The release of Android 2.2 (Froyo) and going on vacation inspired me to try dumping my Crackberry altogether and just using the Nexus One fulltime. All in all it’s been working out quite well.

I’ve also been adding apps like a demon. Here’s the current list:
Adobe Flash
Adobe Reader
Advanced Task Killer
AIM
ASTRO File Manager
AT&T myWireless
Barcode Scanner
CaltrainDroid
CardioTrainer
Compass
DoubleTwist
Dropbox
Foursquare
Gowalla
Last.fm
NewsRob
OpenTable
Photoshop.com Mobile
Ringdroid
Shazam
Shopper
The Weather Channel
Tripit
Urbanspoon
WordPress

And for fun:
Android LightSaber
Bubble
Bump
iVuvuzela
Jewels
Magic 8-Ball

Even better? Every single one of those apps are free (note that DoubleTwist is currently “free for a limited time”, YMMV).

Plus there’s the built-in apps, some of which are new or significantly improved in 2.2, including the email and gmail clients, calendar, Navigation, Voice Search, and the Google Sky Map.

The only things I miss from my Blackberry are the battery life and the real keyboard, and with any luck there’ll be more Androids with keyboards out this fall.

It’s hard to put together a blog post on Facebook and privacy when Stowe Boyd has already said pretty much everything I wanted to say, and said it far better than I.

Still, after seeing several friends severely cut back their Facebook presence or outright leave Facebook altogether, I though I’d have my say.

Ever since the Internet has been around, the concept of sharing not with the world, but with a select subset of the world, has been a huge part of the fabric of the social web. It still is. Wanting to share information via a website with a chosen set of people is not the same thing as wanting to share that information with everyone on the Internet (plus major search engines as well). Telling someone “well, the world has changed, get over it” is a crappy, unhelpful, and disrespectful response.

It all gets down to control over your information. If you set up a website based around the idea that you can share information with only a select group of people (and yes I am looking at you, Facebook) then don’t be surprised if people get pissed off when you change your mind and decide that catering to advertisers is more important than user privacy.

It’s why Gowalla and Foursquare are popular — because users are in control of what they share. Twitter too, for that matter. In all three cases, what’s private or public in those services is simple to understand, and the rules don’t change.

Complexity — especially when it comes to privacy — breeds distrust. Simplicity is always better.

Which, perversely, is why “if you want it private don’t put it on the Internet” makes an appealing argument to some (especially Valley geeks). It’s simple, clean, binary — everything geeks like. And most of the people who make it also operate from a position of high privilege. What I mean by “privilege” is that they are well-educated and well-connected people who do not need to worry about where their next job or paycheck is going to come from, have stable homes and personal lives, and should their privacy be breached in a serious way, they have the ability and resources to get as much assistance as they need in repairing the damage.

The world isn’t binary though. And not everyone has as much privilege in their lives that they can afford to be cavalier about their privacy.

I don’t know whether Facebook will succeed in their desire to become the one true arbiter of the Social Web (and make billions while they’re at it) or not. Short-term, they probably will do very well for themselves. Over the long haul, though, I’m not so sure. Privacy still matters.

I am still on Facebook, although I’ve locked my settings down as much as Facebook will allow, removed some information about myself, and cut back on my friends list. What happens next will depend on Facebook. Keep screwing with my sense of control and I may well join the list of people who’ve bid Facebook farewell.

With Spring in the air I’ve been making some changes (or trying to) on my personal technology use. It’s been a mixed bag of success, which leaves me currently caught in transition — not quite ready to let go of the old and not fully embracing the new.

First off, Chrome for Mac is at the point where it’s usable and I’m starting to switch over to it. As a browser, it lives up to its reports — fast, stripped down, easy to use. My bookmarks were easy to transfer, too. I don’t love how Chrome handles their bookmark display but I’m adjusting fairly easily. And I like the choice of themes, they are much nicer looking that the Firefox themes.

What’s been keeping me from full-out Chrome adoption is that I have a huge pile of passwords stored in Firefox and Xmarks and getting them ported over hasn’t worked. Some of my friends have told me that they should be portable, but so far I haven’t found the setting or application that will help me do it.

This raises the whole issue of password management. Like many people who try to be reasonably secure with my passwords, I have a lot of them and if I don’t visit a site frequently I don’t always remember what password I used. Hence I’ve gotten pretty dependent on tools to help me manage them all (which is also a possible source of insecurity, I know). I haven’t tried 1Password or LastPass yet but I probably should. (Got any suggestions?)

I expect I’ll make a full transition pretty soon but sometimes it’s just easier to open a page in Firefox than try to remember exactly what password I used for what site. So for now I’m still switching between the two.

I’ve also been giving Windows 7 a look. Boot Camp makes trying Win7 on my MacBook Pro pretty painless, so I created a new partition on my personal laptop and installed a copy.

It’s been a few years since Windows was my full-time OS and that was XP, so Win7 is a new experience. Microsoft has clearly done a lot of work on the OS and it’s a more visually-appealing OS these days. I’d be lying if I said I was enthusiastic about making a complete switch though. Having to re-buy all my software, unlearn all the keyboard shortcuts I rely on, and deal with a much more complex set of system settings (not to mention having to worry about viruses again) is not something I’m looking forward to.

Still, it’s been fun to play with something new, and there are a few games I had to give up when I went Mac that I’d like to be able to play again (if I ever have time!). I’ll keep testing & see how I feel after a little more time using it.

It could also be that if I had different hardware I’d feel a little differently — the MacBook Pro’s touchpad isn’t really designed for use with Windows and that’s giving me some issues. I’ve looked at a few Dell and Toshiba possibilities but given that this MBP is less thsn a year old, I’m not feeling the need to go out and buy a new laptop just now.

I’m also still stuck in transition on the phone front, carrying both the Nexus One and my Blackberry. The N1 is a really nice handheld computer and I like it a lot; I’ve gotten rid of my iPod Touch now that I have it. For e-mail though, I still can’t shake free of the Blackberry. The keyboard and Exchange integration are too good.

My deepest wish is that RIM would hurry up and put out a Flash-enabled phone with a big screen and a slider keyboard. I may have to suck it up and go with another solution though, because my much-loved old Curve has taken quite a beating these past 2 years and I’m not sure how much longer I can wait for a replacement for it. I know there will be a lot more options coming soon but I am finding it hard to be patient.

This week sees the launch of a new technology website & podcast, run by my old college classmate Sunshine Mugrabi: TechnoGirlTalk.

Yours truly was one of the panelists on the initial podcast and it’s a doozy — we dive into the James Chartrand controversy, as well as dissect a controversial Droid vs iPhone ad and discuss what it’s like to be a woman in technology.

Recording the episode was a ton of fun and I hope you’ll take advantage of the slow holiday season to download it and listen.

This is a neat way to embed a series of photographs in a page!

Photos are from my rail trip earlier this year.

So this morning, up pops in my feed reader a blog post by my friend Jason about a Halloween Bar-B-Q Bar Mitzvah.

OK, nice post about the food at a recent Bar Mitzvah he went to and how much more fun it was than the standard Bar Mitzvah (the menu is definitely much more interesting than the standard Bar Mitzvah!). The brain-twisting part (for me) was that I also knew the mother of the kid involved; Laura and I went to high school together and we recently reconnected on Facebook. She’s been posting updates about the party planning for weeks. I knew that she and Jason knew each other (they’re both NJ-based foodies with an IBM connection) but it didn’t occur to me that he was actually going to the party.

Most of the people who actually read this blog will probably just shrug and say, so what? For the segment of people that have adopted social media tools and integrated them into their lives, this kind of public intersection is pretty much a non-story. Having spent my last weekend back home in NY and talking to a lot of people who are not part of the adoption curve, though, I’m reminded that there are plenty of folks for whom blogging a kid’s Bar Mitzvah or finding intersections between different worlds via Facebook is completely alien territory.

So last week was Adobe MAX and this week I headed off to Las Vegas for BlogWorld Expo. Talk about a study in contrasts and two very different conference experiences.

One week, I’m working the show and surrounded by so many people I know that I spent the entire conference talking and still managed to miss connecting with some folks. As much as it’s a ton of work and exhausting, it’s also inspiring and just plain fun to spend the week surrounded by a few thousand of your company’s most passionate customers. However, if you’re not mindful and self-aware, all that attention can go to your head.

Then the next week, I’m just an attendee. I knew some of the people at the show and even a couple of the speakers, but by and large I was on my own when it came to finding people to connect with and things to do. If I wanted to enjoy myself and get the most out of this conference, I couldn’t coast; I’d have to work for it.

In a way the relative anonymity was refreshing – for one thing, I actually had the time to have in-depth conversations with people without the pressure of having to constantly run off to say “Hi” to three other people. I could attend sessions other than just the keynotes. I could enjoy relaxed meals with some really cool people like Kyle Flaherty, Aaron Straut, Jennifer Leggio, Stephanie Schwab, and Lindsay Lebresco. As an added bonus, I could do it all without having to spend all day killing my feet on the show floor.

Most important, I got outside of my day-to-day life and got to hear about how other people are addressing some of the same issues we’re grappling with, like: how to connect to always-on, global, engaged and intense communities of customers. Or how to stay on top of the torrent of voices that increasingly defines the Internet today and still have time to get some work done.

The longer I work for Adobe, the more strongly I feel that it’s critical for me to keep a sense of perspective and stay connected to life outside the Adobe bubble for me to be at my most effective. Spending time at events like BlogWorld is one way to do that.

If I’m totally honest with myself, though, I’d have to say I preferred my MAX experience.

PS: I’m testing out a new tool called Zemanta with this post – I got a demo of their stuff at BlogWorld and thought it was worth a try.

The tidal wave that is Adobe MAX has come and gone for 2009 and I’m back home recovering.

I have attended a lot of industry conferences over the years and even helped organize a few. To me, what separates the good from the bad conferences is not the facilities, the speakers, or even the wifi availability, it’s the people. Obviously MAX is about an intense amount of information transfer — with hundreds of hours of sessions, keynotes, BOFs and unconferences — but it’s also about building connections within the Adobe community. The advent of MAX Online means that if all you want is information, you can get that without having to leave your home. The true value of attending MAX is everything else that is layered around those sessions.

Although I’m biased, I think the fact that one of the first things you saw when coming onto the show floor at MAX was a very large and comfortably furnished community lounge speaks volumes about the importance of building connections at MAX. And that lounge was never empty, not even early in the morning. Any time you came by, there were community members and Adobe staff filling the chairs and gathered around the tables; talking, working, Twittering, demo-ing, and much more.

A lot of other people have written extensively about the news Adobe released at MAX this year, so I’m not going to talk about that here. And if I tried to list all the people or all the cool stuff I saw this year at MAX I would fail miserably. Instead, I am going to call out two things that were particularly meaningful to me.

First, there’s this:

Community at MAX Keynote

(Photo Copyright © 2009 by Kendall Whitehouse, used with permission)

I knew going in what the theme of the Day 2 keynote was, of course, but had no clue at all that the keynote would open with a display of Adobe User Group logos from around the world onscreen, so when I saw the screen it was a big warm fuzzy moment. The Adobe User Groups work very hard to build community in their local communities and it was great to see them included onstage. Many of those user group managers were not able to be present at MAX due to the cost of travel, but as one manager put it “At least my logo could be there!”.

And next there’s this:

It’s been a very long time since I first sat down with a copy of ColdFusion and tried to figure out how to connect a database to a web page, and CF has had a special place in my heart ever since. That the CF team included me in the launch gift for CF9 means a lot to me. Thanks guys!

This post is getting a little long, so I’ll just wrap it up by saying that MAX rocked, and if you;re on the fence about going next time, just go. It’s worth it.

My colleague Serge built this cool widget for Adobe MAX:

One of the “fun facts” includes Adobe Groups — thanks Serge for remembering us!

New to me, that is. I recently adopted an iPod Touch from a friend who had upgraded to a Pre and didn’t want the Touch anymore. It came with me on my recent trip to NYC and I had a chance to put it through its paces pretty thoroughly along the way.

I like it quite a bit — for games, web browsing, and of course music. Battery life is decent (a cross-country flight didn’t even drain half the charge) and the screen is lovely. But I am still glad that I didn’t get an iPhone. The iPod’s virtual keyboard does not even come close to being as good as a real keyboard and I’d go nuts trying to manage my email with it.

I do feel a bit silly carrying an iPod Touch as well as a Blackberry. I think it’s the size. I’ve had an iPod Nano for ages, so I shouldn’t feel different about the Touch, but it is bigger than a Nano and that seems to matter. Even so, it’s not a showstopping issue.

I really hate the lack of a decent web browser on the Blackberry but its superb email handling still makes it the winning smartphone for my needs. Unless an AT&T Palm Pre comes out and utterly blows me away, looks like I’ll be staying a two-gadget gal for the foreseeable future.