Amazon Flexible Payments Service launches. That was the last product I worked on before leaving Amazon. After finishing a product definition and filing for a patent or two for the payment web service, I left for NYC and the film world. It had been so long since I'd heard anything about it that I though it had been killed, but I'm glad to see it make it to market. Just glancing at some of the service highlights, it seems to be have retained almost all of the cool features we envisioned for it, especially the flexible instructions. In the next year or so, some people are going to build some really cool payment apps using this service. There isn't the option for free person-to-person bank debit transfers, however, which, though it wouldn't make any money for Amazon, would enable some cool consumer apps.

GMailSecure is a Greasemonkey script for Firefox that forces GMail to use https.

Meemix is another one of those Internet radio sites like Pandora or Last.fm that tries to serve up music that you'll like. I've played with the beta a bit and it seems to be choosing songs well. But goodness gracious that is one confusing interface. Whoever designed that page did Meemix a huge disservice. There are all sorts of non-standard icons everywhere, the majority of which might as well be hieroglyphics. You cannot underestimate the importance of a clear, simple interface for a new product like this, especially one fighting for mindshare in an already crowded space. Pandora, iLike, Last.fm, The Filter, and on and on. I don't track the stock market and venture capital space enough to say whether or not we're in the midst of another bubble, but there are definitely plenty of markets that are overcrowded. They can't all survive. If they truly intend on treating this as a beta that they'll learn from, they better clean up that interface pronto.

The NYTimes outs Fake Steve Jobs: he's played by Daniel Lyons, senior editor at Forbes. Thanks, NYTimes, for now shaving in half the fun that we all had reading Fake Steve Jobs' blog.

Gilbert Arenas is the Microsoft of the NBA. He got outed for stealing someone's joke about shark attacks and posting it to his blog as his own, and after some folks called him on it, he responded on his blog.

Let’s not forget, “Hibachi