Just to let those of you who read this blog, but maybe not TechSource, I have a new post up over there on Hot Games for the Fall. Go check it out, and leave a comment or three.

So I took the plunge and decided to Jailbreak my iPhone 3G, just out of curiousity as much as anything. I wanted to see what apps were available outside the app store, as well as see what customizations were out there for the phone. What I’ve found is that I haven’t found a lot of apps that I would consider truly worth Jailbreaking. There are two or three real standouts that I’m playing with, but mostly the apps on the App Store are pretty amazing on their own.

The three things that I am having some fun with that aren’t available via Apple: Qik, Tunewiki, and Winterboard. Qik everyone is probably familiar with, and I think will eventually make its way thru the actual Apple vetting process. The camera on the iPhone will only do around 15 frames per second in ideal conditions, and streaming live to the net you are looking at only 6-8 even on wifi. But I’m going to take my phone with me Internet Librarian and play with the live streaming some, if the Jailbreak lasts that long.

Tunewiki is an amazing app that will, I think, never make it to the app store. It takes your music, and in realtime finds and displays lyrics for the song…timed to the song itself. I have no idea how it works, and its awesome.

Winterboard is a theming app for the iPhone which gives you control over certain visual aspects of the display, as well as reskinning the whole thing if you download appropriate skins.

All in all the phone has been running well since the Jailbreak, although I would say it is slightly less stable…I’ve had to reboot it a couple of times to get it unfrozen after an install or the first launch of a new program. With that said, it’s neat to have a no-longer black box phone…like they say, it’s not really yours if you can’t open it up.

So in a pretty convoluted story with a straightforward beginning, Amazon has announced that it will be purchasing the social book network Shelfari. Just last month, Amazon also purchased AbeBooks…which is a minority investor in LibraryThing.

*boggle*

So Amazon buys a competitor to a service that they, in effect, already own part of. I can see them wanting Shelfari for the interface, especially as part of a “next generation” Kindle device. But Shelfari doesn’t have much else for Amazon to want, honestly…Shelfari relies on the Amazon book data to begin with, so they don’t have any data that will improve Amazon in any way (except the little bit of social data that can be scraped from the site).

There’s a long discussion about this over on LibraryThing, where Tim is talking the thing out in his open and transparent style. I don’t think this is going to hurt LibraryThing at all…they have better book data, for one, and Amazon now has to fit Shelfari into its systems, which will take a looooong time.

Has anyone seen a value given for the Shelfari acquisition? I’m curious what Amazon paid for them.

Here’s hoping this doesn’t cause Tim too many sleepless nights.

Kudos to DLK and Libraryman for putting this together, and for all my friends that took part. Is cool to see so many people collaborate on something so silly and yet interesting.