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On the edge.  As the world eagerly awaits the release/announcement of the worlds hottest new phones, we are all on edge.  That curious desire to camp out at a phone store overnight suddenly seems realistic yet for a Palm?  This is Palm for goodness sake!

This week sees the Wall Street Journal play bloggers like a flute, I predict we’ll say Hulu who? in 6 months; Robert gets gun-shy about the Pre, and Twitter realizes everything is spam.

We fell for Mossberg, again.

Did he, or didn’t he?  I fall into the “he did” camp.  Here is what he did “...though I’d note that the new iPhone to be unveiled next week will have lots of added features that could alter those calculations.”

Not “may”.  Not “probably”  Mr. Mossberg doesn’t use any of these qualifiers.  He nonchalantly drops this like fact. 

Speaking of facts: Walt lives inside Apple HQ.  Fine, he doesn’t but he certainly is privy to what’s going on in there.  This was a targeted, intended, marketing move by the experienced Apple team two days before launch day of the device that is the first to actually compare to the iPhone.  And we bought it.

We can’t believe Mossberg broke an NDA and slipped up.  Our own Appletell sees it as speculation, ending their piece with “With the WWDC keynote only a few days away it will be interesting to see if he is correct.”  Of course he is correct, that’s like saying, “I wonder if the Apple commercial is correct.”  Mossberg and Apple marketing just got married.  The new iPhone is the bun in the oven.

Hulu who?

Pay for Hulu???  Sha, as in not.  (and I am done with the Wayne’s World references for now).  Seriously?  Hulu became popular cause it is on the internet and free.  Take away one of those and you’ve got what everyone else has.  We call it cable.  Lose the hipness, loose the coolness and pay to play turns us sour.

Here is what our Jodie Andrefski had to say: “According to statements he(Jonathon Miller, the newly appointed chief digital officer of News Corp) made at an Internet Week event sponsored by The Hollywood Reporter, he can see a future which includes at least some of the movies and TV shows on Hulu only being made available to subscribers.  “In my opinion the answer could be yes. I don’t see why over time that shouldn’t happen. I don’t think it’s on the agenda for Monday”

Yeah, good thing it is not on the agenda for Monday cause it is a stupid idea.  People will come to it as an alternative because it is convenient, but if we have to pay, we’ll stay on our couches.  Jonny, listen to me: keep the momentum going.  Keep bringing us to your site.  Tie in advertising.  Change how you handle product placement.  But don’t throw up subscription fees.  Torrents are just a click away.

Robert’s got Palm Pre possible pre-purchase paranoia

Standing next to Robert at the CES announcement back in January, I could tell he was excited then.  Reading his piece on the early reviews, you can still feel that excitement in his writing.  Robert wants to put the Pre into a box: >iPhone, >G1, G1Twitter is spam.  Spam is Twitter. Our Sue Walsh reports on an increasing problem with Twitter: spam.  The way Twitter sees it, spam is following people just to make yourself more popular so they can send out their spam. Only, I say everything on Twitter is spam.  I follow a bunch of people who send out their garbage.  Some of it is self-promotion of their blog posts, some of it is daily boring happenings, some of it is late night drunk dialing.  But all of it could and probably should be considered spam.  One funny aspect is for spam to work on Twitter, users have to opt-in, that is follow the spammer.  Turning the spammer off is as easy as un-following.  This is very different from email in that they’ll keep sending you stuff long after you say, “no, thank you.”  Just un-follow or actually evaluate who you follow. Seems like Twitter should focus on bigger things than fretting over things we can control; silly Twitter.  You can follow my self-promotion, daily boring happenings and late-night drunk dialing here or you can follow Gadgetells 100% non-spam Twitter feed here.