Countless well-meaning, tasteful, and respectable people have taken a swing at making friendly advertising that is both respectful of the viewer and valuable to the advertiser. The problem is that it very rarely works out in the long run because well-meaning, tasteful, and respectable people really do not like “the business” advertising. And viewer-friendly advertising is often of very little to no value to the advertiser.

The business of advertising is a numbers game. When well-meaning, tasteful, and respectable people start out trying to change the world of advertising they typically look at those numbers as they should – they look at them as people. People that don’t want to be swindled or bothered or nagged. People that are at the current web page they are viewing because they really like the blog post they are reading, the newspaper column they are reading, or the video they are watching. People that actually do not like advertising.

So the well-meaning, tasteful, and respectable people say to themselves “I’m one of those people. I don’t like ads. But people that write blogs for free and want to do it full-time need to make money somehow so let’s make a great ad network that sells unobtrusive advertising that people will love.”

Noble. But this business plan isn’t based in reality. This plan can only work if the ad network’s brand is as strong as the brand of the sites in its network. And even then it is questionable whether or not the network can sustain advertiser value longterm. The Deck seems to have success in this area because simply being an advertiser on The Deck comes with some credence. But in my experience this is the exception.

Once the initial novelty of the idea for a viewer-friendly ad network wears off everything comes down to the pageviews and the click-throughs. If the click-throughs are high the pageviews can be lower. If the pageviews are high – and they usually have to be very, very high – the click-throughs can sometimes be not as important since advertisers will typically hope to make up for them with brand recognition of some kind.

And then there is the repeat advertiser problem. If an ad network can bring in brand new advertisers every few months then they needn’t worry about having repeat advertisers. So they needn’t deliver on value. “Your campaign wasn’t all that great but thanks for trying.” And then they simply move onto the next company with $5,000 to spend. The problem is eventually the black books of the individuals running the network will run out of companies to call. Then they have to deliver. Every single month.

Viewer-friendly advertising can work in smaller numbers and with direct relationships with advertisers. However, once an entire “network” of brands are involved it slowly will move away from the relationship between website and brand and move towards the numbers.

Ad dollars will always move towards the latest and greatest thing. The thing the kids love. So newer ad networks with novel ideas on how to do advertising will all typically start off pretty well. Any company with a decent advertising budget will take a crack at whatever the latest fad is. Make no mistake, the same people that will buy your 120×120 pixel well-designed, well-meaning, tasteful, and respectable ad will buy a pop-under ad. They don’t really care about your high-brow morals in the world of advertising. They will go to where the value is. And when your network doesn’t produce value for them in a certain amount of time they’ll stop buying your inventory. Simple.

Patrick Dryburgh nails it in his post about leaving FusionAds:

I hold nothing against the guys running Fusion now. They’re in a tough business, and need to produce page views and sell those page views and then produce and sell some more. So, I get why they need to take money from companies or sign on publishers I don’t think represent the initial vision.

Fusion Ads has to compromise because in the world of advertising there is money in compromising. The more you’re willing to let go of the viewer as the customer and the more you’re willing to give up their experience the more money you’ll make.

Several times in my life where I’ve made the bulk of my income on advertising. Each time I always thought there was a new and better way to do it. A way that didn’t feel so icky. A way to make the viewer and advertiser the customer. It simply isn’t possible. If you’re thinking about starting an ad network of some kind I’d strongly suggest you reconsider.

Last night, after a whirlwind trip to New York City on business and just before crashing like a rocket into bed, I pulled up Tweetbot to see what was going on the in world. It turns out Instagram for Android came out and some people were going a little crazy.

I thought some of the tweets were pretty funny so I thought I’d respond to them here. Here are my responses in no particular order.

If u ain’t following me on instagram ya mama **** **** n u ***

— Courtney Hooper (@SelfMade_Smasha) April 4, 2012

Fair enough. I’m so glad people that have Android devices can now use Instagram.

BTW, on Instagram it’s not a place where you constantly post pictures of yourself without a hashtag! #getwithit

— Victoria Ann Valdez (@victoriaannv) April 4, 2012

Yes, Victoria, the most important parts about Instagram are photos of yourself and hashtags. You’ve got it all figured out.

So now whats so great about the iphone? Yall exclusive temple run and instagram is now wit android.

— Marissa Na’Sha (@SweetAs_Honeey) April 4, 2012

You know, back in 2007 when I bought the first iPhone I thought to myself: “Why am I buying this phone? It doesn’t have Temple Run or Instagram on it.”

House phones bouta come out wit one next month #instagram

— Rodney(@RodneyRaJaan) April 4, 2012

The next logical step for Instagram is to work on house phones, yes. I realize Rodney was being sarcastic. And I appreciate his snarkiness. Good on ya Rodney.

I’m glad @instagram finally came to Android, so I can stop using my iPod for it (apple cams suck!!!!) but wtf is up with “image too small?”

— Ashlee Pahmiyer (@ZombieAshlee) April 4, 2012

Oh Ashlee, you make this too easy. So, Apple’s cameras suck but your Android device takes a photo so small that Instagram can not use it? Got it.

Instagram ain’t nun but a way to cover up all dem bumps on ya face to make it look like ya face all clear, ***** plzzzz

— Yung Trill (@YungTrillOG) April 4, 2012

Yung is onto something here. Girls, be sure to use Instagram’s bokeh effect tool to “cover up all dem bumps on ya face”.

Keep tweet grams off of instagram. It’s annoying as **** and we already have 2 social networks that tell us about things we don’t care about

— Alexandra Juarez (@alexxxjuarez) April 4, 2012

As she tweets about things we don’t care about on a social network that tells us things we don’t care about.

Just got instagram and I have no idea how to use it

— Timmy Mucklow (@TimmysToNice) April 4, 2012

Hey Timmy, THE BIG YELLOW ONES THE SUN!

Am I the only one who doesn’t know how to work instagram?!

— Mollie Gillman (@ayomollieee) April 4, 2012

Hey Mollie, meet Timmy, and THE BIG YELLOW ONES THE SUN!

Now Instagram is released for android, kinda make it less exclusive photo app.

— Lukas Ardian (@LukasArdian) April 4, 2012

Something being less exclusive is like something being more unique. But you knew that right?

dont know how to work this instagram **** im finna delete it

— Savage Los (@losbaabyy) April 4, 2012

The best part about “Savage”‘s tweet is that he somehow managed to type this on a computer on the web. The shift and apostrophe keys are notoriously hard to find on computer keyboards.

Dang all these droid followers on instagram…..this is dang near Facebook ???? Ewwww

— Christin (@ChrisNikole) April 4, 2012

Exactly the same as Facebook. Zuckerberg is probably furious.

I just made an Instagram account only for the effects. I could care less about posting them, that’s what Twitter is for…

— Chet Seeram (@chetseeram) April 4, 2012

Twitter was definitely built specifically for the purpose of sharing photos, yes. Actually, Chet, while I’m responding to you, you may want to check out my post Instagram is a network, not a camera.

Bunch ah hood *** ****** adding me on instagram . . . Lol uh oh #AndroidSeason

— ?Gøld?£™ (@YellowBoneRyda) April 4, 2012

I love hashtags.

These New Instagram ******* thuggin it…No profile pics and ****……????????????????????

— LiMar Tuttle (@LiMarLK) April 4, 2012

Straight thuggin.

Totally gonna sound like a ***** but instagram not so cool anymore

— Patty Rudawski (@Pattyatty) April 4, 2012

I agree Patty. It went from like 25,000,0000 people using it to like 30,000,000 people using it. Totally not cool anymore.

All these useless android users on instagram… Remainder small black burry will have too

— CaroLyna (@CallMeChoKolate) April 4, 2012

Wow. “Useless Android users” Carolyna? You sent this tweet using an iPhone. An iPhone has spell check. And you chose to type in “Remainder” instead of remember and you called a Blackberry a “black burry”. Maybe you need an Android-powered phone?

iPhone’s words of wisdom to the New Android Instagram users: “You dumb babies!”

— jessie maria (@allThtJass) April 4, 2012

Wisdom indeed.

Instagram Gonna be a flop like temple run cause androids got it

— AsierraC?? (@Naturally_Lexie) April 4, 2012

You called it Asierra. Instagram is dead in the water.

Nilai has quickly morphed from being a simple list of links to many lists of links each with their own purpose. Using Smart Labels, which are getting smarter with each release, members of Nilai can save links into these lists with a single click.

Sometimes the purpose of saving these links is to watch a video, listen to a bit of audio, or save a link to do something with at a later time. Starting today it is easier than ever to accomplish some of these tasks without ever having to leave Nilai. Previews make it simple to preview links to video, audio, photos, products, or even code. By simply saving a bookmark to the more than 12 supported services Nilai will automatically identify what the link is to and prepare a preview for you.

Let me give you some examples. The most obvious example is video. If you’re like me you don’t have time during your work day to watch YouTube videos that are being circulated throughout the web via Twitter or from my friends via instant messages. So I save these bookmarks to Nilai to watch later. Now, with Previews, Nilai will let me watch the video on my iPad, iPhone, or my Mac without needing to open the YouTube application or website. It looks like this.

For me audio works much the same way. Sometimes I have time to listen to a bit of audio – like on my 90-mile drive to work. For those occasions I prefer to subscribe to a podcast powered by Huffduffer. But, what if I want to listen to a bit of audio in a few hours on my computer or perhaps on my iPad at night in bed? Using Previews Nilai makes it possible to listen to audio from services like Huffduffer and others without needing to subscribe to a podcast or sync with iTunes. Quick, simple.

Video, audio, and photos is just the beginning. Here is a list of the services that Previews supports today: YouTube, Viddler, Flickr, Vimeo, Speaker Deck, Dribbble, Instagram, Twitpic, Skitch, Github’s Gists, Huffduffer. With many, many more on the way. In fact, I’ll tell you straight away that all of the popular recipe sites are next.

I hope you enjoy the new site and Previews.

During a recent trip to a nearby observatory the presentation highlighted this little number, a comet that streaked across the sky in early August 1972 over the Tetons.

Notice the trajectory. They don’t call this thing an earthgrazer for nothing. This small bit of space rock (about 9′ in diameter or so) actually flew through the Earth’s atmosphere for about thirty seconds before heading back out into space! Impressive rock.

What’s more is that before the days of pocket-sized cameras and phones with built-in high definition video recorders the wife of the guy that took the above, stunning photograph – Linda Baker – managed to capture most of the earthgrazing on video.

Photo credit: James M. Baker. Also featured on NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day in March 2009.

The definitions of indefinite are as follows.

lasting for an unknown or unstated length of time: they may face indefinite detention

not clearly expressed or defined; vague: their status remains indefinite.

Now you know.

First, @cdevroe removes comments from his blog. Now, he’s uploading DSLR photographs to Instagram. Talk about hipster…

— Derek Steen (@djsteen) March 23, 2012

I realize he was poking fun. But I wanted to address this topic anyway so I thought I might as well reply to him here.

Oh, and if I Twitter would allow Google to properly index my tweets I’d be able to call up a tweet from at least a year ago wherein I called people out for cheating on Instagram by uploading photos that were not taken with an iPhone. I’ll be installing Tweet Nest later to see if I can rectify this issue.

So, yes, at one point I was angry with Instagram users for sharing their DSLR photos on the app. But something has changed lately and I knew it was coming.

Two days ago Instagram and Hipstimatic (another camera app for iPhone) let it leak through FastCompany that Hipstimatic photos were going to be sharable on the Instagram network. Here is what their CEO Kevin Systrom was quoted as saying.

“It’s a step in the direction that we’re testing out. We’ve been very careful about making sure that Instagram photos are about what’s happening right now in your life, and we want to allow for more of those photos to end up on Instagram regardless of where they’re taken.”

They’d like Instagram photos to be about what’s happening right now in your life. Certainly the name lends to this sort of network – and I’d hate to draw the correlation to Twitter’s own motto – but suffice to say – they are beginning to view themselves more as a network of people sharing photos than they do as a camera application.

So, while before I thought it was going against the creator’s grain to share just any old photo via Instagram, I now think this will be their direct intent. Sure, my last few bird photos on Instagram were not about what’s happening right now because I took those photos over the course of the last two weeks – but I’m willing to bend the rules a little from time-to-time.

I’m cdevroe on Instagram by the way.

Starting today Nilai will begin automatically labeling bookmarks based on their URL. Some sites are dedicated to a certain type of content such as YouTube, Viddler, SimplyRecipes, Amazon, and others. If a bookmark is being saved from YouTube chances are you’ll want to label that bookmark a video. So why force people to choose the video label every time? Nilai will now do that for them. Saving clicks and time.

The current list of sites that Smart Labels will handle out-of-the-box are YouTube.com (video), Viddler.com (video), Devour.com (video), PHP.net (documentation), api.rubyonrails.org (documentation), ruby-doc.org (documentation), docs.jquery.com (documentation), codeigniter.com (documentation), CSS-Tricks.com (documentation), developer.apple.com (documentation), SimplyRecipes.com (recipe), AllRecipes (recipe), Svpply (shopping), Amazon (shopping), Fab (shopping), Zappos (shopping). And I plan to add more in the near future.

Smart Labels are also smart enough to know when you may be bookmarking a page on one of these sites that don’t fit the label. For example, if you were to bookmark Devour’s About page, Nilai will not think it is a video.

Smart Labels can be overridden. If you’d rather label bookmarks from PHP.net as research rather than documentation you may do so. In fact, every member can set up their own Smart Labels for any URLs of their choosing. (see screenshot) Simply bookmark a link, select a label, and click Add a Smart Label. All future marks from that domain will be labeled automatically. Saving you clicks and time and making Nilai’s Smart Labels feature even more useful to you.

Here are a few Smart Labels I’ve already set up for myself: Daring Fireball (Read Later), Viddler’s Developer docs (Documentation), Tweets (Read Later), Dribbble (Inspiration), and Uncrate (Shopping). This makes my life a lot easier. You may want to do the same, or, you may want to set them up completely different. Your choice.

I’m looking forward to seeing how Smart Labels evolve as Nilai’s members use them.

Smart Labels are not the only updates to Nilai that were released this week. Members can check out the changelog for the slew of updates that I’ve managed to get finished.

I’ve got a new nights and weekends project and its name is Nilai. Nilai is a simple bookmarking service and over the last few weeks I’ve been having a lot of fun working on it in my spare time. In fact, I have found it so valuable to me that it is now my homepage on my Mac, my iPad, and my iPhone.

My father was born in Bandung, Java, Indonesia so I thought it’d be cool to name the service an Indonesian word. Nilai is pronounced (as best as I can tell) Nee’-lie. It is an Indonesian word meaning mark. I think the literal translation is something more akin to “logo” but I’m taking liberty with the word a bit.

I’m building Nilai for the same reason many developers begin working on something new; to scratch my own itch. I was a Delicious user back when the URL still had a few more dots in it. I was a Magnolia user back when OpenID was still a buzzword. I have always needed a place to keep some bookmarks and easily access them later. And, while those needs are slightly different today than they were then, those services would still be useful to me today. If only they were around.

But those services, or at least the services I knew and liked at the time, are gone now. And so are many, many others. Gowalla. Brightkite. Magnolia. Friendfeed. The list of services that I once used that are now gone seems endless. And the pile keeps getting bigger.

The tipping point for me, I suppose, was watching Bret Victor’s excellent presentation Inventing on Principal. If you are someone that builds things I wholeheartedly recommend that you watch his presentation. In it he suggests finding a principal to build by. Well, I’ve found mine.

I’m going to build valuable, reliable, sustainable web services that will last forever.

Nilai is the first service I’ll be building but it won’t be the last. I have several services that I would love to use on a daily basis that I’ve all but stopped using because I’m afraid they’ll be bought out, run into the ground, or shutdown. For now I’ll keep that list under my hat and – for at least the rest of this calendar year – I’ll be working on Nilai when I can find the time.

Yes, I’m charging for Nilai right from the start. I want Nilai to still be up, running, and useful in 2022 and beyond. I hope that others will too and be willing to support that effort. It won’t be a feature-bloated service with apps on every single platform or a few hundred employees – but I think that is actually a good thing. The features that I put into Nilai will have to be valuable enough for me to want to support them for the life of the service. I’ll get more into the features I plan Nilai having in an upcoming post.

One question that will inevitably arise is that of competition. Yes, there are going to be competitors to every single service I build. And some of them will be very good. However, my thoughts on competition are much different than many. For the last 5+ years I’ve been very happily employed by Viddler. Viddler is an online video platform with competition from YouTube, Brightcove and other services both free and paid yet we continue to hire people, make money, and grow. The Internet is not a single street in which competition is so fierce that two competing services can only compete on price. Software is so nuanced that any differentiator, no matter how small, is enough to carve out a niche that makes building the service worthwhile.

If you’re looking for a large community with a huge network effect, maybe you could use the new Delicious. If you’re looking for a much more full-featured bookmarking service from the start, perhaps you could try Pinboard. I’ve never used either of these services but both seem to come recommended by their respective communities.

But I’m not trying to build Delicious or Pinboard. I’m building a bookmarking service that I would use and that I plan to use forever. I’m hoping that a few people will want to use it too and make suggestions on how it can improve along the way. If you want to help out by supporting the project and by making suggestions; sign up to Nilai and tell someone else about it too.

It wasn’t that long ago that I wrote that I thought that blogs were ripe for disruption. And I still think we’re on the cusp of that. Or, perhaps, it is happening right in front of my eyes and I am simply not noticing it.

In a recent discussion between Anil Dash and a few other veterans of blogging Anil mentioned that even something as simple as a status update or tweet could be considered blogging. Although Twitter is rarely referred to this way today it was, at its inception, called a microblogging service. So maybe blogging has already evolved and we just haven’t noticed. The frog in the boiling pot comes to mind.

Although the conversation seemed to focus a lot on commenting I would have liked to have seen much more discussion around the topic of ownership. Some of the participants felt that ownership was important. Others not as much. If you look at how the party split it was split between the platform-builders and service-builders. Ev and Meg built services (Blogger, Kinja, Twitter) while Anil worked on a platform (Movable Type). I think there was much more to say on this topic.

Meg Hourihan on ownership:

But I’m not convinced people view what they’re doing [on social networks] as producing content, nor thinking it’s something they should own, anymore than I want to “own” my phone call with a friend. (Sure I don’t want someone to record it and sell it, but that’s different.) My call is ephemeral, and it’s about conversation and communication, not content.

While Meg believes that she’s seeing the world as it is I think she’s really just identified the problem with these social networks. Twitter and Facebook have permenant URLs for every single tweet and status update that people post. Those links are not ephemeral as Meg describes. She may feel as though they are because Twitter doesn’t give you access to your entire stream but – in reality – these tweets do not go away.

And that’s where Anil nails it.

So that point is very, very interesting, Meg: What if the phone company gave you free unlimited phone calls but they could record, monitor and sell your phone calls and information about what you said on them.

I do agree so much of why people don’t value ownership in social media is that they see it as conversation, not content, but that’s often because we don’t *know* in advance when it becomes meaningful.

In other words, people are viewing Twitter and Facebook as conversation platforms more than they view them as publishing platforms. Facebook and Twitter are finding value in what we all consider to be valueless conversation. They are making money based on what we are saying, what we’re interested in, and what is happening in the world. If they find value in our “content” why don’t we? And, if they treat this information as permanent why aren’t we?

Back to the evolution of blogs. I don’t think there is much argument about whether or not Twitter and Facebook can be considered blogging platforms. So we should lump them into the conversation of how blogs need to evolve. Which brings us full circle back to ownership. I think that people should own their own content. And they should know, up front, that they will own the content if they use a particular service or choose to host it themselves. It shouldn’t matter. They should also feel as though the content they post to any service is to be considered permanent – not a phone call that is soon forgotten.

I don’t think that a blog needs to run on software that you install on your own server in order for you to feel as though you own the content. WordPress.com and WordPress.org are nearly identical services with the same import and export capabilities yet one is a service and the other a platform. So you can use either of these products and feel pretty confident that you own the content and that the information you post there is permanent.

So how does this particular aspect of blogging need to evolve? I think other services such as Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and (fill in the blank) should do a better job of making your content searchable and accessible (read: exportable into a readable format) right out of the box. Not hidden somewhere in a Mac-only application or three-levels-deep in an API doc. One click easy.

The next aspect of blogging that I believe needs to evolve is the reverse-chronological homepage. In May of 2011 I wrote:

I believe the blog format is ready for disruption. Perhaps there doesn’t need to be “the next” WordPress, Tumblr, or Blogger for this to happen. Maybe all we really need is a few pioneers to spearhead an effort to change the way blogs are laid-out on the screen. There are still so many problems to solve; how new readers and also long-time subscribers consume the stream of posts, how people identify with the content of the blog on the home page, how to see what the blog is all about, how to make money, how to share, and how interact and provide feedback on the content.

Imagine you landed on /blog/ here at my cdevroe.com URL. What you’d find there would be what the typical blog homepage looks like. Just a list of posts from newest to oldest. It’d be very difficult to find out what I blogged about based on only the last few posts. This is why I chose to put my about page front-and-center. I believe that is a better way to get to know me, what I’m up to, and what my blog is about.

I don’t think the blog format is broken but it is certainly stale. Someone needs to come along and give us a new way to look at things. And not just in a novel way like tiles or something else that is pretty and neat to look at – I’d like to see something that is valuable, makes it really easy to see what the blog is about, perhaps what is popular now, or what was at one time popular. I think of the currently most visited URLs here on this blog. They are not the most recent posts. Not by a long shot. My top URLs on this blog are a few links that I’ve posted in the past that have somehow found their way to the top of the search engine rankings. Would that be important to show on the homepage of a blog? Or, what about the fact that a few of my posts have had hundreds and hundreds of comments? Would that be important to show?

Sidebar “widgets” sprang up years ago as ways to solve some of these issues. Related posts, popular posts, most-used tags, and other widgets made it easier to discover content that has already been pushed off of the homepage. But I still think that someone, somewhere has an idea of how to fix these issues and that one day we’ll wake up and someone will have made something better.

One last issue that I would have liked to see discussed in regards to what aspect of blogs that may need to evolve would be the use of databases. This is a more technical topic than the others but many platforms and services suffer from downtime whenever a post goes viral or hits the mass media. This simply shouldn’t happen.

Each platform and service chooses to handle content management in their own unique ways. Blogger and Moveable Type, for instance, used to publish HTML files (I have no idea what they do nowadays) while WordPress opted to use a simple database to host the content and serve those pages dynamically. Each approach has their pros and cons. But one thing is certain – it is far easier to serve a static HTML file millions of times than it is to request content from a database millions of times. Today’s web is one where at any moment an URL could be plagued by millions of visitors. Modern day blogging platforms and services should take this into consideration regardless if it was manually installed or hosted.

Blogger, Tumblr, WordPress.com, Twitter, Facebook all have extremely capable infrastructures in place to handle these issues. With WordPress.org you’re on your own to setup WordPress properly to handle load. It has taken some heat for this and while the argument could be made that people that are installing software on their own server should know better – the argument could also be made that by simply pre-bundling one of the many caching plugins into the core codebase this issue would be all but solved.

Tons of traffic to any particular post shouldn’t be thought of as an edge case. If you’re a blogger it will happen. Even if you’ve been writing for 40 years and it has never happened to you. It will. You shouldn’t have to worry about whether or not your blogging product of choice will crumble under the pressure of today’s web. Ever.

I could go on about this topic all day. The rest of the discussion is fantastic and I suggest that anyone with even a passing curiosity about the world of blogging – where it has been and where it is going – should give it a read at your next opportunity.

Looking at Apple’s invitation to March 7th’s iPad 3 event may give away exactly what is on the agenda. This wouldn’t be the first time Apple has dropped not-so-subtle hints in their invitations.

Here is the short list of things I think Apple is hinting at with their invitation.

Retina Display. If you’ve ever used an iPad or iPad 2 you will immediately notice the resolution on the iPad in the invitation as being much better than the current models. So, while I think this was a given, they certainly confirmed it for me.

Maps update. I think the Maps app will get updated signifigantly. Not only do I believe that Apple will drop Google Maps as their API-of-choice to power the application I think, as a result of Apple’s acquisition of C3 Technologies, the application will come with even more 3D-powered features.

iWork update. iWork on the iPad is incredibly powerful and, I’d guess, popular. A nice update to these applications would be welcomed.

No more home button? This one is simply conjecture but the invitation, if the iPad is in portrait, shows no home button on the iPad. I think the iPhone, iPad, iPod having a home button is incredibly useful and I can’t imagine life without it – but the home button has also been one of the main components of these devices to end up giving users trouble. So perhaps Apple has found an even better way. We’ll see.

I think the iPad 3 will have a better camera (ala the iPhone 4S), faster processor, more storage (iBooks are coming in at Gigabytes a piece), and perhaps more RAM.

Here is an off-the-wall prediction: colors. The iPad comes in white and black fronts. I think if Apple is really going to go after the school market they might consider giving people color choices. I realize that Apple’s own iPad Smart Covers come in a variety of colors but I think the iPad may come in more than the current choices too.

1. Open Messages.
2. Close your buddy list window.
3. Click the full-screen icon on your main Messages window.
4. Choose Window > Buddies (or CMD+1)
5. Enjoy.

/tip Kyle “I’ve only been to White Castle once” Slattery.

Colourmod is a Dashboard widget for Mac OS X that you’ll end up using much more than you think you would. I’m not a designer but as someone who fiddles around on the web I find myself in need of a hexadecimal color code from time-to-time. And when I do, I use Colourmod.

There are a few ways that I find myself using Colourmod to find the color I’m looking for. The first, and perhaps most obvious way, is to drag the “blue dot” color picker around the main color well and find the color I want making subtle adjustments by using the slider. The second, is to manually enter in the hexadecimal color code that I’m currently tweaking and make small changes until I get exactly what I want.

One nice feature is the blue arrow that will quickly copy the current color code and place that value into your clipboard. This makes finding, selecting and copying a color code into your text editor very, very quick.

Feature suggestions? Sure. One thing I’d like to see is a single text area that gives the proper RGB color values for a color. Although Colourmod supplies these values they aren’t easily selected. I’d also like to see a much easier and more accurate way to use the color picker. It is very tough to make small changes especially to light gray colors.

Oh, and I’d ditch the ‘U’ in Colourmod. But that’s just me.

Well, here is another widget I suggest taking a look at. Whenever any of us geeks order something online we’re feverishly refreshing the delivery status page of our shipper of choice to see where the package is. Well, not anymore. Now you can use Delivery Status.

Delivery Status is a widget for Mac OS X that makes it pretty simple, and dare I say sexy, to track a few packages at once right from your Dashboard. Junecloud has also made an iOS application for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch so that you can track your packages on the go.

I really like how the widget color-codes the statuses based on the shipper. A nice touch.

See, there are useful Dashboard widgets out there. They’re great. And you should know about them.

First, move older email messages out of your Inbox and into an Archive folder. You should have no trouble doing this. It may take a little while for Mail.app to move all of the messages. If you’re the type of person that has several folders (or Mailboxes) for message categories like family, friends, work, etc. etc. then you may not benefit from this tip. But, if you’re like me, and you leave every single message in your Inbox then you definitely will.

What I’ve done is move every message in my Inbox dated prior to December 1, 2011 into an Archive folder that is locally here on my Mac. This way when I go into my Inbox it is only loading a few months of email. I may do this again in June or wait an entire year if I don’t see much of a slow down. But just doing this has sped up Mail.app a lot.

Second, you could strip the bloat from Mail.app’s Envelope Index. What does this mean? I don’t really know but the layman’s explanation might be this; Mail.app keeps a database and sometimes it gets a little out of control. You can run a few commands via Terminal and it will clean up that mess. Again, do this at your own risk.

Your mileage may vary but with these two tips Mail.app should get just a bit snappier. It has for me.

One of the benefits I see coming from disabling comments is the number of links you end up getting back to your site.

Almost a year ago I wrote about the fact that blogging was ready for disruption. (I still think it is.) And that the new “pro blog recipe” was a blog without comments.

Lately this topic seems to have risen its head again yet not in the same way as it has in the past. In fact, rather than there being a debate for or against a blog having comments it appears that most independent bloggers have resolved that a blog without comments is simply much more enjoyable and manageable while larger outfits still see the need to engage the community.

Matt Gemmell, who recently shut off comments on his personal blog, added a few reasons to the fray. Here is one of his reasons that I have also enjoyed since turning comments off on my personal blog.

I feel more willing to publish short pieces, and to write more frequently.

When I had comments on I wouldn’t publish anything that I thought may not start a conversation. Which ended up leading me in a direction I simply didn’t want to go in – I was starting conversations for the sake of starting conversations. That isn’t why I have my personal blog and I don’t want it to be. So, off went the comments. And it isn’t because I don’t want to hear the opinions of those that read my blog. It is because I don’t want to write simply for the gratification of receiving comments. It has been very liberating.

There is still a place for comments on blogs. Even personal blogs. Some blogs have very good reasons to have comments on them. In fact, even Jason Kottke turns on comments from time-to-time when they are needed. But there are better examples like Horace Dediu’s Asymco. He has made it plainly clear that he runs Asymco in order to work with his community on figuring out a problem. He wants feedback, questions, answers, rebuttals to his hypothesis and blog comments is his primary way of accomplishing that.

So while the debate rages on – and all debates are good when they furnish constructive conversation – unlike Gemmell I firmly believe it is a matter of choice by the publisher rather than a cut-and-dry answer. There are pros and cons to having comments on or off and, once weighed, the publisher can then make a decision on how he or she would like to run their own blog.

Artisan bread is best described by thinking about the person who makes the bread. An artisan baker is a craftsperson who is trained to the highest ability to mix, ferment, shape and bake a hand crafted loaf of bread. They understand the science behind the chemical reactions of the ingredients and know how to provide the best environment for the bread to develop. – Artisan Bakers.

Eliza and I have a bread machine but for a while I’ve had the desire to fool around with making really, really simple bread recipes. The above loaf consists of salt, flour, water and a bit of yeast. Small variations of those ingredients, the amount you knead the dough, and how you bake it – can wholly change the way the final product comes out.

I’m having a lot of fun trying different things (I also made my own tortillas with nearly the same ingredients) and learning a lot as I go. I recommend making homemade bread to anyone that wants to learn about this process. Here is a recipe which I tailored off of Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois who have authored a book about making artisan bread in five minutes. I happened upon their recipe via YouTube. Smart strategy.

The recipe

• 1 1/2 tablespoons yeast.
• 1 1/2 tablespoons kosher salt
• 6 1/2 cups unbleached, all-purpose flour, more for dusting dough.
• 3 1/2 cups of water (about)
• Some cornmeal. (optional, you can use flour)

Put yeast and salt into bucket. Dump in lukewarm water. Dump in flour. Mix with wooden spoon until no more dry flour. Do not over mix or knead at all. Let sit in bucket for 2 hours. Rip off grapefruit sized pieces and bend them into a UFO shape (watch this video to see). Place on pizza peel to rest for 40 minutes while the oven preheats to 450. Preheat oven with an empty baking pan under pizza stone on the middle shelf. After dough ball has rested and oven, pizza stone, and baking pan are preheated – place dough ball on center of pizza stone, drop in a few cups of water into baking pan (this will steam to make the crust of the bread) and bake for 30 minutes.

That’s it. Give it a try!

The realword series features words that are often misused.

To begin, and for no reason whatsoever, we’ll start with Communism.

“Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production.”

Now you know.

Something must have told the Twitvid team that this is a logical direction to take Twitvid but I don’t see it. Broad category social networks have, more or less, been done and will, more than likely, stay the same as they are now for a long time. The best way to compete in social networking is by creating niche communities. Broad category video sharing is simply not niche enough to cut out a following.

Twitvid was and should have been a utility for sharing videos via Twitter since Twitter doesn’t currently allow that. I’m sure Twitter Photos, which all but negated the need for Twitpic and others, scared Twitvid into this pivot. But what would have been even more sensible is to, like Photobucket, make a deal with Twitter to handle their official service in an unobtrusively and mutually beneficial way.

Millions have used Twitvid and I’m sure many will continue to. However, I’ll go on record as saying that not many of those people will use these new features on Twitvid. I think this move sounds the death knell for Twitvid.

“And lots of DF readers on Twitter are telling me they use Apple TV just for AirPlay and Netflix streaming.”

That is exactly what I use the Apple TV for. I do not buy or rent TV shows or movies from the iTunes store. Ever. Although the Apple TV integrates with the iTunes Store, Home sharing (for sharing files from a computer), the NBA and MLB (and others), Vimeo, YouTube, Flickr, etc. etc. the two features I use on my Apple TV are Netflix with Airplay.

I use Airplay to put videos I find via my iPad on the TV. I do this a lot. (Thanks Devour) Even if the source of these videos is from YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, and other outlets – the integration with any of those platforms goes unused by me since I simply use Airplay. I suppose if I didn’t own an iPad my use of Airplay wouldn’t be nearly as significant. It is just so easy. I’ll also, on occasion, use Airplay to play some music via my Apple TV (this replaced my Airport Express’ purpose) and very, very rarely put some vacation photos on-screen.

Another note about Airplay; if you, like me (and obviously Jason Kottke), sometimes acquire a few TV shows you couldn’t get otherwise by grabbing them via Bittorrent you may be interested in Erica Sadun’s Airflick. Airflick is an application that lets you stream video, audio, or photos from your Mac to your Apple TV. Very handy application.

But all-in-all my Apple TV might as well just be a Netflix box. I’ve used Netflix on the computer, on an Xbox 360, on iPad and iPhone and on Apple TV. By far the very best Netflix application exists on the Apple TV. It is easy to use, looks great, and works nearly every single time without hiccup. I don’t know if I’d even be subscribed to Netflix if I didn’t own an Apple TV.

How would paying for a service ensure it won’t sell out? Maciej suggests that free services are more likely to shut down “Because it’s hard to resist a big payday when you are rapidly heading into debt.” No doubt that is true but when is a big payday easy to resist? If I had been paying Gowalla a few bucks a month would they have turned Facebook down? I don’t know. But if they still decided to sell the company (or, more accurately liquidate the product and move the team) to Facebook I would have been both disappointed and out a few bucks.

In other words, paying for a service doesn’t ensure its longevity or that it will never change.

What about Twitter? I saw many people linking to Maciej’s post as being good advice and some even had shown how they added the ability to pay for their free services based on this thinking. However, no one has mentioned that all of us are using and advocating a free service that fits Maciej’s scheme just perfectly — Twitter is a rapidly growing free service.

Yes, Twitter shows us ads from time-to-time in the form of Promoted tweets, trends, and accounts. But unless you use the Twitter.com site you’ll rarely see these ads. And, I’m sure, they’re making money behind-the-scenes by giving businesses access to their “firehose” and more controls and analytics than traditional accounts get. But it is still free for the public to use.

What would happen if, say, tomorrow Twitter decided that all Twitter clients (third-party and official) had to show some fairly obtrusive ads or you’d need to pay a few dollars per month to use the service? I’d wager many would pay up. Many would leave. And their growth would slow. However, none of that would ensure that Twitter wouldn’t sell out to a company sometime in the future. Revenue makes Twitter look even more appealing to potential buyers than if they weren’t making money. Revenue, it could be said, makes a company even more likely to sell.

This leads to Maciej’s next suggestion. Build it yourself. Obviously not everyone can do that (or should do that). But that seems to be the best suggestion he made in his post. The only way to ensure a service will be around and not change is to build and maintain it yourself. But, what if it becomes popular and someone with deep pockets makes you an offer? Then where are you? Back at the beginning.

Some of these friends think that if they don’t do these things no one else does. Or, they think that those that do are just young kids and not their customers. They are dead wrong.

This sentiment goes both ways, however. People that do these things sometimes believe that everyone does them. They are dead wrong too. “Everyone is on Facebook”. No, everyone is not on Facebook. This little blue planet we live on has over 7,000,000,000 people on it. Facebook’s active user base is in the hundreds of millions. Astounding? Yes. Everyone? No.

When you’re evaluating a new marketing strategy, or trying to decide if a business model will work, or you’re looking at a new product — always try to look at yourself to see if you’d be someone that would respond to it. But, just as importantly, know that if you wouldn’t that doesn’t mean others wouldn’t. Try to find someone that does connect to it and try to see how many of those types of people are out there.

I’m using the example of communicating over the Internet for this post but really you can fill just about anything in here such as; people that like rap music, people that enjoy going on vacation, people that drink coffee.

It is true that there are many people just like you. But it is just as true that there are many people that are not like you at all.

In short; I never missed a post.

In some ways, those days are going away and now I’m at the mercy of the realtime web and an algorithm. And so far I don’t think I like it.

On Twitter, from what I can tell, I have access to about 7 days worth of tweets in their official clients; web, mobile, and apps on the iPhone and iPad. Tweetbot, a third-party Twitter client for iPhone, only pulls in the latest 50 messages in my Timeline and also on Lists that I’ve created. If I haven’t checked Twitter via Tweetbot in more than 50 tweets I simply miss those tweets.

Some people do use Twitter just to see, as Twitter puts it, “What’s happening now”. And, of course, that is extremely valuable. The pulse of the planet. But I use Twitter to keep up with family, friends, a few interesting people, a couple of companies, and yes – even a few celebrities. But I want to see every tweet. Not just the most recent few.

On Facebook the News Feed is run by some algorithm (which I shall now refer to as “secret sauce”). This secret sauce is both pretty bad and pretty nebulous. It is pretty bad because I’m routinely missing posts that I probably would have cared about. Case in point, my brother asked me the other day if I had seen a video he put on Facebook. “Nope, never saw it.”, I replied. I have my brother marked as a family member on Facebook. Surely Facebook’s secret sauce would deem a post by him as something I would like to show up in my News Feed? Apparently it didn’t. It is pretty nebulous because apart from some controls on the News Feed about the types of items I would rather not see, there really aren’t many controls for this secret sauce recipe thingy.

I realize I’m probably in the minority but I prefer to have access to every single update from the blogs that I subscribe to, Twitter accounts that I follow, or people on Facebook that I friend. I wouldn’t have decided to make those connections if I didn’t care to see them all. I’m going to miss the good old days.

I found a few things mentioned in the post interesting.

“Coda 2 has now been in development for about a year and a half.”

Three years ago I published an interview with Panic and they seemed to indicate that they were already working on Coda 2 but I guess they didn’t start on it officially for another 18 months. I don’t think they tried to trick us (or me) deliberately but I thought it was interesting considering how early we, the people, were asking Panic to begin working on Coda 2. Amazing insight.

So, when will it ship? Coda 2 is an extremely complex and multi-layered app, and it will take significant time to test, debug, and improve. That means there are many, many more months ahead of us — this release is important and needs to be as close to perfect as possible. So, to those of you currently camped out on the street in front of our office: you’ll need to hang in there for a quite a while still. Thanks for your understanding while we test!

For Panic to come right out and say that it will be “many, many more months” before Coda 2 will ship is fantastic for its users in a number of ways. It is exactly the reason I published the interview with them focused on transparency in software development and not just about the next version of Coda. You’ll remember, if you’re a long-time reader of my blog, how excited I was that immediately following our interview Panic reached out to ask how they could be more transparent, and a bit later they got on Twitter and started a blog.

With this post Panic has educated Coda users so that they’ll know when to expect an update to Coda. They don’t think it is coming before the end of the year but will, more than likely, come sometime early next summer (my guess). This is huge. Over the next 8 or so months if you need an application that does more than Coda currently provides – you may want to look into investing in a different application for the time being. This is a decision that, before this blog came out, would have been very hard to make. Especially for larger development teams.

Imagine starting a company with three, five, or ten developers and that you wanted a license for each of them. You take a look at Coda’s features and you know that you’re developers require, or would prefer, an editor that does something that Coda currently does not. You can now know how long your investment will take take to make a return for you. Perhaps you pick up a Coda 1.x license. Perhaps you don’t. Now you know. Before you didn’t.

If you read my interview with them you’ll know that this is not the way Panic has always operated. In fact, it may not be the way that they prefer to work. But they’re doing it anyway. For you. Noodle that a while and then go thank Panic in their comments.

There is a lot of talent inside of Microsoft. It is everything that happens above the talent that inhibits that talent’s ability to make really great things.

While the Arc Touch Mouse is very, very interesting and seemingly well done it is still based off an old “mouse” (read: move around your desk and move the pointer) paradigm. The multitouch touchpad from Apple is, in my opinion, much better and more forward-thinking because it is getting us closer and closer to having all touch-based interfaces for our computing devices. It is why I switched from using a mouse. I never want a mouse again.

I don’t want to take anything away from the people that worked on this mouse at Microsoft… but I’d like to know if Microsoft would have let them work as hard and long on creating a next generation touch device rather than only a slimmer mouse. And then actually be able to ship it.

I was never much a fan of Steve Jobs. I was always so much more a fan of the company he had built and the products they created.

His idea of thinking differently was to not follow the trends but to set them. The age of computers was, directly or indirectly, crafted by Steve Jobs and his team. Although he is, deservedly so, getting a lot of credit for the revolutionary products Apple has built over the years he wasn’t alone. Apple’s 21,000+ member team all worked in concert to design, manufacturer, market, sell, and support these incredible products. The part that Steve brought – at least from my perspective in the cheap-seats here, was the drive for perfection at the expense of features.

It wasn’t until this last two decades that his methods truly proved themselves to the world and paid off for him. Although Apple saw success in the early days those that would try to copy that which Apple built would be the true benefactors for years. That is, until Steve Jobs stopped being a one-man-team and filled his entire company with people that shared his principles and learned his methods.

Apple products notoriously do less than people want when they’re first shipped. But, no one can ever say that they aren’t beautiful, work exactly as they say, and are the best products they own. Of all the things I own I can say that it is only Apple products that I have a strong affinity for. No other company has captured me as a lifelong loyal consumer of their products. Yet.

I can say that Steve Jobs has had an affect on my life. His passion for perfection at the expense of features has taught me that you don’t have to be first, your product doesn’t have to be for everyone, and your products don’t have to have every feature in order to succeed. Taking your time and building something “insanely great” can pay off. His experiences have also taught me that no matter how great you are you’re only as strong as the team around you. No one man (or woman) can expect to accomplish anything great in our field without the help of people that are talented, driven, and willing to think different. For me those are his legacies; the pursuit of perfection at the expense of features and understanding it takes a team of people willing to think different.

Don’t just do what everyone else is doing, think different.

A little over a year ago I wrote about how it was getting very difficult to choose which camera to use in a given situation. The iPhone 4′s camera was good enough for almost every circumstance I had run into and so the convenience and speed of using the iPhone 4 over a DSLR made for a tough choice.

With the iPhone 4S that decision just got even harder. The iPhone 4S now has an 8MP f/2.4 camera that is also capable of shooting 1080p HD video (the iPhone 4 records in 720p). For any photographer that still pulled out their DSLR over the iPhone 4 they may find it a little easier to use the iPhone 4S. That is why I think the curve to popularity will be a very steep, up-and-to-the-right graph. More serious photographers will use the iPhone 4S then did the iPhone 4.

Time will tell if I’m right. I’d guess, 12 months.

To top it off Apple’s stock price dipped during the event and the tech press has since been rather harsh to Apple for “not releasing an iPhone 5″. The iPhone 4S is the iPhone 5 people. It is as big an update to a piece of hardware as anyone could want. Two-times faster CPU, 7x graphics, an amazing update to the camera, and an antenna that works around the world? What else, besides pure aesthetics, would have been updated on an iPhone 5? Only the name.

The insatiable tech press isn’t the best place to get a balanced view of how great these products, and products from Amazon, Google, Viddler, Twitter, BuzzCar etc. etc., really are. Many of these writers hear about the products too early and by the time they are actually given a launch date they are already bored with the news. Unfortunately the tech press is the only outlet educating both the got-to-have-it enthusiast and our mom’s. Not good.

I sometimes find myself guilty of this and I sometimes have to snap myself out of it. When I want to I either read this or watch this.

• The camera lens will be on the opposite side of the Apple logo. Wrong. According to any photos I’ve seen of the iPhone 4S the camera is in the exact same location as before. (Those of you with iPhone 4 cases that you like are probably very happy about this.)
• The antenna will no longer be built into the case. Wrong. Again, this isn’t the iPhone 5 so the antenna remains relatively unchanged. However, they have somehow managed to make the antenna work for the entire planet inside one phone as well as ad some dynamic switching between technologies. So, at least it is a better antenna?
• The phone will be lighter and have no glass back. Wrong. Wrong.
• The speaker phone will be better. Maybe? Although there was no mention of this in today’s presentation the iPhone 4S now allows for a user-configurable maximum volume limit.
• The build of the home button will be better. Assuming wrong. Apple could have made slight adjustments on the underpinnings of the iPhone 4S’ home button but it may take an iFixit type breakdown to know for sure.
• Every iPhone 5 will support most of the world’s carriers. Right!
• The camera will be better quality both in megapixels and focal length. Right! 8MP and f/2.4. The photos look amazing too.
• Again, the mic will be better, but I think it will be to handle voice commands. Sort of right? Apple is unleashing Siri on all of us – a personal assistant that does whatever you ask it to via voice commands. But whether or not the mic is actually better may take more time to figure out.

So, no iPhone 5 but I think it is very fair to say that the iPhone 4S is an incredible update to an already amazing “phone”.

• The camera lens will be on the opposite side of the Apple logo. I guess this because the iPhone 5 and iOS 5 will allow someone to use the volume buttons as the shutter-button. Using my iPhone 4 and pretending to take photos using the volume up button as the shutter-button I find having the lens on the bottom side of the iPhone to be very inconvenient.
• The antenna will no longer be built into the case. Although the iPhone 4′s issue of having the antenna be part of the casing (it is much of the outer metallic ring) ended up being a non-issue I don’t think they’ll want to deal with these issues again. They’ll more than likely come up with an even better solution.
• The phone will be lighter and have no glass back. When you hold an iPhone 4 you feel like you’re holding something that was incredibly well made. The glass front and back and the overall weight of the iPhone 4 make it feel that way. Plastic weighs less but feels like plastic. Metal was a good choice, I thought, for the iPhone 1. So I don’t know what the backing will be but I feel as though the iPhone 5 will be lighter and no longer have a glass back.
• The speaker phone will be better. Maybe this is the part where I begin to dream or something but the speaker phone feature has never been good on an iPhone. Many times it is not loud enough and more often than not the people on the other end can’t hear you either. So both the speaker and mic need to be better.
• The build of the home button will be better. I don’t know but I’m sure there are rumors that Apple will ditch the home button on the iPhone 5. If there are, I’d doubt them. Having a single home button is just about perfect for everything you need to do with an iPhone. I’d like to see more options with it (double-clicks, triple-clicks, etc.) but overall it works just fine. The problem with the iPhone 4 that I’d guess they’ll fix with iPhone 5 is that the home button hasn’t held up too well. After a year and a few months of usage it has taken a lot of wear in its feel. I often have issue with the double-click feature. I have to very deliberately push (read: almost mash) the button. Not good.
• Every iPhone 5 will support most of the world’s carriers. Making a different iPhone for each carrier’s network technology seems like something Apple should be very unhappy with doing. In order to ensure the iPhone’s growth over the last 4 years they’ve had to do this but the iPhone 5 is a great opportunity to unify all of the hardware and allow people to use these devices out-of-the-box all over the world.
• The camera will be better quality both in megapixels and focal length. The iPhone (and many other phones) have quickly replaced point-and-shoot cameras. In fact, I’d wager that the only people really using point-and-shoot cameras are people that do not have a decent phone camera. The iPhone 4′s camera is good enough for me to use rather than a point-and-shoot but it could be a lot better. There is a lot of room for improvement with the iPhone’s current camera and I think the iPhone 5 will bring a few of those updates.
• Again, the mic will be better, but I think it will be to handle voice commands. Apple hasn’t done much to update how the iPhone takes voice commands. I use this to make phone calls, sometimes, while driving. “Call Eliza Mobile” I’ll tell my iPhone and it works just great. Although I rarely use the iTunes voice commands they are there. But beyond that the iPhone is falling behind Android quickly. I know Apple bought a company that specializes in this sort of thing at least a year ago now so I can’t imagine that sometime in the near future the iPhone will be able to do things like speech-to-type and complex voice commands for things we do with our phones that we’d like to be hands free.

I don’t know how these align with the rumors but as an iPhone user since day one I can certainly see Apple addressing some of these issues with the iPhone 5.

Here is the bit I really like:

“The cornerstone for this update is Gowalla’s new Social Guides. We’ve taken the best of what’s local, the places your friends love, and the recommendations from experts, rolled them all up, and have created the foundation for a collection of Social Guides to cities, parks and regions around the world — ready and at your fingertips with Gowalla.”

I love the idea of traveling to somewhere I’ve never been and being able to easily find places to visit that people – especially my friends/family – have recommended via Gowalla. I look forward to trying this out and seeing how well it works.

Here is the bit I’m not so sure I like:

“We’ve broadened our concept of “checking in” as well. We call them stories now. It’s easy to add friends to a story so you can add photos and comments together as a single experience. Eventually we’ll even bubble up the best stories within our guides, so you can relive all that was great about that film festival you’re going to.”

A check in is a very “thin” experience. There isn’t much to a check in besides; I’m here and so are these people. Everything else on these services revolves around the check in. Gowalla is trying to do something different and enhance that experience to make it more enjoyable and perhaps fun. That’s great. However, I think this is where Gowalla might lose me. I use Foursquare to check in because it is very quick to do so. I switched from Gowalla to Foursquare for this exact reason. And now with “stories” Gowalla seems to be trying to slow this process down even more. So they must be going after a very specific individual that wants to share their experiences with people in certain places, and who are willing to take the time to do that, rather than simply sharing their current location. I’m OK with this but it may not be for me. We’ll see.

I’m happy to see Gowalla going in an entirely different direction then Foursquare. I hope they find their niche and it works for them and for their community. I think we’re still only seeing the tip of the iceberg of the value of these location based services and what they will offer the world still remains to be seen. I look forward to watching it all unfold.

John Gruber’s Daring Fireball is a recipe that is working and the cooks are busy in the kitchen adding a pinch of this, a pinch of that and seeing what works for them.

So far none of these recipes have become better, in this blogger’s opinion, than its master recipe but several have certainly managed to create their own dish that works well enough to feed their own mouths.

What is the Daring Fireball recipe? It consists of the following:

• 1 multiple-times-per-day updated link log.
• 1 not-so-frequently updated blog with longer, well-written posts.
• 1 (or two) audio podcasts (to taste).
• 1 weekly RSS feed sponsorship.
• 1 well-curated image-based ad on each page view.

From outward appearances this recipe nets Daring Fireball a very decent sum – which is why the cooks are in the kitchen. With no inside information here is what one can surmise based on what is public knowledge.

The three main ways Daring Fireball generates revenue is through its weekly RSS feed sponsorship, The Deck Ad Network, and sponsorship of 5by5 Network’s The Talk Show. Daring Fireball also uses affiliate links and sells Tshirts from time-to-time but I do not believe these to be major contributors to its profit. They may both contribute to its ability to generate revenue but I believe the bulk of its profit come from the three channels I’m covering here. Without knowing more about how The Deck Ad Network and The 5by5 Network distribute revenue it is impossible to know exactly how much revenue goes to Daring Fireball but we can do exactly what the other cooks are doing; make assumptions and get close.

Daring Fireball currently charges $6,500 USD per week to sponsor the RSS feed. This recently increased from $6,000 within the last few weeks, and increased to that not too long ago from $5,000 USD and so on. So to figure out the yearly revenue generated through this single sponsorship program would depend on where you start and end the year. But, lets jump out on a limb and say that a weekly sponsorship has cost at least $5,000 for the last year. That’d be about $260,000 USD per year from the RSS feed sponsorship. At $6,500, should it maintain or go up higher from here, it’d be $338,000 USD for the next year.

The Deck, of which Daring Fireball is only 1-of-52 members, has a current cost of $8,300 USD per month. Or, sponsors can pay to buy a day, called a “roadblock”, for $8,300 per day. With 27 sponsors in the month of September that is about $224,000 USD generated. (Assuming The Deck had sold absolutely no “roadblock” ads. If they had it’d be significantly more.) I’m assuming that The Deck distributes revenues based on a traffic-based model of sorts (more page views == more moolah) but I don’t know exactly. But even if you were to split this revenue evenly among all parties that’d be nearly $8,300 per month for Daring Fireball. Based on nothing other than my gut Daring Fireball’s 4M+ page views per month make up a fair amount of The Deck’s overall traffic and so, one could assume, that Daring Fireball gets a slightly larger share than my math suggests.

5by5 is currently charging $3,000 USD a month for its Livestream sponsorship (which The Talk Show does each week) and $3,000 for its bandwidth sponsorship as well as individual show sponsorships which they don’t publicize the price for. It is very difficult to tell how 5by5 would distribute this revenue but, again, I’ll make some assumptions. I assume that a bandwidth sponsorship is all for 5by5. Bandwidth is a bill that goes to 5by5 and not the hosts. Bandwidth for a show as popular as The Talk Show could easily be a few thousand dollars per month (not to mention editing costs, etc.) So if we take the bandwidth sponsorship off the table I can only assume that The Talk Show generates about $9,000 USD per month. $3,000 for the Livestream sponsorship, and $6,000 for the two episode-based sponsorships that are within the show. Plus donations, Tshirts? I think I’m underestimating the revenue-generating power of The Talk Show but I can’t be sure.

Not counting the revenue Daring Fireball generates with its affiliate links and tshirt sales; it is my assumption that Daring Fireball could generate upwards of $550,000 USD per year (going forward). And I believe I’m underestimating because my assumptions are probably low. Again, the affiliate links and tshirt sales are probably fairly good revenue generators but the bulk of Daring Fireball’s profit likely does not come from these two channels.

Why go through all of this to figure out how much revenue Daring Fireball generates? Because it is exactly what wannabe-pro-bloggers are doing every single day. They do this math based on the information they can gather and decide to take a stab at it themselves. And with Daring Fireball’s RSS feed sponsorship increasing every few months why wouldn’t they? And good for them. The more the merrier. I just have one request.

I hope that those that decide to use Daring Fireball’s recipe decide to do whatever they can to make it all their own. Don’t just add a little more salt and pepper – change the main course from fish to beef. Make every ingredient from your own garden and don’t use the same brand ingredients Daring Fireball does. Make something unique that will inspire others to do the same. Be a good cook not a copy cat.

“All of the things that are great on iOS are the same things that are absolutely worthless in OS X Lion.”

Since upgrading to Lion I’ve come to love many of the iOS-lessons-learned that Apple had decided to bring “Back to the Mac” and so I was puzzled by what Chris said. So I asked him to explain further and this is what he said.

“launchpad, full screen apps (annoying implementation), infrequently used safari tabs reloading, I’m sure there’s more”

And…

“I should probably have said some of the great things in iOS make no sense in Lion. Love the reverse scrolling.”

I don’t agree with everything Chris tweeted and I thought I would go over these things here rather than via a few replies on Twitter. I’ll take these one-by-one.

I’ve already wrote about why I think Launchpad could be confusing to new and inexperienced users. On Lion applications are able to be installed using the App Store as well as by-hand and it creates a combination of circumstances that make it harder to understand why you can uninstall some applications via Launchpad and not others. That being said, the rest of Launchpad makes perfect sense for new and inexperienced users. I launch applications using Alfred but my mother would love Launchpad. At the time I wrote that post Kyle Slattery tweeted that he rarely removes applications from his Mac and so many people may never experience that confusion. If true, then Launchpad seems like a great addition to Mac OS X.

Although not every application supports Lion’s new full-screen feature yet I’ve been able to put it to good use with Terminal, Mail, Aperture, and Parallels. I’ve used full-screen browsing in Safari a few times and in a few circumstances (which was very handy at the time) but for the most part I only use this feature in those four applications. Could I live without it? Yes. Is it a got-to-have? No. Do I like it? Yes.

To be honest, I’ve never noticed unused tabs in Safari reloading for me. I’m not a tab-hoarder as some are so my experience probably differs from those of you that keep 40, 50 or more tabs open at a time. I’d drive myself crazy with that many tabs open. My connection to the Internet is normally fast enough that I can open a web page and access it fairly quickly. I don’t need to keep them all open. So, perhaps this is annoying for some but for me it goes unnoticed.

Something I do agree with Chris on is Lion’s reverse scrolling. I love it. Like everyone else it took me the better part of a week to catch on and retrain my muscles and brain – but after that it has been very enjoyable to go back and forth between the iPad and my Mac and scroll the same way. One thing I have found, however, is that this particular change has caused me to begin to use some of Lion’s multi-touch gestures on the iPad. So now I’m beginning to wish that some of these gestures move over to the iPad (such as three-finger swipe between apps, two-finger swipe to move forward and backward in my browser, etc.)

Two more features that I adore in Lion; Resume and Versions. Resume is a feature that allows you to resume any application where you left it after you’ve closed it. This is one of those invisible features that once you have it you can not imagine giving it up. Accidentally close a window on Lion with some work in it, open it back up, and you’ll immediately see the value of this feature. Versions, while I have only needed it once, makes it dead simple to go “back-in-time” on a specific file without having to use Time Machine. I don’t know that this came from iOS, perhaps it is simply an extension of the lessons that they’ve learned from the use of Time Machine, but as more and more applications make use of this feature in Lion the more utility it will serve.

For me the best update to Mac OS X was Snow Leopard. It was the update that made my computer much, much faster and much, much more reliable. It was like buying a brand new computer. Lion doesn’t quite feel like that to me but it does do something very important – it begins to bridge the gap between my use of the iPhone and iPad with my Mac. I use all three of these devices every single day and having them all come together has meant that I’m more productive. And that is a very good thing.

Congratulations to all involved that have worked very hard and made a big difference in Philadelphia.

Alex Hillman, cofounder of Independence Hall, covers it a bit more thoroughly.

As I outlined in Recent software problems:

“Since upgrading to Lion my Mac isn’t going to sleep. It is frustrating as I’m the type of person that never, ever shut my Mac down. Instead I usually would just close the lid and be on my way. But, now, when I come back to my Mac the fans are spinning and in some cases the battery is drained. I’m hoping that a forthcoming update to Lion will fix this otherwise I may have to take drastic measures.”

This problem continues. However, I ran across this solution via a few Google searches.

1. Unplug your Macbook Pro.
2. Put the Mac to sleep (Apple Menu -> Sleep or close the lid)
3. Once asleep, plug your MacBook Pro back in.

I’ve confirmed that this works. I’m still looking forward to a Lion update that addresses these and my other issues.

Oh, I’m using Mark Jaquith’s Markdown on Save WordPress plugin and it works great.

To swaps the events viewer and project stage simply click on Window > Swap Events and Projects. I never knew it was there. Hope this helps!

First, the problems I’m having on my Mac. Since upgrading to Lion my Mac isn’t going to sleep. It is frustrating as I’m the type of person that never, ever shut my Mac down. Instead I usually would just close the lid and be on my way. But, now, when I come back to my Mac the fans are spinning and in some cases the battery is drained. I’m hoping that a forthcoming update to Lion will fix this otherwise I may have to take drastic measures.

Also Lion related, I believe, is Mail.app is a bit crash happy. I’ll be scrawling a note to someone and poof – instacrash with no warning. And although Lion touts itself as the resumable OS and I am usually able to pick up just about where I left off this is still frustrating.

To top it off my Mac is running fairly hot. I don’t believe my fans turned on more than once a day on Snow Leopard but on Lion they don’t seem to shut off and there aren’t any processes that seem to demand it. Again, I’m hoping that a update to Lion will cure some of these things.

Next up, my iPad. Twitter for Mac is one crash happy application. I think it has a lot to do with the way it tries to handle the various types of media that people are tweeting. I’ll do a search for baking (yes, I do searches for baking) on Twitter and within one or two tweets – crash. Unlike Lion on the Mac I can not resume where I was. I have to start over. I appreciate that the team at Twitter wants us to have a unified experience for how media is displayed but it is killing the reliability if the app.

One more gripe about Twitter for iPad. I separate the accounts that I follow into Lists. So, while I only follow about 60 accounts I’m actually keeping up with hundreds using Twitter’s Lists. It’s great. Except that on the iPad app I’m very limited in the number of tweets I can load. On Tweetbot for iPhone (which is arguably the best twitter client ever built) I can go back much further in the timeline. The problem I have is that some of my Lists are rather bloated – like my Software list. I follow many accounts that relate to software that I use this way I can keep up-to-date. But I have hundreds of accounts in that list. Which would be fine if the iPad didn’t limit the number of tweets I can pull up. Give me infinite scroll!!

The App Store on the iPad is dated and I hope that Apple works very hard on making this experience much better. Back in the days of the App Store having hundreds of applications it worked well. Now with hundreds of thousands of apps it doesn’t hold up. For instance, last night I was searching for travel planning applications. For our trip to Ireland I would like to store a list of possible locations to visit based on their location. So, if I’m going to be in Killarney and I want to pull up an already curated list of places we’d like to visit I’d think there would be a good application for that. Hint: there isn’t. Back to why the App Store doesn’t work – I kept having to start my search over at the beginning. Doing a text search turned up very little so I decided to go into the Travel Category. I ordered it by highest customer rating first and then paged through 174 pages of applications. The problem is that when you view an app and then click the back button your back to page 1 without your filters stored. It’s horrible and I ended giving up after only two or three tries.

So, yeah, Apple and Twitter have some work to do – for me. I feel better, thanks.

We’ll be heading to Ireland in a few months. According to these two screenshots from Google Maps Ireland is ready for our arrival.

For those that are unaware, prior to Lion installing an application on the Mac went something like this; download a .DMG file which would mount to your Mac much like putting a CD in the disk drive and dragging the application icon into your Applications folder. That’s it. Drag, drop, installed. To uninstall an application you just delete the application from your Applications folder. Done.

The caveats to this process were the need to unmount the DMG after you’ve installed the application and then trashing the leftover DMG files in people’s Downloads folder.

However, with Lion came the promise of simplifying this process even more. Why? Because, although the above process seems simple it wasn’t nearly as simple as Apple had managed to make installing and uninstalling applications from iOS. On iOS you open the App Store, click Install, the application’s icon shows up on your device’s Home Screen. If you’d like to uninstall the application you tap and hold the icon, an “x” shows up, click it and confirm that you want to uninstall the app. Very simple.

Lion wanted to bring this very same workflow to the Mac. The workflow goes very much the same; Install applications directly from the Mac App Store, the application’s icon shows up on Launchpad, click and hold to uninstall the app from your Mac.

However, on Lion not all applications are created equal. Some applications were installed prior to, or without the use of, the Mac App Store. Perhaps you downloaded the application from the web or you simply have it installed from long before Lion. Either way, these applications still show up on Launchpad – they just can’t be uninstalled from Launchpad.

Which is why I think uninstalling applications on Lion is arguably more difficult for some people because the workflow for one application is different than the workflow for another application. If Apple could have allowed for applications that were not installed via the Mac App Store to be uninstalled using the same workflow they would have. There must be some very good reasons why they can not – however, I thought that they should have at least showed a dialog to instruct the user on how they can uninstall the application anyway.

For instance, if I’ve got Launchpad open I can drag the application’s icon to Trash on the Dock. Shouldn’t this uninstall it? If I was in my Applications folder and did the very same thing it would. So why not from Launchpad directly to Trash? Why even allow me to drag it over the Trash? Why not show a message when I do this: “Sorry, but you’ll have to open Finder, navigate to your Applications folder, and remove the application from there manually.”

I’m not sure why Apple didn’t find some way to either make this easier or to inform the user how to accomplish this simple task. But a few years from now, when 90% of all installed Mac applications have been installed directly from the Mac App Store, Apple will no longer need or care to worry about this issue. And perhaps that alone is reason enough for them not to care about it now.

However, there are times when I just want to focus on what I’m doing. Mac OS X Lion’s new fullscreen feature is designed to help me focus on a single application at a time. However, when Skype, iChat, Mail, or Twitter are open they will notify me (audibly or with bouncing icons) when they’d like my attention. They will inevitably pull me away from what I’m doing to see what is going on.

Skype, for me, is the biggest culprit because our team at Viddler uses Skype as the primary way to communicate. So even though Skype is notifying me that there is something new in Skype sometimes it is just some of the team members chatting about what’s for lunch and really isn’t meant for me and isn’t high-priority.

So there are times that I do not want to be distracted or even notified that something is going on in Skype. I want to be left completely alone and work on whatever it is I’m focused on. Enter Shh, an AppleScript and/or Alfred Extension (I love Alfred) that will quickly close these four applications. It is a dead simple script that closes all of these applications at once (rather than closing them individually).

I’m guessing that I will extend this script to include other applications over time and even enhance it in some way (perhaps by forcing the foremost application into fullscreen mode on OS X Lion or turning off Growl notifications) so if you’re interested in such things be sure to watch this project on Github or contribute to it yourself.

I thought I’d drop a note, for Google more than anything, that I wouldn’t shop at forumsstore.com (which I won’t link directly to). This site comes up on Google as having some fairly great deals on products like DSLR camera lenses.

What I will link to is a forum thread where some well meaning people got together and dug a little deeper to see if this site was legitimate or not. All they came up with were red flags.

Remember, if a website feels shady it probably is. If the prices just don’t seem right, if the site is void of any information about the company, and if the various safety and security logos that are on the site don’t link anywhere – chances are you should stay away.

Google+ has run me over like a freight train. Over the last few weeks I’ve been living on it instead of Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare. In fact, I made the prediction that Google+ could replace many of the most popular services.

But before I get into all of that I thought I’d share how Google+ is different.

Every social networking site was started with a particular purpose in mind. Over time those services typically find their niche (if they survive long enough to do so) whether or not it was the original reason for its inception or not.

Let’s use LinkedIn as an example. LinkedIn was created to be the professional’s social network. A network of people that are connected at some professional, rather than personal or familial, level. This sort of distinction for LinkedIn is completely different to that of Facebook, which tries to connect people that know each other in some way, or Twitter, which doesn’t care if you know anyone, and is an invaluable differentiator in the world of social networking. Heck, it led to LNKD.

Google+, however, goes against this “find the niche” convention. Rather than trying to fill a niche like Facebook or LinkedIn they’re taking on every level of human connection; professional, familial, social, voyeur, etc. and combining them all into one service. They do all of this by providing a different relationship model called Circles.

Circles are nondescript buckets of relationships that you create on your own and can change at anytime. For example you can create some typical social Circles for Coworkers, Friends, Family, Ex-Schoolmates, Basketball Friends, etc. Each of these Circles will have specific meaning to you and no one else. They allow you to segregate your relationships into very meaningful categories that help you connect with many different people all in one place.

Why is this a good thing? In my mind the reasons are innumerable. For instance, maintaining profiles and networks in multiple locations, and somehow engaging with those services regularly, can end up being a monumental draw on your time. I won’t say it is a waste of your time because keeping a LinkedIn profile up-to-date and active has meant many professional opportunities for people. However, keeping every single site up-to-date can get cumbersome and, for those that “follow” you in multiple locations, noisy.

Your LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook networks could all co-exist and never intersect using Google+’s Circles.

One more thing to say about Circles… they aren’t just lists. Facebook and Twitter both have lists and Google+’s Circles are not, and should not be, comparable. On Facebook someone has to confirm that you are their friend before the relationship is created. So if you only want to “follow” what is going on with a particular person you can’t unless they approve the relationship (or if they are a Celebrity and create a “page” for themselves rather than a normal account). Once they have, though, you can then separate them into lists. On Facebook you may use lists to filter your main stream or use them to send messages directly to those within those lists (though not nearly as easily as you can on Google+ which I’ll get to in the next paragraph). On Twitter, lists are made to keep your main stream cleaner. Rather than “following” Ashton Kutcher, as an example, one can add him to a Celebrities or Entrepreneurs or Investors list. This way Kutcher’s tweets don’t muddy up your main stream but you can check in with him from time-to-time using Twitter’s Lists. At least, that is how I use Lists. Oh, and you can’t specify how you share on Twitter. You’re either public or private and that is it.

Here is where Google+’s Circles really separate themselves from the pack. Sharing. Anything you share on Google+; a post, a photo, a video, specific information on your profile such as your phone number, etc. can be shared with a limitless subset of your relationships on Google+.

Here, I’ll provide some examples. Let’s say that you want to send a message to everyone at work. If you had a Coworkers Circle you can type in your message to them, choose to only share it with your Coworkers, and hit publish. Only people that you’ve put into the Coworkers Circle will see it. But it can get even more granular than that. You can choose to share a bit of information with more than one Circle or a Circle and a specific person and so on. Maybe you want to tell all of your friends that you’re going to see a movie tonight but you also want to tell your family and one guy from work. You can do that. Or maybe you just want to send a message to one particular person, or two or three, you can do that too. Or, better yet, maybe you want to send a message to someone privately that doesn’t even have you in their Circles, you can do that (unlike Twitter’s Direct Message feature).

Privacy and Sharing options on Google+ are probably the best we’ve ever seen on a social networking service to-date and, believe it or not, they’ve made it pretty easy to understand and use. We all remember the flack Facebook got for making privacy confusing to its hundreds of millions of users. Google+’s privacy options, by comparison, are very easy to understand.

They even have a “view my profile as” feature that allows you to view your own profile as if you were someone else. You can view your profile as if you were your boss or the public-at-large or your future girlfriend. This makes it simple to edit who can see what.

Hopefully this helps frame where Google+ could potentially fit for some. It could, in theory, replace Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn’s niche approach to social networking and allow you to combine all of your relationships in one place. And, you can control exactly what you call those relationships rather than being tied down to the world’s nomenclature of relationships.

The Plusses

I’ve described why Circles are, potentially, better at describing relationships and give us the ability to combine all of our social networks in one spot. But that isn’t the only thing Google+ has going for it.

Ever since the days of Brightkite I’ve been using a secondary service to handle check-ins. Checking into a place, for me, is a better option than simply tweeting “I’m at such-and-such with so-and-so”. Surrounding a check-in is important metadata like location, time, etc. and a tweet is fleeting. Also many check-in services provide you with some sort of context around the location you’re currently in. At the moment my favorite check-in service is Foursquare. However, Google+ provides you with a nice set of check-in tools (although very young). From the Google+ iPhone application you can simply check-into a place and provide no other information (ala Foursquare, Gowalla) or you can choose to add additional information or a photo. While it separates out an actual check-in from a normal post it doesn’t make you feel as though the two are not interchangeable. They’ve struck a great balance with this and I can only hope it will get better.

Photo sharing from your computer or mobile-phone on Google+ is not only simple but also has a rich feature-set. Don’t forget, you can use the power of your Circles to share photos with any subset of your relationships. A photo of your newborn that you only want mom and dad to see? Done. A super-secret-mockup of something you’re building at work that you only want your coworkers and wife to see? Done. A photo of you in front of a landmark for the whole world to see? Done. Oh, and Google+ allows you to apply some effects to your photos as well. Someday Google+ could replace Instagram, Flickr, and Facebook photos.

Posts on Google+ have no character limit. Some consider the 140-character limit of Twitter to be its single greatest strength. As is often said sometimes your greatest strength can also be your greatest weakness. There are times when our thoughts span beyond 140-characters (no matter how succinct you are). I’ve found the slightly longer posts of Google+ to be most enjoyable and the Google+ team have designed the interface in such a way that longer posts don’t detract from the shorter ones. The vast majority of posts I’ve seen on Google+ could fit within Twitter’s character limit but every once in a while people have more to say.

Google+’s Hangout, Huddle, and Sparks features are neat but they don’t yet fit into my plusses list. They aren’t minuses either. Whether you use them or not they do not get in the way. I’ve played around with these features and while I haven’t found a valuable use for them yet I may in the future.

The Minuses

For any social networking service the single biggest reason they fail is lack of adoption. While Google+ has become the fastest growing site of-all-time that doesn’t mean that people are using it. In my Circles (get it?) Google+ has not yet been fully adopted. The people that have been most active are very early adopters, people that work at Google, and people that do not have accounts on Twitter or Facebook. Will this change? Will Google somehow convince people, as they did me, to use Google+ for a few days to see if it sticks? We’ll see.

Keeping up with your stream on Google+ is fairly impossible and by that I mean making sure you see every single message. It is becoming clearer and clearer to me that these realtime services care less and less about people keeping up-to-date with what has happened but care much more about showing them what is happening right now. This is a design choice and one that ultimately we may all have to get used to – but it isn’t one I particularly care for at the moment. Right or wrong I treat these streams like I treat my email inbox. I don’t want to miss messages from my family or friends and on Google+ this is very difficult. You see, Google+’s stream shows you the most-recently-updated post on top rather than the most-recently-published post. This distinction is important. A post that was written 5 days ago could resurface to the very top of your stream because someone left a comment in it. From what I’ve heard and read Google is using some complex computation to manage the stream. These guys are extremely good at fiddling with “algorithms” until they’re just right so I’ll withhold judgement on how they do this until they think they’ve got it.

The brevity of tweets makes them very, very easy to consume. Posts on Google+ can be a little harder to digest and that has caused, in some, a feeling of being overwhelmed. When my mother logs onto Twitter she sees a few messages from friends and family and perhaps a tweet or two from NASA. On Google+ with links, photos, videos, hangouts, etc. it can be a bit jarring and you feel like you can’t get your feet on the ground. Maybe Google will be able to figure out this problem but maybe not. Those of us that stick with Google+ may be the type of people that can wade through an enormous amount of information quickly while those that can will be left out in the cold. We’ll see.

At a technical level Google+ is fairly sound. The growth rate of Google+ has been nothing short of astounding and the fact that there hasn’t been an interruption in service is commendable. The iPhone application, on the other hand, is another story altogether. It was released fairly soon after Google+ went into “field testing” mode and its newness shows. It is incredibly slow, poorly designed (for actual use but it looks great), and has major issues with location. These types of frustrations, no doubt, will go away but for now the iPhone application falls squarely at the bottom of my minuses list.

Overall I believe that Google+ could replace many services for me; Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Instagram, Flickr. Each of these services may still have their place but the majority of what I choose to share could definitely be handled by Google+ if more people actively used it. Ultimately whether or not I go 100% Google+ or not will depend on whether or not people adopt it. I don’t know if the 25M+ people that have created Google+ accounts will give it enough time to sink in and use it on a daily basis. Selfishly I hope they do because I’m sort of tired with keeping up with multiple streams and services. It’d be very nice to consolidate many of these things into one stream.

Time will tell where we all end up. But if you’d like to add me to your “Really Cool People” Circle I’ve created a special URL for my Google+ profile: cdevroe.com/+

Even though I “know” people that work at Gowalla and their sense of design is practically unparalleled in the check-in service space – Foursquare simply works better and that is why I use Foursquare instead of Gowalla.

“I’ll be honest, it’s been a while since I’ve used Gowalla (a location-based checkin service you use on your phone). I’ve found that in most of the cities I visit Foursquare has more users, more tips, is faster, easier to check in, etc.” – Robert Scoble

This has been my experience as well. Check-in services need to be very, very fast and valuable in order for the mass market to use them. Typically check-in services aren’t social streams (that you check many times per day) they are utility apps to help you track locations that you visit, the current location of your friends, and – most of all – information about where you are from other people that have been there. When this entire process isn’t very easy and very fast it becomes a hassle to use the services and so I quickly give up on using them.

Foursquare, while far from perfect, is simply lightyears faster than Gowalla currently is. Checking into a location is quick and easy. For the most part, everywhere that I’d like to check-in is already in Foursquare. On Gowalla I had to add nearly every location I visited. This task is tedious on Gowalla. Here is one gripe, as an example: When you search for a location using Gowalla’s iPhone application and it isn’t in their database (which happened for 85% of my check-ins even in places like Atlantic City, NJ) – you can’t tap an “Add location” button. You have to back out of the location search screen and go back into another screen to find the “Add location” button. This became so annoying that I downloaded the Foursquare application and haven’t looked back since.

I have had high hopes for check-in services ever since my days using Brightkite (man I miss those days). Foursquare has legs (and $50M in the bank). I hope these services continue to improve but they’ll need to innovate very, very quick in order for the mass market to adopt them longterm.

This lead me to ask myself a question; what is my string? In other words, what do I get excited about? What would I rather be working on or doing than anything else? What would I sacrifice just about anything to be able to do?

Once you answer those questions and figure out what your string is you should immediately start to plan how you can spend more time doing it.

I know a lot of business books say “Do what you love!” but that isn’t the point of this post. I don’t think you have to make money at something that you love doing in order to enjoy it. In fact, I’d wager that for most things we enjoy in life money can actually lessen the joy of doing it. Especially if it becomes your main way of making a living. When you have to make money doing something it isn’t nearly as enjoyable as doing it simply because you want to. My cat gets nothing out of chasing the string. Actually, in most cases he doesn’t even get the string!

I’m still in the process of truly figuring out what my string is but when I figure it out I’m going to try do spend more time doing that activity. Maybe you could do the same.

But it sure did look cool.

I was bent on getting the Tik-tok and iPod Nano to use as a watch since the very first day I came across the Kickstarter project. I didn’t care if it would make sense as a watch – I thought it looked awesome.

So, I did it. I backed the Kickstarter project and picked up an iPod Nano via Quibids (actually, my wife Eliza handled this bit) and within a few months I had my very own iPod Nano watch.

And for a while it worked great. The complaints I had seen online about having to wait a moment to see the clock face, it being a little bulky, etc – never bothered me. I got at least one compliment per day on my watch and I really enjoyed using the clock, the radio, pedometer, and iPod features.

There is only one problem with the iPod Nano watch – it is fragile. iPod Nanos are built well but the entire face is glass. You’d have to expect, even as a guy with a desk-job such as myself, that somewhere along the line you’re going to hit the watch off of a few things. Over the few months that I had the watch I had a few scares where I had hit the watch against something and I thought for sure I’d shattered it. But it held up.

Until Tuesday.

Until Tuesday I hadn’t had a single scratch on the iPod Nano. Tuesday was a very busy day for me and after I got back home from work I was a little frazzled and doing things a little too quickly. I was making simple mistakes doing some of the most mundane tasks because my mind was shorting out a little. One thing I did was I had forgot my phone in the car and when I went to get it I hit my wrist on the railing of my front porch. The iPod Nano ejected from the Tik-tok and launched across the driveway. By the time I had picked it up it looked like this…

I’d like to think that I can continue to use it but I do not think that I will. And, since the price of getting another iPod Nano is about as much to find a decent, sturdy watch that is what I’ll more than likely do. My next watch will be one that I can take with me on vacation, underwater, in the rain, and – won’t have a face that can be ejected onto pavement and shatter.

If you have any suggestions, feel free to email them to me.

You see, with one application GitHub has just expanded its potential customer base many times larger than it already is. GitHub isn’t just for command line elitists anymore. Now just about anyone that can use a Mac application, and understand what it is to commit a new version of their work here and there, can use Git and GitHub to help control their source.

Before today GitHub’s potential customer base, or target-market if you will, has been those that fully grok Git, the command line, and source control. Or, people willing to put in the work to go through the tutorials to become one of these people. Their website was simply icing on the cake for people already using that workflow. In fact, their service was so compelling that many have switched from other source control platforms to Git just to take advantage of GitHub. However, now for all of the designers, copywriters, hobbyists and even solo development shoppes that didn’t seen the need to learn and fully understand source control – Git just got easy and GitHub made it happen. And that is many, many, many people.

Some, including myself, would argue that this could breed a bunch of people that understand GitHub for Mac more than they understand Git. And I think it is fairly obvious that understanding Git, for any professional, is more valuable than understanding GitHub for Mac. However, now that I’ve thought it over for these last few hours I’m beginning to see this application as an extension of GitHub’s many other offerings to make Git easier. You see, GitHub has always provided documentation, events, online training and tools to try to make Git easier for everyone. If Git is easy to use more people will use it and therefore more people will sign up and pay for GitHub. GitHub for Mac is simply an extension of these educational efforts that GitHub has always offered since the beginning. It is yet another lily pad for people to jump on as they cross from shore to shore. Brilliant.

GitHub for Mac isn’t the first application to give Git a UI on the Macintosh but it is the first that came from the guys behind GitHub and that alone will be enough to make many people make the jump. It also helps that the application is very good. If they work as feverishly to keep GitHub for Mac up-to-date as they do all of their other services I think everyone will look back at this app’s launch as a major point in the company’s already incredible story.

I just did something I’ve been waiting months to do. I purchased Reeder for Mac from the App Store.

It isn’t very often that I am so anxious to pay for something that I have been using for free. In fact, I can’t remember any other application that I’ve wanted to purchase more than Reeder for Mac. For months I’ve been using Reeder for Mac’s “beta” builds and they have progressed steadily and swiftly from a pretty good application to an indispensable one. Its workflows are so well refined that it allows me to accomplish a task that – at one point in my life – used to take hours and hours of my time each day. With Reeder for Mac I’m able to keep up-to-date with everything going on in my world in only minutes per day instead of hours. I’m able to use the same workflows no matter which device I happen to currently be on because I use Reeder on my Mac, my iPad and my iPhone. In fact, I simply can not imagine owning a Mac, iPad or iPhone without having Reeder installed.

I suppose I’ve wanted to pay for the application for so long because I’ve wanted to put my money where my mouth was and to finally pay tribute to those that have worked so hard on it. To provide them with the resources they need to keep the application in existence and, dare I say, improve it. I’m really looking forward to the future of these applications.

So, I guess it goes without saying that I recommend you pick up Reeder for Mac too. Oh, and for iPad. Oh, and for iPhone. You’ll thank me later.

Typically when you insert a disc to upgrade Mac OS you need to reboot to the disc for the installation process to begin. This means that during the entire upgrade process (even though this process gets shorter and shorter with each update) you’d be effectively without a computer. The upgrade to Lion, it would seem, doesn’t require this step. The update happens just like any other installation process. However, you’ll still need to reboot when the upgrade process is complete.

Notable, but not as notable as not having to reboot at all.

For years I’ve been following the speculations thrown-out by industry pundits in order to formulate my own opinion of what’s to come at Apple’s next event. This year is no different as I’m tuned in with my ear-to-the-ground and my finger-in-the-air about what is to come at WWDC. I’m really very, very excited about Monday’s event. Moreso than I’ve been for a WWDC in a few years.

But I may choose to back away a little from all of this speculation because the phrasing of various bloggers is getting a bit out of control and it ends up in me being misinformed rather than informed.

Let me explain. When someone is riffing on what Apple’s upcoming, already announced, iCloud service will be it is OK to write posts like “What I think iCloud will be?” or “Based on the current information, iCloud could very well be”. But, that isn’t what is happening. The expectation for what iCloud will be has already been molded over months-and-months of rumors that “people in the know” (that is, people that have been following the rumors for months) already have a pretty hard and fast opinion about what iCloud is.

I’m included in this group. I’ve read enough speculation about iCloud and examined enough about iCloud’s competition to have already formed my opinion of exactly what iCloud could be. On Monday I’ll either be very happy or very disappointed as whatever iCloud ends up being may not align with my idea of what iCloud should be.

Take for example AOL/TechCrunch’s MG Seigler (whom I read regularly) who recently wrote a rather gloomy post about iCloud.

“One killer feature of iTunes in iCloud was supposed to be the ability to mirror songs. That is, for iTunes to scan your hard drive, identify your music, and give you access to those same songs in iCloud without any uploading necessary.”

Emphasis mine. Notice “was supposed to be”.

Was supposed to be? How does he know what iCloud was supposed to be? No, no. What we’ve all wanted from every product from Apple, including the upcoming iCloud, was for it to ease the biggest pain points in whatever area Apple happens to be touching on with its next product. In reality what we all wanted iCloud to be was a much, much better and more consumer-friendly offering than Google’s or Amazon’s music-in-the-cloud services. One of those pain points is obviously this whole uploading your music to the cloud business. But that doesn’t mean that it will be (though I’m willing to bet it will be better in many ways). But, supposed to be? No. Only in our minds.

I realize that we’re all supposed to read these speculative blog posts with our “hypothetical glasses” on but after a while it begins to grate on me that writers (and Seigler is not alone) tend to believe there own opinions as being fact before they’ve even seen the products they are speculating about. That somehow their own ideas about what a product should be become what the product “was supposed to be” even before they see what the product actually is. And I think that leads to people like me being misinformed.

So, perhaps I’ll slowly back away from all of the speculation that happens before an event like this and try only to follow the headlines. I want to make sure that I’m informed enough to know what is going on but not informed enough to be misinformed.