Getting light outside: Twittories #1

I'm one of the contributors to the first output of Twittories, a collaborative fiction project using www.twitter.com as the collaboration engine by Cameron Reilly the Elvis-like King of Podcasts.

It's been an interesting learning experience. It's no small feat; picking up someone else's narrative thread wherever it's been been dropped at the one hundred and fortieth character, keeping some kind of story line going, and leaving the next collaborator an interesting starting point, all in the text length limits of Twitter.

Twittory #2 is still open for a few more collaborators. Get in there!

clipped from twittories.wikispaces.com "I have this rule," she said, colder than the dark side of the moon. "We only talk using public channels from now on."

pseudodictionary accepted my new word: marvin

pseudodictionary accepted my new word, w00t
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

kk, not a completely new word in the conventional sense of "new", more in the marketing sense of "new", meaning "revised, different, tweaked" etc.

A "marvin" is my new word for someone with the brain of a planet driven to depression by being condemned to forever answer stupid questions from people with little or no brain. From the character of the same name in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Fortunately, they're extremely rare. I'm definitely not one myself.

Merry Christmas from the sweatshop!

At last, an xmas ecard I'm actually keen to send to my friends. The copy reads:

"Here's a piece of festive charm, a little christmas bear

He has a little santa hat and santa boots to wear

His little christmas present has been sewn on to his paws

In a sweatshop in Manila where they lock the fire-doors"

Crikey! It's Christmas!

Display ad for maps.google.com.au

display ad for maps.google.com.au
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

I knew they were serious about eating Sensis' lunch, and I'd seen Google AdWords house ads before, but i didn't know Google was doing display advertising now for their products.

This little flash anim was advertising restaurant reviews. Came across it in an Australian motoring blog.

Watch out yellowpages.com.au, here come the geeks...

[thinks: lolz, picture armies of sensis drones rushing to prepare themselves for an invasion by the Greeks. "no, i said 'geeks' you idiots!"]

live-documents.com announces: automatic truth resolution!

live-documents.com announces: automatic truth resolution!
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

How has this remained so quiet for so long? Sabeer Bhatia's new startup office suite isn't just going to sync up your online and offline docs, oh no.

It's going to create "...a single version of the truth"!

Wow, I can't wait to try that on a few internal reports I receive each week at the office. And on my Nielsen vs HBX traffic stats. And on my mate's fishing stories. And on the occasional International War Crimes Tribunal hearing...

Climate change solution: stop measuring it!

Oh, those whacky physicists! Who can really expect to entirely understand what they're on about most of the time? Perhaps we should satisfy ourselves with establishing what variety of psylocibin they've been taking.

But if I'm getting this New Scientist story even half right, then one pair of Heisenbergian blackboard-scribblers is suggesting we're affecting the state of the universe by observing it.

Just like the ole 'cat in the box uncertainty principle' (which for me always seemed like much more fun than setting the cat's tail on fire the way I did when I was a kid, and much more explainable to mum as 'a physics experiment mum, honest!')

So taking this nonsense and applying it to some problems more pressing than the ultimate demise of the universe, can we simply solve the climate change crisis by not measuring it any more?

Is the solution to the AIDS epidemic just to stop counting the dying people?

Is the solution to my personal financial situation just to shove all my bills in the bottom drawer without reading them?

...no, wait, I already know the answer to that...

clipped from www.newscientist.com Have we hastened the demise of the universe by looking at it? That's the startling question posed by a pair of physicists, who suggest that we may have accidentally nudged the universe closer to its death by observing dark energy, which is thought to be speeding up cosmic expansion.

The Bubble 2.0

This video will be huge. "Bubble 2.0" describes the current Web 2.0 situation precisely and with much humour. Can't wait to watch it on the AppleTV at home ;-)

The song's a remake of "We didn't start the fire" from Billy Joel's album 'Storm Front' released in 1989. I wonder what percentage of the 20-something Bubble 2.0 kidz had never heard the original tune before? lolz.

Google adds a new Australian public holiday!

Google adds a new Australian public holiday!
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

Hooray for Google: they've announced a new Australian public holiday on the 27th! Let's call it Google Day.

Oh wait, it doesn't officially exist...

Is Google's Android an attempt to take over the world?

Well, no. (a) "The World" is much bigger than the US, no more so than when you're talking about mobile, where the US is a relatively small chunk; and (b) the article explains how Google goes nowhere unless it goes hand-in-hand with T-Mobile and Sprint. T-Mobile and Sprint are competitors, so this is only a little bit easier than going hand-in-hand with two women you're dating at the same time. Does that end in a happy threesome? Only ever in your dreams.

clipped from www.slate.com Yes, Google Is Trying To Take Over the WorldNext step: Take out Ma Bell. What gives AT&T and Verizon real power over the wireless world? It is their control over spectrum, retail, and government, three areas where Google, as of now, is very weak, and where it must depend entirely on its allies. Spectrum is the one physically scarce resource in the wireless world, and those who control the airwaves have the power to call the shots by denying access to those who do not behave. That's why so much turns on the loyalty of Google's carrier partners, T-Mobile and Sprint, for they are serious players with spectrum. If, as is likely, AT&T and Verizon refuse to allow any Gphones on their networks, the reach of Android may be limited.

Books aren't dead. Neither are e-books the Next Big Thing

I don't think Amazon's Kindle is going to change the book world, though I hope I'm wrong.

I can see that the world would be a better place if there were no more printed books leaving forests denuded, taking up retail shelving, needing to be resold, recycled or worse once you've read them.

I concede that the Kindle is a major step forward in e-book tech, featuring better screen, easier nav, longer battery life and more storage at a lower price than ever before.

Two reasons why I don't think it will be successful:

1. It doesn't solve a problem for the consumer; and
2. It confuses the medium with the media.

It solves problems, but Amazon's problems, not the consumer's. The consumer does not have a problem. People don't walk out of book stores complaining about how unpleasant it is to quietly browse for a while. Nobody throws a book down in disgust and cries, "I just can't deal with the resolution of this typesetting on this paperstock!" and very few of us complain about the price of books (at least, not those of us who might be able to afford an Amazon Kindle.)

The Kindle, and the Sony e-book gadget and all the others are lovely showcases for the latest technology, but they confuse the medium with the media.

The media (the information, the narrative, the opinion, the pictures, ideas and all the rest of it) absolutely do not need to be on something that looks and works like a book (the media) to find an audience.

Modern authors know this from publishing their books online and by writing blogs. The music industry has known this for the past five years or so as they've seen their media transfer from one medium (CD) to another (.MP3) so fast that it's almost killed their industry. But now the music industry is starting to adapt, and is realising this is their biggest opportunity since the invention of radio.

The "word industry" (for want of a better name for it since it's not just a book publishing industry - that again confuses media with medium) just needs to learn not to confuse media with medium and it will stop wasting time with ebook readers and sell large numbers of words... some of them very long indeed!

The only issues the consumer complains about are the very issues that are created by the word industry itself trying to maintain its exclusive control of the creation, distribution and sale of word-based works. The Kindle is mainly an attempt to wrest control from the book publishers and their retail distribution networks and hand it straight to Jeff Bezos.

clipped from www.engadget.com

Building IM on mobile phones is tougher than it looks

The very friendly and open team at free multiple-IM-platform provider Meebo has been copping some flack from users this week for its decision to optimise Meebo for Apple's iPhone.

'Hey,' they're saying, 'What about all the gajillions of Meebo users out there who don't own an iPhone?' and they have a point, kinda. The iPhone isn't the most common handset on the planet...

...Yet. It is the fastest-selling handset in AT&T's stores and I'm fairly certain it will be the fastest selling handset in Europe and the US over the next 12 months when the numbers are in (w00t, bold prediction!)

Meebo more likely chose the iPhone first because it runs a relatively standard, relatively sophisticated browser; essentially most of the functional bits of Safari, based on the well-understood WebKit. As Paul from Meebo says on the blog, making Meebo work on an iPhone wasn't that hard because it wasn't too different to making Meebo work on Safari, and it did that already.

There would be two ways to get Meebo working on a broader range of mobile handsets: develop client software for each of them, or develop versions for common mobile browsers such as Opera.

Coding clients for other handsets is a humungous task. So humungous, nobody really attempts it any more. There are so many different flavours of even the most popular mobile OSes that Meebo would have to quadruple the size of its dev team for the next few years if that was the goal. There's 20+ popular J2ME implementations out there, multiple Symbian versions, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Palm... Fugedaboutit.

Mobile startups with client software don't - can't - support such a range of variants. Most support only a couple of recent Symbian versions, and/or maybe Windows Mobile. Hardly any try to keep up with J2ME.

Developing support for popular mobile browsers is no mean feat either. Good browser support means developing an interface that scales well to a galaxy of different screen sizes, resolutions and numbers of colours. It means ensuring you deliver good usability while taking advantage of whatever additional goodness might be available on some browsers - DHTML, Javascript, Flash, etc.

Yet you've also got to degrade functionality gracefully too, so that the primary Meebo features also work on some of the more primitive mobile browsers out there.

End of the day, Meebo's not really in the mobile messaging game. We can't expect a tiny startup to make that big an investment in developing stuff that's not core to its business.

clipped from blog.meebo.com We had a few bugs to fix before meebo was usable. First off, the iPhone doesn’t have an enter key so there was no way to send an IM message! I spent most of my weekend tweaking our code and learning the major differences between Safari on the iPhone and Safari on the desktop. We released a few placeholder tweaks but using meebo on an iPhone was still pretty fiddly. After using the iPhone and playing around with Safari, we found that the mobile version wasn’t very different to the desktop version and with a little work we could make a really great mobile interface for meebo. A couple of late nights later we were very proud to release the mobile version of meebo for the iPhone.

When meet-the-people sessions go bad

I don't think you could get this close to George Bush or Gordon Brown with a tee-shirt like this, and if you did, you certainly wouldn't get to take a photo of it. It's a sign of how out-of-touch with the modern world John Howard is, that he'd risk internet pranks like this, believing he can get re-elected by hugging as many Australians as possible.

(Thanks to Vote For Kevin and Martin Stannard for the photo.)

clipped from www.facebook.com

The wrong way up a one way street of content

There are now so many microblogging platforms out there, and they're all so new none has quite achieved ubiquity yet. So teh kiddies at hellotxt have decided the right thing to do is to add anothr layer of aggregation on the interweb, this time to let you update all your microblog feeds from the one microblogger.

So gay! Why? Mostly bcoz they'll never keep up. New microblog apps appear quicker than anyone can blog about them, much less try them out.

But also because I'm starting to realise that all this blogging (and microblogging on top of that and microblog-aggregation on top of that) is taking the user in the wrong direction. Well, maybe not the generic user, but definitely me.

I'm being asked in the name of aggregation and convenience to step away from rich content and navigation and adopt command-line txt as my default mode of communication. I'm also being asked to divide and subdivide my total potential audience into smaller chunks based on how they want to receive me, with so much overlap between them it's usually possible to spam my true meatspace friends with my every thought.

This is what I get now. 

I get to push my thoughts through an ever-narrowing set of command line options defined by the subset of content types that will pass all the way from microblog aggregator at the top down to flexible, rich media publishing platform at the bottom. If I got carried away with the aggregation model, the blog you're reading now could become merely an RSS feed of my Facebook News Feed of my Twitter tweets from my Hellotxt login.

That's just wrong. AFU. All my bases are belong to telco and jabber.org.

This is what I want.

Why do I want to flip the model?

For starters, I want to publish the richest possible content to the widest possible audience first. Blogger's my most flexible, creative publishing platform. OK, to bang out a post that includes much rich content I have to go to the immensely tedious trouble of logging in via a browser or blogging client, but I'm old enough to remember desktop publishing, and if you imagine that old standby of print publishing Quark Xpress to be like a four-hour full cavity search in a Kazakh checkpoint that's just run out of lube, then Blogger's browser interface seems like a standup quickie with a supermodel in comparison.

My Facebook and Myspace and Bebo and even Twitter presences are discoverable, but with nothing like the discoverability and search-crawler friendlyness of my long-established blog. Most of my blog readers have never read my stuff before. Sadly, most of them never come back, but that's an issue I could address if I wasn't so half-arsed. 

My Blogger blog introduces me to more new people than anything else, and lets me publish just about anything. Slowly, tediously, but with more control over how and where it appears than just about anything.

Follow the arrows and you'll see my content gradually being stripped of its richness as it gets handed on to Facebook and my other social network platforms I have yet to abandon. At this stage it's still got the potential for images and video, but it gets separated into different modules and not all of it is shown to everyone I know on Facebook - some goes to one group but doesn't display for others.

Finally, at the Twitter level, I'd like just the txt pls, shrthnded enuf so it fits in 1 sms, but like right now, 2 the smllst grps of frnds i.e. 121.

In other words, I don't want my blog to become a vast bog roll of five years of my text haiku; I want my Twitter feed to be the best possible condensed goodness automagically gleaned from my Facebook page, which is automagically being updated from my Blogger blog.

Snap to it, frnds!  

The ABC, our leading online publisher?

Crikey.com.au (subscription) pulls out some enormous numbers from the Australian Broadcasting Commission's (ABC) 2007 annual report.

These are huge numbers for an online business with distribution only via free to air and digital TV. Most local online media publishers also own newspaper, magazine or radio assets that can be used to cross-promote.

For me, this points to the value of an engaged audience. ABC viewers simply care more about what they watch on ABC, that's why they're more likely to interact with the programming online.

Why do they care more? Because the programming is higher quality than 90% of the commercial pap on 7, 9 and 10; it asks as many questions as it answers, it encourages debate, it disrupts normal programming formulas, it challenges and investigates.

Praise jeebus the ABC isn't selling online advertising!

clipped from www.crikey.com.au By June 2007, the ABC was registering just under 2.4 million successful and complete downloads of podcast files each month, representing content from all ABC Radio networks, ABC News and audio from ABC Television. In the month of June 2007, audiences downloaded over two million ABC Radio programs and 1.8 million ABC Television and News videos. In 2006–07, ABC Online reached over 2.1 million unique users per month -- equivalent to 18.4% of the active Australian internet population -- and turned over 102 million page views each month. This represents a 13% increase in users and a 6% increase in page views over 2005–06. ABC Online’s average monthly audience grew by 13%, while the active monthly Australian internet population grew by 5% over the same period.

Facebook beacons: searing flame of targeted viral marketing, or dim bulb of privacy violation?

Right now, the Facebook Platform does a terrible job of managing the way you give permission to third party apps to spam your friends with invites. The 'all your friends are checked by default' approach is a terrible idea, because it actually makes it hard to share something with the one friend who'll really appreciate it.

In the mad scramble to collect new users, no matter how disinterested they are, current Facebook Platform developers sacrifice the most viral part of the distribution mechanism: making a highly-targeted invitation to a user who'll love the recommendation, and who will then spread the invitation to other highly-relevant users.

If Facebook Beacon takes the same shotgun approach to viralocity then I don't think it'll amount to much. If all the web service providers I use add the Beacon code to their templates and I spend the whole day hitting 'uncheck facebook friends' each time I perform an action on another website, I'll delete my Facebook profile quicker than you can say, "f***book".

If, on the other hand, Beacon handles the opting-in and opting-out in a smarter way (by, frinstance, letting me create short lists of friends with similar interests so I can manage opt-in/outs conveniently) then I think it could be huge.

Let's wait and see...

clipped from www.readwriteweb.com Facebook Unveils Ad Strategy - Users Become Marketers At long last, Facebook today finally unveiled its much hyped advertising strategy at an invite-only event in New York. Their three pronged attack has already been reported on ad nauseum, so beyond a quick overview, I won't get into the reporting side much. There are those who agree with Zuckerberg that Facebook's new strategy is a winner -- highly targeted ads and consumers acting as marketers. There are those who think the whole idea reeks of privacy violations -- ads based on the personal information about yourself you intended only to share with friends? There are those who were hoping for something bigger -- the next AdSense. There are those who wonder if the whole thing will work -- who wants to promote products anyway?

Britain's whackiest laws

There's a good reason the Monthy Python team were all English.

clipped from tools.goldcoast.com.au Most ridiculous British laws: 1. It is illegal to die in the Houses of Parliament (27 per cent) 2. It is an act of treason to place a postage stamp bearing the British monarch upside-down (7 per cent) 3. In Liverpool, it is illegal for a woman to be topless except as a clerk in a tropical fish store (6 per cent) 4. Mince pies cannot be eaten on Christmas Day (5 per cent) 5. In Scotland, if someone knocks on your door and requires the use of your toilet, you must let them enter (4 per cent) 6. A pregnant woman can legally relieve herself anywhere she wants, including in a policeman's helmet (4per cent)

Note of caution on Google' mobile strategy

Holy stratosphere, batman! GOOG hits $741.79 on the back of its Google mobile OS announcement. My note of caution: it's a industry coalition! Can anybody point to an IT industry coalition that works, or has worked, for longer than a year?

Google needs the hardware manufacturers to stay on-board. I suppose it could get into hardware manufacture if it felt it needed to, but that's a business it has shied away from in webservers and desktops that it could have been in a decade ago if Google thought that was a good rate of return. And unravelling the Open Handset Alliance first would take time and money. So it's stuck with herding handset hardware cats - good luck with that.

Not all the biggest cats are even in the herd - most prominently Microsoft (well, duh!) Nokia, SonyEricsson and Palm.

Are all the handset makers in the herd going to chuck it all in and adopt the Android platform without hesitation? No, they're going to take a few tentative steps only, keeping most of their eggs in their own proprietary OS baskets, where after all, most of their brand and experience equity is tied up.

It's not the buttons or the battery in a Moto that makes it a Moto, it's the user experience, which is derived entirely from the OS and the apps that leverage it.

The significant risk for a handset manufacturer is that using an open OS also used by other manufacturers leaves them wide open to competition of the sort none of them truly feels capable of beating.

So yes, there's definitely a lot of big names signing on to develop Android devices, but how deeply they invest in it depends entirely on their own strategic machinations, not on how cool users think a GPhone might be.

I could be wrong, this could be the first industry coalition to hum like a well-oiled machine for the next two decades. Or it could be yet another industry coalition which starts losing its way at the end of the first year under the competitive tensions between its members.

google changes logo for melbourne cup

google changes logo for melbourne cup
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

the Race That Stops A Nation also changes the logo of Google Australia for a day. small lol.

Twittering the Melbourne Cup

twittering melbourne cup
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

Next to HG and Roy calling the Melbourne Cup, my next favourite way to consume the Race That Stops The Nation would have to be Ben Barren, in the Bridge Hotel in Mordialloc, via Twitter. I can practically smell it.

Alpha release is not the right time for user testimonials

8Hands sounds like a potentially interesting way to stay updated for those social network addicts amongst us who feel the need to share our love across multiple social networks.

But while I admire the open disclosure, the testimonials and 'top five support forum' posts on 8Hand's homepage are probably too much information, too soon.

Before I've even decided to download and try the software I'm seeing reasons why it might be a risky proposition. Maybe beta launch is a better time to add real testimonials and forum posts to your homepage and leave snippets from, say, Techcrunch reviews in their place for now.

I guess I'm not enough of a social networks addict... maybe there's hope for me yet?...

clipped from www.8hands.com I love this software "Seems like they worked out many of the earlier bugs and seems to run OK on my XP system. Greetings 8hands! "I like the application, It's a brilliant idea and it looks great. simple & smooth - i'm loving it! great app! finally i don't have to log into myspace and see all them spam comments about winning an iphone and finding a date - i can screen them now!

How to draw attention to your RSS feeds

Props to Messymedia for this heads-up on a great post on different ways to draw attention to your RSS feeds. It's certainly the first time I've thought of RSS as potentially being sexy. Convenient? Yes. Speedy? Certainly. Topless? Well, I guess so, if it works for you...

clipped from www.currybet.net Now, it is fairly standard around the web to advertise the availability of RSS feeds with images and icons - in fact over the years there have been plenty of different ones - usually quite small. However, The Daily Star approach is a new one on me.

Why openID is too hard for actual consumers

Why openID is too hard yet
Originally uploaded by bigmick.

Mick's right - OpenID in its current form should really be called Where Are You Taking Me and Why?

Mick's not the only savvy semi-tech user confused by OpenID's jargon - I don't get it either. I've created an OpenID login, and have had to abandon it in despair. I know it's out there, but it's not yet speaking a language I understand.

I wouldn't start from here if I was going there

 

Reminds me of the old joke; I asked the Irishman directions to a certain place, and he said, "Well, if I was going to there, I wouldn't be starting from here."

This lovely cut-away diagram on a bus stop in York Street, Sydney, must have cost a pretty penny to produce. With its extensive index of bus routes below, it shows you which bus stop to queue at to catch a bus to your chosen destination.

Shame, then, that the diagram portrays the street from the perspective of someone standing on the other side of the road. Most people have difficulty transposing between their actual position and their indicated position on a map or diagram, and you can hardly pick up and rotate the bus station, as many of us would a street directory, to reorient it according to the direction we face.

Choice is more often a feeling than an action

Duncan Riley is copping some criticism on Techcrunch over his opinion that OS X Leopard's widgets are newsworthy enough to report on.

I think it's an interesting feature of Leopard, but not really significant to the widget sector (is it a sector yet? ;-) covered by TC.

Unlike most other widget platforms, OS X's widgets are hidden in a Widget app that you need to open first, reducing the number of views/user. They aren't cross-platform, and Leopard's market share is only a slice of the total OS X installed base. I don't know what share of the total OS market OS X enjoys, but it must be small. Growing faster than other OSes, likely, but from a very low base.

Microsoft, with it stated aim of being the Internet OS - and its long-developed habit of copying Apple's interfaces - may eventually copy this 'create your own widget from the browser' feature, but at MSFT's current rate of innovation, count on seeing that some time >2020, by which time it'll be Mozilla-based browsers, not IE, that will have dominant market share.

The other thing to consider is what percentage of users will make their own widget given the opportunity to do so. My experience working on personalisable homepages for portals suggests that while everyone ticks "yes" when you ask them whether they want their own personalisable homepage, when the product goes live, most of those yes-tickers will never take the time to personalise their homepage. My observations suggest that ease-of-use has no bearing on that result - it doesn't matter if it's one button on the toolbar away.

Personalisation is like fast-food - knowing that the fast-food franchise lets you choose your own fillings gets you in the door rather than the competitor's door. But 98% of us choose the off-the-shelf burger after we walk in and view the menu because it's quicker, easier, and we figure whoever decided that pickles and ketchup go together must know what they're doing. Mistakenly...

We think we want choice, but what we really want is the feeling that we could choose if we wanted to.

Telstra home phone rental rip-off

We have one home phone line, provided by Telstra. In the last three months we made only 87 calls, of which 55 were local. Our quarterly bill is for $103.62, which for 87 calls is an average of $1.19 per call.

We don't even have any added services on the line other than caller ID.

Really, is it any wonder Telstra customers feel perpetually ripped-off?

Help pay for a political TV ad? I can do that

Now this is the kind of political ad I'm happy to see more of on TV - the kind that takes the piss out of our Federal Government's use of television ads for shameless propaganda dressed up as public service announcement.

It also comes to the same conclusion I have: I'll vote for a party that's serious about climate change.

You can do too, and make sure thousands more Australians see the ad. Here's a page hosted by Getup.org.au where you can make a secure donation to buy more airtime for the TVC.

Radiohead: not OK, Computer

Lord only knows, pretension is hardly a new attitude in the music industry, but when I read that Radiohead were not selling their latest album on iTunes Store, I had to chuckle at the assbackwardness of it all.

If I were their record label, I'd be down on my knees begging them to recant. If I were Apple's iTunes A&R, I'd be wondering if it was something I'd said to piss them off.

After all, I assume Radiohead will be OK with radio stations not playing the entire album in one go, and I assume they haven't produced a music video for MTV encompassing all the tracks on the album. Yet somehow, the only medium in which the album must be consumed in its entirety is the one where there's any significant revenue to be earned.

Millions of potential buyers will instead lift a copy of the album from a friend's CD or from a free file sharing network.

Will the next Radiohead album come with a waiver that must be OK'd stating that the purchaser agrees that 'Radiohead is bigger than Jesus" before downloading?

clipped from www.tuaw.com Radiohead ditches iTunes to keep album complete Here's an interesting twist on the iTunes vs. record companies situation. Radiohead (disclaimer: I'm a Radiohead fan) is choosing not to sell their latest album on iTunes not because their record company is pressuring them out of the deal-- their record company is EMI, and they're more than willing to sell the record DRM free-- but because iTunes is forcing them to break up their album into songs that can be sold separately.

Apple's iPhoto still can't print photobooks in Australia

Apple's iPhoto *still* can't print photobooks in Australia
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

Apple launched iPhoto 1.0 in 2002 and today I installed iLife '08, which includes iPhoto Version 7.0.1.

Since version 1.0, Apple has offered the ability to print photo books from iPhoto, and by all accounts, it has amongst the best photo book quality in the market.

Now it offers book printing in the US, Japan and much of the larger European nations, but no book printing in Australia. Come on, Apple Australia, you've had more than enough time to build an installed base of iPhoto users here, and to negotiate backend printing relationships. It's well past time you launched iPhoto book printing for Australian iLife customers.

I know there are other third-party solutions I could use, but I'm not interested: I'm an Apple Fan Boy and proud of it, and I want the one-click seamless experience from button-on-iPhoto-toolbar, to dotmac login and shopping cart, to nicely packaged photo book in the mail.

Please.