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2 Great things that suck together: iPhone and MobileMe

There are many many things I love about my iPhone. They are too great to list here so I won’t… but I do want to bring up how the combination of two great things combine to make them both SUCK.

First, Ringtones. I love these things. I love being able to make them myself in a variety of ways (check out my recent post on the many ways to do so). Consequently, I have over 15 Ringtones that are assigned to different people. It is fun and it lets me know who is calling me before I even look at the phone… which is especially great if I’m handsfree on a walk or a bike ride.

Second, MobileMe syncing. It’s also pretty great. It syncs my contact list (and my calendar) with the “cloud” and then to my iPhone and back to my computer. I LOVE not having to sync every day and could never go back to manually syncing with my computer (even though just that is far more than most people can or will ever do with their cell phones… but they should!).

THE PROBLEM IS THIS: Sometimes MobileMe seems to just erase all of the contacts on my iPhone. It’s temporary so I don’t freak out. Just yesterday I was listening to a voicemail and when I switched over to recent calls they were just a bunch of numbers instead of the names… meaning that I’d lost all of my contacts. Since this has happened several times before and they always come back, I didn’t worry too much about it and just postponed any phone calls I was about to make. This by itself is no big deal to me. I understand that glitches happen. But this one is starting to really get on my nerves because….

See, the BIGGER problem is that when this MobileMe glitch happens it also deletes any and all ringtone assignments that I’ve made. All of my custom ringtones stop playing when my friend calls and I’m forced to re-assign them one by one… a process that takes several minutes when you’re using about 20 of them! It seems to me that the ringtone assignment should be a field that is stored in the MobileMe AddressBook database rather than only in the iPhone. This way when the glitch happens the ringtone assignments will be saved along with all of my even-more-important phone numbers and email addresses!

Or they could just fix MobileMe. Ah, but now I ask too much?

Are you having this problem too? Let the world know with your comment!

justin

A great new social community

Everyone knows Facebook and MySpace. Before that, some of us used Friendster and AOL chat rooms or Yahoo member boards. When we think back on how the social aspect of digital media has changed us… some of us yearn for more personal interaction. Sure, Facebook is great for keeping in touch with old friends from high school or inviting people to your dinner party… but the potential for social media goes so much deeper than that.

Imagine you were just diagnosed with cancer. Yeah, worse than the recent financial news, I know. Now imagine what your first actions would be. You might cry, scream or look deeply inward for a while… but chances are the next thing you’d want is information. You’d crave connection and comfort in the knowledge that other people have and continue to go through the same thing you are. You’d probably call your uncle, mother or friend who has already battled it and you’d surely spend hours on google to get more information.

Now imagine there was one place you could go for all of that. Think of it like a niche Facebook. It doesn’t have millions of users and you’re not going to get tons of spam from it but it does have a very focused goal: to help you survive. The numerous and growing number of users at Surviving Cancer Whole share their stories, ask questions and provide insight to whoever needs it. They also have established themselves as a place to get crucial news stories about Surviving Cancer that you’ll want to keep up with.

They have a new blog to accompany the website which you should subscribe to… and if you’re a survivor or current patient you’re questions and/or answers will prove valuable not only to you, but the others in the community.

It’s beyond Facebook and Web 2.0. It’s Web 3.0: Niche social networking at its best! So if you or anyone else you know would be interested in this community, click on over and check it out!

justin

A Blockbuster piece by The Onion: TV

Way back in college, I discovered the genius of The Onion when I picked up a free rag in the student union (rag = old school paper news thing). Since then, I’ve visited their website, subscribed to their podcast, and now watch their videos online like a TV show. Now I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t even have a print version anymore.

That, by itself, is a great example of the sea change in the way people consume media. Much of it is exclusively online… and the social interaction we’ve come to enjoy around it provides a richer experience (for the still few who choose to participate in blogs, comments and twitter-like stuff) than ever before in the days of, say, going to the store and renting a movie. Sure, you might bump into your friend down the street while at the store, but now you get a recommendation from a friend in another country without even having to ASK them! How cool is that?

Anyway, those of us who find comfort in never having to actually talk to people in person will love this Onion video about Blockbuster-as-relic:


Historic �Blockbuster� Store Offers Glimpse Of How Movies Were Rented In The Past

Great Social networks to check out

Well guess what? Facebook is what it is and probably will stay what they are for more and more people: a place for friends to cast their net a little wider with each other and stay in looser contact with more people. Myspace was just a free-for-all that got too big too fast (plus it’s slow and annoying).

but now… you’ve got social networks that are getting super-specific and/or super-simple…

yelp.com seems like a review site but really it’s a social network for foodies!

tribe.net needs less ads everywhere but it caters to free thinkers and group based interaction.

last.fm would be too much like pandora.com (both awesome music listening sites) but it’s actually a social network (not to mention an amazing marketing tool for the record industry)

And in the super-simple category:
twitter.com
unfortunately, only the cognoscenti seem to know about twitter and I’m not friends with many of them so my feed is pretty sparse and nobody reads my tweets… but I see the potential and wish I had more use for it. So if you read this and you use twitter, sign up to follow me, “justinsail”

The point being that we’re still quickly finding new ways to cast our net wider and it is utterly fascinating if you ask me!

justin

by the way, there is a business use for twitter too.

Gmail gets IMAP… it’s all over now folks.

preface: This post is a bit old by now, but I just discovered I’d posted it to the wrong blog on accident. So here it is… still VERY relevant, just not timely!

Thank you, Google. You’ve just turned what was a really good email
account into an amazing one… perhaps the holy grail of email…
Let’s consider…

It’s free.

It’s fast.

It’s huge. Not unlimited, but more than most people need. and growing.

It’s got a great web interface that works with all types of computers.

It’s searchable. (duh, it’s Google)

It’s got good spam filtering.

It allows the use of other email addresses, like for your own domain
name.
… and if you want, you can set it up AS your domain name instead of
gmail.com!

Integrated chat, labels, starring and threading, among other goodies.

It’s got POP access. Free POP access.

and now… drum roll… Gmail has IMAP!!!

Now, for those of you who are less of a geek than me, just know that
IMAP is better. WAY better if you ever check your email from multiple
places. Two computers? no problem, IMAP keeps your mailboxes, all of
them, in sync. Need webmail when you’re travelling? Cool, your
changes, deletions, organization, sent messages will all appear
naturally on your Mail program when you get home! Once it’s set up,
you’ll never have to delete a message twice again. You’ll never have
to BCC yourself just to have access to your email somewhere else.

Lots of paid email hosts still don’t offer IMAP. It puts greater
demand on the server but duh, as email users put greater demand on
their email…. and begin to carry it around in their pocket… this
is the way things will be moving… and thanks to Google for seeing
that!

Market share for browsers, operating systems and search engines

So apple is officially at 6.81% marketshare. Not sure why this particular place is the end-all authority, but these are some interesting numbers….

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=10

Windows XP   78.37% 
 View Trend Windows Vista   9.19% 
 View Trend MacIntel   3.59% 
 View Trend Mac OS   3.22% 
 View Trend Windows 2000   2.97% 
 View Trend Windows 98   0.76% 
 View Trend Windows NT   0.63% 
 View Trend Linux   0.57% 
 View Trend Windows ME   0.43% 
 View Trend iPhone   0.09% 
 View Trend Windows CE   0.06% 
 View Trend Hiptop   0.02% 
 View Trend Windows 95   0.02% 
 View Trend Web TV   0.01% 
 View Trend PLAYSTATION 3   0.01% 
 View Trend Unknown   0.01% 
 View Trend PSP   0.01% 
 View Trend iPod   0.01% 
 View Trend SunOS   0.01% 
 View Trend Nintendo Wii   0.01% 

PS: experimenting with a cut-and-past of an online table with some funky leopard/mail embedding thing going on… hopefully the table looks good on your end (i.e. the same as it does in the link)