This will easily go down in history as one of GMails absolutely worthless features. Some nitpickers might find this valuable, one can never write off obsessions. But for you and me, severely doubt it.

There’s a seemingly related (related to Singularity) project under development at Microsoft which has been hush-hush. That project, codenamed ‘Midori,’ is a new Microsoft operating-system platform that supposedly supersedes Windows. Midori is in incubation, which means it is a little closer to market than most Microsoft Research projects, but not yet close enough to be available in any kind of early preview form.

Do we think Microsoft is gutsy enough to release a completely independent codebase operating system? Given their track record, will people switch to their system, or Apple, or even Linux? We’ll talk in 10 years or so.

Steve Gillmor looks at the various Twitter-based services that use an XMPP data stream. I’ve always wondered how Summize gets their Twitter data. Frankly I’d like to see Summize bought out by Twitter sometime in the future and become an integral part of the service, rather than a third-party implementation.

UPDATE: A deal seems to be in the works, and the overall sentiment seems to be fluctuating between “so-so” and “bad”.

A jQuery plugin to replicate Growl on Mac OS X, within the browser.

Om Malik on FriendFeed’s default recommendation list:

… by putting some of my good friends on the default list, the company is basically ensuring positive attention to its service. Be damned the fact that it really takes the Friend of FriendFeed. I mean just because you are following Loic Le Meur, he doesn’t automatically become your friend?

Amusing reply to Jeff Atwood’s Investing in a Quality Programming Chair.

So much for FriendFeed getting one up on Twitter.

At first, they simply turned autocomplete off for passwords. A quick greasemonkey script fixed that. Then, they escalated and added calls to the form and page to turn off autocomplete as well. Again, minor issue, and a quick fix to the script was all I needed. That’s when they suddenly went hardball.

Amusing write up of how webmasters go out of their way to make sure user accounts remain secure, by making it harder to login.

And so it begins again.

My favourite section is the “Signs you shouldn’t be a progammer”. Describes a lot of my computer science batch at college.

There are many things Elizabeth Woyke gets wrong in this latest “iPhone 3G pandemonium” post trying to say the developers are still shy of writing apps for iPhone 3G, with the focus being on developers who are working on location based apps (using iPhone 3G’s assisted GPS).

The first is that the applications will be installed via Appstore, and not iTunes store. They are two separate things. Appstore will be built into every phone, and will be separate. Hence, the scenario of users syncing multiple iPhones to one iTunes account to install an app multiple times but just paying once doesn’t arise. I’m very sure Apple has considered this and using some sort of unique identification for iPhones, they can block this kinda of behaviour.

Navigation isn’t the only application of GPS. Twitterrific for iPhone is a perfect example. Applications can keep a thread of connection open to receive data and constantly update themselves, which Woyke has gotten blatantly wrong.

All in all, the article is just a step short of jacktastic and miles ahead of sensationalism without cause.

Cult of Mac on why Apple shouldn’t change the design of their lineup now:

It’s a design philosophy that has powered BMW and Mercedes for a good long while. To that end, other than adding bling to satisfy a generation of new money rappers, Rolex has never fundamentally changed the design of the Datejust, Daytona, or Day/Date (aka President) watches.

Any other company, and I would have brushed off the design aesthetic as gobblywoop that doesn’t matter if it means an increase in sales. Apple has always paid a lot of attention to the design of their computers (the “beautiful box”). I don’t expect a major design change, but if the Air is a glimpse of the future, I suspect changes to the keyboard and a thinner form factor for the Pro.

The problem with this would be the problem in all monopolies. There are companies like Apple who’re manufacturing their own chips for use in potential leader capacity handsets that might offset Intel’s plans in that area, but leader in 75% of their markets is a big scary thing.

Even if you could guide your organization off of Microsoft products, you’d still have to deal with customers, vendors and employees who still use Microsoft stuff. You’d find yourself much like the [British] colonies - independent, but having to trade with the British Empire.

While that’s true to some capacity, it is only the freedom of choice that makes it that way. I may not like Microsoft products, but someone else might. Daily interaction with them cannot be stopped just because we work with different platforms (although if it was upto Microsoft, it would end up that way).

What matters is using the best tool for the job. Sometimes that tool comes from Microsoft, and saying no because of prejudice is a little too jacktastic to be taken seriously.

Convenient replacement for dashboard stickies. It’s already becoming my good friend.

Mary Jo Foley brings attention to the fact that Silverlight content is (and has been, before the opening of Flash to Google, Yahoo!) searchable. Strangely, Microsoft has been quiet on this, even though they are the first to jump at blowing their own trumpet at the first hint of aggression.

Ionut Alex Chitu on how Google handles feature addition and removal:

For Google, features aren’t a “one-way street” and you never know when a functionality you start to rely on is removed for unknown reasons. That’s why I think Google should label experimental features more prominently and it should do a better job at communicating the reasons why a service is dropped.

While I’m sure services like GMail (which is still in Beta) will not be removed, it is a little frightening at how much of our information Google holds, and is completely at the mercy of their corporate whim.

8,002,530 downloads in 24 hours. Congratulations to them.

Gordon played down the effort to compete with Google Docs and other free office suites, such as IBM Symphony. He said Equipt is aimed at people who are interested in purchasing a PC security suite – such as Windows Live OneCare – and might forgo buying Office as well in favor of using an older copy they might already have, or that they might pirate.

So not only customers pay extra for security which should be a part of the system in the first place, Microsoft is now piggy-backing on those customers buying their security solution and adding Office as well.

I wouldn’t encourage anyone to choose this as a cheaper way of getting Office. The price offset will get negated in two and a half years, and Microsoft doesn’t release Office updates so quickly.

Question and answers with Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of technical operations at Facebook.

Top reasons for buying the iPhone include lower price (67%), 3G Internet connection (63%), GPS (47%), Microsoft (MSFT) Exchange email support (35%), and third-party apps (20%).

The question to be asked is, would this demand have existed if the first generation iPhone was priced as the second generation?

I’ve been vocal about this for a while. Linked to test cases and demonstrations.

Security, AirPort, Safari, iCal, Spaces and Exposé updates.

This should be a relief for SEO conscious designers. A deeper FAQ is here.

Beautiful pictures of Gibson guitars being custom made through various stages of development. I love the stack of Flying-V bodies lying in the second picture.

“Newspapers don’t have to pay these fines for sales through their classified columns, so why should an online version be any different?”

Absolutely ridiculous sentencing on the part of the French.

Maybe now people will believe what I’ve been saying for half a year now. This should however also alert people on the power any application you add, has on your profile and data.