NYTimes on iPhone 

With the new version of the iPhone software, v1.1.3, you can put web pages on the home page of the phone.

This is good news for NYTimes news junkies, because you can now put a river of NY Times headlines one click away at all times. It's that easy to find out what's going on in the world, just as easily as you check your email.

1. Click on the Safari icon

2. Visit http://nytimesriver.com/

3. Click on the plus sign at the bottom of the screen.

That's it! Now the NYT headlines are always right there. It's really killer, imho.

PS: Phil Torrone is a NYTRiver/iPhone user.

Thanks to Yahoo! 

Thanks to everyone at Yahoo who helped make the first public demo of FlickrFan a success on Thursday night. The meetup was well-attended. There was only one glitch in the demo, otherwise every feature showed off well. There was a lively discussion. Got some great feature suggestions, met some cool new people and reconnected with some old friends.

Yahoo had a video camera there, not sure when they'll publish it, but there will be a link here as soon as it is online.

Thanks to Chad Dickerson, Salim Ismail, Bradley Horowitz and all the Brickhouse people for helping make this happen.

No one asked this question 

Amazingly no one asked this question at the meetup, but it just came up in an email from a journalist who works at a gadget site you've heard of and probably read.

The question goes like this.

Now that Apple is reading Flickr feeds in AppleTV, maybe there's no point continuing to develop FlickrFan.

I always wonder what's behind this question. Does the person think that people who use FlickrFan will stop using it because AppleTV can read the RSS feeds that Flickr produces? How would that work? I don't understand.

I bought an AppleTV, I tried fitting it into my lifestyle, but it didn't. Apple's vision of how the Internet connects to the living room is a very controlling one. They attain a certain ease of use, true -- but the trade-off is too great. I like all the special effects, but I like to be in control of my own experience. I want to be the programmer. And I despise DRM as much as my customers hated copy protected software in the 80s. It does nothing positive for me, as a user, and I don't think it works for the vendors, but then that isn't my problem, it's theirs.

I much prefer the Mac Mini to AppleTV, and to everything else. But this question has always been the stinkbomb lurking over the whole Mac market. The reporters don't stand up for the vendors. What does this guy want me to do? Would he prefer if I stopped developing FlickrFan? Will he say I'm stupid if I do. Maybe I am. Hey, I don't ask for any money for it. Basically I do it because I want to help create a DRM-less environment for us to enjoy networked living rooms.

FlickrFan is one of the things I'm working on. Sure it's crazy to think that I could actually contribute a little to the Mac platform. Apple surely is going to crush me tomorrow, maybe they already have. But why do users care? Why do reporters? It seems to me that we all benefit from choice. When it's a single-party system things stagnate. When there's competition, new ideas can gain traction even if it doesn't fit into the Apple vision for its users. (Which is fairly limited, read this Doc Searls piece written in 1997, it's every bit as true today as it was then.)

Hey if you think building on Flickr is crazy, think about this. My next product competes with iTunes as a podcatcher! I must be out of my mind, eh?

Finally, I could ask this guy, who I respect enormously and whose work I read practically every day, a similar question. Hey Apple writes about gadgets on apple.com. What does that say about YourGadgetSite? Got any plans for a new job? Perhaps a new career? Now that would be just rude, wouldn't?

How about some respect for developers?

Can't believe we're still having this discussion in 2008. Can't we get past this?