RobNeville.net

There are two reasons I haven’t pulled the trigger on a 3G iPhone. The new phone is almost perfect. The first reason has to do with a lack of support for an external keyboard of any kind. I believe that this phone could replace taking a laptop 90% of the time for me with the addition of a keyboard. I believe apple did this on purpose to avoid cannibalizing sales of MacBook Air.

The bigger reason though has to do with the epic failure of Mobile Me to live up to the promise. And no, I’m not referring to the dismal performance of the service (did the Twitter guys write this thing?). No, when I first read about it, I looked at pictures like the one to the left and descriptions of what the service was supposed to achieve and I made a very basic assumption about how it was going to work. That assumption has proved to be very wrong.

When I read the descriptions and look at that diagram what I see is that Mobile Me is supposed to be an aggregator. In other words, it should pull data from MS Exchange servers, my mac at home, my iPhone, whatever and then push it out to everything else. But in reality, Mobile Me is a node, a repository, not an aggregator. It passively waits for someone to push data to it. This is wrong. Why do I need a program running on my windows desktop to poll the exchange server for data and push it to mobile me? If my iTouch can connect directly to my exchange server, then why can’t mobile me connect directly to my exchange server? The connectivity to different data stores whether they be calendars, lotus notes servers, exhange servers, or pop email servers should all be happening from within mobile me. Then, mobile me needs to be the publisher of this information to my devices that want to subscribe.

Oh well. Maybe next version.

On a side note, I also find it amusing that I’ve never been able to get Mail.app to successfully connect to my corporate Exhange server. However, with the latest iPhone/iTouch software…my iTouch DOES connect to my company exchange server. What the heck is up with that??

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I’ve just posted a new page here listing the details of my faithful ol’ Jeep that I’m selling. Have a look. If you know anybody interested in the Carolinas area, please direct them here. It’s a good deal with a lot of extras. She’s ready to hit the trails immediately!

StumbleRead is very close to what I wrote about earlier when I outlined how I’d redesign the user interface for FriendFeed.

You put your nickname and FF key and voila…on the left you’ve got a Google Reader style listing of FF items that you can go through using keyboard shortcuts that work just like Google Reader. When I brought the idea up earlier, it brought some heat from some bloggers that were concerned about losing advertising revenues by siphoning off too much of the user experience from their website. StumbleRead has solved this problem by loading up the original website on the right-hand frame of the browser window.

It looks like it’s also attempting to keep track of which items have been read already. I don’t know how persistent that “read” mark is, but I doubt it keeps track of that between sessions.

Still missing some key elements. I don’t like that it loads the underlying site without asking…some of the sites load too slow. I also still see the same problem of conversation threads that I don’t care about continually bubbling to the top of the heap because some random person has hit the “like it” link.

We’re getting there.