The letter touches on something that I find very important: XMPP–a messaging protocol that gives us a look at (if not provides) that which a new generation of communication can be.

Dear Facebook Development Team,

Using Facebook Chat via Jabber [http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/110]

The above post, from 2008, gave your users some insight as to the aspirations to give Facebook Chat either A.) an XMPP engine or B.) an XMPP transport protocol.

For a while, afterwards, things were quiet. Then, in early 2010 (after enthusiasts and companies noticed XMPP server responses from Facebook.com), Development posted this to the Facebook weblog:

Facebook Chat Now Available Everywhere [http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=297991732130]

in which engineer David Reiss revealed that XMPP integration had been deployed, and that the protocol could be used to interact with Facebook chat.

Yet, as far as I can tell, it seems as though this service does not talk to the outside world (as with other uses of the protocol).

I know Facebook is very much about integrated experiences, but have you given thought to embracing the federation of XMPP, and establishing contact with those outside?

As a non Facebook user, there are many people with whom I interact over XMPP via Gmail/Gtalk (and a few running their own servers), but who would far prefer to contact me via your product. With this relatively recent shift to XMPP, the possibility of that seems so close it’s painful.

Facebook’s new mail features points out a strength of XMPP about which I always preach and I think you recognize: a single, ubiquitous contact.

An address of username@facebook.com could be the definitive contact for a user. The structure of the contact name allows for both traditional mail and XMPP-based messaging. Additionally, as products like Pidgin and GTalk have demonstrated, the extensibility of the protocol could lend itself to potential voice and video calling.

All of this can be had from one contact. With the right software drawing correlations between XMPP and Email identities, as well as XMPP’s features of priority, security, resource, and synching, I think this could be extraordinarily powerful.

I think you understand this. I think Google understands this, too. And I think Verizon, et al. should be concerned.

Yet, when the technology is used in isolation and lacks intercommunication, it feels as though some of the advantages have been lost–which leaves me feeling bleak about the future of next generation communication.

Signed,
Jeff Corgan

UPDATE | 2011.02.22 – Twitter user @sn_ sent a reply to my tweet about this article, stating “They have ignored the issue since one year.” He pointed me to the following year-old weblog post by Aaron Kelley, in which Kelley addresses this problem more technically, and offers users information on how to check when, if ever, Facebook turns on federation:

A request for federation (“S2S”) support on Facebook Chat XMPP! – [aaron-kelley.net]

Kind-of.

Setting resolutions is the type of activity that, as a teenager, I felt was unforgivably campy, and which people only did in their corniest of moods. Truth be told, I still do: I gather I’m just more susceptible to being a cornball than I imagined.

My change of heart was spurred by the following:

2010 is what I would call an “okay” year for me. I successfully enrolled in graduate school, lost a substantial amount of fat, and completed my first semester “decently.” I’m feeling good, as a result, but a number of unrectified problems and unfinished projects lurk in the back of my mind.

By outlining a few loose, achievable goals for 2011, I’m attempting to achieve better productivity through discipline which just hasn’t been present. As with anyone’s resolutions, these goals are a test of perseverance. I want to take the feeling of accomplishment from the past year and amplify it by a few orders of magnitude.

And so here I post them, for archival. We’ll see the success/fail results in approximately 11 months.

Resolutions for 2011

1. Continue to lose weight
2. Find a physical activity
3. Improve my GPA, both Spring and Fall
4. Vanquish my credit card debt, entirely
5. Finish building and deploying a site design for jeff.corgan.org
6. Publish a minimum of 20 articles/reviews over the year
7. Build an application (whether it be Roku, webOS, etc.)
8. Complete oid.corgan.org up to (at least) 365 days.

Unboxing of ThinkGeek’s Epoch Alarm Clock from J. Corgan on Vimeo.

A little clock I decided to pick up to take the place of my DSi as my morning alarm. Offers 5 different display modes (Roman, Octal, Binary, Hexadecimal, Regular), 2 alarm volumes, 2 display brightness settings, and a USB port for charging on the back.

Corrections in video: The display is 13 segment, and only has a setting for 1 alarm.

Can be purchased from ThinkGeek.com: http://www.thinkgeek.com/homeoffice/lights/a7c5/

Recorded Using Cheese: http://projects.gnome.org/cheese/
Converted Using WinFF: http://winff.org/

Here’s what it sounds/looks like in action.

ThinkGeek’s Epoch Alarm Clock – Alarm & Display Sample from J. Corgan on Vimeo.

Giving a glimpse into the display and progressive alarm of ThinkGeek’s Epoch Alarm Clock.

The click of the snooze button is representative of the solid feel of all of the buttons on the device.

Recorded Using Cheese: http://projects.gnome.org/​cheese/​
Converted Using WinFF: http://winff.org/​

Unboxing of Archos Key 4GB MP3 Player from J. Corgan on Vimeo.

From my Vimeo post in late summer 2010:

Unboxing an Archos Key 4GB MP3 Player with @zsunsun (http://www.twitter.com/zsunsun).

After playing with this thing for 5 minutes I have determined that it is something on which it is not even worth wasting one’s time.

The audio quality is PHENOMINAL and it has a built in FM tuner, but that can’t over come its lack of codec support (no sign of OGG, FLAC, Audible.com), poor feature set (no dedicated area for Podcasts), HORRENDOUS menuing (slow, convoluted and winding), and the inability to merge SD and Internal memory. Add to that the fact that it takes 5 seconds to skip between songs and 8 to skip between a song and a podcast and the thing is unusable.

Kudos to Archos on a nicely built (albeit a bit light) music player with great audio, but the Sansa Clip+ surpasses this on almost every user experience front. It is still the king.

My initial impression on audio quality was revealed not to be the case. Though I did no formal testing the audio on the Key sounds “clipped” and unnecessarily/poorly amplified.

The Pulse Smartpen wasn’t actually new to me. I had heard the device mentioned many times in the prior years’ news and occasionally by digital media house Pixel Corp‘s chief architect Alex Lindsay during his appearances on the TWiT Netcast Network. It was something I largely ignored, however, as a gimmick.

Yet knowing my life would shortly turn to laboratory work and graduate studies (both areas in which tearing sheets from a book in need of a duplicate is unacceptable) I became extremely interested in whether or not the Pulse Smartpen was up to the task of creating facsimiles of my hand-written assignments and procedures. After finally finding samples of digitized notes on Livescribe’s online note-sharing community during a coincidental “brown box” special in their web store, I bought in via a (now discontinued) 1GB Charcoal Blue Pulse Smartpen.

I consider myself fairly technologically savvy–or in the very least technologically content–so on some level there’s nothing particularly complex in my mind about the way the Pulse Smartpen works. As best I can gather, the device uses its ballpoint-end camera to photograph the ink users lay down on a background of incredibly small dots which are precisely printed on the company’s proprietary paper. This photographic data is stored on the Smartpen’s internal memory and, when connected to a PC with Livescribe’s Windows or Mac OSX software, is compiled into pages and notebooks of reconstructed writing (the implication here is that there is enough variation in the arrangement of dots for the software to keep track of approximately 5 notebooks).

Technically this all seems very feasible to me. Yet in use, it feels like nothing short of magic. Even months after everyday experience, I am still incredibly impressed at how well the Pulse Smartpen digitizes what I’ve written. It has proven useful for classwork, laboratory work, signatures and design–allowing me the comfort of the classic pen-on-paper interface while also providing a near identical replica for digital storage and manipulation. It really is nothing short of genius–especially given its price point: ranging anywhere from 70USD-200USD based on condition and internal file size.

Despite the lack of Linux support, the occasional shakiness on curved surfaces, and infrequent missing of lightly penned marks, this product is phenominal, particularly for students.

More information on the Livescribe’s Smartpens (the Pulse and its descendant, the Echo), including features I have not mentioned (as I have not used them), can be found on their site: http://www.livescribe.com.

Let’s cut right to the chase: at 99.99USD, the Roku XD|S (the top-tier configuration in Roku’s three-model lineup) is what I would consider a rock solid purchase. The device offers identical firmware to its predecessors (giving it the Netflix, AmazonVOD and MLB.TV, et al. streaming they became known for), in addition to taking the top of the line hardware features from the old models with a spattering of new advances. 1080p and 720p playback over HDMI or Component video (with separately purchased adapter) is native to the new, more streamlined, device and standard definition, again, is available via composite output. A USB port has been added to the XD|S for a future software update allowing local media playback, and the box also makes use of dual-band b/g/n wireless and Ethernet networking. An upgraded remote, with contextual “info” and “instant replay” buttons, has been added to the redesign as well.

For a savings of 20USD, users also have the option of the Roku XD, which sacrifices the USB port, component video output option and dual-band wireless. A third model—the Roku HD—is listed at 59.99USD and makes all of the concessions of the XD, while further only offering 720p maximum playback, downgrading to b/g wireless, and including the newly designed remote minus the “info” and “instant replay” features.

While each new like-functioning box on the market introduces an apporoach that is useful and interesting in the set-top/connected television space, the Rokus are, to me, still the boxes to beat. Their UI may be a bit slow and feature set slim, but their limitations are more than compensated by their ease of use, great video quality, and the leaps in ability I have seen between software upgrades. The content they offer is ever-expanding—and material, both free and premium, is shining on the boxes: In addition to the aforementioned services, Roku’s channel store provides “applications” for network news, Hulu Plus, CHOW, TWiT Netcast Network, UFC, NHL GameCenter LIVE, Pandora, Crunchyroll and much, much more.

For its excellent blend of cost, content, user experience and potential, I cannot recommend the Roku family enough.

For more detailed information on the specifications of each box, the content available, prices, accessories, file format support and possible discounts, visit Roku’s site at http://www.roku.com/.

E-Ink has always appealed to me for being a low-power, non-straining medium for reading. Opponents of the technology always bring up the fact that a person like me spends most of their day looking at an LCD screen without much trouble–thus negating a need for a dedicated device or display. To an extent that is true, but the rapid fire, haphazard path your eye takes when consuming content on a PC is much different than the linear, methodical path it takes when one reads. Having read for extensive periods of time on CRT and LCD displays, I can say that there is definitely a risk of fatigue (especially in late night study sessions).

So I was insanely pleased to see the rise of Amazon’s Kindle and Kindle 2 in 2008 and 2009 respectively: E-Ink was finally hitting the masses in a (relatively) affordable form. When this started spurring excitement in the market, and E-Ink devices were becoming a given announcement at every trade show, I became even more excited. Kindle was a tremendous start but I never bit on the first two models because they lacked two key features: size and PDF support.

Listen: integration with online services is nice and all, and I’m glad the Kindle offers that. However, the majority of my reading material: academic papers, school assignments, and text books I’ve scanned myself (hey, I know it’s not right, but I’ve tried paying large publishers big bucks for quality PDF versions of their text books to no avail, so I gave up and did my own) are in PDF format. PDF is a great, non-editable document standard which I love for rendering documents faithfully across platforms. If the electronic document reader can’t support it, it is useless to me.

And PDF support requires size. Kindle and Kindle 2 are great to replace the paperback book–and in that sense, the whole feature set makes sense. Browse the shop, get a novel, read. The experience is pristine and wonderful. Academic papers, news papers, blogs and magazines, however, don’t really render that well on such a small screen–they are formulated to be consumed in (at least) an 8.5×11″ world.

Plastic Logic‘s eReader filled that void. The eReader was announced sometime in early 2009 (probably CES if I had to guess), and captured my attention. Plastic Logic’s technology (which used a plastic backing instead of E-Ink’s traditional glass) enabled them to make a full 8.5×11″ display while keeping the reader robust and light. Atop of that, the file format support was unparalleled: Microsoft Office, PDF, ebook standards, HTML, TXT, RTF–almost everything I could ever want.

This was aimed at the business professional. A touch display allowed for graphical annotations in documents and a multi-document handler allowed users to switch between files on the fly–all things the Kindle could not (and still cannot) do in any of its iterations.

There’s no way to really quantify how much time I spent on the Internet looking at photos and videos of the eReader from its industry trade-show displays, meticulously reviewing the software upgrades Plastic Logic presented each time. It is safe to say, however, that it was probably more than was healthy, but my heart was entirely set on this.

Unfortunately it was taking Plastic Logic a long time to get this device out of the door. Not in any excruciating way, mind you–they stayed fairly on track with their release forecasts. I felt a crunch from this, however, because summer was drawing to a close. This meant that if I was going to head into my Senior year of college with an electronic book, I needed one immediately.

I have to give credit to my friend John for convincing me to get the Kindle DX. He received one as a gift around the summer of 2009, and brought it in to work. I was hooked, and ordered mine almost immediately. First and foremost I have to say: E-Ink, in terms of clarity and ease of read, was everything I had dreamed it to be. In ambient light, especially sunlight, the Kindle DX’s display was (and is) gorgeous. Really. There’s no other way to describe it.

Store access, content delivery, file support all worked as promised. It completely eliminated the need for carrying cumbersome text books and twenty to one hundred page academic publications in my backpack. It was liberating.

However after a few months of use, E-Ink and the Kindle DX’s flaws were becoming apparent. I found the device only usable in landscape mode (which in essence offered me about one third of a 8.5×11″ sheet of paper at one time)–asserting my previous speculations on display size. Even the DX, with its larger screen was too small to be usable (for my needs, at least). Additionally the device’s speed on content that had not originated from Amazon or was the product of scanning or large file size (in terms of PDFs) was horrendously slow, and difficult to navigate. This was not helped by the Kindle DX’s inherent complete lack of intuitive document traversal.

I appreciated the Kindle DX for what it was, but it had drawn me to the conclusion I mentioned earlier in this post: Kindle, Kindle 2, Kindle DX and most electronic document readers are suited for one thing, and one thing only: reading novels. To expect more out of these devices is not worth while.

The large-format outliers like the Plastic Logic eReader (later named the Plastic Logic QUE proReader – MSRP 649.99-799.99USD) and the recently announced Skiff Reader from the Hearst Corporation (http://www.hearst.com/) are still in their infancy. It remains to be seen whether or not document readers of this size (and price point) can make it in a market where people have been burned from expecting too much from smaller e-Ink devices.

Conclusion?

E-Ink/Document Readers – MAYBE

In reality, E-ink devices aren’t that bad. What it comes down to is whether or not you are the type of consumer who will read novels–and I emphasize that as the target audience pretty strongly. For those that need a device to display and annotate documents which depend on larger formats: forget it. We’re not there yet.

If you are the type to read novels, however, this is something that’s a pleasure to use and with an array of options (Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Copia’s eReaders, and the newly released and inexpensive Kobo eReader), the market is working in your favor to give you a simple experience at a low price. You pretty much can’t go wrong. Just make sure your device has good support behind it.

In my next post, Series I & II Conclusion, I will present the top technologies I think will replace or supplement electronic ink, and how devices similar to Apple’s iPad may replace both the UMPC and the E-Ink device for a certain class of people such as myself.

Series I – Mobile Communication & UMPCs

I decided to jump into the mobile space in the Spring of 2009 with, not a phone (for as it has been documented I hate them), but the Nokia N810.

Despite my past posts in which I begged for a mobile communication experience and fawned over the concept of tablet devices, I quickly came to find that the Nokia NXXX series, while cool in concept, is an actually poor idea. Why? The devices position themselves as more than a communication device–but in reality that’s all the Nokia N810 did well (and even then moderately so). As a browsing tool, it was quickly being surpassed in Internet rendering performance by the smartphones of 2007, 2008 and 2009. Its software library was neat but lackluster–completely overshadowed by the market places on the iPhone and Android OSes. In truth, the Nokia N810 was a mini Linux PC (for better or worse)–and while I loved having Pidgin and gPodder mobile at all times, the lack of performance and cramped interface set a few things in stone for me: I do NOT want two PCs in my life (data management is a pain), and I do NOT want a PC that small ever again.

After a few months, the N810 died. It’s exposure to water and scratches from my long walks rendered it almost entirely useless. It now has a home with my sister who uses it from time to time to play a song or view a webpage. With the screen unresponsive, and the performance slow I can only imagine this is a miserable experience for her.

At that point, I left the portable device side alone for a long time. But when my PC died in late August/early September, it was time for me to look for something new. Over the summer I had become completely enamored with Intel’s Atom chipset for its low power and usable performance. Trusting my experience with Atoms, I decided the time was ripe to fulfill my UMPC dreams

Enter the Viliv X70 EX Express.

Lets keep this short and sweet. Both Viliv and it’s US distributor, Dynamism (Twitter) proved to provide a solid product with solid support. The Viliv itself wasn’t a problem.

What was a problem, and the biggest thing I walked away with, was this: desktop Windows (and desktop Linux and OSX for that matter) are ABSOLUTELY NOT suitable interfaces for devices of this nature. While I still stand by the idea that Microsoft, at least conceptually, hit a home run with the idea of a UMPC, the fact of the matter is iPhoneOS, Android, and Windows Phone’s Metro UI are much more natural and usable on devices that are not only small, but which use touch as their main form of input. Surely there are exceptions: Windows 7 has unparalleled touch integration (and by far is the most touch friendly of the classic OSes), and OneNote increases in functionality every day. But around every corner–from menu systems, non Microsoft Developed apps, and old desktop metaphors–these classic Desktop environments run into repeated problems on non-classic Desktop devices. It’s the same problem with Windows Phone Classic (6.5 and below): in this realm, the desktop metaphor simply does not work. I also have yet to find an overlayed UI on any Desktop OS which isn’t flat-out awful. Even the one combined with the Viliv was useless. The concept is okay, but the second one launches an application you’re taken out of the experience and brought back to the desktop UI that’s prevailed over the past 15 years.

Thus my conclusion is as follows on these two devices as portable computing experiences:

Nokia N810 – PASS
Viliv X70 EX Express – PASS

So where does that leave me? In the next series of devices, I will discuss items I have purchased, observed, or researched as an extension of this genre: E-readers. I will describe how my rationale for (and opinions of) e-readers have grown and changed after my exposure to them, and how the new class of slate tablet devices spurred by Apple’s iPad may actually answer the call.

Corgan

Considering that, and the fact that I own no television, I take the DS platform very seriously. When the DSi was announced I was excited: it has the benefits of the prior model(s) plus added functionality and horsepower.

Particularly, I found myself fond of the concept of the game and application store, which (aside from the ease and fun factors) has the potential to launch the DS and Nintendo into the direction of family/specialized computing about which I wrote a couple years back. As has been seen by devices like the iPhone, pocket computing has a market.

There have been stories about The Big N putting its weight behind application development for the DSi, and of this I am glad to hear. However, I’m also a bit concerned.

While Nintendo, in the past month, has impressed me with the amount of work they’re doing to advertise, update, and maintain their hardware (something I hope they continue), I have become worried that limitations in the design of the consoles will also limit their future growth.

For example: during their presentation at last month’s Game Developer’s Conference, Nintendo pushed out Wii System Update 4.0. Among other things, this update solved the problem of the lack of Wii in-system storage, by allowing users to save games and channels onto SD cards.

While this is a great update, playing games off of the SD card requires users to temporarily dump the game to the Wii’s internal memory from where it can be run. For games, I hardly see this as a problem.

However for application development, I imagine this could be murder. Not only is one limited to the size of the system’s Internal memory but also to the download speeds capped on the system. This could potentially make the deployment of simple, but large applications, difficult.

Then again, to be fair, we have seen Wii games read off of SD cards, so it could be that the core of an application can be dumped into internal memory, and it can harvest data saved to the card itself.

I hope this is the case, because the DSi has a save system I assume to be very akin to the Wii’s, and there is a wide array of applications I’d like to see developed for the portable. I want to see the DSi thrive as a game system and beyond–something Nintendo can apply to all subsequent generations.

Below I have a list of apps I would love to see make it to the DSi (and for which I would gladly pay). They are listed with no order and with their influences and references, if applicable.

• Amazon Kindle (Inspired by Amazon Kindle for iPhone (and soon for other devices))
• PDF Reader (General, No Reference)
• Full Version of Wikipedia (Inspired by Patrick Collision)
• Email Client (General, No Reference)
• Feed Reader (General, No Reference)
• Jabber/XMPP Client (General, No Reference)
• Full Dictionary (Inspired by Collegiate for iPhone)
• Downloadable Maps (General, No Reference)

Good luck developers, and Nintendo.

Corgan