http://johnhaller.com/jh/useful_stuff/disable_facebook_places/

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/privacy-for-facebook/id374187406?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D6

Update August 23, 2010: you should also configure Facebook to tell you whenever a “new” PC/Mac or device accesses your account. This can be useful for being notified if your account gets hacked. To find out how, see here:

http://www.troublefixers.com/secure-facebook-account-from-hacking/

These days, a number of people seem to be looking for MobileMe “alternatives” or “replacements”.  While I still think MobileMe is worth it for many people, I thought I’d summarize some of the websites that provide bits and pieces of “MobileMe-like” functionality.  While MobileMe provides an easy-to-use, “one-stop-shopping” site that bundles various useful features together, many of these features can be found in free, lower-cost, or reduced functionality forms, if you’re willing to do a little work and/or possibly go through some pain.

Disclaimer: I have not necessarily tried/evaluated the following sites.  I do not know how reliable or scrupulous they are.  Take the following with a grain of salt, and do your own investigation.  If you see any errors, please leave a comment and tell me.  Also, all prices mentioned are believed to be current as of January 2009; note that the prices may have changed if you’re reading this a while after that.

Email

MobileMe’s big email feature is “push email”.  Fortunately, “push email” exists in at least two other places: Yahoo and mail2web.  Both of these have free accounts with push capability, although you can pay to get additional features.

Yahoo’s push capabilities don’t seem to be well-known, even though all Yahoo email accounts have this feature.  When setting up a Yahoo mail account on your iPhone, you must set it up as a “Yahoo mail” account, and not as “Other”.

Mail2web offers a free, exchange-based push email service.  It also includes synchronized (“push”) contacts and calendars, although the free version has no way of importing/exportings contacts or calendars (for example, from Outlook or Google).  You can, of course, pay for premium accounts with more features.   When setting it up on the iPhone, you must set it up as a “Microsoft Exchange” account.

While push email is nice, it can be disruptive if you get a lot of less-important email, and it can reduce battery life.  Using a trick, you can get “selective push” of messages, where only messages that you specify get pushed; other messages are not pushed.  This is done using two email accounts: a main email account, and throwaway push account.  For details, see, “Selective Push Email for the iPhone“.

If you don’t need push email, but need mail “synchronized” between multiple PCs, Macs, and iPhones, you might want to consider using an email service that supports IMAP.  With IMAP, all mail is served on a central server.  For example, if you read your email from one PC, that mail gets marked as read on the server.  Then, if you read your email from a different Mac or iPhone, you’ll see that that email will be marked as read.  Google’s gmail supports IMAP, but Yahoo doesn’t.  For more information regarding gmail’s IMAP, see the Google documentation, as well as the gmail iPhone docs.  For some additional pointers to mail providers that support IMAP, see the wikipedia page on webmail providers.

Contacts and Calendars

If you want “push” synchronization of contacts and calendars, you need some exchange-based service.  Aside from MobileMe, I know of only two ways to get “push” contacts and calendars:

• Use an exchange-based service like Mail2web’s live mail service (which offers a free account).  As mentioned above, in addition to “push” contacts and calendars, you also get push email.  However, the free account has no way of importing/exporting existing contacts and calendars.

  Note that any exchange-based service can be used, and there are quite a few out there (sorry, I really don’t have any more information).

• nuevasync (also exchange-based, but this is something of a special case).  This is a currently-free service that provides “push” contacts and calendars for Google contacts and Google calendar.  Push email is not available, although the company claims to be working on it.  I have no idea if they’ll switch to a paid model in the future.

• Google Sync for the iPhone (beta).  This uses an exchange-based interface to sync Google contacts and calendars to the iPhone.  (There is currently no push email service with this.)

  One current limitation is that there seems to be no way to put contacts into groups on the iPhone.

However, note that the iPhone only allows the use of one and only one exchange-based account.  That means that you cannot use nuevasync (for push Google contacts and calendar) with another exchange-based account (for push email).  You can only use one or the other.  You can, however, use nuevasync for push contacts/calendar,  and Yahoo (or MobileMe) for push email, though.  (The iPhone allows you to have more than one Yahoo-based account, more than one IMAP/POP3 account, up to one MobileMe account, and up to one exchange-based account.)

On the other hand, if you don’t need push contacts and calendar, iTunes does a decent job of synchronizing contacts and calendar (although PC users need to buy Outlook to get calendar sync).

Photos

For photo management and web uploading, PC users can use Google’s Picasa (a Mac version is curently in beta).  By default, it only uploads to Google’s Picasa web albums, but there is also a way to upload to Flickr.  You only get 1GB of free image storage space, although you can always pay to get additional storage.  If you only upload modest-sized pictures for web viewing, 1GB can go a long way.  However, if you upload full-sized images from digital cameras, you can use up 1GB quickly.

Of course, you could just use Flickr, but Flickr doesn’t manage the pictures on your PC or Mac.  It’s pretty much a web-only application, where you must first upload pictures to Flickr before you can do anything with them.  Free accounts are limited to uploading 100MB/month, with a max picture size of 10MB.  There appears to be no limit on how much total space you can use (which means that it would take, for free accounts, 10 months to reach 1GB).  You can, of course, pay to get unlimited bandwidth and fewer restrictions.

As a side note, if you happen to need an online image editor, Sumo Paint appears to be quite nice.  It’s a fairly-powerful image editor that runs in your browser.  Performance appears to be decent, although loading and saving may take a long moment.  It also works in Firefox and Chrome, and does not require registration.

Files

LifeHacker did an excellent comparison of many available online storage sites.  Here are some comments.

DropBox

I happen to like Dropbox (still in beta), because it gives you 2GB of free storage space, and because it works on PCs, Macs, and linux boxes.  Among other things:

• Dropbox basically mirrors and synchronizes a directory tree on your PC/Mac/linux box, to the web and to other systems (everything in and below “My Documents/My Dropbox”, by default — you can specify a different directory, however).  Note that, while the directory tree appears to be on a local disk, it’s actually something like a cached network drive.

• When you modify files, only the changed portions are uploaded and/or downloaded — not the entire file.

• From the web, you have access to your deleted files, and previous versions of your files.

• It also provides web photo galleries, and ways of sharing files and folders with others.

• If you need more than 2GB of space, it’s $99/year for 50GB.

• The max file size appears to be 5GB, which is larger than the available space in free accounts.

• One downside is that folder sharing is done read-write; there’s currently no way to make a read-only folder available, although you can share individual, downloadable (read-only) URLs to files.

• Folder sharing can apparently be done only with other Dropbox users.

It’s really quite powerful and easy-to-use — check out their demo video.

Jungle Disk

If you need more than 2GB (but less than 20GB or so, maybe up to 30+GB), but $99/year is too much for you, check out Jungle Disk, which also works on PCs, Macs, and linux boxes.  Although it’s not free, and doesn’t appear to be as nice as Dropbox, you basically pay only for what you use: you buy the Jungle Disk program, and then you buy storage space and bandwidth from Amazon.  While it’s simple enough to set up, it does take more setup work, as not only do you have to install and set up the Jungle Disk program, but you also have to sign up for an Amazon S3 storage account.  Novice users might have difficulty with this.

On the Mac and PC, it looks just like a network drive.

Basically, you buy the client software ($20, runs on PCs, Macs, and linux boxes), and then pay only for the storage and bandwidth you use (yes, you do pay for bandwidth used, in both directions):

• $0.150 per GB – first 50 TB / month of storage used
• $0.100 per GB – all data transfer in
• $0.170 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out
• $0.01 per 1,000 PUT, COPY, POST, or LIST requests
• $0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests (no charge for delete requests)

These are US prices.  See the Amazon website for complete pricing.

For example (I think I have this right), let’s say that you upload and store 20GB of files.  Amazon would charge you $0.10*20 = $2.00 to upload the files, plus $0.01 per 1000 uploaded files.  In addition, $0.15*20 = $3.00 would be charged each month to store the files.  So, for this example, the first month would cost a bit over $5.00, but only $3.00/month after that.  However, downloading files would cost extra (over $0.17/GB) — downloading all 20GB would cost another $3.40 or so.  If this was all done in the first month, it would cost over $8.40.

Note that, at $99/year, Dropbox works out to around $8.25/month, and there are no bandwidth charges.  Heavy users are probably better off with Dropbox at $99/year, while light users might be better off with Jungle Disk.

Note that Jungle Disk uploads and downloads complete files; in general, there is no incremental uploading/downloading of file changes, unlike Dropbox.  If you change a file, the entire file has to be uploaded to the cloud, and, if you also access your Jungle Disk drive from other PCs, Macs, etc., you have to download the entire file.  While this isn’t important for small files, this can be significant for medium-to-large files.  However, you can pay a subscription fee of $1.00/month to get incremental file uploads (not downloads) with Jungle Disk.  This can be useful for people with ADSL internet connections, and for saving upload bandwidth costs, but it does not address the entire-file-must-be-downloaded issue.

Jungle Disk also has an optional backup facility, where directories you specify are periodically (or manually) backed up.

Files and directories can be encrypted once they leave your PC/Mac, and the encryption keys are stored only on your systems.  However, if you opt-in and use their web-based file interface, you have to give your keys to the Jungle Disk people, because that’s required in order for the web servers to work.  User beware.

Syncplicity

I haven’t tried this, but Syncplicity appears to be a competitor to Dropbox.  Comparing Syncplicity and Dropbox:

• Currently, Syncplicity is PC-only.  An OS X version is currently in closed beta, and a linux version is supposedly being worked on.  Dropbox already works on all three platforms (although it is, technically, still in beta).

• Syncplicity’s pricing is similar ($99/year for 50GB, just like Dropbox).  However Syncplicity allows you to add additional storage space, in chunks of 50GB ($99/year for each additional chunk); with Dropbox, you’re limited to 50GB.

• Syncplicity allows you to specify the directories to backup/synchronize.  Dropbox limits you to a particular directory tree.

• The free Syncplicity accounts give you 2GB, like Dropbox, but limit you to only 2 PCs for synchronization.  Dropbox does not limit the number of synchronized PCs, Macs, or linux boxes.

Website Hosting

Sorry, I haven’t set up any public websites, and so I don’t know about good hosting solutions.

I do know that MobileMe’s hosting is pretty basic, as it:

• Does not have database hosting (e.g, Postgres or MySQL).

• Does not have any cgi-bin facility (no PHP, python, ruby/rails, etc.).

For example, much of my email is non-urgent mail: newsletters, mail from mailing lists and special interest groups, etc., etc..  I don’t need to be interrupted for these, but that’s what push email does: I get interrupted for each and every email that I receive.

Fortunately, there is a way to get push email only for selected email, although it does require an intermediate-level of computer expertise.  The basic idea is to have two email accounts: a main email account, which autoforwards select urgent/important email, and a push email account, to cause the iPhone to beep/buzz.  The one big requirement here is that the main email account must support server-side email filtering, and the filtering must also support email forwarding (more on both of these, later).  It works like this:

How a message is handled for selective push email

Let’s say that your Significant Other sends a message to your main email account.  This is the account that you will use for all of your email correspondence; you will read all of your email using this account, and you will send all of your messages from it, too.  Once received, the filter rules on your main email account will then look at the received message, and decide whether or not to autoforward a copy of the message to your push email account.  Messages that are not deemed urgent/important will simply sit in your main email account, waiting for you to read them, and you will not be interrupted by your iPhone.  Messages that are deemed urgent/important will still remain in your main email account, but the filter rules will also autoforward a copy to your push email account, which will cause your iPhone to beep/buzz.  Since the message is from your Significant Other, the server-side filter rules will autoforward it to your push email account, and your iPhone will beep/buzz.

Note that the push email account is only used to make the iPhone beep/buzz.  It’s not used for reading/sending email, and so you’d just periodically delete all mail in the push email account.  The only real downsides of this approach are that the unread messages here will show up in the iPhone’s “unread messages” count, and that you periodically have to delete the push account messages.

Setting It Up (Overview)

Well, all this is nice in theory, but how do you set it up?

You need two email accounts to make this work:

1. You need a “main email account” that supports (a) server-side filters and (b) forwarding of messages.  I know of two mainstream services that have these: Gmail (both the free and non-free versions) and Yahoo Mail Plus (the non-free version only).  You might already have one of these:
   • Gmail supports an “unlimited” number of filters, although you can only have up to 20 filter rules that forward email.  This may seem like a low limit, but you can combine rules into complex ones.
   • Yahoo Mail only supports email forwarding in their non-free Yahoo Mail Plus accounts.  You can have to up 50 rules.

   Personally, I’d recommend using Gmail, because Gmail supports IMAP access and Yahoo doesn’t.

   If your ISP supports procmail, advanced users could set up procmail to do the the filtering/forwarding.  However, describing how to do this is beyond the scope of this article.

2. You need a “push email account”.  The beauty of this setup is that you can use any push email account, with any push email address, as your push email account is never exposed to anyone.  If your push email provider becomes unreliable or goes out of business, you can just switch to another account.  You can use MobileMe, you can use a free Yahoo Mail account (which supports push email to iPhones), or you can use something else, like a free mail2web account.  Also, because you’re not really going to be reading email on this account, and will just be periodically doing a “delete all”, you don’t need an account with a lot of mail storage space.
   • Using MobileMe, while not free, also gives you push contacts and push calendar.  It also gives you synchronization between multiple PCs/macs.  The synchronization is nice, even if you have only one PC/mac, because you can use that to import/export contacts and calendar information to MobileMe and the iPhone.  Unfortunately, note that PC users need to buy a copy of Microsoft Outlook if they want calendar synchronization; Mac users can just use Mail.app.
   • Note that, if you use Yahoo Mail for both your main and push email accounts, you still need two accounts.  If you used only one account, you’d get push email for all mail, and couldn’t get selective push.
   • A free mail2web account also gives you push contacts and push calendar.  Unfortunately, there seems to be no way of importing/exporting contacts without upgrading to a paid account; with the free account, it appears that you have to enter all information manually.  This is a problem if you have a lot of existing contacts or calendar entries that you need to migrate.

   Side note for people trying to get push contacts and calendar: the iPhone has some interesting limits.  You are allowed only one MobileMe account, only one exchange account, but more than one Yahoo account (each of which can support push email).  You can only get push contacts and calendar via the MobileMe or exchange account interfaces; the yahoo interface only supports push email, and not push contacts/calendar.  It would be nice if we could use mail2web for push email, but nuevasync for push contacts and calendar, but both of these require an exchange account interface, and the iPhone only allows for one.  You can use Yahoo mail and nuevasync, though.

I’m not going to talk about signing up for any of these accounts, if you need to do so.  It’s not hard, and you should be able to accomplish that.  I’m also not going to describe how to setup your iPhone to handle the push email account; your push mail provider should have instructions for that.

At this point, you just need to verify that your iPhone works with your push email account: mail sent to that account gets automatically pushed to your iPhone.

Everything else is done in your main email account.  In the following, I’m only going to give instructions for gmail, as I don’t have a paid Yahoo mail account.

Configuring Server-Side Rules in Gmail

This assumes that you will be using gmail as your main email account.  All incoming mail will be read from this account, and all outgoing mail will be sent from this account.  Let’s call this your “main email account”; this is the address that your give out to people.

Your other (push) email account is used only for notifying you of new mail in your gmail account, and is not given out to anyone; you’re only using it for the push services.  This is typically some non-gmail account like MobileMe, Yahoo, mail2web, or somesuch.  In the following, I’m going to use the address “myiphonepush@example.com” as the address of your push email account; all mail sent to this account gets pushed to your iPhone.

All of the magic is done via server-side rules.  From your main email account (gmail), in a web browser, click on “Settings”, and then the “Filters” tab.  You will see something like  (click for a larger view):

Initial filters display

To create a rule that autoforwards selected email, click on the “Create a new filter”.  You’ll then see a page that looks like  (click for a larger view):

Adding a new filter rule

Here, you will be editing the field, “Has the words”; by doing so, you can make this one rule handle multiple people or sites.  This is useful, as gmail has a limit of 20 rules that autoforward email.

Let’s say that you want to be notified whenever “jane@example.com” sends you email, or is cc’d email.  The rule for this is:

from:jane@example.com OR cc:jane@example.com

You would then enter this into the “Has the words” field, like  (click for a larger view):

Creating a filter for jane@example.com

At this point, if you already have any email from jane@example.com, you can press the “Test Search” button to test your filter.  This is a great way of testing your filter before putting it into use.

The filter rules can be pretty complex.  Let’s say that you also want to be notified of mail from john@example.com, but only if the words, “urgent” or “volleyball” appear in the subject.  Your filter rule would then be:

from:jane@example.com OR cc:jane@example.com OR (subject:(urgent OR volleyball) from:john@example.com)

For more information on Google’s advanced search operators, see: Using advanced search.

Once you’re satisfied with your filter rule, you can press the “Next Step >>” button to continue  (click for a larger view):

Telling the filter to forward mail to your push email address.

Here, you click the box, “Forward it to”, and then enter your push email address.  Once you’ve done that, click on “Create Filter”.  That’s it.  You’ll now have a new filter  (click for a larger view):

Your first filter

That’s really it.  From here, all incoming mail will be matched against your filters.  Messages that match will be autoforwarded to your push email account, and your iPhone will beep/buzz.  Messages that don’t match won’t be autoforwarded, and will simply sit in your main account, awaiting your perusal.

To properly use bookmarks, they must be correctly organized into bookmark folders and be tagged with the appropriate keywords.  As you add more bookmarks, you must continually sort them into the proper folder and insure that you’re consistently using the correct tags.

As for me, I have a hard time doing this.  While I can make an initial stab at sorting my bookmarks into various and sundry folders, it’s hard to keep up with new bookmarks.  I tend to bookmark, and bookmark, and bookmark.  After a long while, I have a daunting pile of bookmarks that dares me to organize it.

Tags add another whole new dimension of work for me.  I also use del.icio.us, as it’s a great way of sharing links between browsers.  The problem that I eventually had with del.icio.us is that you have to be religiously consistent with tagging.  Sometimes, I’d leave off a tag when tagging a URL, or I’d add another useless tag.  My del.icio.us account has nearly 1300 bookmarks, and around 370 tags.  Too many of these tags have only one bookmark associated with it.  That’s not good.

Another problem that I have with del.icio.us is that it turned into the “great bookmark black hole” for me.  I’d put bookmarks into it, and I could never find them again.  All too often, when I searched for a bookmark, I could never find the bookmark, because the keywords I used didn’t appear in the tags, the URL or the bookmark title (they would appear in the web page, but del.icio.us doesn’t record that).  I generally don’t use the “notes” field because it’s too much work for me to maintain.  Searching was also not as fast as I’d like, although it’s fast enough for many people.

Now, I want to emphasize that del.icio.us is a great service.  Used properly, it’s wonderful, and many people love it.  Unfortunately, for me, I’m too disorganzed to use it properly.

Computers are supposed to make life easier.  I shouldn’t have to spend time on mundane tasks such as organizing bookmarks.

That’s where Evernote comes in.

Evernote is a program designed to save notes — in text or picture form.  While it’s not designed as a replacement for bookmarks, it has a number of features that make it attractive:

• You can save part or “all” of a web page into a note, and the web page URL is automatically recorded.  (Although I say, “all”, it doesn’t quite get everything.  Evernote records most of the text, but the formatting is often lost.)
• If the bookmarked page goes away, you can still have the important web page text available (assuming that you copied it into Evernote).
• You can easily synchronize between multiple PCs and Macs.  Your notes are also accessible via a web browser.
• When you synchronize, everything gets mirrored into a local database.  You don’t need an internet connection to view and search your notes.
• With a local database, searching is fast.
• Evernote can even search for text in images.
• An iPhone client exists, although it does not mirror notes locally.  With the iPhone, you need an internet connection to access your web-based notes.
• If you still want to use “bookmark folders”, you can organize notes into different “notebooks”.  However, you don’t get hierarchical folders with this, as you can’t put a notebook inside of a notebook.
• You can still use tags, if you’re feeling brave.

The big advantage here is that you can easily copy the important parts of a web page into a note, and Evernote takes care of automatically recording the URL for you.  You generally no longer have to tag URLs (but the feature is there, if you still want to do that), because the web page text acts as tags.  You don’t care if words like “the”, “and”, or “you” get indexed, because you’ll probably never search for them.  Instead, you’re going to search for the real keywords, like “bookmark” or “iPhone”, which should be, hopefully, part of the web page text.  This makes searching really easy, and, if you should find yourself without an internet connection, you can still view the important text.

These days, I no longer bookmark.  Instead, I blindly copy large chunks of web pages into Evernote (the entire web page article, if I can manage it).  Not only does this make it easy to search, but it also gives me a copy of the important text/images, if the page goes away, or if I happen to be somewhere without an internet connection.  Once I find the note I want, there’s a little icon for me to click, to bring me back to the original web page.

Side notes:

• Evernote is free, as long as you don’t upload/synchronize more than 40MB of data per month (synchronization is done via Evernote’s servers).  If you go over the limit, you won’t be able to synchronize until the next 30-day cycle.  While this is enough for many people, it won’t be enough for others (it wasn’t, for me).  If you need to synchronize more than 40MB/month, you can upgrade to a premium account for $5/month or $45/year.  With a premium account, your limit is increased to 500MB/month.
• The free Evernote accounts are synchronized using an unencrypted link.  If you’re simply recording public web page text, this generally isn’t a problem.  However, if you want the synchronization to be done via SSL, you have to upgrade to a paid, premium account.

Now, Evernote isn’t a 100% replacement for bookmarks.  Although I no longer use the pull-down bookmark menu, I do put frequently-used bookmarks onto a toolbar.  If I use a bookmark frequently, there’s no real need for me to put it into Evernote.

Also, some people may find that they’ll still want to organize notes into notebooks, and tag them.  While blindly dumping notes into Evernote is great for searching, you have to remember that a note/bookmark is there before you can search for them.

For example, when I first started using Evernote, I copied over as many of my del.icio.us link as possible.  While going through this long list, I encountered bookmarks that I’d totally forgotten about.  These were interesting bookmarks, and I’d completely forgotten that they were there.  Being able to search is all well and good, but, if I don’t know that something is there, I can’t search for it.

That’s where notebooks and tags come in.  If I just blindly dump notes into one notebook, it’s hard to browse them.  However, if I use multiple notebooks and tags, I have some semblance of a chance to encounter long-lost interesting notes.  This does, of course, require maintenance.  Right now, I’m trying to use as few notebooks/tags as possible:

• The vast majority of notes go into a generic “my notebook”.
• Some of the more interesting notes go into various “interesting” notebooks (as few as possible).  These exist only so that I can find interesting stuff by browsing, later.
• New notes are automatically put into a default notebook called “Unfiled”, so that I can easily see how large the daunting pile is.  Fortunately, the majority of these get dumped into the generic notebook, and so sorting is simplified.
• I use very few tags.  The few tags I use happen to be tags that have little or nothing to do with the note text, such as “To do” (basically, to-do notes) or “Wishlist” (things that I’d like to buy someday).

For more information, see the Evernote home page at www.evernote.com (check out the YouTube video introduction).  It was also recently featured on G4′s Attack of the Show (via the Evernote blog).