I hope this unexpected alert is a sign to come.

So, the alert is trying to tell me there are application updates on the computer it syncs (which is on the same network). This is definitly a cool feature but the functionality could be put to better use, like iTunes syncing over WiFi.

Having VNC for the iPhone is awesome. With the screen resolution and 3G I can actually get something done on my home computer - anywhere. Here are some screens I took, not an extensive review but you all know how VNC works, it’s a remote desktop.

Here’s a screen grab of all the apps I’ve downloaded already. I can’t give any full reviews just yet; no time and I haven’t played with them all just yet. First impressions though:

AIM: Why did I download that, I don’t use aim. Looking forward to a GTalk (native) app, the special iPhone web version will do for now.

Facebook: Pretty awesome. It’s going to be a great contacts backup.

Google Mobile App: I don’t really get it. It’s a start page for all of their iPhone web apps but has some great search functionality on the start page.

Loopt: Very interesting. It’s going to be a cool Twitter app, because of it’s location based social features.

Twitteriffic: Excellent twitter app: location, photos and all tweets. I hope Hahlo comes out with a premium app, I’d really like to see summize integration.

Pandora: didn’t work so well on edge the first time. Let’s see how it works tomorrow on 3G. I’m really stocked about this one.

Remote: Oh man, can’t wait to get this hooked up to the AppleTV.

Super Monkey Ball: graphics are excellent for a phone but I’m not very good at it…yet.

and the best app so far…

Enigmo: This game is fun. It’s going to be a blast to play this in line somewhere or just waiting around.

What I’m really looking forward to is the Wordpress App, now Jared and I wont be asked to update Mobile Admin anymore.

I recently added Disqus commenting to my site. Having a service manage my comments has a lot of benefits:

Functionality - Seesmic integration is pretty cool, not like I’m expecting any video comments but it’s going be be cool when that first one is made.

Ownership - not only should I own the comments on this site but the commenter should too. I’ve always liked the idea of a service that collects your comments (I had the idea well before CoComment ) and since Disqus is taking off it’s seems appropriate to allow my commenters to take their comments with them.

The list of ancillary features stack up, especially for the commenter.

How I’ve enbled it here at Scattered:

I’ve only enabled it for new posts and existing posts without comments, so I haven’t started over…even though I would prefer starting over.

Without Disqus allowing for importing of historical comments I’m not about to throw out years of comments. It already allows for you to export all of your site’s comments and knowing that allowed me make the move over the weekend when I enabled the service.

There are somethings I’d like to see:

FriendFeed integration. I’d love to see comments made from friendfeed show up on site’s using Disqus.

Twitter Integration. Not sure how this would work or what purpose it would serve but people like to comment on posts with Twitter and it should be shown on the post page.

Importing. Allow us to import our comments, finally. There are a few older posts I have that really need Disqus’s threading and voting features.

I’ve been giving FriendFeed a second chance and I’m glad I did. At first I really didn’t know what to think, it seemed to be comprised of noise which led me to think of it as a social RSS aggrigator on par with Google Reader.

Now that I’ve been using it for the last week I’ve really enjoyed it. Even though I may not be participating as much as I want, it’s a wonderful way follow other’s social streams and more importantly have conversations around them.

Rooms are extremely useful. I’m only participating in one but having a place to share links and feeds (something the group I’m a part of doesn’t allow) is excellent. facebook groups, probably the only other good option I can think of is…the modern day forum, too complex with about no additional functionality. FriendFeed keeps rooms simple and that’s where it excels.

That simplicity works into the interface. The homepage gets to be a burden at first but don’t fret, it’s an easy fix. Not sure when they added the “hide” feature but this is the feature that allows me to use the service. What I do: not saying it’s the perfect solution, is to hide all of the blogs and other items that I would normally get in GoogleReader and I don’t want to comment on at FriendFeed. I’m currently keeping Twitter in the mix so I can comment on the tweets with it being sent back to twitter as an @ reply. More importantly I keep twitter and other feeds that thrive in conversation, which are just about impossible to follow or find on twitter.

Those conversations run ramant on FriendFeed and they really make the service. I just wish more people were using the service, not just my “real friends” but I would like to see FriendFeed aggrigate conversations no matter where they originated.

I’ll try to expand on what I mean by aggregating conversations in another post, I should also bring up the terrific FriendFeed bot after I get more use out of it.

After trying to figure out what to do around here I settled on ditching my old theme.

I wrote about the reasoning behid that theme here.

Now, I settled with my ‘07 theme with one big addition - the RSS Stream or LifeStream (as I like to call it).

I’m currently just using the RSS Stream plugin to pull in the feeds. The setup is very basic and instead of modifying the plugin to accept the Google Shared and Google Starred atom feeds I’m just running them through feedburner conversion. The second part of my setup was simply changing the generic feed icons to match the feed.

I’d like to do a lot more, like pull my the Google Shared –notes and links only– into posts so people can comment. Other more reasonible updates include:

• more feeds (e.g. netflix)
• Inline images for flickr
• formatting the feeds better
• styling (e.g. Twitter posts look bunched)
• reply links. If it’s twitter, then a link for a twitter reply.
• displaying the notes from G shared items (stretch goal)

Even with these goals I’m prepared to do nothing more for a long time. I’d prefer to post more than worry about this stuff. I wish Freind feed made it easier for us, without forcing users to ff.com.