Moonwatcher

iToner: Custom iPhone Ringtones with No Hacks

Apple may be making an announcement about iPhone ringtone support next week, but Ambrosia Software has beaten them to the punch and released iToner, which lets you install any MP3 file onto your iPhone as a custom ringtone with no hacks involved.

Now I have XTC, Bach, Yellow, uh, XTC, and Trio tracks associated with the appropriate contacts. Nicely done!

iToner is available as a 30-day evaluation or a $15 purchase. Support awesome software—Buy it!

Read the Times (Now by Section!) on Your iPhone

I previously wrote about the New York Times Megafeed, which is how I usually read the Times on my iPhone. But since the entire contents of the paper are smashed together into one feed, the obituaries and Arts pieces are intermixed with front page news, which I find irritating. This looks like a job for OPML!

So I spent the last half-hour copying URLs from the Times' RSS page and pasting them into an OPML document, which is now publicly accessible here, and therefore browseable on my iPhone via iOPML here.

So if you're a Times-reading, iPhone-toting kind of person, you have a couple more ways to do what you do:

• New York Times Megafeed
• The New York Times via iOPML

Note that iOPML now degrades fairly gracefully into a mobile-friendly format so even if you're not among the iPhonerati, you'll still be able to navigate OPML files like a champ, albeit without the native RSS-reading functionality of the iPhone.

Facebook Ascendant?

Numerology

There are no cool numbers between 5,999 and 7,000. But from 7,000 on you're golden.

Update: I was so totally wrong. :-)

30 Million Users

Lat month, Facebook had 30 million users. In May 1996, so did Netscape.

"Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue."

ebayahooglezon: The Arms Race Continues

Amazon.com just announced its Flexible Payment Service (FPS), a direct competitor to PayPal (now owned by eBay) and Google Checkout:

In much the same way that S3 and EC2 allow developers to forget about leasing space in data centers, buying servers and negotiating for bandwidth, FPS shields developers from many of the messy and complex issues which arise when dealing with money. Once again, we take care of the "muck" and developers get to focus on being innovative and creative.

Interestingly, Amazon's pricing is on par with PayPal's: 2.9% + $0.30 for most credit card transactions, while Google is trying to attract merchants by waiving all transaction fees for its (admittedly less flexible) Checkout service for the rest of 2007.

The enterprise software world is mostly comprised of MISO (Microsoft, IBM, SAP, and Oracle). Similarly, the web services world is shaping up to be a battle among "ebayahooglezon" (eBay, Yahoo, Google, and Amazon). So where's Yahoo in all of this? Apparently they've decided to take on YouTube.

Let's get it on!