To say this is an improvement is an understatement. The old MSN homepage looked like it was designed in GeoCities.

It’s still a tiny bit too cluttered I think, but the Twitter and Facebook implementations will be very nice for people who actually want to use this as their homepage.

Too bad the only email option is Hotmail. And I still can’t figure out what the hell Windows Live actually is.

It’s fairly hilarious that Apple was using those Windows CE-based payment devices for so long. Apple controls the appearance and image of its stores so tightly — except when it came to those bulky checkout devices with shitty styluses running software from their enemy.

This seems like a much better (and obvious) solution. (Though it doesn’t look as elegant as the Squirrel/Square thing.) You know, eating your own dog food.

Ciara Byrne, who I don’t know but apparently writes occasionally for TechCrunch Europe, has written a post “uncovering” TechCrunch as “one big frat party.” Her rationale is that posts like the one I wrote last week about “Asian Boobs” (which is, by the way, the name of the actual app in the App Store) was simply to be able to post pictures of scantily clad Asian women on TechCrunch.

Frankly, that’s bullshit. It’s bullshit and it’s laughable.

There was exactly one point of the post in question: To call out Apple’s hypocrisy with regard to the App Store approval process. Regular readers of mine will know that I have done posts like this for months now. There must be a dozen of them. Maybe more. I point out Apple’s hypocrisy in a number of different ways in these posts. Byrne completely glosses over that point and doesn’t mention any of those. Instead, she lazily states as a fact (again she doesn’t know me, didn’t ask me, etc.) that I simply did that post to be able to post those pictures.

Did I have to post 4 pictures of the Asian girls? No. But I was proving a point. Sometimes proving a point shocks some people, but it gets it across. To those I offended, I’m sorry I offended you, but I’m not sorry for the post. Every single one of those pictures are ones that Apple approved and are live in that app. They have no problem approving those, but will not approve a satirical picture (which is really just text because the pictures are generic) making fun of Hitler, for example.

That too, is bullshit. But apparently, I’m not allowed to make that point because Byrne will make an assumption (again, without ever having met me) that I’m sexist. Oddly, none of my female friends or co-workers appear upset with me about this. But what do they know — besides, you know, me?

She goes on to call out my colleague Paul Carr for no apparent reason other than she doesn’t like his writing style. I won’t defend Paul here because there is absolutely no need to — and I think he’s going to speak to all of this on his own anyway.

Though she buries it under the outrage about my post, Byrne is apparently most upset because she was at the TechCrunch office last week when my post went up and some of the guys there were joking about it. I wasn’t there, so I can’t speak to what was said. But there were other women there, and they don’t appear to be upset about this. Based on conversations I’ve had about the day, I’m very much left wondering if this sexism argument isn’t just a crutch for someone who felt slighted for not being greeted at the TechCrunch office with pomp and circumstance. If that’s the case, it’s sad, pathetic, irresponsible, and much more of a hindrance on women’s rights than any “3 sentences” I could ever write.

In her last paragraph, Byrne writes, “The signal being sent here is that women have no place in TechCrunch, and by extension the tech industry, except as a commodity as in the Asian Boobs app.” I have to believe she knows that the brilliant Heather Harde, a woman, is our CEO. But who knows, Bryne clearly didn’t feel the need to do much research here, so it’s possible she doesn’t know that.

While it’s not up to me, the signal I would actually send is that one woman, Ciara Byrne, has no place at TechCrunch. Not if she’s going to try to shit on our brand to leverage herself by creating false controversy and calling out people she doesn’t know.

My colleague Greg Kumparak at MobileCrunch does the comparison everyone wants: iPhone vs. Droid.

His conclusion is what any rationale person would expect: Droid is better for some things, iPhone is better for some things. Seems obvious but with so much “iPhone killer” hype (partially Verizon’s fault), Kumparak’s review in great in that it takes the time to break down and talk about the stengths of one versus the strengths of the other.

I haven’t had a chance to play with a Droid yet; hope to in a few days. But I’ve heard nothing but great things and I think it’s great that someone has finally built a piece of hardware to realize Android’s promise.

That said, I can tell already that I will think the physical keyboard is useless. That’s just my preference, though.

TC post on the never-ending stream of phones the media labels as “iPhone Killer” that never seem to do just that. There’s a reason for that.

It’s been a long time since I’ve tried to do it. But I honestly have no desire to. I remember clearly just how bad I was at it when I was still in grade school and had to do it for music class. And I think I know why: I’m awful at multitasking.

That may sound like an odd thing for a blogger in the tech space to say, but it’s absolutely true. If I don’t focus on doing one thing at a time, I never get anything done. I simply can’t seem to utilize my brain to do two things at once. It’s why I can’t tap my foot while playing a different beat with my hands. Inevitably, with me, it all blends into one beat.

In some ways that good. When I am able to get focused, I’m very focused. With one beat in mind, I can stay on rhythm for hours. When I know what I want to say, I can crank out a thousand word post with relative ease, changing very little along the writing path. But in this day an age, distractions are plentiful. And just one of them can derail me from a thought. And sometimes those thoughts are then gone forever.

It used to be that to focus on writing, I would sit quietly at my computer. This meant shutting off music and turning off the television. When IM got integrating into Gmail a few years ago, things became a bit more problematic, because shutting off IM (a huge source of distraction) meant remembering that I had it open in Gmail and not just through iChat (which is another distraction I would close). But as someone who covers live-breaking stories during the day, it’s impossible now for me to turn everything off.

With Yammer and Skype constantly open for work, it’s hard to focus on writing during the daytime hours. But the much bigger distractions come from Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, and Gmail, which constantly pause my writing to see if there’s something hot that I’m missing.

And the iPhone had made things a thousand times worse. With Boxcar, a push notification app for the iPhone, I get notifications at least every few minutes. These include new email notifications, Twitter search notifications, Twitter @reply notifications, and Facebook notifications. And when you throw in Foursquare push notifications, BNO news notifications, and Yammer notifications, it’s rare that 2 minutes goes by throughout the daytime working hours that my iPhone isn’t buzzing. And yes, I look at it almost every time.

This ensures that I rarely miss a breaking story. But it’s awful for actual writing. This is why you may notice that every longer piece I write on TechCrunch comes either at 3 AM or on the weekend. And that’s one of the reasons that I stay up so late; I feel I can get twice as much done after about 10 PM then I can before it. After that time, the constant stream of emails slows to a trickle, tweets get quiet, and IMs stop coming in, etc.

I spend every single day looking forward to the night.

Much like Inbox Overload, I fear there is no real solution to this aside from maybe getting a personal assistant who does all of the constant online checking for me and only alerts me when there is absolutely something I need to know. But honestly, I probably wouldn’t trust someone else to do that for me. If I were a boss, I’d probably be the worst micro-manager ever.

But the real problem, as I see it, is that again, like Inbox Overload, distractions are only going to get worse going forward. In the past 10 years, it’s gone from bad, to very bad. But the past 2 or 3 years, the innovation in the distraction space seems to have blossomed.

I fear this will simply drive me into staying up later and later to do what I really like: Writing. Quietly. By myself. With no distractions. Maybe I’ll spend my days learning how to drum.

[photo: flickr/matti mattila]

This is a great freaking game for the iPhone. It’s similar to Rolando, but you don’t use the accelerometer to control, instead there’s a very simple three buttons (backwards, forwards, jump) control system on the touch screen. It’s simple, fun, and very well done. Easily worth the $2.99.

Great stuff from Gruber. But one thing that he only notes briefly in a footnote is Chrome OS. While the hoopla has largely died down around it as it remains mostly an enigma for the time being, I do still firmly believe that it may have the potential to alter the PC industry (that being the Windows PC industry).

Will it kill Windows? Of course not. Will it force most PC makers out of the herd mentality Gruber talks about? Probably not. But if one netbook with Chrome OS installed takes off in sales, which I have a suspicion we may see depending on the price point, it would very slowly start to shake things up.

I’ve been using Windows 7 for a while now. And now I have the full version (booted on my MacBook Pro). It’s fine. Much better than Vista. But why do I even use it at all? Just to use Chrome (which is so much faster on Windows as the OS X version is still pre-beta). If I could just boot into Chrome (Chrome OS), I would in a second.

Most people aren’t ready for that yet, but a cheap Chrome OS netbook (call it a GoogleBook or a ChromeBook) could be a very interesting gateway drug away from the Windows stranglehold in the PC market at the low end.

And with Google pushing from the bottom, and Apple pushing from the top, Microsoft could start to feel squeezed.

Copyright infringement complaints. This sucks. StoneLoops is awesome.