I came home tonight to a bunch or emails and comments letting me know I was on Yahoo for the “Out of iPhones” video. Thanks everyone! I definitely appreciate it, because I would have had no idea otherwise.

Now, if you’re here and wondering why I was calling for an iPhone on an iPhone — that one is not mine! It’s a demo from AT&T and as soon as I make it to a store that actually isn’t out of them, I’ll buy mine.

I did attempt today to get one, but by the time I got to the store, they only had the 8 gig models left. Tomorrow.. I will prevail. Hopefully. Wish me luck!

Figured this is pretty much old news, as everyone has been checking out the new Facebook redesign for awhile but in addition to the new profiles, yesterday at f8 (developers conference) they also announced the official launch of Facebook Connect.

Partnering with 24 other sites (like digg, twitter, CBS, College Humor and my bff loopt) you’ll now be able to annoy your friends even more so by sharing actions back to your newsfeed!!!! In addition, your data will travel with you. Your friends, your profile, and your login will all now be able to be used on these trusted sites if you wish.

Great. Now, if I could just add the rest of my friends on Facebook — I’d be happy. For those of you who aren’t aware, Facebook caps your friend limit at 5,000. I guess I can always go to the place for friends for that..

Now onto the redesign. I’m sure a lot of people will initially switch to the old layout just as I did at first for comfort. There seems to be way too much room in the news feed which leaves peoples icons hanging off in the middle of the page.

What I did like about the old layout is how everything seemed to be lined up just so. Now, it’s kinda everywhere and it feels a bit disproportional.

As for the actual profile page, I think that’s definitely something I can quickly get used to. I love the filters on the wall posts most of all because you can sort through what you’ve posted and your friends have posted quickly.

I also love the tabs at the top that allow you to switch from the wall, to info, photos and boxes which contain all your ridiculous applications all in one nice little convenient spot. Please feed my fluff friend.

Oh, and whoever wrote the little status note I’m sure had this thought: “Oh crap.. twitter is what are you doing, so we need to be RIGHT NOW!!!”

Blah blah blah blah. Let’s be honest.. does anyone really want to read about what it looks like? Didn’t think so.. Go look for yourself or check out the above screen shots and let me know what you think about the new FB, yo

So, basically I can’t think of anything else to blog about other than the iPhone so I’ve been going back to find some old footage of a time when it wasn’t the only thing on my mind.

This is probably one of my more fun random adventures: making cotton candy with some random strangers in the back kitchen of a restaurant. I really wish that I could remember what this place was called — it’s in Cancun if anyone has been here and can remember

UPDATE: I just found out via a bunch of YouTube comments that in England and Northern Ireland they call cotton candy: Candy floss! Fun fact just in case you ever end up on Jepordy

MORE UPDATES:

German: Zuckerwatte
France: Barbe à papa (father’s beard)
Dutch: Suikerspin (sugar web)
Australia: Fairy Floss

And the restaurant I was at was called Harry’s — thanks to Brenda for that information! …and thanks to everyone else who left comments with what you guys call Cotton Candy where you live. That was pretty awesome

I got two things accomplished this Saturday — Saw The Dark Knight and played 108 games of Marble Mash during the previews.

Here’s my suggestion if you plan to see The Dark Knight:

#1. Use the bathroom before entering the theater.

Here’s my short review:

Overall movie was great. Heath Ledger creeped me out. Christian Bale and I are getting married next week. Maggie Gyllenhaal is NOT Katie Holmes. Go see it.

Who else saw this and liked it?!

Last week I was at the beach and there was an abundance of jellyfish washing up on shore for most of it. You could hardly walk in the water without running into one of these little guys.

Naturally, my sister and I thought they looked like something else. I decided it would be best to take this situation into my own hands and report the news.

Do you think I can be the internet and the news at the same time? Uh oh.

This past week Intel celebrated their 40th anniversary with the launch of this really neat site called the Intel World Mural Project. It’s written and visual artwork created by the students at the Intel Computer Clubhouse Network on their vision of what will become in the next 40 years with technology.

I know some of you reading this haven’t been around that long (I know that the person typing this hasn’t). Just looking back on how much has changed in the past 5 years, it’ll be very interesting to see what the next 40 will bring.

In this same sense with how much technology is changing, I was reading an entry today from Jeremiah Owyang about whether or not the president needs to know how to use a computer.

I don’t necessarily want to turn this into a political discussion, but I honestly think it’s important that if you plan to run our country, that you have the ability to turn on your computer. Most of the arguments are “Well, he has people to do that for him”. Really? How you feel on this topic?

Going back to the Intel project, I’d also be interested in seeing how the responses would differ from those who do not use technology (or computers) the way that we all do on an everyday basis. Obviously, they would have an entirely different perspective of how things will be in 40 years.

Nearly a week after the launch of the iPhone 3G, it seems that the world is out of iPhones! All gone. Sold out. Bye bye!

Okay, perhaps that’s a bit of a stretch, but I did call over 35 stores yesterday and they were just that — All sold out! There are also still reports of lines with 3-5+ hour waits at the stores.

If you’re still waiting for an iPhone.. here’s the tips from the employees I talked with to hopefully assure you’ll get one in a somewhat timely fashion.. but probably not

• Get there early.
• Call ahead of time just to be sure
• Each store updates their availability after 9pm on the store’s retail page.
• If you’re crazy enough to camp out over night, “I won’t kick you out, but you could just call first?”

Pretty straight forward.. but don’t forget, you can also try to pick one up at most AT&T stores too.. if they have them. Again, call first to make sure!

Perhaps this was Apple’s brilliant idea of hyping up the iPhone even more by limiting availability, nixing the online purchases and forcing you to activate in store? If you remember last year, there was still very high demand, but everyone who wanted an iPhone — got one. There were even people who were upset because they waited in line for a day and they were still in stock.

Ah, oh well. Can’t please everyone, right?

..and no, I have nothing else to blog about but iPhones. I can’t think of anything else but apps and 3G. Help! Addict!

Okay, maybe some of these aren’t the best.. but these are the ones that have been keeping me more than entertained in the past week.

Jared: Butcher of Song (video above)
You may recall seeing this application back in the day when Colin and Ian of Freeverse created this silly smiley face app with audio of their brother Jared Smith singing “Luna de Xelajú”. It was actually only intended to be a gift for their mom’s birthday but it soon became quite the meme around the internet.

Comic Touch — $4.99
There’s no better way to spice up that other wise boring self portrait or landscape than with a snarky caption or thought bubble. Plus it’s by plasq and they rock.

Talking Spanish Phrasebook
Don’t speak spanish? Well, no need. With this application, you’ll be able to carrying on extremely interesting conversations. Here are a few of the top phrases that are sure to be great conversation starters:

• “I would like a pint of beer”
• “I am hungover”
• “Do you like sport?” (yes, sport.. not sports)
• “I have diarrhea”
• “I’ve locked myself out”
• “May I have another towel?”
• “I’d like to hire a car for one week”
• “Can I try it on?”

Really wish I would have had this app for my trip to Cancun..

YPmobile
This is actually one of the more useful applications. It gives you access to local events going on wherever you are. There is also a “My Plans” tabs that you can keep track of what’s going on. You can even share the events with your friends.

Remote
Are you lazy? Great, then get this application. It’s perfect because you’ll never have to get up to change a song from your iTunes library — Just connect to wifi and you’ll have access to all of your songs and play lists.

ShoZu
Love sharing photos to 5 million websites? This application allows you to send to all of your favorite photo sharing websites and then a ton that no one has ever heard about.

MarbleMash
I use this application mostly for the annoyance factor of the marble’s hitting the metal barriers. Nothing else. Let’s just say the long ride home from vacation with my family will be a little more entertaining for me.. and less so for everyone else

PhoneSaber
This one is a given and much more fun with another PhoneSaber user. Battle your friends and annoy everyone around you.

(There seems to be a trend: A lot of these applications can be used to annoy)

FlashLight
Of course you could just use a blank safari page, but what’s the fun in that? You can also create a flashing strobe light and change the background colors.

Twitterrific
Even though I still feel SMS is the easiest way to update twitter, this application is great for checking up on what everyone is doing. They also have integration with twitpic and will allow you to broadcast your GPS coordinates. Just what I always wanted.. for everyone in the world to have my exact GPS location! Yes!

Alarm Free
Someone on iTunes wrote this review: “Hey there Mr. Mugger, one sec.. let me whip out my iPhone real fast (you knew I had an iPhone right?) and.. ok, unlocked the screen, launched this app, and BEEP BEEP BEEP! HAHA take that! A beeping sound far more quiet than the sound of my own voice! What? You want the iPhone now in addition to my wallet? Weird” — Enough said.

Evernote
This app is actually really awesome. I’ve used evernote before to help me remember random things that I’d see in my travels, from phone numbers, to restaurants to even great hotels that I’ve stayed in. The best part is once this is in your library, you can text search to find exactly what you’re looking for in the photo! You an also create to-do lists and record audio as well.

loopt
It’s a global location based social networking application that allows you to keep track of your friends and broadcast exactly where you are. You can also text and call your friends directly from the interface because it’s based off of phone numbers. As you already know from my past updates about loop..

Others that I’ve been using:
I’ve also been using VoiceNotes, Pownce, Check Please, AIM, Facebook, EtchASketch, Yelp, and Mobile Flickr quite often. Actually, I really haven’t stopped downloading applications since the release of the App Store. Most of them are completely pointless though. I’ll have to do a follow up post on some of my other interesting finds.

What apps have you been using?

Since my post yesterday regarding the supposed “loopt sms spam” ordeal, I dropped an email to them just to see exactly what’s up with their invite policy.

While I was looking around learning the app, there is a button near the bottom that says “Who’s on loopt”. After clicking around a bit, I started getting friend approvals from people, which was surprising because I didn’t even recall sending out the invites.

After asking what the deal was, this was the response I got in regards to the invites:

When you clicked the “Who’s on Loopt” button, all of your contacts that are current Loopt users were auto-selected to receive invites. A total count of people receiving invites appeared at the bottom of the screen. However, we have since disabled that functionality due to customer feedback and confusion. We are working on an improved invite flow that will include an invite confirmation screen that will be released very soon.

The main issue seems to be mostly confusion with their UI. A simple confirmation screen of “Hey, just so you know.. you’re about to send a text message to all these peeps and homies. Are you sure you want to do this?” probably could have resolved a lot of the complaints.

To be completely honest, I actually think this is a far more superior invite system and much more effective then simply running across someone’s profile and clicking add. There’s a 95% chance that if you have my phone number, I’d probably want to be your friend on a social networking site.

I d texted Cait yesterday on twitter so I could add her on loopt.. and our conversation went a little something like this:

Me: Hey, what’s your loopt?
Cait: my loopt? lol as in my phone number?
Me: haha yeah, I guess that’s what we used to call it back in the day..

Now, don’t get me wrong.. there’s still some issues that need to be worked out and I’m definitely not okay with my contacts getting invites without my knowledge — especially with people who definitely do not want to be contact by a third party site.

Loopt is implementing a “black list” but how do you avoid never being contacted by a third party site ever again? Is there a global “black list” that people can subscribe to? Is it really up to the service itself to resolve this issue or perhaps you should just not be as free with your phone number. Or, hey.. maybe even choose some better friends. *shrug*

Either way.. I, just like a lot of you, probably don’t read all of the disclaimers on every site we join. Maybe that’s our fault?

I mean, I just found out that MySpace owns my first born. 16th paragraph, 4th sentence, 3 words in. Seriously.. Read it. It’s there.

With the launch of the app store this past week in conjunction with the new iPhone, a little application called loopt has been causing a bit of conflict with the community. Loopt is a location based social networking site that uses GPS to determine your exact location and share it with your friends.. and then spam your entire contact list via an SMS invite.

There’s a good chance that if you installed this application you’ve made the same mistake that most people made. While searching for friends who were on the service, apparently a text message was sent out to a large portion of my contact list, along with my phone number and my exact location (you know, since that’s the point of the application). Granted, you would think that if you have someone’s phone number, they’d have yours as well…

Hi, hey.. Over here!! People change their phone number for a reason!! With the ease of syncing contacts on the iPhone, it’s not always guaranteed that everyone in your contact list is a BFF (read: best friend forever). Also, there’s always people you just never want to text.. Like Steve Jobs, or an old boss, or maybe even an ex who would rather push you in front of a bus than get a text message from you?

(image from Merlin Mann’s getsatisfaction thread)

If there’s one thing that I hate more than anything, it’s sending out invites to a service. Especially one I’ve never tried and haven’t been actively using for more than 15 seconds.

Never once did I see a confirmation message that my friends would be getting an invite. The worst part about it is that my phone number was sent along with every invite as a text message to my friends. I just recently got a new phone number and I haven’t been as free with this as I have been in the past.

(I stole this screen shot from Aaron who has a great entry about some of his favorite iPhone apps. It’s definitely a good read!)

Now, the bad part is that I do actually like the service. Which, I guess isn’t that bad of a thing — it’s been awhile since I’ve actually been slightly enthused about new social networking site. It’s extremely simple to use and the iPhone UI is pretty intuitive (unless you’re trying to add friends.. I still don’t have that part completely figured out and I don’t think they do either). It’s also very easy to see where my friends are and what they’re up to at a glance.

You do need your friends phone number before you can add them which will cut down on the amount of people who can find you. This is definitely a plus, because I did plan on using this as a close friends only site.. unlike my Brightkite and groovr usage!

Oh, and a side note.. Dave Price from the Middle Show and Black 20 are the intro video for Loopt. As most of you know, they are my favorite content creators!

What are your thoughts on this service? This definitely raises a lot of privacy issues and awareness that we can’t be 100% sure of what these applications are going to do with our information.