Web Worker Daily

In early 2007, tech luminary Tim O’Reilly published a number of thoughts envisioning a more cohesive and universal ‘address book’ application for the Web 2.0 era…these thoughts were quickly labeled as Address Book 2.0.

In the intervening period, we’ve seen companies such as Plaxo and Facebook seek to evolve themselves into the position of defacto social address books, but even such powerful companies have only offered uneven ‘hacks’ for integration with our email, cellphone and IM contact books.

Apple’s Mobile Me service has attempted to provide some of the ‘glue’ to connect these silos of contact data, but at a great price…and of course tied to the Mac universe. It’s also telling that Gmail still lacks a useful API to it’s Contacts data - perhaps data that should really be a standalone application? This has left an opening for companies such as Soocial… Read the rest of this entry »

Between the iPhone and MobileMe, we’re starting to see some complaints about Apple quality and support - widely regarded as the cornerstones of the company’s reputation. Twitter is full of complaints about MobileMe, and the company has gone so far as to add another 60 days of free service for suffering subscribers. Some prominent bloggers have also weighed in on the issue of Apple quality recently, with negative views.

And yet…despite some high-profile complaints, the bulk of Apple users still seem to be satisfied. A survey at our parent blog GigaOM is finding most respondents to be satisfied, and the just-released American Customer Satisfaction Index scores put Apple ahead of all other computer manufacturers for Q2. So despite some stumbles, it looks like Apple hasn’t yet lost its shine.

What’s your take on the state of Apple products?