Category: Technology

To iPhone or not to iPhone?

As I write this, there’s roughly 73 hours left until the iPhone hits the streets. I still haven’t decided if I want to buy one or not, and if I do, I need to get serious about my line-camping plans.

I’m still on the fence, though.

A wave of reviews has hit the web this afternoon, and by and large they are highly positive. The virtual keyboard, considered by many to be a potential issue, sounds like it is a lot easier to use than expected. The biggest snafu seems to be the speed of the AT&T EDGE network itself, and sadly, it sounds like that’s not something that a software patch will be able to fix.

I want one, oh yes. But I don’t need one, and I do have a lot of other uses for the $600 or so an iPhone will cost me. Plus, for that much money, do I really want to live with slow data speed, when that’s one of the key features I’d be using the thing for?

Right now, I’d have to say no. If I am going to drop that kind of cash on a convergence device, I don’t want to spend the next 2 years cursing out my too-slow net access every time I use my iPhone.

And yet — I reserve the right to change my mind.

A Few Facebook (and LinkedIn) Thoughts

I’ve been mulling around a post on Facebook for a day or so. I signed up for Facebook sometime this past winter, but didn’t really do much of anything with my account there until April, when I realized that my 20-something cousins were using it heavily and that if I wanted to stay in better touch with them, that was a way to do so.

Since then, I’ve started checking Facebook more frequently and gotten more aggressive about adding friends. Along with LinkedIn and Flickr, I’m checking it more or less daily now. Sadly, though, my social circle doesn’t seem to be the Facebook target market, because after exporting my entire Thunderbird address book (more than 250 e-mail addresses in all) I found fewer than 20 of those people actually on Facebook. That was disappointing; especially as many of those addresses were classmates from USF. I don’t really expect that my old college friends or my relatives would be on Facebook, but I am a little surprised that so few grad school friends were there.

Aside from not finding a whole lot of my friends there, I like Facebook. It’s easy to use and entertaining, and it lets me share things about myself that I can’t or don’t want to share on LinkedIn. Nick O’Neill has some thoughts on this issue, and suggests that Facebook might “bury” LinkedIn, if they so choose. It’s possible, although if Facebook goes public and gets a big enough warchest, they might just as well buy LinkedIn instead.

This is a really good example of the never-ending dynamic flow between disintermediation and reintermediation, actually. How do you hit the right balance between the costs and the benefits of spreading your information across multiple social networks, versus having everything in one place?

Anyway, if you’re on Facebook and want to friend me, please feel free to do so.

UPDATE 7:30PM: After posting this, I ran across Danah Boyd’s excellent article on the class division developing between Facebook and MySpace. It’s well worth reading.

I’m Going to WordCamp

This may sound a bit odd, being posted on a MovableType blog, but I’ve signed up to go to WordCamp 2007.

Two reasons:

1) The blog I manage at work runs on WordPress and I want to know more about how to make it do its thing.
2) The current speaker roster includes Matt Cutts, Om Malik, Dave Weiner, and a bunch of other interesting people. That’s more than worth the price of admission ($25!!!) right there.

It would be better if the event took place on weekdays instead of a weekend, but other than that, what’s not to like?

Second Life – Hype or Reality?

An article in the Wall Street Journal today reports that some companies, not content with creating virtual “presences”, are now even starting to do job interviews in Second Life.

The more I read about Second Life, the more I wonder what’s wrong. On the one hand, Second Life gets great coverage in the press and seems to have good word of mouth. For example, whenever someone asks about Second Life over at LinkedIn Answers, the responses tend to be very positive. On the other hand, I don’t know a single person in my real life who actually spends any time using Second Life. And my social circle, by and large, is in the consumer category that would be expected to at least try it out – comfortable online, “content creators,” and actively involved in other online communities and activities. Yet — I find Second Life utterly unappealing. And nobody I know talks about it. WoW, of course. LoTRO and CoH, yes. Even games like Star Wars Galaxies and Eve Online get some attention. But not Second Life.

My overall impression of Second Life, in fact, is that the vast majority of people who use it regularly are looking to get kinky in one form or another, or are there because they’re trying to make a buck off it one way or another. Now, I could be completely wrong. If I am, I’d love to hear it. But right now, it seems like there’s this significant dichotomy between what I’m reading and what I’m experiencing. Maybe it’s just me. But maybe Second Life really is a lot more hype than actual trend.

You tell me.

WWDC Day One

Wow, I’m tired.

So, as a preface, here’s what I know about software development: just enough to know how much I don’t know. In other words, once the conversation moves past features and functionality and starts getting into in-depth discussions of threading and memory management, I’m quickly going to be in over my head.

That said, I had fun at WWDC today. Even having to stand on line for 90+ minutes to get into the keynote room wasn’t that bad. The keynote was fun, and Leopard looks like it’s got some nice new functionality for end-users, and the fact that it will be fully 64-bit has got the developer I was sitting with jazzed.

I don’t quite know what to make of the “Safari on Windows” announcement. On the one hand, given that Apple is going to pursue a strategy of getting 3rd-party apps onto the iPhone via Safari, it makes sense that they would push out the browser to Windows as well. It reminds me of the old Java “write once run anywhere” idea. It’s great, if you can pull it off.

On the other hand, I also can’t shake the thought that what they really should have done was to buy Mozilla instead.

Edit: forgot to add — I’ll probably skip days 2 and 3 of WWDC and be back in SF on Thursday. I have to get some real work done too!