I finally got an iPhone today for work. UI felt akward at first but I am getting used to it. What disappointed me the most was how it integrates with my Mac. Sync is nice but why can't I use it as a storage device? Accessing the iPhone as a disk drive via either Wi-Fi or Bluetooth would have been cool but it was disappointing that I had to do everything through iTunes even with USB connection.

While I am well past 24, by two decades egad, I'll throw in my two cents to help Facebook fix Beacon. I figured this is more constructive than joining the negative flash flood going on now.
Facebook Groups as Limited Opt-in
The way out is to use groups to encourage as well as letting users control Beacon opt-in. If I am fanatical about Coke, I would click yes when joining "I Love Coke" group required opting into beacon news about my recent Coke-related purchases. If I like Sci-Fi, I would join Sci-Fi groups and it would feel natural to opt-in when asked if I want my friends informed of my Sci-Fi book purchases at Amazon and not for other types of books.
Group Controlled Privacy
Members of a group should have a direct say in which beacons should be required or offered as optional for members. Minimal number of votes will hamper use of polling for this purpose but, even if not enough people voted to enable or disable a beacon, each vote can be seen as opting-in as an individual decision instead of a group decision.
Group Rewards
Corporate sponsored groups can use rewards to members to entice more users to enable beacons. Opting-in to join random drawing for limited collection of Star Wars action figures is, I think, a lot of Star Wars fans will chooses to do.
To set the world on fire, one must know which way the winds are blowing. As someone wise once said that one can learn even from a 3-year old, Facebook could learn a thing or two from pyros.

Most teens have much smaller network of friends than adults do. They are also less interested in  knowing what's going on beyond their immediate surroundings. I think these and other differences like less self-confidence and higher sensitivity to privacy point to weaker demand among teens for microblogging services like Twitter in current form.
But same arguments could be made against MySpace yet it is supposedly popular among teens. Is it? Other than stats, it's difficult to really know. My son is aware of MySpace but he frequents Lego enthusiast forums and YouTube much more than MySpace pages. My son didn't know what Twitter was so I explained but he didn't find what Twitter does interesting.
While I don't have anything conclusive to say and am too lazy to chase down research grants, I think the effect of age (and sex) on social-whatever is an interesting as well as important research subject.

Tae-hwan Park won 2 more golds at FINA World Cup swimming meet today, bringing the total to 3. The kid is strong but what he pulled off today was really impressive. He swam 1500m freestyle then, just 10 minutes later, swam 200m, coming in first in both. He probably didn't even have time for ceremony in between. Wow.
An interesting tidbit for me: I read that there were three Parks in the pool for 1500m. Maybe I should start swimming again. ;-p
Update: Video of Tae-hwan swimming 400m. Mad sprinter strikes! Still looking for footage from the FINA meet.

I've been reading up on Point-Based Graphics lately because I think this branch of computer graphics will become very important for next generation of MMORPG, one that can be changed extensively by players. Fun stuff.

While I am hoping that more companies open up their silos, I completely disagree that keeping walls around data, whether one owns it or not, is evil. In short, I disagree with efforts to tie moral implications to business attempting to protect themselves. Those who want walls around data silos torn down, including me, are not free from self-interest and I think it is only fair that people should fully disclose their interest before banging on the gates of silos.
IMHO, it's alright and, in the end, good for all to pursue self-interest regardless of which side of silo walls one stands. I think there are about as many reasons to reasons to keep as reasons to keep them up. Future say open but present say close. Near future say move carefully and, most importantly, don't let others dick you around.
It is very annoying to see people apply dime store morals to pursue their own interest, commerical or idealistic. There is no such thing as non-destructive change. Hell, even unasked for honesty like this post is destructive.

Note that lack of links in this post is intentional because I am only annoyed with the trend and not with the people involved.

I ran a smack into possibly serious problem with AIR on Sunday. The problem was that a closed Window (mx.core.Window) was not GCing because there were about 100 references (according to Flex Builder 3 even after forced GC) to the window instance after it closed, none explicitly by my code btw. There were all references from within (children of or owned by the window) or bindings from parts of the window (all too easy to do with MXML magic like an online jailbait dating service) to my model layer.
Looking at Window.close method, all it does is tell its native window to close and remove itself from the system manager it belongs to. Hmm. Supposedly, child controls are smart enough to recognize when it's taken off the 'stage' and removing references but, apparently, it's not happening. And looking at binding implementation and generated glue code, I don't see how anyone can avoid memory leak problems with even moderately complex application lifecycle scenarios.
But then, by the time you find yourself in serious need of a diaper, you would have invested enough time to write a small mound of code and paid $700 (for FB3) to see a nice table of leaks. Gosh, all this is making me happy enough to wet my pants. What a Sunday.

Unless I am mistaken, US stock market's about to break it's back. All the charts I've read just smells wrong and I fear this leg will be a long one, could be longer if China's crazy stock market shatters as result. Oy. I hope I am wrong.

Looked at APML (Attention Profiling Mark-up Language) spec this morning. First impressions are that it's doesn't offer enough and unnecessarily verbose. Essentially, APML models a person's attention with an open set of 'concepts', name/value pairs where name is subject of interest and value is degree of interest or disinterest (-1.0 to +1.0).
Their model for attention seem to simple. For example, time factor has strong influence on what a person is interested in. How do you represent duration and immediacy of interest? Also, interest is often goal-driven and expire as soon as associated goal is met. For example, I was interested in Prius when I was looking for a car for my wife but now I am not. Note that time and goal are related factors.

Anyway, I've joined APML mailing list. 

I don't know if Facebook traffic is tanking or not but I do know that I haven't been visiting Facebook as often as before and noticing more spam-like notifications from Facebook in my mailbox. And it's pretty difficult to find even a handful of Facebook apps I can point to as being really useful.

I doubt MySpace will fare better with their upcoming upgrade. Silos just don't make great application platform and mashups are just windows bound to be closed. Something has to give here and now.