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.

I came across Popcorn.js, an HTML5 javascript library for working with video.  I haven’t used it and really I haven’t done anything with HTML5 which is starting to make me feel behind the 8-ball.  Will have to do some intensive project brainstorming soon!

And because you can’t have just one .js in a blog post, I also came across some video tutorials for node.js on nodetuts.com.  I haven’t used node.js either but it’s on my to-do list of things to investigate in my non-existent free time.

On a different note but still in the web development chord, I saw an article on TechCrunch about the Google Labs Page Speed Online tool.  It’s a profile tool that helps web designers understand causes of slow page loads and suggests ways to improve the load time of your site.

Other Interesting TechCrunch Tidbits

Back in March, MG Siegler put up a post about Netflix move into original content with House of Cards.  As someone who has had television shows cancelled to which I’m very devoted, I hope this experiment works as it would be great to find another outlet for high quality (and high cost) television production besides the broadcast networks, basic cable, and premium cable.  I suspect plenty of shows could make economic sense on Netflix or Apple TV that wouldn’t work for broadcast or cable.

This next item is interesting to me because I lived in SIlicon Valley and worked in the semiconductor industry for years.  It may not be of general interest to the Web 2.0 crowd.  It seems that Texas Instruments is buying National Semiconductor for $6.5 billion.  For those not in the know on the semiconductor business, that’s a big deal.

To The Cloud!

The openstack project announced their Bexar release.  Openstack is an open source system that allows for cloud computing provisioning and management without vendor lock in.  It’s still a very early project but something worth keeping an eye on if you’re in the cloud provisioning space.

Pretty Pictures with Prezi and Balsamiq

For those who are not finding their hopes and dreams entirely fulfilled by PowerPoint, check out the multimedia presentation application Prezi.

On the wireframing front, I’ve been hearing a lot about Balsamiq Mockups for a while so I finally decided to download the free trial and give it a go.  It’s fantastic software and I can see why it has so much (well deserved) buzz.  I’m not a particularly graphically inclined person (witness this web site) and it’s great to be able to mock up interface ideas without having to fight with Photoshop.  My free trial has expired but I suspect I will be buying a license quite soon.  If you’re really cheap you can use the embedded web version on the Balsamiq web site.  It’s an AIR application and they host an almost complete version of the application that anyone can use for free in the browser.  I like the desktop experience, however, so I’ll shell out the $80 for a license.

Moki

Moki bills itself as, “the ultimate guide to online entertainment.”  The service provides a way to discover content from Amazon VOD, Netflix, Hulu, and other online video providers.  Sort of a TV Guide for the web.

Noteleaf

The next cool early stage startup is Noteleaf.  The concept with this company is that they provide you a briefing on people who you have meetings scheduled with.  The workflow is that you add a meeting to your Google calendar and the service will send you a text message that links to a “mobile profile” about the person that aggregates information about the person you’re meeting with from various online services such as LinkedIn.

Xobni

Not as new, but along similar lines is Xobni (inbox spelled backwards).  Xobni provides similar capabilities to Noteleaf but is organized around the inbox instead of the calendar.  Based upon your SMS and email history it creates a rich address book with profiles of the people you contact populated by information from their online presence.

paper.li

I’ve heard a lot of people talk about Twitter as a news service that’s curated by people you select.  Taking this view to the next level, paper.li allows you to create a daily “newspaper” based upon Twitter and Facebook posts.

Fitbit

I came across Fitbit through Brad Feld’s blog.  It’s a $99 device that you wear which tracks your vitals and gives you insight into your personal fitness as well as sleep habits.  You can choose to share the data publicly, as Brad Feld has done, or not.  If I ever get serious about getting back into shape this would be a great service.

Mark Suster posted some thoughts on his blog about why he’s planning to stick with Disqus instead of jumping on the Facebook comments bandwagon.  I agree with a lot of what he says, which is why I’m linking it here of course.

I’ve followed what my old friend David Weekly has done with the Mountain View Hacker Dojo with interest over the past few years.  I’ve wished that we had a strong enough technical community in the DC area to have a hacker space movement here.  During some idle Googling recently I’ve discovered that we actually do.  There’s a new one not far from where I live called Reverse Space.  I swung by to check it out and it’s still very early and a work in progress but I’m thrilled that there’s spaces for the technical community in the DC area.  In looking through the list of hacker spaces on hackerspaces.org there are actually several in the DC and Baltimore area.

I don’t use R at the moment but given the sort of work I do I suspect I may use it in the future.  For those not in the know, R is a statistical programming language.  I haven’t used it but I hear it’s great and it certainly has a devoted following.  I casually pay attention to the R space and I saw the recent announcement of the RStudio IDE.  Here’s a review I found.

On a non-technical note, I came across this article on CCN Money that discusses the possibility of banks limiting our ability to spend with debit cards in the future.  For years I only used debit cards.  Lately I have started using a charge card and paying the balance in full each month.  But I stll hate the idea of limiting the financial options of people without great credit who can’t quality for reasonable credit or charge cards.

There are so many “social media experts” out there but I often wonder what the real ROI for a business is on their social investment.  I think it’s probably a lot more about driving brand awareness and customer relationship development than hard, measurable ROI.  Still I was interested to read this article on Venture Beat that reports a study which shows social media popularity can perhaps predict stock prices.  From the article

The study tracked three brands, Starbucks, Coca Cola and Nike, over the course of 10 months in 2010-2011. The number of Facebook fans, Twitter followers and Youtube views were used as measures of each brand’s social media popularity.

I think it would be useful to look at Twitter @mentions as well.

I don’t have an XBox 360 or a Kinect but I’m very interested in the creative things people are doing with hacking the Kinect.  I came across a couple of articles on Engadget about creative uses for the Kinect.  One article discussed using the Kinect for 3D modeling in free space.  The other article talks about a project to help the blind “see” by getting haptic feedback.