Cool developments this week

I found out about a couple of cool things this week.

New York Times Desktop App

First, the New York Times now has a desktop app running on the Adobe AIR platform. I downloaded it, and it's pretty cool. It's about as close to the real thing that I've seen as far newspaper websites and mobile sites go. The most intriguing thing though is the fact that this app isn't free. The Times plans to charge $3.45/week for full access - and for the first time, I think this is something people might actually pay for. The app provides such a rich experience that I think people will (literally) buy into it. If it works for the Times, I'm really curious to see if it works for other newspapers, and especially local newspapers.

MiFi

The other development that's kinda gaining a lot of buzz is mifi. The idea here is that you'll be able to split a 3G signal with a portable router = no more reliance on DSL, cable, T1 lines. You'll be able to pitch the mifi device in the middle of a park, or at the beach, and your friends can surf the web while catching rays. So far, I've seen plans for a Sprint device and a Verizon device. I'm hoping that once these things come out, my parents (who live in a rural area) will be able to break out of their dial-up funk and catch some wireless broadband.

Seesmic vs. TweetDeck

I haven't spent much time on this yet, because I just started using Seesmic a couple days ago, but I'm already disgusted with it enough that I quit using it...at least for now. There are some issues:

1) I have my Twitter and Facebook accounts synced...when I update Twitter, it's supposed to update Facebook too. On Seesmic, for some reason, it doesn't work. I have to do both, separately, which brings me to the next problem: 

2) You can't (as near as I can tell) update Twitter and Facebook at the same time. It doesn't give you the choice. THAT'S annoying, especially because of #1.

3) One of the reasons I wanted to try Seesmic is because I had read (from a bunch of sources) that it's Facebook integration was much better...One thing I noticed is that it bundles all the Facebook interaction together...i.e. when I write on someone's wall, it shows up looking exactly the same as if I had changed my status, and vice versa for others doing the same. Very confusing.

Granted, I'm running Seesmic on Linux, and I'm not sure it was intended to do so....but it's an AIR application, and I'm running AIR on Linux, so I see no reason why it shouldn't work...

Let me know if I'm completely off my rocker on this, but Seesmic seems totally inferior to TweetDeck.

*UPDATE* Apparently, Twitter's Facebook app is broken...hence the issues here. I'll test it out again once Twitter/Facebook get everything back under control...