Matthew Gifford

I was digging around in Flickr yesterday and stumbled upon some pictures of people playing kickball with the Decemberists. How cool.

From InformationWeek (via Web 2.0 Explorer, via Read/Write Web):

When asked which other products and services Microsoft would host, another Microsoft insider said, “Everything. Hosted Office. Everything hosted.”

It appears that Microsoft is going to crash the “Web 2.0″ party sometime next year.

Just hours before Flock went live, I received an invitation to download the developer preview (version 0.4.8). Being an early adopter, I decided to test it by making it my full-time browser for a few days. (I’m back to using Firefox for now.) Since it’s a developer preview, I’m not going to spend time discussing rough edges and bugs. (Except to mention that 0.4.8 would become unusable in less than an hour due to a horrible memory leak. Version 0.4.9 does not appear to have this problem, as far as I can tell.)

There were two aspects of Flock that I found particularly intriguing. The first is the integration of its bookmarks with del.icio.us. The first thing I did was to start copying my Firefox bookmarks over to Flock. I soon realized that there was a problem: There’s no way to keep bookmarks that I don’t want to share from appearing on del.icio.us. I’d rather not tell the world where I do my banking, what companies I have credit cards with, where we keep important things at work, etc. Also, I found that I really missed the keymarks that I had set up for the bookmarks that I use the most. If two things are changed, I will probably switch to using Flock full-time.

The second feature that I was interested in using was the blogging tool. Overall, I was pleased with how easy it was to set up and use. My only complaint about the editor itself is that there’s no way to switch from WYSIWYG to HTML mode. I do not like the way tags are implemented. Rather than using the categorization system built into WordPress, Flock dumps “Technorati tags” right into the body of the post. I don’t know if this is done because WordPress does this in a non-standard way (if there’s a standard way to do this at all). But it will have to change before I use this part of Flock.

Overall, I think Flock shows a lot of promise. However, before I can make it my primary browser, some things will need to be changed.

And could someone please tell me how Flock plans to make money?

It appears that Google is about to launch a new app (via Slashdot) called Base. Essentially, it will allow people to create publicly-available databases. I’m not sure I understand why people would want to use it. But I do know that it feels at least slightly evil. I do know I’m not the only one who feels this way.

By the way, the title of the Ars Technica article about Google Base is a classic:

Google Base: All your base are, in fact, belong to us

The upcoming Wilco live album sounds really good. (via Marusin)

It’s always annoyed me that there is no global keyboard shortcut for maximizing windows in OS X. I found out today that you can create your own.

I’m working on a little project that requires that a Ruby program automatically runs once each day. In OS X Tiger, cron has been depricated in favor of launchd. I’ve tried setting it up on my own without success. Are you familiar with launchd?

Some of my readers may recognize Tim O’Reilly’s map of things that make up Web 2.0. (I’m going to try very hard to never use that term on this site again.) A site called Bubble 2.0 has responded with the Bubble 2.0 Meme Map (via The Social Software Weblog).

macosXrumors is reporting that Mac OS X 10.5 will have a new Finder (via TUAW).

According to the sources, Apple will entirely re-design the Finder in its next major Mac OS X update. The new version of the Finder, code-named “Chardonnay� (like the wine), will be totally based on the Spotlight meta-search technology which was introduced earlier this year with Tiger.

If true, this is good news. As much as I like the idea of Spotlight, it’s so poorly implemented that I never use it. I still prefer to use grep or even the command-line Spotlight app I wrote.

The last 3:45 of today’s 43 Folders podcast is really funny.