The getting photos off the phone part is sort of helped by Photo Stream, but not really. But that’s also not what this is about.

The podcast bit can be managed really nicely through Instacast. Export your podcast subscriptions from iTunes, import ‘em into Instacast, and it’ll become your podcast player. It’s very handy.

The only thing it doesn’t do particularly well is let you know when to start it up and download new podcasts. (Actually, there’s a cool feature in Instacast HD for the iPad that does just that, but I don’t listen to podcasts on my iPad all that much.)

Screwing around one night, I was trying to come up with a solution, and I remembered that I had Boxcar installed, which gets me push notifications for Twitterrific (since it doesn’t have them natively). I logged into Boxcar, noticed they had a “Push me a notification when there’s a new entry in this feed” option, and thought “Hey, I’ll plug in the podcast feeds and get push notifications whenever there’s a new podcast!”

Amazing, right?

Except, it didn’t work. I don’t think Boxcar supports podcasts as a feed type or something, as it just seemed to ignore any new items that showed up.

But I was not discouraged.

There’s another cool “send me a notice” website/tool out there called ifttt.com. Basically, it’s an awesome little site that lets you plug things together and trigger actions. The premise is “If [this] then [that]” (hence ifttt.com). I’d been using it to send me emails before it’s forecast to rain (can’t forget that umbrella!).

It also lets you send notifications based off of RSS feeds. And it can send those notifications into Boxcar.

That opened up a whole world of possibilities.

First, I plugged in my podcasts. I turned my weather notifications from email to Boxcar push notifications.

While dorking around inside these cool webapps, I noticed that Boxcar also ties into Growl (the Mac desktop notification system). “Awesome,” I thought, “I can have my computer push stuff to my phone when scripts finish and stuff.”

And that is entirely possible. You simply install the Boxcar Growl theme, configure a few easy settings, and boom, your computer can send your Growl notifications to your phone, straight through Boxcar. Mine is configured to only do so when my screen saver is on or I’m inactive. If I’m in a meeting, IMs will get shot to my phone so I can determine if something is urgent. Long backup jobs or scripts will let me know they’ve finished.

Tying all of this into growlnotify (the command line tool to let you send arbitrary stuff into Growl) means you can basically trigger almost anything into a push notification. It’s an amazingly powerful toolset.

Whoops! Looks like the TechMeme snippet finder grabbed the advertising block rather than the more important headline/content block from this Washington Post article about Steve Ballmer and Yahoo!. Stupid computers!

Then, people can “follow” you or “friend” you, just like on pretty much any social network, and get updated to what you’re doing. People can have updates sent to their phone, IM, or just over the web (HTML or RSS). It sounds so egotistic and silly: who would want to know what you’re doing all the time? Do people care that much?

It sounded so stupid. I checked out some of the more famous Twitterings (?) online and I wasn’t sold. Then, I went to Vegas. I wanted to send notes back to people at home–you know, just silly stuff. I signed up for Twitter and gave it a shot. I really haven’t stopped using it since. The ability to just send a text message off to a phone number and have it update a little blog is pretty powerful, and can (depending on how many people use Twitter in your little network) be pretty helpful if you’re looking for some quick info from your friends.

I can think of a whole bunch of other uses (some of which I’m going to try to implement at work … we’ll see how that goes), but, fundamentally, it can be a useful way to get some information out when you don’t have enough in your brain to do anything too big (like update your blog …).

I’m guessing it’ll fade out, but Twitter is a handy fad. I’d almost like to sync my Twitter status to my IM status/info, so people can sort of follow me however they’d like.

The other good thing about Twitter is that it’s one way. It’s only outward communication (though you can use it to sort of carry on a conversation) which is nice, particularly these days when there’s just so much data flying at you (for instance, at work, I’m on 4 IM networks, plus two email accounts, plus normal web stuff). Twitter’s unidirectional (monodirectional?): I just spew and I don’t have to listen back. Not very friendly, but sometimes it’s what you need.

I’m going to try to add my Twitter feed to my blog (look that way —->). We’ll see how it goes.

Holy crap. That’s ugly.

Clicking the little link to vote takes you to a Thank You screen that says that voting will help ensure the best stories are presented. I would have expected something more interactive, more (dare I say it) Web 2.0-y.

Then I actually read the Thank You message:

“Thank You for participating in the Slashdottit Rating System

Your vote in the Slashdottit system will help insure the best stories are presented to our readers, with hyper accurate numbers to indicate their relevance and general awesomeness. Only by requiring the contribution of every random user of the internet can we guarantee the most scientifically perfect numbers will be generated. These numbers will guarantee that every story that appears on Slashdot will be interesting, insightful, and flawless. Vote early, vote often.”

Ha. Clever. April Fool’s. Well played.

It got worse when AdSense came along, and it got even worse as Digg, Facebook, MySpace, and the other social networking-type sites got big. Now, not only were people gaming the engines, they were throwing up lame articles and gaming other systems to get both the search juice and the traffic. Their spammy site gets the best of both worlds, and the rest of us deal with more spam–just not of the email variety.

This week was a big to-do about one of these SEO/SMO guys who got banned from now-Yahoo! owned blog widget because he was posting how to hack it (and, quite frankly, being an all-around douche). So, a guy who games the system for a living was bitching about being banned from a free tool that he’d been posting how to hack. Topping it off, a whole bunch of other SEO folks (many of whom I’ve been reading for a few years now) hopped on and defended the guy.

I just don’t get it.

I understand that the whole idea behind this widget (MyBlogLog) and behind other sites (like Digg, Flickr, etc.) is community. You build a community and you get more than just the functionality of the widget, you get the benefit/fun of the community. It’s all so Webtwopointohy.

Finally, a voice of reason came through my feed reader. I’m hoping we’re reaching a tipping point. I’m hoping we’re reaching the point where every sales and marketing guy out there looking to score some quick money doesn’t look at every new site and widget as something to game and make money. Now, I’m not against making money. I’d love to create a site that has some value to people and figure out a way (ads or not) to make some money. But the group of folks who exist solely to put up a site with ads, get it on Digg, and get enough sheep to click on it need to go away. They used to be called spammers, and it’s about time we go back to calling them that.

Well, I don’t have to anymore. ProfileLinker did it for me.

TechCrunch pointed to them today, which means they’re bound to get a good bit of traffic today. Reading through the comments, folks are hitting on many of the reasons I never got energized to actually do anything about it: the networks could cut you off; users would have to really trust you to give you their login/pass; there are so many networks that you’d be constantly trying to keep up as new networks emerged (as well as keep old networks working).

Partnering with the networks is the only way to make it work long term, I think, and that’s a tall order given that any centralized management system removes page views from their site, thus removing ad views from their site, thus directly reducing their revenue stream.

Still, it’s an idea that needs to happen because managing multiple profiles is just silly.

With the prevelence of social networking websites on the web, particularly the big three of MySpace, Friendster, and Orkut (or maybe LinkedIn), it seems like people are always encouraging you to the join the one they’re a member of. That usually means you start with like a Friendster account, get convinced to join Orkut (leaving your Friendster setup wilting …), then you move to MySpace (and they both wilt). Then one day you remember your Friendster setup, and you go back in there to find now there’s a bunch more people there.

Or at least I assume that’s what people do. I don’t have a MySpace account, but I do have an Orkut account (I don’t think I’ve logged in for over a year) and a Friendster account (which I check maybe once a month). But, if you really cared about these networks and keeping your data up-to-date, wouldn’t it be handy if you could update it in one place and have it magically update the rest?

That’s my idea: to build MyFriendKut.com (I should probably removes some vowels to make it very Web 2.0). You’d setup your account on the site, and then give the logins to your social networking accounts (yeah, privacy issues, but whatever, it’s all about convenience). The site would have a bunch of settings that are common to most of those sites. When you want to change something, you change it at the MyFriendKut.com site, and the site pushes it out. So then you keep all of your sites up to date through one interface, saving you time to stalk people on MySpace. Fun!

Better yet, maybe the site also throws up a tabbed interface or something that authenticates you to the social networking sites so that it’s one-login-shopping. See! Amazing idea!

Now I just have to get motivated and build it. And probably check to see that no one has already built it. Then figure out how to make money off it. Sell out and become a millionaire. Just like the Underpants Gnomes.