Not too long ago, Facebook announced the Open Graph protocol. For those of you unaware of what this is, here’s a brief description in their own words:

The Open Graph protocol enables any web page to become a rich object in a social graph. For instance, this is used on Facebook to enable any web page to have the same functionality as a Facebook Page.

While many different technologies and schemas exist and could be combined together, there isn’t a single technology which provides enough information to richly represent any web page within the social graph. The Open Graph protocol builds on these existing technologies and gives developers one thing to implement. Developer simplicity is a key goal of the Open Graph protocol which has informed many of the technical design decisions.

Put simply, that little “like” button that you now see all over the Internet lets Facebook know what pages are more popular than others and when you search for something on Facebook, that plays a large role in to the rankings of the search results. While this is a great system for businesses to help drive more traffic to their site or promote their brand, it will, as Facebook’s open graph continues to grow, be a very bad thing for bad news.

Say, for example, that a terrible earthquake occurs and you read a terrific article about the aftermath of the earthquake and the destruction that it caused. Are you inclined to “like” the devastation of an earthquake? Probably not. Therefore, information that could potentially be critical to the recovery of the earthquake, news about where is safe, aftershocks, and who knows what else will likely never get a “like” click and will suffer in Facebook’s search rankings. See where I’m going with this? Although it is a fantastic new way to interconnect the social web, some thought clearly needs to be put in to the logistics of using a term such as “Like”. In Facebook’s credit, you can already change the button to instead say “Recommend”, but perhaps something like that should be the default, not the second option that few sites use.

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All the talk over the last week on the Internets has been focusing on the new iPhone 4 or the fully-enabled iOS 4 on an iPhone 3GS, but not everyone is getting a brand new iPhone 4 or already has a 3GS. This review is for those of you, like myself, who are still saddled with the aging (yet still pretty awesome) iPhone 3G. The following review will let you know what you’ll get in the new OS, what you’ll be missing, and will hopefully help you decide if it is worth upgrading.

The Good
The very first thing I played around with when it was done updating was folders. If, like many users, you have compiled 3+ pages of apps that you use frequently enough that you are unwilling to uninstall them and clean things up, then you are probably sick to death of attempting to organize your apps. Folders are like a dream come true. Although I cannot explain why it took Apple this long to integrate a feature that dates back to the original computer operating system GUIs, this is a feature that is truly welcome. Instead of 4 pages of apps that are loosely organized and a pain to navigate through and reorganize, I have managed to condense everything in to a single page with 4 main folders.

Once I was able to move beyond the excitement of having folders (Sad, right?), I popped open the mail app. The new inbox structure is great and navigating through the app just to get to each account’s inbox has never been easier. I’ve never really been a fan of a unified inbox, but from what I understand it is hugely popular and was a very highly requested feature, so kudos to Apple for adding it in. Also, for you business users out there, you can now access more than a single exchange account, so there’s that.

For those of you that do a lot of mobile web browsing, you’ll also notice that not only is Safari faster to load initially, but there are some nice new changes. For starters, you now have a choice of the default search engine and can switch between Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Along with the option of which search provider you want to use, search recommendations have been added and are powered by whichever search engine you select as your default. Supposedly there’s also better better HTML5 support and HTML compliance is extremely high, as my phone scored a 94/100 on the Acid3 Test (Note: Firefox 3.6.4 on Mac OS X 10.6.4 only scores a 93).

Are there more things that are awesome about upgrading to iOS 4? You bet, but those are the three that really stand out.

The Bad
The bad points about upgrading your iPhone 3G to iOS 4 aren’t so much as what’s wrong with it once you’re done but what you know for a fact you’re missing and won’t ever get until you buy new hardware. Most notably, multitasking, facetime, and desktop wallpapers. I understand that do to hardware liabilities multitasking and desktop wallpapers had to be disable or they would have just about crippled the phone (at least according to Apple) and facetime simply won’t work without the front-facing camera, but it still hurts to know the awesomeness that others are experiencing which your phone shall never enjoy.

The Ugly
Speed. Sure, a few of the built-in Apps such as Safari and Mail are snappier than ever, but I’ve started noticing more and more that it just seems a bit more sluggish than it ever used to. It is by no means unusable, or even anywhere close to it, but Apple has clearly switch gears to optimizing the software for the newest hardware. Even uglier is the crashing. This really can’t be blamed on Apple because it is an issue exclusively with 3rd party apps, so my guess would be this will be less and less of a concern as the app developers update their code for improved compatibility with iOS 4.

Conclusion
Overall, it is a very solid upgrade for the iPhone 3G. The addition of folders and the improvements made in Safari and Mail are enough to make the upgrade more than worthwhile. If, however, you’re concerned about some of the issues I’ve discussed above, then maybe put it off for a month or two until Apple has released the first bug fix (presumably to be called iOS 4.0.1) and more developers have had a chance to ensure that their Apps are up to date and working properly.

The following are his “leaked” (Read: fake) tour demands for his band.

As the latest addition to the still rather vacant One Mayfair Place on the corner of Mayfair and Center in Wauwatosa, the Ginza Sushi Bar is in a great area and has no immediate competitors when it comes to Sushi. When it opened about a week ago, my wife and I decided to oorder a few rolls for takeout. Although I don’t recall exactly which items off the menu we had ordered, all of the rolls were fresh and delicious. Even having only been open for a day, they seem to have already mastered takeout and had our food ready fast and already packed neatly in to a brown bag when I walked in the door. Although the size of the rolls aren’t as large as what I am spoiled with at Wasabi, they are still quite good and cause a little less damage to the wallet.

Earlier today we decided to make our second trip there, but this time for a nice sit-down lunch. Both of us ordered the $13 lunch bento. The price seemed a bit steep, but they really do a fantastic job of filling you up. We were promptly brought out a fresh salad and within a minute or two of clearing our salad plates we were brought the rest of the meal. Honestly, it was more than I expected. Both of us got the teryaki chicken bento, which had a large amount of the chicken, topped with thinly shredded and fried sweet potato, a California roll (which my wife substituted for a sweet potato roll – a very good choice), a steamed veggie whose name I cannot recall, the option of either a spring roll or some little fried stuffed rice ball, and a bowl of white rice. By the time I’d cleared my plate I was thoroughly stuffed and extremely satisfied.

Although I can’t (yet?) speak for the menu in it’s entirety, I am willing to pronounce Ginza a worthwhile destination if you are in the Mayfair area and looking for a good meal. It certainly isn’t the best sushi in the metro-Milwaukee area, but the food is good, the service is fast and friendly, and it is in a very convenient location across from Mayfair Mall. I will definitely be eating there again.

Here’s the address and website:

As you may or may not be aware, I started a new blog not too long ago called The Apple Vine. It was fun while it lasted, but I simply do not have the time to upkeep that website to the level that it deserves, so I will be retiring The Apple Vine and once again posting any Apple content that I feel is worth posting here at Chai Life. Thanks to anyone who read TAV and I hope you remain a reader here at Chai Life. I will be reposting many of the more popular posts from The Apple Vine here so you can continue to access them if you so desire.

About once a day (maybe more, maybe less) I will be reposting some of the more popular items from The Apple Vine from there to here.

Based on market capitalization, Apple has official become the largest tech company in the world, passing Microsoft. Thanks in large part to ridiculously successful sales of the iPhone, iPod, and now the iPad as well as continually growing Mac sales, the company has slowly but steadily chipped a way at a market once entirely dominated by Windows-based products. Market cap, according to Wikipedia, is “a measurement of size of a business enterprise (corporation) equal to the share price times the number of shares outstanding of a public company.” During regular trading hours today, Apple’s shares (AAPL) dropped $1.11 to finish the day at $244.11, which sets its market cap somewhere around $222 billion. By comparison, Microsoft’s stock (MSFT) fell $1.06 to $25.01, for market cap of about $219 billion. Although this is mostly important to stock investors, specifically those who invest in those two companies, it is a huge first for Apple and is a title I’m sure they are hoping to hold on to for quite some time.

Republicans have a long and storied tradition of taking a national tragedy, such as the events of September 11th, 2001, and manipulating it in their favor. Their strategies often line the pockets of executives, wall street, government contractors and military contractors with excessive amounts of cash. Now is the time for the Democrats to employ a similar strategy and take advantage of the horrible eco-disaster taking place in the golf coast. Unlike the Republican party, however, their motives can be entirely pure. Help wean this country off of its oil dependence and on to cleaner, safer, and renewable energy sources.

The oil spill that began two weeks ago and continues to pump massive amounts of oil in to the gulf of Mexico today is a huge disaster of epic proportions. There isn’t a sane person in this country that doesn’t think so and if there is one positive thing that can come from this, it is to utilize the hugely negative view of oil, specifically offshore drilling, to help pass a sweeping energy bill that will pump money in to wind farms, solar technologies, and research of future clean and renewable energy sources. Many people might not realize this, but the United States is one of the more ideal spots in the world to utilize solar energy. If the government would help subsidize installation of existing technology, while promoting the research neccesary to produce less expensive solar technologies, the US could easily find itself requiring less and less of the dirty fossil fuels.

So why aren’t we doing this? There is an underwater volcano of oil spewing in to the Gulf of Mexico as I type this and I sincerely hope that the Democrats in the Senate and House realize that this horrible man-made disaster is their golden opportunity and take full advantage of the growing hatred of oil in this country and pass sweeping energy reform.

Twitter for iPhone
Category: Social Networking
Last Updated: May 18th, 2010
Current Version: 3.0 (Previously Tweetie 2)
Size: 2.4 MB
Price: Free

Once upon a time there was a @Twitter client for the iPhone named Tweetie. Although it was not a free client like some of it’s stiffer competition (Read: @Twitterrific), Tweetie was generally considered the best Twitter app available for the iPhone. Then, on April 9th, 2010, Twitter itself announced that had purchased the parent company of Tweetie and would be updating the iPhone client, re-releasing it as “Twitter for iPhone”, and dropping the price all the way down to the low low price of free.

This brings us to today, where the first and only official Twitter client has been unleashed on the world. I never used Tweetie, so I can’t really say if the differences between Tweetie 2 and Twitter for iPhone are big changes or even if there are any changes other than the name and icon, but I have been using Twitterrific, so that is my baseline of comparison. With that in mind, the new Twitter client is awesome.

Virtually anything that you can do on the web via Twitter’s website is integrated in to the client. The client goes even beyond that, though. The interface is extremely clean and easy to navigate and understand. The pull-down to refresh method integrated in the client is my personal favorite way of doing it. You can easily view top tweets, popular tweeters, view maps of localized tweets, and just about anything else you might want. You can even edit virtually every part of your profile with the exception of the web design options. If that’s not enough for you, then try swiping across a tweet. It gives you instant easy access to retweet, set it as a favorite, reply, view the tweeter’s profile, and more.

Sounds awesome, right? Well, it is, but it isn’t quite perfect. Ok, so functionally it is pretty close, but visually it is frankly a bit bland. This is where Twitter could really take a page out of the Twitterrific playbook. Twitterrific has an absolutely fantastic look two it and even offers three different style options, whereas the official Twitter app is visually the closest to Twitterrific’s most basic and likely least used style. I’m not asking for them to have a graphic designer spend the next month working full time on revamp of the App’s visual style, but spicing it up a bit wouldn’t hurt.

Despite a few flaws, if you have an iPhone and use Twitter, this is a must have. There really isn’t another free client available that offers everything that Twitter for iPhone does and you wouldn’t want to pay for something you can get for free.

As of first thing this morning, Apple has rather quietly announced an update to it’s entry-level White MacBook. Keeping its price of $999, the laptop now offers a faster 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo processor as well as the NVIDIA 320M graphics chip used in the latest revision of the 13″ MacBook Pro. It also now boasts the same higher capacity 63.5Whr battery first introduced in the 13″ MacBook Pro. According to the Apple Store online, it is available immediately and ships within 24 hours.