I wonder if Cory Doctorow believes in marriage. Or, if like his latest Boing Boing piece: iPhone – the roach motel business model, he disagrees with it on the basis that it is the ultimate “lock-in”. I ask in all sincerity because “lock-in” isn’t so bad if you like what you have. If, for example, [...]

Continue Reading: The iPhone or Marriage: which is the ultimate lock-in?

I’m really enjoying the discussion about the lack of buttons on the new iPhone. The Bokardoan Boris writes in a comment to my post yesterday: “The killer app of mobile devices is not voice, it is text communication. And touchscreens are notoriously bad as keyboards. No tactile response. QWERTY is good for when you have [...]

Continue Reading: The iPhone has no Buttons!

Like everyone else, I hung on every word that Steve Jobs said during his keynote yesterday. He said a lot of important things, some of which will affect the way software is made and used in the future. And, being that he’s talking about reinventing the mobile phone, our social lives in and around mobile [...]

Continue Reading: Killer Mobile App? Making Phone Calls

The upcoming Macworld starts Monday. Here are some thoughts about where Apple might go with social software and hardware. First off, Apple is making a huge social software push. This is indicated not only in the up and coming MacWorld rumors, but in their already-released details of the next release of OS X: Leopard. If [...]

Continue Reading: 3 Predictions about Apple’s Social Software Future

How the “Album-Only” restriction on iTunes is getting out of hand and ruining the experience of true music fans…and what you can do about it. I’m a huge fan of U2. I’ve listened to them since I was a sophomore in high school, when I purchased the Achtung Baby album after hearing One and Mysterious [...]

Continue Reading: Why iTunes Needs an “Album-Only” Enema

Email, chat, and other messaging tools are converging…and most people don’t seem to mind. So it seems that Danah Boyd got into the same trouble I got into when I said that social networks were killing email. She wrote a whole post explaining why she claims email is dead: “Do young people have email accounts? [...]

Continue Reading: On The Convergence of Email and Chat (Google and Apple [and Yahoo] Get It)

Top-of-mind was just sold for $1.65 Billion dollars. That’s the amount Google paid for the social video site YouTube, which owns the top-of-mind space for the word “video” in the minds of the populace.

When I think of the word “video”, I immediately think of Youtube. When people want to upload “video”, they immediately think of YouTube. When people talk about where they saw the latest episode of the Daily Show, they talk about YouTube. When advertisers think of “video”, it’s all YouTube.

YouTube is what people think about when they think of the word “video”…

Continue Reading: YouTube and the Importance of Top-of-Mind

Update Added several points about upcoming Leopard features.

Several recent Apple developments suggest that the company is ramping up for a huge push of social features in its software:

Wiki Server

A wiki server? Yes, a wiki server. From the preview site:

“Leopard Server includes a Wiki Server to make it easy for teams to create and distribute information through their own shared Intranet website. For the first time, all members of a workgroup can easily create or edit content right from their browser. With a few clicks, or by dragging and dropping, they can upload files and images, track changes, assign keywords, hyper-link pages, view and contribute to shared calendars and blogs, and search for content on the group Intranet.”

Continue Reading: Apple Making Huge Social Software Push?

Daring Fireball‘s John Gruber makes a great point in his recent post: Familiarity Breeds a User Base

In referencing Joshua Micah Marshall’s two reasons for not using a Mac (despite admitting that he’s heard great things about them), Gruber suggests that we underestimate the power of familiarity. He says:

“But the reasons behind his (Marshall’s) reluctance to switch are eminently reasonable, or, if not quite reasonable, understandable. He’s a political nerd, not a computer nerd, but he’s cobbled together enough knowledge about Windows and PC hardware that he’s comfortable knowing he can get his work done with them, and that when things go wrong, that he can probably fix them.”

Continue Reading: Familiarity in the Recommendosphere

Brady Forrest, organizer of Microsoft Search Champs, the event I just returned from where Microsoft asked a bunch of bloggers/technologists (including quite a few Mac users like me) what we thought of future MS products:

“We don’t want to waste our time getting pats on the back.”