SHODAN LIVES
Notes and links from @colemanm.

Apple bought Lala

Music service Lala was bought by Apple recently. There are a number of possibilities here:

The good:

• An owner with cash could keep the service running indefinitely
• Maybe Apple understands that the iTunes store isn’t enough anymore
• That iPhone app shouldn’t have trouble making it through certification now

The bad:

• Active development will almost certainly slow to a crawl until the business end of the deal is worked out
• Might mean that Apple sees the threat, and is only trying to snuff this out
• Apple has a less-than-golden record with web services

The reasons I love Lala are exactly all the reasons I can’t stand iTunes. I’m sick of having to sync my phone for 20-30 minutes every time I want to change one thing. I’ll plug it in with the intention of grabbing the latest few podcast episodes or to add/remove one album, but it can’t just do one thing. First it prompts me to update my phone software, then has to transfer all the app updates and photos, and back up the phone. 30 minutes later I have my two new podcasts I wanted for the commute. What should be a simple process gets complicated to the point of obnoxiousness by a bloated desktop app (don’t even get me started on how poor iTunes’ performance is with large libraries).

I think the major point is: why would I want to manage a bunch of local MP3 files myself? Most legit MP3 stores only let you download the tracks once, then backup becomes your responsibility. Lala’s “web albums” are just what I need. I don’t care about owning the tracks, I just want to hear them when I want to hear them.

Rant over.

A Lala app could negate the need to sync music anymore, but with the acquisition by Apple, my confidence is shaken that it’ll ever become a full streamable version of my music library.

BeeJive

This app is right up there with Tweetie in the most-beautiful-and-useful app contest.

BeeJive’s push notifications have almost eliminated my need for SMS. Most of the people I communicate with regularly have iPhones, and also have BeeJive.

MMS on iPhone finally? It doesn’t matter, because BeeJive now lets you send pictures inside of chats. It also can send voice clips now. The files are uploaded to some storage space on BeeJive’s servers.

The killer feature now released in 3.1 is group chat. On the fly, you can create chat rooms and invite friends into them. Every message sent to the chat room sends a push notification to your phone. In the few minutes we were messing with it, it worked perfectly. This functionality doesn’t even work correctly in Gchat, in my experience. Now we can all argue about where to go out on Saturday night together on our phones!

All the people I talk to are on Gchat now, so I never use AIM, Yahoo!, or MSN at all. One of my favorite features of Gchat is that it archives all my conversation history in my Gmail account. I search my chat history regularly when looking for a link someone sent me, an email address, or some other info. And because all Gchat activity in BeeJive goes through Google’s server’s, even mobile chat history is archived.

The app is $10, but we’ve saved more than that just by cutting out our SMS plan with AT&T.