Jared W. Smith

I’ve been fortunate enough to test the TweetDeck User Streams Preview in a private beta over the last month, which enables TweetDeck to display a constant flow of Tweets, unencumbered by API rate limiting, in true real time. Last week User Streams entered public beta, and if you haven’t tried it, do it. Real-time Twitter is something Twitter veterans haven’t seen since May of 2008, and a vast majority of Twitter users have never really experienced it (unless they were among the few to turn on SMS updates for everybody). While this isn’t honest-to-God Twitter over XMPP (though the Streaming API will make such an application possible once more), this isn’t a bad alternative. Give it a try and let me know if you are overwhelmed — I know I was at first (I follow over 1700 people and bots on Twitter).

A little over four years after its initial launch, it’s interesting to read Paul Thurrott’s initial impressions of the original iPhone. Some reservations, like the virtual keyboard, in the end weren’t a hindrance. AT&T most definitely is, though. Fun read.

Apparently I should be thankful that I should have to worry about supporting Internet Explorer 6, because unless this is a forgery (and I have reason to believe it isn’t), Internet Explorer 2 is alive and well. My question is: Who in their right mind is running a so-horribly-unpatched version of Windows NT on the live Internet?

Could OpenOffice.org be in trouble at the hands of Oracle? I’m willing to bet they probably won’t put as many resources behind it as Sun once did, but I also don’t count out the open source community in keeping up maintenance of a very widely-used package. In open source, where there’s a will, there’s at least five open ways (and vigorous debate about which one is best). While Google Docs is my daily driver as far as word processing and spreadsheets go (primarily because Gmail makes it effortless to go between the two), OpenOffice has proven to be a solid complement, especially for presentations.

I’m not quite sure how advantageous the new Gmail push notifications are for iPhone given just how lousy iPhone notifications are, not to mention that Google Sync via Exchange is a more complete experience. The only potential advantage to the push notification method is better battery life, though given the volume of e-mail I receive in a day, push anything usually takes a pretty quick toll. And, frankly, I only want notifications for high-priority events; a selective implementation would make more sense, not one that blasts every single message at me.

Google Wave proper may be dying, but I’m fully convinced that the tech will live on, both in the open source community and in other Google products. I’ll miss Wave — while it indeed wasn’t something I used often, my ReadWriteWeb colleagues and I thought it had a bright future as a collaborative live-blogging platform (and there may be some wisdom in speculating it could resurface as such a tool in the future). In the end, Wave failed to quickly answer the question “what is this for and why should I use it?” which unfortunately in an era of social service glut is a question it needed to answer to have any hope of mainstream adoption. Its poor performance (you really needed to use bleeding-edge builds of Chrome to get the most fluid experience — IE? Forget it) sealed the deal.

Blue Ion‘s recent launch of a site for Tryon Plaza in Charlotte is very notable in one aspect their blog post doesn’t cover — it uses HTML5 (and not just the doctype — there are actual HTML5 tags at work here). I’d been debating on how much I’d want to use HTML5 in future projects both for ReadWriteWeb (where I have been using the doctype on new projects) and for future revisions of this very blog. If HTML5 (with IE support via the HTML5 shiv JavaScript) is good enough for a quality shop like Blue Ion, it’s good enough for me. ;) Developers, how are you using HTML5 in production projects (if at all)?

The new Facebook stuff is pretty cool (I’ve already rolled out Like buttons on each ReadWriteWeb article), but I cannot get the Mark Zuckerberg-as-Faceborg-King metaphor out of my head. Their intent is to be the underpinning of the social Web via their implants (erm, plugins) that will enhance our Web experience. I’m just waiting for a pseudo-cybernetic Sir Patrick Stewart to show up as Facebook’s spokesperson, that’s all.