The Talk Show: Live From WWDC
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Linked List: August 29, 2006

Tuesday, 29 August 2006

Public beta — complete with warnings that there are missing features, bugs, and that the data store is not to be trusted yet — Getting Things Done app.

Musicast 1.0 ★

Very well-done new app ($18) for sharing your iTunes music over the Internet. You select which of your playlists you want to share, and Musicast runs a web server on your Mac that shares those songs. The web interface has a very slick UI (as does the Musicast app itself), and it also publishes your playlists in RSS format for iTunes (or whatever other feed reader you want to use).

Jeremy Bogan’s Telemarketer Trap ★

He’s set up a special line where he forwards telemarketers, with a playback loop full of comments intended to keep them on the line for as long as possible (“Why don’t you tell me a bit more about what you’re offering…”). He’s recording the resulting calls and posting the funniest ones.

Evan Williams: Pageviews are Obsolete ★

I’ve long thought that equating pageviews with popularity leads to site design that requires users to reload pages over and over — e.g. the way many “news” sites break up articles into two or three pages to load.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt Joins Apple’s Board of Directors ★

Interesting:

“Eric is obviously doing a terrific job as CEO of Google, and we look forward to his contributions as a member of Apple’s board of directors,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Like Apple, Google is very focused on innovation and we think Eric’s insights and experience will be very valuable in helping to guide Apple in the years ahead.”

Unlike Microsoft, Apple clearly doesn’t consider Google a competitor.

Let’s hope this leads to Google producing better Mac desktop software.

Universal Backs Free-With-Advertising Music Rival to iTunes ★

Universal has apparently agreed to participate in SpiralFrog, an upcoming new music service that plans to make music available without charge, but to get the downloads, you’ll have to sit through advertisements (or perhaps the ads will be attached to the downloaded songs?), and the music will be encoded in a protected WMA format, which means it won’t work on iPods. And users will have to keep coming back to the SpiralFrog web site once per month to watch more ads to keep all of their previous downloads enabled.

I smell yet another dud.