Now that I have had it for about 30 hours, I can finally post my first iPod Touch Rant ;->

First: it's a beautiful piece of technology. It works so well you can almost forget in how many ways things can go wrong when you are using complex technology like this (but Apple has been getting us used to this type of quality).

I decided to buy this iPod (the 8Gb version) because:

• iPhones are not available in Europe
• When they will be available, the first generation won't be 3G (i.e.: on-line they would be slower than my current phone)
• I'm quite happy with my Nokia N73, the way it synchs with my address book and the quality of its camera

But most of all, i bough this little toy because I think that the iPod Touch could be the real new thing: theoretically it's everything you can do with your iPhone, without the phone stuff, which, let's be honest, it's old technology. My iPod Touch can get on-line on any wifi network, and there's no reason why it couldn't do everything the iPhone does over IP except...

...except that apparently the audio jack is output only (meaning no mike) ...except that it has no bluetooth, so no wireless headset ...except that they deliberately didn't install some apps (for example email) ...and most of all except the fact that Apple doesn't allow me to load any software on my iPod.

But I believe that this is just a first step, it's not about creating a platform, it's about putting a real and usable browser in our pockets (I'm not even very interested to the media part, and I have a 80Gb iPod which will continue to be my main media repository, except maybe for a few videos that I'll want to watch on the Touch bigger screen).

All I would really like is bluetooth support, allowing the iPod to use my phone to get on-line, just like I can do from my Mac (and according to some rumors, there's a bluetooth chip in here, it's just not activated).

Technorati Tags: iPhone, iPod Touch

Amanda Lorenzani reports on why Italy is a good place to develop software.

This morning you can almost hear the noise of thousands of Jaiku friendship invitations arriving in all our mailboxes: with the acquisition news everybody is back checking Jaiku.

I like the "aggregator" approach of Jaiku, I'm wondering what would happen if they would go all the way and, for example, really become a full Twitter client.

Today Jaiku only collects twitter posts from Jaiku users who configured their accounts accordingly, but there's no technical reason why Jaiku could not collect for me posts from all my Twitter friends (well, a reason might have been server load, which won't be an issue anymore with Google resources), not only the one subscribed to both services. And, of course, there's no reason why Jaiku could not forward whatever I post on their service to my Twitter account, maybe scaling it down gracefully when needed (i.e.: shortening urls, scaling down images, converting links to their mobile version where applicable).

If Jaiku would do these moves, there would be no reason for me to ever visit Twitter again: I would get all Twitter content simply visiting my Jaiku account, plus all the other information that Jaiku is collecting for me.

I think that once fully interoperable, we will see the separation of the transport layer (how messages are relayed to whom) from the actual services layer. At this point the two are very close, actually you can only send short burst of text on Twitter, but as/if these services will evolve (just look at everything Dave is doing with Twitter every day to have an idea), the real deal will be with the added value things you'll be able to do with these network, not which backbone you are using to move them around.

Technorati Tags: Jaiku, twitter

I've been discussing this issue on email with Dave, he asked me to post a recap, so here it is.

A little scandal has developed recently in the Italian blogosphere, after a guy figured out how to leverage on a known Feedburner bug in order to climb a popular top 100 list. BlogBabel was using Feedburner, among other services, to update an index of the the most popular blogs, and faking the number of subscriber of a blog feed a blogger was able to get almost to the top (BlogBabel has since stopped using Feedburner's data).

From what I gathered, what is happening is that to count the number of subscribers to a feed, Feedburner uses an information that collective feed readers (such as bloglines or googlereader) put in the referrer: each time it downloads a feed, Bloglines declares how many subscribers they have to it as metadata in the referrer. For example, here's a recent line from my blog log file, where you can see that according to Bloglines there are 382 subscribers to my feed:

65.214.44.29 - - [09/May/2007:05:23:39 +0200] "GET /rss.xml HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "Bloglines/3.1 (http://www.bloglines.com; 382 subscribers)"

Sending a false referrer line to Feedburner, claiming that you are Bloglines and there are 2 millions reader subscribed to a feed, Feedburner will add 2 millions to the number of readers, and if anybody is using that data for ranking, that feed will skyrocket to the top.

PS: it looks like somebody has been fiddling with TechCrunch feed.

PPS: inspired by this ongoing story, here's a tool you can use to add fake users to your Feedburner counter.

PPPS: according to Dick Costolo from Feedburner in a comment, the issue has now been resolved.