Now it’s just a matter of time before developers make the shift.

As luck would have it, Instapaper Free makes a great reading source for your iPod or iPhone. I’ve been using the free instapaper web service for about half a year now and frequently find something online I’ll flag to read later with the keen bookmarklet. Then, when I have an Internet or phone connection, I can sync my articles in the app on my iPhone. Instapaper even reformats the articles for mobile consumption using something similar to Arc90’s Readability bookmarklet.

Of course, now I’ve finished all my saved articles and am left wonderig what to read next. I have a few books loaded into Stanza, but I’m right in the middle of another book and don’t feel like switching. So I’m blogging. From somewhere above Quebec. The iPhone Wordpress app keeps getting better.

Update! While writing this post I was thinking, “gee, this’d be cool if I could get this content onto my Kindle”. Sure enough, there’s an experimental option on the Instapaper page to download any folder’s most-recent 20 items in .mobi or ePub formats. Nice!

Sure enough, the good people at Automattic have already done this and it’s been available for quite some time. It is a bit of a n3wb mistake not to have noticed it earlier, but that’s ok. I am comfortable in my ignorance.

Prepare yourself for more blogging!

Last.fm has never had a public radio API, although we’ve tolerated third-party clients using the undocumented calls that our client uses. This is finally about to change – we’re going to make a public, documented streaming API available to everyone who has an API account.

This will block out existing apps like Songbird and Fire.fm to name a couple.

Way to go.

I don’t envy them their position of having to deal with the recording industry (to which they are closely connected via parent company CBS). I don’t expect it’s easy to run a company that gives away music when the RIAA is doing its damnedest to squash file-sharing. I do find it annoying that they’ve carved out three large populations and said, “you can play for free and we’ll just make our money off of these other countries”. I was always under the impression that giving Last.fm our music listening data via scrobbling was all the payment they required. That data’s valuable for tracking what people listen to, how often they listen to it, and I’m sure they can do all sorts of interesting statistical and probabilistic analyses on it to sell it back to the music industry. I guess that’s not the case.

About that data. Knowing that I was shipping listening information to Last.fm made me aware of my listening habits in an unusual way. I was always cognizant of the fact that my listening was being sent upstream to another entity. I was interested in increasing the number of songs I listened to. I was aware when I was listening to certain music “too frequently” and would try to curb that to a degree. I wanted my played music to be representative of my entire collection rather than a few favorite albums. This is subtle, but it changed the way I listened to my music, and not necessarily in a good way. It’s like I was listening to my collection for other people and not just myself.

What did I get out of this? I did get a few very solid musical recommendations. I sent some money to iTunes to buy albums from *stellastar, Cut/Copy, The Helio Sequence and others directly based on Last.fm’s recommendations. The social aspect never really panned-out for me though. I don’t pay attention to what my friends are listening to in any meaningful way. The discussion groups were not interesting to me. It doesn’t really feel much like a “community” in the way that Flickr and other social sites do.

To be fair, $5 per month isn’t a lot of money. I pay that for Xbox Live, but I would have to say that I get a lot more for my money on Xbox Live. Or Flickr Pro. Being able to stream low-quality music over a Flash-based player is not a good value for me considering I always have an iPod of some type close by.

So there we have it. I’m sorry we can’t be friends anymore, Last.fm. I may be back from time-to-time to check in and look up some music. Maybe I’ll take a look at Blip.fm to see what that’s like… If you’ve got a favorite music service on the web (don’t talk to me about Pandora. They don’t like Canada) that works in Canada. Drop me a note in the comments.

Normally I do my blogging with Ecto. It’s decent software though still in beta for version 3.0. I like Ecto a lot and will likely continue to use it. I enjoy using external apps for writing – call me old-school. I can take it.

So it is with some interest that I’m trying out ScribeFire. This is not a simple “here’s your blogs post page in a sidebar” kind of extension. This is a full blog-editing application built in XUL and embedded within Firefox. It appears to have a bunch of other features as well, allowing you to publish web-pages to a variety of sharing services like Digg or Facebook. It also has del.icio.us integration allowing bookmarking bookmarking and tag-searching from within it. This feature alone is useful as del.icio.us hasn’t updated their Firefox add-ons as of this writing for version 3.0. That said, the del.icio.us integration in ScribeFire feels a little crude.

As a blog-editor, it seems pretty feature-ful. It supports editing pages in Wordpress (a feature only recently added to Ecto) and embedding flickr or youtube links. The included search tools for grabbing images from flickr or videos from youtube does seem a bit limiting though. They are basic and you might do better to actually find the content you were interested in on those services yourself.

ScribeFire feels like a very reasonable blog-editing application. It gets the job done and seems to support most of the editing features I would want. Edits are easy (I’ve edited this twice now) and the sharing integration for Digg also feels pretty decent. Because it’s built on top of Firefox, a lot of the integration with third-party sites is essentially seamless, allowing you to use your login credentials for those sites right in Firefox. Awesome stuff!

Technorati Tags: blogging, wordpress, firefox, extensions

Let’s paint a hypothetical picture, 5 years down the road:

del.icio.us: Five years from now, the yahoo! acquired bookmarks service has been rebranded as Microsoft Windows Live Favorites and is tightly-integrated with IE9. Users have options to sync their bookmarks with the Live service and can view bookmarks in the Xbox 720’s Xplorer browser (for a low-per-use cost of only .05 points per visit). Microsoft Windows Live Favorites only provides legacy support for “alternative” browsers (outdated versions of Firefox, Safari, Opera) and users refusing to use a Windows Live Passport are unable to access their bookmarks. RSS reading has been dropped in favor of Microsoft’s Live Channels format.

flickr: Gone are the somewhat clumsy, but usable Flash components of flickr (rebranded as Microsoft Live Photo.net), replaced by all new Silverlight components. After the initial roll-out of Silverlight 1.0, the subsequent version 2.0 saw little support for Firefox, Safari and users of Mac and Linux, despite the best efforts to implement an open source version on those platforms. Feature parity is expected sometime around Q2 2014. New features include online photo editing with photopaint.net and the addition of home movies. Users also have access to their photo libraries on their Xbox 720 and Zune players and can upload photos directly from their Microsoft-powered smart-phones. Former users of flickr from before the acquisition have largely moved on after a considerable legal battle to force Microsoft to have their pictures removed after a number of people complained about seeing their photos show up in Microsoft ads on MSNBC. The new Microsoft Live Photo.NET EULA is 27 pages long and no longer provides CC-Licensing support as an option.

Yahoo/flickr Groups: Yahoo Groups and flickr have had vibrant user communities dating back over 10 years. Some suggested that these were the real reasons Microsoft put in its bid 5 years ago to purchase the Yahoo! machinery. Now, 5 years later, Yahoo and flickr groups have become tightly-integrated with MSN Messenger and members of groups can easily chat with one another online, share pictures, home movies and discuss topics of interest. Of course, most groups are also havens for spammers and automated bot systems that fire messages soliciting users to visit penis-enlargement sites, online casinos and adult match-making services. Then there are the viruses…

Zimbra: Just before MSFT acquired Yahoo!, Yahoo had acquired Zimbra. The little online mail and calendaring system that won the hearts of many and the inboxes of more than a few companies. Zimbra’s server tools, now rebranded as Outlook Online has been wedged into Exchange server. The web-front end has been remodeled using Silverlight and is now Windows only. Previous versions of the tools have been end-of-lifed. Windows Smartphone users can access Outlook Online services through Outlook Mobile. Other office apps have been integrated online as well and Yahoo/Microsoft have a subscription service for hosting all of your online office documents which can be shared with other Yahoo.net users and groups.

Yahoo! Maps are available directly on vehicles equipped with Microsoft’s SYNC (now known as Windows Auto) as well as on Zunes through the Windows Live Wifi services.

Alright, enough navel-gazing. Yahoo.NET is now People Ready. I get it. As a user of del.icio.us and flickr, I’m pretty concerned about my data and where it could end up. Currently it’s there and pretty easy to get at. Five years from now I can imagine it being much harder to extract. I don’t want Silverlight apps.

I should also say that Microsoft isn’t stupid. I have no doubt that the real reason they’re interested in Yahoo! is because of the users they already have. Driving them away en masse would be bad for business, and at the price they’re reportedly paying (upwards of $45b), they’re going to want Yahoo! to be a money-maker.

Finally, I’m just going to link to a funny blog post: What if Gmail Had Been Designed by Microsoft?

Earlier this month, I took the bold leap into anonymity and killed¹ my Facebook account. I’d been wrestling with quitting for awhile, feeling that the whole system was dumb and lacked respect for its users and their privacy. I made a bit of a big deal about it among my 15 or so friends who I was able to coax into a group I’d created for just this purpose. For the week I was there, it was probably the most fun I’d had with Facebook since I joined. For that week, I was a small-time cult leader enjoining my followers to drink the kool-aid and delete themselves.

As far as I know, I am the only one who drunk the kool-aid. The rest of them are still there, waiting for the spaceship. But at least they have each other.

Facebook is a fad. It is currently popular with students and people who feel the need to connect themselves to others who are similarly uncomfortable with solitude. It is a place for the people to be able to write things and share their comments and photos with others in a spammy, intrusive way that doesn’t require the use of such technical antiquities like Email or Phone Calls. When someone does something, everybody knows about it. One might ask, why would anyone voluntarily put so much personal information about themselves into a closed system? Why not put your energy into updating your address book, or writing a blog? I think it’s because Facebook is the Easy Button of the internet. Also, it is a colossal waste of time and energy. I find myself cringing when I hear people use the verb-form “Facebooking” in everyday conversation. In any given public place, you are almost guaranteed to overhear people discussing Facebook given a suitable span of time. My aunt uses Facebook. It is not cool.

I asked a friend of mine (who still hasn’t deleted himself) last night while playing a game of Halo why he was still using Facebook. He said, “it’s a good way to share baby pictures”. Users of a certain age will be aware of all of their friends with babies because most of these people include their babies Right In Their Profile Pictures. Usually, these proud new parental types will feature themselves and their darling angel with them, in a pose of domestic bliss or singular happiness. I would encourage these parents not to do this. Profile pictures are public. Anyone searching through a local network for babies to abduct has an easy way to find a target. There are a lot of sick people out there, don’t make it easy for them to insert themselves into your life.

There are other chthonic aspects to be concerned about. The (conspiracy?) theory that Facebook was funded by a bunch of neocons with a big DARPA seed grant to track individuals’ transactions on the internet is not as far-fetched as it sounds. The genius here is that users voluntarily enter their information. It is not a very well-kept secret that one of the perks of working at Facebook is that the employees get to browse user profiles and see what people are really up to in there. That, to say the least, does not speak well for how they respect their users’ privacy and data. The only reason I can see them (Facebook The Company) resisting handing over their databases to some shady government agency is if they thought it might get out and hurt their pre-IPO impressions.

And then there’s Beacon. Oh Facebook Beacon, you are amazing in your intrusiveness. Someone with Beacon installed who visits an “e-tailer” and buys something, broadcasts their purchase to all their friends. This effectively gives Facebook a window into other websites you may frequent. Great marketing? Sort of, because since these people are a network of friends, the seller gets to advertise to a group of like-minded people about what one of their own is buying. Spammy? You bet. I don’t need to hear when Phil buys another P.G. Wodehouse book from Amazon. Invasive? Oh, probably.

Lastly, there’s all the hype and inflated valuations being tossed around. “Facebook’s worth 12 Billion Dollars!” wtf? On What Planet am I Living on? Yes, I understand that information is the new currency. I should. But imagine, you putting in all that effort to update your information, your friends, your purchasing history, your messages… All that information is going to get a few people at this company a shit-ton of money. What’ll you get out of it? Better targeted marketing! (and maybe a Poke! or two)

The combined might of big pharmacy needs to band together to build a patch to help people quit Facebook. There’s good money there, and I’m just giving this idea away.

1. when you “deactivate your account” all of your profile information is still in there. They tell you this when you do it. I’ve heard stories from other brave people who’ve tried to actually get their data deleted that it is really quite difficult. My solution was lazier, I just wiped out all of my profile data through the interface. Then got tons of messages like, “omgzorz! you’n'dria broked ups?” Well, ok, not tons of messages. I got two.