App.net has gone Freemium. The service that had been slagged off as Twitter for people who have fifty dollars now has thrown the gates open wide, though not wide enough for everyone to come in at once. Free users need to be invited by an existing, paid user, and are limited to following 40 people, and to 500 MB of storage, with a per-file limit of 10 MB. [1]

I’ve written about App.net before, and how unimpressed I am with the service. It’s great for certain things. The community is still small enough that a user’s post can be spotted on the global public timeline, and get a response. People on App.net that would drown in Twitter @-replies will actually @-reply you back. It’s conversational.

If Twitter is Times Square—a comparison that is increasingly apt—App.net is the prototypical small town square, for good and for ill. These are comparisons made before, and by better writers, but they bear repeating. The paid barrier to entry has, however, kept App.net from reaching critical mass. Marco Arment has noted that this may be the reason for the new direction. I’m inclined to agree, and that was the crux of my previous post on the service.

I’m glad to see App.net taking the service more open, and I hope the Freemium model works for them. It’s to everyone’s benefit for the service to get more users and have more engagement. On the adoption curve, App.net has most of the early adopter crowd. Though they probably don’t aspire to a large-scale, or at least a Twitter-scale network, they do need to do whatever has to be done to keep moving along that curve. It’s a question of survival. They need users, they need users to stick around, and they need users to pay to move to premium, which is more likely to happen when the service provides them more value.

Yet, I know that people are going to raise a bit of hell. As a paid service, App.net has the “geek elite” credibility that Twitter no longer has. Part of the motivation for its existence was, and I read this from multiple technology writers, that Twitter was being taken over by the “normals.” Problem is, that’s an inevitability of any technology or service, whether they’re a large-scale service or otherwise. If you really want a small network, free from the riff-raff, there’s always tent.io.

Good luck, App.net, and Godspeed.

The name of this site implies a distinct lack of topical focus, and that is by design. I have a ADHD mindset, and rarely can stay interested in one topic for long. At one point in the site’s storied history, my focus was on books, writing and literature. It lasted about three months.

Since taking the site daily, I’ve found the lack of focus to be a mixed blessing. On one hand, I have the freedom to post whatever I like on here, but on the other hand, I often find myself sitting, directionless, at a blank screen trying to figure out a topic—any topic. Sometimes the results of that are great, and sometimes the results are extremely subpar. Still, up they go, the better to keep the streak alive.

If you, the reader, are concerned, I’m not giving up the daily posting thing. What I am doing is refactoring, and honing in on a focal point for Sanspoint. Like everything I write, it’s based on what’s occupying my thoughts, and what I read. The main focus on Sanspoint is going to be technology, culture, the technology of culture, and the culture of technology.

It sounds a bit pretentious, I’m sure, but I think a lot about culture. Music especially, and so much that I started a podcast just to talk records and music with equally passionate friends. I also think about books, and about TV and movies, though I don’t watch either terribly often. I also think a lot about technology, not just in the sense of what neat new gadgets are out there, but what software and hardware can do for me. This includes, of course, accessing, buying, and making culture.

Then there’s that intersection. The technology of culture, the culture of technology. That’s where things get really interesting, and that’s where I want to probe. I hope you’re willing to come with.

The other day, I ran into a bit of difficulty with getting my daily blog post up. I’d written the start of a post on my iPad, with the intention of finishing and polishing it up in the morning, possibly on the subway on the way to work. Imagine my surprise when the file, which was stored on Dropbox, utterly failed to appear on my phone. And on my work computer. And everywhere else. I addressed this problem by simply writing the rest of the post in Drafts, which synced back to my iPad, copy and pasting the text into the document there, and proceeding with my typical blog workflow. [1] Nothing was lost, thankfully, but the sinking sensation of knowing that something isn’t where I thought it would be brought back a lot of bad memories from the bad days of syncing across devices.

Back in the day when I had a desktop and a laptop, and Dropbox but a gleam in some developer’s eye, I tried syncing a Yojimbo database between two machines. The only supported way to accomplish this was to use .Mac [1], which cost the princely sum of $99 a year. My poor college student self couldn’t afford that. It was expensive enough buying the Mac mini and the iBook G4. So, I found a workaround—an app called SyncTogether, that promised to be a surrogate .Mac for my local network. For a while, it worked, but then it didn’t. Synchronizing became a pain, with pop ups asking me which of two seemingly identical items I wished to keep in Yojimbo. Somewhere along the line, the synchronization database became completely fouled up. Wanting to start from scratch, I dove into the terminal and tried to rm -rf my way out.

The result permanently fouled up any attempt at future synchronization between my mini and my iBook forever. After trying a tool that allowed me to access the desktop Yojimbo database via the web, I gave up on the app entirely.

Comparatively speaking, Dropbox farting and failing to move files around was a mere annoyance. After all, I got my blog post finished and out the door. It was a bigger annoyance the first time it happened, trying to share an important work-related file with my bosses, falling back to e-mailing the file as an attachment. Dropbox usually works so well and so seamlessly that when it fails, it feels like a betrayal. Meanwhile, when the various Apple sync services fail to work, we brush it off as “Well, what did you expect. This is the company that gave us iTools/.Mac/MobileMe.” For what it’s worth, iCloud hasn’t failed me yet, but I don’t use it for document sync. That’s what Dropbox is for. It syncs the text files I live in, the TextExapnder snippets that help me work faster, and the 1Password database that I can’t do anything without. [2]

The more reliable something is, the more we come to rely upon it, and the more frustrated we get when it fails, even in a minor way. It’s a danger of this modern, connected life, the digital equivalent of the dog eating your homework. [3] And, that does happen—John Steinbeck’s first draft of Of Mice and Men was eaten by his dog, and he had to rewrite the entire novel from scratch. While writing a fiction piece a few years ago, TextMate, my text editor at the time, crashed before I could save. Attempting to use an iOS note-taking app on my phone nuked my entire Notational Data folder. At least I was able to restore everything from Dropbox’s backup when that happened.

And, thinking about it, with Dropbox letting me recover three years worth of text files makes me a little more inclined to forgive it for failing to synchronize now and then. It really could be much, much worse.

There’s been a wave of new iOS calendar applications that promise to make calendaring “social,” showing you who you’ll be meeting, where you’ll be meeting, and do it all by integrating with your assorted social networks, primarily Facebook and LinkedIn. I gave three of these apps a try, though by “try,” I mean I installed them and deleted them within the space of five minutes. The first, Tempo lost me the minute I saw it had a reservation system, akin to e-mail app sensation Mailbox. Perhaps I’m a little old-fashioned, but I don’t like waiting longer than the download process to use an app. If your app isn’t ready to handle the load of new users, your app isn’t ready, period.

The second app, Sunrise, lasted long enough for me to sign into it with my Facebook account, only to discover that it didn’t integrate with the native iOS calendar, only with Google Calendar. While I’m wary of using Facebook to sign into anything, not being able to view the pre-existing calendar events on my own phone was a deal breaker. Deleted. A similar app, UpTo, had the same problem. Deleted.

After three application failures in a row, I backed up and rethought the whole thing. Why the hell does my calendar have to be “social” anyway? There may be some value to this in a business environment where you have specific meetings with specific people, but that’s what the event name and notes fields are for, yes? “Meeting with Bob from Sales” is enough information for me. I don’t need a picture of Bob, the ability to view his LinkedIn profile, or anything beyond knowing when the hell I’m meeting with him and why. Having a calendar access my social networks to view calendar events is useful to a point, but even with the Facebook integration in iOS and OS X, I find myself just manually adding the events I’m going to a calendar rather than rely on the global Facebook Events calendar, but then again, I get a large number of event invitations on Facebook.

This takes a lot of gonads to say, especially since I work for a social network, but not everything needs to be “social”. Back when I was exploring task managers in the days before Things.app had sync, I tried out Wunderkit, a task manager that was also its own social network. The idea boggled my mind. Whose task list am I going to follow? Why do I need to follow it? At work, we use Trello to manage projects and tasks for our various teams. It’s invite-only, and while I’m not exactly fond of it, Trello is clearly designed to be a group task service. It’s networked, but it’s a-social. There’s value in services like Trello, Campfire, etc., for small organizations to get things done, but they work best as an overview of what’s on the team’s plate. It’s up to the individual to manage their own tasks at the individual level.

Ultimately, I’m a believer in software that does one thing really well. To wrench this back to calendars for a moment, the only calendaring app that wedges in secondary functionality I’ve seen that remotely compels is Horizon, which integrates a weather forecast. But, my phone has a perfectly reasonable weather application that is literally a gesture away. It’s not hard, and I’m not pressed enough for time, that I can’t pull down the Notification Center and see if the weather is going to be crap.

“Social” features are an easy way to differentiate your app from the mass of similar apps in your class. There’s only so many ways you can cleverly display a calendar, show tasks, read e-mail, et cetera. Differentiation is hard. Facebook integration is easy. [1] When it comes to calendars, the one that still stands above the rest is Fantastical. Why? Because it is extremely easy to put something into it, and extremely easy to get something out of it. Launch the app, click the plus symbol, and type out a simple phrase: “Meeting with Bob in Sales at 2PM next Thursday,” for example. Fantastical knows how to parse that, and makes it easy to add it. Boom. Done. No muss, no fuss, no Facebook, and no waiting in line. If someone can find a way to make calendaring better than that, I’d like to see it. Really. Just a tip: making it “social” isn’t going to do it.

My name is Richard J. Anderson, and I have a problem. I have a huge music collection, and I’ve barely listened to any of it. I have a Smart Playlist in iTunes for all music with a play count of zero. It contains 90 gigabytes of music. 90 gigabytes. That is a lot of music. This happened because I am, by nature, a completionist. I want complete discographies of my favorite artists, including singles, B-sides, and live albums. I gravitate towards extended versions of albums, special editions, bonus tracks and bonus discs—even for artists and bands I’m just starting to get into. Now, I’m in a crippling music debt, and Crush On Radio isn’t helping.

I’ve decided to whittle away at this backlog, slowly but surely. It’s starting with an official moratorium on new downloads—excluding picks for Crush On Radio. It’s a little thing, but it keeps the problem from becoming increasingly, exponentially, worse.

The second part is to sit down and actually listen to the music. I’m accomplishing this with a pretty simple setup: a Smart Playlist of unplayed tracks, and LaunchBar. Since iTunes handles playcounts on a track-by-track basis, it’s impossible without scripting to pull a list of complete albums with unplayed tracks. Instead, the Smart Playlist gives me a visual overview of what is sitting in my library, and I summon the complete album using LaunchBar.

If there’s a missing element to this, it’s music on the go. I’m willing to think in depth about solving this problem, as I have a short commute and mostly spend it listening to podcasts over music. However, the basic framework for a solution is in place here, starting with another Smart Playlist, this one of music that I’ve added to my library in the last two weeks. This gets synced with my iPhone and iPad—whenever I think to sync—and gives me the freshest music in my library.

Handling the archives of unplayed material is going to be trickier. I’ve found some scripts that can help pull and generate playlists of albums, but I’ll still have to winnow those playlists down to fit on a 32GB device, and nestle alongside apps, books, and my evergreen portable music collection.

Remember, that’s 90 gigs of music. If they ever put out a 256GB iPhone and iPad, this would be less of a problem.

Finally, there’s the hardest thing to do for any music fan: culling. Typically, I cull music from my library only when I’m upgrading an album to a superior version. I don’t need two versions, for example, of Frank Zappa’s Hot Ratswhen the 2012 remaster is so much better than the previous version. I have music in my collection that I’ve picked up with the full intention of listening to so I can see if I will like an artist or band, only to put it aside. I need to isolate those albums, play them, and decide if they should stay or go.

I’m probably never going to have a music collection small enough to use iTunes Match, or not need an external hard drive, or cause iTunes to take several minutes to launch. That doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t know what’s in there, listen to it, and have only things in it that I enjoy.