Mobilicio.usbeta

Why I probably won’t get a new iPhone 3G

I thought I’d put down several thoughts on the new iPhone. For the last couple of days, I’ve been hearing phrases thrown about such as “game changing”, “raising the bar” and “setting the standard”. In my opinion, some people may have been drinking a bit of the Jobs Kool-Aid. Yes, the iPhone is flipping sweet. Yes, the UI is gorgeous and it’s performance is amazing. Yes, the form factor is sexy. Yes, they finally added 3G, aGPS and Enterprise Exchange support. And yes, MobileMe will be pretty cool. All excellent points, I agree. Even makes me consider getting one (I did say “probably”, after all).Here’s why I don’t think I’ll take that step, though:

1. It’s not open - I’ll grant you, Apple has succeeded on closed technologies. Just about everything they produce is closed and proprietary. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it. I vote with my dollars and have voted against the iPod for many years running and again last year with the iPhone. Then there are the (soon-to-be) applications. Developers have to sell through Apple and forfeit a percentage of income (unless the app is free). Why shouldn’t I be able to build my own applications and sell them from wherever I wish? Apple seems to be taking the stand that it’s difficult to garner awareness of mobile apps and they’re “solving the problem”. I can see where they’re coming from, but I believe it just forces developers to build and sell through Apple. Not to mention all these apps are still “coming-soon”.
2. It’s still not open - And then there’s MobileMe. All very nice if, again, you want to be locked to the Apple platform. I’m sure it’s going to be a great application for those who are willing to go that route. But for me, I’m very happy with applications like ShoZu, for example. It’s a great tool that integrates directly with my camera. I take a picture and I can choose whether to send it to Flickr, Twitpic, Evernote, etc. Not just MobileMe.
3. In many ways, they’re playing catch-up - Apple is wowing audiences at WWDC about GPS. GPS is nothing new. My phone has it. Even if I didn’t have the feature, Google Maps does a decent approximation based on the cell towers alone. Everybody’s just so happy that it’s now included w/ the iPhone, they forget these services have existed for a while. Loopt is the big word of the day, it seems, because they’ve built their application for the iPhone. Take a look at their site and you’ll notice “over 65 phones supported”. That’s a lot of non-iPhones. Other catch-up items? How about 3G and Exchange. At least now, as an enterprise user, I am more likely to consider an iPhone. Before, these were deal-breakers. I’ve had 3G on my phone from the moment AT&T took the network live in my area…about three years ago.
4. Lastly, three old complaints that still haven’t been addressed - These three are brief since they’re still complaints from the original iPhone. A) No memory card slot. I’m a power user and love loading many applications on my phone that make it a valuable and powerful tool. So many, in fact, that I run of out memory. I’ve learned to prioritize the apps and moved many to various microSD cards. I can swap them in and out at will. This is a big strike against the iPhone for me. B) Battery. One problem with being a power phone user is battery life. To solve this problem, I am constantly charging one phone battery while using the other. You can’t do this with the iPhone. C) Physical Keyboard. This is, at least for me, still a big hurdle. Trust me, I would *love* to get used to the iPhone’s virtual keyboard, but it’s just not for me.

So, what phone will I buy when I need to upgrade 4-6 months from now? I’m keeping my eye on the Sony Xperia X1 for starters. I’ll definitely be watching for devices that run Android. And, yes, the iPhone 3G. Ok, maybe I should have titled this post “The iPhone’s still not as great as everyone is making it out to be” instead of “reasons I won’t buy”. It’s a little ranty, but I’m just typing top-of-mind. I swear this isn’t a blog-bait post; there are still a lot of great reasons to buy one, especially now that the price has dropped dramatically. Send a comment if you think I’m way off base.

Oh, and in case you’re curious, I’m using WinMo 6 on the AT&T 8925 (HTC Tilt) at the moment. Some of my favorite phone apps: Anything by Spb Software, ShoZu, Evernote, Skyfire, Skype, eReader and, of course, Mobilicio.us. (you can use Mobilicio.us on an iPhone, too!)

Add comment | June 11th, 2008 | by Rob Shields

It’s Come Full Circle for Windows Mobile Users

For those of you using Windows Mobile:  now you can save your bookmarks via your mobile device, too.

I can’t believe it’s taken so long for me to hear about this match made in heaven:  Mobilicio.us to view your bookmarks and a del.icio.us plugin to save them.  Dale Lane has created a free del.icio.us plugin for Windows Mobile that allows you to post del.icio.us bookmarks directly from Pocket Internet Explorer.  The plugin opens a form and prefills the form with the current page name and URL.  Dale provides the CAB file and the full VB source code on his site and the plugin requires the .NET Compact Framework 2.0.
He was also kind enough to mention he uses Mobilicio.us in the comments of his blog post. Thanks Dale!  Awesome work!

Add comment | June 7th, 2008 | by Rob Shields

Mobilicio.us Down, But Not Out

Jason and I would like to offer our humblest apologies to all Mobilicio.us users across the world and sincerely thank you for your patience.

The good news is Mobilicio.us usage has been growing beyond our wildest hopes. The bad news (if it can really be considered that) was the increase in usage required an upgrade in how we hosted Mobilicio.us. When we decided to switch server hosts, we never dreamed we would run into the number of issues we’ve been having, much less the extended down time the site has experienced itself. Without going into mind-numbing detail, suffice to say our timing of the switch could have been picked with a bit more care.

But let me be clear, our problems have in no way been the fault of the hosting company. I don’t want influence any of their potential customers or be accused of laying blame on them.

Rest assured, Jason and I are working hard to make sure we get Mobilicio.us back up and running as soon as possible.

Thank you again for your patience and support.

Add comment | August 24th, 2007 | by Rob Shields

Recent Coverage. DB Cleanup Again.

We’d like to thank Lifehacker and Download Squad for their coverage of Mobilicio.us. It’s good to be heard, and stuff like this motivates us to set aside a little bit of time to work on the site and possibly work out some of the issues that make it difficult for those of you with older phones to access your bookmarks.

ALERT:
The recent surge in traffic has taken us over our 100MB limit for our database. So we’re once again clearing out the bookmarks of users who haven’t logged in in a while. This just means that those folks will have to wait for their cache to be updated next time they log in.

Other solutions to the DB problem are (1) moving to a server where we can have a > 100MB database and (2) rewriting our code to cache less than all of your bookmarks. There’s no money for (1). (2) has some promise. I’ll think about it.

Thanks again for all the support. Let us know what we can do to make Mobilicio.us great for you.

Add comment | March 28th, 2007 | by Jason Coleman

Wieza Integration, Simpy Coming Soon

We are pleased to announce that Moblicio.us now works with the Wieza bookmarking service. Wieza is a new tool built on the “Scuttle” open-source project. Find out more about Wieza.

Support for the Simpy bookmarking service is coming soon. Simpy has their own API. While client code is available in PHP (what Moblicio.us is developed in), I think it will be easier to write a service to translate del.icio.us-like API calls into Simpy API calls than update our code to handle different APIs based on the service used. The great thing about this is that once that translation service is built, any application will be able to use it. So not only will Mobilicio.us have another bookmarking service in its dropdowns, but we’ll be helping other applications in the community integrate with Simpy.

Add comment | November 20th, 2006 | by Jason Coleman

Fall Cleaning: We’re Clearing the Mobilicio.us Cache

In about 10 minutes, the Mobilicio.us DB is going to exceed our quota of 100MB. As of this writing, we have about 450,000 bookmarks from about 1100 users cached in our system. That’s an amazing number. Over 400 bookmarks per user. I can’t imagine how big the del.icio.us databases are. 

We’re looking into improving our hosting situation so we can support a larger user base, but then Mobilicio.us isn’t making any money and dedicated servers can cost a lot. In the meantime, we’re going to have to clear out the cache so the application continues to work. Most of the bookmarks in the DB are from old users who aren’t using the service anymore. We’re going to do our best to figure out who these users are and only delete their cache. However, some previous users will have to wait a few seconds to a minute for us to re-cache their bookmarks the next time they login.

So, sorry for the inconvenience. I bet most of you wouldn’t have even noticed, but I wanted to throw this out there in case any of you were wondering about performance issues. Thanks for all your support.

Add comment | November 15th, 2006 | by Jason Coleman

Ma.gnolia Integration is Live

The Ma.gnolia Integration is Live. While we have put the site through some strenuous testing, problems may still creep up. Please let us know if you are having any problems accessing your del.icio.us or Ma.gnolia bookmarks through Mobilicio.us. Please use the comments below (so everyone can learn what’s going on) or send us an email.

Getting Started with Ma.gnolia

• Point your mobile device to http://mobilicio.us, go to the login page, select “Magnolia” from the dropdown and enter your Ma.gnolia credentials.
• You will be logged in. Click on “Your Bookmarks” to see a listing of your bookmarks (it will be very slow while it caches the first time).
• By default, only bookmarks tagged “mtag” or “mtag-g” will be shown. This allows you to select which bookmarks you want to show up first when you log into Mobilicio.us. However, you can use the form at the bottom of the page to search for different tags or click the link to “show all”.
• Repeat users will want to create a personal “My Mobilicio.us” URL from our website here.

For Users of del.icio.us AND Ma.gnolia

• You can setup an account for both del.icio.us and Ma.gnolia. Simply follow the same setup instructions for both services.
• At this time, we can only show bookmarks for one service at any given time. By default, this is del.icio.us or the service you signed up with first. You can set a cookie through the Mobilicio.us settings page to change your default. This will require you to log into Mobilicio.us again.
• You can also append the service type to your My Mobilicio.us URL by adding “&t=delicious” or “&t=magnolia” to the URL. This is case sensitive. Also note that this may not function correctly if you are already logged in.

We’d like to thank the Ma.gnolia team again for putting out this awesome “mirror” API. We hope our new Ma.gnolia comrades will enjoy this service.

Also, we hope this may allow anyone who wanted to switch away from del.icio.us but couldn’t do without Mobilicio.us to explore new bookmarking services. Seriously, there’s got to be at least one person out there like this.

Add comment | September 6th, 2006 | by Jason Coleman

Intigration with Magnolia Coming Soon

Magnolia has just released a “mirrored” version of the del.icio.us API. What that means is that we can simply change the URL of the API we are linking to (like we had to do last week to point to the new del.iciou.us API) and bam: all of a sudden we are caching Magnolia bookmarks.

In reality it is a little more work than that, but this definately makes it much easier to integrate with Magnolia. I think this is a smart move for them. While their own API is arguably better than del.icio.us’, having this API option will bring more third-party tools to Magnolia’s user base. And social bookmarking is all about the third-party tools.

It’s a busy weekend for us, but look for Magnolia integration sometime early next week.

Add comment | August 25th, 2006 | by Jason Coleman

Login Bug Sqaushed

Logins, registrations, and all Mobilicio.us services should be working as intended now.

For those interested, the problem was that del.icio.us had changed the address of their API. We’d like to thanks Britta from del.icio.us support for letting us know about the updated address.

Please let us know if you experience any issues using the service over the next few days. Thanks.

(click here for previous coverage of this issue)

Add comment | August 15th, 2006 | by Jason Coleman

Temporary Outage Alert

We are currently experiencing technical dificulties.  There seems to be a serious issue with logging into and using Mobilicio.us at the moment.  While we work diligently to resolve the problem, please use this limited-functionality URL to view your del.icio.us links on your mobile device:  http://mobilicio.us/justlinks.php?a=userName

Replace userName with your del.icio.us username.

Important note:  Unfortunately, the issue is affecting the Mobilicio.us account signup services as well.  The above URL will only work for existing Mobilicio.us customers.  If you have not signed up yet but would like to see how Mobilicio.us-affected links look on your mobile device, you can use our own URL:  http://mobilicio.us/justlinks.php?a=mobilicio.us

Once again, we apologize for the inconvenience.

1 comment | August 15th, 2006 | by Rob Shields