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6 Reasons Why I Switched to an iPhone After 7 Years on Android
1. Better Hardware – the build quality of Apple is better than any other phone, irrespective of OS. Period. 2. Fragmentation – just give me stock Android, dammit! And stop the bloatware. HTC Sense was particularly bad (and the battery life was horrendous… which brings me to my next point) 3. Battery life – it’s just better. Integrated hardware & software gives Apple the advantage of being able to optimize battery life. 4. Google now has excellent iOS apps – except Google Voice. My life is on Google, and finally I can function on iOS fully (including Calendar push/pull, contact syncing, Google Drive, etc.) The only thing I miss is…
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The Holy Grail of Mobile Payments
Long before Foursquare or even Dodgeball was a gleam in Dennis Crowley’s eye, there existed a number of real-time, location-based networks that dwarfed Foursquare in size. They continue to thrive today. Who are they, you ask? Why none other than
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Tethered Thunderbolt Faster Than My Office DSL
I love my new Thunderbolt Android phone on Verizon’s network. It’s a battery hog, but I’ve managed to tease out almost a full day’s usage with judicious battery management. The best thing, though, is Verizon’s 4G LTE network, which kicks ass. I just moved into new office space in downtown SF, and we have AT&T’s DSL here. We’ll probably get a new provider soon, though, because the Internet speeds suck. As an experiment I’m tethering my Thunderbolt to my laptop today, and after a quick speed test it’s clear that my tethered Thunderbolt kicks my office DSL’s ass: Office Internet Speed This is actually much better than average, maybe because…
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What’s Your Real Twitter Cred? – A Better Metric
People who propose a count of followers or followees on Twitter as a meaningful measure of a user's "authority" are completely missing the mark. Twitter is a social, interactive tool, so to measure influence properly we need a more appropriate metric. In this post I detail what those measures should look like and why they're so much better at describing influence.
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Can Tipjoy Make Micropayments Into Megabucks?
I’ve been interested in the micropayment space for a long time now. I think it’s a promising market, and one that is just waiting to be addressed well. A while back I discovered a service called Tipjoy, which started as a Y Combinator funded project. I liked it the first time I saw it, and I like it even more now. The most recent development from them is a tight integration with Twitter which lets people use a syntax similar to Twitter’s direct message function to send payments to other Twitter users. For example: p @peter $0.25 because he finds cool new websites This would create a promise of paying…
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Twitter Transparency
I’ve been working on a post talking about the challenges that Twitter has faced lately and why I think they’re on shaky ground these days, but before I get a chance to finish it and post it here I figured I’d link to a post on the Twitter blog where they answer a number of technical questions that people (notably TechCrunch) have been asking them. I give them kudos for addressing these questions publicly and for permitting transparency into their operations and technical challenges. As I see it, however, they’re still not out of the woods yet, even if I (and most of the Twittersphere) am pulling for them in…
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A Short-Lived Affair
There are few tech things I love more than my dear, sweet Blackberry (recent crashing issues notwithstanding), but one thing that comes close is Twitter. So what could be better than something which marries the two? In an attempt to do just that I downloaded Twitterberry the other day to test it as a client on my Blackberry. Unfortunately, I found it to be a great concept but poorly executed. It contrasts starkly with the fluid, effortless UI of the Blackberry. My chief complaint is that it’s too difficult to see updates from your friends when using Twitterberry. The screen defaults to an input screen where you can enter tweets,…
