Looks like the new Touch models weren't ready for release and in their place Apple announced only a speedbump/refresh. All the images of cases for a camera-sporting Touch are not likely to be fakes. These were the same types of leaks as other years - all of which proved to be accurate.

Also underwhelming is the new Nano. It does have some great new additions at a nice price point, but Apple has been extra coy and disingenuous with its announcement.

The first thing was their comparison to the Flip video recorder. They didn't announce any specs for the iPod's own video recording. Checking the freshly posted specs on their site however shows it only records VGA video. Who the fuck wants that? My 10 year old digicam records VGA video and uploads it to every sharing site on the net simultaneously via HSDPA.

Ok, maybe 10 y/o cameras don't do upload, but VGA video is so 5 years ago. The Flip they showed in their slides does 1280x720. And so do half a dozen other Flip competitors and a number of tiny digicams.

The iPod also doesn't do stills. At least there's nothing written about it on their marketing pages or tech specs. I suppose it's a fixed 640x480 camera and it would sound/look pretty crummy to announce it could shoot < 1/3MP images.

The shuffle... yawn. No changes except price.

This event was primarily a venue for announcing recent iTunes milestones. I understand they need to cripple the Touch to keep the iPhone looking hot, but it's really starting to look lame from a hardware perspective. The focus it seems is primarily on apps and perhaps with a great big push coming for games. They're pushing even harder for comparisons against dedicated handheld games machines now.

The iTunes 9 sharing feature does sound like the bright spot of the announcements. At least if it doesn't end up being a PITA to use or being crippled in some way they didn't make clear in the event.

The new iTunes as far as music goes, isn't really any better than the previous version. Nothing significant was added.

If you manage iPods and iPhones then the improvement to the app organization is going to be a big plus.

I'm not sure if the new store layout requires this new version, but I can see Apple making it that way. Even though the content is HTML and would have presented perfectly fine in the 8.x version.

EDIT: Nice new bug in 9.0... iTunes now mixes together the tracks of multi-disc releases. It used to number the tracks 1..10 followed by 1..10 and now it does 1,1,2,2,3,3...10,10 Arrgh.

I agree about the underwhelming aspect of the announcements. It was more of an Apple bragfest than an announcement of a genuinely cool new product, drop everything and queue up to get one right now.

I'm more "don't-cared". I'm not obsessed with the output of any particular company, and I don't know why anyone else should be. If there was something neat, I'd hear about it anyway. If not, well, then I'll still hear it, from the obsessed.

I don't believe one has to care or be obsessed in the least about any particular company to have an opinion about a particular announcement. Or in this case an event with a number of announcements.

So now that you've heard about what's been released, what's your opinion of those products. Mine as mentioned is "meh."

What Bruno said in his original post. Meh. Nothing that warranted a big event.

To tell you the truth, the device that truly looks to be pretty cool as a music and media player, is the new Zune HD. I'm sure it's going to be a failure, and that's too bad, because it does sound like some nice hardware. I'll have to see and use the built-in software in person to give a detailed opinion though.

The iPod and iPhone right now is all about apps. They suck for music and video, IMO.

Oh, in that case, what are your thoughts on Dell's new Inspiron Z laptop and Studio XPS desktop computers?

How about Pizza Hut's new stuffed-crust pan pizza or Dunkin' Donuts' new breakfast biscuits?

A large number of people here own iPods and are experienced enough with current music players to be able to give an opinion (if they so choose of course) about new similar products.

I haven't used any Inspiron as a primary machine and don't have any interest in that particular product.

Everything Pizza Hut makes is an abomination scarcely fit to even share the same trash can as regular garbage.

As far as biscuits go, I prefer English muffins or a nice crusty bread.

Looks like iTunes 9 has new UI elements, once again making it stand out among the rest of the apps in OS X. And it's not 64 bit on Snow Leopard. Still beachballs a lot when trying to multitask. So, not real impressed there. Out of all the Apple apps I use, iTunes feels like a bloated cow compared to everything else.

The new syncing options are handy though. I might actually put though into the layout of my apps on the phone with the new interface. And finally, the iPhone understands events, something added to iPhoto 2 years ago.

The home sharing in iTunes will be handy for when I travel. I can stop manually moving around an iTunes library, and instead just pull over the content I want while on the road. Then if I download something, I can easily get it back onto the main desktop when I return. I was hoping they were going to enable this to work over wide area bonjour, but it looks like it's local network only.

Yeah Pizza Hut = yuck What ever happened to the rebranding as "The Hut" was that a joke ?

Fast food biscuits are always gross.

Mp3 players are pretty much dead to me. The reason I wanted one was to have all my music with me in the car so the price of these flash ones needs to come down enough to get some large capacities since that's all that gets made now. Plus all I listen to are podcasts now anyway and the old carbon is good enough for that.

I was very "meh" about the announcement. The issue I have is the same one I have with 90% of Apple's press conferences, that there isn't enough to warrant the spectacle. Seriously, here's a company that invited press from all over the nation to tell them about price cuts and treat them to a live Norah Jones song. If any other company did this, everyone would be bashing them for going to so much trouble over so little. But because it's Apple, people are used to it or forgive them for it.

Speaking of which, by far the biggest announcements were the price cuts. As predicted, the new prices make the Zune HD a little less competitive, though the 16GB Zune is going to be $20 more than the 8GB Touch (which, I wasn't aware, didn't get the speed bump that the 32 and 64GB ones have).

Anyway, I have zero interest in what happens with iTunes, as I hate using it.

Lastly: I know the Nano is thin, so they probably had no choice but to locate the camera where they did, but that doesn't make it any better of a position for it. It basically means you can't take portrait photos, and it'll be hard to keep your finger out of the lens even in landscape mode.

So yeah, a big "meh" all around.

ps- my favorite announcements today? Pandora and Facebook apps for Android! Woo!

My favorite announcement: the Leica M9. Now if only I had a spare $10K laying around to get the body and maybe two "cheap" lenses.

It doesn't take photos anyway, only videos. It looks like the best way to avoid a finger in the shot is to hold it one handed. With the small size of the Nanos, this should be easy.

As for the overall hype and being underwhelming, I think it's all due to the press, and nothing specific Apple does. There has been a ton of hype leading into any Apple event, with wild rumors and other non truths building up the events to more then they really are. Other companies hold pointless events like this as well, they just don't get the hype. For example, Microsoft had an event yesterday at CEDIA to show off some features in Windows 7 Media Center, and Sony showed off some new TV models, something they also do every year about the same time like Apple does with the iPods.

I'm not underwhelmed because of the hype nor because of the press. I ignore that stuff anyway. Having worked so many years so close to Apple, I know not to trust most of the speculation and rumors leading up to an event like this. A lot of it is just pulled out of thin air.

All that aside, I just don't think what was released was nearly competitive enough within the marketplace to make me think "wow, that's some cool stuff." And of course Apple don't need to have that type of release at the moment because they command such a long lead over anyone else. This lead has, for years, lead to some pretty crummy progress on their part though. When a company has this type of share however, it's nice to see them competing with themselves and continuing a strong path of innovation. Apple seem to always make a decent (or even grand) splash when something absolutely new comes out, but then it pretty much stops there. Even with the iPhone this is easy to see. The only exciting thing happening there are 3rd party apps.

My takes on the other stuff: Leica M9 - a super expensive point and shoot from a company that has done absolutely nothing remarkable in the digital realm. Leica digital products are as underwhelming as any non-desrcript P&S released month after month. The only thing going for them is nostalgia, IMO. I wouldn't pay $500 for an M8 nor M9. Seriously.

Facebook. I think it's getting obvious that this thing is a few steps lower on the social evolutionary ladder than AOL. My wife uses it and I cringe. Fingers crossed that it goes away in a few years. At least it's not as totally and completely useless as Twitter - which makes Apple look like it has no hype whatsoever.

Pandora... It's radio. Radio you have to pay for. No thanks.

Apple's iTunes LP format... You need a 2GHz Core 2 Duo minimum to use these new files. What? They're still 246kbit AAC. I would have liked to see an "album" format that costs $17 use a non-lossy codec. Most people won't give a crap, but I won't be buying any digital downloads at even half the price of a CD, let alone up to two times the price.

Calling the Leica M9 a "point and shoot" misunderstands the camera. It's got a full-frame 18MP sensor (albeit not in the same league as the sensors from Canon and Nikon). It's got some really spectacular lenses (spectacular in both price and image quality). It's got a bizaro manual focus system that is actually pretty cool to use. It lacks the mirror box of SLRs, meaning there's some parallax issues to deal with, but you get the moral equivalent of these fancy image stabilization systems simply because there's less bouncing around inside the camera.

Perhaps most importantly, the M9 has a completely old-school user interface. Select your shutter speed and aperture, then press the button. Consult the meter if you must. After fighting with all the menus upon menus in my Panasonic LX3, it would be awfully nice sometimes to have all of the relevant state of the camera represented in two simple knobs instead.

If I could get a complete M9 kit, with lenses, for $3000, I'd buy it tomorrow. Since the actual price for my dream kit is well north of $10K, I'll be sitting it out for now.

The M8 was hotly anticipated before it came out. Same nostalgic rangefinder appreciation - which I can understand. But it didn't deliver the goods. Image quality lags behind Canon and Nikon. At the end of the day, you're paying bespoke prices for something that's still essentially mass produced and that isn't able to deliver the image quality of cameras costing a fraction of its price.

I did forget that the M9 was introducing a full frame sensor. The sensor would definitely bring up the price significantly in any camera. If it could deliver the goods in the IQ department I'd give up $1000. That might translate to $2000 for people who might be more interested. But $10k? Nope. Not going to cut it. At that price, it might as well be selling to the folks who want it covered in Swarovski crystals or precious stones and metals.

I will also concede that new P&S don't have manual controls.

EDIT: Two things I'm most jealous about Leica Rangefinders... The first is the ease of manual focus. Manual focus is next to useless on current Nikon and Canon bodies, IME. And of course Leica's native support for the DNG raw format, which I'm sure comes from their desire not to sink funds into developing their own software, rather than their eagerness to support Adobe's initiative. Whatever the case, it's a breath of fresh air being able to use non-camera-maker software to fully develop your raw images according to the original camera-set intent.

Well, Swarovski does make optical glass in addition to their overpriced rhinestones.

Oh, I might as well add the other totally underwhelming release of the week into this thread. The Palm Pixi. Oh boy. Way to segment your Pre market further by introducing such a craptastic handset. Developers are going to love having devices with two different screen sizes. Oh wait, there are no developers for WebOS.

A useful way to think about the M9's insane price: A brand-new M9 body costs a staggering $7000. A Leica M7 (film) body costs $4400. That means the "digital premium" is $2600.

For contrast, a Nikon F6 film body, new (assuming you can find one) is $2500. The Nikon D700 digital body is $2700. Digital premium? Only $200. Of course, the F6 was something of a collector's item, so maybe a Nikon F100 is a better comparison. That body is $750 new, yielding a "digital premium" of not quite $2000. Somehow, I imagine the real answer, for Nikon/Canon, is somewhere in the middle of those two numbers.

If you look at it this way, then the Leica digital premium is maybe 2x what it should be, and the Leica base price is clearly out of whack as well.

If the Leica M9 were manufactured in the volumes of the Nikon D700 / Canon 5D Mk II, I'll bet it would go for half of it's current price. It's not that Leica's making a killing, but rather that they have very high development costs and an expensive manufacturing process, for which they don't have the economies of scale to help us out. If you read DPReview's Leica Factory Tour, they note that the manufacturing floorspace dedicated to the R-series of SLRs is much smaller than the M-series. Leica rangefinders are just tweakier to get right, and they (rightly?) make you pay out the nose for it.

Yeah, that's not going to happen. It only has something like 300 million users. And comparing it to AOL? I don't see that.


Okay, I really want you to tell me how that statement is at all accurate. I listened to Pandora for a couple hours yesterday. Didn't pay a dime. I also didn't hear a single announcer or commercial the entire time, didn't hear a single repeated song, or a bunch of crap the record companies are trying to push. 95% of it was stuff I liked, and for the other 5% I could just skip it.

So no, it's nothing in the least like terrestrial radio, and it's completely free. You get some benefits from the paid version, but you don't "have to" pay, as you assert.


Anyway, sorry to get off topic. I maintain that Apple puts on more spectacle in these press conferences, and does so more than other companies. Did Microsoft have Norah Jones at their WMC event? "Ladies and gentlemen, we think the new camera in the nano is so great, here's Norah Jones!"

*edit*
I agree with Lifehacker here. That feature excites me more than anything else they mentioned. Of course, that's because it will fit my uses perfectly. This way, when my wife asks me to add something to iTunes, I don't have to launch it on her computer. I can simply put the files in the iTunes folder on our NAS, and the next time she opens it up, it'll get done.

Up until now, I've been putting the files on the NAS, and opening iTunes on my computer to add them to our library, which would then get updated when she logged on. Now I can (thank goodness) uninstall iTunes from my PC. Woohoo!

ps- oh, and this is a feature Songbird had before iTunes

Apple has musicians at their musical events. Microsoft has musicians at their operating system launches.

Really? You don't see Facebook trying to be a catch-all replacement for "the internet" just as AOL was trying? I mean, to a lot of people (just like it was with AOL), Facebook *IS* "the internet." They use it for email, instant messaging, contact management, picture uploading, news, etc...

Re: Pandora being a paid service...



I thought the "free" Pandora had gone away or had been severely crippled over a year ago? Ok, "free" is nice. But watch out for airtime usage if you're not using WiFi. But, it's still radio. Better radio, yes.



That feature is next to absolutely worthless for me because Apple have not implemented it in a sensible way. One specific watched folder? What good is that? You still have to manually copy your music to that location. How is that any easier or more automatic than dragging it (from wherever) into iTunes?

Now, if I could set my own watched folder (like in every other application I've ever heard of or used that uses that type of feature), then I could set my principle top-level music folder and it would grab anything under it, including within sub-folders if it was done right. I'll admit that plenty of other software with customizable watch folders won't handle arbitrary sub-folders.



Correction, you must put it into the special watched folder within the iTunes folder. I can still see how this might be useful for you though since you're not actually going to be using your wife's machine.

This needs to be made into a preference item that allows an arbitrary list of folders with the ability to set whether or not to scan sub-folders before it's really useful for the widest audience.



It's a pretty basic feature. Other companies always have a ton of room to innovate because Apple *always* does a half-assed job with their consumer software. Only their pro-level software goes to 3/4-assed. Or is that 1/4-assed?

Ok, useless for me as well, then.
Does anybody know if you can at least organize subfolders as you wish? If so, maybe there's some (windows) registry setting to change the top level folder?

I like the Pixi! So yeah, it is low end compared to the Pre with its 2MP Camera (fine by me), slightly smaller screen (WebOS scales everything anyway - practically a non issue), no WiFi (I practically never use the WiFi on my G1) and slightly slower processor (ok thats annoying).

But, its really slim! Very pocketable, no sliding and moving bits is a huge bonus and supposed to be cheap too. I like it a lot, its like a WebOS Treo.

Maybe Bruno doesn't like Facebook because he doesn't actually have any friends to go on it with him? If he acts like he does on the BBS in real life I bet he's a really popular guy at social engagements......

Oh man, I missed that! No WiFi? I think I'd shoot myself! I use WiFi on my G1 constantly. Then again, I don't have 3G on AT&T, so maybe I'd use it less if I did...

Also, when traveling internationally with my iPhone, I disable the data service and go exclusively with the WiFi. Couldn't to that on the Palm Pixi (assuming you were roaming to one of the few countries that has CDMA infrastructure...).

How may countries outside the US even still use CDMA? Canada? At this point I think the Pre has been both a success and a failure. It's been able to keep Palm alive, but I suspect they are very much under their estimates. We'll have to see how this is going to play out long term. The Pixi is an indication that they're gong to segment their product line which isn't going to bode well to solidify and expand mind-share.

With regards to Facebook, I have people inviting me on a weekly basis. Before that it was Linked-In and Hi5 and so many others. Facebook is a load of rubbish, IMO. I'm not a fan of "catch-all" sites and for many people it ends up being their only web destination. I'll give it props for looking better than MySpace, but I wouldn't even wipe my ass with either of them.

It's also a problematic scourge for IT, a big time-waster and project breaker for companies and a wasteful time-sink and addictive obsession for some people. I know at least one person who's personal life is being quite affected by Facebook at the moment. Not a good scene.

Andy does bring up another valid problem with how some people treat Facebook. You'll find this covered in the media as of late because they love to whore Facebook and Twitter. A lot of folks compete on the basis of "friend count" - they could really not give a rat's ass who the "friend" is nor ever communicate with them, so long as their count goes "ping," up by one. A cottage industry is forming around this phenomenon and you're seeing "friends" for sale. Wholesale even.

BTW Andy, your personal attacks are indeed tiring, but I can ignore them. I'm sorry I hurt your feelings with the truth in whatever other threads you keep complaining about.

Back on topic.... I've now also *finally* been able to get iTunes to fully scan all my music for its "Genius" features *and* submit those tracks to Apple (that last bit wasn't working for the first two days).

I can say that the Genius side-bar does have its uses, though it won't replace visiting Last.fm nor Rate Your Music for me. The Genius Mixes (the new feature) however is very disappointing. It definitely uses the genres you have your music tagged with, not what Apple may be using at their store. If you have a disproportionate amount of music with one set of tags, you're going to end up with mostly mixes for that type of music. Seeing as you're limited to 12 mix selections, you really don't have the room for variety because you can't actually customize the mix presets.

A more useful feature would be to allow creating these mixes by choosing some seed artists or genres yourself. As it stands this is just another half-assed pseudo-feature. Neat enough to encourage thought on the subject, but implemented badly enough to cause mostly frustration. The Apple M.O. for a while.

Small correction to my opening post... I believe Apple showed an image of a standard Flip Mino in their slides (also does VGA video), not the MinoHD (720p recording). However, the standard Mino is under $129 retail. The MinoHD is the one within the price territory of the iPod Nano (at $150+)

Regardless of what Andy says, your comments about Facebook are somewhat revealing. You're clearly looking at the most negative side of the service that you can. You're holding up the worst examples and defining the entire site by those examples.

- not everyone who uses Facebook is addicted to it
- not everyone uses Facebook as their AOL-like "internet for dummies"
- not everyone strives for the highest friend count possible

Like I said before, Facebook is nearing 300 million users (if they haven't reached that already). Not all of them use it the same way.

Anyway, I know I'm not going to change your mind on the service. You're not going to hear it, but it's not the evil thing you think it is.

By the way, has anyone seen Facebook Lite? (lite.facebook.com) It's a great streamlined view of the site, without a lot of the crap that's been added over the years.

A surprising number of countries are compatible with U.S. CDMA handsets.

Now that 3G GSM is really just a CDMA variant, we might finally see some measure of infrastructure convergence. I won't predict how many years that will take.

It's the fact you are always 'right' and anyone who disagrees with you is 'wrong' and is an idiot. Also the fact the design and implementation of any product or service is wrong. We had a guy at work like that and the common consensus was that he had some form of mental abnormality. I've just got tired of reading it day after day over multiple threads. BTW, if by the truth you mean your comparison of the UK with a penal colony then you're wrong. It's your opinion, and that, in my opinion, doesn't count for shit.

I really and truly hope I never get to meet you in person, you really are the biggest self-important prick I've ever had the misfortune to come across and I feel genuinely sorry for your friends, family and anyone who has to deal with you on a regular basis if this how you act outside the BBS.

This is last you will hear from me on the matter.

I had a look at it when I came across an article about it on the BBC News website. Given I don't really use the extra applications that bloat out the normal site, it may very well become my default way of looking at it.

Belize does. I had to switch from AT&T to Verizon because our village only gets coverage through Smart, a Belizean provider that is CDMA only.

I can switch my phone between providers when going back and forth to Belize by selecting NAM 1 or NAM 2.

You know... I have to admit that I can't help but think the same of you, every time you make snide posts like this. We get it... you don't like Bruno, you've blocked him. Can you drop it, now?

Not liking is a little mild, but yes, you're correct.

I will do my best to bite my tongue in future, but sometimes I just can't help it, he makes it so easy.

I do value your opinion on the matter and I know others share it and will use it as lightly and productively as they might use some other more specialized site. But the potential for the things I mentioned and that you summarized quite well, is alarming. And believe it or not, quite common.

Even if I hadn't been paying attention to the news reports on the matter in the past two years, just going by the few people I know that use it and people I know of through other people, there are already examples of some of the problems I mentioned closer to home than I would have previously anticipated. Anyway, I know some otherwise pretty normal people that use Facebook in some pretty strange (maybe "bizarre") ways. Even one who I'd say neglected her kids because of it (and more to that story which I won't get into).

Most of these social sites at one time or another were more popular in some centres than others. Facebook was enormously popular in the Toronto area long before it hit it big elsewhere. Shockingly disproportionate stats from what I remember. It got to such a head that any office having anything to do with the government of Ontario or the municipality of Toronto blocked it. This was already quite a few years ago.

Anyway, they're just not my type of site, just like back in the day I didn't frequent the "hot or not" sites (there's probably a module for Facebook that does that too right?) I prefer to see friends in person when we can. Things like photos get sent via email to some people and put on a photo sharing site. Of course my wife puts photos onto Facebook.

Thanks for the kind words. I'd be insulted if you didn't think that of me.

I think a lot of wives use Facebook. None of my friends use it but all of their wives do. My wife is like my Facebook liaison she tells me what's happening on there so I don't have to look at it.

I don't think anyone has actually mentioned the best announcements of the past two weeks. Or maybe I'm just forgetting since I'm somewhat tired tonight.

Anyway, Logitech announced their new Squeezebox products, Radio and Touch (officially) last week. They both looked good right from rumor through to leak. They looked great when reading the announcements and specs. They look even better after reading more about them in the forum (which I don't frequent very much at the moment).

The Touch pretty much adds at least a base implementation or the underpinnings of everything I mentioned in a couple of posts about a possible future SB4 a couple of years back. It's going to run a "TinySqueezeCenter" which will allow you to play music off a connected/external USB device and/or SD card. That's a great addition that's surely going to help push this product into the mainstream.

It could also be a hacker's delight because of its full USB implementation and sizeable (for this type of device) LCD touch screen. And for Matt, it plays Pandora and you can even publish real-time liked tracks to Facebook. You can actually view your Facebook page(s) on it as well.

The Radio product is like a smaller Boom with the addition of a small color LCD. I think I'll be getting one of those to use as an alarm clock in my bedroom. It's $100 cheaper than the boom at $199 and a lot smaller. It doesn't come with a remote, but I do have an extra one lying around from one of my classic SB3.

Logitech is really whipping out some good stuff lately. This, coupled with the announcement of what I believe is their best remote to date, the Harmony 700, leaves me wanting to open my wallet to them again.

I think that's a bit of a generalization.

More accurately, I think that women in general are better at keeping in touch with people, so they're just that much more likely to use Facebook as a tool towards that goal.

Personally, I use Facebook to keep in touch with people I wouldn't otherwise. There's an argument to be made that it might not be worth keeping in touch with those people if I wouldn't without a tool like this. To that I say that there's all sorts of levels of involvement that we attribute to people we know and see regularly, and Facebook just extends that scale down past people we couldn't involve ourselves with before.

For example, if it weren't for Facebook, I wouldn't have found my good friend from 5th-8th grade. A British diplomat's kid, he had to move back to England when the family's stint was over. We lost touch. Thanks to Facebook I was able to find him and instantly catch up before I even got a chance to call him, and find out that he'd gone to college in Texas, moved out to San Francisco, is getting married, and just got a job coding for Digg.com.

Granted, I understand your points, Bruno, but I really think that for every person you're talking about, I could give you at least one of the people I'm talking about. Frankly, at best I think that can extend to anything, not just Facebook.

Anyway, enough about that.

Sadly, I've never been super excited by the Squeezebox products. It might just be the size of the place I live in. It's two stories, but still pretty small. If I want to listen to music anywhere on the first floor, I fire up the home theater with the Tivo that's connected to my music collection in the office upstairs. If I'm in my office upstairs...well I just listen to it on my computer with my beloved Klipsch speakers. That only leaves the bedroom, where I just don't listen to music.

And if I need to listen to music on the go, I just use my G1.

Facebook appears to me to be the modern AOL. A nice, self-contained multiverse, where people can go to avoid the wild and wooley real internet.

Oddly, the only people I know who use it, are women.

Cheers

But AOL was sold to people who didn't know better -- who hadn't even seen the real internet. I use Facebook because I have seen the wild and woolly real internet, and Facebook's better -- at least, it's better at the things it does. It's the best way to share photos (with friends and family -- for sharing with the whole world you probably want Flickr or Picasa), it makes much more sense than Twitter for twittering-type behaviour (manually clicking on "@jonrosenberg" links to follow conversation threads?), and the on-site "webmail" messaging facility is policed and so is spam-free. And the fact that all these things are neatly integrated with one another is a big plus, too.

I don't pay any attention to the vampire sorority crap, but then I don't pay any attention to World of Warcraft either -- or to soccer, for that matter. In each case I accept that some of my friends, otherwise perfectly sensible, do pay them attention.

There are still things you'd need the real internet for -- Facebook's blogging support isn't as good as Blogspot's, and it's discussion-board system isn't as good as the one this BBS runs on -- and maybe one day Google Wave will come along and do all of these things better still, but for now it's a pretty essential helper for long-distance friendships, and there's a whole bunch of people outside my immediate social radius who I'd be interacting with a lot less, or not at all, without it.

Peter

Peter, your points are all completely valid and absolutely make sense. The same with Matt's. But I do think that you guys (and even some people I know that have similar usage patterns and motivation) are the exception rather than the rule. And keep in mind, that at least in my case, when I criticize Facebook, I'm talking about the platform and its creators rather than its users (unless I mention them specifically). So I still maintain that it's an AOL-like destination. Now some movie studios are picking up on it and are starting to do thing like include "Facebook keywords" in movie advertisements.

I'll say it again, Twitter is the most over-hyped POS to have hit the net in... Forever. It was first picked up by people who were definitely web savvy. But by people who use words like "meme." The internet stuffy crowd, the folks who seemed to be trying to make themselves into the internet aristocrats in a way. Now it's being picked up by everyone. Their site is a usability nightmare and just completely useless for an outsider. As soon as you use Twitter for things like replies it becomes totally impossible to follow. It was designed as a one-stop shop for mini RSS-like announcements and now people are using it as a replacement for Instant Messaging in some cases.

Matt, if you don't like having a system on all the time to use as a server for music, then something like the Squeezebox might not make sense for you. I think however that you're one type of potential customer that Logitech really needs to hone in on. Someone who has heard of the product, knows about what it does and doesn't have an immediate desire for one. If you set one up and used it for even a week, I'm sure you'd be converted. They need to achieve that traction without having people have to borrow units ahead of time.

Now I have thoughts of getting a Squeezebox Touch into a car...

Andy mentioned it in the General section of the seemingly long forgotten empeg-car section. It's an interesting idea. Although I'm now very much attached to the bluetooth integration of my current HU so that would have to be bodged on somehow for me to think about buying one.

I utterly dislike facebook, but I do use it - a bit. Some of my friends use nothing else, so it is a useful way to keep in touch with them.

But I'm not a woman - honest!!

:-)

On Facebook: I find that a large number of my friends, men and women, use it. The UI is pretty reasonable for the things it does.

On Twitter: All the ugly @ and # syntax to work around the lack of forethought by the developers really pisses me off. On the other hand, custom Twitter clients like TweetDeck do some pretty cool things.

I find both Twitter and Facebook to have real value for odd things. To pick a random example, a Houston local microbrewery does one limited edition beer every year. You buy it on the day it comes out, and after that you'll never find it again. They were regularly tweeting all day about which supermarkets still had some left. To pick another example: at many technical conferences I attend, people will tweet with a hashtag for the conference (e.g., #usenix). You can set a search on that, and then you'll see chatter about the conference while you're there. This works remarkably well, although nothing terribly deep went by.

Standing back a few paces: "Microblogging" is definitely with us to stay, but I figure Twitter and Facebook will at some point both collapse in their heaping lack of profitability. Hopefully by then, there will be some sort of IETF microblogging standard that would allow you to run your own server and interact with others in some vaguely standard way that, so far as most users is concerned, looks and feels just like the centralized web sites, despite being a widely distributed system under the hood.

Why not supply this info on an RSS feed that interested parties can subscribe to? Twitter really just brings this capability to one centralized server and with a strict character limit. It's nothing new and nothing remarkable. What likely puts me off the most is the kinds of press it gets. And that every time you hear someone talking about it it's with some kind of smarmy attitude. The self-important blogger type.



Again, unless you're envisioning a number of features that haven't been mentioned, this can be done right now with RSS. And there are even a number of decent clients for publishing and subscribing/reading.

The main thing that RSS lacks is any notion of push (i.e., a traditional pub/sub model). A student and I worked out a clever solution to this, he built a complete working prototype. See also, Open Microblogging.

In short, what you want is a whole lot like an RSS feed, but with additional infrastructure to handle timely push notifications. And, while you're at it, how about decent crypto for authentication, gossip protocols for scalability, and on and on.

You might be interested in this.

Some people have found awesome uses for Twitter. One of the stores around here uses Twitter to announce shipments, sales, remaining stock on limited items, legislation that is either up for votes or has been passed/defeated, etc. I find it really nice to see what they just had delivered or any unexpected specials.

That's a cool name: pubsubhubub. Their system is all about adding publish-subscribe to existing Atom/RSS feeds. That's nice. What you miss is the microblogging metadata (one message being in response to another, topic hashtags and widespread discovery of people using those tags).

Tim, the places you mentioned are using it like RSS but with the Push ability Dan mentioned. It doesn't sound like they're using it to blog nor to IM or carry on conversations of inane topics. Which is good and shows a very typical and valuable role for this type of tech.

I can definitely see the benefits of a syndicated publishing protocol, but I really dislike the fact it's using a centralized and proprietary server. But that and other merits aside, it's the "hype" that I've disliked the most. It's not a panacea for all communication issues on the net nor is it the second coming of Christ as some media outlets would have you believe.

RSSCloud is another solution to the open microblogging problem. It'll be interesting to see what happens to the character limits once it's not being enforced by a third party.

Am I too cynical for seeing that as a good thing?

I agree with your dislike of inline metadata as used with Twitter. However, that doesn't mean that we should exterminate the metadata entirely. We should instead hang it off the side. Hashtag-like things can exist just like blog entries with "topics" or other group-like tags. Similarly, the fact that one microblog entry is responding to another can be explicit as well (perhaps requiring some sort of adaptation of pingback/trackback).

Of course, once you get rid of Twitter's length limitation, these "microblog entries" can be as long as regular blog entries, and that's not a bad thing at all. It does mean that any dedicated clients you've got need to be smart about hiding some of the text (as, for example, Facebook does with its "more..." button). One nice feature is that you solve the annoying problem of comments. Today, you never know where to look for comments. Twitter @replies? Facebook comments? FriendFeed comments? Google Reader comments? Too many comments! Now, comments are just another kind of microblog entry (kinda like tweets) but you wouldn't have to see them if you weren't following the original conversation (kinda like just about everything else).

Oh, the other thing (used a lot with Twitter posts) are URL shorteners. Arrrgh! They're fine if you're trying to rick-roll someone, but I want to know where I'm clicking to, not see a bunch of garbage characters.

For a perfect example of the uselessness of twitter and replies and URL shortneing, see the Twitter feed of the otherwise excellent Strobist Bog: http://twitter.com/strobist

Looking at the iPod range I am suprised at the price gap between the Shuffle and the Nano. The Shuffle starts at $59 for a 2GB and rises to $79 for a 4GB, the Nano is $149 for 8GB and $179 for 16gb.
Has the Nano always been at the $150 price point?

That's why I use [url=minilink.org]minilink.org[/url], which retains the domain name and the extension of the original URL.

Totally agreed. URL shorteners are not only ugly, but they're an additional point of failure, and they also give zero indication to the user of where they're about to take you. They leak private information to the shortener vendor, who now knows where you're going and how popular that destination is. Eventually, they'll probably introduce interstitial adverts.

I only use them in cases where the original URL is either even more ugly or, in places where it counts, exceptionally long.

*edit*

Okay, I feel the need to correct myself in a previous post. There are indeed ads in the free version of Pandora. However, I completely missed them because it's about 20 seconds every ten songs. This is not a deal breaker in the least, I just didn't want to be inaccurate on that point.

The bottom line is: I've always hated radio, but I might pay for Pandora.

Fixed in 9.0.1.