I know I promised Twitter a rug if it bought Summize ASAP, but seeing as they took my exact idea to buy Summize and point it to search.twitter.com, we'll call it even.

I'm really happy they bought Summize, it's a great service that makes Twitter a richer experience. I'd still love to see search integrated into the site itself, but that will come. For now, search.twitter.com is the right move.

In the fine tradition of Oh MacBook Pro, Oh Yeah, I made this the other day.

"All white, oooh nice."

This whole uproar over Jason Calacanis quitting blogging has to be one of the most ludicrous bitchmemes / bitchfeeds ever. I was going to go back and read over all of this stuff from the past couple days, but then I realize what a complete and utter waste of my time that would be.

Calacanis is quitting blogging and has started instead to spread his thoughts on an email list -- yes, an email list. This is 2008 let me remind you. He sent the first one out today. I didn't sign up because I don't want and/or need any more emails than I already get. Plenty of folks have reposted what he said on their own blogs however (big surprise there) and Steven Hodson has a nice breakdown of the bullshit.

Allen Stern thinks this is all just to spread the word on Mahalo. Maybe, but more it's just silly. And what's sillier is how much we are all talking about it both in the blogosphere and on FriendFeed (yes, I realize that with this post I now am as well - funny how that works, huh?).

Blogs are not dead, blogging is not going to die. Calacanis will be back blogging in a few months time. Just wait until there is something he feels like he needs to talk about and actually wants people to hear. Do you think he is going to use a mailing list with a thousand people on it? No.

From the things I did read, he has some fair points, but they are points that have been discussed ad naseum about comment trolls, etc. That's the Internet, you have to take the good with the bad. And the good far outweighs the bad so you deal with it.

With all that said, ladies and gentleman, I'd like to announce that I'm quitting blogging and will now send messages via carrier pigeon only. If you'd like to receive one please put out some bird feed for my pigeon in your backyard.

I probably use Gmail more than any other site out there. So you'd think I'd be addicted to my Gmail contact list right?

Wrong. I never use it. Why? Because of Google's idiotic approach to contacts.

Google makes it so that basically anyone who emails you and you respond to is added to your contact list. That might be fine for someone who gets a few emails a day and only talks to friends and family, but for me, who gets several hundred emails a day now, most of which are from people I don't know, this is a huge problem.

But it could be that Google is about to change that. As Google Operating System notes, Google will now have a "suggested contacts" area on your contacts page. This page apparently explains itself as:

"My Contacts is a place to import, store and view all of the contact information that's important to you. You can also create your own groups of contacts to easily email many people at once. We add people you've emailed to Suggested Contacts. You can move contacts from Suggested Contacts into My Contacts at any time."

Finally!

The worst part about the old Google contact list was that it was influential for things like "friends" on Google Reader and other Google services. This needed to change, and so I'm glad that it is. Now I can actually use it.

Some of you may know that a little thing called the iPhone 3G is hitting stores at 8 AM on Friday. Like any good fanboy, I'm going to suck it up and camp out tomorrow night in front of an Apple store.

But it's for work - I swear! I'll be blogging, taking pictures and maybe some video live from the Stockton St. store in downtown San Francisco. More importantly, I'll also once again be leading a live VentureBeat FriendFeed room throughout the night (or until my batteries die).

So join me there or if you're around come say hello in person. And maybe bring me a spare battery.

I really wanted to try Google's new virtual world, Lively. Unfortunately, it made the mistake of making the product Windows-only. So instead of doing something like writing a review, I'm writing a post bitching about that.

In fact, watching FriendFeed today I saw just as many items with people bitching about the lack of Mac support as there were regular comments on the product itself. Even Google employees were saying it.

Granted, the FriendFeed community, and my friends in particular, may be somewhat Mac-biased, but you increasingly hear grumbles of this nature throughout the Internet when a product launches as Windows-only. I'm still waiting for Netflix to get their heads out of their asses and release a Mac-compatible version of "Watch Now".

I completely understand that for some small developers it's hard to code for two or more completely different systems, but come on, this is Google. Their CEO is on Apple's board of directors for god's sake!

Yes, I have Windows XP on my iMac and could dual boot it if I really wanted to, but it's kind of a pain in the ass when I have stuff open for work. Besides, doing that to run Lively would come with an unwanted side effect: having to use Windows (something which I haven't done on my computer in close to nine months).

A funny thing happened on FriendFeed today. Well, actually it wasn't funny at all. To me it was particularly lame, to others it was simply annoying. A boy cried wolf.

One user decided he was going to make up a big rumor out of the blue and try to spread it using FriendFeed. The annoying thing is that it somewhat worked.

Some of us who deal with rumors for a living quickly dismissed it as having no basis, but the problem is that quite a few other people started to run with it. Just look at how many comments it got. Even if users didn't believe it, many took the time to comment. Some even took the time to look into it.

Finally, the user admitted that he made the whole thing up and used the excuse that many new media douchebags use: it was a "social media experiment" and he promised not to do it again. As Mike Arrington replied in a comment: "don't worry, you spent your credibility capital, doesn't matter if you do it again."

Here's the problem. Services such as FriendFeed and Twitter are powerful crowd-sourcing tools that can be very handy in terms of getting to the bottom of rumors. We saw that a bit today with the Twitter/Summize situation. However, when people intentionally abuse this system, it damages it for everyone else going forward - no matter their intent.

The moral is: Don't be a d-bag. With great power comes great responsibility.

You can find me on FriendFeed here.

People ask me a lot what "social media" is. I want to tell them that it's a stupid fucking buzzword that could mean about a million things. Instead I'm usually more polite than that.

From now on though, maybe I'll just direct them to the slide embedded below. It's 74 slides. That right there should show you why it's hard to define in anything but vague generalities.



[via SixtySecondView and FriendFeed]

In my earlier post about talking about FriendFeed on FriendFeed, I for some reason left out one of the central points I intended to make: that I fully expect to see a lot of the weekend Bitchmemes that used to take place on the tech news aggregator Techmeme, move over to FriendFeed - where people can really bitch about something to their heart's content without having to do something as cumbersome as writing a whole post about it.

I think we really saw that this week led by CenterNetwork's post on FriendFeed follower patterns (Allen is exactly right by the way, which made some of the other posts about how quickly the big guys are gaining followers just look kind of silly).

There was a huge FriendFeed discussion on that post. A huge one under Scoble's "Participation Premium" post. Along with quite a few others.

And so ladies and gentlemen a new weekend getaway is upon us: the BitchFeed.

See you next week when the topic of discussion will no doubt be how awesome FriendFeed was during the iPhone 3G launch. Followed the next day by how overhyped the iPhone 3G is on FriendFeed.

You can find me on FriendFeed here, feel free to bitch at me/with me.

People were quick to jump on me when I said in a post last week that Google's brilliant Google Talk on the iPhone was the first sign of the downfall of the text message. Many took that to mean that I thought that specific app on that specific phone was a death blow to the txt. I'm not an idiot; I know that this one thing will not kill the text - but it's not nearly as powerful as some people think.

Look at this survey published in the New York Times today. 82% of Americans have never used text messaging. Again, 82 percent.

That may skew a bit high, but it's still way up there. Why? A lot don't understand the concept, but even more don't want to pay extra to send tiny amounts of data. Text messaging is a rip-off of monumental proportions.

I predict that within the next two years unlimited text messaging will be included with most cellular plans. Otherwise the medium will eventually die, overtaken by other forms of free messaging done over the Internet on your phone.

While the first two rules of Fight Club may be that you do not talk about Fight Club, I think the first several rules of FriendFeed are that you must talk about FriendFeed.

I was mostly off of the Internet the past day or so (I know, gasp), so I decided to jump back on and check out FriendFeed's "Show best of day" feature to see what big items people were talking about. 7 of the top 10 are directly about FriendFeed. At least one other is about Twitter with much of the discussion below it being about FriendFeed.

Now I love FriendFeed as much as anyone else - and have since October of last year - but this is pretty ridiculous. And I think we all know it's like this pretty much everyday.

It would be silly for me to bitch at everyone to stop writing about it - after all, I know full well that I'm one of the worst offenders for writing about FriendFeed between what I write here and on VentureBeat. And I realize that this very post is a continuation of that problem.

Instead, maybe we can get an option for a "Best of" minus talk of FriendFeed? It could be as easy and excluding all items that include the word "FriendFeed."

I realize I could hide all of those items that I don't want to see, but that would take too long to do every day - and honestly, I do want to see those a lot of the time, I just want to option to eliminate them all if I'm looking for something more substantive.

I also realize that this "best of's" are tailored for each user, but I'm willing to bet that most of this people reading this post right now are seeing the same thing.

While this will probably be less of a problem as time goes on - there are just a lot of new people on the service right now and they're excited about it - even now on sites like Digg and Techmeme we often see the most popular items being about those sites themselves. I would love to just have an option not to see those sometimes.

There is some great stuff out there to be found on FriendFeed, it's just surrounded by layers of meta discussion fat. "Best of" is a particularly useful way to view FriendFeed, but it needs noise filters just like everything else.

You can find me on FriendFeed here.

The iPhone 3G is coming out on Friday. The 2.0 software and App Store will launch on the same day. There are a lot of cool apps out there, but one area is going largely overlooked: games.

The best looking one I've seen so far has to be Rolando. It reminds me a lot of the old classic, Lemmings, but it's all touch screen. If they get the controls right it's going to be awesome.

Rolando will hopefully be out in the App Store by August for $9.99.


Rolando for iPhone - Teaser trailer from handcircus on Vimeo.

I have been using Digg today - all day. Two years ago that wouldn't have been such a crazy statement for me. But recently I've rarely visited the site.

So why is it back in my good graces? Because of the new Digg Recommendation Engine. Digg just started beta testing it and I was luckily enough to get it this morning. After several hours of playing with it, I feel confident in saying that it's great.

I have a longer analysis over at VentureBeat, but simply put, it allows me to find useful content once again on Digg. For too long I've looked at Digg's homepage and seen it filled with stuff I've read hours beforehand. It was a waste of time to even go. The Upcoming section was more interesting, but filled with way more crap than anything useful. It was too time consuming.

This Recommended area strikes the perfect balance. It's mostly stuff that is relatively new without being total crap because people who digg the same stuff I do have dugg it. These recommendations should get better with time - and even just from this morning until right now, I would say that they are.

I do wish that there was a way to dismiss or hide recommended items rather than having to bury them. Sometimes I feel like just because a story isn't my cup of tea, that doesn't mean I should bury it - I used to reserve buries for total crap. Now I may reconsider that stance to make the site and this area more tailored for me.

This may even help Digg's homepage become more diverse over time because it could end the cycle of like-minded people digging the same sites and same stories over and over again. Digg wasn't always like that, but it became that.

Screw Digg's homepage, I'm bookmarking this recommended page. Digg just got useful again.

Not content to simply unveil a kick-ass iPhone version of the site today, FriendFeed also let it be known that embedded mp3 audio files can now be played from directly within FriendFeed as well. (The feature has actually been quietly rolled out for a few days.)

This is awesome, especially for podcasts, but one service that still does not play nice with this is Muxtape. That's because its RSS feeds don't actually contain an embedded version of the song and are only the title as far as I can tell.

Muxtape and FriendFeed: What do we have to do to get such functionality? It seems like such a no-brainer, being able to like and comment on songs from Muxtapes your friends upload. Not to mention you can have some great music to listen to while you use FriendFeed.

FriendFeed has seemingly been exploding in popularity recently. It's making my statements from December look good:

"I really like FriendFeed and quite frankly I'm a little surprised that more of the 'regulars', those tech users who seem to be on every service, either don't use it or don't talk about it often."

They're heeeerrreee...

And:

"I'd be surprised if FriendFeed doesn't catch on in 2008."

It's happening before our eyes.

Likewise my thought from early October of last year that maybe Google would have been smarter to buy FriendFeed rather than Jaiku seems like a pretty good one. Seriously, does anyone use Jaiku regularly now?

It's been a while since I've updated on the l33t Tech Reddit - the custom Reddit myself and other including Jason Kaneshiro, Frederic Lardinois, Steven Hodson, Mark Hopkins and Louis Gray started back in January. I'm happy to announce that Reddit has finally come through on a promise to enable comments for all users (previously only the moderators could comment on stories in restricted Reddits).

I had gotten several emails from people saying they liked the content all of us were sharing, but wished they could comment on it just as they can content on regular Reddit. Now you can.

And you are. There's already been quite a few number of comments left and I don't think there is any question that as a result of this new feature, our subscriber base has soared past 3,000 just a few days ago.

Check it out here if you're interested, and also check out the l33t Tech News Podcast we do every Sunday around 5:30 PM PST, talking about some of the hottest stories from the previous week. You can find the Elite Tech News website here as well.

Replies are still down on Twitter. To me, this basically makes Twitter useless. It's a communications tool that doesn't allow you to communicate with anyone, only yell into the wind.

These replies have been down or a few days now, and while Twitter assures everyone they are working on it, a lot of folks are getting fed up. I am also looking like an ass now for praising Twitter's stability the past few weeks and thinking it had turned an important corner.

It did. Unfortunately, then it made 3 more turns in the same direction...

Right now Twitter is directing all users to go to the Twitter search site Summize to see their replies. This is ridiculous Twitter, just buy the goddamn thing already and make it "Twitter Search" or some such - but please, just integrate it with the site. I have enough tabs open already, I don't want another one just because you can't do your jobs.

It definitely seems that people are also not using the @ replies nearly as much since they are not working on site -- so even if I do go to Summize, I won't find much

Quite a few services now have the ability to search Twitter, including Summize and FriendFeed, yet Twitter still has no search. Now, with no ability to see replies, Twitter looks even worse.

Twitter: Ur doin it wrong. You just got all that new money. Buying another company may not be the best solution, but it is the quickest. Users are pissed off. Just look at the shirts they're making -- and the clubs!

A new Apple patent uncovered today indicates that Apple may be releasing a new kind of mouse to replace it's current Mighty Mouse - which, quite frankly, sucks. This one would use a touchpad in place of the scroll ball, which, in my opinion is absolutely the right thing to do.

A similar patent was uncovered last year, but this newer one seems much farther along.

This new mouse also sounds at least somewhat in line with prediction #9 for 2008:

9) Apple releases a new kind of mouse with multi-touch capabilities
We already know Apple is working on a ton of new products, many pertaining to mobile computing, but the desktop is still here to stay for a while, and the Mighty Mouse - in my opinion - still sucks. The new Apple desktop keyboards (which I just got) are very slick, they need a mouse to match it. 

While this patent doesn't seem to explicitly imply multi-touch, it does talk about touch, and everything Apple does these days with touch is multi-touch.

Interestingly enough there is also talk of the device having audio and haptic (tactile) feedback.

I still find it humorous that as fast as technology is moving in the 21st century, we're still using keyboards and mice to interact with computers. This is why I'm so excited for devices like Microsoft's Surface Computing and any Apple Touch Tablet/Mobile computing device that it's likely working on.

Oh sweet Jesus, finally.

Blogger has just rolled out several functionality upgrades in draft mode tonight. The editor got updated and looks a little nicer, you can now export and import blogs and blog posts, there are now webmaster tools built-in, you can have star ratings on posts (yawn), but most importantly, you can finally make it so people can leave comments under a post without being directed to another page to do so!

I know, I know, I should have upgraded to something like Disqus long ago, but I don't have too much time to tinker with things these days. I still might do that, but I'm going to give these new Blogger comments a shot this weekend. I did a brief test this afternoon and it worked great, but I have too many customizations running on my template so it screwed up the look of the site.

People hate on Blogger, but I'm still fairly happy with it. I love WordPress too, use it for work, I just set up ParisLemon back in 2004 on Blogger and so it feels like home to me. My biggest complaint has always been the comments thing, now that's fixed.

Me <-- Happy.

I know. Crazy, right? Before everyone collectively tells me at once "No!!!" Hear me out.

Lifehacker has a great how-to guide today for using a Windows Vista PC to stream Netflix Watch Now films to your Xbox 360. This is exactly something I want.

Regular readers may know my hatred of the multiple set top boxes I have in my living room. I want one, not a half dozen, but with me close to adding an Apple TV (or a Mac Mini) and a Netflix Roku box, I could be tangling myself in way more cables than I want.

This solution would replace the need for the Roku box because I already have the Xbox 360 and a computer capable of running Windows Vista (which supposedly is required for the task).

I currently have my Intel iMac dual booting Windows XP, but I haven't loaded it up in months. I scared to death that upgrading it to Vista will brick my system in someway (I'm not sure my copy of XP is exactly...legal), but it may be worth it to get this functionality.

I'm pretty sure I can get Windows Vista Home Premium (one of the 17 versions of Vista) for less than the price of the Roku box too.

Okay post your horror stories in the comments or on FriendFeed. Tell me why I should do it. It looks like even Intel won't upgrade to Vista. I'm scared, but this new idea intrigues me.

UPDATE: Some good info in the FriendFeed thread on this post here.

Since it first rolled out in late February I have loved the idea of iTunes doing a 99 cent Movie of the Week rental. I still don't love the regular rental store pricing ($2.99 - $3.99) for the time allowance (24-hours from when you start watching), but it's hard to argue with 99 cents.

Each Tuesday I open my iTunes software and wait with anticipation as the top banners in the movie section show what the Movie of the Week is. So you'll imagine my surprise when I opened it today to find that it was RoboCop -- a movie which was already the Movie of the Week, several weeks back. A re-run? Are you kidding me Apple?

I already rented RoboCop, I don't want to see it again. I understand that you don't have that many movies in your store, but you have more than enough so that you don't have to cycle through old ones after just a few weeks. What gives?

If you really want to evangelize RoboCop for some reason, you can do it, but offer a new alternative option as well for those loyal customers who have already seen it.

Think different Apple. As in, different movie.