My nit with the design is that when you update applications, the app icon on the phone doesn’t stay put. In fact, the iPhone 2.1 update scrambled the order of all my applications. That’s the kind of detail I’d expect Apple to get right.

See more iPhone design pet peeves.

But there are also details of the UI that have bothered me; some big, some small. This is the first in a series of posts about iPhone pet peeves.

Pet peeve #1: Apple allows developers to access the address book without asking the user’s permission. Apps can copy your entire contact list to their servers and you wouldn’t necessarily know. Early versions of the Loopt application abused this to send spam text messages to your contacts. Apple knows better: applications have to ask for permission when accessing location.

Wireless carriers had long held on to core cellphone features with an iron grip. Want access to the camera, GPS, microphone or address book? Good luck. It usually involved spending a year or more negotiating with a carrier and then writing and (rewriting) your app to work on dozens of phone models. And when you were all done, you brought it to a market with little distribution support at a price few people would pay.

In the last couple of days, I’ve downloaded more apps than I had in my entire history of cell phone usage (dating back to 1996). There’s one big reason: once developers had access to features like GPS and the camera, they created compelling applications.

The most compelling apps have come from independent developers or startups. Some have used public APIs for other products; although there isn’t an official flickr app, there are several apps that interact with flickr. AOL is the lone exception among large companies, with apps for AIM and AOL Radio.

Here are some of the apps that caught my eye. With the exception of iMilk, all are free. That’s another refreshing change: Apple is making it easy for application developers who want to distribute free applications. Even paid apps can be relatively cheap, with a one time price of $3-$10 being common. (Versus the previous $3-$5 per month.)

All is not perfect in app land, of course. Much like when Facebook launched their app platform, some developers are having a hard time keeping up with the demand. I’ve also had my phone reboot at least half a dozen times when using various apps.

The functionality in some of these apps is limited compared with their other incarnations. For example, in Jott, you can’t send Jotts to others. As these apps are revved, they’ll become even more compelling.

Jott

Jott allows you to record a voice “note to self”. The note is then transcribed and put in your Jott account, which is available by phone or Web. It isn’t as robust as Jott’s

Where

A mobile social network that lets you plot friends on a map, look for restaurant reviews, find and reserve Zipcars and even look at a map of the night sky where you are with the constellations plotted. (Video of the app.)

There are a number of players looking to create mobile social networks. Whrrl, Loopt and Limbo offer somewhat similar apps. Where offers a range of features beyond social, while Limbo is the most social.

(Disclosure: I did some consulting for Where last year.)

Facebook

Facebook took an early lead with the iPhone 1.0 by having one of the best iPhone optimized sites. The lead developer released a toolkit that was used by other developers. The application version adds the ability to upload photos and IM, but lacks some of the features found in the browser version.

AirMe

Upload pictures to flickr (or an AirMe account). The pictures are automatically geotagged with your location. AirMe also tags you pictures with the current weather conditions.

NearMe

See pictures from Panoramio of places around where you are.

Twittelator

See and update Twitter. Post pictures and location updates. Twitterific has less functionality and also has ads.

Urbanspoon

Kind of like a Magic 8 ball to decide where to eat. Uses GPS to find where you are. Shake your iPhone and it will select a place for you.

iMilk  ($2.99)

“Drink” virtual milk. Uses the iPhone’s accelerometer to empty the glass. If you prefer, you can pour it into a glass before drinking.

Remote

Control your Apple TV or iTunes. Play songs, see album art and search your iTunes library. Works over Wifi, so you don’t have to be in line of sight. Much better than the flimsy remote that ships with Apple TV.

Pandora

The world’s greatest music discovery service now streams to iPhone. The app is beautifully simple. Add in an aux in jack or FM transmitter for your car and say goodbye to the $14 a month you’re paying to XM or Sirius.

Yelp

Why settle for the hand-picked (usually glowing) reviews displayed in the restaurant window? Pull out your iPhone and check Yelp. My favorite feature is a filter that limits the search to restaurants that are open now. Very helpful for those midnight cravings.

We could get the hotel staff to find the tickets and send them to us by cab, but that would take at least an hour and we’d have to count on the cab driver not taking off with the prized tickets. (Which were worth a lot more than the $100 cab fare.)

A quick call to the box office and we found a solution: if we could fax the tickets to the box office, they would reprint them. A fax glitch later, we had three of our tickets. (Only one page went through.) Fortunately, I had a digital image of the fax in my email account and the Palace box office also does email.

As this experience illustrates, sports and entertainment venues are rapidly coming into the digital world. Being able to handle situations like this dramatically improves the guest experience and reduces costs for the venue:

• Tickets purchased directly from the venue can often be reprinted with just a credit card.
• Print-at-home ticketing eliminates mailing costs and reduces the number of people needed to staff will call windows. (Note that this doesn’t mean reduced costs for you, because the ticketing companies charge for this service.)
• The San Francisco Giants Ticket Relay allows you to transfer tickets electronically to someone else. If you decide at the last minute that you can’t go to a game, you can transfer the tickets by email and your friend can pick them up at a kiosk.
• The Washington Nationals are experimenting with mobile phone ticketing that sends a scannable 2-D bar code to your phone.The current technology is too kludgy to be useful, but it will get better.

Digital ticketing also allows venues to generate additional revenue. At the Boston Symphony, season subscribers can electronically return tickets for a tax deduction. Those tickets are then resold.

Major League Baseball’s deal with StubHub allows ticket resales even on the day of the game. (For StubHub tickets that can’t be transferred digitally the market dries up based on FedEx’s schedule.) And, of course, MLB gets a cut. Those extra butts in seats also help to pad concession revenues.

There’s an additional benefit to the venues: digital ticketing increases the risk of buying tickets from scalpers. An “authentic” ticket could have been invalidated electronically.

I expect that we’ll also see more last minute deals offered by email and mobile phone to fill seats at underperforming events.

But what does it mean for every day consumers? The biggest impact is likely to be in the mobile space. Microsoft’s ownership of the Windows Mobile OS and Yahoo’s large audience and mobile applications could revolutionize the industry.

As revolutionary as the iPhone is, it’s not a true network device. Apple did a terrific job integrating four devices – phone, Internet tablet, media player and camera – into one.

Even as our lives get more and more digitally connected, the cell phone remains a remote island of information. Someone needs to build a device that integrates the Internet seamlessly.

Some of the things I’d like to see:

• A network address book. You no longer have to use the 10-key keypad or a sync cable to keep your address book up-to-date. In fact, you don’t have to update it all – as your contacts move, those changes are automatically reflected. The address book would incorporate network presence so that you don’t call people when they’re in the middle of something.
• A network calendar.
• Integrated photo applications. I’ve been looking for a way to view pictures from my friends on flickr through my mobile phone or iPod Touch. The best efforts have been clunky. When I take pictures, they’re seamlessly integrated with my flickr account, without the hacks that are currently required. (Sprint has done a nice implementation of this kind of integration with Picture Mail, but their Web application is awful and little used.) The pictures could also be used for picture Caller ID.
• Richer data push to the phone. It amazes me that we’re still stuck sending 160 character text messages to each other. A network-integrated phone would allow for a better experience. Want to invite someone to dinner? Send them a message which appears complete with photo, address, review and link to driving directions.
• Web access to text messages and integration with IM. When you’re at your desk, text messages come in on your IM client. Leave and they get routed to your cell phone. All of your texts are available in your mail app. The carriers are an obstacle to making this happen (text messaging is highly lucrative), but a combined Microsoft-Yahoo might be able to pull it off.
• Network control of your phone. Phone stolen? No problem, send a bullet to erase all of the data. Forgot where you left your phone? See a map of where it is.
• Local search integration. Found a business that you like? Add it your network address book for quick and easy access. Click to rate right from your cell phone.
• Location-aware presence. The option to publish location to other networks, including IM networks. More on that later.

Some variations of a few of these features, like the network address book and calendar, exist in enterprise-focused devices. Yahoo! Go is an excellent consumer application that includes features such as a flickr viewer, but without integration into the OS isn’t as great as it should be.

Microsoft’s ownership of the phone OS, deep integration of Yahoo! Go and their combined consumer audiences could be combined to create a phone that out Apples Apple.

See also:

• iPhone as your social network
• Remote control for your cell phone

ObDisclaimer: These are my personal views and do not reflect the views of my employer.

Having gone to school in Chicago, I love deep dish pizza. Unfortunately, there’s no Carmen’s or Giordano’s in the D.C. area. The last time I had good Chicago-style pizza was when my friend Jason flew in a few Giordano’s pies for his Super Bowl party. (The Colts were are also represented with tenderloins.)

I was connecting through O’Hare today and wanted to get some deep dish at the airport. I asked Google for “deep dish pizza at o’hare”. No luck.

This is a really difficult query for search engines. It seems simple, but it has a lot of components that make it tricky. But it’s exactly the kind of query that search engines should be able to handle.

Breaking apart the components of the query, we have:

“deep dish pizza” is a distinct concept. It’s different from “New York pizza,” “Sicilian pizza,” and “Indiana pizza”. (I don’t know what that is, but my friend Wanita swears there’s such a thing.) I could restrict my query using quotation marks around the phrase “deep dish pizza” but I shouldn’t have to do that. On the other hand, “deep dish pizza” is close enough to “Chicago-style pizza” that those results should be included.

The second part of my query was “at”. Search engines typically treat words like “at” “and” “near” and “or” either as filler and ignore them, or they use them as Boolean operators. There’s a big difference between the query “deep dish pizza at o’hare” and “deep dish pizza near o’hare”. With 90 minutes between flights, “near” doesn’t work.

“O’Hare” is also tricky. It’s a known place with a physical address. But Google and other search engines know it as ORD or 10000 Bessie Coleman Dr, Chicago, IL 60666. Compare the results for “deep dish pizza o’hare” with those for “deep dish pizza ORD“. Frequent travelers might shortcut to ORD, but again, that’s not a burden users should have to bear.

The answer, in theory, lies in natural language search. I’ve written before about how search engines force people to think like computers. Natural language search tries to teach computers to think like people. The most talked about company in the space is Powerset. I saw a controlled demonstration of their technology in August, but the promised fall public beta has yet to materialize.

Keyword-based search engines fake some of this by using tricks like stemming, synonyms and anchor text. With the uptake of sites like Yahoo! Answers and the sheer volume of information on the Web, there’s a decent chance that someone has phrased the question the same way. In the search results page for my original query, one of the results was a Frommer’s Q&A.

In addition to the structural challenges of queries like this, there’s also the challenge of how data is gathered. Data providers do a terrible job of gathering information about a place that’s really a collection of places — such as malls and airports. In some cases, information is simply not collected. In others, the information that is collected isn’t sufficiently descriptive. The physical addresses of these businesses aren’t meaningful to users. “Terminal 1, Gate C3″ makes sense; 10000 Bessie Coleman Dr, Chicago, IL 60666 does not.

OK, how many geeks are pulling out their laptops and doing searches like this you ask? Not a lot. And in search from the Web, it’s relatively easy to re-do the query and keep tweaking it until you get an answer.

Getting better answers faster becomes increasingly important as search moves to mobile devices and with voice-based search from the likes of Tellme and Google’s GOOG-411. In those environments, the penalty for failure is much higher. Users can’t easily tweak queries. They can’t browse endless Web sites to try to get the answer. They need the algorithms to do the work for them.

I was finally able to find out about pizza options at O’Hare by going to the O’Hare Web site and looking at a PDF map of Terminal 1. There isn’t a deep dish pizza place in Terminal 1, though there are Pizzeria Unos in other terminals.

The pyschic search engine would know that Pizzeria Uno is not an answer that works for me.

More on: local search, search, wireless

The integration is not true interoperability, like what exists between Yahoo! and MSN’s IM products. Google/AIM works like a multi-headed client, such as Trillian or Pidgin. In order to chat with someone on AIM, you must have an AIM account. You provide your AIM account information and Google logs you into AIM and displays your AIM Buddy List integrated with your Google buddies. (AIM buddies have the AOL running man icon next to them.)

The integration worked reasonably well. I could see and chat with my buddies. Just as with Google buddies, chats were automatically stored in my Gmail account. Unfortunately, the indexing is less than optimal. If a user’s screenname is “jsmith2000923″ but displays as “John Smith,” you can only search by “jsmith2000923.”

Another flaw is that AIM’s mobile indicators don’t show up reliably. You might think that someone is available, when they’re really just available on their mobile phones.

A bonus with the addition of AIM integration is that you can use AIM to send SMS messages from within Gmail. Just add the phone number as an AIM buddy.

The AIM integration isn’t yet incorporated into Google’s downloadable client, Google Talk. Without carpet bombing the United States 100x over with CDs, it seems Google Talk hasn’t gotten a lot of traction. Given that Google was very late to the IM party, I suspect that many of the people likely to download Google Talk use Trillian or Pidgin instead.

That’s OK, because integrating chat into Gmail was a genius move. It drew many Gmail users into Google’s chat and I know a few people who went from just Google Talk users to Gmail users. In the two years since the announcement, I’ve seen many of my non-AOL friends become Google chat users.

I already run Pidgin at startup on my computers, so this integration isn’t critical for me. But it will be useful when using someone else’s computer. Now I can just log into Gmail and have access to my Google and AIM buddies. This poses a threat to Web-based IM providers such as Meebo. (Meebo does a whole lot more, but this might be “good enough” for many people.)

That still leaves out my Yahoo! and Microsoft buddies. Sadly, this is one of the few areas where the Web companies have trailed the wireless carriers. Wireless operators in the United States have had true interoperability for several years now. But they had a financial incentive to do it: they charge for each message sent and received.

Disclosure: I worked at AOL Search.

See also:

• Gmail <3 AIM (Google Blog)
• Google Talk + AIM = Now! (Justin Uberti’s blog)

More on: AOL, Google, SMS

This won’t work for last-minute cravings. You have to create an online account at papajohns.com and pre-configure the pies that you might want someday. Just in case your pizza tastes vary from time to time, you can configure up to four favorite orders.

It sounds like way more work than it’s worth. But that’s what I think of their online ordering system and yet an astonishing 20% of Papa John’s orders come from the Web site. I’ve used it a few times, but it’s generally easier to pick up the phone.

An added bonus (for Papa John’s) on SMS orders: you pay full menu price instead of getting their latest specials. With specials frequently knocking 40-50% off an order, that could be a lot of dough.

Last week I was in Boston. As I headed out to dinner, I updated my Facebook status:

Later that night, I got a Facebook message from a friend I haven’t seen since high school. He lives in Cambridge and wanted to get together.

Unfortunately, the message arrived after I had gotten back to my hotel.

This almost-connection was facilitated by Facebook’s social graph and status updates. Next time I’m in Boston, I know to look Chike up. Twitter, Jaiku (acquired by Google) and Pownce can be used in the same way. But none of them know geography; they require that someone look at the message and determine that Cambridge is nearby. A friend who lives in Los Angeles is just as likely to see that message as someone in Cambridge.

There are a number of companies trying to turn that missed connection into an actual connection. Among them are Loopt, uLocate and Whrrl. Google purchased a pioneer in the field — Dodgeball — but hasn’t done much with it. (Dodgeball’s founders very publicly left Google, complaining that they couldn’t get engineering resources.)

Although the details vary based on site, you can publish your location from the Web or a cell phone. You can also see where your friends are on a map. I could have checked a map before I headed to Cambridge to see which of my friends were nearby. Some services will even alert you when a friend is nearby.

More on: location-based services, maps

Disclosure: I have a consulting relationship with uLocate.