ZD's random thoughts

According to TechCrunch, Gizmo5 is part of Google now. That implies Google Voice will have more features.

Yes, it also means I might be able to make VoIP calls on my Droid soon.

Image via Wikipedia

This morning I picked up a Droid from my the local VZW store. My iPhone was out of contract and I have been looking forward to an android phone.

Overall, I like this phone

• It seems to be more responsive compared to my iPhone.
• Plus it has two apps I have been wanting – Google Voice and Google Maps Navigation.
• I like android os.

Issues I am having:

• Verizon Wireless’s 3G coverage is worse than AT&T in my basement, contrary to what they claimed in the commercials.
• It seems only one Google calendar is supported (sync-ed), although multiple gmail accounts can be added into the phone.
• (normal) Yahoo mails are not supported by default.
• On iPhone, you can see the number of unread emails, texts, etc, in a red circle attached to the application. There is no such information on Droid.
• I actually do not need the built-in keyboard since I have been used to iPhone’s software keyboard.
• Lack of (other) decent apps, compared to what I had on my iPhone.

I will try it for some more time and decide whether to keep it.

If you are on the dev channel, your Chrome will be upgraded automatically.

There are some new features as well as some bugfixes. New features include enabling “Edit Search Engine” menu item,  and “default browser”.

Performance-wise, it seems this version has a smaller toll on the CPU compared to previous ones.

While some people prefer a public social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace, others prefer a private ones, or private-label sites.

There are many decisions to make when deciding to go with privates social networking sites. If you hate the administrative overhead, there are some “freemium” type of hosting services such as Ning and CollectiveX. Basically you can either a “free” private social networking site with a vender host name like yournetwork.ning.com or yourname.collectivex.com, or you can cough out some monthly subscription fee to use your own domain and some advanced features. And apparently these hosting providers put ads on the free sites to cover their cost (and sometimes to make a profit).

If you want DIY, there are options, too. Some open source packages exist there. Ellg is a PHP based open source social networking framework, and Community Engine is a Rails based one. If you want to stick to OpenSocial standards, Apache’s Shindig is worth looking into. In addition, Shindig has implementations in both Java and PHP. Partuza is an example open source social networking that uses Shindig implementation of PHP.

There is another PHP based open source social networking project called U Center Home. It looks nice. However, I am confused by its license. On their sourceforge page, the license is GPL, while on their corporate site, the license says – “free for personal/non-profit use”.