You might not have even heard of FriendFeed before yesterday’s announcement that Facebook had bought it. Nonetheless, it’s a pretty big deal for us rockstar bloggers — if you don’t consider yourself a rockstar blogger please move along now.

Of course I’m kidding — read on and see what the all fuss is about…

FriendFeed was my first experience with what social media experts call a lifestream — an extremely ghey-tarded moniker for the evolution of longform blogging. The idea is that if you’re active on a bunch of different sites like Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter, etc. you can use FriendFeed as a central hub to collect your goings-on at those different places.

Crucial for me was the FriendFeed widget — it looks like this:

An even better version of the widget currently lives used to live at www.andrewcurrie.ca — my domain for the past ten years. I’ve been blogging here at WordPress.com since 2006 and honestly didn’t know what to do with my old home page, but FriendFeed brought it back from the dead and gave this blog a run for its money. That is, until yesterday’s news.

It’s a definite coup for Facebook, as that social network definitely needs a better search engine if nothing else. But for FriendFeed fans it’s a different story, as the future of their social network is very unclear. In fact, the best we could get is this rather empty promise from one of FriendFeed’s founders:

Obviously I can’t provide a lot of detailed plans and guarantees, but I can tell you that I’ll do my personal best to ensure that the FriendFeed users and community are treated right. I love this product too, and don’t want to see it disappear.

So what’s a rockstar blogger to do?

A lot of FriendFeed refugees are heading over to use another service called Posterous. I’ve just started using it myself and can only describe it as the opposite of FriendFeed — whereas the latter acts as an inbox for your breadcrumbs scattered all over the web, Posterous sends content to multiple sights and services automatically from a single point.

I’ll have more to say as I get up to speed with Posterous. It may end up being an interim solution for something more like FriendFeed, but as for FriendFeed itself I’m moving on.

What I’ll miss:

• The widget!
• The mobile site — as far as I know Posterous doesn’t have one.
• Autoposting to Twitter et al from Google Reader for Mobiles on Opera Mini — sharing worthy links is a big part of what I do on the internets, and the killer combo of Google Reader for Mobiles and Opera Mini saved me from the bookmarklet kludge for Opera Mini that Dennis Bournique tried to teach me (and I still don’t quite get).

And not so much:

• The friends — I did subscribe to a few notable users but really, I was only there for the widget.
• (and speaking of virtual friends) Robert Scoble, specifically — this consummate early adopter and influencer was from the start a champion and community-builder for FriendFeed; unfortunately his ignorance and arrogance on at least one topic make me wonder how much forethought goes into some of the stuff he writes.

Last night I handed over my 2007-vintage BlackBook to my sister in law, whose IBM ThinkPad has been compromised — most probably by her kids clicking on banner ads.

Though this is the last version of Apple’s consumer portable to have FireWire (and target disk mode) built-in, it has become too cumbersome for me to cart around and has been replaced by a diminutive Asus Eee PC running Linux.

What I’ll miss:

• That it was generally a stable product, probably because I kept OS X Tiger on it and never went near Leoptard.
• (oddly enough) iSync – though not unique to this particular machine, I did store all my PIM data here. I’ve since moved on to a “cloud-based” PIM 2.0 app, but through all my trials of Nokia smartphones iSync never let me down.
  

And not so much:

• The heft – in this day and age, this thing was just too big to carry around comfortably. That fugly briefcase I had didn’t help much either.
• The glossy screen – it looked great in the store and terrible everywhere else.
• The fan – it seemed to kick in at full blast for no apparent reason and was annoyingly loud when it did.
• Paying an extra $200 CAD to get it in black. That was dumb.
  

Loyal readers know I’m no fan of Apple’s iPhone, mostly because its many fanboys and girls are blissfully ignorant of other smartphones and what they can do. The iPhone’s YouTube Player, in particular, is surprisingly bad when compared to the premiere YouTube app for S60, emTube.

emTube Search

Start up the emTube app and you’ll be greeted with a nice clean interface, allowing you to see the top-rated and most viewed videos on the site, or search for something more specific — in this case a little submission of my own from last summer’s iPhone launch in this country.

emTube Results

And here’s where emTube puts Apple to shame: I can view the streamed video using an available connection or I can download it to my handset for playback anywhere else. The saved file is optimized for the resolution of my handset — in the case of my E71, 320 x 240 pixels. Click here to see an archived copy, and download the associated file to see how much better it would look on my phone!

emTube Fail

But all is not well in world of emTube. The trouble started when the developer went MIA sometime last year — not a huge issue as copies of the last-known release are widely available on Nokia’s MOSH.

But now it seems our beloved YouTube app has stopped working entirely. You can still search for videos but try to view or save them and you’ll get the error message shown above. And judging from the cries for help on the Howard Forums this issue affects S60 handsets and users worldwide.

Thankfully there are alternatives, the easiest of which is to visit YouTube’s mobile portal on the built-in S60 web browser. Clicking on any of the videos will launch the on-board install of (ugh) RealPlayer, with predictably awful results. And of course there’s no way to save the video to your phone, although you can at least save a link to the specific video stream.

CorePlayer YouTube Interface

I chose instead to purchase an app called CorePlayer. At $30 USD it ain’t cheap, but it does support a wider array of video codecs, including my personal favourite.

New to the latest release is an integrated YouTube player. It took me a while to find it; this app was originally built for touchscreens, and the UI for devices without one is fairly bewildering.

CorePlayer YouTube Options

There are certainly a lot of options, though. And it’s here in the specific settings for YouTube streaming that I may have found an answer to why emTube no longer works. Choosing FLV (Flash video) or H.264 (QuickTime) as a file handling protocol yields the same error I get with emTube. Only Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) delivers the goods, so it seems that the folks at Google are the ones responsible for this mess — though why they’d want to deny a superior YouTube experience to the world’s most popular smartphone OS is beyond me.

If you’re wondering, CorePlayer’s RTSP video looks nowhere near as nice as FLV or QuickTime, but it’s at least better than RealPlayer’s ghastly solution. For now it will have to do. Rest in peace, emTube, you will be missed…

I still remember the first time I saw a Fido handset. It was some kind of Ericsson, pre-dating the T18z but with a similar design, with an integrated belt clip built into the hardware. Like most Ericsson handsets of the day it was very European and classy, but then Sony bought out their handset business. And while market share increased, that elusive cachet was largely gone.

It’s the same story with Fido; back in the days when Rogers was still a TDMA network, Fido was GSM all the way, and carried the first dual-band handsets that could be used in Europe and parts of Asia.

But then our government inexplicably allowed Rogers to buy a controlling stake in Fido, effectively creating a monopoly on GSM service in this country. For the past few years Fido has languished, with Rogers getting most of the premium handsets for their own portfolio and tossing a bone or two Fido’s way.

As of today Fido has a new logo, and there can be no mistake about its place in the Rogers empire — as Koodo is to Telus and Solo is to Bell, Fido has officially been re-branded as the poor cousin to the “premium” Rogers Wireless.

But it’s not all bad news: To effectively compete in the bottom end of the market Fido has done away with the roundly-criticized System Access Fee, and while their handset lineup will continue to be, well… craptacular, the killer feature of the removable SIM chip — enabling the use of unlocked phones — remains intact.

Though I’m clearly a mobile elitist I’ll be staying loyal to Fido for the foreseeable future — I’m locked in to a pretty damn awesome calling plan and a best-that-can-be-expected-for-Canada deal on data. Still, it does suck that Fido isn’t cool anymore…

What I’ll miss:

• The exclusive handsets, especially my hiptop;
• The European-flavoured ads, courtesy of Fido’s Montreal-based agency;
• Being the envy of fellow Canadian travellers to Europe and Asia.

And not so much:

• The System Access Fee, obviously;
• The small, largely urban calling area before Rogers took over.

What I’ll most remember:

• Driving home from the family cottage and re-acquiring a digital signal just north of Orangeville, Ontario — letting me know I was back in civilization.

Talk about bad timing… Last Friday morning I fired off an email to one of the show’s producers pitching myself as a guest — little did I know that The Lab with Leo had already been cancelled.

As lame as it sounds, The Lab and its predecessor Call for Help have been my dinner date most nights for the past couple of years. And despite the usual suspects phoning in because they can’t check their email or their pirated copy of Windows won’t boot on a ten year-old computer, the show is — sorry, was — actually quite informative. It taught this n00b everything he needed to know about Windows before diving into XP and the WinMo (and subsequently deciding that he liked his Macs better).

The roster of regular in-house guests was impressive, from security expert Steve Gibson to digital photography guru Ray Maxwell. In fact, the only element missing from the show was a dedicated segment on mobile phones. Given that I screen-tested for another Techtv show a few years back I thought I might at least have a chance but alas, it’s too late. Now I’m stuck watching reruns of The Simpsons or, god forbid, the xenophobic fear-mongering that the six o’clock news has become…

What I’ll miss:

1. Everything I ever needed to know about Windows.
2. Similarly useful info about Macs as well.

And not so much:

1. Stupid callers. Lots of them.
2. Fat guys and golf shirts as far as the eye could see. Whether intended or not, every single episode sent a strong subliminal message to its viewers to step away from their computers and go shopping or to the gym.

And good riddance!

As of this President’s Family Day our friends in the US and A will no longer have nationwide analog cellular service, and “me too” Canada will likely follow suit.

For those of you too young to remember, it’s worth reflecting on just how far mobile technology has progressed in just over a decade. Pardon me while I adjust my bifocals and lean back in my rocking chair…

My first-ever handset was an extravagant birthday gift that ended up being more of a burden than anything else. Even though it was a Nokia (I can’t for the life of me remember the model number) I never used it thanks to Bell Mobility’s prohibitive airtime costs, yet after it was stolen, replaced and then recovered I somehow ended up with two!

Sometime in 1999 I upgraded to the RAZR of its day, the Moto StarTAC seen here. Its bleeding-edge features included a two-line LED screen and a (more or less) unbendable antenna. But by that summer I was trialling my first CDMA phone with Bell, then moved quickly over to clearNET before settling down with Fido and GSM in early 2000.

I did have to endure Bell Mobility’s AMPS network a few more times, though — on tour in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, at the family cottage, and anywhere else Fido hadn’t rolled out their network to yet. For these occasions I strapped a montrous analog sled onto the back of my trusty Nokia 5190, thereby giving up all rights to text messaging and call display.

What I’ll miss: The cheap thrill of reacquiring a digital signal just north of Orangeville on Highway 10, letting me know I was on my way back to civilization.

And not so much: Just about everything else.

Mr. Leo Timbol, proud new New Beetle owner

Pictured above with yours truly is Mr. Leo Timbol, who I’ve known for over a decade. He used to work in the apartment complex where I used to live, and his wife is now among the army of caregivers working their asses off for my mother.

Today I handed over to him the keys to my New Beetle, #47,844 off the line in 1998, the model’s first year of production. Oh, and in case you were wondering, Leo didn’t buy my car — I gave it to him.

Everyone I tell this to can’t believe it, but for me it’s quite logical: He needs a car, and I have a car that I no longer need. Easy fix, right? Sure, I could sell it, and probably even walk away with a decent chunk of change. But I’d never know who would ultimately end up driving it, and rather than run the risk of my former ride falling into the hands of some posh uptown Super Sweet 16 type I can forever take satisfaction in knowing that I’ve done a good deed.

What I’ll miss:

1. That unmistakable thunk that every VW makes when you slam the door, trunk or hood. Just makes you feel, well… Safe.
2. Those indigo and red interior lights. I never got tired of that. Ditto for the dashboard so deep and wide that you could serve Thanksgiving dinner on it!
3. The road trips, even though we never really got farther than a couple of hours away.
4. The occasional impromptu drag race pulling away from a fresh green light. I usually won.

And not so much:

1. The hole of a parking lot downstairs from my condo, and the abuse my poor Beetle suffered at the hands of drunken 905ers who couldn’t score any phone numbers in clubland.
2. Watching gas prices go higher and higher…
3. The manual transmission, but only when stuck going uphill in stop-and-go rush hour traffic.
4. “Hey, is that a real flower in your dashboard?”

I’m well aware that you can see the punchline for this coming from a mile away… Let’s just wait for it, shall we?

I purchased this Fantom Lightning during the last century, at the height of the bagless vacuum craze. One thing the TV ads failed to mention is that every time I opened up the thing to empty the canister half of the contents would rise up into a cloud of dust, then quickly fall to the ground for me to vacuum up all over again.

The on-board HEPA filter was similarly useless; in theory it turned this humble dirt-cleaning device into a makeshift air purifier — in practice replacement filters were impossible to find, and the one that came with got clogged up too fast to make any noticeable difference.

Oh, and about your patented “stair-hugger” design… Guess what? I don’t have any stairs.

We lasted almost a decade together, but I can’t say that I especially enjoyed the experience. Despite your supposedly compact size you were just as ungainly and prone to taking out drywall coming around corners as any other vacuum I’ve ever used. I’d go so far as to say the only positive thing to come out of this ownership experience is that I’ll no longer fall prey to overpriced vacuuming fads — I’m talking to you, James Dyson!

So farewell, Fantom [here it comes]… You really do suck.

DingedBerry

(The trouble started long before this unfortunate minor accident — a waist-high plummet to cold, hard pavement last month…)

Today I pause in memory of Canada’s mobile success story and the 8700-series handset that’s now sitting in my drawer. I might still be using it today if weren’t for PocketMac, absolutely the worst excuse for synchronization software that I’ve ever endured. And I’m not alone.

Admittedly we Apple snobs are spoiled by software that plays nice with the Mac’s many built-in resources, like the SyncML-compliant copy of iSync that comes pre-installed on every computer they sell. But PocketMac will have none of that, spreading a mountain of crud across my MacBook’s hard drive in order to work. And by “work” I mean nothing short of hard labour — it absolutely astonished me that my computer’s dual-core processors and fans would kick up to full speed while syncing calendars and contacts to a wireless PDA — you’d think I was plotting the trajectory of a moonshot, for chrissakes!

Not that the result was in any way worth the effort… After more than a week’s worth of un-undoable syncs I suddenly discovered that, unbeknownst to me, PocketMac had been quietly deleting phone numbers and email addresses from my contacts! It got so bad that soon I could only sync one-way to my BlackBerry, which as any good grammar student knows is not really “sync” at all.

Now I could pony up some cash and switch to the reportedly better Missing Sync for BlackBerry, but I shouldn’t have to on principle — PocketMac is, after all, RIM’s official sync client for Macintosh. And even with The Missing Sync there are still some shortcomings with the actual device when it’s not tethered to my Mac.

Let’s just say that Nokia has opened up my eyes to what a smartphone can be, and in comparison the BlackBerry diminishes in stature to a mere messaging device. The selection of available software for it is relatively thin when stacked up against what’s on offer for users of Symbian and Windows Mobile. Of course most people with BlackBerries don’t ever go beyond email, but me? As you can probably guess, I demand a little more.

And so I’ll be hanging on to my RIM stock, but bidding my actual Blackberry a curt “buh-bye”…

What I’ll miss:

1. The set it and forget it (almost) push email. Except for the software forcing you to top-post, this is honestly the best implementation of mobile email I’ve ever had the pleasure of using, hiptop included!
2. BlackBerry’s global inbox. Email from multiple accounts, text messages, even missed phone calls and message alerts, all lumped together in a searchable list — and everything older than 30 days is automatically deleted.
3. BlackBerry Maps. I can’t compare it to Nokia’s own mapping software as the latter is not compatible with my E61i, but I’ll bet it wouldn’t integrate with my address book like on the BlackBerry!

And not so much:

1. The disaster that is PocketMac. See above.
2. BlackBerry’s on-screen fonts. No matter which one I tried at whatever size I still felt like I was looking at a computer terminal in a public library in 1979.
3. The dearth of add-on apps. See above.
4. The web browser. Faster than the one on my hiptop but still pretty pokey.
5. Looking like every other tool on Bay Street when I had to whip it out to take a call or reply to a message.

Ted Rogers, this is all your fault!

It was with great sadness that I removed the $20/month unlimited hiptop data plan from my Fido account yesterday. I’ve relied on the Danger hiptop, both 1st and 2nd generation models, since January of 2005 — a record for me, as somebody recently pointed out that in the eight months that she’s known me I’ve burned through no less than three smartphones.

I remember the first time I saw the hiptop in my local Fido store… I didn’t quite get what it was all about, focusing instead on the bizarre external camera that plugged into the unit’s headphone jack — I’m still trying to figure that one out!

But when tri-band models were being cleared out I took the plunge, and the automatic over the air sync of my precious calendar, contacts, email and to-dos quickly won me over.

A scant few months later I was using the new and improved hiptop 2 and all was well, except when I travelled off-continent and had to shut off the data connection or risk bankruptcy from the hiptop’s persistent connection to the mobile internet and the data roaming charges that resulted.

By fall of 2006 I had reached the upper limits of what my calendar could hold. I was using Windows at the time and Fido offered a utility to sync my data to Outlook, but while it managed to free up my contacts for use on my regular computer it always choked on everything else. I started deleting my oldest events but quickly came to the horrible realization that I was erasing precious memories forever — how else could I possibly remember that I had banana pancakes at Fran’s from 12 to 1pm on July 25th, 2005?!

And then the killing blow… The CRTC in its infinite wisdom decided that it was perfectly all right for this country to have but one GSM operator, so they green-lit Rogers’ takeover of Fido. At that very moment Fido was testing the hiptop 3 for their network — but Rogers, offering no unlimited data plan of their own, quickly put an end to that business. There was a lot of speculation and even a letter-writing campaign, but the successor to Fido’s only data-centric device turned out to be little more than a cruel joke — the hollow carcass of a Nokia E61 without 3G or WiFi.

Around that time I had been toying with an HTC TyTN, but because Windows Mobile had clearly been beaten too many times with the ugly stick I pulled my hiptop out of retirement and popped my SIM card back into it. But it wasn’t the same. Data outages were growing ever more frequent now, and after being spoiled by the TyTN’s impressive HSDPA and UMTS speeds loading up a full HTML page on my hiptop seemed glacially slow.

The hiptop unlimited data plan is no longer listed as an option on Fido’s website. It will be grandfathered for current users, but since Fido no longer offers the hardware it seems likely that they’ll shut down the connection to Danger’s servers at some point in the future. It’s a real shame; in a lot of ways, the hiptop has been the best mobile phone I’ve ever had.

I’ll especially miss:

1. Paying only twenty bones a month for all the data I can eat!
2. Not having to sync anything to a desktop computer.
3. Dangling shit from it (see photo at top of post).
4. Watching eyes widen with interest anywhere I flipped open the hiptop’s screen to reveal the keyboard beneath.

But not so much:

1. Having to turn off the data connection when travelling.
2. The data outages when I wasn’t travelling.
3. Having to play a couple of levels of Breakout while waiting for a web page to load.
4. A few precious memories forever lost because I reached the limit of calendar events — even if they were only meals at restaurants!