Morisy dot com

From the New York Times:

A screenshot from one of On the Go Girls banned applications.Fred Clarke, co-president of a small software company called On the Go Girls, which made Sexy Scratch Off, said that as of Monday all 50 of his company’s applications were no longer available. They included an application in which a woman wearing a swimsuit appeared to wipe finger marks from the iPhone’s screen with a rag and spray bottle.

“I’m shocked,” said Mr. Clarke, who said the company had not had a problem with its applications since the first one went on sale last June. “We’re showing stuff that’s racier than the Disney Channel, but not by much.”

Mr. Clarke said his company had been earning thousands of dollars a day from the App Store.

“It’s very hard to go from making a good living to zero,” he said. “This goes farther than sexy content. For developers, how do you know you aren’t going to invest thousands into a business only to find out one day you’ve been cut off?”

How long until developers start picking platforms they can't get kicked off? Until the risk is greater than the reward, which means "really soon" for anyone who wants anything more provocative than sparkly unicorns in their app. And it's not a new or even particularly shocking phenomenon, since Apple's previously banished dictionaries.

The strangest part is that this is all on the device with a beautifully crafted browser that can, you know, browse the great smut basin that is the Internet.

Maybe I'm daft (ok, we all know I am daft), but what new features, really new features does Google Buzz bring to the table? For the end user, it really seems like something that could have been cobbled together with a clever Greasemonkey script, which is an unusually low bar for a Google product.

It just pulls Google Reader into GMail. Oh, sure, there's some location-aware nish-nosh and something about better thumbnails, but the conversations I see on Buzz are identical to the ones I was seeing on Reader. A while back, Reader even let you put up aimless updates, basically creating Buzz without the buzz.

With pre-Buzz Reader and some simple RSS magic, you could even pull in and share you Twitter feed, your Flickr photos, and whatever the hell else they're now trumpeting, and you already saw updates pre-selected by your friends and colleagues. Buzz just pulled together (quite nicely, I might add) a lot of elements that were already there for power users and forced them down the world's unsuspecting throat.

Still, it's not a bad move at all.

SpareChangeNews.net was down for a good chunk of the day yesterday for some weird billing mixup. It was resolved fairly quickly, except HostGator somehow mixed our most recent backup with the site we had a year ago, and all these files conflicted so the site was broken for 6 more hours until I could get my hands on a working FTP terminal.

Sorry if you tried to access the site in that time.

I've been working on a (secret-ish!) side project recently that hopes to index a lot of profiles, and allow people to browse through and compare those profiles as convenient.

One thing I'm struggling with at this early stage is the taxonomy architecture. For example, one taxonomy will probably end up being based on geography. My first impulse was to structure the taxonomy like this:
USA
-Northeast
--New England
---Massachusetts
----Greater Boston Area
-----Somerville
-Southeast
--Etc, etc, etc.

I have since been informed that this is insane, or at least a moderately bad idea, particularly in Drupal. So my next idea might be equally insane: Just allow everything to be free tagged with vague prompts and a catch-all parent taxonomy, or perhaps assign some root taxonomies (location, genre, medium) with free tagging.