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The Last Podcast

Opinionated Web 2.0 News and Commentary

To Pay or Not to Pay for iPhone Apps?July 2

Here is an exceedingly dumb article from the Time Magazine website. You might want to read it in all its glory, but I will just give you the last paragraph:

If Apple ever does decide to let all iPhone apps be free, it would be a radical departure from its typical way of doing business. To switch to an ad-supported model, it would have to partner with a company that already has a huge inventory of interactive ads. Google would be the most obvious choice, but the search giant is already poised to be Apple’s top rival in the mobile arena once its Android handsets go on sale this fall. Such an alliance might be a little too close for comfort.

So - dear Time writer – in the time you researched this article, where did you miss the part where developers could chose the price of their iPhone apps (including FREE!)?

Technorati tags: iphone 3g, apple, time

Twitter Ain’t Worth Anything Right NowJuly 2

Silicon Alley Insider argued that Twitter might be worth over a billion dollars in a year. Sure – and I might be worth over a billion dollars by the end of this year as well…

Let’s face it – Twitter hasn’t worked at all lately. Every time you want to log in, it kicks you back the Fail Whale, a white page, or if you are really lucky, your login page – just don’t expect the next page to load up.

More and more folks are moving away from Twitter over to Friendfeed now. Some people are still holding on, arguing that all their followers are worth oh so much to them… But those followers are worth absolutely nothing right now, because Twitter simply doesn’t work anymore.

I give Twitter another week or two – after that, I think it will have reached its point of no return…

Moving Along and Posting on RWWJune 24

As some of you might have noticed already, updates here have been a bit sparse lately. There is a good reason for that. After a whirlwind of activity last week, I started posting on ReadWriteWeb today and officially joined the most dangerous profession of all.

This will keep me busy and off the streets for a while. My responsibility over at RWW is to post news and reviews during the weekday mornings and with doing my graduate work during the afternoons, my spare time has suddenly become a bit more limited (in a very good way!).

While my friend Steven Hodson has been saying that I would sooner or later start writing for one of the bigger blogs, I didn’t really think that was going to happen, and I sure didn’t think it was a blog I respect as much as ReadWriteWeb. However, when I saw that ReadWriteWeb’s editor Richard MacManus post saying that they were looking for writers last Monday, I jumped on the chance and send him my application. The rest, as the old cliche says, is history.

One of the greatest things about RWW is that I get to work with great bloggers like Richard MacManus, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Sarah Perez, Alex Iskold, Bernard Lunn, and Corvida. Everybody over at RWW has been extremely supportive as I stumble with RWW’s publishing system and try to adapt to the RWW style of doing things. With Marshall also being here in Portland, I guess RWW is now indeed a bit of a Portland blog as some have been pointing out.

This is definitely a case of turning your hobby in a job – and even though that can often be dangerous, I can already see how the crew over at RWW will keep me grounded and provide a great support network.

So what’s next for the Last Podcast?

Things will be a bit quiet here over the next few weeks. Once I get into a bit more of a rhythm, I will start posting here more often again. As RWW has a very specific focus as to what kind of news and reviews I will post there, there will be plenty of material left for me to write about. Also, as I focus on news and reviews there, all my rants will still appear here for the foreseeable future.

Until then, my future looks something like this (just kidding!):

GPS Will Turn Us All Into IdiotsJune 19

According to a bunch of so called experts interviewed by ABC News, using a GPS will make you dumb and will herald the end of human communication (or at least our ability to ask for and give directions):

“There is a social function of being lost,” Slavin said. “And that social function of being lost will itself be lost. Think about how many times in the last month or so you have asked somebody for directions, or somebody has asked you for directions. That bit of social communication, in which a stranger and native meet at some point, will slowly ebb away. The question is: Will we feel ourselves to be natives everywhere, or to be strangers everywhere?”

But soon, people may not need to have any sense of direction whatsoever. The GPS on the iPhone allows a person to search for a type of place, such as a Chinese restaurant, eliminating search time for places people don’t yet know exist, but also ending that human impulse to explore.

These arguments are so ludicrous, they are almost not worth discussing, but the

Feedly: Bring Your Feeds HomeJune 17

(Hat tip to Louis Gray for bringing this service to my attention)

After a long phase of private alpha testing, Edwin Khodabakchian today released an open beta of Feedly, a “more social and magazine-like start page for Firefox 3.” It’s release is, it would seem, timed perfectly in synch with the release of the final version of Firefox 3 tomorrow.

What Does It (and Doesn’t It) Do?

At its most basic core, Feedly is an RSS reader that lives locally in your Firefox browser as an extension (sorry – no other browsers are supported at this time). As its tag line promises, this feed reader functionality is implemented in a very stylish, magazine like layout by default. If you wish to do so, however, you can switch to a more traditional full-feed or summary view of your feeds, as well as an image only mode. Just like in Google Reader, you can skip forward and backwards using the now standard ‘j’ and ‘k’ k