Happy New Year!

Back in LA for a few days...

Spent the morning with my laptop at Panera Bread, still the best source of free nationwide WiFi and french toast bagels!

Finally got around to making a few tweaks to my blog. I added a Shelfari bookshelf, and a Flixster badge. Shelfari is nice. My friend Mike recently left Microsoft to work there. I like the way they let you customize the bookshelf, and hope they continue to make it even more customizable.

Flixster, on the other hand, is hideous. It's heavy on the advertising, and is highly tailored to MySpace and Bebo (read: 12 year old) crowd. I started using both apps on Facebook to keep track of what I'm reading/watching, share with friends, and discover new reads/films. Flixster fills up my profile's news feed with all sorts of crap about friends taking quizes rather than information about what movies I've watched. The blog badge is animated, and cycles through 20 "recent" movies showing only one at a time. Horrid.

I also recently ditched Bloglines for Google Reader, and will never go back. It's much better than the first time I tried Reader before their major revamp, and it's much better than the recent Bloglines Beta. Offline reading support through Google Gears seems promising but useless until it supports images (who wants to read blogs without inline images??).

Here's a nifty little device I stumbled upon recently that geotags photos right on the SD card -- no sync/software required. Definitely wanna ditch my PhotoTrackr for a Photo Finder, but then again, how long until it's all built into mainstream cameras? 1 year? 2?

Finally, it seems Windows Live Messenger might get support to talk to AIM and Gtalk soon! That'd be a dream come true -- one IM client to serve them all!!

That's all for now. Need to blog more soon on life in general, the startup, etc. Off to New York City in a few days for New Years. Yay.

&& GTalk !<3 AIM?! :-(

Cool to see Google and AOL working together so that Gmail users can now IM AIM users. I personally prefer not to chat from the web page where I read my email, so I really hope Google Talk also gets this feature soon.

Two years ago, I had 4 IM clients installed on every PC. When Microsoft and Yahoo decided to partner, I was able to ditch YIM and knock the total down to 3. Hopefully soon, I'll finally be able to kick AIM to the curb as well.

It seems like every new version of AIM is more poorly designed, bloated, and unstable than the previous version. Most recently, the latest release of AIM completely screwed up my new laptop, and apparently it's been a widespread problem for people who run with UAC turned off.

I don't mind so much having both Windows Live Messenger and Google Talk running at the same time. They're both pretty solid, and are good for different things. WLM is featureful -- supports tablet ink, folder sharing by replication, and a bunch of other neat things. Gtalk is incredibly fast and lightweight -- almost everything's a single click away. I'd love to have a client that supported the best of both worlds, and interoperability between the two, but sadly, I suspect that's not likely to happen any time soon. ;)