Heres a few reasons why I won’t think it will succeed, at least in killing other services out there.  Please note these things are immediate first impressions, not prolonged use:

1. Its not a Twitter killer – Twitter succeeds because its deals with signal vs. noise in a unique way.  By forcing tweets to be less than 140 characters, only the important information is included.  Buzz doesn’t have this limit, imagine all the people you follow on Twitter into Buzz.  The amount of content produced and shown (especially since the current UI shows comments by default) will be astronomical.  Buzz has yet to show how it is going to deal with signal v noise.
2. Its not a Facebook killer – Buzz is all about publishing with sharing tacked on, Facebook is about sharing with publishing tacked on.  The walled garden of Facebook for better or for worse puts users into a sense of security.  Buzz is public by default, Facebook is private by default (despite Facebooks stupid privacy changes), this alone changes how people use it.
3. Google sucks at social and content generation – Don’t get me wrong, I love Google and their idiosyncrasies.  But it has to be said, Google sucks at social, and anything Google has done with regards to content generation sucks (rather than aggregation of other media which it is great at).
4. It’s not a Wave killer – People are under the misconception that Wave is the awful interface that was meant to replace email.  It’s not.  Wave is an underlying server structure that deals with a lot of current issues with synchronous communication and data breakdowns.  Buzz may actually be built on top of Wave, but again probably not, as Buzz (at least at this stage) doesn’t have functionality that needs OT and federation support.
5. No API – The “API” for Buzz at the moment is nothing more than a nested RSS feed (each profile has an RSS feed, and each story has an RSS feed of comments).  Nothing new here.  Twitter succeeded by having a rich API that people could applications that made sense out of the stream of data.  Any application could have Twitter as an output, whether for notifications, awareness, or another medium to publish on.  Any service like this: you need multiple ways to get data in and get data out.
6. Its stuck in Gmail – I love gmail, I use it everyday…from the comfort of Mail.app.  As far as I’m concerned there are 2 people that use the web interface for Gmail (apart from everyone using it from a public machine such as in a netcafe) – people who are web browsers fanatics, and people who don’t know how to hook their Gmail up to something like Outlook or Mail.  Web fanatics are those who already have a Blog, already using Twitter every 30 seconds, already running Disqus and already using Tumblr.  These people aren’t going to abandon an existing infrastructure that already have critical mass for something that only a limited amount of people will see.  For those using Gmail because they don’t know any better, chances are they aren’t going to post much because they aren’t going to grok it.

If anything, Buzz is much more likely to kill news sites such as Engadget, Blogger, and anything where there is rich content generation.  Buzz is essentially just a decentralised Blog recentralised inside Gmail.

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The screen sharing infinite loop

An interesting issue that I encountered when working on 2 macs at the same time. Stupidly I didn’t close 1 set of screen sharing before I opened the other. Unfortunately I couldn’t take a screenshot, as the computer was having a hard time keeping up with the infinite redraws.

The coolest thing was that a growl notification popped up as it was happening, so the notification went down the tunnel in a really really nice animation. I wish I had a phone which would take movies! *curses iPhone*

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http://www.hawkwings.net/2007/03/01/a-faster-way-to-speed-up-mailapp/

My mail sql db only went down a few meg, but the speed is phenomenal, running as fast as when it was first installed.

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Disable Gmail Spam Filtering

If you are a regular user of both Gmail and a desktop email client, then no doubt you have run (even if you have not realised) into the issue of Gmail catching legitimate email as spam.  While this isn’t such a big deal if you are using the web interface, it is a nightmare for users of email clients such as Mail or Outlook – where your junk folder is not normally visible.  With the release of Google Apps for businesses, this can become a very very bad thing, when suddenly you start missing critical emails.  Whats worse, is that Google doesn’t provide an option to disable spam filtering, even for Google Apps.  However, there is a work-around, and while quite silly, its easy as to implement.

• Log into the web interface on Gmail / Google Apps Email
• Click settings in the top right hand corner
• Click the Filters tab in the settings
• Create a new filter
• In the “Has the words” field, enter “is:spam” (without quotations) and click next step
• Ignore the ridiculous and untrue popup message
• Check “Never send to spam”
• You should now see that in your filters if a message is tagged with “is:spam”, then it is never sent to the junk folder

And its done – completely silly, but it works.  Now you will never miss an email again (even those hundreds of Viagra ads, so be warned).  The only big pain with this is if you are hosting a lot of Google Apps users, you need each user to manually do this, rather than having it system wide.

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Apple iPhone * 4?

Jason at ZDNet has just released a rumor discussing the possibility of the next iPhone containing a 4 core processor.  While he does talk about pure processing power, there real benefit would be the much better ability to perform and support multitasking .  Essentially, this would mean developers (including Apple themselves) would have much more power to perform functions apart from the application running at the time.  Essentially, this implementation would greatly improve the chances of getting copy/paste, quick switching, and most importantly services/applications/notifications running in the background.  Initially it would seem to be purely about processing power, but it would allow the architecture to better support features iPhone fan-boys have been ranting about since its first release.

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Modbook Pro!!

Axiotron Modbook

This is one technology that I’ve always wanted, but there has always been two issues: the price, and the lack of touch interaction.  While the price hasn’t really improved ($4.998 US for the base model), they have finally figured out how to allow both finger and stylus touch at the same time:

“The Modbook Pro employs revolutionary new Synergy™ Touch technology developed by Axiotron. Synergy Touch adds touch in support of pen-based input. Unlike any other touchscreen computer, the Modbook Pro’s Synergy technology enables pen and touch input simultaneously.”, Axiotron

While the machine looks ‘nice’, its a long way from the standard of the Unibody design of the MBP, and its a little gut-wrenching that the mod involves the holocaust of so many design hours of Unibody’ness.  I think I will wait until Apple officially releases one or the Modbook starts incorporating the Unibody (ha ha ha ha sigh).

Daylite Touch

Marketcircle Daylite Touch

Easily the best iPhone/iTouch application released at Macworld, especially for those productive type people who are on the move.  Rather than providing a dodgy bridge between an online calendar, or providing some fancy yet completely overkill GTD application, Daylite Touch bypasses all the stuffing around in favor of an application that does it all.  While not released yet, Marketcircle promises that it will provide a simple way to sync and display notifications, to do lists, calendars, project management data and notes in an easy to use application.  Syncing will apparently work seamlessly regardless of connection, and most importantly provides the ability see colleagues calendars and delegate / share information effortlessly (take that copy and paste advocates).  Will it actually work as promised?  Who knows, who really cares, at least its making progress towards the killer iPhone app.

TechRestore Matte Screen Mod for 15′ MBP

Well, its probably not the preferred option, but at least its now affordable and available.  For $199 USD, TechRestore will replace your Macbooks mirror with an actual LCD monitor that you can see without squinting.  From the TechRestore website:

“What this service includes: Replacement of the super glossy, super shiny LCD screen on your MacBook Pro with a matte finish, non-glossy screen. We also remove the shiny glass cover on your MacBook Pro and replace it with a black bezel that surrounds the matte finish screen. ” – TechRestore

Sounds quite decent, although I would definitely be waiting to see some reviews just in case they are replacing it with some dodgy screen.  

Slingbox

The Slingbox Pro HD - Slingbox

I should forward this section by saying that I don’t care.  It doesn’t mean I don’t want to care, it means that I can’t.  That’s what you get for voting for a government that is apparently going to fix the Internets, and when it comes to the crunch makes the country broke and has a democratic republic pissing contest with China.  Anyway, Slingbox is a product that is relatively popular in the US, which allows a user to view their media from a remote location.  This media might be their movie collection, music collection, or even live streaming of a paid content provider (such as Foxtel in Australia).  There were two big advancements at Macworld, The Slingbox Pro – HD which evolves the system to allow streaming of HD content, and the SlingPlayer for iPhone, which will allow your Slingbox to stream directly to your iPhone.  This is a fantastic technology, which surely will be very popular in countries where the Internet isn’t a joke.  One day Australians might even be able to try out this kind of thing, without going bankrupt in the process.

iTunes DRM Free Music

iTunes is now providing DRM free music.  Pretty obvious advantages, usual Apple limitations.  Unfortunately they are not offering any songs in lossless format still, so buying and ripping CD’s is still the way to go for audiophiles.

Macbook Pro 17′

MBP 17's bare ass - blakespot@Flickr

Yeah yeah, its a Macbook Pro Unibody, been there, seen that.  The most interesting thing though, is the inclusion of a non-replaceable battery.  Not interesting that its not replaceable, but interesting about the large amount of whining about it.  I may have missed the email, but apparently power points are an extremely difficult thing to find these days.  My argument is if it takes you more than 8 hours (Apples battery time estimates, so about 40 minutes in the real world) to find a power point: your an idiot and won’t be able to afford this stupidly expensive machine with your Centrelink cheque anyway  ($9500+ AUD for the max’d model).  The only real issue that the non-replaceable battery is that for some reason it also means that you can’t replace the hard drive or memory easily (1 step forwards 2 steps back).

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