Intro­duc­ing reddit: you can now use reddit to save your favorite arti­cle. At the bottom of each post you’ll find an reddit icon. And remem­ber you reddit here first!

I am cur­rently at Blog08 Rock­stars of the Web event, rock on… More on this after the break [...]25-10-2008: Yes­ter­day was really nice, a lot of tal­ented young people dis­cussed about the future of blog­ging (I am get­ting old). A great rock­band was play­ing live called Love OD. I espe­cially liked the pre­sen­ta­tions of Pete Cash­more and Paul Brad­shaw, it’s always nice to learn some stuff. There were also some dis­ap­point­ing moments: Boris van der Ham (pol­i­tics) and Piet Bakker, a pro­fes­sor at the Hogeschool van Utrecht who really didn’t got it! Our host Patrick de Laive did the con­fer­ence with a whole lot of rock ‘n’ roll flavor. Patrick yo’old Swagger!

iTunes (Music) (Games) (Movies) Store hence the name! iTunes already left it’s origin a long time ago. Apple should work out some­thing (iMedia Store or what­ever). iTunes is a strong brand, but it doesn’t cover it’s orig­i­nal propo­si­tion any­more! Apple lost the Com­puter in it’s name to state: more then just com­put­ers. The iTunes brand has to be updated! It’s an online store where the con­sumer can buy music, games, movies, audio­books etc. not just music! If I’ve under­stood cor­rectly Apple’s is going to offer soft­ware in it’s line-​up. The iPhone/iPod Touch are the first to receive it’s apps through iTunes.

Online ser­vices are the next big evo­lu­tion­ary thing after Web 2.0. You already see some com­pa­nies making the shift, like Adobe with it’s Adobe Pho­to­shop Online (PSX), Adobe even branded the Pho­to­shop line with a new very much dis­cussed (Web 2.0 Aquaish) logo. Google is also exper­i­ment­ing with online apps (Cal­en­dar, Docs, Talk etc.) and Apple already has it’s .Mac ser­vices for years (thanks to WebOb­jects). I think and pre­dict that a lot of com­pa­nies will offer these kind of ser­vices in the future and see a tighter inte­gra­tion between web-​based appli­ca­tions and desktop-​based appli­ca­tions, maybe even elim­i­nat­ing their desk­top cousins and trans­form into a sub­scrip­tion based model.

OpenID is an open and decen­tral­ized iden­tity system, designed not to crum­ble if one com­pany turns evil or goes out of busi­ness. We love open stan­dards here and your pri­vacy is very impor­tant to us. As of today dig­i­tal­ren­dezvous will sup­port OpenID.

Intro­duc­ing Send-​To-​A-​Friend: you can now send your favorite arti­cle to your friends. At the bottom of each post you’ll find an enve­lope icon. Send­ing an arti­cle to a friend is lim­ited to a 10 min­utes inter­val (for spam­bot pro­tec­tion). Please be polite and don’t spam anyone (your e-mail will never be pub­lished). This a 1.0 release, so there might be some quirks

Web appli­ca­tions are becom­ing more and more ver­sa­tile and fea­ture rich. Hoping to get a jump on Google and other com­peti­tors, Adobe Sys­tems plans to release a hosted ver­sion of its pop­u­lar Pho­to­shop image-​editing appli­ca­tion within six months, the company’s chief exec­u­tive (Bruce Chizen) said. Adobe laid the foun­da­tion for a hosted Pho­to­shop prod­uct with Adobe Remix, a Web-​based video-​editing tool it offers through the Pho­to­Bucket media-​sharing site.
Like Adobe Remix, the hosted Pho­to­shop ser­vice is set to be free and mar­keted as an entry-​level ver­sion of Adobe’s more sophis­ti­cated image-​editing tools, includ­ing Pho­to­shop and Pho­to­shop Ele­ments. Chizen envi­sions rev­enue from the Pho­to­shop ser­vice coming from online adver­tis­ing.
That is new ter­ri­tory for Adobe. Because folks like Google do it in dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories, and Adobe wants to make sure that they are there before com­peti­tors start oper­at­ing in areas of their franchises.

When Apple rebranded iTools to .Mac, Apple made fun of Microsoft’s .Net (.Net is Microsoft vision of an appli­ca­tion pro­gram­ming frame­work for future Win­dows appli­ca­tions). When Apple bought NeXT, NeXTSTEP and WebOb­jects were part of the pack­age deal. NeXTSTEP and WebOb­ject were light years ahead of any­thing out there. The pro­gram­ming envi­ron­ment was capa­ble of run­ning on sev­eral dif­fer­ent oper­at­ing sys­tems. Parts of NeXT’s soft­ware were later used as the foun­da­tion for Mac OS X. WebOb­jects is suc­cess­ful being used for the Apple Store, iTunes Store and .Mac (.Mac is Apple’s vision of easy to use Web Ser­vices).
I see .Mac as (online) soft­ware and soft­ware has to be improved and get new fea­tures over time. The devel­op­ment of .Mac is slack­ing and get­ting behind other ser­vices, is .Mac ever going to improve? Even Apple’s board of direc­tors asked Steve Jobs what was going on? If you com­pare .Mac to Google or Yahoo you’ll soon get the pic­ture. 1GB disk space… common Apple, that’s old school! Where’s the PHP sup­port? Where’s the stan­dards sup­port? You’ll have to keep up!!! I am even con­sid­er­ing drop­ping my .Mac account! 99 dol­lars a year for this? Sorry, Apple you’ll have to do better! But there’s light at the end of the tunnel, if we can believe the rumors. Leop­ard (Mac OS X 10.5) will offer loads of enhance­ments and even tighter inte­gra­tion with .Mac. I’ll sit this one out till Leop­ard, but if Leop­ard doesn’t bring any improve­ments I’ll def­i­nitely end my sub­scrip­tion and say .Njet to .Mac (njet means “NO” in russian).