Two days ago, I turned on Buzz in my main (non-spam/social network) gmail account to somewhat disastrous results.

After adding a few posts and commenting on others to try it out, suddenly my inbox was filling up with Buzz notifications. Gmail proper, of course, elegantly collapses these into one thread (at least), but on the iPhone, all hell broke loose. My inbox quickly filled with the equivalent of a chat room conversation.

Now I will say, as far as chat room conversation goes, this was pretty interesting, but not having access to real email without parsing through clutter wasn’t exactly great for my productivity.

Since I kinda like Buzz…definitely enough to keep it turned on, anyway, I quickly came up with a filter fix that causes all incoming Buzz conversation messages to skip my inbox entirely and go directly to a folder where I can read them when I’m bored.

Here’s how you can set this up:

1. select any buzz message in your inbox in gmail’s web client.
2. Click on the More Options drop-down and select filter messages like these
3. In the subject field in the filter setup menu that appears, type Buzz:
4. Test the filter (unfortunately gmail currently ignores punctuation, so if anyone uses the word buzz in their subject line, these messages will also have the filter applied to them. Fortunately it’s an uncommon word).
5. Click next step
6. Check the following options: Skip the Inbox (Archive it), apply the label (create a new one called google buzz)
7. check the little box marked: Also apply filter to ## conversations below.and click on the create filter button.
8. …and you’re done…hooray!
This will allow you to access your buzz conversations out of line from your standard inbox everywhere you access email (including on the iphone) so long as you have your external clients set up using IMAP. Because we’ve skipped the inbox, your phone won’t go insane alerting you to messages that aren’t important. Pretty neat

Apple has begun its literary lockdown a bit earlier than I expected, with today’s news that popular iPhone app, Stanza, was required to remove USB ebook transfer functionality.

To recap:
Previous versions of Stanza enabled transfer of ePub and eReader books to the iPhone via USB. According to the Techcrunch article linked above, a source at Stanza’s parent company (owned by Amazon) stated that Apple requested a version update with this specific functionality removed. No further details have been disclosed.

With the launch of the iPad and iBook imminent, I anticipate more actions like this, some overt, others more insidious.

Speculation Time!

At worst, since iBook can be considered core functionality on the iPad, they could elect to ban other e-reader apps entirely. Strongarm tactics like that would undoubtedly garner a fierce initial reaction, but that hasn’t stopped them in the past (see: Google Voice.)

A more likely approach would be to subtly devalue the non-native reading apps, perhaps by offering extended multitasking privileges for iBook that are simply unavailable to 3rd-party developers through the SDK. Let’s call that semi-tasking for now

We’ll all have to wait and see. I’ll try to keep this post updated with the latest. As an avid reader, kindle owner and future iPad owner, I’ve a vested interest in the outcome of the impending eBook format wars.

No matter what transpires, I expect it to be difficult to tell if Apple’s interference with 3rd-party developers is caused by new relationships with ever-paranoid publishing companies or based upon their own grand plans to win in the eBook space.

Page Saver is a must-have firefox extension for anyone who does research on the web, including user experience professionals, visual designers & artists, product managers, and anyone else who takes screenshots of webpages for inspiration.

It’s a huge upgrade from Apple’s native Grab application. Rather than simply taking a snapshot of what’s visible on your screen, Page Saver captures the entire contents of the firefox browser tab as a png or jpg with the click of a button. The basic version of the extension provides a ton of custom options for free, and a few more in their Pro version.

For my purposes, the free version works like a charm. Below is a comparison chart to help you determine which version you might need.