Blues night in downtown Durham, originally uploaded by lonb.

Over the years my main project became my full-time job. MailTank, which is nearing release 4.0 this summer.

After the launch I have decided to spend some time working one a new web service.

I have learned a lot building MailTank, the business, the technology and honing my entrepreneurial skills.

In late July I will announce the home for the new business, after which Speedymac will be no more.

It has been a good ride running Speedymac LLC. I founded the business upon moving to North Carolina in 2001.

Thanks to everyone that has written comments, linked to me and more important written me e-mail over the years (i answer every email).

In the mean time you can follow me on Twitter, FriendFeed and Flickr at @lonbaker.

I have been experimenting with Tumblr and Disqus, over at Silicon State.

Combining different services to power a blog has been on my mind lately.

This blog runs on Mephisto, a Rails application, and it actually manages a number of web sites in one install.

I love Mephisto!

But. (<- inevitable for a developer)

There are things I want to try without writing code.

For example, automatically pull Flickr, Del.icio.us and Twitter items in as blog posts, not sidebar items.

This experimentation lead me to Tumblr, which is mainly used for tumblelogs.

It lacks searching and comments, but has most everything else I want.

Search can be hacked in using Google’s customer search boxes.

Comments can be integrated through Disqus, using a simple javascript.

This has me thinking.

Is Disqus doomed to be a “feature” or will it thrive as a full blown service?

Should commenting be portable and searchable independent of a blog?

Would that encourage richer conversations?

Just thinking. Always thinking.

Having used Skype for a few years, I love it.

However, I recently tried the Skype for Mobile beta on a Nokia phone and was stunned to find a product so unlike the desktop version.

Initiating a call, something that can only be done over WiFi, Skype forces the phone to conduct the call over the regular cellular network after which it complete the route over the internet.

Epic failure!

Who want to use a VoIP client on a WiFi enabled phone only to be forced to make a cellular call and get double billed?

Hopefully they come to their senses and achieve the comparatively minor technical achievement that Gizmo and TruPhone have as a standard feature.

When will the clouds begin to partner in ways that accelerate adoption?

For example, if you use Amazon S3 for storage, unless you are running on EC2, the roundtrip to and from that cloud can be slow and costly.

If another cloud service were to create a direct connection into that cloud, it would be a huge value add when evaluating doing business with these “partner” services.

Why do I ask?

I have used Amazon EC2 and S3, am running hosting accounts, virtual servers and a complete rack of owned servers.

I get the bills, see the latency and believe there is a huge opportunity for middle tier vendors to differentiate their offerings.

Few other companies are going to build an S3 competitor. The rest of the infrastructure pie will be grabbed by making smart partnerships to connect efficiently and cost effectively to these cloud services.

This guys may be building the new social architecture I envision to compete with the walled services trend in social sites.

Chi.mp is building a flexible, permanent home for your online identity on your own domain. You own and are in control of the facets of your digital life, not any one service provider.

One place for your profile, your contacts & content, where you have control over who gets to see what.

Chi.mp is as open as you are.

They seem to be advancing the discussion in a constructive way at Ownyouridentity.com.

Comments on blogs are a foundational element for building a community.

With twitter-spawn friendfeed, adding comments to tweets, the question is, could friendfeed and something like Disqus merge to offer cross community comment streams?

Right now, some think comments on Disqus or friendfeed are heading for a black hole.

But, imagine if a blog post linked to in a tweet displayed the comment thread from disqus in the friendfeed stream, and if comments on friendfeed would show up in the Disqus thread on the blog post.

That would spawn some very very interesting communities and discussions.

A good sign in any emerging market, squatters.

It happened during the original gold rush for domain names and now Twitter is generating the same behavior.

While looking for streams of interest to follow, I ran across .

pcmag for sale. email me at twitterforsale@gmail.com

Will Twitter take a side on this behavior? Or allow the community or market for such practices handle it naturally?

It will be interesting to see how it unfolds.

The discussion about Google vs. Facebook and making user data portable validates my opinion.

Since the day MySpace was the place to be, it was obvious to me that MySpace and subsequent services were repeating the original AOL business model.

A carefully camouflaged wall has been under construction since the moment VCs smelled the payday in the social web.

Until Goggle made their play this week, it was a well kept secret. But Google’s move forced Facebook to publicly reveal the wall and their intentions.

Suddenly, people are noticing this issue.

The side affect of data portability is an all but guaranteed lower valuation for these service. If users come and go as they like, vendors have far less ability to protect shareholder value.

There is a new service architecture I can envision to solve the portability issue, one that turns the tables on the vendors of these walled services and give users full control, both in portability and privacy.

But that is for another post.

Dan Farber makes the following point.

These recurring problems once again demonstrate that the much loved Web 2.0, consisting of many start-ups lacking adequate infrastructure and stable code, is unreliable.

(Via News flash: Web 2.0 is unreliable | Outside the Lines - CNET News.com.)

I almost let this go, but on further thought, I have to call bullshit.

Yes. Many internet services do not deliver 100% availability.

Scratch that - MOST internet services do NOT deliver 100% availability.

Here is a news flash:

That makes them like is every other business on the planet!

Twitters down! So is power in New York.

Seesmic locked up! Hmm. So has my mobile phone, computer, car and washing machine.

Every single system in our society, from the plumbing to the computers on the space shuttle, will and do fail - some of the time. It is a certainty.

Just like you or I getting up tomorrow and not going to work.

Get over it, move on or do something more than whining.

Dan Farber makes the following point.

These recurring problems once again demonstrate that the much loved Web 2.0, consisting of many start-ups lacking adequate infrastructure and stable code, is unreliable.

(Via News flash: Web 2.0 is unreliable | Outside the Lines - CNET News.com.)

I almost let this go, but on further thought, I have to call bullshit.

Yes. Many internet services do not deliver 100% availability.

Scratch that - MOST internet services do NOT deliver 100% availability.

Here is a news flash:

That makes them like is every other business on the planet!

Twitters down! So is power in New York.

Seesmic locked up! Hmm. So has my mobile phone, computer, car and washing machine.

Every single system in our society, from the plumbing to the computers on the space shuttle, will and do fail - some of the time. It is a certainty.

Just like you or I getting up tomorrow and not going to work.

Get over it, move on or do something more than whining.