Jason Burns recently started up Take My Tech where he is giving away his spare tech related items to a random commenter (once there are 100 comments on a post…see the initial announcement).  This sounds like a pretty neat concept for a blog and along the lines of an idea I have to clear out some of my excess “stuff” (launching soon hopefully).  I’m going to keep my eye on this one and am hoping that it turns out to be a success.  (And another plus in my book…the site is running WordPress.)

I’m not sure if I’ve blogged about MySpace before (if don’t have anything nice to say…) but today I am going to do so because I finally saw a change that is actually pretty useful/helpful.

They’ve been working on adding filters to view your “friends”, which was a little helpful, but today I spotted a “New Friends” option, which appears to list your most recent additions in order. Some people may not care about that, but when you’re managing multiple accounts and each has hundreds of friends it comes in very handy. Now I don’t have to wonder if someone accepted my friend request, I can simply look to see if they’re on the list and when I spot them I can pop over to their page and drop them a note. Very useful indeed.

Now if they’d add a decent region based option as well as adding RSS feeds for the bulletins I’d be a happy camper (I’m getting used to the “our page design options suck”…but it would be nice if it were improved as well).

While I don’t have a “personal” MySpace account (check out Facebook for that), here are the handful of accounts which I manage if you want to add me:

• Future Karnies of America
• Surge Bucket Media
• Trolley Dodgers Podcast
• Utter Oddcast
• Watershed Studio

Preface: If this were coming directly from me, it would be a very biased AND completely unauthoritative recommendation as I do not own an iPhone and have no plans to purchase one.

That said, I was quite surprised to see the “A-list” tech blog Gizmodo ripping the iPhone three months after its release. And numerous other popular sites jumping on board…see Yahoo!, The Guardian & Wired to name a few.

While I do find the recommendation against buying an iPhone a little surprising since all of the Mac users that I know are true fiends for all things Mac, I think that Apple, and even AT&T for that matter, didn’t take one major fact into consideration…you’re not only selling this device to “Mac Heads”. A good majority of the people that will drop that kind of money for a phone are techies who want a device to do exactly what they want it to do and will “hack” it into submission if necessary.

Which brings us to the issue at hand. Apparently Apple issued a firmware “upgrade” which disallows hacking the iPhone and has in turn rendered the iPhone useless for those who have hacked it. Unless of course they revert back to the previous version, which then won’t allow any “official” iPhone upgrades.

While I understand the monetary side of why they did it, I can’t see how this will be good for business, especially after the uproar from the recent $200 price drop. But hey, I guess that it isn’t my business, right?

Via Macworld…

Those 4GB iPhones just became collector’s items. Apple dropped the 4GB version of its mobile phone and slashed the price on the 8GB model to $399—$200 less than its introductory price.

If I were a fan of Mac at all AND if I had bought one of these things at $599 a few months ago I’d be livid and probably never buy another Mac product again. And guess what, it sounds like some people are a bit upset. This is just a bad business practice.

I love technology and new gadgets and gizmo’s, but I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again…as a rule of thumb, DO NOT BUY TECH PRODUCTS WHEN THEY ARE FIRST RELEASED! Give them a little time to have the bugs worked out and then wait at least for the first price drop, if not the second or even third. Trust me, you’ll thank yourself in the long run.

UPDATE: September 6, 2007 @ 3:30pm (EDT)

To appease the uproar Apple is offering a $100 “store credit” to customers.  So you’re still out $100 for being a “bleeding edge” type AND you don’t actually get any of the money back. I guess you can now go claim a “free” iPod Shuffle* and download a few songs and/or a few episodes of Lost.

* My review of the iPod Shuffle will be coming some day, so be on the lookout for that.

Anyone who uses Skype is probably experiencing connectivity issues and has been for the past few days. At first I had thought this was an issue with my internal network, but that is not the case (thanks to Wired for reporting this).

This is bad news for anyone using Skype for business purposes (as I am) and makes me question my decision of using Skype for VoIP. While my call volume is fairly low since I use e-mail for most of my communication, I know that at least two clients have tried to get in touch over the past two days, and that is bad for business.

I do have a Gizmo number as well, but I wouldn’t say that is a silver bullet either as it has its own issues too. (Go figure, right?)

While my land line does cost a lot more and doesn’t offer “go anywhere” capabilities (useful when you take your “office” mobile), it is stable for the most part. But I’m not ready to switch back just yet. At least not until this is a consistent issue. I’ll ride this one out for a bit and see how everything unfolds. Skype is aware of the issue and they are working on it. Hopefully this will be resolved by Monday and we’ll be back to normal. Until then, e-mail me.

* For anyone wondering what the phrasing is all about, that’s a jab at a comment made by eBay (who owns Skype) a little over a year ago. [1] [2]