cingular vs AT&T

Imagine that Toyota bought out Ford, and then started selling Camrys under the Ford name.

Craziness? Well, something similar happened in another industry: Cingular will be renamed to AT&T Wireless. This is after they spent a ton of advertising dollars trying to unify the brands after Cingular bought out AT&T wireless last year (if you recall, cingular changed their lettering to blue and adopted AT&T's signal strength bars gimmick). Obviously, this will be extremely confusing to their customers.

What's the big deal with the AT&T name anyway? Yes, AT&T is one of the most influential companies in history, in terms technological impact. But: Were they a great company? No way. They did extremely well and became a monopoly, but once they were split up and regulatory climate changed they could barely put up a fight.

So when I see the AT&T logo now, that's what I think of: a once-great company that couldn't compete and eventually failed. I'm sure its because I wasn't alive during its peak, but the mystique surrounding the AT&T name doesn't affect me at all. I'm sure most 20-somethings feel the same way. Hopefully the SBC execs know what they're doing.

Update: New reports say that the cingular name isn't going anywhere. I kinda suspected that this was a hot issue between SBC and cingular executives.. only time will tell what will really happen.

Paul Graham on Openomy

I've already blogged about how awesome I think Paul Graham is. He wrote a good article on Web 2.0. From the article:

What a bang that balloon is going to make when someone pops it by offering a free web-based alternative to MS Office. [5] Who will?
.....
Hint: the way to create a web-based alternative to Office may not be to write every component yourself, but to establish a protocol for web-based apps to share a virtual home directory spread across multiple servers.

Hrmm.. this idea sounds kinda familiar.

Paul-- we're working on it

openomy-ruby v0.2.1 available

Release early. Release often.

I've released a new version of the Ruby bindings for Openomy, v0.2. Lots of really useful updates for this version: XML parsing (thanks to Bin Yang, who contributed an early version of this), new helper methods, and bindings to all of the current Openomy API calls. Click here for the documentation (and more complete changelog), and here for the library download.

By far my favorite part about all of this stuff is our users: we've gotten so many emails with great feedback, good wishes, bug reports, and suggestions. Thanks! Keep 'em coming!

UPDATE: I guess I released a little too early-- I missed a pretty significant bug. A new release, v0.2.1, is up at the same location.

The fix is related to the GetDownloadUrl call-- it has now been moved to the Files object, so it can use the user's confirmedtoken in the request. The call in v0.2 didnt properly generate the Url. Oops. Lesson learned.

Introducing Openomy/RSS

RSS has been called the "pipe" of Web 2.0 -- a way to allow different applications to share data with each other easily.

Openomy officially launched this morning. I've been using it for the past few months and its been a really simple and convenient way to get at my files from anywhere. If you've been using it, you may have noticed that despite its very Web 2.0 flavor, this crucial piece of the puzzle has been missing.

No longer: Here's Openomy/RSS. It's a web site that lets you publish your Openomy tags over RSS feeds-- subscribers to the feed get notified when files under the feed's tags get updated.

The coolest part of Openomy/RSS happens under the hood: Instead of being a core Openomy service, Openomy/RSS depends solely on the Openomy REST API. Also, we've decided to make the website open source-- It's built with Ruby on Rails and the Openomy Ruby language bindings. Since its a Rails web application, it should be easy to modify and extend to be the basis for any Openomy web application. We're really excited to see what you folks can come up with!

You can download the full source code to Openomy/RSS here. If you have any comments/suggestions/patches, email me: maurice.codik@gmail.com