Gearing up for WWDC Today

Today is the first day of the WWDC in San Francisco and the web world is all abuzz about what might come out.  I’m really looking forward to hearing what they have to announce as I have recently joined the ranks as a Mac user.  I still have my Blackberry Curve and I love it but the iPhones are just so damn sexy that I want one of them too.

Hopefully today they announce a way for me to get one.  I doubt it but I can dream right?  I just read a rumor that the new iPhones might just be available today after the keynote so that would be pretty cool.  With all the buzz surronding this, I can’t tell what might happen.  I guess I’ll just have to wait and see what the next 2+ hours brings.

Let me know what you think and I’m surely going to post my thoughts post-keynote as well.

Is Twitter the Digg Killer?

For the longest time, all I heard about was whether or not some up-and-coming site would be the “Digg-Killer”. And site after site failed at that. But in my mind, we’ve had it around for a while now. Twitter. At around the time I really got into Twitter, I began to cut my time with Digg. I don’t really know why. I was an avid Digg user. I used it constantly.

But as Digg began to have articles that I didn’t care about take over the front page, I grew less and less interested.  But I also noticed that articles that I did care about started to show up in my Twitter stream.  As I found a good group of people to follow that were interesting to me and from them, I got the news and articles that were important to me.  I didn’t need Digg and all of its LOLCATS pictures that I see as a waste.

I also started to find that most of the Digg stories that I clicked on came from the same group of sites.  So I just took out the middleman.  I still think that Digg is a great idea but now, I know that an article is really good if it’s re-tweeted to me by multiple Twitter friends.  I’ve removed the politics behind the front page of Digg by following people who I trust will submit interesting stories to me.

What do you think?  Am I completely off here?  I’d love to hear what you have to say.

Getting Everything Together

Over the past view months, I have not kept a normal schedule with blogging and other things that I deem important in my online life.  I want to change that as well as some other things for the new year.  I have heard people talking about personal re-branding and that has interested me a lot.  My online persona isn’t as organized as I would like.  I have this blog as well as my site at kodedkreations.net.  I have always treated the Kodedkreations site as my techy blog.  I have had it like that for almost 2 years now and I’ve done quite a bit with it.  While it’s not been as successful as I would have liked but I’ve had a few readers stop by every now and again.  Now I feel it’s time to clean some stuff up and make some changes.

In addition to my Kodedkreations blog, I, of course, have this one.  It’s a bit newer as I realized that I was using the same name on every site that I would sign up for, Digijustin.  Seemed obvious that I locked up that domain name so I did.  I have posted some of my personal thoughts but it’s not really that interesting so I thought what better time to reorganize than the new year.

So what I’ve decided to do is get rid of the Kodedkreations site for now and migrate it to this site. So as you can see, all of my old posts are here now and all links from Kodedkreations go here now. I don’t know what I’ll do with the Kodedkreations site for now but I still own it for a while so we’ll see.  I look forward to a fun 2009 and hopefully more blogging.

iPhone 2.0 Announcement

Steve Jobs has just finished his keynote at WWDC and here are my thoughts along with some highlights:

• The new firmware won’t be available until early July so this is a bit disappointing as most thought it would be released in the next couple of days. Kind of a let down but I think it would be hard for them to release it today or even tomorrow.
• One awesome feature is the syncing with Exchange. Data will be synced both ways and stay up to date on your iPhone as well as the exchange server. Really cool feature it sounds like. This is also going to use the recently purchased me.com website to sync everything together. And that looks like it is replacing the .mac service; for the low price of $99 a year.
• Now to the big news. The new iPhone will use the 3G technology thus drastically improve the speed of the network. Also, GPS support is integrated. That is really cool. With the 3G and the GPS, I am really enjoying what’s being said right now.
• And now the price has been announced. $199 for an 8gb model and $299 for the 16gb one (which you can also get in white). Will be available on July 11th in 22 countries.
• That seems to be it as Steve Jobs has just left the stage

Overall I am really excited about this announcement today. He never mentioned any catch for the low prices for the iPhones but I am guessing that there is. Hopefully I am wrong.

UPDATE:

Apple’s iPhone page does state the following:

Requires new 2-year AT&T rate plan, sold separately.

That sucks. I guess the price is $200 higher as per the rumors if you get it without. We’ll see.

iPhone 2.0 to be Announced Today

Today is the alledged announcement from Steve Jobs at the WWDC that the new iPhone 2.0 is being released. There has been a ton of rumors and speculation about this and I am very interested in hearing what actually comes out of it. It starts at 10:00 MST so that is in less than 20 minutes for me. Once the announcement is made, check back to see my thoughts on everything announced.