Five days ago, I had roughly 150 followers while I was following about 250. Not a bad niche but I figured I could do better. I just needed to be a little more proactive. I realized that usually when I follow someone, they return the favor and follow me back. So I decided to up the ante and I increased the number of people who I follow from 250 to 1610 as I write this post. After the dust has settled, I am currently up to 780 followers. So basically about half of the people that I followed returned the favor. Not too bad.

I’ve realized that in this ever changing Web 2.0 world, you have to stay on top of the trends because in the blink of an eye, they change and you’re left in the dust of yesterday’s must join site.

So I’ll continue with my experiment and keep you up to date on what is going on with it. And hey, I always appreciate new followers so check me out:

http://twitter.com/digijustin

So right around 9:00 this morning, I get the news that the phone is $179 for existing customers. Not a bad price but I just did spend a few dollars on a new Blackberry Curve just 6 months ago. After the site being down all morning, I finally got in and checked out to see this $179 price for myself. Only it wasn’t $179. For me, I was lucky enough to get a price of $299. Not exactly what I had in mind. T-Mobile has a upgrade policy where you get the best rate after you are 22 months or more into your current contract. With me being only 6 months in, I am not a good enough customer. T-Mobile would rather me wait 22 months rather than get a 2 new phones in that span. Seems weird to me but what do I know?

But regardless of my troubles, I am still excited about this phone. It has a very open platform that will allow for users to improve things as they see fit. iPhone frowns upon that with the exception of the App Store. Also, rather than see this as a phone, they see it at an internet experience. Andy Rubin of T-Mobile said today that “This will transform how and where people can use the internet. Thanks and I hope you enjoy it!” I think this is cool because with the iPhone, there is a movement to move the internet outside of just the desktops and laptops to allow internet access anywhere you are.

Also, the G1 will have copy and paste, something will more than likely make iPhone users very jealous. Also, in place of iTunes, the G1 will use Amazon’s music service which offers 89 cent songs so that is nice too. One of the coolest features is the tie in with the Google Maps especially with the street view. You can stand on a street that is in Street View and as you look around, the screen will show where you are facing using it’s internal compass and GPS. Pretty cool indeed. And of course it has all the bells and whistles that we expect from Google with Gmail, Gtalk, Gmaps and the rest of their suite of cool. Oh and it’s going to work on T-Mobile’s new 3G netwok. Wish my new Curve did that.

Overall as I’ve already said, I am excited about this phone and how it takes the mobile phone another step forward. Google and T-Mobile have teamed up to deliver what I think is a step in a great direction. I really like the sound of this quote from the announcement today, “It’s completely open… no one says ‘you can’t do that’.” That’s a big step from the rules of Apple’s SDK.

So basically we’ll see if this is the phone that is the Apple killer. I don’t think it will be but it will be a solid #2 for a while. After that, who know? I’d like to know what you think about it so leave you comments below.

Because I like to think that I have a pretty good knowledge of what is going on in the Web 2.0 world, I have accounts on a few of these micro-blogging sites. Following the release of Twitter at the 2007 SXSW, I signed up for it. I used it for a while but I didn’t get much out of it. But I’ve written about that before. I’m using it again on a pretty regular basis. I like to post things that I’ve done, heard or have opinions on.

Twitter is the biggest micro-blogging app out there with 2,955,142 users based on numbers from http://twitter.com/digijustin
Pownce - http://pownce.com/digijustin/
Plurk - http://www.plurk.com/user/digijustin

I’m also looking to meet new people and see what others are saying.

So me being me, I had to have both right then and there. So I open up iTunes and click the Check for Upgrade link and begin the upgrade process. It runs through its usual process and then it got to some section with Quicktime and it stalled. I gave it about 20 more minutes before I shut it down. The Cancel button didn’t work so I had to shut it down via the Task Manager.

Since it had hung so long, I decided to check to see what version of iTunes I actually had at that point. I opened it up and checked: 7.7. But right after doing that, iTunes asked if I wanted to update my iPod’s firmware. Since that was part of my master plan, I said yes. It got mostly through then I got an error message saying that the upgrade could not be completed. I clicked okay and then was told that my iPod Touch was in Restore Mode and was asked if I wanted to restore it. I declined and unplugged my iPod Touch from the computer. I couldn’t go anything with it. It was stuck in restore mode.

I began thinking that I did update it with iTunes 7 instead of 8. So I decided to retry my update to iTunes 8 and this time I was successful. I tried to restore my iPod once again and was told that an unknown error occured. Not good. I now had a $400 paper weight. I tried the restore a couple of more times and was shut down each time. I read some of the support docs that Apple had and tried some things. The last thing I read was to try to restore using a different computer. So I did. And it worked.

Then I went to my regular computer and restored from the backup that was done prior to the bricking my iPod Touch. That took FOREVER but worked. Then I tried the update once again and once again, I bricked it. Thanks Apple.

Today I finally got it all working and upgraded to 2.1 but had to use 2 computers to do it and that just isn’t feasible. I don’t know if I created a weird situation with my upgrade freeze but if you run into this situation, just know that you need to restore to factory settings on a different computer, restore from backup on your computer, and then use that different computer to do the update.

Too much work for an upgrade. So if Apple sees this at all, I might have found a bug in the system that you missed.

It only works on Windows machines right now but versions for Macs and Linux are coming soon according to Google so all can be happy. So if you haven’t yet, check it out at Google Chrome. You’ll be glad you did.

We did some work for 3 of Red Bull’s blogs (redbullsurfing.com, redbullskateboarding.com and redbullsnowboarding.com) where we allowed commenters the ability to login via their Facebook accounts and have their comments written to their MiniFeeds and NewsFeeds. Along with that, we added a flash piece to the redbullusa.com site that slowed all the entries from the 3 blogs in a cloud format and clicking on an article would show you what your Facebook friends had to say about that article. You could also directly see all of the articles that your friends had to say about any of the blog entires. It turned out awesome and very visually appealing.

None of these items are live yet but keep checking as Facebook Connect will be released to the masses soon. Other than the cool Connect stuff we’ve been able to play with, we have a few Facebook apps in the hopper. I can’t talk about them yet but they’ll be out soon and I’ll fill you in when they are released. Some cool stuff going on for sure.

Today I finally bit the bullet and am going through the upgrade to 2.0 with a stop at 1.1.4 as I’m reading is necessary. I did a backup of my iPod earlier today through iTunes. Not too sure as to what that actually backs up.

I have no problem going “legit” with my iPod Touch. All along I wanted the installer and the apps that come with it as well as the ability to have email on it. I had those via jailbreaking it but now with 2.0, I really don’t feel that I need to jailbreak it anymore. I’ll still investigate what a jailbroken 2.0 iPod can do and maybe I’ll do that too.

Here’s the timeline:

9:30pm - I begin the upgrade to 1.1.4. I have already downloaded the file so it’s pretty fast.
9:36pm - It’s done and I’m happy that I still have my music on there. My home screen is weird because there is only 8 icons on there.
9:38pm - About to start the 2.0 upgrade. Again, I have already downloaded the file and all I have to do is run it.
9:44pm - Uh oh, An unknown error occured (6). Wonder what that means. It’s having me do a restore. I think I read about this a couple of days ago.
9:47pm - Wish I could have stopped it from trying to download the 1.1.4 update. Oh well. I guess I have an extra 5 minutes.
9:51pm - Apparently I should have restored it to 1.1.4 first before going to 2.0 I’ve read. Oh well, maybe others who read this won’t follow my errors.
9:52pm - Restore is going down.
9:58pm - Just was asked about the 2.0 Software Update in big iTunes window. Didn’t see that the last time. Also restoring the backup I did earlier today.
10:00pm - Restore complete now loading back up. Get asked about 2.0 again. Music’s gone.
10:04pm - Going to try the 2.0 update again. While this is going on, anyone subscribed to MobileMe on an iPod yet?
10:11pm - GRR Unknown Error #6 again. I’m stuck in a perpetual screw up/restore loop. At least it knows not to download the 1.1.4 file again.
10:20pm - It just finished its restore and this time my home screen looks a lot cleaner. I still think that I won’t restore from the backup I did this morning.
10:22pm - Didn’t restore from old backup this time. Started fresh. Syncing photos from my computer.
10:26pm - Third time’s the charm right?
10:35pm - I think it did work this time. It’s restarting my iPod. I’m being asked to set it up again or restore it.
10:37pm - It’s even syncing the Twitterific app I downloaded on Thursday for fun. Cool.
10:45pm - Got work email setup with Exchange. Pretty easy. Time to play with App Store.

Overall, this wasn’t a hugely painful process. Sure I had to redo a couple of things a couple of times but I’m happy that I’m legit now with it. I don’t know if I will go back to the pre 2.0 days but if I do, I’ll use this link here from iPod Touch Hacks. They seem to know what they are talking about.

If you have any experiences with upgrading to 2.0 on your iPod Touch, I would love to hear them or share more about what I did.

There is no mention of the “official” launch date as of yet but they say in their post that “early next week, we’ll post more answers to FAQs and share the new policies around the new profile design.” That seems kind of bad since they are opening up the new platform to everyone to check out next week as well. I foresee a lot of people complaining that the apps they have installed don’t work. Of course they don’t, programmers are still working with the buggy API and trying to find their way around in a new, dark room.

I am one who is 100% in favor of the new look and feel that Facebook is releasing but personally I feel that they need to get the API working closer to 100% rather than 50% and have more documentation before they announce to the masses to “come check this out.” Luckily they aren’t requiring all apps to use the new API as of yet but hopefully it won’t come too soon.

Anyhow, I’ve been working for the past week or so on getting to know the new API and platform changes that Facebook should be releasing in the next month or so. While it seems that a lot of things will just work as is, there are a couple of main points that will need to be changed for any Facebook app written on the current platform.

The main change I feel is the way that the application publishes feeds. Previously, you would call the Feed.publishTemplatizedAction function. It is pretty basic and relatively easy to understand. With the new platform, this old call is being removed and to be replaced with a couple of API calls. With the old platform, you needed to register your templates, get a Template ID back from Facebook, and then use that to call your feeds whenever.

I had a lot of issues at first getting the syntax correct on how the data was passed to the feeds since there isn’t a lot of documentation on how they are supposed to look. Especially since Facebook changed the call Feed.registerTemplateBundle. But once I got the new changes implemented and the hang of it, publishing feeds stories finally worked as they once did.

The big change to the feed stories is that you are able to have 3 feed sizes. The default is the one-liner. Just like it sounds, one line of copy. Next are the short story and the full story. They are very similar with the exception that you actually register an array of short stories with each one having one less dynamic piece than the one before it. With full stories, you only register one but you can make it large. I’m not sure of the size difference between the short and full stories as I don’t think that has been decided as of yet. If so, let me know.

Those are really the only things that I have done with the new API as of yet. Seems really cool but also a lot of work to keep your old apps working seamlessly. First of all, each application that you have, you will have to run the Feed.registerTemplateBundle API function to get a template ID for your app to use exclusively. Secondly, you will have edit your API calls to now call the Feed.publishUserAction instead of the Feed.publishTemplatizedAction call being made previously. It’s not a “huge” change but still there are a few differences.

My idea for updating the apps that I have worked on was to just change the API code that we use on every project but I have seen that won’t work exactly as I had planned. Currently, I pass the entire feed story as a string into the API call but with the new way, I’m going to have to pass a JSON array because the story itself has already been registered along with the template ID. It’s not a big deal but it would be nice if Facebook made their API a little bit more backwards compatible. But I can see why they are doing it this way. Everything is changing and it would be hard to keep the old stuff working. I would like the ability to register templates like they do it currently through a form on the Facebook site. That way I wouldn’t have to create a page on each app just to get a number back and then remove that page. Seems like kind of a waste to me but it’s still early, maybe they’ll do that.

If you have worked with the new Facebook API, I would love to hear about your experiences and what you think about some of the pending changes. I’m excited to see what changes end up happening and where the platform goes.