News roundup: RIP Vox, Gmail features, Skype, Apple's Ping, Television

RIP Vox. The social/private blogging tool is closing later this month.

Gmail Priority Inbox got a lot of attention. The Bean loves Gmail, but this feature drew one big yawn. Clunkiness > Usefulness.

Calling phones via Gmail (and via Google Voice / Google Talk) is more like it. You can get a quasi-phone line with inbound and outbound calling... all for free. If they actually packaged it decently, and you didn't have to deal with 3 separate products, it could be the end of Skype. Usefullness > Clunkiness (but only slightly).

But, while Skype's main rev stream may be doomed, they're making some nice improvements like 10-person video calling.

Apple launched Ping, a social network around iTunes. Granted, the Bean hates iTunes, but what? It's already bloatware, with all sorts of functionality that shittily replicates stuff that's better done in a browser. (Eg Buying/watching TV on iTunes blows.) And why the generic name? They'll probably start suing anyone who uses the term ping in any context. It'll probably be a huge success though.


Television (drug of the nation before facebook)

Lots of attention to Internet TV lately. While Netflix does a lot right, it sucks that one must stumble through iTunes or subscribe to an evil cable company to watch Mad Men. So, we welcome the new Apple TV, Google TV and Amazon's TV forays to keep things progressing.

We think it'll come down not just to numbers of shows and movies, but to the virtual and physical interface. The Bean wants Netflix, DVR software (pulling off cable/satellite/broadcast), DVD playback, Pandora, YouTube, Hulu, etc etc all intuitively accessible via one remote with text that's easy to read from 15'. Over time the DVD playback and DVR/cable/broadcast pieces will become obsolete, but for the next few years it's certainly needed.

WMC is the closest thing right now that covers this, but it seems you still can't fully integrate Pandora, Hulu, etc. (Have yet to try this quasi-integration approach for Hulu.) And, long-term, WMC's doomed because, well, it's a Microsoft product.

Kryder's Law check-in

(As in the "Moore's law of storage".) Every once in a while I buy something new and am amazed again by these laws. Just got a 1.5TB external drive for $89.99.

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Elements-External-WDBAAU0015HBK-NESN/dp/B002QEBMBY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1283437702&sr=8-1

My previous one was 400GB for a couple hundred bucks a few years ago, and it's now full. Of course my happiness with this new drive will seem quaint in a couple years...

Google Wave to crash

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/update-on-google-wave.html

The Bean's not surprised people didn't get it, another fancy platform in search of a purpose. Hopefully some of the ideas/functionality will make it's way into GMail and GChat.

Google Font API

Very cool, the web needs more fonts. Via Mashable.
http://code.google.com/webfonts/preview

You may notice the Bean's new distinctive logotype above. Some of these are rendering like crap though, in Chrome and FF :(

Amazon using Facebook Connect

Found this in the Times this morning: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/27/an-amazon-facebook-alliance-to-make-shopping-more-social/?ref=technology

Like most else on Amazon, good luck trying to find how to turn this on by browsing through Amazon. Luckily the article included a link: http://www.amazon.com/gp/facebook

While we've used FB Connect as an easy login in various places, this is one of the most promising and interesting Connect integrations we've seen. Perhaps most interesting, none of your shopping info gets pushed back into Facebook; Amazon is solely using the social graph (incl. you and your friends' interest) to help your shopping on Amazon. It's a pure example of the exporting the social graph to other services.

We'll see how it works in practice, and whether it proves embarrassing to participants. So far, for one of my friends' upcoming birthdays (we'll call him "B"), Amazon recommended the CD "Animal" by Ke$ha.

Dug through a few more friends: no herbal supplements for ED, Grecian formula, hemorrhoid cream, or self-help books.. Though, a Ke$ha CD is probably worse than any of those.

Great tutorial on Facebook Connect on Rails

Using the Restful Authentication and Facebooker plugins:
http://madebymany.co.uk/tutorial-for-restful_authentication-on-rails-with-facebook-connect-in-15-minutes-00523

With complications from an existing app / dealing with discrepancies with non-FB users, editing profiles, etc., it's taken much more than 15 minutes. But, still way faster than I expected.

Only catches I found were:

a) To get "extended permission" to get the user's email, couldn't get the auto-generated links FB Connect buttons to work. Tried setting the options as I saw in a couple of discussion boards, but nothing worked. Just making my own link and adding "&scope=email" did the trick though, like this:

<a href="https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/authorize?client_id=<%= ENV['FACEBOOK_API_KEY'] %>&redirect_uri=http://food52.localhost/users/link_user_accounts&scope=email"><img src="/images/fb_connect.gif" alt="Facebook Connect" /></a>

b) actually getting the email address from the fb_user object was tricky. In the "create_from_fb_connect" method in the User model, a simple fb_user['email'] kept crapping out... *until* I read somewhere that you need to install both facebooker AND facebooker2. Then it started working as desired.

script/plugin install git://github.com/mmangino/facebooker.git
script/plugin install git://github.com/mmangino/facebooker2.git

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Unrelated, recently tried out admin_data, a really simple way to make some basic admin tools: http://github.com/neerajdotname/admin_data

Not going to cover a lot of my specific admin tool needs, but for a simple interface to my models/DB, has come in handy.

Links of note

Big name VC a-flowing: $30M to corporate social networking service Jive, $10.5M to newfeed as magazine service Flipboard. Re. Jive: we get the corporate social networking promise as a benefit to companies, but don't really think people will want an intra-corporation identity in this era. People are their own brands, which transcend their couple of years at whatever company, so it'll be a tough fight trying to contain that. Re. Flipboard: slick presentation of social newsfeeds sounds good to us.

10 inspiring TED talks. TED kinda annoys us. (And we think it's not just because we're not invited--not invited to non-annoying Davos forum either.) But, there are some interesting talks that come out of it

Wired predicted the iPad 11 years ago.

Android: Motorola savior or temporary lifeline?

Facebook and BranchOut as threat to LinkedIn. We wouldn't worry much about this if we were LinkedIn; we're convinced a completely separate product+brand for business-oriented networking will win out. Then again, we think the same about family-related social networking, but it's been a challenge getting people to use Wee Web instead of FB.

Facebook ranks below airlines and cable TV companies in consumer satisfaction. But higher than MySpace at least.