In the past, I have scoffed Facebook and been proven correct. And I have railed against iPhone hype…and been wrong.

I finally broke down and joined the rest of the lemmings and picked up an iPhone 3G S, on launch day no less. I was sort of intrigued by the whole thing and took a closer look when I knew a new phone itself was coming out, as well the updated 3.0 software. I also qualified for the subsidized $199 price for a 16 GB model.

After almost two months, I have to admit the iPhone is one of the coolest things ever. It really is a revolutionary device, and I rarely ever actually use it as a—you know—phone. Here is a quick, stream-of-consciousness review:

The Awesome

• Mobile Safari - I was not expecting a web browser this capable. I have surfed the web for hours on the couch with this thing. The ability to manipulate the page with gestures is genius.

• Visual Voicemail - David Pogue and I are on the same sheet here. Not having to listen to that stupid voicemail menu makes my day.

• Google Maps + Compass. - I use this all the time.

• Mail - syncs perfectly with my Gmail account and Mail.app on my PowerMac, thanks to this article. I have also been playing with the iPhone-enabled GMail page from Mobile Safari as a page on the homescreen—well done and in some cases better than Mail (the same Google web item also has links to iPhone-optimized Google Calendar and Reader pages…very well done).

• WiFi - excellent, as well as the ability to remember networks and auto-connect to them.

The Good

• The onscreen keyboard is easier to use than I thought, but still takes some getting used to. One thing I miss from my Blackberry is the ability to hold down a letter to get it as a capital.

• Photos - I don’t take a lot of pictures with it, but I’ve synched a fair amount from my desktop.

• The App Store - This is like crack cocaine (I’m guessing). I’ve bought lots of useless stuff. And I can’t stop.

The Whatever

• Voice Control - doesn’t work so hot when I need it to - like driving.

• Voice Memos - relegated to my last homepage screen along with YouTube and iTunes.

• Messages - There are legions of ten-year-olds that send more text messages during the walk to social studies then I have in my entire life.

So I stand corrected. The iPhone rules. Standby for a future post about iPhone Apps I use (or don’t).

I just upgraded the site to Movable Type 4.3. I was fully expecting things to blow up. At first glance, they haven’t. We’ll know more when I hit Save…

Update: Not a smoking hole yet…The one thing I was worried about is if my old MultiBlog plug-in still worked, so that Elsewhere entries are pulled to the main page. No problems there. This capability is inherent in MT now, but I didn’t have to make any changes.

The other area where I had done some tweaking is in the comment section. I used another plug-in, MTIfEqual, do some trickery and color my own comments differently from everyone else’s. That plug-in is no longer supported (or I deleted it when I converted), but again, the functionality is now inherent in MT 4. While testing it, I noticed that any comment I posted was “sent to moderation”, a feature I had previously turned off. When I went to look for the comments, I couldn’t find them in the pending section. I dug around and finally found them in the spam section. Even the comments where I identified myself as me got tagged as spam…along with the other 12,000 comments identified as such. Holy smokes, I had no idea that much comment spam was still coming in here. Further investigation showed that the SpamLookup plug-in had my IP address on the blacklist. Additional test comments resulted in this very domain being on the blacklist. I disabled part of the plug-in for now and investigate the anti-spam capabilities a bit later.

If you write a blog post for a blog no one reads, does it make a sound? So it has been a few weeks since my last post here…been busy…had another baby…whatever. One small contributor was Facebook, a internet phenomenon I had previously scoffed.

After almost a year of using it, I think I was right the first time. Facebook is at best boring and most of the time, irritating as hell. Maybe I shouldn’t say Facebook. Facebook as a web application is pretty well done in terms of ease of use and presentation. My ‘friends’ however, are the irritating ones. This article in Macworld nails it:

There’s a growing sense among Facebook users that the amount of time a person spends on Facebook may be inversey proportionate to how much is going on in the person’s (offline) life. Perhaps unfairly, you may get the impression that only bored and boring people have time to tell their friends that they love the new pita bread at Trader Joe’s.

I have a new rule: one more FB post that consists of nothing more than “I’m eating” or “I love my kids” - you’re done.

Meanwhile, as your rediscovered friends update you about their everyday goings-on, they offer you a multiple opportunities to recall the reasons you lost contact with them in the first place. Examples: “Don” was always a nonsensical rambler back in college—and lo and behold, his rants take up half of your news feed now…Facebook has recently started allowing users to “hide” their friends, and you may be inclined to “hide” almost all of them.

And thank God for that little Hide widget. If I have 144 friends on Facebook, but end up hiding almost all of them as punishment for publishing worthless crap, what’s the point?

First you filled out a long list of interests, hobbies, favorite movies, books, and music; posted album after album of the hottest pictures of yourself; and wrote endless updates about what you were up to. Then, a few months ago, the 25 Things note burst onto the Facebook scene, inviting you to achieve new levels of narcissism by laboring over a creative autobiographical fact sheet and posting it to your profile. Responding to that challenge, you were more candid, literary, and elaborate than ever, but now there’s nowhere to go but down. Illustrating this depressing fact is the recent, hideous Facebook trend of using quiz results as status updates. “Which kind of partier are you?” Result: “The hot girl throwing up in the bathroom!” … “Which kind of animal noise are you?” Result: “Ribbit, Ribbit!” Facebookers are clearly wiped out of material. There is nothing more to say.

For the love of all things holy, enough with the retarded quizzes. I. Do. Not. Care. Current scientific technology does not provide a mechanism that can accurately measure how much I don’t care. You’re a redwood tree and my last shred of diginity goes on a siesta and I find that I’m supposedly a potted plant. Awesome. Can I have the last five minutes of my life back? I’d rather spend it anxiously awaiting status updates about the weather in your city.

I’m about thisclose to taking a blowtorch to my friend list and defriending (is that even a word) just about everyone. And I’m done being polite with the Confirm and Ignore buttons. Yes, I know you went to school with my brother and we talked once at a football game, but sorry dude. I’ll manage to get by without having to read about your cute kitty. I don’t even like my own cat.

One issue the Macworld article brings up is the defection of FB users to Twitter. Don’t even get me started. If I ever end up on Twitter, you can take a blowtorch to me.