Back in the day I wrote a review of online photo editors, and my biggest concern with all of them was the lack of some web-oriented options, most notably Photoshop’s brilliant ability to have an image resized and scaled to a certain (exact) size while cropping. It’s an extremely valuable option if you’re working for the web, where you usually need a photo in a certain size (on this site, I usually want photos that are 490 pixel wide).
A friend just told me that one of the best photo editors out there, Picnik, has added a lot of new features. I went to take a look, and lo and behold, Picnik now has the aforementioned option! Now, it definitely gets my recommendation as an online photo editor; if you haven’t, try it out.
Here’s a new, painfully simple way to create mixtapes - well, not real mixtapes, but lists of MP3s which can be played directly in a web browser. Which is pretty much the next best thing. The service is called Muxtape and it has literally no options, which is sometimes a good thing.
Here’s an example of a Muxtape. I don’t have one near, but I bet it’s optimized for the iPhone.
I’ve noticed recently that I simply cannot keep up with all the e-mail I receive, both here and on Mashable where I’m the features editor. I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to all of you who wrote to me and I didn’t reply, but unfortunately my e-mail overload is getting bigger and bigger and I doubt this situation will get better.
I have, however, become a lot more active on social sites like Twitter and Pownce. Since I’m blogging when the USA is asleep, I’m quite a lonely blogger, and it feels good to have this stream of info from other bloggers, readers, developers, designers and tech aficionados. Furthermore, if you send me something over these networks, I’m actually more likely to notice than if you send me an e-mail - especially since Gmail’s spam filters have become somewhat less effective. Therefore, I’d like to call everyone to join me on various social networks I’m actively using. Here’s the list:
Franticindustries.com got hacked over the weekend with the usual result of nasty keywords appearing in the posts. After a couple hours of tinkering, hopefully I’ve now patched most of Wordpress’ many security holes; but the blame is ultimately on me for not keeping Wordpress up to date.
In short: lame wannabe hackers: not cool. Not keeping your Wordpress up to date: dumb. Spending half of the weekend hardening Wordpress’ feeble security: priceless.
There’s a blogger fight going on this weekend, with a little lifestreaming application by the name of FriendFeed at its centre. FriendFeed lets you see your and your friends’ activity across various web services in a simple feed, and it also adds the ability to comment and tag any individual item. For some reason, several prominent bloggers decided that FriendFeed is the next Twitter; while I agree that connecting and organizing all of your web activity in one place might be the next big thing, I don’t see FriendFeed being exceptionally good at it.
I’ve tried out FriendFeed briefly before, and let’s just say I wasn’t overwhelmed with what it can do (you can see my feed here.) Similar services abound: see Profilactic (my coverage here, my profile here), SocialThing, or Correlate.us as examples.
All of these services do more or less the same thing. Louis Gray seems to think that the big difference between FriendFeed and everything else is the fact that you can comment on items or “love” them, but I don’t see what, exactly, are the benefits of these options. I can barely find time to comment on blog posts; why the hell would I comment on bits and pieces of my (or someone else’s) online activity? The fact that the option is there doesn’t exactly hurt, but at best I consider it a very minor advantage.
To be honest, I’m a little bit biased about the entire concept of lifestreaming. I have on my hard drive the outline of a project that would - in my opinion - do much more with this idea, but I haven’t had the time or the manpower to start it. In brief, I think that all the apps I’ve mentioned above, as well as others like them, don’t really help you organize your online life well enough; they’re just spewing it all out in a long, hard-to-follow string of events which are only interesting as a “what’s this guy up to right now” kind of thing, but quite pointless in the long run. Thus, no, I don’t think that FriendFeed is in any way revolutionary: it’s a nice application and it’s popular because it’s a little bit better than most of its competition, but I don’t see any disruptive capacity in it just yet.
Guy Kawasaki (of Truemors fame) launched a new cheapass (10000 bucks) startup: Alltop. The only problem is: it’s not a startup. It’s nothing more than an extended version of Popurls (they admit it in the upper right corner where it says “Inspired by Popurls), which is in turn a nice enough RSS aggregator simply because it came early, but let’s face it, it’s a static version of Netvibes.
So, where does that leave Alltop? Nowhere, really. Absolutely no one would report on this one if Guy Kawasaki wasn’t behind it, and next time, they probably won’t.
Now, the interesting thing about this story is not the site itself, but the fact that this is one of those situations where you think to yourself: what the hell were they thinking? What was Guy thinking when he announced Alltop? What is he hoping for; how does he hope to gain readership for this thing, how does he plan to make money off it, and the like?
Luckily, you actually can learn what Guy was thinking in Kristen’s video interview with Guy, embedded below.
My interpretation is that Guy is thinking that RSS is a concept that the majority of internet users don’t understand (which is correct,) that folks who are new to RSS don’t want to bother to find all the feeds that they might be interested in (also correct,) however, everyone wants to be able to read a lot of information from various sources in a very simple way (partly true), and this is what Alltop provides. Another very positive thing about this project is that it was very, very cheap, and therefore, even if it fails, who cares? You got to congratulate Guy on that one.
There are also problems. One problem is that you cannot just copy a site (Popurls), add some non-essential improvements (more feeds) and think that you’ll achieve the same level of success as the original. It just doesn’t work that way, and it’s hard to explain why, but it just doesn’t.
And even if it did, a company like Netvibes can simply publish a customized page which would show the exact same feeds, only with all the benefits that Netvibes have. In other words, Alltop is replaceable. Easily.
BTW, if you’re interested in something like Alltop, only much better and with much nicer options, check out DailyRotation. They’ve been doing it for years, although the site is focused only on technology.
Secondly, he’s understimating his users. People do care about customization. MySpace users, which are for the most part kids that don’t know much about computers, customize their pages to an extreme extent. Alltop doesn’t even let you see more stories for a particular feed, and that’s the first thing people are gonna miss. Popurls is better with that regard - it gives you some basic customization options.
All in all, I think I know what Guy was thinking when he created Alltop; the idea isn’t all that bad, but the actualization of it is just not good enough.
I know the iPhone has been tested, tried, cracked, and tampered with in all possible ways, but I don’t often see anyone talking about a serious issue that stabbed my eyes practically from day one I’ve had the device: multitasking.
Now, these problems are reiterated by a find from TechCrunch, which points out certain flaws and limitations in the iPhone SDK, namely:
“Only one iPhone application can run at a time, and third-party applications never run in the background. This means that when users switch to another application, answer the phone, or check their email, the application they were using quits. (p. 16)”
Now, as all of you iPhone users know, the iPhone supports multitasking - up to a certain degree. For example, if you open a page in your web browser, it’ll remember it even if you close Safari, open something else and then open Safari again. However, it does this by running all sorts of services in the background (that’s also why the iPhone is so blazingly fast compared to other cellphones.)
But iPhone applications can’t do everything in the background - sometimes the application just stops what it was doing when you quit. Furthermore, there’s no intelligent or easy to use interface to switch between (running) applications. Having to close one to open another isn’t really how I imagine multitasking. My Sony Ericsson P1i, for example, has a task manager for easy task switching.
According to the “iPhone Human Interface Guidelines” third party applications will be even more limited. They won’t even be allowed to run in the background. Perhaps I’m not the most common type of user, but I don’t look forward to silly games and Facebook-style timewasters from this SDK deal; I’m into really useful, robust apps that’ll continue to work, if needed, even if I switch to something else.
For me, this is a deal breaker. The iPhone is a very powerful gadget, but if you’re gonna limit it and the third party applications written for it left and right then it’s always going to remain what most people perceive it to be today: a fun, slick, trendy smartphone that can’t keep up with the “real” smartphones like Nokia N96 or Sony Ericsson P1i when it comes to real business.
