Anyone have a suggestion on how to easily sync bookmarks, online logins, dropbox files and evernote across three machines like this? Ideally a method where I can also log out of all these services, because in the case of the iMac, different people use it from time to time.

I hate having to log in and out of everything so often. There has to be an easy fix to this, any ideas?

-faster, uses less resources
-better bookmark manager
-search from the url bar

Makes me wonder, what other services that I’ve used forever should I reconsider?

Consider the following:

• The average American still watches over five hours of tv a day.
• The cost of producing professional looking content has plummeted (my phone shoots HD video).
• Companies like Netflix are going around traditional content providers (cable industry) and producing original content on their own.
• Kids ages 12 to 17 spend one third of their time online watching video.
• Online video advertising spending has doubled in the past two years and estimates say it will increase by 33% this year.
• 1.3 Billion Videos are watched every day.
• The entire tv viewing experience is archaic and frustrating for the user (commercials, programs in time slots).
• Yet, over 90% of American households still pay for tv, because there is no serious alternatives (yet).

And now there is this Washington Post story about Steve Jobs talking on the subject. Television is definitely the next big industry to be disrupted by the internet. It can’t come soon enough.

Every time I’m tempted to write about some tech product that’s been around awhile, I’m torn. On one hand, I’ll be blasted by the technogeeks for being late to the party. On the other hand, it doesn’t seem right to keep something great hidden under a barrel from the rest of the world.

I feel that way about a lot of web services. The service Pogue mentions is Dropbox. I recently was telling my Dad (and new iPhone owner) about it. Then a few days later I was telling a friend about it. I’ve used it forever and can’t believe there are still people out there who haven’t heard about it or people didn’t realize that this was the service they needed to make their lives much easier. David Pogue’s review makes a better case than I could ever do, I urge you to check it out if you need some convincing. Or just click here to sign up and try it for yourself.

I usually use Friend or Follow or a similar service to establish who is still following me. Some of the people I follow are in this grey area where the content the put out isn’t great, but I feel some sort of social obligation to continue to follow them. A simple check of who isn’t following me is a quick way to justify dropping these people.

The final way I would like to further hone the feed doesn’t exist, but it should. I would like to see someone build a third party app on the Twitter API that sorts my followers my more complex methods. The one I would use specifically would be something like sort by “tweets per day over last 30 days.” See all of the people I follow sorted in this fashion would be a great way to quickly evaluate which ones to drop and which ones to continue to follow.

On this note there is definitely a future need for automated curation here. There needs to be some way to tell Twitter to selectively filter out tweets from my own followers on certain subjects. For instance there are a lot of sporting events I don’t really care about. On Saturday my feed is cluttered with people talking about College Football games. All those people who watching shows like American Idol? I could definitely go without those. At this point I tollerate it and continue to follow these people, but if there was a way to further tweak the signal to noise like this I would be a huge fan.

1. Create a new e-mail account through Yahoo. The name doesn’t matter, you’ll only use it for about fifteen minutes. It is very important that this is an account that is new and has never been used before.

2. Within your new Yahoo Mail account import your Facebook contacts. Go to the “Contacts” Tab, then “Import Contacts” then click on “Facebook.” You’ll have to be logged in to Facebook or it will prompt you to do so. Go ahead and click through all the prompts until you have a bunch of contacts in your Yahoo account (where you previously had none because it was new).

3. Export your Yahoo Mail contacts into a .csv file. Go to the “Contacts” tab and go to the black “Actions” drop down and click on “Export All.” The option you want to select is “Yahoo! CSV.” Go through the prompts and save the .csv file to your desktop. This file is a format readable by Microsoft Excel that will list Name and Email address for all of your Yahoo contacts, which at this point are all of the email addresses your Facebook friends used to register for Facebook.

4. Import the .csv file from your desktop to Google Plus. Before going through with this you might want to go through and selectively edit. Keep in mind that these are the e-mail addresses people used to register with Facebook and they might not all be up to date. Once you have the list of people you want to add all at once, go to Circles > Find People > Upload Address Book.

It makes me think, how long of a digital trail are we unwittingly leaving? In some cases we are leaving one that will apparently last forever. Good to know, scary to think of the implications.

Back in May I wrote a post about how there was a need for a standalone messaging app and obviously some people at Facebook agreed. Read the full details on the app launch via TechCrunch.

Last week they launched the app. The timing was curious. At the same time London was in full on riot mode and now MP’s have set a date for a formal inquiry into the methods rioters were using to coordinate. They have singled out Facebook, Twitter and RIM (makers of the Blackberry) for inquiry. Details can be found here. RIM’s Blackberry Messenger (BBM) service appears to be the main target. The thought among some (not all) MP’s is that the UK government should have access to messages to either identify perpetrators of crimes or outright censor the messages. Serious free speech and privacy implications aside, here is what worries me about Facebook messenger. Facebook already at least censors these messages in helping the MPAA and RIAA fight piracy (evidence here). What’s to stop them from extending this censorship in times of perceived crisis? Slippery slope to say the least.

Here is what I now want. A standalone messenger app that works on either mobile device or computer. It behaves like text messaging in that the messages are generally shorter. It would detect where I am at the moment and direct messages only to that location. For example if I’m logged in on the computer and using that to chat it wouldn’t blow up my phone at the same time. It would be encrypted. It wouldn’t log messages or at least it would delete any older than a few days. It wouldn’t be owned by some company ready to sell me out for a few pennies. All my friends using it. It would be great.

Does something like this exist? If not, someone should build it.

Flipboard also combines with another app called Instapaper. While I’m using Flipboard to browse through news I can tag anything more substantial (10 page NY Times features for instance) as “read later.” Once I do this, these articles are all pulled into the Instapaper app and available on demand at any time (even when I don’t have an internet connection). It works the same way with my iPhone. When I am looking through Twitter I can tag anything as “read later” which is especially convenient when you consider no one wants to read a five page article on their phone.

All of this “saving for later” adds up in a few different ways. First, I find myself reading more five to ten page articles than more substantial books. Increasingly before I go to bed I’ll pick a few significant articles to dive into instead of reading another chapter out of one of the books on my nightstand. Second, I find that if anything is going to take longer than five minutes to read, I’ll immediately save it for later. The unintended consequences is that even if something is really timely (such as all the Bin Laden information), it will be a few days until I really delve into it. I’m not sure if either of these are necessarily bad things, in the end I’m reading more regularly and that makes me happy.

The only time I every use Facebook is on my phone. I wasn’t selective enough with accepting friend requests at first and now my feed is filled with people I only vaguely care about. The people I want to know about don’t even really use it at all, further aggravating the problem.

The only functionality I use on the iPhone is the messaging. It is almost like I have e-mail, texts and facebook. Three different ways to send messages for three different (but sometimes overlapping) audiences. Everything else in the Facebook app is worthless to me and on top of that the alerts for when I have new messages are never timely.

What I need and want is an app that just handles fb messages, is that too much to ask?