Donald Jenkins

Regardless of how tech-savvy you are, using a feed reader will save you a lot of time and, despite what Robert Scoble says, Twitter lists are no substitute for using RSS, so long as you remember that, like with a real printed publication, there’s no reason to feel guilty if you don’t read your feed in full. Using Google Reader, despite its clumsy interface, is better than no feed reader at all and should be enough for the moderate user. But Shaun Inman’s Fever now offers an attractively designed, fully customizable and fantastically clever way of digesting a larger-than-average number of feeds efficiently and pleasantly. Although it suffers from the absence of a proper iPhone implementation, I’ve decided to use it as my default feed reader from now on.

Google Buzz has one thing going for it: in contrast to Twitter and Facebook, it actually does make it easy to “generate your own buzz” by asking you to simply add services to your pre-existing Google profile, in contrast to Facebook which has been doing exactly the opposite, turning itself into a sort of closed shop.

There are three things I don’t like at all about Buzz:

• first, you need to use Gmail to even be on Buzz; using Gmail for Buzz should have been made optional, not mandatory;
• second, I don’t believe it will take off: I doubt that they will be able to get enough people to follow their Buzz activity to make the service gather momentum, which is another reason why tying Buzz to Gmail is a mistake;
• third, Google hasn’t addressed the issue of user names properly: when anyone uses any Google service, Google creates an account under the slug chosen and from that moment, no one can use a service.

Despite settling the privacy concerns, Google hasn’t clearly positioned its service as a private, friends-only oriented one, like Facebook originally was and should have remained, or a public one, like Twitter; the privacy slip-up shows they obviously didn’t think this one out at all when they designed Buzz, which is a pity; if they’d positioned Buzz from the outset as the social network where you can easily share some content publicly, and some just with your friends, they would have been onto a winner.

My new website, which I coded myself over a couple of days, is a bit of a landmark in my four-year blogging experience: I designed and coded it using the tools I had been dabbling with over the past few months and dispensing with off-the-peg templates altogether. Starting from a stripped-down version of the WordPress template, I designed the theme, wrote the CSS and coded the pages, using Coda, a rather clever little application that has now matured, three years after its launch.

In doing this I have merely been going further along the minimalist road that I had set upon four years ago when I first started blogging: the result is a site that is less of a blog and more of a place where I can share my online presence (meaning, essentially, Flickr and Twitter), while keeping Facebook separate for interaction with people I know in real life.

Social networking, which was in its infancy when I started using it in 2006, has matured. Three years ago, a vast number of start-ups were competing in the field, and few people other than geeks actually bothered to use them. Today the sector is much more concentrated, meaning it makes sense not to use every social network in existence. I believe social networks have now consolidated sufficiently that—outside of this blog, of course— I mainly rely on Facebook, Twitter and Flickr for my web presence.

Facebook doesn’t seem to understand, though, what makes it special—the fact it is the only mainstream social network where you can share content with friends that you don’t necessarily want to share with everyone. This doesn’t mean I’m going to stop using it if the constraints on my privacy and the new closed-shop type approach—both of which, in my opinion, go against Facebook’s own interests by reducing its usefulness, go no further. But now that the consolidation of the social networking sector is finally upon us, I hope the convenience it has brought us isn’t going to be wrecked by misunderstanding of privacy issues and a step back into an oligopolistic closed-shop system.

It looks like I was the first person to have activated a newly-acquired iPhone 3G S. The people at Orange called me yesterday to ask whether I wanted to collect mine at midnight, as they were opening their Champs-Elysées store specially for the occasion, making them the first retail outlet in the world to sell the new phones as Paris is six hours ahead of Standard Eastern Time.

With the change in my lifestyle, interests and job that occurred last year, and also the decision to switch to English after three years of blogging in French, the time has come to draw the process to a logical conclusion and make donaldjenkins.net my only home on the web.

Cutting down the time spent posting an article on your blog is easy if you plan things a bit. When you post on your blog, you are actually doing three unrelated things: (1) setting out your thoughts in writing, (2) coding what you have written (using Markdown or HTML, adding links, pictures and tags) and (3) publishing your post.

A lot can be gained from separating those three tasks in time (doing them in sequence rather than switching from one to the other) and in space (choosing the online or desktop tools that suit you most for each task, and getting them to work together to minimise the effort required of you when you write and publish a new article).

In this post we will be looking at ways to get TextMate, MarsEdit or ecto and WriteRoom to work seamlessly together so that you can concentrate on each stage of producing your post without being distracted and automate most of the coding and uploading processes.

I have decided to implement Facebook Connect on this site, instead of OpenID which seems to be confusing users rather than helping them. The Facebook Connect system is still in its infancy, but the range of potential applications is breathtaking.

I’m really pleased with MobileMe. It’s alone in offering an OSX based, centralized personal data center for calendar, contact and email that can be accessed by any desktop, web or mobile device client and push data pretty well instantly in all directions.

The initial MobileMe glitches, which are evidence, not that the product was badly designed, but just that its launch was not prepared sufficiently, are trivial in comparison with the unique power it offers.

I’m hoping that its two glaring faults, lack of support for own-domain email and poor spam management, will be ironed out in the next release.