Ben Brooks has some thoughts on Readability that I found fascinating. I’m just not sold on “free” services anymore and their net benefit. I found myself nodding along with what he was writing.
However, Marco Arment released an update to the Instapaper bookmarklet today and I stumbled upon it even before he announced it. Much better.
Seth Godin’s latest manifesto was rejected from the iBookstore because he had links to Amazon within the pages of the book.
While I am sympathetic to what he says, I think there are many differences between the “traditional bookstore” and what he is running into at the moment.
Also not mentioned is whether a book would get rejected from other e-bookstores if they had explicit links to competitors. Here are some other general thoughts about his entire predicament:
Is Apple wrong here? It’s probably leaning toward probably, but there are always problems in trying to draw direct lines between the physical world and the electronic one. Yes, we would all love it if we could do whatever we want wherever we want and people would just let us do it … and to an extent Apple is! You can load that ePub into iBooks simply by clicking a link on a website, and in many ways it is easier to do that than find something in the iBookstore.
Right now EVERYONE is trying to see how much control they can keep on their independent stores and trying to lessen the number of people you need to interact with in order to get in front of people, but that also means that some traditional roles are being mashed together.
In this case we see bookstore and publisher get smashed into one and it is causing people some headaches. With the App Store Apple mashed together the software publisher and big box retailer. As we consolidate in this way, the method of control (the publishing level) is being moved closer to the customer so we hear about it more.
No one likes seeing sausage being made.
UPDATE: Brian Ford has some thoughts about this whole thing over at Me & Her and I found it enlightening. Sounds like laziness to me.
I’m beginning a long process of trying to move away from as many Google services as I can. Here is what I am now using:
I was lucky enough to stumble upon their offering right around the time I was really looking to move my personal and business email accounts elsewhere and they fit the bill. I can host many different domains from the same account, take care of forwarding accounts, and a lot more.
They offer ActiveSync and IMAP (which were requirements) and a lot more that I don’t use. So far besides some growing pains with the new service they have been working very well. Support has been great and I have even had the pleasure of talking with a real human being so far.
Would recommend.
I was going to switch everything over to MobileMe, but Apple changed everything again and now I’m working with iCloud.
I keep my personal, business, and work calendars within iCloud and sync everything between my MacBook Pro, iPhone, and iPad. Along with that I share calendars with my wife. I’ve never had any issues, plus it is now free.
I do the same thing with my contacts and it works the same way. I’ve never had any issues and I hope they don’t now show up.
Sadly, this is the one place where I will probably not be able to get away. While DuckDuckGo has worked pretty well, the lack of image search and the slowness of the queries really is hard to swallow. There are things that I like, and it is really clean and infinite scrolling can be nice, but the deficiencies are enough to likely push me back to Google.
Is there anyone else that can just give me a forwarding number for free?
In closing, I’ve been relatively successful so far in moving away from Google’s other services, but there are areas where they really excel (and search is the main one). I’ll keep looking, but right now I’m happy that my email, calendar, and contacts have now been moved away.
One thing I will never understand is the need to announce when you are “leaving” something. I know I’ve done it in the past, but I need to stop … and everyone does.
I’m not sure why it has become a common practice to spend time writing up a treatise about why you are leaving a platform/OS/technology for something newer/shinier/ different, but it is depressing.
One really cool thing about technology is that we have choice. It is not just a choice of what we use but a choice to also move onto other things if our interest wane or our needs change.
That’s really cool.
It has not stopped us from still searching out the unicorns in our technology lives. That one magical thing that will forever fix everything that is wrong … be it productivity, popularity, speed, etc.
Then this morning I wake up to Mark Boulton’s Snark and more of the same. More attacking. More complaining. More entitlement. A sad state of affairs.
A little bit of “nice” could go a long way.
The title has no hint of sarcasm, honestly.
The Mobile IE team just posted a follow-up to their decision to implement a subset of Webkit’s vendor prefixes and it is nothing but good news:
After hearing the community’s feedback on this issue (and a couple of face-palms when we realized the broader implications of implementing other browser vendors’ CSS properties), we’ve decided that it’s best to only implement the -ms- prefixed version and not the -webkit- one.
That is music to my ears. Good job Microsoft, I applaud you.