It’s hard for me to recommend anything other than the iPad, and not just because I am some Apple “fanboy.” The iPad provides the best experience possible, and the attention to detail outpaces every other tablet on the market. It’s so lopsided (in the iPad’s favor), I would not even consider the iPad a “tablet.” It’s in a category all it’s own.

So my gut/quick answer is always “iPad.” There is no other “tablet” I’d recommend or even try.

But then I try to think about the question from a less passionate/opinionated/biased perspective, and try to put myself in my friend’s shoes. Maybe they don’t care about all the excellent usability aspects of iOS, or perhaps they don’t care to meet the iPad’s price point.

So far I’ve only been able to suggest looking into the Amazon Kindle lineup of devices, as I try to recommend devices that actually have a content library associated with them.

I also suggest to stay away from the Samsung (and other) devices for the exact reason above (no content library associated with them).

In general, I think it’s a waste of time to buy a tablet just to have one. You should have a reason or intended use-case. For example, you may be interested in reading books with a tablet, or watching movies. Maybe using apps and playing games?

Think about what all those things are: content. And who has vast content libraries backing up their devices? Apple and Amazon:

“It’s all about the content, though. That’s the difference that other tablet makers missed. Motorola, Samsung, RIM – they seem to be chasing the iPad on specs, building the best tablet they can manage at the same starting price of around $500. But they have no clear message telling people what you can do with them.”

Nobody buys a tablet so they can type emails out on a glass screen. They buy it because it lets them interact with things they love.

I’ve been looking for something like this, which allows me to better hide what I’m looking at in the browser (especially in the work-place), and more effectively focus only on the content I truly care about – the stuff I want to read.

Removing the ads and noise creates an ambient, guilt-free comfort zone, where over-the-shoulder onlookers would be hard-pressed to guess what site I am on, let alone the type of content I am reading. Worst-case scenario, it’s just words.

It also helps web designers like myself gauge how effective the particular site design is, by comparing the regular browser version to the “Reader” version. If the differences are more than subtle, chances are you need to re-design the layout so it more effectively focuses on your content – unless you desire a cluttered appearance.

The only problem I have is I don’t use Safari regularly. Opening the browser just to read a news story is less than ideal, especially when I’ve committed to Chrome and Firefox. So that would be three browsers I would have open at once.

I thought the idea was to remove clutter? Touché, I suppose.

With social networks comes ubiquity. Many services perform the same task (uploading videos, posting micro-content, etc), but each network strives to provide an overall better experience with different features or a more fine-tuned application.

So it makes sense to join more than one network that performs the same task, if only to experiment with what the service offers. Not to mention with each social network comes a different community of users to interact with. And since some users are part of your community in one network, but not another, why should they be excluded from viewing your content just because they aren’t a part of all the same networks you are?

Knowing this, I see the logic behind cross-network auto posting – and that is, get your content out to all of your difference “audiences.”

But there is a downside that’s rarely considered. I spoke briefly about this in regards to Facebook’s “Blog It” application.

As you prepare content for one network, and automatically stream it to a bunch of other networks, you are lessening your message intent because you are no longer taking advantage of each network’s unique personality. Not only that, but for the few people that actually do follow you in many of those networks, they’ll see your content multiple times.

Eventually your followers will begin to distrust your content, knowing that it’s not being published by you directly, but rather copied over from some other realm.

After all, social networks are about people, not machines. I don’t want to follow system updates – I want to follow updates from you! I want to know that you’re sitting there, in some remote location, actually inserting the update. I want a person behind the update.

As soon as you distance yourself from each network you’re a part of, you also distance your followers personal connection to you, thereby cheapening the overall value of the social network.

Your content loses it’s realm, and only becomes a generic message passed across cyberspace.

Everyone loses.

The web is my life, but I’m not referring to the web as you may know it. As a web content publisher, I use blogging, Twitter, etc, to build my foundation for coming to conclusions and realizations in the real, physical world.

To understand web content publishers, you have to remove the notion that the web is just some resource used for email and research.

Active content publishers and social network enthusiasts consider the web as a much richer, far more vast environment with infinitely interesting people and ideas. Therefore, we put our lives on the web in the form of content, in order to expose ourselves as much as possible to these ideas and people.

Some would snide at using micro-blog tools like Twitter to post all of the mundane details of my daily life. Or personal blog posts about new ideas or concepts that interest me.

Such content updates, to me, is a form of nostalgia and self-enhancement. The act of writing helps formulate crystal clear ideas in my head, allowing me to think more clearly, and therefore act more effectively in the real world.

I imagine a future where I Twitter on my wedding date, the birth of my first child, and even during the tragic passing of loved ones.

I don’t publish to exploit such sacred life events – I do it to enhance the nostalgia surrounding it.

To have such moments and times recorded forever is a wonderfully rich way to participate and reflect on life.

If someone didn’t update in a few hours, I wondered where they were, and what they were up to.

This was when I followed 50-100 people.

My rate of following new people has continued on a steady pace, and now I’m following nearly 350. It’s becoming too much for me to keep up with.

I refresh the Twitter home page a couple times an hour, during the day. This includes refreshes on the mobile Twitter site on my iPhone. Those that updated 5-10 minutes prior to my refresh, I’ll see. Everyone else, however, takes a back seat. It’s hard to remain informed by so many people, but at the same time, I want to constantly expand my network of contacts.

For me, Twitter has reached a saturation point. The intimacy of “knowing” a select group of people has become lost, and now I feel I’m just following a bunch of strangers. We’re not “connected” like we once were.

RSS

I’ve resorted to using RSS to follow a select group of individuals that I want to keep an eye on, because there’s just no way to “catch” their updates in the general stream of activity on a day/hour/minute basis.

RSS, however, is server delayed. Reading Twitter updates via RSS is like reading yesterday’s newspaper. It loses that impulsive, live edge.

Notifications

Perhaps this is precisely why Twitter allows notifications to be sent to SMS or IM. You choose who you want to “monitor,” and only those updates get sent to SMS or IM – in real time, as it happens.

In practice, the concept of Twitter notifications is not realistically scalable. If you have notifications set for more than 15 people, you’ll quickly become overwhelmed and annoyed by the amount of incoming updates.

An enigma

This leaves Twitter in a state of an enigma – something that could be inherently useful, if there was some way to scale your abilities to maintain intimate exposure to each and every person you follow.

Humans can’t scale like server farms. We only have limited capacity to absorb information to form meaningful, intimate relationships.

We think Blog It brings some of the best social aspects of Facebook to blogging, making it easy to blog from within Facebook and tell people you know all around the web that you’re doing so.

This is good idea, but unacknowledged are the unintentional hideous results. This concept will only add to the clutter of lethargic redundancy throughout social networks. It desensitizes content.

A good quote from Andy at Pain in the Tech:

This mass spam system undermines the different types of communities and users. … this facebook application violates a related form (though much less noble of course) of social responsibility in that it doesn’t encourage and foster differences and creativity, just “Abuse” of disparate systems that the user can exploit for much exposure for some kind of perceived advantage, but everyone loses from the homogeneity.

In other words, this is a cheap and easy way to “spam” all of your social networks with updates that don’t hold any value unique to that specific network.

Each social network you join should do something for you. Whether it makes you a better content publisher, or helps you meet more like-minded people – it’s the value of the network that makes it worthwhile. It’s not about how many different networks you join, or how quickly or easily you can update them simultaneously. People that join as many social networks as possible, and then proceed to mass update each network with the same message, only decrease their overall message intent.

For example, if you have a Tumblr account, and you truly find advantages to using that network, you should be able to update your Tumblr site through direct means, ie: visiting your Tumblr dashboard and updating the way the application was built to be updated. If you can’t find the time to do that, and your Tumblr account is only useful if you can update it through Facebook, you don’t need a Tumblr account.

This Facebook “Blog It” app essentially lessens the value of every social network it auto-posts to.

Related

• Avoid using feeds as content
• FriendFeed adds to content overload

You could be traditional, and flip on standard cable, following shows as they air, and absorbing the commercials in between. Or, you can follow your favorite shows or movies in other formats.

Here’s my current order of preference:

1. Optical media: DVD’s
2. Streaming: Hulu, Netflix, etc
3. Regular television
4. Set-top: Apple TV, Comcast, TiVo, etc

This is partially incomplete, because although I own an Apple TV (and have watched podcasts and listened to music through it), I have yet to watch a movie or TV show through it. So, #3 could easily become #4, but maybe not…

Television’s up-side

Regular television, to me, is good for two things: instant and random programming.

When I say “instant,” I mean you push “On,” and something starts. There is no finding the DVD, loading it into the DVD player, waiting for the main menu, clicking ten more times to start the first episode, etc. Meanwhile, my food is getting cold.

When I say “random,” I mean you never know what to expect. Sometimes I am indecisive, and want the TV to decide for me. Let’s say I’ve had a long day at work, and I just grabbed a beer. TV, please entertain me.

Commercial interruptions

However, regular television fails to immerse me for longer than 20 minutes. It’s more of a passive, casual experience – a quick fix. With constant commercial interruptions, I don’t know how anyone can become immersed in a show.

Sure, there are commercials on Hulu, but I can live with those because they are less “in your face.” For example, since you have to watch Hulu on a computer, I can flip to my RSS reader or email program during commercials.

Optical wins

In most cases, optical media is still the most flexible, portable, and commercial-free way of watching TV or movies.

Followers (friends) can leave comments on your content, or mark items as “like.” Once an item receives a comment or is “liked,” the item gets re-promoted to the top of the list. The more people that “like” or comment on your items, the more exposure your content receives.

Think of it as Digg meets RSS feeds.

So far I’m not caught up on the idea.

Creates duplicate streams of content

FriendFeed doesn’t solve any problems, nor does it offer a new way to promote content. It simply regurgitates content you’ve already posted elsewhere, which, in turn, creates duplicate streams of content for your readers.

If I’m already subscribed to your Flickr photos, why do I need to see those same photos in your FriendFeed stream?

Adding the ability to “promote” items in FriendFeed, by clicking “Like,” or posting a comment, only duplicates the spots that people can promote your items. For example, in Flickr, viewers can mark your photos as “Favorite,” or leave a comment. They can do the same in FriendFeed. Instead of one location to track activity on your photos, you now have two.

I personally don’t want multiple locations to track activity. The less input sources, the better.

I’ve discussed reasons to avoid using feeds as content – number one being duplication.

Nothing unique about it

For each new service I use, there is some level of uniqueness that it provides me in letting me publish content in new and interesting ways. Twitter, for example, introduced to me micro-blogging – a concept I was previously unfamiliar with. I embraced the idea as a new way to be creative with my content (by keeping it short, and to-the-point).

FriendFeed does nothing for your publishing abilities – it only increases the load of extraneous “chatter.”

Your content still resides on other servers, and FriendFeed just spits it out into a chronological timeline.

Content overload

If you’re feeling overloaded by the amount of content you follow or attempt to consume, services like FriendFeed do nothing to help decrease this load.

It’s wise to make sure that visitors you refer see the content that you want them to see.

For example, let’s say your dream job is at Google, and you somehow bump into Matt Cutts at a bar. He listens to your interests, and you refer him to your site. When Matt visits your site, he should be impressed, right? Right.

So it’s wise to make sure your best content is on the front page.

On a typical blog site, how can you do this?

The easiest way is to create a “Most Popular Posts” section, which highlights the posts receiving the most attention (either with comments or unique visitors). Make this section visible on the front page, so that new visitors do not miss it.

Another way is to create “Featured articles,” which also reside somewhere on the front page, on top of all other posts, and styled to stand out.

Is there any other methods of displaying your best content?

With more bloggers starting to use Twitter, Jaiku, Tumblr, etc – the option is available to import an external RSS feed as a method of creating new posts. I’m sure other services allow this too. I’ve noticed it on Facebook as well.

Although this may seem like a handy way to merge content, I firmly suggest not doing this, because it creates duplicate streams of the same content.

Your readers (followers, friends – whatever you want to call them) are responsible for managing your streams of content. It’s not your job to “assist” them in this process. You’re not assisting anyone. You’re just repeating yourself, and aggravating your readers.

Keep your content relative to it’s domain. Publish an RSS feed at that domain, and your readers will pick it up.

Your readers have tools at their disposal to help them manage lots of separate RSS feeds. For example, Yahoo! Pipes mashes feeds together into one larger, super feed. OpenKapow is a similar service that works along the same lines. If all else fails, their feed reader should allow some basic organizational techniques, such as using tags or folders to “group” similar feeds together.

The point is, as an author, don’t worry about how your content is organized at the user-end. Just worry about publishing.