Path uploads your entire iPhone address book to its servers. Shouldn’t this be the kind of shady behavior that an app store review process prevents? Would be fantastic to see answers to these 3 questions.
Update: Path’s CEO answered those three questions a minute after I posted this. His response to #2 is a cop out. “Industry best practice” is just a way of avoiding blame. Protect your users data and do what’s right, not what’s typical.
BadgeStack Project. Interesting badge-based learning software built on top of WordPress. Looks like there’s a hosted side of it as well. (via Matt Pearson)
A complete list of open source help desk software packages. This is cool. Now, how can I find the time to test and play with all of them…
The Internet needs a strong, independent platform for those of us who don’t want to be at the mercy of someone else’s domain. I like to think that if we didn’t create WordPress something else that looks a lot like it would exist. I think Open Source is kind of like our Bill of Rights. It’s our Constitution. If we’re not true to that, nothing else matters.
Matt Mullenweg – Open Web FTW. (via Daniel)
What if a little site you love doesn’t have a business model? Yell at the developers! Explain that you are tired of good projects folding and are willing to pay cash American dollar to prevent that from happening. It doesn’t take prohibitive per-user revenue to put a project in the black. It just requires a number greater than zero.
maciej – Don’t Be A Free User.
Dear Internet: It’s No Longer OK to Not Know How Congress Works. This post is so well put. The tools our political representatives use may seem horrendously backwards, but they are reality and to affect change we have to understand how they work.
So sad and so true:
No app built for reading starts with the premise that the publisher has done an acceptable job.
Brent Simmons – The Readable Future.
A reader is for engaging with information; it’s a tool for consuming, managing, and using knowledge. In addition to presenting new information to consume, I also want it to pay attention to, infer insights from, and make accessible in an evergreen matter what I’ve already read. For me, this presents the pinnacle of personal information management — an intelligent tool that can reinforce what I already know and help guide me towards what I need to know.
Daniel Bachhuber – “Phone” is to the iPhone as “RSS reader” is to ?.
There are a set of tools we can use. But we don’t have to jump onto every new network that comes out, exclaiming “No No NO! THIS ONE changes everything!”
Daniel Agee – “Google+: Should I Give a Shit?” — We Have A Bigger Problem.
Since I started using Rdio I’ve run into a problem: I never open iTunes. This is mostly okay as Rdio replaced my local iTunes library. The downside is that my podcasts live in iTunes. By not opening the app the podcasts never update and I forget they exist.
A few days ago someone, I have no idea who to credit because Twitter search is a clusterfuck, who I follow on Twitter mentioned Instacast. It’s fantastic.
Instacast gives you a native iOS app that is built around one thing: subscribing and listening to podcasts. It’s a great example of a focused app that does one thing and does it really damn well. Best of all it’s not connected to my iTunes library. My podcasts now update every time I open Instacast. No need to be chained to iTunes.
The player is also tuned specifically for podcasts. The built-in Music app places a volume slider at the bottom, Instacast has a time slider. It still has all the necessary things like AirPlay and local caching.
Overall it’s just a really well-polished app. I’m excited to get back into podcasts now that they’re more easily updated right on my iPhone.
