Brain scans that reveal what you’ve seen and total recall combine to create the future. I had the second idea for a while, except mine involved video rather than images. It also involved some sort of robotic eyeball.

Nothing too new or exciting from Apple this time around.

Storage Upgrades And Price Cuts

Obviously to fend off the upcoming Zune HD, which now looks rather pricey in comparison. Very nice, but not a dealmaker. I want an iPod Touch, and it still lacks a camera.

Genius For Apps And Playlists

Added a Genius feature for apps to rake in more cash. Lame. I wonder how long this new “feature” took. Probably all of 1 hour with one coder.

iTunes Gets More Bloated

Woo.

iPod Nano

The new voice recorder is great. It’s got a radio and allows pausing of radio, but no radio recording, which my Sandisk Sansa has. It has a video camera, but it can’t take stills for some reason. But I was right about design “reaching a limit” of sorts. This time around, no major design update, just a change to a glossier coating. The new finish is repulsive though. Instead of the clean brushed finish every other Apple product has, they chose to give it a glossy coat this time around, which gives it a rather cheap and ugly look. The only reason this change was made was probably for the sake of change. Just for that, I would not want to buy it. Plus I’m sure it would scratch much more easily.

No Upgrades to iPod Touch

I was hoping for a camera at least, but nothing. I’ll probably get an iPod Touch once it has a radio, video camera, camera, voice recorder and radio recorder, to match the features on my Sansa.

Yahoo! rolled out a cool new search engine results page. I have to say, such a drastic change was long overdue for search engines.

Interestingly enough it has a few of the elements I thought could be useful when I posted about the future of search engines a while back. The new design is centered, it has a sidebar with a notepad. The best new feature is the ability to search any website from within Yahoo!. There’s awesome tabs on the left that appear to be dynamic, and change based on your search term. Brilliant! Ads are also closer to the center, and should be good for increasing profits.

Nice new search engine results page, but too bad all of Yahoo!’s other internet properties are an absolute mess.

I use Meebo simply because it’s a webapp, and won’t slow down my computer too much. For some strange reason, Meebo thought it would be a brilliant idea to make chatlogs public to everyone. A simple search with some keywords will bring up plenty of results.

site:http://chatlogs.meebo.com/ "keywords"

And all that stuff will be brought back. You can narrow things down as well if you add a separate “username” part to the search. While you can’t see the usernames straight out, a simple View Source will solve that, which makes it even worse. Digital records are great, but only if you’re the only person who can see them.

Messed with a Palm Pre the other day at a store. Still doesn’t match up to the iPhone. It has a rather flimsy feel because of the plastic body, but it was better than most other phones. The Pre commercials themselves were pretty strange already but…

Microsoft has been running a “Laptop Hunter” commercial campaign in response to Apple’s “I’m A Mac”. The Laptop Hunter campaign is probably even worse than the commercials with Seinfeld.

The “I’m A Mac” commercials attack PCs as being boring, unhip, generic, unstable, and geeky, while portraying Macs as just cool and reliable. These Laptop Hunters commercials essentially respond with, “But PCs are cheaper and they have bigger screens, which is why you should buy them.”

The comments that the laptop hunters make are also unbelievably inane. You would think that the ad team would play up the geeky tech smarts of the PCs, by having the hunters list technical aspects of the PCs, but instead they decide to play the lower price game, which is a stupid move, especially when most consumers have the bad taste of Vista in mind. Most of the time consumers would rather have a more expensive, but higher quality product, as shown by Apple’s skyrocketing profits.

So what do the inevitable PCs want? “Speed, a big hard drive, and good gaming computer.”

Speed

That’s pretty subjective. But it’s no secret the Windows OS falls terribly short on every aspect of this. The times I have used a Mac, they were incredibly smooth, with very little lag. With Windows, everything is a tic slower, there are temporary freezes, and general instability. And they would hardly get the speed they want, especially with Microsoft Office getting slower and slower with each new version.

A Big Hard Drive

Even the lowliest Dell Inspiron packs 160GB of storage, so I don’t even see how this is a concern.

A Good Gaming Computer

So Windows is better in this respect. Also, who uses Blu-Ray on a laptop? Blu-Ray is for high resolution movies, and you’d hardly see any difference on a laptop screen.

Maybe these were good commercials, but I just saw a terribly planned response that fell flat.

I made the bright decision to download the fancy newfangled Windows Live Movie Maker. It has an extra word; it must be good. So the first time I run this, it asks me to update the program. Why wasn’t this update included in the installer? I had to download the update, install that, and then run Windows Live Movie Maker. Who are the twits that code this garbage? And worst of all… it didn’t even have a storyboard. Sure, it’s beta software, but how are you supposed to make videos without a storyboard. This isn’t beta. Maybe alpha.

Even worse, everything that can be done in Windows Live Movie Maker can be done with Microsoft Office PowerPoint. In fact, it was worse than PowerPoint. It had fewer transitions, timing features, and everything. It’s embarrassing that they even released this. I’m having doubts about Windows 7 now too.

It seems that the Windows Live Movie Maker team’s idea of new is changing the color scheme and adding a dynamic resizing scrollbar at the bottom.

Kind of late.

Windows Live Gallery

Where is this site going? It’s not listed on Windows Live anywhere, and it’s not getting updated, but all the Windows Live Spaces modules are from here.

Web Activities

A really great idea, and yet there’s a pitiful amount of activities of add. FriendFeed is wiping the floor with Windows Live. FriendFeed has over 20 different activities. Windows Live has a whopping 8. Where are the updates?

Kumo / Windows Live / Live Search Fiasco

So apparently they didn’t plan their online approach to well, and now they’re going to rebrand Live Search as Kumo. Just when everybody is really familiarized with Live Search.

Windows Live Spaces

A service with great potential, and as usual, no updates and a major lack of features. It has ugly themes. Since Windows Live obviously doesn’t like spending time developing themes, why not let users do it? It also has a slow module browser and a lack of features. Pretty much every other blogging service has more features.

Slow

I don’t know if this happens to other people, but when I switch between Windows Live services, say, Hotmail and Spaces, I get led to a blank intermediate page, where I frequently have to wait 3 seconds while it redirects.

Unintuitive Settings Pages

Editing settings on Windows Live is frequently like navigating a maze. Everything seems to be on a different page, and pretty soon you’re lost.

Lack of Privacy Settings

Not enough settings. Not organized well.

Lack of Modules

I guess they can’t do much about this one. But I will probably create a module soon – probably just a blog search module, but less ugly than the current one which has a scroll bar and 50+ different radio buttons.

Hotmail Is Still Slow

Or at least it feels slower than Gmail, despite the speed increase.

I’ve been thinking about the internet recently, mostly because people are always asking me since I’m online more than usual. I’m not online endlessly refreshing my Facebook or watching videos on YouTube of people crashing into fences or anything like that. The internet is like the revolution that personal computing was. A few of these ideas are taken from Meatball Sundae, which I happened to be reading at the time.

Information At Your Fingertips

Originally this was applied to computers individually, but really it’s more applicable to networks. There is really no other medium that has such an incredible amount of information with so much variety.

No Physical Limitations

It’s all digital. Stores can be infinite in size and distance does not exist. The ways you can now stay connected with people across the world are just amazing, with videos, audio, text, etc. Whatever you create can be as big and wild as you imagine it.

Ease of Publishing

No other form of media makes it so easy to publish content. You pay to publish everywhere else, but on the internet, it’s all free. Setup an account on Windows Live Spaces, and instantly you have a presence on the internet.

Power Of Voice

There is no other medium where everybody has equal power and has equal opportunity to reach the masses. You don’t need to be on a fancy TV channel or get prime spots on a magazine. If you have something new, people will come, the word will spread. Even better ideas go viral.

Scale

All other media is mostly regional, and you can only capture so many eyeballs. The internet has no boundaries, and its scale is enormous. Just recently total world internet users passed 1 billion, and that’s only 15%.

Money To Be Made

Basically, there’s a massive opportunity here, and everybody has a shot at it. Just like personal computing was back then. Some people took advantage of the opportunity, because it was the perfect time. There’s a reason Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were born in the same year. Now is the perfect time to get involved. Ideally, being born in 1985 would be perfect for somebody to latch on to the internet revolution. While I can’t say what the trend to latch onto would be, but I have a couple ideas. In fact, if you get started now, it’s a tad late. So get to it.

A while back I decided that Google Lively was useless. It seems somebody else thought so as well, because it’s going to be discontinued by the end of the year.