There is a lot of discussion going on about the Kindle at the moment. This is this new “e-book” reader from Amazon. You can carry round zillions of books in your pocket and buy books when you are on the move (and read them instantly). And it only costs $400.

Who do Amazon think are going to buy this thing? It is being marketted as if it is suitable for non-geeks. There are lines in the promotional video like ”no need to have a computer” etc. But Amazon have just really missed the point here I think. Books are good technology. They are doing really well, and they have done for a long time. However simple they can make the interface it is never going to be as simple as opening a book. And it’s going to be more expensive.

And I don’t know about you but I tend to only read one book at once. Why the hell would I want to carry around so many at once? At first I thought the situation was that this device fixed a problem that didn’t exist. Books are after all good as they are. But I think now after reading some more about it I don’t think that it even does fix this imaginary problem. Reading is still going to be awkward with this fancy electronic ink screen and it will just not be the same as the reading that everyone is useful.

I can’t see a single reason why anyone would buy this device when you could buy an Eee Pc for the same price. It just makes absolutely no sense.

I’ve just seen this great comment from Zack on my Hotmail Closure (Part 1) article. I thought it was worth posting about.

Zack writes:

aswell many of these chain letters state that there are only 578 names left. Consider this:

Your email address can be anywhere from 1-64 characters in length.
in your email address, you can have anything from a-z,
0-9, preiods(.), hyphens(-) and underscores (_) thats a total of 38 possibilities for EVERY 64 characters in your email address.
that means that there are 64^38 (2 760 698 530 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000) possible email addresses.

now for the funny part:

the worlds population is only 6 602 244 175 (as of july, 2007)
that would mean in order for there to be ONLY 578 names left…. every single person on this planet would need to have:
4 181 454 786 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 email addresses….

I think Zack’s analysis only covers email address of 64 chracters. Since you can have email addresses of anywhere between 1 and 64 characters there are even more possibilities. But the point is very well made. Hotmail is not running out of email addresses.

I will not be going to Facebook.com again for some time. The iPhone version of Facebook is great to use in any version (see it here) but I think it is better suited to a smaller screen. Hence it works perfectly as a widget. You can browse, post, change your status, check your inbox etc. And you don’t see any of the new application shit. It is simply marvellous. Ad free for the moment too.

Flickr is to become Yahoo’s only online photo service when they kill off Yahoo! Photos in less than two months time. This can only be great news for Flickr users as it shows Yahoo focusing more of their efforts on Flickr. As I said with the release of Flickr’s new web uploader Flickr is looking like a really complete photo site experience. There is nothing else quite like it on the internet. With video coming to Flickr soon it is important that it is dealt with in the right way… and with more people working on it there is more chance this will happen.

I wonder if the price of Flickr will increase and/or the amount of videos you can upload will be at all limited. Hmmm.

Flickr have released an amazing new web uploader which doesn’t seem to have got much coverage in the Tech world. It seems to be flash based but it works super smoothly…

Gone are the days of selecting the images one at a time from the web uploader; you can just select a bunch of photos at once and they will zing onto Flickr in no time. The progress is indicated to you in a really snazzy way and once they are uploaded you have lots of options of what to do with them in a much improved post-upload interface.

Credit to the Flickr team for this update. It is much appreciated and I think it irons out the only kink left in Flickr’s solid photo sharing offering. When you look at the smoothness of this uploader and their AJAX organiser you can’t help thinking that Zooomr are headed for Techcrunch’s deadpool anytime soon.

Facebook just released their new applications product. And it is quite simply amazing. Facebook has become the first well implemented web based operating system. No one has any reason at all to leave Facebook now… everything can be done through it’s new platform.

It’s incredible.

Today Facebook have launched Facebook Mobile. The extra functionality is broken down into three sections - you can browse Facebook on your phone, you can upload content to Facebook on your phone and you can get text updates and send text updates to Facebook. I am only interested in the latter.

So what does this text service offer? Well you can search Facebook users, and get there info I assume delivered to you by text. And you can write on people’s walls, send people messages, poke people… etc. On January 7th I said that I thought that Facebook could do with acquiring Twitter or at least making use of some of their ideas on this Flickr Photo. And now it looks like that is what they have done.

The actual functionality of Twitter - sending you updates on what your contacts are doing - seems to be missing for now. I don’t think there is any sort of automatic message sending out - it only sends you messages to requests that you have made. But it is hard to tell without using the service which is something I am not doing anytime soon. I do know though that a feature where everytime a friend updated their status you got it on your phone (i.e. Twitter) would go down amazingly well among students.

Facebook Commands:

Twitter Commands:

If it is not there right now - it would be a great addition. And I am sure it will come.

Techmeme is completely jammed! Take a look at this snapshot of the page. The discussion on the iPhone is all over it.

And over on Technorati where the top tags and searches are:

And if you glance at Digg you can’t help but notice the most digged story ever with nearly 15,000 diggs and more than 1000 comments:

And also that the iPhone occupies 6 of the top 10 stories on Digg:

And on Reddit it is number 1 with more than 600 votes:

And finally from Newsvine we see this:

Wow.

The site that was set to offer live audio streaming of the upcoming Macworld Keynote already seems to have fallen offline. World Of Apple seems to be showing a “Server Not Found” message right now. And it is just 51 minutes until the keynote…

Update: Can now get the Favicon. Not the site though. Better use Mac Rumors Live instead.

I have terminated the Google Adsense adverts that used to run to the right hand side of this blog, and have replaced them with some Text Link Ads. You will notice that there is just one link there right now, but this is because of the way that Text Link Ads works. Sponsors actually have to buy the space on your blog. So it does take a while to build up revenue.

I will let you know how the campaign progresses - this is me optimising my blog for once, something you can expect to happen around January every year, as that is when I have to pay my hosting bill. If you think that you would like to join Text Link Ads because of reading this post then you can click on the links below. Choosing the affiliate link will benefit me, and this site through the Text Link Ads affiliate scheme, at no cost at all to you.

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