ProductWiki & OpenID
I recently stumbled across ProductWiki, a product review service based on the wiki model of users contributing items, writing reviews, and rating products that are on the site. Just browsing around ProductWiki, I really love the interface and the way their model works. You search for items on the site, either with a search field or a drilldown type method (similar to Newegg or Amazon). Once you select a product, you can either “love it”, “want it”, “have it”, or “tag it”… or any combination thereof. They also have links provided for purchasing products via the Shopping.com API.
My favorite aspect is that their service supports OpenID, which I’ve discovered an interest of late. For someone who has so many accounts at various services all over the web, the idea of consilidating authentication to one set of servers is quite appealing. The only other service I use that currently supports OpenID is Ma.gnolia, the social bookmarking service. After digg implements OpenID support, I’m predicting that it’ll really take off. For those folks concerned about security in the land of OpenID (which is a reasonable concern), I would say that I only support OpenID for services that just require a human behind an account, such as digg, del.icio.us, Last.fm, or any of the other hundreds of Web 2.0 applications out there; not for use with eBay, Amazon, or your banking information. My experience so far with OpenID has been a good one, and I hope it continues to improve convenience and accessiblity around the web.
Those Crazy Germans
OMG! Two Rivers!
Fixing My Damn Bluetooth
So I spent the last 6 months owning a bluetooth headset and being completely unable to use it, thanks to Verizon’s horrendous phone software. I have a RAZR V3m from Verizon, and for my birthday Colette bought me a Motorola H350 headset, like this:
From the moment I first used it I could never receive calls via the headset. Whenever I’d answer a call with the headset connected, I could hear the caller but they couldn’t hear me. After that I basically quit using it until a few days ago, when I decided “F THIS I’M USING THIS PIECE”. Someone on a message board had told me that a master factory reset would correct the issue, but that turned out to be untrue. Everything was still fubar. So I finally broke down and rode to the Verizon store to have the tech there flash the firmware on the phone to the latest version (thanks to Verizon’s genius, you can’t do anything like this yourself). He takes the phone and the headset and tells me it’ll take 45 minutes for the process to complete, which is BS but I left it with him anyways. After I got it back he tells me everything’s working perfectly, but I quickly find out that he’s wrong… it’s even worse than before. Now I couldn’t even hear the person calling me. Once I stopped being pissed off at it again, I tried the master reset just for kicks and it worked! Now I can look like a douche with a headset on everywhere I go. Thank GOD.