Philip Greenspun, a CompSci professor at MIT, wrote a nice post. Something most twenty and thirty somethings don’t want to hear, but should anyway…
http://philip.greenspun.com/business/internet-software-patents
Actually, I feel challenged to prove him wrong.
I’ve finally made the leap away from being a directory-o-holic and landed in iPhoto from iLife 08. It does the organization automatically (“Browse Package Contents” in Finder.)
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?
My favorite mobile blogging device is now listed on eBay. The HTC Universal has a usable keyboard, beautiful touch screen, plenty of horsepower, 3G, Wi-Fi, BlueTooth, dual-cameras etc.
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.
A while back I wrote about switching to the BlackBerry 8800. The long route to that BlackBerry was because I wasn’t entirely happy with the iPhone – it was just a glorified phone/iPod when released. Now that Google Mail supports IMAP IDLE, 3rd party apps are running, and the 1.1.3 update can be used on my preferred T-Mobile (with a little massaging), I’m back to using it as the preferred lifestreaming device.
Until Term-vt100 works as well as Rove’s SSH client, the 8800 stays in my bag for backup…
So I got to thinking the other day about all the peeps on Twitter who have slick, short, names. Most I follow on Twitter follow this convention (ev, al3x, jack, biz, dick, iofy, to name a few). It’s not just a status symbol on the service, but also a matter of resource utilization.
I switched from solyoung to sol. Easier to remember and less to type (special thanks to the Twitter guys for help with that.)
Each message on Twitter is limited to 140 characters. As of yet there isn’t a Twitter application which handles the @user feature. Thus, a response to a longer name both costs time and characters. Another Twitterer I follow (you should too, he’ll change your life) is braverydanger. That’s thirteen characters (or fifteen including the @ and a space.) A response to jack or iofy with the @user feature costs six total characters, allowing 6.7% more room for a response.
This becomes even more important on a mobile phone when typing the extra characters could cost an additional twenty or more seconds (assuming a typical numeric keypad w/out T9 input.)
The switch meant losing all my previous followers (name changes are bad news for brand recognition.) It also meant getting my tweets over to the new account. Both are worth it since I’m young in the game of blogging.
(note: Twitter’s API saved the day. To copy the tweets from the old account to the new account I screen-scraped the old posts and wrote a shell script that imported the scraped posts in reverse order with do/curl/while. Fifteen minutes of coding.)
Now… If only the guys at sol.com would let me pick up that domain for less than the quarter million they quoted last time ;)