With the move to Seat­tle I decided that Picplum.com was the per­fect solu­tion for keep­ing my dad, my grand­mother and my wife’s mom in the loop with pho­tos. While both my dad and her mom are on Face­book, my grand­mom isn’t. And there’s some­thing dif­fer­ent about receiv­ing phys­i­cal pho­tos in the mail, which is exactly what Pic­plum does.

Pic­plum is a ser­vice where we can send pho­tos to their ser­vice from your smart­phone or desk­top and then on a reg­u­lar sched­ule have those pho­tos auto­mat­i­cally sent out to a pre­de­fined list of peo­ple. The com­pany is founded by Paul Sta­ma­tiou (Geor­gia Tech alumni) and Akshay Dodeja. They’re funded by Y Com­bi­na­tor (also funded Red­dit, Justin.tv, Drop­box, and more) and are look­ing to turn the photo indus­try on its head.

I signed up far before I placed my first order with them. It was a ser­vice that I intended to use, but felt silly using for only two pho­tos. I mean, it just feels weird. It’s insub­stan­tial. At least, it feels that way to me. In a world where I get people’s ran­dom thoughts wire­lessly on my phone. I can see videos of peo­ple eat­ing their din­ner, or watch­ing tv, or I can open Skype and video chat with my friend in south-east Asia. In that world, two pho­tos seems insignificant.

But to my grand­mother, who lives in rural Geor­gia and who’s most excit­ing part of her week is a trip to see her doc­tor two towns over. Two pho­tos from her grand­son in Seat­tle, WA… that’s gen­uine excite­ment. That’s some­thing she can show her neigh­bors. Some­thing she and I can talk about when I call her. This isn’t a ser­vice for me, it’s a ser­vice for her.

This week I finally placed an order, send­ing out seven pho­tos in the first batch. Five of me and Katie, one of our dogs, and one of the Seat­tle skyline.

The sys­tem is beau­ti­fully built and very intu­itive. If you do end up hav­ing ques­tions they have an on-screen chat ser­vice for cus­tomer ser­vice and when I asked my ques­tion I was talk­ing to Akshay, one of the founders. The flow is quite sim­ple once you setup your account, you tell it what email addresses it might expect pho­tos from. In this way I set it up so that either I or Katie can email them pho­tos and have them added to the sys­tem. Then I can log in on the com­puter to man­age, either remove dupli­cate pho­tos  or  upload pho­tos from my PC.

If you’ve recently moved away from fam­ily, or have a young one who is enter­ing your life and will require lots of pho­tos to be shared with fam­ily, then Pic­plum is a fan­tas­tic ser­vice. And when you real­ize that it’s a ser­vice for the recip­i­ents more than for your­self, it all makes per­fect sense.

Some Ideas for Picplum

• Notes. Allow notes to be writ­ten on back of pho­tos, it might com­pli­cate the lin­ear sys­tem but it would be invalu­able to be able to write lit­tle notes such as post­cards. “Sally at 3 months.”
• Dis­tri­b­u­tion lists. I have my core who I want to send pho­tos to reg­u­larly, but the more peo­ple in their sys­tem then it’s eas­ier for me to send pho­tos through Picplum.
• Pull from my social media. Inte­grate with Twit­ter and Face­book and Google+. Let me share a photo and in the tweet I type “#pp” sig­nal­ing their ser­vice to pull the photo for my next batch.
• Expand capa­bil­i­ties. Rather than be just a “push” plat­form, mean­ing that they send out batches. Setup a gallery which is friendly for fam­i­lies and less tech savvy peo­ple, mak­ing it dead sim­ple for them to get printed pho­tos on my dime. I’d set a spend­ing limit per per­son or over­all, a pre-approved amount per month.

Prob­lems for Picplum

• Where’s the pivot? As a photo plat­form there’s already a very com­pet­i­tive mar­ket­place. How does this scale to a big busi­ness? I have to believe they’re build­ing this and see­ing where it leads them with the belief that they can pivot or respond based on the mar­ket response.
• While an easy and direct inter­face, it’s still a ser­vice that my grand­mother can’t use. It requires a cer­tain level of tech­ni­cal savvy even with the lin­ear process.

We’ll see where Picplum.com ends up going, but in the mean time I’ll enjoy using them and fol­low­ing their journey.

This post was unso­licited and is my own opin­ion, I receive no com­pen­sa­tion for writ­ing this. I did include my refer­ral link in this post, so any­one who signs up and uses the com­pany earns me future credit for send­ing out photos.

Last week­end I offi­cially turned off my Android phone and felt the power in my hands as I began using an iPhone. As I wrote last time, it wasn’t a deci­sion I took to lightly.

I spent a fair bit of time before my last post, and after, con­sid­er­ing why the chang­ing of Android to iPhone bore such weight for me. In some ways, I’ve tried to cham­pion Android among my less tech savvy friends. I held up the open­ness, show­ing off my cus­tomized inter­face with unique icons and mov­ing wall­pa­per. I con­stantly defended Android to my tech savvy friends who had iPhones. I even, for a short time, con­verted one to the world of Android only to see him return to iPhone ‘because it just works.’

The fact is that Android is fol­low­ing the path of Win­dows, becom­ing a more open OS and trad­ing cost to the detri­ment of sta­bil­ity or smooth func­tion. When a siz­able OS change occurs, as did with their still-rolling-out Ice Cream Sand­wich ver­sion, old phones are left in the dust. And unlike Win­dows, where users tend to cling to the ver­sions they know and love, many Android fans lust for the next ver­sion. Why? Because it might do more bet­ter. The OS still feels unfinished.

So here I am, con­verted, hap­pily using my iPhone. I would esti­mate that I spent roughly $50 on apps for the phone, from top notch games like Puz­zle­juice and Ascen­sion, to the best app for Twit­ter, Tweet­bot, and on to other nec­es­sary apps such as ones used to help me eat health­ier. It’s sad, because I’d hap­pily weigh the best Android apps with the best iPhone apps and say that they will often match up excel­lently. But there are also are­nas where Android sim­ply falls flat. Tweet­bot far out­shines any­thing I found on Android, but on Android I found I pre­fer the selec­tion of Red­dit apps such as Red­dionic (which is still in Alpha.)

In the first days I had the iPhone, I spent prob­a­bly six hours toy­ing with it and adding apps, here is the cur­rent list of apps I’ve downloaded.

more

Today, while dri­ving today, I nearly threw my phone out the win­dow. I thought about rolling it down and chuck­ing it out as I rolled along at 50 miles an hour, watch­ing in joy as the phone shat­tered and broke on the pave­ment and snow. I had had enough.

You have to under­stand, I’ve sup­ported the Android OS since the Droid 1 got into my hands. It was a fan­tas­tic phone and I was very happy… for the first year or so. And then the phone began to fall behind, tech­nol­ogy moved for­ward and the Droid 1’s proces­sor and mem­ory quickly fell fur­ther and fur­ther behind. I was able to com­bat this with cus­tom ROMs and thanks to the preva­lence of the Droid 1 I was able to enjoy a thriv­ing hacker com­mu­nity to squeeze every ounce of power out of it.

Come a few months ago and my Droid 1 was nearly dead. It limped along with a bro­ken power but­ton, poor bat­tery life, and increas­ing forced reboots. I held out and fought, drag­ging the phone kick­ing and scream­ing to my two year phone upgrade with Ver­i­zon, but when the time came the promised phone — the kwisatch hader­ach for Android was not to be seen, the Sam­sung Galaxy Nexus kept get­ting pushed fur­ther back. And I was forced to suc­cumb to a sub­par phone, the LG Rev­o­lu­tion. My patience had run out, and I did not rel­ish the thought of dri­ving across the coun­try with a half oper­at­ing phone. And my loss of patience led me to make a rash decision.

The LG Rev­o­lu­tion has been noth­ing but painful as far as phones go. For our drive we relied on Katie’s iPhone’s GPS to get us nav­i­gated safely. Why hers and not mine? Because using the GPS was caus­ing my phone to reboot. For phone calls we had iffy qual­ity. Some­times when I get a call the phone never shows me a use­ful screen and just vibrate rings end­lessly. The only way to stop it is to pull the bat­tery. I mean seri­ously, What… the fuck.

Now, my anger isn’t against the Android OS. I think it does fine and will con­tinue to improve. But if a per­fect Android phone exists out there, then I might have to go through three or more phones before I find one which works. Whereas if I go straight to the iPhone I know I’m guar­an­teed a sat­is­fac­tory per­for­mance. Maybe not stel­lar. I know there will be frus­tra­tions there, but… well… I’m ready for a change.

So in the next few weeks I’ll be going for it. Time to try out iOS.

Being the gad­get hound / tech­non­erd that I am, I keep a run­ning list of the gad­gets and giz­mos I want. And see­ing as how I’m no longer run­ning up credit card debt to buy all my new gad­gets, I no longer just go out and get them — instead opt­ing for a rea­son­able and respon­si­ble approach. I blog about it.

Droid Bionic

The next Android phone, expected in August. It will be a 4g dual core phone and is gen­er­ally believed to be the next must-have Android phone. I’m still rock­ing an ‘OG Droid 1′ and sadly its age is begin­ning to show as app require­ments con­tinue to expand. When I went to my local Ver­i­zon store to get my wife an iPhone, the sales peo­ple unan­i­mously agreed that wait­ing for this phone was the right call. If how­ever, once it is released, it falls short of expec­ta­tions I’ll have to re-evaluate what to purchase.

Base Cost: $299 + 2 year con­tract extension

21.5″ iMac 2.7gHz

My wife has been some­what of a home­less com­puter user for the past six months. We got used lap­tops from my pre­vi­ous employer when I still worked for them, we got an amaz­ing deal on them (which may be related to me ask­ing for the deal while the boss was pos­si­bly ine­bri­ated.)  They per­formed admirably until about a year ago when the first lap­top went out. We then switched her over to mine which went out just a few months later. Since then she’s been shuf­fling between machines as pos­si­ble. Less than ideal. So I badly want to get her a new machine and I don’t want to cut any cor­ners on this one.

Base Cost: $1,499

Nook Touch

I have a first gen­er­a­tion Nook and I love it. I have almost com­pletely moved away from the world of paper books. I have a ver­i­ta­ble library on my Nook. And while I love it, Barnes & Noble has suc­cess­fully made me feel like I need an improved reader. The new Nook has a touch screen, it removes the e-Ink flicker dur­ing page refreshes, and most impor­tantly — it’s bat­tery is sev­eral mag­ni­tudes stronger. As it is, after one long plane ride, I may need to recharge my Nook. The new Nook’s bat­tery is sup­posed to be able to han­dle a great deal longer before need­ing a charge again.

Base Cost: $139

Doxie Scan­ner

My mother used to pub­lish a newslet­ter called “The Get Orga­nized! News” which was a monthly newslet­ter all about orga­ni­za­tion. I am far from an overly orga­nized per­son. I’m fine with piles of papers, and a lack of obvi­ous orga­ni­za­tion. How­ever, there reg­u­larly comes a time where I need to find some­thing. Bank info, account cre­den­tials, etc. Going paper­less is a won­der­ful dream. The idea that I can sim­ply uti­lize my extra-appendage of phone or lap­top to find what­ever it is I need. I can uti­lize this scan­ner and the cloud to achieve this dream.

Base Cost: $149

WD TV Live Hub

For our wed­ding, one of my bosses gave us a WDTV Live box, it’s a lit­tle box which con­nects to our TV and lets us watch media files eas­ily on it. It’s become a sta­ple in our home enter­tain­ment, and while it works well in most cases, it has a few prob­lems such as view­ing MKV files and requir­ing an exter­nal hard drive to be con­nected. Shortly after we got our box, West­ern Dig­i­tal released this new box, WD TV Live Hub which cor­rects a lot of stuff includ­ing all of the issues I out­lined above. So, obvi­ously, I need to have it.

Base Cost: $199

Unde­cided Gadgets

There are still a hand­ful of other types of gad­gets or tech­nol­ogy I have yet to decide on. These are ones where I know I have a need to fill but I have yet to decide what I want.

Enter­tain­ment Sound Sys­tem — Katie and I want a bet­ter sound sys­tem for our tele­vi­sion and enter­tain­ment sys­tem. I don’t yet know what sys­tem I want.

Tablet — iPad 2 seems like the clear choice, but aside from peo­ple going, “ooh you have an iPad” — I’m not sure it’s worth the $$$. Is there a bet­ter choice? Would a Chrome­book be worth it? Or a net­book? Or even the Nook Color rooted to give full tablet con­trol? I just don’t know yet.

Dig­i­tal photo frame — One of my projects has been to begin archiv­ing fam­ily pho­tos. I want to have one which shows fam­ily pho­tos, but could also be used to show art. On a larger scale, I wish there was a dig­i­tal photo frame which I could give to my grand­mother and be able to eas­ily update via cell phone sys­tem (she doesn’t have wire­less inter­net) remotely. Liv­ing in rural geor­gia there is cell phone cov­er­age but no wifi.

You know what?  I love the lat­est thing. I love the shiny new tech­nol­ogy. I’m con­stantly try­ing new browsers like the cur­rent zeit­geist ‘Rock­Melt’ browser, or the Opera Mobile for my Android phone. But those things just aren’t as cool as the three things I need to review:

Sharpie’s Liq­uid Pencil

The future is here. Like the erasable pens of the 80s and 90s, but bet­ter. When I found out these were avail­able I hit the nearby Wal-Mart and grabbed a pair of them. I’ve been writ­ing with it for nearly two weeks and I feel com­fort­able finally pro­vid­ing a review.

The rea­son this pen­cil is so… futur­is­tic is that the ink/liquid lead is erasable… for the first “24” hours (and that 24 is quite loose.) I sus­pect it has to do with the humid­ity here in Florida, but I have yet to find writ­ing that I have writ­ten which can­not be com­pletely erased.

My only real com­plaints with this is that it is a less than per­fectly smooth writ­ing expe­ri­ence (prone to clump­ing or other imper­fec­tions) and the erasers are lit­tle nibs which are prone to being pulled out of the pen­cil and strug­gle with any seri­ous eras­ing. I have not test the pen­cil with other erasers yet.

Ver­dict: Buy but don’t write checks with them.

WorkFlowy.com

A list tool for the list-iest of list mak­ers. Truly a fan­tas­tic tool which I have become com­pletely reliant on. It’s like an infi­nitely expand­able and amaz­ingly use­ful tool. I use it as a brain dump and track­ing of var­i­ous lists. One thing I’ve begun doing is mak­ing a small para­graph log for what I do every day. You know, for legal defense and stuff. And so I can look back in a week and know what the hell I did.

The site is really decep­tively sim­ple and lack­ing in pizazz. It does one thing and it does it really really well. I’d write more, but it wouldn’t make a dif­fer­ence — go check it out.

I’ve shared about it to a num­ber of my online friends, it seems to be most strongly attached to peo­ple who pre­dom­i­nately work on the com­puter as opposed to other pro­fes­sions which do not leave some­one hand­cuffed to the com­puter. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t not for you. (I don’t hate over-using negatives.)

Ver­dict: For the list mak­ers out there, this is crack cocaine mixed with smart drugs

NewsBlur.com

This one popped up on Hack­erNews a few weeks ago and I stopped using it after just a cou­ple days, falling back on the tried and true Google Reader. But two weeks ago I went back to News­Blur and really dug into it. And I haven’t looked back since (except when I click the Reader link in Gmail out of habit.)

I have a love-hate rela­tion­ship with Google. I think they do an excel­lent job in many things, but I grow frus­trated with the stag­na­tion of launched prod­ucts and I’m ner­vous about how much of my life is in their hands. Email, search, site sta­tis­tics, etc. And Google Reader is one that has really grown stale with lit­tle to no inno­va­tion in the last few years. News­blur was a breath of fresh air with an inno­v­a­tive inter­face and a num­ber of great fea­tures, and the import directly from Google Reader is an excel­lent way to draw me in.

Admit­tedly I ponied up for the $12 “Pre­mium” which turns off the limit on the num­ber of feeds I can track (non-premium has a 40 rss feed max as opposed to the ~160 I cur­rently read.) This site is not really going to be of inter­est to any­one who doesn’t use RSS for news / blog con­sump­tion, you don’t even have to be a junkie like I am — but RSS isn’t for everyone.

The other big strength for the site is that it has intel­li­gence train­ing on what posts you’ll like and dis­like. I haven’t taken the time to really hone in and train my pref­er­ences yet, I pre­fer to just raw­dog it and power through the data over­load. Cuz’ that’s how I roll.

Ver­dict: RSS users should find this site quite use­ful and easy to use.

So there you have it, from liq­uid pen­cils to a new way to process my news and a tool which keeps mas­sive list / brain dump — three tools I want to share.

When it comes to web devel­op­ment, or tech­nol­ogy as a whole, I want to be Julian Del­phiki. You may expect me to tell you that Del­phiki was a famous sci­en­tist or some bril­liant engi­neer who cre­ated an enhanced beach ball, but in fact he was just a child when he had his great­est success.

Julian Del­phiki is bet­ter known as Bean, the dimi­nu­itive greek kid who helped Ender Wig­gin save the earth from the bug­gers in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. His spe­cialty was being the prob­lem solver. He thought of the stu­pid ridicu­lous over-the-top ideas and made them work.

I want to be the mad sci­en­tist of web design. Ask me for the impos­si­ble, give me the time and the resources, and I’ll find the way or I’ll blaze my own trail.

There’s a mag­i­cal idea here, the seduc­tive power of the infi­nite. Web design is an infi­nite can­vas with infi­nite can­vases avail­able. But even in the infi­nite bound­less work­space the pos­si­ble can be hard to find. I love web design for that feel­ing, the same feel­ing a sculp­tor has as he digs his fin­gers through clay. The way that Edi­son felt when his light bulb lit and held its burn for longer than the flash so many oth­ers gave off as they went off.

Or when the Pirate Black­beard first spot­ted his prey and then suc­cess­fully over­ran them and began to pil­lage and plun­der. The feel­ing of sat­is­fac­tion and plea­sure bask­ing in vic­tory. He cre­ated a vic­tory where in many cases there should have been none. Now imag­ine if Bean had been a pirate, Soma­lia would have been deeply inter­ested in that.

Inven­tion is a won­der­ful and pow­er­ful thing.

If we decided what had won E3 for the most press and buzz, undoubt­edly it is Xbox 360’s Natal (nah-tall). This project is bring­ing the next level of inter­ac­tion and immer­sion in games. The abil­ity for us to move past the Wii’s active level using a con­troller into an active gam­ing expe­ri­ence on our own.

Now the first thing is to share that a bit of this tech­nol­ogy is bought or licensed by Microsoft, it isn’t their own. Johnny Lee, who is best known for the hack he did with the Wii, where he mod­i­fied a pair of glasses to inter­act with the Wii and cre­ate an impres­sive expe­ri­ence where the screen reflected his loca­tion and ori­en­ta­tion, allow­ing him to lit­er­ally look behind objects and such. Also I saw a demo for some of the func­tion where a per­son can con­trol sys­tems with­out any con­troller, such as we saw the flick­ing through movies etc.

Of the demos though, Natal’s Milo is the most amaz­ing, stun­ning and unbe­liev­able. The func­tion­al­ity shown in this demo is so smooth and real­is­tic I find it very hard to believe.

Fur­ther, I real­ized halfway through the video that Milo had not fallen into the Uncanny Val­ley for me. Obvi­ously he’s still clearly ani­mated and not going for the 100% real­is­tic look, instead going with a more artis­tic nearly anime art style while still stay­ing some­what close to realistic.

But con­sid­er­ing even the ani­ma­tion as ho-hum, con­sider the AI we’re shown. The abil­ity for the sys­tem to process nat­ural lan­guage, detect inflec­tions, and the cre­ation of real­is­tic audio. Just wow. This could be truly epic and if the game / sys­tem con­tin­ues to develop in this way, I will def­i­nitely be acquir­ing an Xbox 360 for it.

Link short­en­ers have come under fire this week. Schachter crit­i­cized them say­ing they make the web more frag­ile as a sin­gle point of fail­ure for hun­dreds of thou­sands if not mil­lions of links on the Inter­net. Jason Kot­tke posted agree­ing with him. And they’re right. There’s no dis­put­ing that. How­ever I have two pro­pos­als for ideas which could strengthen the web while still uti­liz­ing shorteners.

First, what if link short­en­ers devel­oped a sim­i­lar frame­work to what Identi.ca is doing as a dis­trib­uted Twit­ter clone? Mean­ing that there is a uni­fied data­base between any num­ber of link short­en­ing sites.

There would be some coor­di­na­tion required such that sites would have to work hard to remain up to date in their data­bases to avoid col­li­sions. But this would allow peo­ple to take ‘abc123’ and go to one of the mul­ti­ple domains to uti­lize the link short­en­ing. It would of course still be ham­pered by the fact that peo­ple would have to take the tokens to a new url to get redirected.

The sec­ond pro­posal I have is for a third party to backup the short­ened links.

Imag­ine if Google indexed all the link short­en­ers (or rather, uti­lized the data they’re already track­ing) and pro­vided an easy way for peo­ple to access this infor­ma­tion? Maybe as a sin­gle page peo­ple can go to that pro­vides the expanded url and redi­rects them or as a plu­gin in Fire­fox. Now this doesn’t have to be Google or even a search engine, Twit­ter could do it, or per­haps some­one else. And through this sys­tem the Inter­net infra­struc­ture is strengthened.

Updated 8:31am: Changed ‘their’ to ‘they’re’.

Expec­ta­tions are a dan­ger­ous thing.

On the one hand, when they are cor­rect they can greatly speed up your process giv­ing you some­where to begin and allow­ing you to forgo many ques­tions and tests in terms of fig­ur­ing out the sit­u­a­tion. Or, when your expec­ta­tions are wrong, it can cost you valu­able time.

Sun­day I woke up, ready to edit and pro­duce Man­a­Na­tion for the next day, but I dis­cov­ered some­thing. My com­puter had frozen and would not boot, ask­ing me for a bootable disk to be inserted, and I could hear one of the hard­drives pro­duc­ing the ‘click of death.’ A small click­ing sound that indi­cates the read­ing arm is bro­ken or stuck and thus the hard drive is near­ing death.

My machine (Mace II, named for Mace Windu, yes I’m a geek) has three hard dri­ves. C: is the main drive where all the action hap­pens. Oper­at­ing Sys­tem, pro­gram files, my doc­u­ments, mp3 col­lec­tion, etc. D: is my stor­age drive for movies, big apps, some back­ups. O: is for Man­a­Na­tion stuff exclu­sively. I also use an exter­nal hard drive to run back­ups and for trans­port­ing Man­a­Na­tion video files.

I shut the machine off and, assum­ing it was my C:, main hard drive, since the machine would not boot. So I ordered a new hard drive rushed from NewEgg. In the mean­time I pro­duced a low qual­ity video with my Flip cam­era and had it run on Mon­day instead of the sched­ule episode.

Yes­ter­day the new hard drive arrived. After work I got home and set up the new hard drive, booted with a Win­dows XP CD and installed the OS. It took about an hour, K and I took our evening walk dur­ing the time, and then after it booted up I went to install Mozilla Fire­fox only to see some­thing peculiar.

It was try­ing to install Fire­fox to the G: drive. For those not used to Win­dows machines, Win­dows is almost uni­ver­sally on C: drive. This comes from the days when you would have an A: and B: drive for floppy disks, so C: fell to the hard drive. It’s not required but it’s the stan­dard. When I inves­ti­gated fur­ther I dis­cov­ered that the drive I had just installed was indeed the G: drive and that the C: drive was my old main hard drive. The one which had died was my mid­dle hard drive, D: drive.

This was good news on many counts: first it meant a quick fix. I just had to fix the jumper­ing on the hard dri­ves and it would boot into the main drive again, restor­ing order to the uni­verse. Sec­ond it meant a huge reduc­tion in needed time to rebuild my machine and re-install the appli­ca­tions. And thirdly it meant that there was min­i­mal crit­i­cal data loss. I’m fairly good about back­ups, but I had got­ten lax on back­ing up files that weren’t Man­a­Na­tion or web projects.

The main thing that bugs me, is that if I had checked which drive was dead, I would have found out that I could remove it (tem­porar­ily) and booted the machine nor­mally, thus sav­ing myself the delay on Man­a­Na­tion. Alas, les­son learned and I can only make a promise to myself to check which hard drive died before rush­ing to replace the whole oper­at­ing sys­tem and drive.

But, all is well in the world. Mace II is back on his feet, with a bit more stor­age space, and I learned to always check my expec­ta­tion when there would be over

One thing which is going to become even more cen­tral to our online exis­tence is the preva­lence of sig­nal vs noise. We’re being bom­barded with more and more infor­ma­tion about friends, fam­ily, idols and news. I pride myself on keep­ing a fairly short (150) list of feeds in my Google Reader, of which I speed through the major­ity of them, skim­ming with lib­eral use of the key­board shortcuts.

In my Twit­ter though, I’m wrestling with the issue as there are a num­ber of peo­ple who I fol­low, but are not peo­ple I’m truly that inter­ested in. In my per­sonal Twit­ter app, Tweet­Core, I had come to a solu­tion where it used a sim­ple algo­rithm to hide tweets from some­one past the first X, and thus remove the noise to allow me to enjoy my feed with­out too much noise. It’s not per­fect, but it’s bet­ter than any other twit­ter app allows right now.

It’s also the sin­gle rea­son I haven’t killed of the Tweet­Core project. It has had almost no time devoted to it in the recent months, but I need it to man­age this level of infor­ma­tion and noise in my life.

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As soon as I saw that Safari had a new beta out, being the new Mac con­vert that I am, I went and grabbed it. Over­all, it’s a huge step up! It feels smoother, faster, cleaner, and is no longer a hin­drance for me to use as my main browser.

Squir­relFish (now Nitro) the new JavaScript engine is blaz­ingly fast! It makes Gmails’ multi-inbox func­tion­al­ity quick enough to be usable and not annoy­ingly slow as it was in FF3 and other browsers.

The built in Fire­bug clone is quite pow­er­ful and on the first use was intu­itive and smooth.

I much pre­fer the tabs at the top of the screen as I have a nasty habit of acci­den­tally click­ing them as I make lib­eral use of the book­mark bar. This sep­a­rates the two bars and avoids such incidents.

Over­all, I love it and it quickly replaced Camino as my browser of choice on my work machine (the browser I use for non-work stuff though it could soon over­take Fire­fox for work stuff.)

How­ever, I do have a few gripes:

1) I dis­like the place­ment of the ‘new tab’ but­ton. I use the but­ton fre­quently and the upper right cor­ner is not ideal.
2) No easy way to change the default search. While I use Google fre­quently, I’m also a big fan of Ask.com’s search and there doesn’t appear to be an easy way to inte­grate them so far.
3)  In fact you can’t remove the default search bar with­out remov­ing your loca­tion bar, they’re linked. Not a fan of this option either.

The Pirate Bay is per­haps the most well known bas­tion of power for the seedy under­ground of inter­net piracy. It con­tin­ues to sur­vive and grow in the face of a con­tin­u­ing surge of legal pres­sure from around the world. There are sto­ries of their plans, if they do hap­pen to get shut down in their native Swe­den then they will be up within a mat­ter of hours on a backup loca­tion in another coun­try with equally lax laws.

The prob­lem is that their search is still lim­ited. It’s only files on their tracker, but con­sider what it could mean if they took on Google.

Now obvi­ously they can’t really com­pete with Google on par with the speed and true depth, but The Pirate Bay can do a few things: ignore cen­sor­ship laws and not worry about any­thing on that, reach the darker cor­ners of the Inter­net, and for those search­ing for ques­tion­able mate­r­ial they can pro­vide a resource that they trust.

Obvi­ously I’m not con­don­ing or encour­ag­ing this behav­ior, but it is an inter­est­ing fact that there has yet to rise a real pirate search engine. It’s an untouched cor­ner of the dig­i­tal underground.

So why? Why hasn’t any site really pur­sued this?

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Of course, after I post about this blog being more jour­nal and less soap­box, I have an idea that war­rants a seri­ous look and a blog post. The idea mor­phed in the few hours I pon­dered it yes­ter­day, start­ing out as a con­cept for a kid’s social net­work gov­erned by the social net­work of the par­ents and turn­ing into a more philo­soph­i­cal con­cept of what my (one day) kids will think of the social net­works I am so deeply inter­twined with.

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Face­book has come out and openly said that their goal is to mir­ror our rela­tion­ships in real life not to nec­es­sar­ily con­nect peo­ple who didn’t know each other pre­vi­ously. Ear­lier today I read Nick O’Neill said that Face­book could kill Twit­ter by sim­ply enabling sta­tus pulls from the API.

While that would def­i­nitely cre­ate more com­pe­ti­tion there is a very core and cen­tral point where Facebook’s sys­tem can­not be Twit­ter with­out a very core change.

Face­book, as said above, is a 1-to-1 rela­tion­ship sys­tem. Every rela­tion­ship is mutual between peo­ple. Where as the power on Twit­ter is that it is 1-to-N. Tim Fer­riss, the author of the Four Hour Work Week has over 10,000 fol­low­ers and is in turn fol­low­ing ZERO peo­ple. If that was on face­book, he’d have to fol­low each of those peo­ple. Kevin Rose has over 80,000 fol­low­ers and fol­lows only a very small per­cent­age of those. Not pos­si­ble on Facebook.

Now Face­book would def­i­nitely con­quer a seg­ment of the mar­ket that revolve around just friend sta­tuses but so much of Twit­ter is fol­low­ing peo­ple who we can’t nor­mally keep in touch with that this mar­ket would have to remain with Twitter.

Could Face­book adjust and make their sys­tem com­pat­i­ble to the way Twit­ter uses? Sure. But not eas­ily. And def­i­nitely not as eas­ily as Nick made it sound.

No I haven’t heard any rumors about it. This is just com­mon sense.

Microsoft has a browser because it’s the door out of their plat­form and if they didn’t have it, their users were going out the win­dow using the very pop­u­lar alter­na­tive: Netscape. Win­dows installed the door and made it stan­dard, sure enough peo­ple started using it.

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