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Music + Technology + Random Nonsense from the Music Industry by Ethan Kaplan, VP Product, Live Nation

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Friendster founder on social networking: I invented this stuff [UPDATED] | Technology | Los Angeles Times

It’s telling that my “resurrect Friendster” movement I tried (update your old friendster profile) got nary a use on Twitter. If you invented it (you didn’t), make it better (you didn’t). At any rate, I updated my friendster profile for the first time in four years recently. Go me.

[From Friendster founder on social networking: I invented this stuff [UPDATED] | Technology | Los Angeles Times]

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Don’t come out with an app store if your device can’t support apps!

I’m looking at you DirectTV

I have two DirectTV HR21 DVR’s. DirecTV, reacting to the new trend of “app stores” decided to add this to the OS on this device. The feature is in beta, and has been since an update in June. The problem is, the HR21 is not suited to running “apps.” The screen resolution of its on-screen display is too low, the device is way way too slow and this “feature” is unusable and I suspect slowing the box down for other things.

It is a sad state of affairs that the device that is driving a 1080P HD display can display moving video in full 1080P, but can’t render on-screen displays that look any better than they did 5 years ago.

I love DirectTV, but every day the HR21 and their ilk (the high end of their equipment I may add) gets more and more long in the tooth. I wish DirectTV would focus on new set-top boxes rather than adding an app-store to a device that is not capable of driving any apps that are worth anything.

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Thoughts on the Palm Pre

I have a Palm Pre, and have been using it for a bit now and here are some random thoughts:

  • Why is this device being called an “iPhone killer”? THe iPhone is an Apple computer with a phone application and a cellular modem. The Palm Pre is a phone.
  • Multitasking is highly over-rated on this device. The device has a beautiful interface, and needs a much higher speed processor.
  • The keyboard is unusable. Seriously. I prefer soft keyboards.
  • The UI is really nice, but really slow and unresponsive. Multiple touches are necessary, and it doesn’t have the “finger feel” of an iPhone. No inherent tacticality (not a word, but it should be).
  • The music application is pretty interesting and has a nice visualization component with the album art, but the music skips at the slightest processor jump.

All in all: good first effort, but otherwise a failure of a phone. I await my MyTouch from T-Mobile, we’ll see how that one is.

Now, I think the Pre platform, and WebOS shows a huge amount of promise. I also think that Apple is missing the boat by not allowing more applications to participate in a multitasking system. They only allow the Phone, iPod and a few other background processes background tasking. I do understand the reasoning, but I think once they get the vetting of iPhone apps up to speed with some good tools, systems and beef up the SDK, they should allow people to select applications for “slots” as background tasks. That way a user has control of it (similar to how push notifications work) and we can still run apps in the background.

Competition is good, I just wish the competition was better in this case.