I love the internet. If possible I want to be able to touch it all times. I want to be able to see a billboard, find it interesting, and plug the company's website into a hand held device and find out about them. I want to walk past a cool t-shirt, or other product and place an order right there, or at least post information about it to either an online to-do list or twitter or something. I want information at my fingertips 24/7. This doesn't mean I'll be using this information at all times, but the possibility so that when something comes up I can know the answer to what glycyrrhizin is. This is the information age after all.
One item that was announced Wednesday, will, I hope, promote this. September 5th at an Apple press conference, Apple announced some very interesting things that has the blogosphere buzzing. The big news is that the iPhone is now $200 less, but whatever, it's the price they pay as early adopters (update, jobs is a crafty bastard and is giving them $100 in store credit). The slightly less big new, but very interesting in my mind, is the release of the iPod Touch.
I love the concept of the touch because it has the two things that I need, wi-fi and an mp3 player. Apple goes even farther by adding a browser. Now of course you will tell me that the iPhone does all of this. But the iPhone only has 8gigs of music, where my computer has 40. Plus I don't have the money to upgrade my service plan to support the phone at $20 a month minimum.
The touch does everything I want, at least until I am brought back to reality. The touch has only 16 gigs, while my computer has 40, and my 3 year old iPod has 20. Plus what I really want wi-fi for is SSH, which Apple says won't happen, since there is no SDK. I also can't use flash on either the touch or the iPhone. O ya, the touch also doesn't support email or iChat or anything else besides a basic browser and Apple's music store.
Well you know what my solution to all of this? Ignore the huge gap in size between the touch and the Classic (what if I want 40, not 16 or 80 Apple? You guys suck) and buy the Classic. So last night at the opening of the new Los Gatos Apple Store, That's just what I did. I'll have a review of the Classic up sometime this weekend, I hope.
The other news that I want to mention is that Facebook is planning on opening it's entire directory to search engines. Why is this good? because now when someone types in your name into Google, if you deem it so in your security settings and you have a Facebook account, a very simple piece of information will present it self, your name, your picture, and the ability for the person to join Facebook and add you as a friend and/or message you. This is a genius marketing strategy, and will probably get many users onto Facebook. This will also, I hope, promote more Facebook users to pay close attention to their security settings, because the default ones are somewhat open. The cool thing about Facebook though is that you can very easily lock down your profile so that only people you approve can see anything about you.
Anyway, that's all for now. The blogosphere has been pretty active as of late, so much news I don't have time to write about it ;)
Hasta,
/Nat
p.s. I think the iPhone's a scam, but none the less Scoble's right. We need an SDK. If there were an SDK I would buy an iPod Touch in addition to my Classic (but I would not pay $100 for the SDK...).
p.s.s. It seems like I'm not the only one in this iPod predicament.