This is a trend that’s becoming crystal clear. Essential services cost money. Need tethering support for your iPhone? AT&T will charge extra. Need GPS turn-by-turn navigation? Here it comes. AT&T will charge extra. Their new Navigator software is free, with a catch:

The application, which provides voice-guided directions with automatic rerouting and real-time traffic updates, is a free download from the AT&T store and includes maps for the U.S. as well as regular updates. Naturally, it requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later, but it’s compatible with both the iPhone and iPod touch.

The application is a free download but the turn-by-turn navigation service is $10 a month. I can’t wait to play an iPhone game that charges me 99-cents to go to the next level.

Proof positive that small is good, less is more, Tiny is better. The Tiny suite from Pixelated Software. TinyCal integrates with Google Calendar, TinyAlarm does one thing well, and it’s free.

Founded in 2004 by a team of former Apple employees… dedicated to the creation of innovative, stylish, and cost effective solutions for the Macintosh

John Nack on Adobe’s attempts to sabotage HTML 5:

Bullshit

Adobe representative Larry Masinter:

No part of HTML5 is, or was ever, “blocked” in the W3C HTML Working Group—not HTML5, not Canvas 2D Graphics, not Microdata, not Video—not by me, not by Adobe. Neither Adobe nor I oppose, are fighting, are trying to stop, slow down, hinder, oppose, or harm HTML5, Canvas 2D Graphics, Microdata, video in HTML, or any of the other significant features in HTML5. Claims otherwise are false. Any other disclaimers needed?

Uh, yes.

Let your actions speak louder than your words. Adobe products are proprietary, slow, bloated, buggy, and expensive (can you say Flash?). Adobe as a company is self serving to the detriment of official standards and customers. Adobe’s products attempt to circumvent both Windows and Mac user interface standards with a proprietary UI design, again, to the detriment of customers.

I will not believe what Adobe’s representatives say while the company’s actions are so obviously corrupt.

I can’t be the only one who thinks that search engines suck subway scum. There’s Google’s search engine, and Yahoo!, and Microsoft’s new Bing (which will be Yahoo! very soon), and a few dozen others. 15 years into public internet search and it’s still the same. Enter keywords, wait for page, click for hours to find something useful.

The Motley Fool’s Tim Beyers on Bing:

Bing ought to be able to show you what others think of the content you’re searching for—whether they have saved it, how they rate it, and how they use tags to categorize it.

Now, that’s an idea with legs. Except, that to get ratings on search results requires search engine users to leave ratings. That’s more work. Yahoo! has this social bookmarking thing called Delicious. Could that get integrated into Yahoo!‘s version of Bing?

Say you use Yahoo! to search for “The Motley Fool.” You’d see what you see today—pages ordered by ranking, as well as related searches—plus information about how those pages were tagged, how many times, and by which Delicious users in your network. Beyond that, adding ratings or exposing comments wouldn’t be difficult.

Except for the fact that I don’t like Delicious, I do like the idea of some sort of regulated approach to ratings on search engine results. Why? Most results suck subway scum. There’s too much crapola to wade through to get what you want, despite the advanced search options. The term in use already is social search, which I don’t like as much as rated search.

Social search is a way of sharpening what has classically been a blunt instrument—the give-me-everything-you-can-find-as-fast-as-you-can search engine. Both Bing and Google are like this today, but won’t be forever.

That’s because both Facebook and Twitter already provide social search, which provides specific results often better than Google, Yahoo!, or Bing. What of Google’s Wave. I like this stream concept where everything rolls together because it’s all encompassing, but encompasses a little too much of Google’s world to give me comfort.

The real trick is to develop search results that are closer to expectations than to advertising hooks. Easier said than done because we don’t pay to search. Social search like Delicious is yet again another promise that search results will be better. In the future.

Who’s running the show at Microsoft? Windows XP’s Start button is what you click to shut down the computer. Click Start to Shut Down. Apple hits Windows hard with the I’m a Mac and I’m a PC television commercials, and Microsoft responds with I’m a PC commercials, which totally miss the point. Microsoft’s soon-to-be-released cloud computing system is called Windows Azure.

azure |ˈa zh ər|
adjective
bright blue in color, like a cloudless sky

noun
1 a bright blue color.
• poetic/literary the clear sky

Only Microsoft would misname such an important initiative. Who’s running that place?