I think Twitter has taken over most of the times when I once would've written a quickie blog post. But now that Twitter has turned unstable and lost its Jabber support, I'm losing interest. (Note to self: if I ever start a futuristic service company that's interesting amongst a core group but not really growing, make sure the service becomes crappy before a while to get people antsy and eager for it to get good again. See: New Coke.

I'm experimenting with a new approach that I'm not sure is working. I know I certainly am enjoying it, but I may be creating rifts with as many people as I'm forging alliances with. Can a person just ignore the hundreds of other people who have had chances to learn and grow but have proven incapable or unwilling to do either? Can you take that list of people who waste your time with inane and clueless behaviors and simply ignore every single thing they say or do?

And can you somehow avoid getting fired in the process?

On an unrelated topic, I finally got a beta invite to Yahoo!'s Fire Eagle. Though I'm hearing a lot of zeitgeist chatter about Y! starting to rot away, they're still a juggernaut and this particular product seems kind of interesting. After trying so many different location-based social and business services, it's nice to find something that can glue them all together. It does not, however, address the fact that pretty much every single one is terrible.

I tried LightPole. I tried Plazes. (Which autolocated me at a random IBM facility in Dusseldorf.) I tried Navizon for the Blackberry. I tried BrightKite. Dopplr. Ping.fm, hellotxt, blah blah yawn yawn. Really, how horrifically difficult could it be for one application to properly and continuously track my location and feed this data back. And then how horrifically difficult could it be for many applications to piggyback on that info and use it to accomplish something meaningful.

Horrible user interfaces. Horrible. Awful, useless out of date data. Huge amounts of "proximity" based clutter that is many weeks out of date, and impossible to remove from my view.

I have half a mind to venture off on my own and try to create something of my own that actually pulls it off. Fire Eagle is fine as the glue, but the tasty nugget at the center is entirely absent- or so rigidly confined to specific devices as to be impossible to appeal broadly. Even if the iPhone pulls it off, I still can't imagine everyone wandering around with iPhones. Meh.

Oh, also, I played around a bit with Adobe AIR. It's the coolest way I've ever seen to make Windows-caliber ugly apps run out of the box on OS X. (Yes, that's sarcasm, asshole. >:O)

On the bright side, some technologies are doing things properly.

Except for when Dropbox causes my desktop mac to crash catastrophically, I love it.

Firefox 3 is nice, but optimized OS X builds are even better. Now that I found Firebug 1.2, I'm actually starting to phase out of Safari as my primary browser. (For reals this time.)

I shall categorize this day under "Meh!"