"France and Germany are getting better.. but the ability of the countries to agree on anything is getting worse. The EU is getting further away from being a single entity.." - riaz
"Freemium vs Paid is definitely a hot topic right now with the economic downturn happening all around us. One of the theories seems to be that due to the recessions/slowdown ad spending is going to decrease and so therefore ad funded models are going to suffer. The other side of the coin though is surely people have less money so they are less likely to pay for something.. Either way - I think it really comes down to the type of service being offered. Disqus really would not be the leader in 3rd party commenting engines it is today if it was paid for - but then there does not seem to be any advertising anywhere in any case. In the case of disqus, they could make their money through licensing deals with blog providers or even news sites - leaving the cost to the user free. In each case, the company needs to do the analysis and work out the best methodology for them. Some will choose freemium while others will choose paid for. One bright note - ad spending online is due to increase not..." - riaz
"The real difference between and old and new is the transparency that is available to the new media journalist. No more should mistakes be buried in a tiny paragraph in the depths of the paper. Everyone should be using the strikethrough.
The key thing though is the writer really does need to do some basic fact checking - this view that we should just get it out there and then we can always strikethrough it later is not helpful. At the very least it should make it clear that this has not been fact checked yet. I rarely return to articles I read (why should I?) so the "facts" I thought I had learned will not be corrected unless it turns into something huge.
On the other hand I don't count Twitter as an official place for news.. just gossip/conversation so tweeting about something that isnt fact checked is fine.. Twitter can be used to do that fact checking.." - riaz
"Thanks Emma - yes I did expand the search - in the end I found someone via Google's web search as I could not find my paper Yellow Pages, and expanding yell did not provide an obvious answer - I noticed also a box on the results page showing me an option for people who "served my area" but unfortunately this only listed one supplier as well.
Does the digital version have all the businesses listed in the paper version?" - riaz
I like not having to scroll all over the place. I'm a mess everywhere else - I like a little organization online, at least! - Marci Maleski
The new facebook LOOKS great....but performs like shite.... - Sean McGee
I never liked facebook, but I loathe it less. - (teh)Hussein
me too...some functionality has been lost, but i prefer the new look too! - Susan Beebe
New facebook much clearer. Still resent all the 'hate the new design' group invitations - David Miller
that and the iPhone app are definitely making me use the site more.. - riaz
I'm with you and riaz. The new look for me makes it a lot better to use. I've had issues over the last couple of days with the status updates being up to 24hours behind but that seems to have resolved. The 2.0 release of the iPhone app that has added in commenting, notifications and the live feed has made it much better - Rory
I don't care one way or the other. :) Either one worked fine for me. - Leslie Poston
"hmm have to say that the quality of the interface is nowhere near as simple as freeparking (though freeparking is not quite so colourful and looks dated).
That said the pricing is much better.." - riaz
My dad loves his Hotmail. Won't switch to gmail for anything. - Kate
HA! Ya I got the email about the "new & improved" Hotmail and had to laugh. - Duarte
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I remember having a Hotmail account back in college. The memories! - morgan
i still have my hotmail account, its tied to my xbox, its the only reason i still have it. - Simon Wicks
I have a number of clients who prefer it and frankly it is a good service. The domains.live.com system lets you use it for white label email and the outlook connector does (usually) a good job of hooking it to outlook (for free). With storage at 6GB its not a bad deal. - Soulhuntre
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Many libraries have signs posted in their public computers area to hotmail.com to get an e-mail account I have noticed. As far as people I contact, I only have one hotmail contact. He migrated away from Yahoo! Mail, although I'm not quite sure why. - Jake (aka Jawee)
Duncan, thanks. That's the sentiment that jumped out at me immediately after reading the original press release. :-) - JR R.
I filter yahoo.com and hotmail.com mails straight to the spam box. The best you will get from them is some lolcat joke, and that's on a good day. - Allan Jenkins
If you sign up for Live services you get a hotmail/live mail account. - Sprague D
I still have a hotmail addy but its used as a dumping ground, I post anything that maybe important but I really don't want to see. Like when I signed up for a starbucks gift card I used my hotmail addy because I didn't care to be e-mailed any announcements from starbucks. - Colide81 (James)
Nothing says "competent professional" like a hotmail.com address. works best if you have a username like "kewl_sk8r8235" to go with it too. :D - william_randolph
Oh Lisa, you and your crazy stories. Hotmail still exists. Beer kills brain cells. Now let's go back to that... building...thingie... where our beds and TV... is. - Eric
This is a really sucky (and ongoing) move by Apple, showing they don't know a thing about building an actual third-party developer community. If/when Google releases a native iPhone mail app, will they be similarly blocked? - Kevin Fox
As an Android developer this is almost good news from my perspective. Why choose Android? Because different applications can compete, rather than first-to-market (or Apple native) always wins. - Reto Meier
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I mostly wish they would allow 3rd party podcasting apps on the iPhone. I hate that I have to sync to my laptop to get my podcasts. Everything else comes via the "cloud". - Cyrus Lendvay
Kevin, don't you think they would? I bet Firefox and Chrome would be blocked as well. - Louis Gray
Okay this astonishes me. Apple could do so much to work with the community and yet they are banging into walls instead. - VibeMetrix
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Re: Firefox/Chrome, the SDK agreement already effectively forbids them with this clause: "No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Published APIs." Depending on how you define "code," this definitely covers JavaScript, and possibly HTML and CSS. Hard to make a web browser without those. At least here Apple is being upfront about restrictions. With Podcaster and MailWrangler, the rejection was ater a lot of code had been written. - Mihai Parparita
surprised ... Pay me to explain why ... ROTFLMAO - Scott Moskowitz
dear Apple, you suck. let competition flourish and let your users decide which apps are best. - Jon Price
@jon price make product, bro - calling you out !!! Let the market decide - Scott Moskowitz
EBay are in SO much trouble it's funny - and entirely predictable. They are no longer an auction site, and it's their own fault. If they got rid of "buy it now", and banned automated buying software, they might see people return - but I very much doubt it. - Jonathan Beckett
EBay's using "Sell It Now" for StumbleUpon. - Amit Patel
The eBay acquisition of StumbleUpon never made much sense. So, the question is, who wants them now? - AJ Kohn
StumbleUpon still drives a lot of traffic. The problem was likely that it didn't drive a lot of traffic to an Ebay auction. $75M was a crazy price for something that the acquirer didn't know how to monetize, and I'm not sure anyone knows how to monetize traffic-generation properties. Unless you can extract other value (like the real-time search data Yahoo could theoretically extract from del.icio.us) then I'm not sure I understand why anyone would purchase one of these sites for such high prices. - DeWitt Clinton
I wonder if they will get more than $75 million for it, can't wait to hear the purchase price. - Jeremy Campbell
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wasn't meg whitman under consideration for something .. her and fiorina both are examples of corporate narrow-mindedness - Gregory Lent
I'd like to know how much they make via StumbleUpon advertising. I'm guessing not much, but I could be wrong. - AJ Kohn
even from an outsider... you could tell the neither Skype or StumbleUpon were aligned with their competencies - brutal acquisitions. - Stewart Rogers
ebay is worse that google when it comes to messing up startups - DC Crowley
wonder if it will go as fast as the Alaskan governor's jet. - Nailed Jello
SU is actually breaking through to the mainstream. I think it builds more volume. When people get addicted, they are addicted for a long time. And when they integrate with engines or social nets, the SU power grows huge. I never like it for eBay,but great for IAC or anyone with engines and a property. Amazon another good choice. - George Bounacos
WTH?? SU is one of the most useful services on the net.. what is eBay after anyway? - Hayk
SU was not just a site for crawling and indexing. It is an entirely new approach to things. SU approach could have been applied for exmaple by eBay to crawl on similar buying sites/products and make suggestions to buyers or during auctions. Bloody hell, there was much potential to monetize on. Gregory is right, eBay management lost vision and sight at the same time... - Hayk
think it may be AT&T, my vodafone BB hasn't worked since 9am today. 3G is up, but can't send/recv - clarke thomas
2.1 update coming on Friday, my man. The Steve says so. - Paul Reynolds
It is really hard to believe that with such issues people continue to line up for the Iphone. Are the only people that are happy with it the ones that have more than one cell phone (i.e. another phone that lasts longer than a few hours and actually works 100% of the time) - Brian Sullivan
Human and Internet nature, Brian. People tend to complain about things more online than praise. I don't think anyone would tweet stuff like "Oh yeah! I made a call on my iPhone right now and HAD NO ISSUES!" on a regular basis. - saeba
The iPhone 3G is my only device and I love it. No complaints whatsoever. But this is my first iPhone and I don't install a gazillion apps. I can do heavy web browsing, listen to podcasts and make occasional calls all day long. - Paul Reynolds
I had to restore mine last night for the first time. Took hours. - Steve Rubel
You gotta wait until Friday like the rest of us who are suffering. :P - l0ckergn0me
@Brian: Do you own an iPhone? Probably not. I do, and I've had no major issues. What Leo forgets to say is that he keeps loading umpteen million apps onto his iPhone (as he's freely mentioned on MacBreak Weekly), so perhaps that's got something to do with it? There are plenty of iPhone users who have no problems with their phones. It's really easy to make pithy remarks when you're basing them on fluffy, secondhand information. - Cheryl Jones
I'll add that I've used "dumbphones" (like a Moto RAZR), Windows Mobile, Symbian S60 *and* UIQ3 phones in the past, so I'm not a typical phone user who barely knows how to use all of the functionality on my phones. The iPhone isn't necessarily a power-user device, but for what I use on my mobile (mainly my browser and a few key apps, besides media player functionality), the iPhone fits my usage just fine. - Cheryl Jones
No I don't own an iPhone -- I barely use a cell phone at all but when I do I want it to work reliably. The apps on the iPhone causing problems I find immaterial as an argument-- that is a feature that is heavily promoted and controlled by Apple supposedly they said to prevent these types of problems so it should just work. - Brian Sullivan
Doh. In the time it took me to type up my comments, I got beat out. Oh well, I still meant what I typed. **smirk** - Cheryl Jones
Mine got hosed last night. Tried to restore from a backup and then tried to set it up as a new phone. Now I just get the 'Apple Logo of Death'. The really neat thing is the Genius Bar at my local store doesn't have any appointments until Thursday afternoon. Just as well I have my N95 as a back up. - Jonathon
so many complaints .. what is apple's response? - Gregory Lent
Bah. The annoying thing about these complaints is that other smartphones have had these same issues in the past, even when people don't load up 3rd-party apps. For the most part, I feel the iPhone does pretty well at sandboxing apps so that they don't catastrophically incapacitate the phone functionality, but it's unavoidable if someone's going to load a ton of apps that will eat away at the processor's memory. - Cheryl Jones
@Brian: the iPhone -- or any other smartphone -- is not for you, then. Move along, nothing to see here. - Cheryl Jones
Cheryl -- I will move along when I am ready thank you very much - Brian Sullivan
I'm on my third palm treo, and I have the same issues with stability. - Trevor Lee
Let me check, yup, Blackberry Curve up and running. - Vince Green
yea - i have had to reset more times than i should and apps are definitely crashing more lately :( - riaz
I've gotten the new BlackBerry Bold for its reliability. Satisfied my Apple urge with an 2G iPod touch. This is a good combination of devices. - Joseph Thornley
Happened to me last night. I messed up and tried to install an app right on the phone. Hopefully the 2.1 that is due this Friday will fix everything. :) - Mark Bacas
@Mark that's what happened to me as well. - Steve Rubel
iPhone 2G is stable enough but distinctly slower on 2.0 - hopefully 2.1 will fix that as well. - Alexander Carlill
I played with the whole line of Samsung smartphones yesterday, absolutely no innovation in the UI, packed with PC-style thinking. Sure, they may be more reliable, but without 3rd party apps it's clearly easy to make a phone that works. I'll take the crashes I've been experiencing over those, any day (partially because I believe in the almighty Firmware Update!) - Marko Bon
I had a Blackberry Curve. It was rare, but it did crash. I could only do about 1/3rd what I can do with the iPhone 3G and that 1/3rd was an ugly and slow experience (compared to iPhone). - Paul Reynolds
It's gotta be the over the air app downloading. Ever since I've told people to download through iTunes only, everyone I've given that advice to has had no more problems. Come on apple fix this in 2.1! - Justin Flood
Just be glad it didn't lose its mind. I had to restore my 5 times (on 2nd iphone now). No over air installs. I would listen to a podcast or music or video. Then it would stop playing. Nothing would work then and it also showed no iPod content, even though it was there. Since the last one, I have limited myself to less than 40 apps, limited ipod content, no custom ringtones and so far no more issues. - Alan Ashley
So then don't get apple products, i'm sick of people bashing them. you have plenty of other selections. - orionstarr
i've seen this with both OTA app install and iTunes app installs, numerous numerous restores over the summer - deeje
that stinks, 5 of my buddies and i haven't had any problems. Is it cuz we jailbroken'em ? - videopixil
yes @videopixil, its because we jailbroke them :-) - Noe Ruiz
The iPhone is not really a iPhone untill its Jailbroken..well atleast useful untill it is. :D Sorry about your iPhone Leo. - Noe Ruiz
I've heard this anecdotal evidence about OTA app download/installs vs. app installs via iTunes, and while it is possible that this is the cause of a lot of the instability people are seeing, I personally have not experienced this. I don't have 10 million apps on my iPhone, but just about all of them were downloaded and installed OTA. And my iPhone has been pretty solid. - Cheryl Jones
The only major problem I experienced was while I was on a trip and couldn't dial out, probably because I was in an area with low/no 3G. Once I turned off 3G, I was able to dial out fine. And that only happened once. The hubby's iPhone gave him a lot of grief at the beginning because I guess his work building has awful 3G coverage. But after he decided to turn off 3G while he's at work, his phone was fine. Of course, that's not ideal, but hopefully that's firmware fixable as well. - Cheryl Jones
Same here, well not at LAX, but had to restore 4 times in the last 2 days. Hopefully the Friday update will help. I don't install over straight to the phone from iTunes anymore, that is for sure. I think mine might have been an issue of getting overheated though. Anyone hear of that happening? - Kat
Kat, the phone can get overheated from a lot of different reasons. Using GPS for long periods of time can make the phone very warm. If a 3rd-party app seems like it's searching for a network connection and isn't succeeding for a long while, that can heat up the phone. If a 3rd-party app is just generically stuck in a loop, that can heat up the phone. Do you know the circumstances that your phone is overheating? - Cheryl Jones
hey man, watch your back. We don't mention iPhone shortcomings in public. We keep it on the low-down. You never know where Steve's soldiers will pop up. How can you not know this?? - john conroy
They just announced a free update thats gonna be out friday - Trevor Lee
I haven't had to yet, but I am getting a lot of latency when I switch between apps. The small wait is not worth the time to restore just yet. - Scott Lockhart
Bloom's already off the rose for me, also. - Jason Kaneshiro
I gave up and sent my iPod Touch back today. None of my apps were working, and now it won't hold a charge for more than one day. My problems started after the 2.0.1 upgrade. What version were you on? - Daynah
It has happened numerous times for me too. Last time my backup was corrupt, so had to revert all the way back to factory. Essentially each time the phone reboots itself (most often due to app crash) the whole process must be repeated. Very frustrating indeed. Apple support asked me to manually delete all app via iPhone, then remove/redownload all apps in iTunes and resync. Another several hours worth of effort. Amazing how patient we all are. - Bo Stern
The same thing happened to me a few weeks ago. Twice in 3 days it went into an endless loop of rebooting. I limited the amount of apps I had installed and haven't had much issues since. I read somewhere it may be because there's a bad app that causes the Springboard to crash. - Rodfather
Not good, that's really inconvenient happening on that much of a regularly basis! Thursday/Friday your aiming for now!! - Joe Dawson
When it happened Saturday, I thought it was a beta app I was testing. But it happened again today without that. It may be apps, and it may be when trying to sync on low batteries. I'll watch this. - Louis Gray
So glad I don't have an iPhone. After paying that much for a phone i wouldn't want the problems. :( - Jason Shultz
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I swear I didn't do it! ;-) I think the 2.02 software has some serious issues. - Jesse Stay
just found out that if an app is uploading or downloading, any trip to settings or the app store hose the phone. - Micah Baldwin
Here is another common/related problem: http://tinyurl.com/69uznb - makes the use of stateful iPhone apps just about useless (unless of course they sync via some website) - Bo Stern
louis as i'm sure you heard/read jobs did make a point of saying that 2.1 will fix issues. he didn't really elaborate other than it will stop crashes, improve connection and improve the battery issues. we'll see on Friday... - MG Siegler
I've had to restore 4 times in the last two days and my backups never work, so it's always restore to new. WHAT a pain. I hope this next update helps. - Kat
I wonder if it's really a Windows O/S under there? - Susan Beebe
I seriously have not had these problems everyone keeps bitching about. - Michael J. Cohen (mjc)
Restoring it one thing, but mine has now completely frozen and will not respond to even the on/off button or connecting to iTunes. Am beginning to hate this F in phone, I need a reliable phone for work :( - Sally Church
How representative is this of the total number of iPhones in circulation? Or is this limited to the early adopter crowd that actutally queued up? Just a thought. - Roberto Bonini
I have an iPhone 2G (and as I mentioned not having problems) I think it's mostly 3G iphones with issues - Michael J. Cohen (mjc)
I have a iPhone 2G as well. I'm pretty sure it's caused by a bad app/too many apps. I used to have 7 pages worth of Apps and reduced to 3 and haven't had the same issue since. - Rodfather
Using built-in keyboard shortcuts (http://www.apple.com/pro/tips/...), you can easily grab screenshots of application windows, the entire desktop, or any selected portion of what's visible on your desktop. Oh wait, you don't have a Mac yet... :) - Kelly Fox
If you have Vista there's a built-in app called the snipping tool that makes it easy to take screenshots (in the Start menu under Accessories). - Shannon Jiménez
Shannon - thank you! I didn't know that about Vista. Kelly, suck it. : ) - Carla Thompson
"Actually they should somehow import email.. probably as a separate area (I wish they would move twitter into a separate area as well - I already hide a lot of twitter as a reult)." - riaz
"Your first point (No user profiles) is an interesting one - it seems an obvious thing not to have. The question though is what is Friendfeed's strategy. Right now it looks like they want to pull user data in from the wider web and manage that data. If this is their longer term strategy then it would make sense to pull profile data in from a third party - I regularly click someone's linked in profile if they have one. Their valuable IP then becomes their ability to manage, prioritise and manipular user information coming into the platform as well as being a searchable database for all that information.
On the other hand it is relatively easy to implement this and if they used a standardised format maybe they could push this information out to other the third party providers. Also - and this is possibly more important from a commercial perspective - they are able to profile their users better for targeted advertising." - riaz
not convinced by this - both that it will happen and that it happening is a good thing. For it to be good, people would have to click through and pay attention to the website they arrive at so that conversions increase. Otherwise, marketers will still pay the same amount to the publisher for the higher click throughs. - riaz
" So, let me rephrase my question: are different components of web 2.0 going mainstream or is the entire concept finally catching on?" -I would say different componets. is Beeboo really worh $850M , strong userbase in UK/EU , but is the prodcut really viable comp'ed to other stuff ? Google Friend connector is coming out and then users will rush over there. Property managment and retention in this fast moving platforms is tricky. e.g Twitter, late comers are joining, early adopters have moved on , value of Twitter increases by userbase, but value to commuinity detoriates inversely to new users. so its a catch 22 - Peter Dawson
I would say that it is moving mainstream, this acquisition and sites like Facebook offering features it's raising awareness! - Joe Dawson
I am not so sure - the tools are certainly crossing over now to mainstream audiences but users will need a reason to use them Sharing photos and videos were already there and they generate conversation; integration of wall posts in facebook into the news stream makes it more like life streaming and will also generate conversation but I am yet to be convinced this is going to spread outside the net addicts and student demographics. I think we are going to need mobile access to achieve mainstream adoption. - riaz
Lifestreaming, (or the ability to import and aggregate social services) is quickly becoming the must add functionality component for social networking services. It's definitely becoming a commonplace feature that I think will continue to proliferate throughout the web.
I do see a problem though, in that most sites adding Lifestreaming features are just slapping on the features and doing a poor job of educating users on how to use them. I've written about this lately, and I think this is the barrier that will stifle the ability for Lifestreaming to go mainstream if it isn't corrected. - Mark Krynsky
via FriendFeed MT Plugin
Riaz - How do you think mobile access will affect mainstream adoption? - Corvida
It's really interesting how the current UI, not having undergone any "Wow it's all different" iterations, is so similar yet different from where we started. - Kevin Fox
via Bookmarklet
It reminds me how much I dislike JPG for screenshots :) - Paul Buchheit
It took me a while to figure out what was going on here, until I realized you'd Bookmarket-ed a blog post from *2004*! That's ancient history, man! - Paul Wilcox
Great to see you had a Prius label in 2004 :) - Roshan Vyas
Archive is nice :D it is very interesting to see the evolution. Thanks Paul :) - Harun Baris Bulut
I love the fact the delete button wasn't introduced yet. I tell people about this and they don't believe me - Derek Coatney
not being able to delete was a bit strange, I remember. - Josh Haley
Delete was there from day one -- it was just in the "more actions..." menu. - Paul Buchheit
Is there any important feature in today's Gmail that hasn't been envisioned from the beginning? - Ionut
That's an interesting question. I guess it depends on your definition of "important" and "beginning". In the very beginning, the only definite vision was to make something "better". However, pretty much everything in there today had been prototyped or at least talked about well before launch (see the chat integration in http://www.techcrunch.com/wp-c... for example). As usual, coming up with the ideas is easy, but fitting them cleanly into the product is hard. - Paul Buchheit
The funny part about this is I was being sort of snarky but didn't really mean for Kevin to post the thing about the bandwidth. I had a legacy server in the Google datacenter from the Blogger acquisition that I was using to host shellen.com and evhead.com. Kevin went ahead and made screenshots of that thread anyway. :) I got a few angry comments from people on my blog that I was 'stealing from Google'. This is why the internet needs a sarcasm mark. - Jason Shellen
Yeah, I actually recalled that faux pas when I reblogged this now. 'Oops!' Psst, you don't still have that server in a Google datacenter, do you? FriendFeed could always use some free bandwidth... - Kevin Fox
I just assumed FriendFeed was being hosted from servers in a Google datacenter anyway. They wouldn't really miss the bandwidth anyway, would they? ;-) - Tony Ruscoe
"Yea - I love the iPhone - the interface and apps are great but typing just is not a great experience - still its the best convergent device out there so far for me. Maybe sending voice/video messages is the next step rather than text messages - with the unlimited data bundle that works great for all iPhone users.. not so much for others mind.
Maybe there is a place for seesmic/kyte.tv and the like after all." - riaz
