I held off on getting a Facebook account for quite a while (3 years if memory serves). I decided to give it a chance, and deleted it after about 6 months. It was fun reconnecting with some old friends, but not without its share of disappointments and really bad parties.

The “convenience” aspect always rings of “user friendly” or some other buzzword to me. The person referring to said convenience seems to me to be saying, “I’ve been sold on an incomplete definition of convenience and haven’t given it a lot of thought.”

I tend to regard Facebook as just a tremendous waste of time. Your second point touches on this. I liken it to being on Earth’s largest FWD: list.

If indeed it is your opinion that social networking as a whole is just a really bad (albeit perhaps lucrative) idea for yourself, for privacy, for open standards, and for the Internet (and perhaps society) at large, I’d have to say that I agree with you.

Making an effort to support standard-based email is reassuring. There’s also this: http://developers.facebook.com/opensource/ . I only hope they’re serious.

FWIW, I think LinkedIn has some promise, but I personally don’t care much for dealing with headhunters, and I state this specifically (and very carefully) in my very minimalistic profile there. So far, they’ve been mostly respectful of it.

As far as data routed through the RIM servers, I’m not 100% sure how much it is. I know that the default mail client goes through their servers and a pissoff I forgot to mention is that you can’t connect to e-mail or the BB market without cellular service (or at least, I haven’t figured out how). However, I installed an alternate e-mail app called LogicMail that works fine and seems to be about equally powerful, although it doesn’t integrate quite as well with BB notifications.

My point in this post is not to convert Android or iPhone lovers to Blackberry, nor to convince Blackberry haters that they should change their mind. I just wanted to point out to those that are dissatisfied with the current mobile market that Blackberry is a valid alternative and is not the dead, outmoded technology that the media would have us believe. It’s got its warts, but I find the Blackberry warts are less ugly for the particular kinds of usage I enjoy than Android warts.

Does the blackberry offer an “ssh” application that I could login to my servers with ?
I’ve never used blackberry, but I might actually think about it if they have an ssh application.

I use the multiple functions of my android evo 4G very little, simply because I hate the virtual keyboard.

Even if I enjoyed reading your article, I still don’t like blackberry, and find it quite at odds with my experience on stability. I have seen many people reboot their blackberry more than once a day, and mind you, they didn’t even install all the crapware that floods the Android Market (which, I agree, most is worthless, but there are several nice apps there, including ssh clients, vpns, network scanners and other sysadmin tools).

Kind regards from a fellow archer.

On Mac OS X the iCal and Address Book apps support these protocols out of the box. On Linux I use the Lightning Thunderbird extension for calendar. And on Android there are sync adapters for CardDAV and CalDAV.

Again, this solution isn’t perfect. The only holdout is access to my address book from Linux. There doesn’t seem to be any extensions to Thunderbird out there. Evolution supports both protocols but it’s a tad buggy I found.

One of these days I might see if I can’t get thunderbird to talk CardDAV but until then I at least have read access to contacts through Roundcube webmail using a plugin.