook and Google Earth integration (as well as a drop-dead-simple semi-RESTful API).

Friends can pinpoint me down to the meter on my Facebook profile, updated every 30 seconds. To be honest, it feels strange to openly publish this data. Security, and lack thereof, has us believing we shouldn’t share such information. But this fear is caused by the exception and not the rule. And in reality, my location in public isn’t private. Additionally, there are laws and common courtesies we live by, and I trust that people are inherently good.

Soon these services will be in the mainstream. Everyone will be able to pinpoint the location of anyone. Let me emphasize that… Soon everyone will be able to pinpoint the location of anyone. Not publishing your location will be like not having a mobile phone.

I’ve been using FriendFeed and del.icio.us more and more lately. Viigo (one of the best mobile RSS experiences available) has direct push to del.icio.us. It’s far superior to the iPhone’s mobile Google Reader sharing experience, so I’ve been happily consuming and sharing.

But FriendFeed isn’t updating these del.icio.us posts. It would be understandable if everything weren’t updating, but it seems to be del.icio.us entries. Flickr, blog entries, Google Reader, and Twitter items are nearly instant.

To get around this one can view his or her page, edit/add services, click the del.icio.us item, and finally click ‘refresh’ – but that’s hardly worth the effort.

Is FriendFeed feeling growing pains? Bret Taylor mentioned in a comment to Robert Scoble (who had similar updating problems) FriendFeed had a hiccup during a spider.

Personally, I doubt this was anything more than a technical glitch, but geez… The purpose of FriendFeed is to share what we’re doing on the Internet. If things aren’t pulling through, it’s a critical issue.

• For fellow FriendFeeders: http://friendfeed.com/sol
• For friends on Del.icio.us: http://del.icio.us/solyoung

Apple iPhone vs. Nokia N82, or complimentary citizens

.

That’s it! Twice in a week I’ve been left with a dead iPhone from snapping pics and pushing them live at an event or outing. Don’t get me wrong; I love the iPhone for most everything, but the lack of a swappable battery is adding some hate to the relationship (lack of video has also been a bone of contention).

The Nokia N82 is looking like a sweet option. Everything but a useable keyboard…

Quick Links to the streams:

• Flickr Photostream
• Twitter
• Utterz

My plan was to Twitter my progress and TwitPic/Flickr the pics out to my followers. But I woke up at 3am from a caffeine rush and a thought of typing for an hour becoming a nightmare – and boring. Utterz.com, a service doing pretty slick mashups of audio/video/text/photographs/etc, while harnessing APIs from pretty much every popular social networking service, caught my eye (more on Utterz later).

Here’s the day – check the Flickr photostream and the Utterz links below for my audio commentary while I running…

1. Lined up and ready to go
2. Started!
3. Mile 1
4. Mile 2
5. Mile 3
6. Live music between mile 3 and 4
7. Mile 4
8. Mile 5
9. Passing Ed Rendell, governor of PA
10. Mile 7
11. Mile 9
12. Finished!

About Utterz: You start an utter by calling or emailing. Either one initiates it. After that, you have 10 minutes to add more content to the utter. Utterz automatically adds audio from a call or content from an emailed pic/video/audio/text to create an utter similar to what I created above. The call-in feature (dial, press 2, talk, hang up) is extremely simple.

Now, none of the above would be impressive except that Utterz.com is doing it right. This is how services today are supposed to work. Utterz is tied in to all the social networking and blogging services. Any new utter is announced on Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, or even your WordPress/Blogger/MoveableType/etc blog (hosted or self-hosted – COOL!)

After a few months of preparing for the Broad Street 10-miler, it’s now the night before and pre-race excitement is setting in. iofy’s new office in the Navy Yard of Philadelphia is a block away from the finish line, so this will be a pretty nice way to finish a race. There are showers and refreshments in the building… Life will be good.

The race starts at 8:30am EDT. For the first time while running a race I’ll be Twittering. This is partially because I want to try it as a social experiment, and partly because I’ve been sick and not training for the last week (read: I’d like an excuse to run slightly slower than usual).

If you see someone blow by you, with the above on the back of his shirt, send a text message to 40404 with “follow sol”…

Gear:

• iPhone
• Nike+iPod Nano

Software & Services:

• Twitter
• TwitPic (Send a pic to twitpic and have it announced on Twitter)
  
• Flickr (Get the photostream here)
• MobileTwitter (stable jailbroken iPhone Twitter client)
• Twinkle (jailbroken iPhone geolocation + Twitter)
• Snapture (jailbroken iPhone camera.app replacement)

Good luck and see you at the finish line!

The exploring of Twitter integrated photo services continues… Today’s post is on SnapTweet, a service working towards announcing Flickr image uploads via Twitter updates.

Before continuing, here’s my philosophy on how a perfect Flickr/Twitter integration works:

1. Images posted to Flickr are optionally announced on Twitter.
2. No additional account required – either Twitter or Flickr is used for authentication.
3. Do not attempt to own the content. It’s ok to own distribution. Images on Flickr. Tweets on Twitter. Render wherever. That’s how consumers what their content.

Summary

For the most part, SnapTweet fits my requirements. There are bugs and gotchas with their implementation, but this is an ideal service for many folks. SnapTweet is tailored for the person who spends time in Flickr and wants announcements sent via Twitter. It is not for the person who Twitters all day and uses Flickr as a repository (me). A pretty neat feature is the direct message to send a link to the latest image on Flickr.

How SnapTweet works

SnapTweet uses one’s Twitter credentials via the Twitter API for authentication. After logging in you are asked for your Flickr username. You are given the option to enter a user-defined tag name so SnapTweet can synchronize with Flickr.

SnapTweet allows update announcements with links to your Flickr images in one of two ways. Tag the image on Flickr with the user-defined tag set in SnapTweet or send a direct message to @snaptweet on Twitter.

Tags

I set my user-defined tag to ’snaptweet’, but anything could be used. SnapTweet synchronizes with Flickr by checking tags of the 10 most recent images. When an image is found with a tag, a Twitter update with a link to the image is fired. The Twitter status update is set to the name of the image in Flickr (power users can customize the update via additional tags).

This is outstanding for anyone who spends time in Flickr. Simply tag images and have them announced.

Direct Messages

I’ll be using direct messaging. When you send a direct message to @snaptweet, it grabs the link to your most recent public Flickr upload and sends a Twitter update with the text from your direct message, with the link to the image appended.

Problems

There is a drawback to using tags: Timing. A Twitter update is sent when synchronization between SnapTweet and Flickr occurs. It’s easily possible for this to happen many minutes after you’ve set a tag, which may be after you’ve already sent your own updates to Twitter. This gets confusing, and it’s never fun to wonder when your tweet will post.

Tagging via an email upload is a royal pain. Using the tag method as a way post announcements on the go isn’t optimal and there are more elegant solutions out there.

The direct message feature requires your knowing the most recent image on Flickr. This is usually not a problem, but if you’re rapid-firing image uploads, you may cross up an update.

Verdict

SnapTweet follows the right philosophy for delivering your content. They let Twitter and Flickr host the data. They’re good for the Flickr lover who prefers spending time in Flickr over Twitter. I recommend SnapTweet for users in this category. The direct message to get the latest pic is a nice trick to keep handy for simpler image posting.

Overall, for users wanting to send pics with commentary on the go, my TwitPic + Flickr method is your best option. SnapTweet doesn’t do well in a real-time posting environment since it has to synchronize and you have to add the task of tagging your images.

How to is after the jump…

With all the web services and photo sharing systems, I’m amazed an integration of Flickr and Twitter hasn’t already happened. Twitxr came out and claimed compatibility in Dave Winer’s scripting.com comments, but it never actually worked. I’ve wanted a way to post a pic to Flickr and have it announced on Twitter right away. Nada.

I love to shoot pics on my iPhone and post them immediately. Live photo streams are terrific! Flickr makes it easy by allowing you send to an email to a pre-defined email address. All you do is send an email with a photo as an attachment to your Flickr upload email address.

Now TwitPic is offering a service for Twitter users just like Flickr’s service, but they store the photo and send an announcement to Twitter with a link. Whatever you put in the subject line of the email is set as your update in Twitter.

Combining these two services is easy. Just send an email to both services at the same time and the pic will be posted in both places. The subject line of the email will be set as your update in Twitter and as the title of the pic in Flickr.

If the above didn’t already give you the ‘Ah HA!’ feeling, here are the precise instructions (iPhone specific, but works with any email capable phone):

1. Set up Flickr so you can send email to your account. Do this by visiting http://flickr.com/account -> “Email”.
2. Save your Flickr upload email address to your address book. I named this contact “Flickr”.
3. Set up TwitPic so you can send email to your account. TwitPic uses your pre-existing Twitter account credentials for authentication (smart!). Do this by visiting http://twitpic.com -> “Log-in” -> “Settings”.
4. Save your TwitPic upload email address to your address book. I named this contact “TwitPic”.
5. SendPics (iPhone Jailbreak Specific): I recommend using SendPics to send full-rez images to Flickr, but the default photos iPhone app works good too.
6. Address the email, with pic attached, to your Flickr and TwitPic contacts, placing both contacts in the ‘To’ field.
7. Enter your Twitter update in the Subject line. This also becomes the Title of the image on Flickr.
8. Enter any additional tags and a description in the body of the email. This only applies to Flickr.

• Day 1
• Day 2 

Image courtesy of Komax Systems

Day 3

The question most people have been asking is, “What is the flow like?” Many have described this amount of flow as unmanageable and anti-social. Here’s what I’ve learned first-hand by Day 3…

After wrapping up yesterday’s post and promising to add 500+ friends per day, I destroyed my sleep cycle by obsessively discovering more than 1,000 new people. Since I’m a developer and VP of Engineering at iofy, I focused on developers and technology gurus. I’m also fond of the marketing and sales spaces as they relate to social networks, so spent some time beefing up that area of the flow too.

I do this by finding the most intelligent/witty/interesting people I can and spider through to their friends. Unlike a spammer, I only add a person if their tweets have been interesting and intelligent and I feel they’ll contribute to my education.

I woke this morning to a faster flow. At times today it closed in on my maximum reading speed, especially 9-5. With ~2,200 friends I’m now able to see instant changes in volume based on time of day, news, etc. Last night at 1:00am EDT, it was trickling. Before getting to the office it was still slow. Later, it drastically picked up. I’m getting metrics now and will share them tomorrow.

Our company president, @cart, supplied me with Steve Gillmor’s “Swarmtracking” this morning. Steve has a very similar approach but instead of using a Jabber client he uses the built in GMail web app and has search criteria. His article describes some good methods for tuning and searching, but the methods are distracting and require action (clicks). I also disagree with comparing this to a tracking system. One can use it that way, but it’s so much more powerful as a system for being fed valuable information.

What is the flow?

Reading and consuming the flow is like streaming a Google Search of the latest happenings that relate to you. Imagine a constant stream of somewhat relevant information. You scan as links and tidbits pass by. When something catches your eye, you click a link or respond with insight. Depending on one’s popularity, the flow splashes, much like a rock tossed in a river. One can see multiple splashes as multiple topics hit your flow at the same time.

The “Replies” page on Twitter.com works as an automatic net so I can listen to anyone speaking directly to me. It’s an automatic net and no further filtering is needed.

Unlike an RSS reader, this is real-time. My preference is to have an RSS reader open in 3/4 of my monitor and the flow open in the other 1/4. It’s immersion.

Additional thoughts and how-to (after the jump):

The tools I’ve been using are the twitter.com web site, Quotably.com, Adium as an XMPP/Jabber client, and email.

I use Twitter’s site for locating friends. I’m at the point where I’m almost ready to write my own API wrapper since their AJAX for managing friend additions and updating settings are buggy…….. <geek-speek>My dev team implemented a three-peat system at iofy for AJAX calls to avoid these bugs… AJAX calls for data frequently fail. I think Twitter just bombs out after a single failed try</geek-speek>. Their system would be more reliable with our approach and I wouldn’t have had to double and triple add people (sorry to those that received multiple add notices).

Adium is wonderful for reliably rendering the flow. You need to have a very easy to read font and have the updates spaced logically to differentiate them. Any more updates than present and it will be mandatory to have smooth scrolling. As of yet I haven’t found a smooth scrolling message plugin – please leave a link in the comments if you know of one.

My follower notifications have significantly gone up since describing this transition. Whenever I receive one I click the link to view the Twitter page. If they’re interesting and intelligent, I add them.

The iPhone is usable as a replies mechanism by using Quotably.com. I hope they’ll create an iPhone enhanced version soon.

Some utilities I want and we’re sure to see soon for flow management (hint, start writing these folks…):

• Powerful Twitter contact management and connection utilities.
• Twitter specific XMPP client. This should have automatic highlighting/tracking of replies, smooth scrolling, and a rating system for your users.

Lastly, the ease of finding intelligent people seems to be diminishing. I’m far from having a hard time discovering the new, but it takes more effort. This also could be because I’ve been become more selective as I discover the precise types of personalities I want to mix in.

A couple days ago, after months of thinking about how to consume more information, I was inspired by Scoble’s post to switch off of a standard HTTP Twitter API polling application (Twitterific) and move to a Jabber based client (Adium). It has been an amazing discovery.

Initially, and until yesterday, I was using Twitterific to read posts from ~100 friends. I had SMS updates coming in to the iPhone for friends beyond the normal scope of Internet friendship (wife, co-workers, family). I bumped my friend count up to ~500 before my first flow entry last night

I picked these friends by viewing the friends of some of my other intelligent friends. If I found the last 20 posts from a friend in their list to be interesting and smart, I added that person as a friend of mine. If I found that friend to be exceptionally intelligent, I would review their friends and do the same process to find more. A tree diagram for contact spread would be very interesting!

500 friends created a slow flow in Adium (Jabber client). Today I followed the same process of friend finding and upped the count to 1,100. It seems intelligent people keep intelligent company (thank goodness!) and locating other intelligent Twitterers is not terribly difficult.

The flow speed at 1,100 is roughly 100 updates per 10 minutes (1 tweet per 6 seconds). Sometimes it gets much faster, but it’s easily manageable. With an approximate average of 100 characters per tweet and an average word length of 5 characters, this translates to 200 words per minute. At this point it is at a speed where one could read every post if they weren’t focused on other things, but more is tolerable.

I’m looking to have a flow that is well beyond fully readable. It’s supposed to be a river. I’m guessing this will be in the 5,000 to 10,000 friend range, but as I adapt it should grow. I’ll be growing my group of friends by at least 500 per day for the next X days to see how this works out.

I’m way beyond the point where I can pick out closely related friend’s tweets from the flow without software assistance. This also means it’s impossible to re-route the updates to a phone when away (my wife is happy about this ;). My solution has been to create a second account used only for following family and co-workers. My updates are still sent from the main sol account.

A latent side-effect of making all these new friends and finding all these smart people has been that they (likely, you) want to follow me too. Approximately 1/4 to 1/3 of the people I’ve followed return the favor and follow me. If you’re in to marketing don’t count on this lasting – I’m sure unscrupulous groups will use this against us and we’ll get a lot more careful in who we befriend.

For now, for those I’m connecting with, it’s a pleasure to meet you and thank you for making us all smarter.

Steve answered, “We change our minds a lot. The web apps have worked well, but developers wanted to do more. And we heard that. Creating an SDK is a lot of work, you want to make it something you can live with for 20 years, and yet update it without breaking apps. This is an elegant and clean system.”

I’m certain Apple had the SDK in development since before WWDC ‘07. As Steve said, it takes a long time to develop an SDK. They just weren’t ready to announce it yet last year and covered by offering web apps. Their marketing machine and product release practices entice us to want more. We hated Apple last summer for it!

The remainder of the question was handled by Phil, “Second question. Electronic submission will be very fast, and this is a whole new process.”

A lot of people are screaming bloody murder about Apple controlling this process. While I don’t really like the idea of only getting Apps installed via Apple’s system, it could be a lot worse. Apple will be CHiPs, not the DMV. There will undoubtably be apps which make it possible to download and install while being untethered anyway.

The impression I got during the sign-up process to develop for the iPhone and download the SDK was impressive. Not because of the smoothness of the process (I hit terrible snags due to the server congestion), but because it’s obvious they’re going to allow developers to easily publish apps. What I got out of it is they’re making it better and easier to write software for the iPhone than for Windows Mobile or other handhelds. Apps will be as easy to publish as an album of music… Same model.

Dave Winer has been leaning towards the negative side of Apple’s plans, but he likes the idea of an untethered podcatcher. I’d love to talk to him about that… It’s something I expect iofy to work on.

Above screenshot taken from http://developer.apple.com/

The iPhone SDK was released today as predicted. Either there were errors in Apple’s push of the site updates or, more likely, developers are so hungry for this SDK that developer.apple.com is down.

I’ve been hammering on ‘Refresh’ for an hour. Could everyone please stop so I can get started on some code!?

The iPhone SDK has been a long time coming. Apple has been working on it since before last June’s WWDC ‘07, despite pushing the “You can build amazing web applications” message. The reason for pushing the only-web-apps decree was because the API, tool-chains, development environment, etc, weren’t ready.

Back at WWDC ‘07 the development community felt slammed by the news that we couldn’t build native applications or otherwise access the great hardware features of the device. We grumbled and asked questions, and were told it was a marketing/branding/positioning decision.

Back then there was a feeling of something amiss. The voice of the engineers at Apple seemed to speak, “one more thing.” Every time an attendee took the mic and posed a question about iPhone access (there were a lot of these questions) the engineers responded with wobbly words about web apps while exuding a sigh of, “it’s coming…”

It just flat-out felt like Apple had to make their June 29th release date for the device and they couldn’t get the SDK complete. Standard feature-drop. The typically well groomed Apple machine was recovering from an all-nighter just to get the iPhone itself released.

At the time I wasn’t certain of an SDK in the works. As most developers returning from WWDC I was dejected – they have to have an API, they just have to! I even agreed to a bet in early July ‘07 with my company president: Apple releases an SDK within one year of the iPhone release.

I’m looking forward to March 6th for more than winning a bet. On Thursday I find out if my prediction was correct and if I read the Apple folks. If we get a healthy suite of tools I’ll have validated my assumption that Apple had an SDK under way prior to WWDC.

UPDATE: Cartwright Reed reminded me the bet was an official iPhone SDK from Apple that iofy could use. This is important since I (and all developers looking forward to the SDK) could still lose if the SDK is only accessible to companies blessed by Apple. So far this seems unlikely.

I’ve been reminded today about how easy life is when we use the right tools. My wife and I were out skiing and watching Spring Mountain’s Big Air Jam. I took pics with an iPhone and Canon SD-1000 and was blasting them straight to Flickr/Twitter. I was also taking video…

At lunch I pulled out the MacBook Pro and iMovie. In fifteen minutes I’d imported and edited the videos, laid a techno track, and exported. Sure the videos could have been uploaded raw, but a highlight reel is better edited, cleaned, and combined. Check it out after the jump.

For those that enjoyed the photostream today, I’m pleased and hope you’ll spread the word.

I like Robert Scoble’s preference of broadcasting live (I was doing this in 2001).

A historical note: I used to broadcast live. I was the General Manager at LIvVE.com, from 2001 to 2004. We would do live remote broadcasts with nothing more than a Sony GT1 and a high (cough, cough (28.8k)) speed cellular connection. Back then we risked a punch in the nose when going about an interview with an UMPC device shoved in someone’s face.

The highlight live broadcast was on the 4th of July in 2001 at the New York Trade Towers. A guard offered to let us film from the top of a tower if we slid him a fifty.

And now for the highlights reel

iofy has a subscription to the O’Reilly Safari. It allows complete online access to O’Reilly’s entire line of books, as well as books they still have in the works. As a tech company, we thrive on this.

Lately I’ve hooked up bookmarks on my iPhone to titles I like. At any time, a single click lands me in the book I left off on. It’s far more convenient to have books in a pocket, on a device one already keeps on hand, than to carry around a Kindle or hardback.

Continue for full-size screenshots…

is working well as a good photo stream and album holder (using the Sets feature.) It works as a free backup service too ($25 per year for photo hosting is close enough to free.)

Both apps accentuate mobile blogging and connecting to people. I’ve been using the iPhone to take pics on the go, dropping them in to Flickr on the fly via Flickr’s email service (iFlickr on jailbroken iPhones is fantastic too), and then Twittering the links.

Which leads to tying together Twitter and Flickr. Twitxr ties Twitter and Facebook together, but isn’t really that impressive since it only runs on hacked iPhones and hits those two services. I’d really love to find an app and/or service that hooks Twitter and Flickr together. Both have APIs. This seems natural, no?

Yahoo! has a lot more than search to offer – it shouldn’t be their primary business. As Scoble and Winer both pointed out, the wars are being fought on platforms – Especially the mobile platform. Yahoo!’s Go service synchronizes calendars, contacts, etc, from phone or PC and runs on Windows, OS X, BlackBerry, Symbian (Nokia), and Windows Mobile. Heck, it runs on almost every phone out there and OS X has Yahoo Sync built in. It’s been over a year since I’ve synchronized my phone by wire and I’m able to keep three phones and two laptops in sync.

Dave Winer shares insight from past technology wars while asking which platform will be adopted as the standard for synchronization of contacts, social networking, etc. I argue it could be Yahoo!. They’re embracing OpenID and offering Pipes. The Go service has plugins which tie in to MySpace and other social networking sites. They’ve got an identity system, a delivery method, and a decent reach in to the mobile market.

Finally, Yahoo’s two destinations – Yahoo! Music and Yahoo! Finance. These two are both number 1 in their class. Numero Uno. Why? They have content. Google offers search – when you’re looking for content. Yahoo!’s Music and Finance (and other sites) have that content.

These are the Yahoo! products that matter to me and the reason I’m a Yahoo! shareholder. If the sale goes through I’ll happily cash out with a profit and start looking elsewhere for services that satisfy consumer need.

It met its demise in the outer pocket of a WWDC07 laptop bag (yes, my bag, d’oh!)… Cracking the screen and becoming unusable. I don’t feel like doing a screen replacement. It’s now up for sale and I’m using the iPhone as the primary, with the BlackBerry 8800 as a backup. I’m hoping HTC will make another similar all-in-one device for mobile blogging soon – preferably with Windows Mobile 7.

Since I’ve been diving in to a heavier load of server programming, an SSH client has been a priority. Rove offers a terrific terminal app, Mobile SSH, covering Telnet, SSH 1&2, etc. It’s $95, but well worth it. Tailing a log file while walking with my wife last weekend was far superior to sitting at Starbucks and dealing with WiFi. Spoiled? What?

Add to it that Rove offers a combination VNC RDC client called Mobile Desktop and a file manager app (though I have no idea when I’ll be FTPing or SFTPing stuff from the bberry – who has that much content on a bberry??). What Rove lacks in creativity for naming its products, it makes up in enterprise level quality.

If I had thumbs and fingers the size of matchsticks, the blackberry could replace my laptop. The keyboard is small, but so what?… Mobile blogging isn’t about long, drawn out posts (like this one? Sorry.) With WordPress hooked up, posts are possible. We’ll see if this turns in to a true mobile blogging platform… I’d love to hear from people on their preferences in the mobile blogging arena.

So it’s hooked in to WordPress for mobile posts. Flickr is plugged in to the 8800 and flickrRSS on WordPress. Twitter is plugged in to everything. I’m not so hot on Facebook – I’ll write my own apps…