I thought I'd expand a little on my description of my ultimate eBook product. I've put quite a lot of thought into this over the past year or so, and come up with what I think could be a great little piece of hardware.

The basic form-factor would be something like the iPhone/iPod Touch, but with a screen around the size of a sheet of paper. Personally, I think A4 would be a good size for it, although I'm sure there would be plenty of Americans then annoyed by the fact that it's the 'wrong' proportions (A4 does have the benefit of being pretty much exactly the same size as my MacBook though, which is nice). I see no particular reason that it couldn't be as thin as an iPhone, especially with all that area in which to spread out the innards. For the most part it would be relatively in-extraordinary: eInk touchscreen (ideally in color, but that might be pushing it a bit for our current eInk technology), some decent amount of storage for files (1 GB maybe? More?), WiFi, a web-browser (makes it very easy to implement my eBook store idea I posted about before), and the ability to view a variety of file formats like plaintext (really stretching it there, I know), RTF, PDF, &c.; I think my eBook store idea would be a pretty-near killer app for it, but the real kicker, in my opinion is bluetooth.

Not just bluetooth, or course. What I want is the ability to pair it with my computer so that I can essentially use it as a second screen for viewing documents. What I envision is this. At it's most basic, you pair the device with your computer over bluetooth and it shows up on your desktop giving your normal filesystem access to put files on it and organize them as you see fit. However it does much more than that. It also gives you a new application that can open all the file formats that the device can display. If you have a Mac you can either put this app in your Dock and drag files to it to be opened, or set that app as the default file handler for PDFs and/or other filetypes. When you open a file with this new app the file doesn't display on your computer screen, it displays on the reader. Basically the reader becomes a second monitor for viewing content that lives on your computer. It should have a similar function that ties into the web browser on your computer so you can just click a button or hit a keystroke and the website that you're currently viewing on your computer comes up on your reader.

For me, this would be huge. When I take my laptop off to a cafe or wherever to work I either have to lug around hard copies of any relevant documentation up to and including large reference books like The Django Book. My only other option is to use electronic references which, while more than adequate and sometimes even better for conveying the necessary information, take up quite a bit of real estate on my MacBook's 14.1" screen (or even on my iMac's 24" screen since I usually have anywhere from 5-10 windows of code open). If I had a product such as this I could just double-click my documentation PDF or eBook (many reference books now come with an eBook version) and it will pop up on my reader where I can reference it exactly as I would a piece of paper. True a conventional eBook reader would be able to fill the same function in many ways, but this functionality would significantly simplify the process and allow me to use the more functional interface provided by a full computer. It allows you to simply double-click a file on your computer to open it, and then walk away with the document in hand to read on your way to a meeting or to peruse over lunch. Basically it completes the metaphor of files on your computer and lets you physically handle them as if you'd just pulled them out of a file cabinet.

The really cool thing about this idea is that we could have it tomorrow. It would only be a software update for the iPhone or iPod Touch (plus the attending local app) to make this a reality. It probably wouldn't be particularly hard to do either. If they wanted to, I bet Apple could give us this capability in the next update. Using the small iPhone screen wouldn't be quite as good, but it would be a start and I, for one, would use it extensively.

It's been far too long since I've written anything. A whole lot has happened since the last post, much of it work. I'm on track for my biggest project yet to go live pretty soon, and I've got a number of other smaller projects that should be released even before then.

In the mean time Jessi and I spent 10 days on the west coast at the end of last month. It was a fairly busy travel schedule: fly from Boston to San Francisco on Friday so Jessi could host an OurStage.com sponsored Yelp party, then Saturday morning fly from San Francisco to San Diego where we spent a relaxing weekend with some very fun members of Jessi's family I hadn't met before, the Monday Jessi took the train to LA for some meetings and I flew straight back to San Francisco (LA's just not my town) to hang out with friends and see my dad until Jessi came back up on Wednesday for NoisePop (also sponsored by OurStage), then back to Boston on the following Monday. It was definitely very nice to be back in the Bay Area, although I learned that it's never a good idea to plan on relying on the free WiFi in a hotel. Though our hotel (the Civic Center Holiday Inn) had it, it was pretty flaky and seemed to have some policy in place that prevented outgoing traffic, which meant I couldn't SSH into my server, which meant I was severely limited in what I was able to do from the hotel. Fortunately we were right across the street from the absolutely amazing San Francisco Public Library main branch which is probably my second favorite public library after Boston's Copley Square branch, and provides pretty fast free WiFi. All in all it was a very good, but very exhausting trip.

Since getting back, my focus has been pretty much all business. I've gotten a lot of work done, though I still have a lot of work left to do, and hopefully I should be able to make some pretty big business-related announcements over the next couple months. I did, actually, have one small business milestone while in San Francisco: I hired my first contractor for a small job. Jesse Legg helped me out with a quick project so that I would have the free time to work on another that had a looming deadline. Not really that big of a deal, but I think it's still an indication that I'm on the right track and my business is continuing to grow.

In other news, I just saw on Gizmodo a story about a new eBook reader from Netronix. It's basically like they took Amazon's Kindle and made the changes that I would have wanted made: they added a touchscreen interface and gave it WiFi instead of EV-DO. While the lack of EV-DO obviously limits it in terms of being able to get content no matter where you are, I think it will prove to be a more useful direction for eBook readers. What I would like to see, similar to Amazon's always-on eBook store, is some framework by which people with a WiFi enabled eBook reader can walk into a brick and mortar bookstore, browse through the books, and, when they find what they want, but it electronically and download it directly to their reader via the store's WiFi network. In some ways this would be less convenient than Amazon's store, but it would also be vastly more flexible and give people the option of still supporting their local bookstores. I would also really like to see this sort of technology extended to libraries, although the whole premise of the library is predicated on the limited time that you have access to the materials, so it would probably require some sort of DRM in order to be workable. Hopefully, with the popularity of the Kindle, eInk technology and the whole concepts of eBooks will start to advance more quickly and we'll start seeing better and better reader technology. I know I will definitely own an eBook reader of some sort in the next few years. I just hope it has some mechanism for both the sort of WiFi store described above and some note taking capacity.

Amusingly enough, just two days after my post on photovoltaics in which I mentioned the possibility of orbital power generation plants that send the power back to Earth via microwave transmission, National Geographic ran a story on exactly that.

This technology is one that's been of interest to people for quite a while, and has been showing up in science fiction for decades. Apparently the Pentagon is also interested in space-based solar power, and the South Pacific nation of Palau has expressed interest in being part of a proof-of-concept implementation of the technology.

The details are all in the article, but essentially Palau has an uninhabited island where they propose building the rectifying antenna to receive the power from space. This would demonstrate the possibility of the technology as well as the safety. Apparently, this project could be completed as early as 2012 for about $800 million.

My new iMac came a couple days ago. So far it's absolutely great. Unlike my PowerMac G5, it plays HD video without choking. Even better, after installing Perian I can watch all that HD video in Front Row using the remote instead of having to deal with navigating through the file system, opening it with VLC, and then setting it to fullscreen. I also really like the new keyboards. A lot of people have been complaining about them, but they're like the MacBook keyboards, which I love, only better. It is annoying that the switched around the functions of the F keys though (going to the Dashboard used to be F12, but it now F4; hitting F12 increases the volume), but that won't take too long to get used to.

The only annoyances so far have been dealing with my external hard drives, and Leopard. The hard drives are really my own fault, when I originally put together the 500 GB RAID to store my video I used an eSATA enclosure along with an eSATA controller card in my G5. The iMac has neither eSATA ports nor anywhere to put an eSATA controller card. Fortunately, however, it does have FireWire 800 (IEEE 1394b), so I just replaced my old eSATA enclosure with a new USB 2.0/FW/FW800 enclosure and that was ready to go. Leopard is a slightly larger problem however.

I've already upgraded my MacBook, and so far I really like Leopard. However the vast majority of my work requires me to edit remote files which I do using Cyberduck and TextMate (two fantastic programs, anyone who has use for an FTP/SFTP client and/or an advanced text editor should definitely check them out). Unfortunately Leopard breaks the integration between the two so that I can't just easily edit files on my server as though they were local. This isn't, I don't believe, a bug in Leopard, merely a change in functionality that Cyberduck and/or TextMate will need to take into account before the it can work again. I know that TextMate 2.0 should be coming out soon and that it will be Leopard-only, so hopefully that means it will fix the problem. Until then, one of my computers needs to stick with Tiger, and since I already upgraded my MacBook that means it's my iMac. I kinda wish it were the other way around, but it would be way too big of a pain to change that now.

Last night I sold my PowerMac G5 and 24" Dell monitor. I bought the G5 almost exactly four years ago on October 20, 2003. At the time it was the top of the line Macintosh with all the options, but since I had an Apple Student Developer account, it only cost me about $2500, the cost of the low-end PowerMac. Despite being four years old, it's still a great machine. It's perfectly capable of doing just about anything you might want it to do including video editing (which is what the guy I sold it to is going to use it for). The only thing it really has a problem with is playing HD video. It had problems decoding 720p H.264 content fast enough and would often stutter. 1080p content was completely unplayable. If it hadn't been for the fact that watching video was my main use for it (I can do all my work on my MacBook just fine) I would have kept it until it either failed catastrophically or simply was no longer able to run the software I needed.

I'll be replacing it with an iMac. It seems like a bit of a shame to replace a PowerMac with an iMac, but a 24" 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo iMac will be completely paid for by the money I got for my 2.0 GHz G5 PowerMac and 24" Dell LCD monitor, so I'm essentially upgrading my computer for free. The iMac should have no problem playing even 1080p H.264 content, as my 2.0 GHz Core Duo MacBook plays it about as well as my PowerMac played 720p. The screen in the iMac should also be slightly better than the one I sold, so this turns out to be a pretty good deal for me. Actually, it's a really good deal for me. The only out of pocket expense when getting the iMac will be AppleCare, which I definitely think is worth it. Oh, and I also have to get a new hard drive enclosure. Before I was using a SATA to eSATA enclosure along with an eSATA controller card for a 500 GB RAID, but the iMac won't have eSATA so that's out (and I sold the enclosure along with the G5), so I also had to order a SATA to USB 2.0/FireWire/FireWire 800 enclosure to replace it.

Until I get the iMac I'll be stuck with just my MacBook. It's a little odd right now having nothing but a little laptop sitting on my desk, but, to be fair, it's just as capable of a computer as the PowerMac was, so currently I'm not actually missing out on anything other than the bigger screen (and the use of my 500 GB RAID) in the meantime.

This is, oddly enough, another iPhone post. I know I said I wouldn't really be commenting on it any more, but this is a post that will be useful to other people and isn't relevent only to iPhone owners. Really, this has more to do with email than iPhones.

The story starts out, however, with my iPhone. One annoyance of the iPhone is that it doesn't have any spam filtering capabilities for your email. Whatever shows up in your inbox shows up on your iPhone. This isn't necessarily a problem for everyone, but it is for me because the nature of what I do requires that my email address be easy to find and easy to read. So I get a lot of spam. And I use a client-side spam filter to deal with it (specifically, the one built into Apple's Mail, but that's not so important). As a result, having my iPhone check my mail automatically didn't work so well. Every 15 minutes (the period I had it set to check email) it would ding to alert me that I had mail, only for me to find that it was, almost without exception, spam. So I needed a way to filter my email before it got to my iPhone. There are a couple way that could be done. The most obvious is probably to install something like SpamAssassin (a server-side spam filter) on my email server. But I didn't really want to do that. I've never really liked SpamAssassin, and maintaining it can be a chore.

There is, however, a very reliable and very accurate server-side spam filter available that I actually already used. That would be the spam filtering offered by Google's Gmail. Applying that spam filtering to my regular email was actually very simple and in some ways increased my flexibility in terms of ways to deal with my email. What I did was this:

1. On my email server, set my email addresses (josh@dydxtech.com, josh@joshourisman.com, and a couple others that I keep around for legacy support reasons) to forward to my Gmail accounts (one for personal, and one for business).
2. Create new, private email accounts on my email server. These are where all of my email is going to end up, but I'm not going to publish the address anywhere or tell them to anyone.
3. Set my Gmail accounts to forward to the appropriate private email accounts
4. Transfer my archived email from my old accounts to the new private ones

Pretty simple, as long as you have a basic understanding of how email works. Basically email goes to my public email address, is forwarded to Gmail which filters out all the spam very reliably, and is then forwarded to my super-secret, private email account. All mail sent from that account has a from and reply-to address of my private account, so it's difficult (though not impossible) for people to determine the addresses of my private accounts thus cutting nearly to zero the amount of spam that I ever have to deal with. Gmail, of course, isn't perfect, but if some spam gets through all I have to do is log into my Gmail account and mark the offending message as spam there. Similarly if I'm not getting an important email I can log into my Gmail account and check the spam folder there and mark it as not spam if necessary.

So what does all this have to do with carrots? Well, that comes in at the last step: transferring my archived email from my old accounts to my new accounts. This turned out to be the most difficult step, although it didn't have to be. It sounds easy enough: set up both the old account and the new account in your mail client, drag the messages/folders from the old account to the new account. Done. It actually worked exactly like this for my work account. But I've only had that account for a little over a year, so there isn't all that much email in there. My personal account, on the other hand, contains my archived email going all the way back to September 6, 2000 when my Carleton College email account became active (it was from my dad). Sadly all my email from high school and earlier were lost that same day due to me being naïve enough to think that now that I was in college I could trust the IT people to know what they were talking about. They didn't, and I lost several years worth of email because of it. Come to think of it, that's probably why I do what I do all these years later. I also, in the process, found this gem sent on December 30, 2000, it was the very last email I received in the year 2000:

             \     /
              \\   //
               )\-/(
               /o o\
              ( =T= )
              /`---'\
         ____/ /___\ \
    \   /   '''     ```~~"--.,_
 `-._\ /                       `~~"--.,_
------>|     Go Carrot!                 `~~"--.,_
 _.-'/ \                            ___,,,---""~~``'
    /   \____,,,,....----""""~~~~````

So anyway, the problem I was getting to. Basically, when trying to copy all that email over (nearly 6000 messages) it wasn't working. I'd try and copy it only to find that I was ending up with some tiny subset (usually less than 500) emails in my new account. So I tried splitting it up into smaller quantities. Same problem. I spent a good chunk of yesterday trying to fix this. This morning I woke up to find only about 200 messages in my account. So I finally put a little extra thought into it and realized what I was doing wrong: I had SSL turned on. All IMAP traffic between my computer and my server was being encrypted. That meant it was going slower that it normally would be. That meant very long copy times, the potential for time-outs, and the potential that my client would decide to synchronize it's folders in the middle of a copy. Seemed like a likely culprit. So I turned off SSL and tried again. The first thing that I noticed was that the transfers were suddently blazingly fast. I had known there would be a speed different, but the actual slowdown you get in email tranfser when using SSL is vastly more significant that I had expected it would. The result? Everything copied over perfectly in one try.

So really there are two lessons in all of this: 1) a good way to filter the spam out of your email before it gets to your iPhone (or other email device that lacks it's own spam filter, or if you just want to filter your spam without having to train filters on multiple computers) is to route your email through Gmail, and 2) if you're going to be moving large amounts of email messages around, especially between accounts, you might want to consider turning of SSL for the duration (keep in mind, however, that this exposes your email to the internet; it would not be impossible, or even all that difficult for someone to snatch the text of those emails if they wanted to).

I've now spent a weekend (and weekday) playing with my iPhone. So far I've discovered nothing to dampen my enthusiasm about it. In fact, I probably like it even more than I did before. Having confirmed that the touchscreen wasn't a significant impediment to typing or dialing the only concerns I had left were the low speed of EDGE for data transmission and the lack of an IM client on it.

Neither of those things are concerns anymore. While EDGE is slow, it's sufficient for the basic needs of email and looking up driving directions with the built-in google maps application (which is completely awesome; a fun test is to center the map on your current location and then just type 'starbucks'—or 'dunkin donuts'—into the search bar and watch all the little red map pins drop out of the sky skewering your local caffeineries of choice).

As for IM, I've always been a huge fan of meebo.com, a web-based, multi-protocol IM app. They've been my favorite Web 2.0 app for as long as Web 2.0 has been around, and their recently released iPhone optimized version doesn't disappoint. Unlike most sites, you don't even need to go to a special address to get to the iPhone version: just type meebo.com into your browser and it automatically detects that you're using an iPhone and shows you the correct interface. You can log into any account for any protocol they support (AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, Gtalk, ICQ, and Jabber) or into your already existing meebo account (unfortunately you can't create a new one from your iPhone) and it takes you to a low-profile, low-bandwidth, IM interface optimized for the iPhone. They didn't try to mimic the way the site works in a traditional setting (exactly like it does on your desktop, complete with a separate window for each conversation), and they didn't try and shoehorn desktop metaphors like tabs in. Instead they simply show you your buddy list. Click on a contact and you get a conversation screen where you can chat as you normally would. The only elements on the screen are their buddy icon, a small icon to take you back to your buddy list, a text box to enter your message, and a send button. If someone else IMs you while you're in the middle of a conversation the number of new messages you have appears in a little bubble over your buddy list icon (just like a dock icon in OS X) and the content of that message briefly appears in a little pop-up. Switching conversations is just a matter of going back to your buddy list and selecting a different person to talk to. It's that simple. And it's been designed specifically with the limitations of the EDGE network in mind so it works just fine even if you don't have access to a WiFi network. It's done incredibly well, and even if Apple adds iChat in later I don't expect I'll stop using meebo (which isn't too surprising seeing as I don't use iChat on my Mac either in favor of Adium; also, I imagine that the reason iChat isn't in there is because AT&T; doesn't want there to be a messaging application in there that doesn't let them charge per message as they usually do when it comes to instant messaging and there's no way I'm going to eat up my text messaging allowance with iChat when meebo's around).

So basically, the iPhone rocks. That's my review. Unless something seriously unexpected happens, I don't expect I'll be commenting any more on the iPhone itself. But you can be sure you'll be hearing about whatever apps I end up using with it, whether they be web apps or actually apps added through hacks (I'll start messing around with iPhone hacks soon, I'm sure).

I'm writing this from my brand new iPhone. I know that I had previously said that I would wait to get one and that I wasn't particularly interested in the first generation one, but it turned out to actually be a fairly practical purchase, surprisingly enough.

It all started because Jessi's birthday is coming up (as is mine) and I knew she wanted an iPhone. We had, up until today, been on a family plan from Verizon, which saved us a fair bit of money over the two individual plans we had before. But because of that it complicated the matter of getting an iPhone for Jessi. So I looked at just about every possible configuration of cell phone plans we could possibly have.

It turns out that T-Mobile is unequivocally the cheapest provider, while Verizon is the most expensive (I didn't bother looking at Sprint, they have nothing that would interest me over the others). AT&T; are in the middle. After comparing the monthly costs of a Verizon family plan, a T-Mobile family plan, an AT&T; non-iPhone family plan, an AT&T; iPhone family plan, an individual iPhone plan and an individual T-Mobile plan, and an individual iPhone plan and an individual Verizon plan I found that there were only a few cases that actually made sense.

Due to the fact that there was still a whole year on our Verizon contract it just didn't make financial sense to switch to another provider to try and save money, so regular family plans on T-Mobile or AT&T; were ruled out. The only way that it made sense to switch wireless providers was if it was going to involve getting Jessi an iPhone (assuming an iPhone is actually worth the extra money, that is). Between the theee options that involved getting an iPhone for Jessi (an iPhone family plan or an iPhone individual plan for Jessi and an individual plan for me from either Verizon or T-Mobile---an iPhone individual plan plus a non-iPhone individual plan from AT&T; would actually be more than the iPhone family plan because if the amount of minutes needed) the cheapest actually turns out to be the iPhone family plan.

So the only remaining issue was the initial cost of two iPhones plus the early termination fee from Verizon. Apple's new price drop on the iPhone pretty well took care of that and the clearance prices on the 4GB model offset the cost of the early termination fee. So I figured that there's no time like the present and ordered two 4GB iPhones.

Making this even more amazing is the fact that I placed the order Yesterday, I got the free shipping that's supposed to take 5-7 business days, and the iPhones arrived TODAY! Way to go Apple.

And yes, I typed this whole entry out on the touchscreen, I'd have to say that the concerns about it not being usable were unfounded. The only problem I'm having with it so far are that it can't quite keep up with my typing which can be annoying and takes me back to the days when I was using a IIgs. Also when it gets too far behind the autocorrection stops working until I stop and let it catch up. But even so, this is by far the best phone I've ever had, and I like it way more than a Blackberry.

Now to turn of the damned keyboard sound...

As you probably know, I spent last weekend in New York. My last post was actually written from the SOHO Apple Store. The main reason I went there was because I knew I could get a free internet connection, but I was also hoping for the chance to play with an iPhone. Sadly, the iPhone table was about five deep in people, so I gave up on it. But I did manage to play with one at the 5th Ave Apple Store the next morning.

Prior to having actually touched one, I was of mixed feelings on the iPhone. On the one hand, I've been awaiting the so-called touch-screen iPod for as long as there have been rumors of it. The iPhone is clearly that, and more. However I was, as most people were and some still are, concerned about the efficacy of the interface, in particular typing on the touch-screen. Beyond that there were obvious, to my mind, flaws of the first generation device that everyone has gone into already. Jesse Legg has already written on the technical flaws of the iPhone and I see no reason to continue harping on them myself. Instead, I'll just say that I never had any intention or desire to buy the iPhone as it currently is. My plan has been to wait at least until the 2nd generation when they've repaired those flaws and hopefully made some other improvements as well.

That was, of course, until I actually got to use the iPhone. My expectations for the interface were high, but the actual product completely blew them away. Using the iPhone is so incredibly simple that anyone should really be able to do it. The screen is extremely bright and sharp and the interface is well designed and takes full advantage of the enormous screen available to it. In other words, it's an absolute pleasure to use for all the basic tasks. This was really to be expected, but Apple completely outdid themselves this time. Then, of course, it came time to test the virtual keyboard. I honestly was not expecting much, and when I saw how small it actually turned out to be I thought I'd be disappointed even still. The fact that the first time I tried to hit a letter I hit the one next to it instead didn't do much to improve my outlook. But when I tried actually typing out a message I was amazed. Within a minute or two of practice my accuracy had improved amazingly, but it really didn't need to at all. At one point I accidentally typed in 'uojpmw'. The iPhone correctly translated that to 'iPhone'. In fact probably about 99% of the time when I hit the wrong letters because of the small keyboard and lack of tactile feedback it didn't matter because the software was able to correctly predict what I had intended to type. The only times there were ever any problems was with it not getting the word right was with shorter words. For some reason it wasn't very good at the two letter words. Other than that, I was flat-out amazed. Even disregarding the auto-correcting, I'm now of the opinion that the small, touch-screen keyboard is more than sufficient. I think that within a week of using it, anyone should be relatively comfortable with it. Within a month, they should probably forget that there was ever any other way of having a keyboard on a phone.

Having entered the store with the position that 'the iPhone is cool, but I have no real desire to buy one at least until they fix a few things', I found myself very tempted to buy one right then and there. As much as I enjoy using a Mac, I would hardly call myself an Apple fan boy, but just then I was probably as close as I've ever been. I resisted the urge, of course; I'm very happy with my current phone (the Motorola e815, though I plan on replacing it with a RAZR 2 when I can) and provider (Verizon) and don't particularly want to drop $600 on a phone and then spend an additional $75 per month or so on the plan (also I have no particular love for AT&T;). None the less, I was forced to walk out of the Apple store with the opinion that Apple really hit the ball out of the park with this one. The fact that they sold nearly a million units on the first day would seem to support that thesis. I'm very much looking forward to the future of cell phones now. The iPhone and it's successors, I think, will really stir things up. We're hopefully going to start seeing a whole lot of innovation in cell phones, something we haven't really seen in a while.

I can't wait.

It's hardly news that Facebook has released an API to allow people to create custom 'applications' that will run on people's Facebook profiles. What is news is that I'm now looking at that API in more detail as there is a possibility that I will be creating just such an application.

While I'm not a particularly big fan of Facebook (although I am a member because it does have it's useful moments), it would be pretty foolish to ignore it altogether, and the new Facebook Applications opens up a whole new world of possibilities for one, such as myself, who works extensively with web development and web technologies. It also opens up a whole new world of possibilities for marketers and those who could potentially abuse personal information.

For example, when someone adds your Application to their Facebook profile you are given their user id. The Facebook API allows you to look up a users profile based on their user id. I haven't yet looked to see exactly what information is provided, but I imagine that you can get your hands on pretty much all of it; certainly everything that's public. It also allows you to look up the user ids of all the friends of a particular user, as well as all the groups they're in. Considering the whole 'seven degrees of separation' phenomenon, it would not be difficult, assuming you could get just a few people to use your application, to get all the profile information on just about everyone on Facebook. You have access to their pictures as well.

Clearly this was all possible before, but now it's much much simpler to set up an automated system to do it for you. All you need to do is create even a vaguely popular application, and the data will basically just gather itself. Throw in a little data mining, and you've got an extremely powerful tool for gathering personal information about a whole lot of people.

We've already seen how poor judgement when it comes to what goes on your Facebook profile or your MySpace page can get you into trouble. It seems to me that Facebook Applications have the potential to bring a whole new world of hurt down on the users, especially now that it's no longer limited to just students.

Of course, as always, you, the user, have the power to control what information others have access to. If someone pulls some personal information about your off of your Facebook profile and uses it in a way you don't like, you really have only yourself to blame.

This is not to say that it's all doom and gloom, of course. The Facebook Applications also open the door to a whole host of exciting new possibilities. It will now be possible for Facebook to position themselves as the hub of your Web 2.0 experience with all your web services being pulled together into one, easy to use dashboard on your Facebook profile. I think there are going to be some very cool tools developed as Facebook Applications. Maybe I'll even create some of them myself.

Just remember, that you are the one that's ultimately responsible for what information you make publicly available to the internet. If there's any information that you would want your employers, parents, &c; to know, don't put it on your Facebook profile.