Talk about a shit sandwich for consumers of Twitter's API. I particularly love this:

With our new API guidelines, we're trying to encourage activity in the upper-left, lower-left and lower right quadrants, and limit certain use cases that occupy the upper-right quadrant.

Oddly I couldn't give two shits about most Twitter applications that aren't in the upper-right quadrant they apparently loathe.

Also, the tone of the post is that of a message from on high to the peasants below. Twitter's ego has gotten out-of-hand.

I stumbled onto Ruby on Rails in 2004, right when it had been publicly revealed. After digging into it and loving it, I was quickly looking for good ways to host sites created with the nascent framework. Around that time, TextDrive was just getting underway.

TextDrive was shared hosting for nerds who wanted a shell, a place to play with stuff like Rails while being stable and reliable. Sounded great. There had been what they called the "VC": a group of people who paid a lump-sum of money to get a lifetime of shared hosting for helping to come up with the money to get the company going. I'd barely missed the first "VC" round, but they held a second right after, and I signed up. I don't recall exactly how much right now, but I feel like it was $400 or so. This was in 2004-2005.

Over the years, they offered upgrades to their latest offerings. I took almost all of these add-ons, as I believed in what they were doing.

For instance, the "Mixed Grill" was one such offer I took, just after TextDrive became Joyent. For $500, it added on cloud storage (more rare in this form back in early 2006) and the new "Joyent Connector", which was to be a hosted service with a bunch of features small companies want, like email and calendaring.

Note that in the offer above the question, "How long is it good for?" is answered with "As long as we exist." Not only does Joyent still exist, but it's a successful, ongoing concern. We "VC" didn't pay too much, but we did put out an outsized-for-the-times amount of money to back something we believed in.

Today, I received the following email from one of the original TextDrive co-founders:

Action Required: Legacy Service End of Life

Dear Scott W. Hill,

We've been analyzing customer usage of Joyent’s systems and noticed that you are one of the few customers that are still on our early products and have not migrated to our new platform, the Joyent Cloud.

For many business reasons, including infrastructure performance, service quality and manageability, these early products are nearing their End of Life. We plan to sunset these services on October 31, 2012 and we'd like to walk you through a few options.

We understand this might be an inconvenience for you, but we have a plan and options to make this transition as easy as possible. We’ve been developing more functionality on our new cloud infrastructure, the Joyent Cloud, for our customers who care about performance, resiliency and security. Now’s the time to take advantage of all the new capabilities you don’t have today. Everyone that’s moved to our new cloud infrastructure has been pleased with the results.

We appreciate and value you as one of Joyent's lifetime Shared Hosting customers. As this service is one of our earliest offerings, and has now run its course, your lifetime service will end on October 31, 2012. However, we believe that you will enjoy the new functionalities of the Joyent Cloud. To show you our appreciation, as one of Joyent's lifetime Shared Hosting customers, we'd like to offer you a free 512 MB SmartMachine on the Joyent Cloud for one year. Use this promotional code to redeem the offer.

Promotional Code: redacted

Please review the Terms and Conditions for the Joyent Cloud One Year Free 512 MB Machine Promotion by visiting this link.

To find out more about the Joyent Cloud and your options, please follow this link to our migration center for additional details.

Sincerely,

Jason Hoffman Founder and CTO Joyent jason@joyent.com

The mealy-mouthed language of the message is insulting. I don't know about you, but the statement, "your lifetime service will end on October 31, 2012" reads like a joke. And, "To show you our appreciation, as one of Joyent's lifetime Shared Hosting customers, we'd like to offer you a free 512 MB SmartMachine on the Joyent Cloud for one year" is another gem. If Jason wants to show his appreciation, I'd prefer he just honor the agreement giving me lifetime hosting. As to the point that I am "one of the few" that haven't gotten on-board with their latest offering, check out the reaction on the web and Twitter. There are more than a few of us.

There are plenty of comments out there that we should shut up since we were obviously suckered and should have known better than to expect a lifetime of service. Maybe so, but I expected that any loss of this account would be due to the company going belly up, as opposed to being screwed by the same people who both took my money and also recently took $85 million in VC money.

Joyent should be ashamed and I hope this reflects poorly enough on them to cost them some business they value more than they did mine.

This is Part 2 of my ongoing Nexus 7 and Android/Jelly Bean review. Here's the introduction, with links to all the parts.

First Impressions

The Nexus 7 feels great in the hand. Its size is shockingly smaller than the iPad I'm used to, but its weight is seriously nice. The back is made of a rubbery-plastic that's covered in dimples, kind of like a golf ball. It feels premium even though it's plastic and provides a nice grippy surface. That's important, since this device seems to want to be held in one hand.

The only buttons are on the right-hand side. There's a rocker to control the volume, and a too-hard-to-find power button to bring the thing to life. Gone are the hardware buttons of Android old, and that's mostly a good thing. I do miss having an easy to press hardware button on the face, rather than having to hunt for the one on the side to turn the tablet on. The nice part about the main buttons be drawn on-screen is that they change orientation with the rest of the interface when you rotate the device from portrait to landscape and back. I'll write more about Android's default set of system buttons, which I found lacking in previous releases, later when I talk about the OS.

Accessory Ports

There's a mini-USB port on the bottom for charging and data transfer with other devices, and it's certainly nice that Google used a standard to support these functions, rather than a proprietary port like Apple did. The Nexus 7 also came with a charger.

The headphone port is on the bottom corner of the tablet, which I think is generally an improvement over having it on the top, where the headphone cable tends to run across the screen. It's true that on devices like these the "top" can mean anything since they rotate the UIs easily enough. Still, it's a good idea. The only small gripe I have is that it tends to put the port right in my palm when holding the tablet. No biggie. The sound is fine. The tinny speakers are nothing to write home about, although it sounded just fine through earbuds.

There are some dimples on the side that are probably for accessories, and I've heard a dock is coming. I don't have any accessories.

The Screen

The screen is something I was really worried about, coming from the Retina Display. Have no fear, this screen is good. It's definitely not as good as the retina, but it's close enough. The resolution is 720p on a small screen, so you generally don't see pixels unless you're trying to. Screen brightness is changeable, and I didn't have any problem finding settings that pleased me in all lighting conditions. It's not good outside in bright sunlight, but none of these kinds of devices are.

It's a 16 x 9-ish (actually 16 x 10) screen, so it's great for watching movies and using the entire screen. It's not quite as great for books, but mostly because of the software, so I'll write more about that later.

Two places the screen size and resolution do let the Nexus down is reading magazines and comic books. I found that small type on magazine pages is illegible and lacking detail. On the retina display, even if type is too small to read, you can tell that all the information is there. In a lot of cases, that's not true on the Nexus. Comic books also want a bigger screen if you like to read them page-by-page like I do. Instead, I had to read them panel-by-panel for the most part in order to really feel comfortable and feel like I really got to appreciate the art.

The screen is surrounded by a black bezel that's outside the touch sensitive area, where you can rest your fingers or gain purchase when gripping it. I found that there isn't quite enough of this area, and I tended to squeeze the sides more than I do with the larger iPad. When I did allow my fingers to sit in this area I found that I triggered touch events fairly often. I think just a little more bezel would have been helpful.

There's a front-facing camera just above the screen, if you care about that, which I don't. I never use the one on my iPad, nor do I expect to use this one. I'll try out a Google Hangout just to make sure it works. (I take it back: the one thing I use the camera for on my iPad is depositing checks with the wonderful USAA iPad app. There's an Android equivalent, but it's not yet compatible with the Nexus 7. Come on, USAA!)

Battery

The battery charges very quickly compared to my iPad--it took probably between two and three hours, but I didn't time it. I used it frequently for two days before needed to recharge. The screen is by far the biggest draw on the battery, and your mileage will vary. Nothing but good things to say about the battery so far.

Networking

The Nexus 7 is (so far) a WiFi-only device. That's a big bummer, because I want to use this thing everywhere, just like I do my iPad. No 4 G means that Navigation, the new Google Now, Google Wallet and other on-the-go applications are a lot less useful. I'm sure there'll eventually be one with a cell-based data connection.

The WiFi is good. At home, there's a place where my MacBook Pro has terrible WiFi reception and the iPad is just passable. The Nexus 7 appears to have no trouble connecting, showing 3-out-of-4 bars there.

I mentioned Google Wallet a moment ago, and should mention that the Nexus 7 has NFC, so it should be a functional payment device using Google Wallet. I'll probably try it someplace where I can also be on WiFi.

The Nexus 7 also has Bluetooth, but I haven't yet hooked it to my portable Bluetooth keyboard. I'll try that later and report back. I'm sure it works fine.

Sensors

It's got the now-normal battery of sensors, so it can tell quite a lot about its position and rotation. Works great.

Bottom Line

The Nexus 7 hardware doesn't disappoint. Asus did a great job in manufacturing it, and Google was very smart in its decisions about materials. It's a surprisingly nice, complete package, especially when you consider the $199 price tag (I got the model with 8 GB of storage). There's plenty here to impress and little to dissuade. The only question will be if one wants the 7-inch form factor in a tablet. My first impression is that the size is nice, and may even be better than the ~10-inch iPad for a lot of people. For me, I prefer the larger size, but like this form-factor a lot more than I thought I would now that I've lived with it awhile.