Friendfeed

To my mind there were three parts to Friendfeed. (I’m using past tense because of the sale, as the site/application is still runny happy as a clam.) I should say first that I am writing this as a big fan of Friendfeed.

Piece 1 was “content aggregator”. This part worked wonderfully. It met a big need, that being we create content in many different places on the web, and we need a way to pull all that content together. Friendfeed did that. If the Friendfeed site goes away, we’ll need another solution. Yes you can post announcements about content in various places on Twitter, but that feels awkward, plus the auto-aggregation tools are not built-in like with Friendfeed. Yes you can link to all your other content from your blog, but that’s ugly. Friendfeed was easy to use, and homogenized the different sources somewhat, so that it became a package.

Piece 2 was “comment aggregator”. Unfortunately this was a tough nut to crack. The problem statement is simple enough – it’s very hard to have a conversation around a say a piece of content on my blog when part of the conversation takes place in my blog comments, part of it takes place in response blog posts from others, and perhaps part of it takes place in comments on watering holes like Digg. My rough understanding was that Friendfeed was hoping everybody would just comment on Friendfeed instead, which didn’t work out. Some people did, which just added to the fragmentation.

Piece 3 was “social network”. This part I have to confess I never got. I followed people, and it was great to get all the content in one package for the people I cared about, their blog posts, Twitter updates, Google Reader (RSS) shared items, etc., all in one place. But there was this expectation that the whole thing would sew itself together into something like Facebook, where you can just keep track of your whole social network by watching your “feed”. In Friendfeed the big feed with all the comments, and all the content from people you hadn’t subscribed to (friends of friends) was not useful. Too much to follow, and not what I was interested in. And I can’t even describe what “rooms” were supposed to do, as I never understood them.

So despite panning the last two sides of Friendfeed, I feel so strongly satisfied with the content aggregator aspect, that I hope that it sticks around for a long time, or that somebody can create something even better at doing that job, by building on it’s legacy.

iTunes HD – the skinny

I was wondering about snagging TV and Movie video from iTunes, and how it would look on my TV, especially if it went through my iPhone first..

Gizmodo, a year ago, spelled it out pretty clear:

http://gizmodo.com/5048025

As for iPhones/iPods – it looks like you get a standard def file with the higher def download, which goes to the iPhone.

Windows on Netbooks a big win for Microsoft over Linux

Not enough has been made of the fact that Linux has not triumphed on the netbook, even at a lower price and pre-installed. The fact that people fully expect Windows, even just to browse Facebook and pick up their email, is absolutely telling in terms of the chance Linux has on any desktop any time soon, if ever. Doesn’t bode well for Apple or ChromeOS for that matter either. This is not about which is better. It’s about momentum, here known as installed userbase. And that is a huge advantage for Microsoft, and netbooks are the undisputable proof of it.

Snow Leopard clean install for the Windows guy

I wound up with an Apple computer by accident. That is I got an iPhone, and thought it was so great that I decided to write some programs for it, and it turns out you can only do that on Apple computers.

So I bought the cheapest one they had, a Mac Mini. It’s been an ok computer hardware-wise, but getting used to the MAC OS has been a bear. Perhaps in another post I will describe my trials.

This post is about my Snow Leopard (from regular Leopard) upgrade experience though. I didn’t know what to expect. I put the cd in while the machine was already running. There was a button to click to start the upgrade. So I ran the upgrade. That all seemed to work ok, though it took quite awhile. But when it came back up, while successful, it was clear that a clean install was not done. I still had programs and preferences.

So I went a-googling and found that the clean install options had been slightly hidden in this version, and I needed to boot the disk, which I did, and then wiped the drive, followed by the install. That also went well, but took a long time.

When the computer came back up, it was once again clear that something was wrong. The GarageBand, iMovie, and iPhoto applications my Mini had come with were gone.

It turns out they aren’t part of Snow Leopard (nor are they part of Leopard). They are part of a software suite from Apple called iLife, and they came free with my computer. So I was wondering if I was going to have to reinstall whatever cd/dvds the computer came with, and then reinstall Snow Leopard. But when I dug out the disks, I found that there was one for Leopard and one for other software. Guess what that other software is? iLife. I am happy to report that it installed ok right on top of Snow Leopard, and as far as I can tell, I am good to go.