Thinking of building a Facebook platform app. It would be a free, cruddy version of the "gifts" offered on the site. Instead of cute icons and pleasant surprises, you could send rusty nails and moldy hams. Maybe a splintered chopstick.

Oh, doom, doom, doom. Apple launches iTunes Plus, which sells DRM-free tracks. Now I'll find it so much harder to squash impulse buys of music due to DRM lockdown. I haven't bought a thing from iTunes since about 6 months after the store opened, thanks to that. But now... Oh, I'm in trouble now.

Mark Bernstein: "Continuing with the spring cleaning theme: you need a server. Yep: you. A place to put files. Some for sharing, some just for safekeeping. A place far, far from home. A place with professionals who take care of the machines."

That reminds me: I have a server. I also have an S3 account. I need to put files there and back things up on a regular basis.

Intrigued by Palm's new Foleo, but it's mostly just got me hoping that Apple comes out with a rumored / wished-for tiny solid-state notebook.

Oh yeah, and all this offline / local web app and DB-on-the-desktop stuff? As Dave Winer mentions, it's not totally new - though renewed interest / uptake might do odd and wonderful things with the concept now. Personally, I've been interested in desktop websites since before the days of Radio UserLand 8 and around the time of Fractional Horsepower HTTP Servers.

And, of course, Google Gears has piqued my interest as well. Poking around with offline web apps has been on my round tuit list since Brad Neuberg first clued me in about his Dojo Offline Toolkit in the works. Seems like there's something brewing here, and I'll probably wish I had lots of offline apps when I'm on the plane to the UK next month.

My ears definitely perked up when I read that Apollo will include SQLite. Maybe I'll finally build a Flash-based news aggregator like I've thought about for years. You know, for me, every new platform gets interesting when I can conceivably build a news aggregator with it. :) Kind of a mutant cousin to Zawinski's Law.

Also, thinking more favorable thoughts than last week about the new Facebook platform. Having a great amount of social network fatigue, I find it hard to get enthused about yet another one at all - popularity notwithstanding. But, having done my own "hello world" app, perused the docs, and poked around the edges - I have to say that this looks like a promising way to add self-hosted guest rooms onto their walled garden. And without weird and barely tolerated hacks, ala MySpace. It's the reverse of inside-out mashups via public APIs - but they've got those too. It's not necessarily either-or. If your audience includes people who (unlike me) are living on / through Facebook, this is a good way to loop your app more easily into their routine.

Not sure what to think about CBS buying last.fm. It makes me wonder for how much longer I'll have that iScrobbler icon in my menu bar.

Hello world.