Since Amazon announced their Kindle Fire Device, to be released November 5th, I’ve been wanting to pre-order it. It seemed like a no brainer at first: A tablet that runs android, for much much less than the Apple iPad.

The Amazon Silk browser stores highly used content in the cloud and pre-loads it to your device when you hit a page — In other words, it guesses what you’re going to click on next, so when you hit a webpage, the Fire is working in the background to load what you’re most likely next clicks will be, which results in a lightning fast experience for most users. Sounds great!

But upon further investigation, it turns out that what has happened is that Amaon has forked android in a totally different direction… which makes me a little concerned.

Amazon aims to release its own App Store, which will circumvent the Android Marketplace. App Programmers will now need to optimize for Apple’s App Store, the Android Marketplace, and now, Amazon’s App Store for Android… which, clearly, is not a one-to-one relationship to the Android Marketplace as I had originally assumed.

So the question becomes, is the Kindle Fire still worth it? I want access to Android Apps, but what I’m really interested in is a cheap tablet that I can use to hit Google Reader and other sites — I sit infront of a computer long enough during the day that I want a different experience when I’m casually browsing the web.

But is the Kindle Fire taking us in a different, bastardized direction?

Boutiques.com apparently launched with an interesting little meta tag that tells search engines to essentially ignore everything on its website.

With one line of code, they’ve told Google, Bing and every other search robot out there to ignore its content.

After reading on Hacker News How to Screw Up a The Launch of a Million Dollar Web Property, I couldn’t help but make a quick rebuttal…

I’ve noticed over the past few days a few stories talking about Boutiques.com and their alleged incompetence. Sure, they’ve blocked off all the robots out there with one line of code… but one line of code takes less than a second to remove!

So what if Boutiques.com doesn’t want to be indexed by search engines during the first week of their launch? Perhaps they are interested in releasing their new site to real human beings rather than search robots.

One line of code is easy to change, and although the hacker community has decided that they are all incompetent, it seems to me that they are generating buzz and creating backlinks with this move. I’d wager you’ll see the meta tag dropped soon enough…

Personally, I never visited boutiques.com before this debacle took place… so they certainly have more attention being devoted to them now by humans than they had pre-launch… regardless of whether or not robots like them or not.

Update: Boutiques.com is owned by… Google! Plenty of incompetent people over there. This must be an oversight… rolls eyes. If you can’t find them in a search engine, I guess you’ll have to visit the actual site.

After you log in on a website, that site transmits a cookie to your computer. This is how you stay logged in as you travel from page to page during your session. The Firesheep extension allows anyone using it to sniff out and capture these cookies as they are transmitted from the wireless router you are connected to.

There is a way to Protect from Firesheep using Firefox, although it’s not guaranteed to work across all sites. Your best protection is to abstain from logging into no SSL encrypted sites when you’re on a public wireless network. Some websites, such as your Bank or PayPal always use SSL (look for the ‘https://’ and not ‘http://’) are immune because all communication between your web browser and the server is encrypted.