What if we made a distributed Twitter? Like DVCS. All the hip young programmers today use DVCS, whether that’s Git, or Mercurial, or … yeah, Git or Mercurial. The key to DVCS is that there’s no single point of failure, no centralized repository.

"joabj" on Slashdot:

Now that Facebook has amassed more than 500 million users, a growing number of open source social networking developers are wondering if Facebook’s photo sharing, status updates and other features wouldn’t work better as Internet-wide standardized services.

I think of Twitter and Facebook as centralized blogging systems. Conversely, I think of blogging as decentralized social networking.  The primary goals of social networking services boil down to:

• Post information that you want to share.  In the case of Twitter, that information is in the form of "tweets".  In the case of Facebook, that information is in the form of pictures and status updates.
• Follow information posted by other users.
• Send messages to other users.

Compare that to blogs:

• Users post articles to blogs. An article can contain just about anything that can be posted to Twitter or Facebook.
• Users follow other users with RSS feeds from blogs.
• Users can typically contact a blogger using a form or email link on a blog.

In that respect, decentralizing social networking services is a solved problem. There are numerous blog engines and RSS readers. Many of them are open source. They communicate using open standards. Blogs do not rely on a single company or service, and therefore have no single point of failure. However, Twitter and Facebook were both started long after blogs became relatively common. Why are Twitter and Facebook so popular? It boils down to this:

Ease of use: It is not difficult to start a blog on a blogging service, and it is not difficult to use an RSS reader. However, Twitter and Facebook collapse those functions into easy-to-use web sites.

Telling your friends: It is easy to say "find me on Facebook". Saying "read my blog on virtualsanity.com and use an RSS reader to stay current; do you have a blog?&quot is a bit awkward.

I love the freedom that the open and distributed nature of blogs provide, but the ease of use that comes from centralized services is winning the mindshare of many users.

1. The Reader button does not appear until the page is rendered, with ads.
2. Users have little motivation to click the Reader button until they have seen some of the ads and until the page layout annoys them.
3. The Reader-rendered article also lacks page navigation and other functionality.  A user that wants to further explore the site will need the original page.

I have had my iPad for three days now, and if I had to describe it in fewer than five words I would call it “a big iPod touch”. After all, the most significant difference between the iPad and the iPod Touch is the physical size of the device.

That said, those claiming this description unfairly diminishes the importance of the iPad are also right. The capabilities afforded by the bigger screen, improved performance, and improved battery life are enormous. This is evident in all the apps.

Safari on the iPad is almost indistinguishable from Safari on the iPhone and iPod Touch, but I can view any web page on the iPad without squinting or endlessly scrolling and adjusting the display size. Mail on the iPad, with its two pane interface, looks more like Mac OS X than it does the iPhone. NetNewsWire and Twitterific are two apps that take great advantage of the screen real estate of the iPad.

Finally, there’s the keyboard. The software keyboard on the iPad is much better than that on the smaller devices, but it comes nowhere close to the convenience of the hardware keyboard offered by a desktop computer. I am typing this with a Bluetooth keyboard on my iPad. While Apple could undoubtedly offer Bluetooth keyboard connectivity on its smaller devices if they wanted to, the smaller size would make that awkward.

While the iPad clearly has more in common with the iPod Touch and the iPhone than it does a desktop computer, I honestly believe that it “competes” more against notebook and desktop computers than it does against the smaller iPod and iPhone devices.

Lesson Three: “If you don’t own and control a local, physical copy of your digital media, then the existence of that media is merely hypothetical.”

I appreciate and heavily use cloud-based services, but I know that they and the data they store could disappear on me at any given moment. For example, although I use GMail with Google Apps, I make sure that I control the domain name, and I use Apple Mail combined with Time Machine to ensure that I have a local backup of that data under my control.

What is my point? First of all, thank you to Oracle. More importantly, I want to acknowledge and appreciate that Oracle has some good technology, and that it is the right choice for many (not all) applications.

Today, after arriving at a destination, I mistakenly disconnected my iPhone from the car stereo before pausing the podcast I was listening to. Much to my pleasant surprise, this automatically paused the podcast. The iPhone is apparently smart enough to pause the recording it is playing when the headphone connector becomes disconnected. I was impressed.

Nice touch, Cocoa Touch!

Message Thread Handling: While most mail clients thread messages within a single folder, they typically don’t group together messages across folders. So, if a thread consists of ten messages, it is likely that some of those messages are in your “Sent” folder, others are your “Inbox” folder, and perhaps others were filed into a “from [sender]” folder. This makes it difficult to reconstruct a thread. GMail keeps messages together by thread, and shows you the contents of the entire thread on a single page.

Muting a Thread: GMail allows you, with just one click, to “Mute” a thread. This archives it, and (more importantly) keeps notifications of new messages in that thread from appearing in your inbox. This is great for stopping long threads that aren’t relevant to you from interrupting your workflow.

Message Focus: GMail hides both quoted text and message header information by default. So, the user can easily focus on the content of the message, and away from the components of the message that typically don’t warrant attention.

Reply/Reply All: While in the midst of composing a message reply, GMail allows you to easily change whether your reply should be sent to other recipients of the message. Just click “Reply” or “Reply to all”, and the recipient list of your reply is updated. You don’t need to copy and paste the addresses or start with a new message window in order to change this.

Using a hosted service like GMail has many advantages, and many disadvantages. But none of the features listed above are any less feasible on a desktop mail client than they are on a hosted web application.

The point of this post is not to advocate using GMail. If you’re working for a company that has its own internal mail server, it is likely that trade secrets, customer information, and other non-public information regularly come into your mailbox. Under such circumstances, it is inappropriate to entrust Google (or any other third party service provider) with that email if your employer has not explicitly chosen to. The point of this post is to ask: why haven’t desktop email clients caught up?

Acquiring the iPhone

I bought my iPhone at the Apple Store at Rockingham Park. Knowing that the store was scheduled to open at 7am for the event, I arrived around 6:20. There were about 20 people ahead of me when I got there, and roughly another 20 behind me when the mall doors opened at 7am. The line then moved inside the mall to just outside the store itself. At that point, it divided into two lines: one for those like me who had reserved a phone, and another for those who had not. (Since the line of those who had not reserved a phone was much shorter and being processed in parallel, I would have been better to not reserve a phone, or to “forget” that I had.) We were individually allowed into the store as Apple employees became available to help us.

Once I got to be first or second in line, I could go into the store to look around. I was even offered demo’s while waiting to be assisted. We were got bottles of water and candy at the same time. I think I got into the store at around 8:10 and was being assisted with my purchase at around 8:15.

My entire purchase took roughly a half hour. My purchase was a little longer than typical because AT&T picked me for a random identity check before accepting my credit card. Essentially, I had to answer a few multiple choice questions over the phone about things like where I was born, in order to prove I am who I said I was. (Oddly enough, the only other company that has ever made me do that is T-Mobile; it must be a phone company thing.)

When I left the store, my phone was fully activated. I was told that it could take up to six hours for my phone number to switch from my old provider. That did happen as expected. My only disappointment was that the phone was not fully charged when I left the store. But the iPhone having a low battery was unquestionably a productivity aid for my work day, so I won’t complain about that.

I want to point out that all the Apple Store employees were very helpful, knowledgeable, and friendly. They appeared every bit as excited about the new phones as those of us crazy enough to stand in line to buy them. I’ve made several large and small purchases at that store, and every experience has been very good. (Given my utter loathing of retail shopping in general, this is saying something.)

First Impressions: Keyboard

This is my first phone with a (hardware or software) keyboard, so I can’t compare this to anything. Given the space constraints, I think the software keyboard works remarkably well. But make no mistake, I wouldn’t attempt to type this blog entry on the iPhone. The frustrating parts of using this keyboard are:

• Entering a good password that includes mixed-case characters, numbers, and punctuation.
• Entering particularly long URL’s. I suspect I will use bookmarks more on the iPhone than I do on desktop computers. Also, if I was choosing a personal domain name today it would be shorter than “virtualsanity.com” simply for the ease of typing on mobile devices. Oddly enough, I didn’t foresee this use case when I chose it in 1999.

I work with a gentleman who has both a Blackberry with a physical keyboard and an iPhone. He tells me that, surprisingly, that the iPhone’s software keyboard is easier to use.

My conclusion: Keyboard use can be frustrating, but I’m not sure it could become less frustrating without significant tradeoffs in device size.

First Impressions: Safari for iPhone

Safari is great! Some pages read very easily, others require a little more pinching than others. Obviously sites optimized for the iPhone or other mobile devices are ideal. Page download speed obviously varies between sites, but overall I haven’t found it frustratingly slow — even over the AT&T network. In fact, last night I was home and using the phone for a few hours before it occurred to me that I should connect to my wireless network.

First Impressions: Mail

I use Google Apps for my personal email. My experience with the combination of Mail on the iPhone and GMail/Google Apps accounts has been, thus far, disappointing. I’ve seen timeouts connecting to the GMail IMAP server, and I’ve seen new messages not appear in the refreshed IMAP message list that do appear in the web interface. I honestly don’t know what blame lies with the Mail application versus Google (or even AT&T).

Its worth nothing that, for the past several years, I have preferred the GMail web interface to any desktop client offering. I understand that many would disagree with me on this. Its not that I don’t appreciate the benefits of a native desktop app, its just that I believe Google has done an exceptionally good job of making a very good email client, and they’ve managed to do it within the constraints of the web browser.

I expected this to be different on the iPhone, but it wasn’t. It didn’t take me long to bookmark the GMail web interface on the iPhone, and it didn’t take me much longer to find a great GMail site-specific browser (GMate Mail) for the iPhone. The iPhone-optimized GMail webapp is great on the iPhone! Honestly, the only weaknesses are that I can’t get notification of new messages using only the webapp, and that I haven’t yet found a way to set the GMail webapp as my default mail application. (I would love to hear about apps or ways around these minor limitations.) The GMail web interface never ceases to impress me.

First Impressions: Syncing

I am not a MobileMe subscriber. But I used iTunes’ ability to sync Google Contacts with both my Mac and my iPhone. My Google Contacts data had a bunch of duplicates and outdated info. That aside, the syncing process works very well. As a Mac user who, until now, has had low-end cell phones, I have never before had a cell phone address book that I could synchronize with my email address book. I am very, very pleased about finally having this.

First Impressions: App Store

As luck would have it, my credit card information changed since last time I purchased anything through the iTunes store, so I had to update that. Unfortunately, when I would enter my Discover card information iTunes would tell me that “credit card processing was temporarily unavailable”. The error message made it sound like a site-wide problem with taking any credit card orders. I first encountered this last evening, and I encountered it again this morning. I’m sure the iTunes store is under unusually heavy load with the iPhone release, but I couldn’t quite believe that credit card processing was universally unavailable for so long. So, I tried my Visa card and that worked. I have no idea if the problem is specific to Discover cards, or just my Discover card. But that was frustrating. It was particularly annoying that I couldn’t download free apps until I figured out how to get around this.

My impression of the App Store itself is that there are so many apps its impossible to find what I’m looking for unless I already knew what I wanted. I’ve heard this advice before, but I’ll reiterate it: I don’t think any iPhone app developer can expect to sell or give away an app without independently promoting it. If a developer just submits an app to the store, it will be nothing other than one app among many thousands.

The process of downloading an app through iTunes and installing it on the phone was seamless (beyond the credit card processing issue). I have not tried to use the App Store directly from the phone.

Apps I Downloaded

I downloaded these iPhone apps:

GMate Mail: GMate Mail is a GMail site-specific browser that allows you to easily switch between GMail accounts. It seems to work very well. I wish it could become the default mail application, and get notifications of new messages. But its nice and its well worth the price to get quick access to my auxiliary GMail accounts. In addition, I had occasion to send a support question and got a response very quickly; I was very impressed.

FileMagnet: This is a great little desktop/iPhone app combination that lets you copy documents (in various common formats) from your Mac to your iPhone so that you can read them on your iPhone. Its very slick! Honestly, I’m a little surprised that Apple didn’t build this functionality into the iPhone with iTunes.

Google: This app provides voice-based Google searching. It also provides links to various Google applications. It provides one set of links for an “@gmail.com” account and another for a Google Apps account. But you are limited to one account for each account type. You can think of this aspect of the app as simply a pre-defined set of bookmarks to Google applications. Its useful and free.

Tweetie: I haven’t spent much time with this yet, but its a nice simple Twitter client. I’m fairly new to the Twitter fad, and I’m therefore a very light user of Twitter. But the app is useful. (I have tried the Mac version of Tweetie as well, but tend to just use the browser when on a desktop.)

Rowmote Pro: An awesome remote control for FrontRow and Hulu Desktop.

MLB.com At Bat Lite: Gives you baseball schedules, scores, and team standings. Cool.

UDID: Allows you to send the UDID of the phone to an email address. The UDID is a serial number-like string. If you have occasion to need an app from the App Store that is not yet available to the public, you need this.

Where’s my car?: I haven’t yet had occasion to use this, but its goal is to help you remember where you park your car. I’m embarrassingly certain that I will find this useful.

Final Thoughts

Even including when I’ve purchased computers, I haven’t been so excited by an electronics purchase in a long, long time.

• I think the new iPhone, combined with the new iPhone OS, absolutely rocks. I’m trying to decide whether to buy one; I currently have an old T-Mobile phone.
• Snow Leopard at $29 is a great value.
• The new MacBook Pro line is also a great value.
• I realize existing iPhone owners are angry they can’t buy new iPhones for the subsidized prices that non-contract holders can. But honestly, I’d have been shocked if that wasn’t the case.

All in all, I think the keynote announcements were spectacular!