Emily Chang, Pete Cashmore and the Download Squad all talked about xFruits months ago, but it seems pertinent to bring it up again now that there’s been some pickup of Dave’s River of News meme.
Interestingly, you can either run your own rivers without relying on Dave to offer the content or set up your own at xFruits, as John Walker suggests.
Heck, while we’re on the topic of decent mobile sites, I’ll point out a few other destinations I frequent on my Blackberry:
A Flickr set gem, this collection of 85 posters puts modern pharmaceutical art to shame and serves as a great design and inspiration resource.
Wow. Ma.gnolia is so rockin’ lately.
I mean, I’m biased, but that’s ok.
I have a longer post coming soon that I’ve been saving up, but I wanted to get this out ASAP so all you folks out there with del.icio.us tools can port your apps to work with my favorite social bookmarking service…
Why now?
Because Ma.gnolia now supports the del.icio.us API. Oh yes. Check it out. And let crew know what you think!
Alex Bosworth has some great pointers on building web APIs. We’ve been advising many of our clients on building out or planning APIs for their products and this advice is very much in line with our advice (we’re also partial to OpenID and microformats).
Oh, and if you forget your API or microformats at the door, Sebastian has developed a way retrofit your site with microformats using Dapper. How cool!
In Valleywag style, here are events that you should go to (though no, sorry, they’re not all Valley-centric):
Turns out that Adobe has been storing up a bunch of links on del.icio.us. Also seems like they’ve got a recent hankerin’ for microformats. Howzem apples?
Via Lifehacker.
Now instead of relying on individual bloggers to email-update enabled their blogs, co.mments will take care of the work for you — on any blog! Ever want to get follow-up notifications on responses to comments you’ve left on someone’s blog? Or just wanted to find out about new activity on a given blog post? Well, now you can. Via email.
Those upstart folks at Performancing have released a version of their blog editor that works with MySpace. This is also apparently one of the first add-ons using their own PFF extension system.
“We have a serious problem. Whenever I try to pitch Linux to anyone under 30, the question I get is: ‘Will it work with my iPod?,” he said. “We are not yet as a community making the painful compromises need to achieve widespread desktop market share. Until we do, we will get locked out of more hardware.”
Who said it? None other than Cathedral and Bazaar author Eric Raymond. He continues with a warning that the up-and-coming iPod generation [doesn’t] care about our notions of doctrinal purity and that they want their tools and gadgets to just work.
This is something that Firefox enthusiasts must take to heart, for what Raymond is talking about with regards to becoming the 64-bit desktop also applies to our dearly beloved open source browser.
The reality is that most people don’t care (or even know) what browser they’re using. In fact, as IE7 and Safari continue to improve, Firefox 2 is stagnating as a viable commercial product. The harsh truth is that once IE7 is pushed down the auto-update pipes, most people will no longer be incented to try Firefox since IE will once again be just good enough. It won’t matter whether they’re double-clicking the Blue E, a compass or some cute fox as long as they end up on MySpace.
If Firefox wants to continue its upward swing, it needs to continue to innovate and make things faster, easier, simpler and a better overall experience than its competitors. To date, Firefox 2 isn’t offering anything that wows me like something from an Apple product announcement (obviously heavy on the visuals, but stuff like CoreAnimation still rocks for devs). Until the community can answer Raymond’s warning, he may once again be foretelling the future.
Had dinner with Felix from Plazes the other night — always good dining company. An exciting recent development for them: looks like they’ve also publicly launched Plazer for Mobile! Now if only they supported the Blackberry… c’mon guys, Google’s doing it! Why can’t you?
Factory Joe 