John Gruber has posted a really interesting and insightful piece on BlackBerry vs. iPhone, and why he thinks that RIM is, fundamentally, in a very very bad place indeed.

However, there’s one point that I have to disagree with John on:

“In broad terms, BlackBerrys are optimized first for email; the iPhone for the web. What’s more important, an email client or a web browser? For most people, and perhaps even most current BlackBerry users, the answer is clearly the web.”

For the majority of business users, I think John has got this completely wrong. For them, the ability to send and receive emails, and view the attachments which come with them, is far more important than web browsing. Witness the number of users who spend their time in meetings thumbing their BlackBerry.

That’s not to say that John is necessarily wrong in his overall point that iPhone is going to eat RIM’s lunch. But in optimising for email, as John acknowledges, RIM are actually delivering something that’s far more desirable for business than a device that’s optimised for web.

Betsy Schiffman at Wired writes a story about Mike Arrington’s deal with the Washington Post, and mentions that ” it seems crazy-crazy to us that the Washington Post, a paper known for the sort of reporting that can take down U.S. presidents, is publishing content written by a dude who invests in the companies he writes about.”

This, of course, sends the TechCrunch macho-dickwads into a froth, and they come back with this:

Nice characters, eh? I’m sure their mothers - who they probably still live with - are very proud.

I’m really enjoying using Brightkite at the moment (I’m ianbetteridge if you want to friend me), and I’m pleased to see that the iPhone web application has now been released in alpha form.

But I was even more pleased to see this comment from one of the developers on the Brightkite blog:

“The native iPhone application with core location (cell triangulation, GPS) is in the works. Checking in will become much easier. We will be releasing it in June through Apple. There are no plans to release a jail broken version as of right now.”

With Jaiku effectively stalled, Brightkite looks a nice solution for location awareness. Plus, it integrates with Fire Eagle, which is great.

marketing: OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta Features:

“With Version 3.0, OpenOffice.org is now able to run on Mac OS X without the need for X11. Thus, OpenOffice.org behaves like any other Aqua application. The cool thing is, while the market leading office suite vendor dropped VBA support and the Solver feature, OpenOffice.org recently introduced limited VBA support and includes a powerful Solver component. In addition, OpenOffice.org integrates well with the Mac OS X accessibility APIs, and thus offers better accessibility support than many other Mac OS X applications. Finally, people like OpenOffice.org 3.0 for Mac OS X because of its very good stability and performance. Reportedly, some Mac users have switched to OpenOffice.org just because of its extremely good stability.”

There’s quite a few more goodies, but for Mac users this is the big one. Download from here.

So now that Google Reader has the notes feature, allowing me to make little comments on everything I share, and the ability to share anything I browse to, I want to be able to use it to replace del.icio.us in my blog workflow.

At the moment, I use del.icio.us to create those “links for…” posts. Del.icio.us does this automatically - and what I want is for Google Reader to do the same job. Does anyone know how or even if this can be done?

• Interview with Mitch Kapor
  Interview with Mitch Kapor, concentrating on gestural interfaces for Second Life
  (tags: virtualw MitchKapor SecondLife)
• Working on the Right Things (Considering OS X “Panther” Support)
  Linden Lab wants to end support for Panther - I say yes please.
  (tags: Mac Apple SecondLife Panther)

My blog friend Mathew Ingram has a post up on the new features in Google Reader, which provide the ability to add comments to items you share, and share any items via a bookmarklet. Mathew thinks the features are “kind of lame”, particularly when compared to FriendFeed. However, I think that Mathew is missing a few things.

The thing about FriendFeed is that it’s incredibly Twitter-centric, and provides something that Twitter readers have been complaining about virtually since the services was born: a threaded comment view. This means that it turns Twitter into a pretty decent discussion system, something that it sucks at at the moment. This is why it’s become popular with Twitter users - it meets a need that Twitter itself has steadfastly refused to meet.

But comparing it to Google Reader is a pointless exercise, because the two products are designed to do very different things. Google Reader allows you pretty good granular control over anything that comes in RSS form, and allows you to sort and categorise information whichever way you want. The folder structure means that, for example, I can concentrate on my work-related feeds when at work, and save reading friends till later.

FriendFeed gives you a “river of news” view with locked-in comments (although, to be fair, they seem to want to open that out - hence the ability to post back to Twitter, and, forthcoming, the ability to post back to Disqus). The only granularity you have is to click on the feed source - you can’t tag or categorise feeds effectively.

Does that matter? For people wanting “Twitter Pro”, the answer is no. FriendFeed provides proper discussions for Twitter in a much more useable way than anything else. But that doesn’t make FriendFeed a good RSS reader, unless all you want is a single stream of news/noise. Of course, that’s exactly what Dave Winer has been arguing for for ages, with Scoble agreeing, so it’s perhaps no surprise that Scoble has been a big FriendFeed champion.

It’s also worth noting something that I think a lot of people have forgotten: Google already owns a service which does everything that FriendFeed does, and much more. It’s called Jaiku, and I expect that Google will be starting to make something more of it in the not-too-distant future.

• Guardian column: Gary Vaynerchuk
  Excellent column from Jeff about Gary Vaynerchuk, who’s now getting 80,000 viewers a day on his wine programme online.
  (tags: jeffjarvis socialmedia wine television)
• heisel.org > What is Web 2.0 and why do (some) journalists fear it?
  Good summary of why journalists shouldn’t fear Web 2.0
  (tags: journalism publishing web2.0)

Apple re-affirms commitment to video apps:

“To extinguish concerns that Apple was ‘giving up’ on pro video apps, their director of marketing for professional video applications Richard Townhill told TVBEurope, ‘I can categorically state, on the record, that is not the case.’ As for the delay, Richard said ‘… we wanted it to work without an IT department to support it.’”

Well that seems to put to bed that one.

Apple Adds Chinese Handwriting Recognition in 2.0?:

“A sign of things to come? Or just another in a long list of iPhone rumors? It appears
that Apple has included Chinese Handwriting Recognition in the iPhone 2.0 Firmware
Beta according to MacRumors.com.
Chinese users can apparently draw a character on the screen with their finger and
then choose from among options for the recognition.”

(Via GottaBeMobile.com.)