Friday, June 29, 2007

Got Pownced

Yesterday I was invited into the new world of Pownce (thanks LaceyFelix). Not only did I get Pownced but I found my way into Zooomr. Pownce is a new micro blog/messager ala twitter and Jaiku; Zooomr is a photo sharing site ala Flickr and PhotoBucket with some Facebook like features and unlimited photo storage.

Pownce is the product of Leah Culver, Daniel Burka, Shawn Allen, and digg founder Kevin Rose. Like Twitter and Jaiku it lets you update your friends with messages though here are are not limited to 140 characters. You also have the choice of sending a link, a file, event, or just a message. Not only that but you can also group your friends into sets and send messages to a set of friends, a individual friend, or out to the public. The sets I can see being handy being a twitter addict and only wanting to say something to a few people on my list i.e. co-workers, on-line friends, family. The friend feature works a lot like Twitter and Jaiku in the fact people can follow you without you having to be their friend. There is a pro option that allows you to send 100mb files instead of the 10mb limit imposed on the free users and no advertisements for $20 a year.

Pownce also has harnessed the power of air (adobe integrated runtime) to build a desktop program. It is a nice little program that could use a few more features but as it is still in alpha mode so I'm sure they will be adding them shortly. Kevin Rose already announced on Pownce yesterday that they are working on making the desktop program self updating along with the fact that more invites will be coming soon after the next version (don't ask me for an invite yet, I don't have any). The desktop program did have some connection issues from time to time but I'm thinking that has to do with the 15,000 invite requests Pownce received in the first 24 hours of existence.

The only thing I see keeping me away from Pownce is the lack of sms text messaging which is one of the main ways I use twitter. I'll just have to see how it works with my cell phone.

I found my way into Pownce when a tweet came my way about a live diggnation feed on Zooomr being broadcasted from the Apple Store in Palo Alto with everyone camping out for the iPhone. After diggnation Robert Scoble took over with the guys from Zooomr and it seemed like everyone from Silicone Valley stopped by. I am excited to see what comes from Pownce and Zooomr but with so many different web services these days it is becoming hard to keep track of them all.

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Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Conversations that have been (or will be) abolished due to technology

I was thinking about all the usual conversation starters today and how today's technology has rendered some of those inconsequential. We don't need to ask about the weather anymore because of the plethora of websites, gadgets, and widgets devoted to the subject. We need not ask what is going on in the news of our old domiciles due to newspaper websites. We need not ask about how a friend might know so and so, because on facebook that is part of the process of adding friends to your list. With the web the way it is going we have music sites that let our friends know what we are listening to, movie sites that let people know what we are watching, and travel sites that let people know where you have been and where you are going. We have text messages to say all those short sentences that don't warrant a phone call. We have status updates via facebook and twitter to let people who are all so curious on what we are doing

So what do we talk about? We still fall back on all that we are used to but are starting to be allowed the freedom of skipping the formalities. We can now say, hey I saw that you saw this movie with out vamping on what movies you have seen lately. We can now say what did you like of the new (insert band here) album without the usual what have been listening to lately.

Is this then end of useless chatter, the end of chatter, or the beginning of chatter unknown? Probably a little of each. Let me know what you think will be abolished and/or develop.

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Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Safari on Windows - a review

So today (or in fact yesterday because I finally am posting this at 1:11 am) Apple released a beta version of their web browser Safari. I took the bait because whenever I have looked at a site in Safari (on a mac) it rendered a web page completely different than Firefox, Opera, and IE. To be fair I have noticed differences in the way a page is rendered between Firefox on Windows and Firefox on Mac, I'm just hoping this isn't the case for the windows and mac versions of Safari. I'm tired of having to go through every single version of every browser to find a happy medium, it's either that or writing a different CSS file for every browser and having a javaScript or PHP function to select the correct one for the appropriate browser.

After using Safari for a day, well not quite a day because it was hard to use it exclusively, I have found some pros and cons.

The first pro is that it seemed to render faster, i.e. the Digg page that announced the product to digg's users and has over 8300 diggs and 1134 comments at the time of this writing (a recipe for a very big web page). It also has a very slick looking interface, my history carried over from firefox after install, and more real-estate for the web page.

My main con would be that Safari doesn't implement add-ons yet (I must have ad-block, greasemonkey, de.licio.us, and over a dozen other extensions in firefox). This could be coming in the future as Apple's webkit is going open source (the engine underlying Safari). I also was missing Firefox's "spell check this field" feature which I use regularly in forums, comments, twitters, blog posts, digg submissions, and anywhere else I am placing my words on the web.

So yes I'll use Safari, but as it stands it won't be for much more that debugging websites and trying to render large websites (by the way, digg when are you going to page out your comments?). As it stands that is how I use IE, unless I'm watching movies in Netflix's "Watch now" or MLB.tv which don't support Firefox yet (I'm running vista so don't correct me about MLB).

I'm wondering when we'll see the release of the firefox add-ons "open this page in Safari" and "Safari Tab" (Damn I shouldn't of said anything, I could have finally found my first Firefox add-on)

I can see why Apple is trying to make this move, they are trying to put yet another application on the desktops of the Widows iPod users (rumor has it that it will eventually be bundled w/ iTunes and quicktime) to help coerce then into buying a Apple computer once they become familiar with their products but why haven't they incorporated more into the browser. Right now it seems like Firefox lite, which is what Apple seems to do best, they seem to always take the minimalist approach which may hurt or help them in this market. Most of the users I know that have gave up IE on Widows only did so because Firefox gave them more thus leading IE to incorporate more to win back some users. The users I know that still use IE only do so because it is familiar and came with their system. So Safari's only chance in its current state is to appeal to the minimalist user who uses iTunes and the developers who will use webkit to develop what I hope to a long list of Add-ons to rival Firefox and make it a better browser, it still has a long way to go.

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