Gmail recently launched a Gmail mobile application (not to be confused with the mobile browser version located at http://m.gmail.com). This app is super fast and has most of the features you have come to love in Gmail (e.g. converstions, auto address complete, etc.). I am using it on a BlackBerry Pearl. A full list of supported devices is here.

This post and the one before it stem from a post I read this morning by Charlie O’Donnell about the future of the calendaring industry. While Charlie raised many important points, I was struck by the quote below:

I hardly know anyone who uses any calendar other than one their job forced them to… and less than half of the Outlook users I know put personal items on their work calendar. (italics mine)

We have different identities based on the various relationships we have. And software isn’t designed to help us easily maintain these identities. It is painfully evident in the calendaring space but is a problem in many areas of digital life.

I have a Google calendar that tracks my birthdays, social engagements, doctors appointments, Browns games, and other goings ons about town. I will have a work calendar when I start my new job in a few weeks that will be dominated by meetings (and my secretary). And never the twain shall meet. This is primarily due to the fact that the existing software can’t easily handle the problems of trust levels and interoperabilty. It can be done, but not seamlessly.

I face the same bifurcation issue with email. In a few weeks I will have a new work email address to add to the host of personal addresses I maintain. Again, the software isn’t up to the challenge of easily handling correspondance with various constituencies from one interface. I want the work address and boilerplate to be used when I contact a client or a colleague. I want my personal address to be used when I contact a friend. And I don’t want to have to manually adjust these settings with each message.

When it comes to this blog, I feel the push and pull of these competing parts of my life. There are stories I would tell, thoughts I would share, if not for the fact that this blog is in the words of Stephen Dunn, “open on all sides, in cahoots with thin air.” Setting up a second blog would only make thebifurcation more permanent. I want to present a public blog and filter certain posts for friends and family. I am sure I can set up some sort of pass protected site, but no blog software has made it easy as far as I can tell.

I guess in the end, I want technology that works the way I do (and, I surmise, we all do). I may be asking too much, but any company that can create software that changes identities - seamlessly - depending on the relationship involved, will come out on top.

My phone recently had an accident involving water. I waited for several days and, much to my surprise, after it dried out it began working again… Almost. A few of the buttons are difficult to press and battery saver is no longer relaible. While I have insurance and can get a new phone for $50 dollars or so, I was hoping to invoke the warranty. It’s been dry for months. There was no way they could tell it had encountered water right?

Wrong. Without knowing that I had dropped it in water, my friend opened the back, took one look and said, “Did you drop this puppy in water?” I looked at him, amazed, and confirmed that I had. He pointed to a red dot on the inside of my phone and explained that the dot had been white when I got the phone and only turns red when it comes in contact with water. Flipping over the battery exposed a second one of these red dots.

Tricky Verizon. Very Tricky. (actually almost all providers now use this detection system).

Before and after photo below:

This is downright awesome. Quickmuse holds what they refer to as Agons where two poets are given a passage and are given 15 minutes to right a poem. Their keystrokes are captured in real time so you can literally watch them as they write the poem - every thought that hits the page, every edit, every deletion.

Robert Pinsky and Julianna Baggott were asked to write poems in reaction to the following passage:

“He was an intellectual. He used to read novels, poetry, history, stuff like that. And he could hold a conversation with almost anybody on all kinds of things…. He was real sensitive. But he had this destructive streak in him that was something else…. [H]e used to talk a lot about political shit and he loved to put a motherfucker on, play dumb to what was happening and then zap the sucker. He used to especially like to do this to white people.”

–Miles Davis on Charlie Parker

Watch Pinksy craft the poem or see the finished version.

Other Agons include Paul Muldoon vs. Thylias Moss and Jonathan Galassi vs. Marge Piercy. All battles are archived on the site.

I am sure most of you already know, but an agon is the Greek term for “debate” or “contest” and both tragedies and comedies had formal agons in which the central idea of the drama was debated.

Interesting article on MovieBeam, a new service backed by Disney, Intel and Cisco. MovieBeam is a set top box that stores 100 movies at a time for your viewing pleasure. You pay for only what you watch and there are no monthly fees. What fascinates me is how they get the movies onto the box. According to the NewYork Times:

This wireless movie-delivery feature gives MovieBeam its name. The company doesn’t require an Internet connection or even a computer. Nor does the service depend on what cable or satellite setup you have, if any. How, then, can it send enormous, multigigabyte movies to MovieBeam owners nationwide?

Answer: Very cleverly. MovieBeam’s movies are encoded in the broadcast signal of PBS stations across the country. You’re actually receiving MovieBeam’s movies at this very moment — but they’re invisible unless you have the MovieBeam box. (MovieBeam pays PBS for these piggybacking rights.)

I didn’t even know you could do that!

This service doesn’t seem to solve the problems I raised here, but perhaps it is a step in the right direction. (via LJ)

Skype is allowing Skype-to-phone calls in the U.S. and Canada for free until the end of the year. Interesting.

I can’t take it anymore. Used to be when I got ready to leave the house I had a simple routine:

Wallet? Check. Keys? Check. Let’s ride.

Now, my routine approximates the flight check preceeding the take-off of a Boeing 747.

Wallet? Check. Keys? Check. Phone? Check. iPod? Check. Digital Camera? Check. Camera Charger? iPod Charger? Phone Charger? Check. Check. Check.

When did these extra gadgets (and their incompatible power sources) become indispensable to my way of life? Wasn’t wireless’ promise, in the end, supposed to be an untethered existence? Yet here I am, more connected to my gadgets and less connected to the world I live in and the people I live with.

Flashback to my time in Baltimore. I went over a year without a cellphone (or a home phone for that matter). My friends reflect on that time with pure awe? How did anyone reach you? How did you make plans? Making plans was difficult. No doubt. But not for the reasons you might imagine. See. People don’t make plans anymore. Or rather I should say, people only make plans to make plans. A typical “plan” goes something like this:

Hey whatcha doin’ later?

Don’t know. Chillin’. You?

Same?

Want to get into something?

Sounds good. Whatcha thinking?

Dunno. Maybe go see this flick. Maybe grab a beer.

Cool. Give me a shout later?

Cool.

Those aren’t plans. That is one person naming some activities and another person saying that if he hasn’t found anything better to do he will commit later when you call and ask him again. You should have seen the look on my friends faces when I tried to make real plans in my phone-less days. It was akin to the look claustrophobic people get when you put them in a closet.

Hey, want to get together later tonight?

Sounds cool. What’d you have in mind?

Movie? Drinks? Just want to hang out.

Yeah man, call me later and… (digusted sigh)… why don’t you get a damn cell phone!

Let’s meet up at O’Sheas at 8:00.

I… um…

Well, I’ll be there at 8:00. If you can make it drop by. If not no worries.

Ok… Cool.

The “I… Um” was my friend’s realization that if he committed he couldn’t back out if something better came along. Backing out would leave me sitting at a bar all by my lonesome (truth be told, I have been left alone in worse places than a bar).

When did we move from making plans to evaluating options like a day trader? Can we go back?
Though I love my iPod, it presents a similar problem. Have we become so bored (or boring) that we can’t walk to the bodega without a soundtrack? The iPod could, in time, represent the end of meeting strangers or overhearing interesting conversations. It could spell the end of chance run-ins and right place right time coincidences. All because we have earbuds where our earholes should be.

The senses are connected and when we have loud music in our ears, we litteraly see less. How many times have I seen a friend who says, “I walked past you yesterday on Houston and said hello, but then I saw you had your earplugs in”? What might have happened had we stopped and chatted. What untold fun (or trouble) might I have gotten into had it not been for “iPod etiquette” which says that if a person has earbuds in they mustn’t be interrupted?

A few weeks ago I would have argued that my camera had no bad side-effects. I found myself wanting to walk instead of taking the train. I was seeing more. Every turned corner was an opportunity for a once in a lifetime shot. The details jumped out at me. I was seeing things in my everyday environ that had gone unnoticed for months or years. Has that building always had that beautiful trim? Look at the way that awning hangs… just so. But then I realized. I was living through a lens. I wasn’t experiencing life. I was capturing it. Did I think that by doing so I could live it later?

So, can I become untethered from these machines and someone reconnect with people? I took my first step yesterday when I called Verizon and asked them to turn off the text-message feature on my phone so that I could not send or receive text messages. A small gesture to be sure, but the beginning of a personal revolt I suspect. Why text-messaging? I don’t like that we, as a people, have gotten so efficient that even talking on the phone has become innefficient. Now, we communicate without sound (in part, I suspect, because voice communication would require us to remove the earbuds from our ears).

If I do go totally untethered, will there be anything left to experience if everyone else noiselessly goes through life, earbuds firmly rooted, fingers busily doing the work that used to be assigned to the larynyx?

I just might have to see for myself. I am betting the world will be as interesting as I remember.

Update: Mike over at TechDirt points to an interesting article entitled “Is mobile entertainment empowering or imprisoning — or both?” over at Post-Gazette. I also enjoyed Mark Cuban’s post “The End of Boredom”.

I am interested to hear mroe about this deal. Yahoo’s MyWeb2.0 seemed to have most of the functionality that del.icio.us had and it had the added benefit of saving a cached copy of the web page - a feature that del.icio.us was sorely lacking.

I wonder if they bought it for the brand or if del.icio.us has something on the inside that the average user is not aware of (besides a ton of data). I do hope that they consolidate the two services.

I am becoming a bigger and bigger fan of Yahoo as they acquire some of the web’s most useful services - del.icio.us, flickr, upcoming.

Update:

I just realized that almost no one is using Yahoo’s MyWeb2.0 (what an awful name). As of today, the entire service only has 459,842 pages and 110,620 tags. I just misplaced the stats for del.icio.us but they tower over that. So, Yahoo wasn’t only buying data, they were buying users.

Rumour has it that Google will be launching a calendar program as early as December 6th.

The url http://calendar.google.com/ is live but points to the Google homepage right now. Typically when they activate a new sub-domain it indicates that a new service is imminent.

I’ll be interested to see how they do. Gmail and Google maps were absolute genius. Google Reader and Google Base… no so much.

Update: As of the 11th the site is still not live. Oh well.

This week’s award for most useless value proposition goes to Podtrac, which claims to “enable podcast advertising and measurement by expertly giving podcasters and advertisers all the essentials they need.”

Update: I am not saying that Podtrac offers a useless service, only that their website copywriters could use some help spelling out the value of the service.