Yesterday I reported that the apps that I thought would drown in the Oauthpocalypse were still alive.

I don't usually like the death metaphor when it comes to software, but -- these guys are now really, officially, seriously and permanently dead.

 9/2/2010; 10:12:13 PM.   .

You know it's not so bad riding mid-day in the middle of a heat wave.

For one thing, most people stay indoors, so the path isn't crowded.

The first half of the trip is great cause there's a powerful tail wind. I fly!

The return ride is a great workout cause there's a huge head wind. I crawl. My legs burn.

But always, the breeze actually keeps me cool. I think it would be worse if there was no motion in the air.

In any case, after a morning of dealing with stupid uncooperative servers, there's nothing like pounding the pavement with my bike, which I absolutely adore. Great ride.

The map. I hour three minutes. 11.86 miles.

 9/2/2010; 2:17:37 PM.   .

We lost two-plus hours this morning as I scrambled to rebuild the scripting.com server.

A mysterious outage. I tried to reboot the server over and over, and it wouldn't come back. So I created another instance, but kept making mistakes with AWS. Then after fretting and thinking of a million other ways to do it, I sat down with pen and paper and wrote down, step by step, what I thought would work. Then I did it. It worked.

Moral of the story, there are no shortcuts possible. You must pay the piper. And as Jerry once sang, so wisely:

I know the rent is in arrears.

The dog has not been fed in years.

It's even worse than it appears!

See, Jerry was a musician, but he understood programming.

Namaste y'all!

Still diggin.

 9/2/2010; 11:10:58 AM.   .

Further examination of Apple's new social network reveals more problems.

To review from last night's post:

1. It's awkward, at least, that it runs in iTunes and not a web browser. There's no Back button, no way to copy the address of a page and share it outside of iTunes. Also if it were just a website we'd be able to access it from an iPad now, not some time in the future.

2. There's no way to Like the song you're listening to. In other words there doesn't seem to be any integration with the music-listening app, even though the social network is embedded in it.

3. It's a ghost town. Obviously they're recommending all the musicians they have, because they have nothing to do with my musical interests. Same with users.

Now, onto this morning's revelation.

Chuck Shotton writes: "It seems that the only way for mere mortals to post something to the timeline is to buy a song, review an album, or commit some other act of commerce on the iTunes Store, which I certainly have never done.

"It's unfortunate, because the capability is there to do much more. I followed Cold Play as an experiment and they can post pics, songs, status updates, and all the stuff you'd expect to do with a Facebook-like social media tool.

"I'm baffled why Apple has this locked down for normal users. Someone there has to have seen the potential for this to totally upset the social media balance. But if they cripple it at the outset, that critical mass of users will never happen, IMO."

So Ping is not a social network, by any realistic definition of the term.

Update #1: My guess as to why we can't post to the timeline is that Apple is afraid we might say something harsh about them or Ping.

Update #2: Doc Searls nailed it on Steve Jobs's art, in 1997.

 9/2/2010; 8:15:04 AM.   .