Apple, the iPhone & social media integration

Perhaps the most interesting feature of the recently-released iPhone 3GS is the ability to upload photos & video to MobileMe and YouTube.

(Of course, unless you’re a MobileMe subscriber — and I’m struggling to justify spending $99 per year on it, the excellent ‘Find My iPhone’ service notwithstanding — all you’ll be able to do is upload videos to your YouTube account.)

Apple have recently begun integrating social media into their desktop apps — iPhoto ‘09 lets you publish your photos to Flickr, Facebook and MobileMe. In my opinion this is great — Apple wants people to share and store their photos so integrating these popular image-sharing services right into iPhoto makes a lot of sense.

So why not offer the same functionality on the iPhone? Why only offer YouTube uploads?

Less than a week after the iPhone 3GS launched YouTube uploads increased by 400% per day. So it’s obviously something that people are using.

Right now the only way to ’share’ your photos is to either use a third party app (Facebook app, free, or Flickit, free) or email it to somebody using Mail on the iPhone.

Maybe it’s something Apple are working on. Maybe they don’t think people will use it. Maybe they just want more people to use their MobileMe service (perhaps one of the reasons push Gmail isn’t available on the iPhone?). Who knows.

Michael Jackson: 1958-2009

Wow. Michael Jackson has died. He was only 50.

Shocked.

RIP MJ.

Pepper making a meal out of drinking water

Pepper’s adventures in the linen basket

Pepper is getting more and more adventurous — she loves to ‘investigate’ the bath every now and then. Her most favourite place is between the shower curtains — she can hide there and pop out a paw when one of us takes a shower!

At the weekend she ‘discovered’ the linen basket. She just jumped right in there — we were wondering how she was going to get out but she managed fine. Then she started chewing the basket itself…she was in a very playful mood!

Despite all the toys we’ve bought her she still loves playing with simple things — be it an airline eye mask or a simple paper bag! Here she is playing with snakey in a big rustly bag.

Quite funny when she ‘hides’ in there — only a paw showing…

She finally seems to be taking to her bed (bought by her gammee!) — she loves to get in it and pad it. It fits her perfectly and she does love to sleep in there.

iPhone 3G S lust

So we finally got iPhones last Friday. We preordered them so muggins here only had to trek to the AT&T store on State at 6.45am on Friday to begin the wait.

There were only about 7 people in line ahead of me so the wait wasn’t a long one. Almost at the end of the wait, Chad (I kid you not) got our two iPhones from out back, did the number swap, activated them and we were good to go. Thanks Chad! I was in and out by about 7.20am.

Goodbye Nokia. You were the single most useless, frustrating and un-usable phone I’ve ever owned. If I could I’d close the street below and launch the damned thing off the balcony. Ugh.

But, oh my, iPhone — where have you been all my life?