The real question is whether migrating would result in my writing more…of that I’m not so sure.

I wish Leah Culver the best with her continuing work at Grove.

On a more meta note, I’m writing this post on the WordPress app for the iPad. Surprisingly quick and efficient even without a Bluetooth keyboard.

The app itself works well as far as sending and receiving messages from my friend on her iPhone, and it shows the delivery status as with iMessage on the iPhone. After I went through the initial setup and entered my Apple account/iCloud credentials it was able to pull down my address book from iCloud.

Messages does not have any way of indicating if my contacts have an iMessage capable device. It would be nice if it had a feature to automatically filter my contacts, because there’s no point in showing me contacts who I can’t actually communicate with through Messages. It does know that someone is not iMessage capable because if you try to send a message to someone’s phone who is not a iMessage user it displays a popup informing you that you can’t send a message to them, so hopefully that capability will be in the final release.

Another limitation, which might be a feature, is that the chat history is not currently synched between Messages on my laptop and the iMessage app on my phone. On the one hand I’m not sure that I necessarily want all my instant messages going through Apple. On the other hand, they already get my message history when my phone backs up to iCloud so it wouldn’t be giving up any more privacy than I already do. Given that, it would be nice to have a consistent chat history across devices synched through iCloud.

Not that anyone reads this site, but input is appreciated.

But watching the lectures on iTunes U is not exactly the same thing as being enrolled in the class.  There’s no homework.  No reading assignments.  I suppose you could buy the textbook if you wanted, but I never have.  But now Apple has released the iTunes U iOS app for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad.  This changes the game significantly because now in addition to the audio or video lectures, there’s lecture notes, assignments, and the other things you’d typically expect from a college course syllabus.  While it’s still not the same as sitting in a classroom, it’s a whole lot closer.

But here’s the thing – there is no iTunes U app for OS X.  You can download the course material from iTunes on Mac OS X, but there is no integrated course experience as is provided by the iTunes U app on iOS.  Compare and contrast the following screen shots from the Stanford Machine Learning course in the iTunes U app on my iPhone and then the same course in iTunes on my Mac.

iTunes U iPhone App Screen Shots

Course home screen

Course overview

Instructor bio

Course info

Course posts

Course materials

iTunes U OS X Screen Shots

iTunes Course List

iTunes Course Screen

Which set of screenshots looks better to you?

I installed the iTunes U app on my iPhone and it ran fine, but while an iPhone is fine for playing the lecture video, it is not really a great platform for reading the associated written material.  Presumably a good interface could be created for an OS X iTunes U application, but Apple has chosen not to make one.  So the message would seem to be that if you want to enjoy this incredible free educational content you need to buy an iPad.

I’ve been thinking about picking up an iPad when the iPad 3 comes out, but this may just be the killer app that moves the decision from “likely” to “no brainer”.

Given that the application has historically only been available on the iPhone and my iPhone certainly already knows who I am, I thought the process might be lower friction and more automatic.  I haven’t done any iOS development but I thought that surely there must be some sort of single sign on capability offered by the iOS SDK.

I did some research and it turns out that as of iOS 5 there sort of is and sort of isn’t.  With iOS 5, Apple has released the Accounts Framework which provides a centralized store of account information that applications can query to authenticate against web service providers.  But it currently seems only to support Twitter.  Which means, in practice, that if I wanted to create an application that supported sending tweets on behalf of the user I could tie it into the existing Twitter authentication stored on the device.  That’s certainly a nice to have feature, but it’s an awfully limited vision.

From looking at the Accounts Framework documentation it seems that it could also be used to store any arbitrary authentication information, such as OpenID or OAuth credentials for other services.  I don’t know if anyone has actually implemented anything other than Twitter clients using it or whether it would actually work with third party accounts right now.

I’m really surprised that Apple hasn’t gone the further step and decided to offer authentication in a more native way.  Every iPhone user and most iPad and iPod Touch users have an Apple Store account.  Why not expose this account, perhaps using an existing technology such as OpenID, to allow me to authenticate to third party sites?

As a developer I have no great need to own the login credentials of my site’s users.  As long as I have their email address, I don’t really care what password, software certificate, biometric, or smartcard methodology they are actually using to authenticate themselves.  It’s one less thing to worry about when developing an application if I can leverage an existing authentication infrastructure.

As an end user, I’d love for unlocking my phone to also unlock my stored credentials and enable true web application single sign on from my mobile device.  I hope Apple sees the opportunity and includes this in iOS 6.

For anyone not familiar with the iTunes Match service, the idea is that for $25 a year you can have iTunes scan through your music library on up to 10 devices.  Using technology that has not been publicly discussed in any detail by Apple but presumably involves using Fourier transforms, iTunes looks through your music library to identify any songs that are already available from the iTunes Music Store.  For all of those tracks, iTunes will make a note that you have the song and are entitled to access it.  For any tracks that don’t match against the iTunes Music Store it uploads your local copy of the song to iCloud.

The magic is that once this process has completed, all the songs in the library (up to 25,000 tracks) are available on up to 10 PCs or Macs running iTunes or iOS devices (iPhones, iPads, iPod touches) where you have signed in with your iCloud account.  When a new song is imported it will automatically be added to the iTunes Match library either by being matched against the iTunes Music Store or uploaded if the song is not matched.

All of the iTunes playlists are also synced across devices and changes made to a playlist on one device are instantly propagated to all your other devices that have iTunes Match turned on.

The service is not all things for all people and depending on your mix of devices this may be more or less useful.  For me it’s great.  My primary iTunes library is on a Windows PC and it contains somewhere around 10,000 songs.

I currently have an iPhone 4 and have been an iPhone user since the 3G came out, but I have never been very good about syncing music to it.  Even with the highest capacity iPhone there’s no way I can have all my tracks synced to the phone so I have to make choices about which songs or playlists I want to sync.  And invariably I’ll be somewhere away from my computer and want to listen to something I haven’t thought to sync.  Plus I tend not to plug my phone into my computer all that often and actually I don’t even bother turning that Windows PC on much.  So mostly I don’t listen to my iTunes library at all any more.  Pretty sad.

I also have a 17″ MacBook Pro but I’ve never bothered to copy my library to this laptop because, while it could hold the entire library, I don’t necessarily want to commit that much disk space to music since I already have it on my home PC.  So I don’t listen to music in iTunes on my laptop either.

That’s been a lot of music just sitting there not getting enjoyed.  Too bad.

Since Spotify launched in the US over the summer I’ve been subscribing to Spotify Premium and doing most of my music listening through Spotify.  I love Spotify and they have an incredible selection of music, but they don’t have everything that I have in my iTunes library.  I don’t really buy music much any more since I can listen to most of what I want on Spotify or YouTube, but when I was in my teens and early 20′s I bought a LOT of CDs, including a fair amount of obscure stuff that just isn’t going to be in Spotify and may or may not be in the iTunes Music Store.

With iTunes Match I now have access to my entire library on my iPhone 4 as well as my MacBook Pro and I can choose to download only what I want to listen to.  But I can make that choice spontaneously as I think of something I’d like to hear.  I’ve read some critiques of the service that state that you can’t sync everything at once, but that’s actually not true.  If I open my iTunes library on my MacBook Pro and select everything I can indeed right click and download everything.  That would probably take a while.  However I have used that technique to download everything by certain artists to my MacBook Pro.

The one feature that would be nice is if there were a web based player on iCloud.com that would let me listen to music streaming through a browser if I happen to be on a computer that doesn’t have iTunes or that I can’t link to my iCloud account for some reason.  But that’s a “nice to have” feature request and not a use case whose lack of availability I’ve actually wanted to use in any real life scenario as yet.

I’ll confess that I’m still mostly listening to music through Spotify but I suspect that I will find myself listening to more music in iTunes now that I have my library accessible wherever and whenever I want it.  Definitely worth $25 a year.

However taking their schemaless ad-hoc visualization and reporting and marrying that to Hadoop seems like a natural combination.  The Splunk for Hadoop software is not available yet but there is a beta signup page.  I recommend checking it out if that’s your kind of thing.

Here’s the video from their site:

But it turns out that you can glean some knowledge about what circles a friend may have added you to.  When items are shared on Google Plus it will show the visibility level of the item.  The choices I’ve seen so far are Public and Limited.  If the item is Limited you can click and see with whom that item has been shared.  If I have some knowledge of my connection’s social network, I can look at the list of people with which an item is shared and guess about which circles I might be a member of.  For example if everything they post is shared with everyone else they know on Google Plus, the two possibilities are that they share everything with everyone or else I am not a member of any of their more restrictive circles.

If I see that a coworker has shared an item with me and all my other coworkers it implies I am a member of their professional relationships circle.  That doesn’t preclude the possibility that I might also be a member of other circles but if the only content I ever see has either unlimited distribution or only me and my coworkers I can guess my membership.

To gather this kind of data requires the target to be active enough in posting to Google+ to have a corpus of shared data to view the sharing visibility.  And without other techniques such as looking for comments from third parties mentioning content that I didn’t see, this technique will only help me understand what circles I might be a member of and not, by itself, reveal any information about Circles to which I do not belong.  The other caveat is that content can be shared with multiple circles so when I look at the visibility I may be seeing a union of multiple sets but having a large corpus of content would help identify that and could lead to identification of circles of which I am not a member.

Still I hadn’t seen anything written about this yet, so I thought I’d write it up.

I do make use of Facebook groups to keep my friends, professional contacts, childhood friends, and others separate but it’s imperfect.  I actually don’t go out much any more but if I did I wouldn’t want one of my friends to tag me in a compromising photograph and have it visible to my professional contacts.  But on the other hand I don’t necessarily want to hide all pictures of myself from my colleagues.  Yet this is the choice Facebook offers me.

Since Google+ has been taking off in user adoption (see graph) and their Circles feature helps segment one’s social graph, I thought I’d give it a look.  Unfortunately the main Google account that I use is the Apps for Domains account I have with secretelite.com.  Yet Google Apps for Domains does not support Google Profiles so it’s not possible to use Google Plus with my standard Google account.  Instead I have to log in with my old GMail account.  That’s the main drawback that has prevented me from checking out the service prior to today.  They really need to fix that because I don’t see myself constantly switching Google accounts to go between my email and Google+ pages.

That complaint aside, once I did get logged in to the service it actually is pretty good.  It would be nice to have a setting that tagged photos of someone in one of my circles would only be visible to my other friends in that circle and I didn’t see that feature.  Still I do like the approach Google has taken with Circles in that in order to add someone on Google Plus I have to select a circle grouping for them.  That is a much closer analog to how my relationships work in real life.  People can be in more than one circle, as in real life.  Some of my professional colleagues are also friends, while others it’s simply a professional relationship.

I also like the idea that adding someone to a circle is asymmetrical.  Just because I add someone does not mean they have to add me.  This is a good mix of the traditional social networking symmetric confirmation relationships and the follow idiom from Twitter.

When I share content in Google Plus I also have to select its visibility every time.  This is good as it forces me to make a conscious decision about who I am sending this to.  That option exists with Facebook but it’s not required so I usually skip it.  Interestingly, I have shared two updates on Google+ and because I had to select the sharing visibility I actually set both to Public.  I don’t think I have ever made anything public on Facebook.

None of my connections happened to be online when I was exploring the service so I haven’t used the Hangout feature.  From the press coverage it looks cool.  Also I’m not entirely clear what Sparks is for so I haven’t tried that yet either.

Other than the multiple Google account issue with logging in, the barrier to using Google+ more regularly would be the network effects of Facebook.  I have hundreds of connections on Facebook, most of whom are not on Google+.  Google+ did offer to import my contacts from my Google address book.  That’s not useful in my case because while I do keep my Google address book updated and synced with my iPhone, that is my address book on the secretelite.com account which I can’t use with Google+.  It would be nice to have a way to import my Facebook and LinkedIn connections.

Despite the network effects of Facebook I’d be inclined to use both in parallel to get a better sense of which really best suits my needs.  If only they will fix the Google Apps for Domains account issue.