DISQUS

I remember going to a Niall Kennedy meetup/showcase at CNET that I swear was in Jan or Feb 2006. @Biz talked about Odeo and a side project the group came up with riffing on creative IM status messages like "shouldn't have eaten that whole burrito" instead of "busy".

It is amazing to think that was the frame of reference for short messaging back then. Good work to all of you for creating a totally new genre of communication.

I know the feeling, though my sleep pattern doesn't sound as bad as yours. Once I'm out, I'm out, but it used to take me ages to get there. I recently started taking melatonin and the difference has been amazing. Hooray for drugs!

I've just started hitting the same problem- my oldest is now 9 and starting to take an interest in music.

It looks like request.com will sync multiple iTunes libraries if you are willing to run a separate server just for music and pay $3k for it.

As a "green geek" it bothers me to think about having another machine turned on 24/7 in my house- though the alternative of keeping all our computers up just to stream the music isn't great either.

I am a volunteer IT guy at my kids' preschool as well and they have the same problem with photos- multiple users, multiple machines and no way to easily sync libraries across the network.

Agreed completely- there has to be a better way.

Tumblr MP3 blogging is really fun and really easy, but it's REALLY hard to find other tumblrs to follow without spending a lot of time at it. I'm hoping that will change sometime soon.

That's an interesting viewpoint. When I was a teenager I would buy tapes or CDs just because I liked the album cover or name of the band. I'm not willing to take that risk on music anymore . . . Don't know where that leaves me, except that I understand the risk point.

One of my all-time favorite quotes was where Neil talked about how musicians generally mellow as they get older, but he's gone the opposite direction- from folk-rock with Buffalo Springfield, through CSNY and eventually on to stuff like Rust and the Arc Weld 40-minutes-of-feedback record. He's a legend for sure.

We are saying the same thing. The point of your original post, I think, was that a blanket non-compete puts an extra burden on employees when the NDA restrictions accomplish the practical objective. My comment above attempted to agree with you- the NDA gets the job done in most cases.

California doesn't exactly fail to recognize the issue. It won't enforce flat-out non-compete restrictions, but it does say that an employee can't use confidential information belonging to employer A in the service of employer B- including things like customer lists, business plans and products plans as well as technical "IP".

To people accustomed to the more stringent restriction available in other states this probably sounds loosy-goosy, but it actually gets pretty close to the same place. It may cause real-world problems a bit more often than in MA or NY (for example), but in percentage terms I'd be willing to bet the difference is pretty minor.

In Fred's example Employer A can advise Employer B that VP Sales is under a confidentiality obligation. Especially in startup contexts, the offer letter gets rescinded pretty quickly- in part because the (smart) letter itself makes VP Sales affirm that she is not under any confidentiality restrictions.

I've been looking for something that will synchronize iPhoto the way Request does iTunes. In my house photos get uploaded to 1 Mac, but I'd like to share them with other PCs and Macs machines in the house. Does anyone have a suggestion for this? Many thanks.

I just checked out Ben. Nice-thanks for the tip. He reminds me of Brendan Benson too, though I might like Ben a little better- Brendan seems too caught up in devising clever wordplay.

This woman should team up with the infamous $65M pants lawsuit plaintiff. http://tinyurl.com/yv89c4

I took the point of Marc's piece to be that on a "Level 3" the developer doesn't have to pay for bandwidth or hosting or worry about scaling very very quickly when Facebook-style superviral adoption happens. Developers still need to pay for Amazon services, so even though it lets them scale very quickly they still need the checkbook to support it.

He has a valid point- if you don't have a revenue stream to support your traffic then an "all you can eat" Level 3 platform makes a lot of sense.

OTOH, I suspect that people haven't been building Level 3 platforms all along because it takes more work to convince developers to use them if they are going to be "locked in".

"Graph" seems a little wonky and abstract. It doesn't seem to have caught on- I've more commonly heard people talking about the "social map" to describe interpersonal relationship.

"Social network" is more accurate, but it has turned into shorthand for "social networking platform".

In other words, it's all about trying to distinguish an individual's set of contacts from the applications on which they connect. You've talked about this a bunch- interesting that people are having trouble finding the right words to differentiate the two.

Nice song. Growing up in Boston going to alt-post-soft-punk-thing shows these were two of my favorites as well, though I liked the "early" Lemonheads better. Nostalgia . . . <sigh>