I gave Jess a gmail invite several weeks ago. I asked her today how it was working out. She said “Fine, but nobody sends me anything.” I asked why and she said “Because we don’t use email - none of my friends do, we only use IM.”

Fusionary.com circa 1997. It’s been a while.

Everyone who matters loves Wikipedia. Someone was going on and on about how great the coverage was on the Hurricane Ivan page. So I went there, and here’s what constituted the entire page…

That there is an example of what’s wrong with Wikis. But in less than 2 minutes it had been properly restored and it is indeed a great resource - even with the blips.

I know, I’ve been on about Flickr quite a lot lately. So what, it’s the best web app I’ve come across in a long time. Maybe ever.

There are dozens of web photo sharing applications out there, so why is Flickr better? I believe it’s because it is being designed by people who actually use it, and smartly. Just when something irritates me, it’s fixed. Must’ve irritated them too and they took care of it. The site started out too Flash heavy, and everyone rightly complained. Now, it has a great balance of Flash-where-you-need-it and properly-implemented normal web app where you don’t.

Here’s a short list of other things I like, since you asked…

1. They’re not afraid to put things where they make the most sense, even if it looks funny.

2. Have you seen the size of some of those fonts!? Whodo thunk you could use a font that big and no one would pass out. Big, readable things I can click easily. Love it.

3. They pull features that don’t cut it, even though they probably seemed like a good idea at the time.

4. The developers are responsive and available.

5. The community features are a great byproduct of the site’s main goal, photo sharing. And they don’t get in your way if you don’t care.

6. Almost every feature is both useful and usable, and there’s a lot of ‘em. That’s hard to pull off.

7. The APIs and RSS everywhere. I’m writing a gallery and can think of a half-dozen cool things to do with it. Flickr is a platform. That fact alone will give them the edge. I bet we’ll see a cottage industry spring up of folks creating Flickr-based apps .

It’s not perfect, some things are still awkward or unfinished, and eventually they need to stop moving things around constantly, but for the most part it’s on its way to perfect.

I’ve heard stories of people ditching iPhoto for Flickr. That seems a tad extreme, but it gives one an idea how good a web application can get when done right.

According to this Apple Insider article, the new iChat will support the Jabber protocol. I’ve been a fan of Jabber for a very long time. I even tried convincing a few coworkers to run a Jabber client, but it was too early. Jabber is a platform, not an IM service. I hope that more support like that from Apple will give it enough good press to make it relevant.

I’m typically neither politically correct nor socially conscientious, but I could be convinced to take action against the self-centered, thoughtless bastards driving too-big-for-anything-but-my-fat-selfish-ass SUVs.

Check out the new CXT.

“At 258 inches, or 21-1/2 feet long, the CXT is about 4-1/2 feet longer than the new Hummer H2 pickup, and about 2 inches longer than the F-350 Crew Cab.”

I hope SUVs become the fur coats of the next decade. A little public ridicule and scorn might convince Mrs. Grocery-Getter that she doesn’t really need 3 tons of ostentatious stupidity to get around in.

Subtle, meditative and beautiful, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring won’t appeal to everyone. I loved it. You should too.

My own little anthropology experiment, The Refrigerator Project on Flickr only has 22 members at this point. I was worried no one at all would join, but a recent post on the Flickr blog helped a little.

Join, post a photo of your fridge, and don’t forget to “copiously annotate” it afterward. That’s the interesting part of the whole thing!

After a little more tinkering, I’ve got a (barely) working prototype of a local image gallery driven by the Flickr API.

It ain’t pretty, but it works. It grabs sets of images from my Flickr photos and displays them in a grid. The joy here will be that I control the presentation but leave the dirty work of organizing and uploading to the Flickr site. It’s neat. Take a peek at the work in progress here

I have no idea if it works or not, but seems like a good idea - a Flickr plugin for iPhoto. There’s a thread about it here.