I joined Twitter recently, and I'm loving the way you can post things quickly. I encouraged all my friends to join, because that's what Twitter is all about. Once you've all joined and you're all "following" each other, then it's like you're kind of hanging out again. It would be awesome for my Philly friends, and for my family. Twitter kind of erases the distance; it's like you're all together again.

So Twitter isn't about a microblog service. It's about hanging out with your friends with virtually no effort during your busy day.

But Twitter's not the only service that does this. So does Pownce, and so does Tumblr. So which one's the best?

Well, it depends. Revjim.net has a good article on the distinctions between the services, and it's worth reading.

I have a simpler take on the situation. I haven't investigated all three services yet, but gut feelings can be telling.

Twitter is all about popularity. You go with Twitter because everyone's there. It's amazing—with a Twitter client on my computer feeding me tweets, I find out about world happenings before they hit the regular web, let alone the traditional news media.

But Twitter has problems. It can't handle the traffic. It tends to bog down and break. Although they've made some amazing strides with this problem in recent weeks, they haven't eradicated it. In addition, some people would like more options form Twitter. These are the tech guys who want some nicer features, and access to the features so that they can write programs to interact with Twitter. The argument against this view is that Twitter is simple for a reason, and if you add too many features, the speed and simplicity is lost.

So, people look at Pownce. Pownce is nicer, thay say. It has more features. It has a better, more fleshed out API for programs to interact with. and it's more stable. In short, Pownce gives them everything they can't seem to get from Twitter.

But nobody's on Pownce.

So most Twitterites (Twitterbugs? These cute Web 2.x names bug the crap out of me) go to Pownce, hang around for a few days, and then go back to Twitter. It's like a nice new bar with no clientele. You go back to the place where, well, everybody knows your name.

And Tumblr? Well, in most industries there are room for two big names, and a third smaller, more distant competitor. Coke and Pepsi have RC, for instance. That's what Tumblr seems like to me, the RC cola of the microblog world. Don't get me wrong, I love RC cola. And Tumblr proponents say that Tumblr isn't really like Twitter or Pownce, that it's for "richer data," although I'm not sure what they mean by that. In the microblog world, Tumblr (at present) seems a distant third.

So, back to Twitter. Twitter's like an old girlfriend you go back to because all of your friends like her. But if she keeps abusing you, how long before you throw in the towel for good? Well, OK, Twitter doesn't abuse people. But some tech folks are beginning to make an issue of Twitter, and are sounding the trumpet to try Pownce.

So I guess I'll look at Pownce. But frankly, I feel like it's the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD debate all over again. I'm not that attached to microblogging. I just want to hang out with my friends. I'll look at Pownce, but Twitter works for me fine until (and unless) everyone goes somewhere else.

Then maybe I'll switch. There are no easy answers, people. Sorry.

Um, I'm not sure what to say about this one.


Via Boing Boing:




Tom Spina Designs created this Han Solo in Carbonite desk for a client. I would be incredibly productive with a desk like this. Just sayin'.

Link

Via Slashdot:

Stony Stevenson writes to point out that Netscape has finally reached end of line with the release of version 9.0.0.6. A pop-up will offer users the choice of switching to Firefox, Flock, or remaining with the dead browser, but no new updates will be released.

More here.

I remember the good old days (sniff). It's all been downhill since version 1.1N anyway. Darn browser is going to make me cry...

NO WAY! This thing is actually a real product?
I don't believe it.

Via Engadget:

Filed under: Peripherals

The day you've been waiting so very, very, very long for has finally arrived: Optimus Maximus keyboards have begun shipping out to their new homes. In addition to the pricey, OLED-studded 'boards, the Optimus Configurator software utility is also available, allowing you to customize your new purchase to your heart's content. In other news, Art Lebedev says that he's planning a new project which will make you salivate uncontrollably for five years straight, and end with you taking out a second mortgage on your home to purchase it. Huzzah!

Reference

I think I have every one of these obsolete skills...

Well almost every skill. I've never churned butter or caulked my wagon to ford a river, at least. And I've never learned how to unlace my corset.

John Gruber at Daring Fireball couldn't have been more in tune with my perspective on the MacBook Air.

Via Daring Fireball:

The Air’s missing optical drive and FireWire/Ethernet ports are like the original iMac’s missing floppy drive.

Reference

Wil Shipley has written about it too (although with a title not for the easily offended), and he agreed with my comment that I was baffled by the "it's too expensive, unlike the 12 inch PowerBook" claim. The much missed 12 inch PowerBook was the same price, not less than, the MacBook Air.

The MacBook Air is a shift in thinking, from disks to online living. Physical disk media is dead—long live online access to media.

Like I've said, the Internet is my filing cabinet--why bother buying discs anymore?

Sign me up--it would be really great to consolidate and simplify my phone services:

Google Grand Central.

I reserved a number (or filled out the form, anyway).

This one comes from Slashdot:

Disney Takes Another Stab at the House of the Future
Disney has announced that they are going to take another stab at showing us the "House of the Future". The 5000-square-foot house will appear normal from the outside but will house gadgets like lights and thermostats that automatically adjust when someone enters the room and countertops that can identify food placed on it and suggest recipes.

Reference

I'd love to see it if I can get down to Orlando, but 5,000 square feet? That's a lot of house.

(UPDATE: Crap. It's in Disneyland, not Disney World. Anaheim is much more difficult to get to from here than Orlando.)

This is awesome! I won one of the speaker roles at REAL World 2008 in Austin next month. REALbasic is an amazing development tool, and I hope to do it justice with my talk.

My first shameless plug, but if anyone buys a copy of the MacHeist promo, I could use 1 referral:
Link to my referral page
There's more coming to this page regardless—there's a lot going on, and I have a huge backlog of stuff to communicate.

Is Apple really going to try a PDA again? AppleInsider seems to think so.

Woo hoo!

So I don't play them much, unless I'm just tooling around with friends, or playing a puzzle-oriented game.

So for those of you with better hand to eye coordination, and possible more nostalgia regarding classic games, might like the Macintosh Garden site.

Lots o' free stuff. Even Oregon Trail, or as I like to call it, Let's All Follow Dan and Anne.

Of course, those of us with Intel Macs will need to find Classic emulators now.

I like the look of the Zune. I think that the hardware is prety slick. It's Microsoft's implementation that's wrong. Leo's got it exactly right. And like Brad said, if Universal is taking a dollar from each Zune sale because of piracy losses, does that mena I can priate videos if I buy a Zune?
Here's Leo Laporte's take (click here to view).

Sydney at night.

And then zoom in with the buttons on the page.

Cool.

I'm trying Second Life after hearing about it on the latest TWITcast.

I'm sure I'll regret it.

My Second Life name is Mick Tandino, if you're interested.

I'm not sure why people just wouldn't live in the real world instead of spending money to live in a virtual world. Strange.

Well, you've all heard that Apple now makes Macs with Intel chips. You've all heard that yesterday Apple unveiled a new technology to let their Macs boot between Windows XP and Mac OS X, right?

Well, you haven't heard anything yet.

Via Engadget:

Now that Apple's Boot Camp is in the wild, there's very little to be said about booting into alternate operating systems on the Mac, right? Wrong! Because, not surprisingly, no sooner did Apple take the wraps off its little 30th birthday suprise, than Mac owners (or non-Mac owners who could cajole friends into lending them their Macs for a spell) began to put the Apple boot manager through its paces. And they've found out quite a few interesting things, including:

• Boot Camp can load Vista. Or at least the Vista installer. Marc Orchant at ZDNet is one of those using a borrowed MacBookPro, and he was able to load the Vista installer with no problem. Alas, his lender insisted on doing a full backup before allowing Orchant to go any further, so we have yet to see whether a full Vista install is possible -- though we remain optimistic.


• Boot Camp can load Linux. Or at least a Linux installer. Torifile at applenova.com also got cold feet, and aborted an Ubuntu install after confirming that the setup loaded and was able to recognize a keyboard and other hardware.


• International editions of Windows will work with Boot Camp. This should come as no surprise, but with a beta product that's designed to do something that isn't supposed to work, you never know. But the PC Watch team in Japan wasted no time and installed the Japanese
  version of XP Pro without a hitch.


• Boot Camp can load Windows XP Media Center Edition. Now the Mac mini really is a media PC!


• Third parties are already filling in some of the gaps. With a basic Boot Camp setup, you can't access your Mac OS X partition from your Windows XP partition. However, MediaFour's MacDrive software solves that problem. Now you can boot into Windows and read and write to your Mac partition, which could allow you to have common settings files for some cross-platform apps. Whether or not it will also allow you to share your iTunes library between partitions remains to be seen.
  


• You can boot from external drives, even though Boot Camp's installer won't allow you to set it up. Actually, that may not be true. However, you can create external boot disks using narf and blanka's boot manager (see, there's still a use for it!). And we're pretty confident that someone will find a way to do so within Boot Camp as well very quickly.

Good one. Made me laugh.

I guess I misled you again. Windows Vista isn't being released in a month or two as we originally thought, or even November as I told you today.

It's now pushed back to next January. 2007.

From CNet:

Chipmaker Intel declined to comment on the delay. Advanced Micro Devices had no public statement prepared when contacted by CNET News.com.

"Microsoft really dropped the ball on this one," said Sam Bhavnani, a principal analyst with Current Analysis, in an e-mail interview. "There are significant negative ripples that will be felt throughout the personal computer industry."

Wow. All this, after Microsoft stripped out so many features to make it to market. And how likely will it be that Vista will be delayed even more?

Don't get me wrong, I want my next PC to have Vista. I just don't want to grow old waiting for it.

In case you haven't noticed, I'm redoing my template, and teaching myself a few things more about markup and CSS.

In true bad form, I'm doing it live so you can all see the ugly process. Hold tight, it's going somewhere.

Hopefully not off a cliff.

:-)

I wonder what Jobs has for us this time? I think that Foxtrot wonders too.

So these were the top ten moments of 2005 on the web, huh?

How did I possibly miss the Numa Numa Dance? More importantly, having successfully missed it in 2005, why did I have to be subjected to it now? Or the spawned imitations?

For extra credit (or extra dedication to pain), see this song (good animation), or this song ( the better song I thought, but my wife liked the first one better--she thought the bunny was cute).

For your viewing and downloading enjoyment, click here. Thanks to blogsip. Nice.

So, yes, I took a personality profile on the Internet last month. You can take it here if you'd like. Superficial as always, but interesting to note my score.

(Here it is).

Is it a surprise to anyone that my Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Openness are almost off the charts, while we ignore the fact that my Conscientious percentiles are, shall we say, somewhat lower?

My wife's scores are almost the opposite of mine. Maybe that's how we complement each other. In fact, I'd say that's how we avoid (mostly) driving each other crazy.

Or maybe she's just a saint.

(grin)

digg.com seems to think so. I'm not much into games, but it held my attention for at least, um, 22 seconds.

Oh, the game is here.

However, it's in a case on my belt. At several times in last few months I have leaned on it and called the first person in my phone list unknowingly.

So, my cousin Jeannine several hundred miles away has gotten several silent phone calls, one at 11:27 at night.

I've now added a new contact in my phone address book at the beginning of its list, namely me. Hopefully I'll only crank call myself by accident in the future.

But which is which?

I guess it depends on how you look at it (literally).

Cool. And a bit freaky.

Armed dolphins on the loose in the Gulf o Mexico from Katrina?

I'm just kind of stunned. Well, if you can laughing and stunned at the same time.

Thanks to Brad (and Slashdot) for the link.

Or at least, we won't after our current banana becomes extinct in a few years. It's already happening. And the weird thing is, it's happened before, just before I was born. Seems a little Matrix-like to me, at least if you equate Zion and bananas...

So it looks like biodiesel is a pretty good alternative. In fact Worley and Obetz are selling biodiesel at the pump in nearby Manheim and in my town any day now.

So I just need a diesel car...maybe a used Jetta Ecodiesel model.

Yeah. A VW again. Cool. I'll look on Ebay.

Hmm. Not much on Ebay, but...wait! Look-an awesome car! Rebuilt turbo diesel engine, upgraded drivetrain, special car features, more. The perfect car. 28-35 mpg, even for a vehicle its size.

But then I show it to my wife. And she says "If you buy another Vanagon Camper, you'll be sleeping in it, so I hope it has a good heater in addition to the diesel engine."

Sniff, sniff. Good-bye, cool opportunity. I was even willing to drive you back from Denver, Colorado.

Guess I'll have to look further for my renewable-energy vehicle. And all I wanted was to save the environment.

The Jetpack Propulsion Home Project.

Gotta give the guy credit for guts, though. (grin)

The program is in terrible disarray, essentially because budget cuts forced engineers to make shortcuts in designs, which led to shortcuts in safety. It seems that half a space program is NOT better than none.

What a shame that the NASA engineers tried so hard to make things work with inadequate resources. I'll bet the odds are a thousand to one that the agency will get the proper oversight and funding to recover from the shuttle program properly.

This article has a great retrospective on the program, if you have the time to read it. Here's a sample article comment on the effect of funding restrictions affecting shuttle design:

"The Soviet Shuttle, the Buran (snowstorm) was an aerodynamic clone of the American orbiter, but incorporated many original features that had been considered and rejected for the American program, such as all-liquid rocket boosters, jet engines, ejection seats and an unmanned flight capability. You know you're in trouble when the Russians are adding safety features to your design."

Someone has waay too much time on their hands again:

Especially for 50's aficionados:
The Tack-O-Rama clip art website.

After all, where's a good Mailomat when you want one?

You know, the online community is roiling with comments and suppositions over this Intel and Apple thing. Now I read Bob Cringely and others writing that Intel is going to buy Apple.

Now that's just silly. Everyone knows that just isn't so. How can Intel buy Apple when the truth is that Apple is going to buy Intel? :-)

That's right, you heard it here first. Although I should more properly say that NeXT is buying Intel, since NeXT were the ones who bought Apple for all practical purposes in 1997.

Apple is really using Intel Pentium chips in its Macs beginning next year. The Mac faithful are reeling. Some of them really think the sky is falling.

Seriously, folks. If you're simply offended that Apple is moving to the "Dark Side," you really need to rethink what makes Apple innovative. They use IDE drives. They use PCI cards from ATI. They use USB. The list goes on and on, industry standard components that are used in PCs everywhere.

The fact is that yes, Apple is a hardware company, but it's always been the things it does with the hardware that make it great. It's both the form and the function, and if Apple decides that Pentium chips make OS X function better, it's a good bet that they know what they're doing.

And an even better bet that they have some tricks and surprises up their sleeves to make this move look like magic in the making.

(Some people have too much time on their hands. Pretty funny, though):

Via Boing Boing:

Cory Doctorow:


A blogger had her dead iTrip replaced by the manufacturer, who asked for photographic proof that she'd destroyed the old one. So she built an iTrip incinerator out of model-rocket engines and then lovingly photographed and described her build, up to and including the moment of iTrip immolation.

Link

(via Make)



Reference

Well, it's helping to teach me CSS at any rate.

Someone told me recently that brown was a strange favorite color. Green and brown are my two favorite colors, and I think that this scheme looks decent. I dunno.

Next up, PHP.

My Tangelo products site looks pretty good too (I'm working with Brad to market Tangelo, so this page is part of my work). Nothing much on it yet, but it nice, huh?

Actually, my major achievement with the Tangelo products site was how well I stole it completely from Brad's sister site and duplicated his work with an orange scheme instead of lime. I'll work on it more though and add things.

Like Steve Jobs (or someone) said, good artists copy, great artists steal.

Currently Captivated By: VH1 One Hit Wonders.

Been watching it all night while I worked on the website. Many 80's hits in it.

Even if I'm involved with it, it's still exciting to see Tangelo reach version 1.1 today. I use it to produce (and screw around with) this website. In fact, now I get to monkey with the templates and rebuild the site in the next couple of weeks.

Tangelo 1.1 has some nice flashy/fun features...

Currently listening to:
"Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World" by Israel Kamakawiwo'ole

and some substantial things like podcasting support.

It's nice to work with something that's so easy and fun to use.

Hello. Héllø. Just testing some • Non ASCII characters. ç † ∆ ™ ©˙˚µ≤ƒ©ß´∑´∞ø√

:-)

I've been working with Tangelo beta 1.1, and it's really nice. Of course, I'm an interested party since I work with Brad to do the docs and marketing, but I think this one even outdoes 1.0. The new Podcasting feature is really nice--and no one else does it on a desktop blogging app. No one.

Via The New York Times > Technology:

Jef Raskin was a computer technology pioneer who named the Macintosh computer after his favorite apple but altered the spelling for copyright reasons.

Reference

What a shame. He was a controversial figure at times, but definitely had a vision.

This is a test audio enclosure

Yes, absolutely mesmerizing...

...who is kinda creeped out by this website? Or at least the pics (the ones that show up at least).

It's just a little weird.

Currently listening to:
"Steppin' In A Slide Zone" by The Moody Blues

Current Mood: Reflective

Currently Infatuated With: Tangelo

Currently Trying Not To Think About: Everything else.

Tangelo 1.1 is going to be really cool.

Nope, it's not mine. It's this one. Made me laugh.

Well, folks, Tangelo was released on Tuesday February 1st. You may have heard of this website/weblog creation tool--it's the fruit of over a year of work by Brad Rhine. I'm working with Brad to market it, and this website has been a Tangelo experiment since Christmastime (I chose the ugly purple color, though--have to change the template again).

I'm writing this post in Tangelo--what a sweet program.

It's really just the beginning--there are big plans for Tangelo. I'm really excited.

It's in beta but go to http://video.google.com to see what's up. Search on any term or name.

:-)

Yes!

We've just moved the entire site, including all archives (but not comments, which I archived separately) over to Tangelo. We're live now, and I hope to rebuild the templates and add comments soon. BTW, you have no idea how much time I've spent in the past year policing my comments on Splitfocus. Comment spammers have flooded me with as many as 600 comments per day at times, and in fact I've spent more time cleaning up comments than actually writing for the site.

At any rate, Tangelo is a welcome breath of fresh air. Desktop publishing under my control--gotta love it.