Sunday Chatter – 4/4

April 4th, 2010 posted by Chris Jacobson · No Comments

iPad Launches — What Are Your First Impressions?

The highly-hyped iPad tablet computing device from Apple came out in the U.S. on Saturday, with thousands of customers flocking to their nearest Apple store to make the purchase. An article I read showed photos of customers at the company’s flagship store in New York City waiting in line and then coming outside with the new gadget. One thing I noticed from the captions was that not a single person in the 10 photos I viewed was actually from the United States. Spain, Russia, Canada and Italy dominated the first photos of the device in the hands of consumers. Obviously Apple knows how to hype a product if these people make the trek to New York just to buy one. The Wi-Fi version for $499 is the only kind available right now, with the 3G version becoming available at a later date for $130 more. The highest priced model runs $829. Canadian consumers can look for their iPad in stores towards the end of April.

WordPress 3.0 Beta Released

Late Friday night, WordPress released a 3.0 Beta version of their popular blogging software. One of the main differences from previous versions is now you can manage more than one blog from a single installation of WordPress, therefore making it easier to switch back and forth between multiple blogs to write posts. But keep in mind that this is a VERY early beta version and even the developer has said it’s not completely ready yet. If you have a test site you can try it out on, I recommend you do that instead of using it on one of your main sites. There’s also a new default theme called Twenty Ten — including custom background and header options.

Yahoo! Closes Publisher Network

It was no April Fool’s joke, but Yahoo! decided this week to close its Publisher Network, which has been in beta mode since its launch in 2006. It’s hard to think Yahoo! is even relevant these days, with their search functions basically being outsourced to Microsoft and Google AdSense still going strong. Zac Johnson dove into this issue further in depth and examined why Yahoo! made this move to close its publisher platform. I tried signing up for the beta since the beginning, but they were only running it for U.S. publishers, but had always said they would be looking to expand internationally. Yahoo! recommended in their closing e-mail for publishers to try Chitika instead.