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My take on technology and other topics...
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Posted on Friday, November 18, 2011 8:12 PM
The June launch of Google+ was met with a mixture of
intrigue and bemusement. Intrigue because social media has become such a phenomenon
in the second decade of the 21 Century that anything new
inevitably provokes curiosity. Bemusement for much the same reason – in an
online world which offers Facebook and Twitter, who needs a third mass market social
network?
Of course Google+ is not the search giant’s first venture
into social media. 2010 saw the launch of its previous attempt - Google Buzz – but this was severely criticised at
launch for lax default privacy settings. In particular, users’ most frequent
Gmail contacts were openly displayed on their profile pages. Although such
security holes were later plugged, Buzz never recovered from the bad publicity
and last month, Google announced the discontinuation of the service.
To date, Google+ has fared better and after a wobbly exit
from an invitation-only beta status, this brand new and shiny social network is
open to all. For those who spend their social media lives bouncing giddily
between Facebook and Twitter, Google+ still excites little interest, but in
spite of widespread indifference, a modest but growing user base has begun to
develop. Google+ offers some advantages - a much less cluttered interface, as
well as an innovative ‘circles’ feature for easy contact and friend tracking,
but the site is still a very long way from competing with Facebook’s global
audience.
Google’s latest addition to the network is Google+ Pages,
their answer to Facebook’s feature of the same name. Pages allow brands,
companies and organisations to establish a promotional presence on the network
and were unveiled earlier this month to a decidedly mixed reaction.
More positive commentators have hailed the intriguing
innovations available in Pages, including:
*The ability to add a brand page to your Google+ circles straight
from a search results page. *Access to ‘hangouts’ (live audio/ video chats) – providing
an excellent way for brands to talk directly to their fans on Google+. *The ability to place followers of a particular brand
page into different categories and share different content with each. (Of
course, the latter option depends on the Google+ Circles function).
But most of the reaction has centred on the things Google+
brand pages cannot do. There is, for example, no ability for more than one
person to administer a page, and extraordinarily for Google, no analytics are
available. Custom URLs are not also available, and admins cannot run contests
or promotions.
Respected tech journalist Robert Scoble highlights
the many difficulties that will be faced by large companies trying to maintain
brand pages when only a single member of staff can administer them. Scoble is
so unhappy with Google+ brand pages in their current form he delivers the
unambiguous verdict: “I wish I’d never heard of them”, adding “Google,
did you really think this through?”
No doubt Google+ brand pages will evolve and develop over
time. But there is something very Google about
the launch. The world’s premier search engine has so much power and so much
money that it can get away with half-finished product launches that would
cripple a less influential firm and kill a start-up. They know full well that
the power of the Google brand will draw people to brand pages whatever their
shortcomings. As website Search Engine Watch put
it: “Google Brand Pages Lacking, But You’ll Make One Anyway”.
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Posted on Monday, September 05, 2011 4:53 PM
For a few weeks in August, the UK was racked
by some of the worst urban unrest in decades.
Windows were smashed, fires started and shops and restaurants across the
country looted. TV news reports were filled with images of the police in massed
ranks fighting off hooded gangs armed with bricks and bottles. Of course, there is nothing particularly new
about such scenes, even within relatively recent history. In 1981 the nation was convulsed by serious riots in
major cities and just four years later, an infamous riot in Tottenham turned
truly ugly. In the aftermath of last months’
disturbances politicians queued up with worthy but predictable condemnations of
the violence and destruction. But this time, they had something new to blame
for the disorder, something undreamt of by their 1980s predecessors: social
media. In response to old media reports of rioters
using social media to organize and plan their activities, Prime Minister David
Cameron told a hushed House of Commons: “Everyone watching these horrific actions will be stuck by how they were
organised via social media. Free flow of information can be used for good. But
it can also be used for ill. We are working with the police, the intelligence
services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people
communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting
violence, disorder and criminality.” Much old media attention focused on the alleged use by some rioters of Blackberry
Messenger, which some confused journalists appeared to think
was a social network. It is actually, of course, an instant-messaging
application which allows users of the eponymous smartphone to talk directly to
each other. At the height of the riots, Tottenham MP David Lammy responded to
reports that some rioters were using Blackberry Messenger to plan disorder by
calling for the service to be suspended. And at the end of last month, representatives
of Blackberry manufacturer Research In Motion duly joined others from Twitter
and Facebook at a meeting with government officials. This was held, according
to reports, to discuss “voluntary” ways of restricting access to social media.
Home Office Minister Theresa May insisted the aim was not to restrict “internet
services” but to “crack down on the networks being used for criminal behavior”,
but to do so without seeking “any additional powers”. (At least, not yet!) Unsurprisingly, this ‘blame the messenger’
approach has provoked consternation and criticism. We are used to hearing about
repressive regimes attempting to control radio and television broadcasts, or filtering
the whole Internet like China, and the British Government is never slow
to criticise such oppression. Why should we regard restricting
access to social media in some yet-to-be-specified way as any different? Whatever their initial spark, the August
riots quickly turned into orgies of opportunistic criminality and vandalism. But
if we set a precedent and allow the government to restrict access to social
media to try and prevent future outbreaks, how do we know they won’t take that
easy step further forward and restrict access to the Web to try and hinder legitimate
protest at some point in the future? If nothing else, such a move would send out
all the wrong signals.
Social media services such as Twitter played
a real role in recent democratic uprisings across the Middle East. As Jo
Glanville, editor of Index on Censorship
magazine, recently noted in the New York Times:
“You do not want to be on a list with the countries that have cracked
down on social media during the Arab Spring."
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Posted on Thursday, August 11, 2011 6:31 PM
I now have not one, but two e-readers. Do I really need
two? Perhaps not, but in my defence I offer the fact that e-readers combine two
of my obsessions – books and gadgets - in one neat package. Bargain!
So why the second device? There is no doubt that Kindles have
an enormous brand recognition – for many people Kindles are e-readers, in the same way that hoovers are vacuum cleaners. They are also very capable e-readers, although
not without their quirks and failings – a stiff and arguably unnecessary hardware
keyboard amongst them. I first became aware of Canadian eBook seller Kobo (the
name is an anagram of ‘book’) when they released an e-reading app for the Apple
iPad late last year featuring a suite of social and other features they dubbed ‘Reading
Life’. So was Reading Life shallow gimmick or exciting
innovation? The jury is still out, but I was intrigued. Social networking has
spread into so many other areas of modern life, why not reading too? Then in
May Kobo announced a new model e-reader which incorporated both a touch screen
instead of that clumsy Kindle keyboard, and some (though not all) Reading Life
features – specifically reading awards, reading statistics and the ability to
post awards and content on Facebook.
I had only ever played around with the Kobo app, not
bothering to seriously tackle any books as I have never been entirely convinced
by the iPad as a reading device. But here was a an actual e-reader with Reading
Life incorporated. That had real potential. One visit to eBay and a week later a Kobe eReader Touch
arrived from the US. It is not a perfect device by any means, but it looks and
feels so different to the Kindle that I have never regretted the purchase. Rather than cheap grey plastic, the Kobo Touch is made
from tactile rubber with a distinctive quilted back which invites you,
appropriately enough, to touch it. It is also noticeably smaller than the
Kindle – about two inches shorter and around an inch narrower. My first
reaction to this size difference was disappointment – they’re squandering the
extra screen real estate provided by that virtual keyboard, I thought. But I
was gradually won round as I realised the more bijou dimensions of the Kobo
Touch let it sit very comfortably across the palm of one hand. The Kindle, by
contrast, requires a rather less relaxing two-handed pinch. Other Kobo niggles include the absence of such basics as
Twitter integration – it’s present in the iPad app, so why isn’t it here? – and
a search function. Read a long and complex book on the Kindle and you can
search it at any time for previous references to names and events. Great for people
obsessed with details like me, or for those with bad memories. There is no equivalent
on the Kobo Touch and this lack initially jarred, but perhaps I spent too much time looking things up on the Kindle and not enough time actually reading. Sometimes, perhaps, it is
better to just keep ploughing on and not worry about events three chapters ago.
The ‘awards’ – badges that pop up every so often, for
performing particular ‘feats’ (reading at particular times of day, reading a
certain number of books, looking up words in the built-in dictionary, etc) –
are quite fun in a competitive kind of way, and if you feel like showing off you
can post them to Facebook too, no doubt to the baffled bemusement of all your
friends. Read a physical book and watch your bookmark slowly
travel from the front to the back cover. It’s an organic, visual experience.
But read the same book on an e-reader and you will know precisely how far you
have read at any one time. And I mean precisely – for example, my Kobo Touch
tells me I am currently 32 per cent of the way through A Clash of Kings by George RR Martin.And the Kobo Reading Life statistics feature is
an amplification of this e-reader characteristic – not only will it tell you
how far you have read (curiously the Kobo numbers pages by chapter rather than
by the whole book), but also the length of your average reading session, how
many pages of the book you have read, the percentage of your ‘library’ (e-book
collection) read to date…the list goes on. Geeky, perhaps, but strangely
compelling. I don’t find it difficult to imagine Kobo readers comparing their
stats like school boys trading football cards in the playground. So is the Kobo eReader Touch e-reading done right? Its
approach is very different to the mega-selling Kindle and it offers some
distinctive reading experiences. That pleasingly smooth rubber case and
(admittedly not as responsive as it could be) touch screen make the Kindle feel
cheap and plasticky by comparison. The Kobo even features an expansion card
slot! But there is one area in which the Kindle wins – choice.
Amazon is a juggernaut, a behemoth, and the number of Kindle titles available
with just one click of a button leaves the modestly proportioned Kobo in the
shade. Will bestsellers and popular fiction keep Kobo afloat? Only time will
tell.
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Posted on Sunday, June 19, 2011 12:53 PM
Ah, Twitter. Some people still scoff at the supposed
mundanity of many tweeters and the site’s alleged lack of visual excitement
when compared to Facebook, but the San Francisco-based service is now five
years old and has attracted a very impressive user base in that time – currently
in the region of 200 million users.
And if recent news is anything to go by, that user base
will only get bigger. Earlier this month, tech giant Apple announced that
Twitter would be deeply integrated into iOS5, the next version
of its mobile and tablet PC operating system. When it is launched this autumn,
iOS 5 users will be able to tweet directly from several built-in apps,
including Photos, Youtube, Safari and Maps.
Currently, iPhone and iPad users must open either the
Twitter app, or the Twitter website in the Safari browser, and pull in any content
they wish to tweet from there – for example, photos or videos.
Given the huge, multinational popularity of the iPhone
and iPad, the launch of iOS5 will almost certainly lead to a further dramatic
spike in the Twitter user base. So why did Apple – which has gone from the edge
of bankruptcy in the mid-1990s to the world’s most valuable brand in little
more than 15 years - choose Twitter for this coronation, not global leader Facebook? According to Joe Wilcox, writing on technology site
betanews, the decision may be down to Apple and Facebook having different priorities.
Facebook is, he writes, intensely focused on pulling user content into the ‘cloud’,
pushing related advertising there – and, of course, making it difficult for
users to pull that content back out. Apple, by contrast, still makes the
majority of its profits from hardware sales rather than software, and so prefers
user content to flow freely between devices. Facebook is also, in one sense, a web- (or cloud-) based
operating system, and one for which software developers can write applications.
Some of these have proved enormously popular (yes, Farmville, I’m looking at
you!). You don’t need a degree in business studies to see Facebook apps as
direct competition to Apple’s iOS and Mac OS app stores. We saw a glimpse of such conflicts of interest in
September last year, when Apple launched Ping, a poorly received social network
focused on music which was integrated into its iTunes jukebox software. At its
launch, Apple CEO Steve Jobs publicly demonstrated Ping’s various features,
including Facebook integration. But to the disappointment of many, the latter
feature was almost immediately removed. A subsequent investigation by Wall Street Journal
columnist Kara Swisher revealed that Facebook and Apple had failed to reach
agreement on Ping integration, because, to quote Steve Jobs, the social network
had demanded "onerous terms that we could not agree
to." So, of course, Apple launched Ping with
unauthorized Facebook integration, and this was, predictably, quickly blocked
by the site! Meanwhile, app hype aside, a great number of tweeters
still use the Twitter website to broadcast to the world – at least some of the
time! With them in mind, Twitter recently announced two new website features: improved search results and integrated photo hosting.
That latter will mean photographs can be attached directly to tweets without
the sometimes use of third party sites like Twitpic. It seems we’ve come a very long way since the first ever
tweet, sent on 21 March 2006 by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. Wondering what
this momentous pronouncement was? “Just setting up my twttr”. Prophetic words!
Scott Forstall, Senior Vice President of iOS Software at Apple, demonstrates Twitter integration in iOS5 at the Wolrdwide Developers Conference June 6 2011 |
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Posted on Thursday, May 12, 2011 11:46 AM
News from the publishing front line: UK sales of "digital book products" rose by 20 per cent last year.
According to the Publishers Association, total sales hit £180 million
last year - a healthy figure which helped make up for a 3 per fall in
physical book sales. It seems pretty clear in which direction the wind is blowing. As
Richard Mollet, Chief Executive of the Publishers Association, says in
The Guardian article: "Digital publishing is growing at an impressive
rate in whichever part of the sector you choose to look." As
more and more of us become comfortable with handheld electronic devices,
reading book on gadgets like the Kindle no longer seems anywhere near
as strange as it might once have done. I am currently using my own
Kindle to plough my way through all 835 pages of A Game of Thrones
by George RR Martin, book one in a series of five (and counting!)
equally door-stopping high fantasy epics. According to the Kindle, I am
currently 29 per cent of the way through and it all seems very natural. Some
people react the rise of the Kindle and its rivals with
desperate-sounding jeremiads. "It'll never replace real books!" they
proclaim. But has anyone ever said they would? The experience of reading
an e-book will always be different to that of reading a real book (or
'treebook' as they have now been dubbed in certain corners of the
internet!), and that will never change. Reading a printed book is a
physical, sensory experience and sometimes that's just what you want. Some of you may have read my previous blog post
on the Kindle. Since then, a software update has brought at least one
welcome change to the device: real page numbers! Only some e-books
feature them at the moment but it is the proverbial step in the right
direction. I have also been exploring one pretender to the Kindle crown. Based in Toronto, Canada, Kobo
is a self-described 'eReading service', combining a website, apps for
popular mobile devices like the iPhone, the iPad, Android phones, the
Blackberry and even the Palm Prē! There is, inevitably, also a reading device complete with e-ink screen. It's been given the self-explanatory name Kobo eReader
and looks not unlike the Kindle but it does have a few distinguishing
features - a quilted back, for example, and a range of exotic-sounding
colours. Pearlized Lilac or Onyx anyone? At the end of last year,
the iPad version of the Kobo app saw the introduction of an innovative
but perhaps not entirely practical suite of features called 'Reading
Life', since introduced to the iPhone version as well. Readers can track
their reading habits via statistics and an evolving personal 'Book
Cover', share favourite passages on Facebook and Twitter, unlock virtual
trophies to mark particular reading achievements (which can also be
displayed on social networks), and even check in, foursquare-style, with
characters and places in the books they are reading. "People
who are making the switch to e-reading and building their lifetime
libraries want an innovative social experience to go with it,”
proclaimed Kobo CEO Mike Serbinis when Reading Life was unveiled.
“E-reading is going social, local and real-time with Kobo Reading Life,
allowing us to create a fun, engaging and meaningful experience for our
users.” Combining the popularity of social reading experiences
like book clubs with the popularity of social networks? It would be easy
to dismiss reading life as nothing more than a collection of gimmicks,
but Kobo may well be on to something here. We are still waiting for
anything resembling a response from Amazon. Perhaps they feel Facebook
check-ins would get in the way of just reading books?
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Posted on Thursday, May 12, 2011 11:29 AM
At a recent family gathering, talk turned to my late father, who died more than eight years ago. Dad was a man of voluble opinions and of enthusiasms too - when he passed away, he left a home in downtown San Francisco filled with valuable first edition books and rare tools. These are the things which we and his friends remember most easily. But his interests extended into many areas and some were easier to miss. He never entered higher education but in the right mood could talk knowledgeably about Scottish history and had an unshowy, sincere interest in poetry. He inherited his mother's love of animals, especially cats, but in a very understated way - while Granny Annie (as we called her) openly doted on her furry friends, he quietly looked after strays in need, feeding a feral cat who lived on nearby rooftops and another who prowled the boatyard where he worked as a carpenter. One day he found a fledgling which had fallen from its nest and painstakingly hand-reared it - later telling me the story in great detail over coffee and cake in a cafe somewhere in the Cotswolds. When my brother and I flew over to California to visit him as teenagers, he often took us to the cinema. I recall him rolling in the aisles at 1988 crime comedy A Fish Called Wanda and on another occasion recounting the plot of 1981 apocalyptic action flick Mad Max II: The Road Warrior to my brother and I with great relish (and sound effects!). He also took us both to see old Japanese samurai films on several occasions. One that made a particular impression on me was the famous Yojimbo from 1961, later remade by Sergio Leone as A Fistful of Dollars. Afterwards we would retire to - where else? - a Japanese restaurant. At the time I took all this for granted - after all, doesn't everyone like going to the pictures? - but Dad's interest in the silver screen dated back decades even then. For him it seems to have been more than a bit of escapist fun on a Saturday afternoon. Long before I came on the scene, my parents regularly went to see films purely because of the director, like true cinema buffs, and my mother also recalls my father and his brother Jay excitedly returning from viewing samurai epics in the mid 1960s. I am told that his all-time favourite film was the 1948 gold prospecting yarn The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, although oddly, he never mentioned this to me. Reminiscing over a meal with my mother, something startling suddenly occurred to me. I've turned into my Dad! I go to the cinema so often I have a loyalty card, I am a long-standing member of rental service Lovefilm, and doubtless to the delight of my local HMV, I buy films. My living room and study brim with DVDs and a small but steadily growing collection of high definition Blu-rays. I have been doing all this for years , but for some odd reason, I never really connected it to my father until that moment. As he once said to me: "it's funny how the genes bounce around". Very true Dad.
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Posted on Wednesday, April 13, 2011 12:35 PM
It was sometime in 2007 that I first began hearing my
friends and colleagues talking a new website called ‘Facebook’. I didn’t get
it. Oh, I got the basic principle – that you could post photos of yourself and
share details of your latest escapades and musings with friends near and far.
What I didn’t get was why you’d want to. I said to the Facebook users around
me: “If you want to have a presence on the web, why not just start a website,
or write a blog?”, and they looked confused and slightly baffled, as though
they hadn’t thought of that. But of course,
they were right and I was wrong. What I initially failed to grasp was the social nature of Facebook and its
predecessors. If you set up a Facebook profile, you are, of course, not just creating
a presence on the web, you are linking yourself to everyone in your friends
list, all of whom have full, real-time access to everything you post. Such
distinctions seem obvious these days, now that the concept of social networking
has crept into so many corners of our interconnected, internet-saturated lives.
But just four years ago, they were rather less obvious – to me at least! Back here in 2011,
Twitter and Facebook have become the twin pillars of the social media landscape
and it is hard to escape links and connections to either network on news media
and content sharing sites across the Web. But the Internet
never stands still and over the last year or two, the field of social
networking has begun to evolve away from the desktop in ways that reflect the
rise of mobile computing and the exponential growth of the smartphone market. In
2009 we saw the wobbly rise of location-based social network foursquare, which takes full advantage of
the GPS chip embedded in many modern smartphones. And now an even newer wave of
social networking services are focused on their cameras. Last year the
world was introduced to Path, a app-centred
social network based around the idea of sharing photos from your daily life
with your ‘50 closest’ friends and family, in contrast to supposed sprawl of
Facebook. (But does anyone out there really have 50 “close” friends and
family?) Meanwhile, Instagram, for the iPhone, is, and I quote, “a fast, beautiful and
fun way to share your life with
friends through a series of pictures.” It sounds like fun, but you do have to
look closely to see much of a difference between it and Path. And now comes yet another iPhone app for
sharing your smartphone snaps with the world: Color, recently
launched with the help of a hefty $41 million in venture capital funding. Does
Color bring anything new to the photo-sharing party? Users can tag their photos
with location data and browse the photos of people in their current vicinity.
In other words – it’s Instagram meets foursquare. Clearly the
venture capitalists who have backed these concepts with hard cash think they
have a future – and perhaps they are just months from becoming all the rage.
Smartphones with embedded GPS chips and decent cameras are, after all, no
longer expensive novelties confined to the well-off. But until
significant numbers of people start to use these apps and post their photos, Color
et al. will struggle. I have several friends who simply cannot grasp the
concept of Twitter, now second only to Facebook in mainstream appeal. How many
of them use Path? Precisely none – there was little point in installing the app
on my phone! I know a handful of people who occasionally dabble with
foursquare, and even fewer who use Instagram. A recent update to
Path added several new Facebook sharing options. You can now tag Facebook
friends featured in your Path photos, publish your Path snapshots to your Facebook
wall and privately share them with – your guessed it – your Facebook friends.
No doubt the developers felt that such compromises were necessary to broaden
Path’s appeal, but the danger is clear. If people start to use Path as a mere
add-on to Facebook, any chance it has of establishing a distinct identity will start
to crumble.
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Posted on Sunday, March 13, 2011 5:34 PM
One of Twitter's most distinctive features is its
'follow' mechanism. You can 'follow' other tweeters and thereby see their
tweets in your timeline, but they are under no obligation to follow you back.
This is in stark contrast to Facebook, where you 'confirm someone as a friend'
- the very phrase implies a reciprocal relationship. Add someone on Facebook
and you automatically see all their updates in your news feed. No real problem
if you have 32 - or even 102 - friends, but less ideal if you are famous and
have thousands of people competing for your attention online. Once celebrity users began to voice their frustrations
with these issues, Facebook introduced a new mechanism, whereby you could
declare yourself a 'fan' of someone or something on the site. This dealt with
the issue of communication overload but there was still something missing.
There is little real difference, after all, between a Facebook page and a
conventional website. It is just as packaged and impersonal. Then Twitter came along and the celebrities flocked. Here
was the perfect way to talk directly and easily to your fans, unmediated by PR
men or even – gasp! - journalists. It was direct, immediate, and heart-felt -
or at least it seemed to be.
Fans could follow the famous in the tens of thousands and
that had no effect on who they personally chose to follow. It was ideal. But celebrity tweeters still have a problem - what to do
when one of their Twitter followers tries to talk to them. Anyone can, after
all, send an '@' message to anyone else on Twitter, and that person will then
see it in their timeline, regardless of whether they follow you. They can
choose to block you, but this is a painstaking, individual process. If the famous person responds to '@' messages, they please a
few fans but risk encouraging a flood of other messages from enthusiastic but
unrealistic tweeters. Or shold they just ignore them? Most celebrities -
understandably - opt for the latter course most of the time, and this has the
additional benefit of discouraging Twitter 'trolls' who might otherwise line up
to make rude comments in the hope of provoking a response. Last week saw the launch of an entirely new spin on
celebrity tweeting. Twitrelief, part of the annual Comic
Relief initiative, sees a variety of comedians, presenters, authors, fashion
designers and actors offering eBay bidders the chance to win a 'superfollow',
in which said celebrity will follow their tweets for 90 days, retweet one of
their 140-character utterances, and also send them an '@' message. Many of the
participants are also offering various extras, including personal appearances, signed
scripts and walk-on parts. Despite the worthiness of the cause - all the money
raised goes, of course, to Comic Relief - the launch caused a great deal of
controversy on - where else? - Twitter. Many Twitter users condemned the
concept - it was self-aggrandising, they claimed, it was reducing genuine,
albeit Internet-enabled, human interaction to a commodity. Others argued
passionately that it was for charity and therefore above any kind of criticism.
Proponents of each view angrily unfollowed each other and for a while on launch
day (March 10), Twitrelief was an official Twitter trend. At the risk of sounding cynical, I took the critical
view. Isn't there, after all, something inherently undignified about
effectively paying to have a celebrity listen to what you have to say? I also
think the eventual winners of each so-called superfollow will find it hard to
relax and be themselves on Twitter for the duration of the 90 days. Some will
no doubt gush and embarrass themselves, others will feel they need to engage in
140-character performances in the probably vain hope of impressing their
temporary Twitter buddy. And even if they do manage to engage the celebrity in
a genuine conversation or two, the artificiality of the whole enterprise will
be thrown into stark relief on the 91st day when their new Twitter friend
unfollows them. But perhaps I am taking too negative a view. Lots of
money will, of course, be raised for worthy causes and perhaps many of the
auction winners will genuinely enjoy the experience. Twitrelief poses some intriguing questions about the
nature of social networking. Can it be packaged and commodified in this way?
Should we expect social networking-enabled communication to be genuine on some
level or is it inherently artificial? In other words: is a tweet from Stephen
Fry the equivalent of a backstage autograph?
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Posted on Wednesday, February 16, 2011 8:13 PM
And so, after only four episodes, it seems the end is already nigh for BBC big budget sci-fi drama Outcasts. Today the corporation took the rare step of announcing that from as soon as next week, the show will be moved from its primetime slots to late Sunday nights thanks to low ratings. No doubt any planned second series will now never be made. I reacted to the news with a frustrated sigh. After some initial scepticism I had found becoming getting increasingly gripped by Outcasts. The drama's premise - humans fleeing a catastrophe-wracked earth have established a colony on a planet named Carpathia - is reasonably original, the characters and conflicts engaging and credible (within a science fiction context). There are no cheesy aliens, laser blasters, robots, talking computers or any of a hundred other science fiction clichés. Indeed, for a show set on another planet, Outcasts takes a decidedly down to earth (!) approach to events. An episode earlier this week showed two engineers casually tramping up into the hills to repair a communications antenna with rucksacks on their backs, like two hikers setting for a bracing day in the Lake District. It sounds mundane but you would never see Captain Kirk and Spock doing any such thing. The colonists' city is a completely convincing huddle of prefabricated buildings and storage containers. You watch and think: "yes, if humanity ever finds an inhabitable planet with a breathable atmosphere and also solves the not inconsiderable problem of actually getting there, then that is exactly what a settlement would look like!". Outcasts was filmed in South Africa and the first few episodes broadcast have featured some striking visual images - a fat moon hanging low over jagged mountains, creeping clouds of white dust, a disintegrating space craft burning through the sky in a streak of fiery purple, churching cyclonic storms viewed from orbit. Outcasts may not be perfect but at least it takes risks. At least it's something different and has the courage of its convictions. But I seem to be in the minority for thinking so. I have been genuinely astonished by some of the negative reviews of Outcasts on Twitter, for example. You find yourself wondering - like a strident fanboy huffing and puffing on the letters page of their favourite magazine - "were they watching the same show?" Perhaps a brand new science fiction show was never going to find a huge mainstream audience, but it does look as though some people just won't give anything new and different a chance. No doubt the next time a slightly left-field script crosses the desk of whichever commissioning editor green-lit 'Outcasts', they will play it safe and choose something predictable and mainstream instead. What a pity. Television is a harsh mistress, both here and in the US. So rarely are shows given the chance to grow, develop and find their audience. If they are not instant hits, they are quickly and mercilessly cancelled, like unadoptable strays being put down in a dogs' home. And the people who did enjoy the shows are left dangling. Few things are more unsatisfying than a story with no ending.
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Posted on Wednesday, February 16, 2011 8:09 PM
When the first iPhone went on sale in the UK in November 2007 I was there on launch day. I had been using Apple computers of various kinds for a full decade by that point and was very curious to see the Apple take on the mobile phone. Despite being relatively underpowered, the first iPhone looked astonishing, quite unlike any other mobile phone available at the time. Before the iPhone I used a succession of Nokia phones - most recently the N95. The N95 featured a then-innovative slide-out keyboard and came clad in a shiny silver metal case that gave it a curiously armour-plated look, as though Nokia suspected users might take into a war zone. At the time Nokia smartphones seemed impressively high tech, bristling with gigabytes of memory, GPS systems and multi-format multimedia capabilities. That was the hardware. The software was something else entirely: treacle slow, buggy, and weighed down with fiddly menus. At the time, I took this for granted as I simply didn't realise that anything better was possible on a mobile phone. Until, that is, I took my first iPhone out of its box. Yes, it had an average camera, and couldn't multitask, cut and paste or send MMS (picture) messages, but the interface and user experience was so far ahead of the clumsy N95 that there was no going back. Three years on, current iPhones come with much better cameras capable even of atmospheric shots in low light (see photograh). They can happily cut and paste text, run more than one app at at a time and send picture messages with the best of them. Nokia, meanwhile, is struggling. Last week, a startlingly blunt memo by recently appointed CEO Stephen Elop was leaked to the press. In it he claimed the venerable Finnish company was "standing on a burning platform". He compared competition from the astonishingly popular iPhone and the ever-increasing number of devices running the Android OS to "multiple points of scorching heat that are fuelling a blazing fire around us". Dramatic language indeed. Elop continued: "The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don't have a product that is close to their experience. Android came on the scene just over two years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable." This was followed by a few days later by the announcement of a new alliance with Microsoft. Nokia will adopt the Seattle software giant's recently released Windows Phone operating system as its primary smartphone platform, (although not until October at the earliest), slowly phasing out the aging Symbian OS. A radical move, and one which has received a decidedly mixed reaction. Both Nokia and Microsoft's share prices dropped following the announcement (Nokia's by an alarming 25 per cent) and a group of Nokia shareholders even launched a short-lived initiative calling for Elop's immediate dismissal. Nokia is still a huge company but there is little doubt that is in big trouble. Reading the news I couldn't help but recall the fate of the once mighty PDA maker Palm Inc. After floundering for years with self-defeating corporate strategies and confused and confusing attempts to replace its increasingly long-in-the-tooth Palm operating system, the ailing technology firm eventually released the well-received webOS. But it was too little, too late. The company struggled to make headway in a newly crowded and utterly changed smartphone marketplace. Last summer Palm was wholly acquired by Hewlett-Packard for a relatively modest $1.2 billion.
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Posted on Wednesday, February 09, 2011 2:19 PM
Ah, the Amazon Kindle - certainly the best known and probably the best selling of all pure e-book readers. Yes, other products are available - for example the Sony Reader - but none have (yet anyway) achieved the brand name impact of the Kindle. When the urge for an e-reader overcame me last year, I bought a Kindle. This was partly because I am a fairly heavy Amazon user, and partly because I had heard a lot about the Kindle and was intrigued. I had also used the Kindle app on my iPhone - yes, the Kindle is a software platform as well as a physical product. For someone who is both a confirmed bookworm and something of a gadget hound, the Kindle sounded like the perfect new toy. There is certainly something pleasingly new and 21st Century about downloading a book - no need to wait days for the bulky physical edition to arrive, or to pay over the odds for it in a bricks and mortar book store. And just like digital music players, e-book readers can save a lot of space. Books are bulky and sometimes heavy. Every book bought on an e-reader is valuable shelf space saved. Perhaps an 'iPod moment' for books was always inevitable. But there is one major difference between music and books. Whatever the format - physical (vinyl, cassette, CD) or digital - recorded music has always been intangible, something delivered to our ears by a mechanical device. But to read a book, you have to touch it. You hold it in your hands and turn the pages, so the experience of reading a book is bound up with the physical object itself - the front and back covers, the pictures, the weight, the texture and smell of the paper. All this disappears with an e-reader. Books become mere consignments of words, graphics, and information - efficient but slightly cold. Some e-reading platforms attempt to mitigate this effect - Apple's iBooks are a good example - with a natural-looking layout and virtual pages which can be turned by touching the screen. But even this thin simulation disappears on the Kindle. Open a book on your Kindle and you are presented with a rectangle of text. When you've finished reading that, you press the forward button and the next rectangle of text appears. There are no page numbers, just the oddly termed 'locations'. On a particular screen of text, you may be informed, for instance, that it represents 'locations 43-51' of 3829. This may make perfect sense from a programmer's point of view, but it seems remote and unintuitive to me, nothing like the experience of reading a physical book. The Kindle is really all about the screen. It uses so-called 'electronic paper' (e-ink) to create clear, readable text even in bright sunlight, with none of the backlit glare or flicker of conventional LCD screens. When I switched on my Kindle for the first time, I was instantly reminded of the Letraset transferable lettering sets I enjoyed as a boy. The third generation Kindle is undeniably light and has a smooth, tactile, rubbery case. If I could change one thing about the design, it would be the somewhat stiff and unresponsive keyboard beneath the screen. A full, hardware keyboard is simply unnecessary in such a device and just seems to get between you and whatever book you are reading. At most Kindle users will type the occasional search word or note. A virtual keyboard like that found on the iPhone would be quite adequate for this, allowing for a larger screen and - hey! - maybe even real page numbers. But what do I know? The current model, launched in July 2010, has been a huge hit. In December, Amazon announced that it had already become the best-selling product in the entire history of the company.
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Posted on Wednesday, February 09, 2011 2:09 PM
Just a couple of months ago, few people had heard of Quora, the suddenly very fashionable social question
and answer site. Founded back in 2009 by Charlie Cheever and Adam D’Angelo, traffic
to the the site suddenly exploded around Christmas and it now has comfortably
in excess of 500,000 registered users. The premise behind Quora is very simple. Registered users
post questions – and other registered users answer them. Despite the enthusiasm
of some social media commentators, Quora is a social networking site in that
sense only: the connection it forms between question setters and those who
answer them. A visit to Quora reveals a sparsely designed, text-heavy
site with a clear message: it’s the content that is important here, not eye
candy. The latest questions to be posted scroll down the home page, in an
simple feed. A straightforward search box at the top is available to users
looking for questions and answers on particular topics. Of course, Quora is the not the first question and answer
site – but a few relatively simple factors distinguish it from well-established
rivals like Yahoo! Answers and WikiAnswers. Firstly there is the
uncluttered design, free from the garish ads and colour splashes of
other sites. Then there is the fact that users must use their real names rather
the internet pseudonyms so common elsewhere. The belief – or at least hope
– is that this will encourage quality material. People are far less likely to
troll, flame or post nonsense when their real name is attached to the result. Finally, Quora has attracted some big names –
particularly amongst the technology industry. Quora users include Steve Case, co-founder
of the once enormous AOL, and Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook. If you
want to know exactly what the latter thought of recent – and much lauded – film
‘The Social Network’, for example, Quora is the
place to look.
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Posted on Friday, February 04, 2011 8:48 PM
These days more or less everything Apple Inc. says or does seems guaranteed to cause a global stir and the iPad, launched last year, is no exception. Since it first appeared on shelves, we have seen a predictable flurry of 'me too' copycat tablets, as well as acres of media speculation on the role tablet computers may play in the future of media consumption. Apple wants to us to think otherwise of course, but in truth the current iPad, with its bulk and backlit screen, is not a great choice when it comes to reading books. Yet it is precisely these shortcomings, largely down to the iPad's full colour screen and multimedia capabilities, that make the iconic tablet a great way to read digital magazines and newspapers. To come anywhere close to the experience of browsing through a printed magazine or newspaper on a computer you need both space and colour. The iPad and at least some of the copycats offer this. The popular Amazon Kindle doesn't. Yes, you can read newspapers on the Kindle, but they appear only as a static and uninspiring list of headlines. Unlike actual newspapers and magazines, the Kindle is also restricgted to black and white. Since the iPad first appeared, several existing print publications have launched special iPad editions, taking full advantage of the device with embedded videos and animated graphics. For perfect examples, search for US magazines Wired and Popular Mechanics on the App Store. We've also seen iPad-only magazines. Just before Christmas, Richard Branson, who knows a bandwagon when he sees one, launched lifestyle magazine Project. And now, a big hand, please, for the world's first iPad-only newspaper, The Daily, launched just this week by Rupert Murdoch's News International corporation. Full colour and multimedia-focused, The Daily is also, slightly disappointingly, US-only at present, although an international rollout is expected eventually. The disappearance of News International stalwart The Times behind a paywall last summer was preceded by the appearance of an iPad edition. Whatever you may think of it politics, The Times, with its print-like pages and no-fuss inclusion of multimedia (why look at a photo when you can watch a video?) felt very natural on the iPad, and the brand new Daily is clearly following in its wake. Meanwhile, other UK newspapers, including the otherwise Apple-obsessed Guardian, have continued, rather disappointingly, to drag their feet when it comes to the iPad. Yes, you can read The Guardian on your iPad via the built-in browser but there is no sign of an iPad-specific app. I wonder where we will find ourselves in ten years time? When 2021 rolls around, printed magazines and newspapers may seem as quaint, charming and thoroughly old-fashioned as vinyl records do today.
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Posted on Thursday, January 27, 2011 6:24 PM
"Digital music sales 'slowing' " proclaims the BBC headline. What? Are people flocking back into HMV and queuing up to buy those shiny silver disks we were all so enamored of a few short years ago? Not really. In fact, the statistics from the British Phonographic Industry only show that the relentless growth in digital music sales is slowing. Revenues shot up by a healthy 25 per cent in 2008, then by 12 per cent in 2009, then by (gasp!) only six per cent last year. No doubt the number of music fans open to the idea of buying it online is gradually declining. It would be nice to believe people are also buying more CDs, but if they are they don't seem to be doing it on the High Street. Shares in the only significant bricks and mortar music retailer left - HMV - recently plunged after the firm announced poor sales over the Christmas period. For all its convenience and infinite choice, digital music has always faced one problem: its insubstantiality. Buy a CD and you have something solid to hold in your hand. Buy an album from the iTunes store or elsewhere and you acquire a few ephemeral-seeming computer files. It's just less intuitive. The very process of converting CDs into digital format for playback on computers, iPods and similar devices is called 'ripping' - a term that sounds both obscure and painful. Some people latch onto the physical in the digital music equation - buying iPods because they are desirable shiny objects but never really understanding - or wanting to understand - how to put music on them. A former colleague of mine once asked me to show her how to put new music onto her iPod on three separate occasions….but even as I explained the process for the third time, I could tell she wasn't really listening and would have forgotten everything I said an hour later. I am old enough (just!) to remember when vinyl could be bought from any record shop. Vinyl was a very tactile medium - in stark contrast to the insubstantial perfection of digital music. You took an LP out of its sleeve and held this solid, intricately-etched black disk in your hands. As you watched light fall across the shiny grooves, you could almost the sense the music rising and falling within them. And of course if you were a music fan, there was no better place to spend an hour or two than a record store, surrounded by rack after rack holding the promise of undiscovered, eye-catchingly packaged delights. Who knew what you might find there? Yes, you can get almost anything you might want on Amazon with a few clicks and a credit card number. It offers a cornucopia of choice we could only dream of a short decade or so ago, but...it's just not the same. Log onto Amazon - or the many many similar shopping sites - and at best you find a wispy, virtual facsimile of those 'bricks and mortar' record stores which have now largely been consigned to history. You just cannot capture that piquant atmosphere on a website. Its multimedia-crowded aisles may not have seen much in the way of vinyl for years, but if HMV closes, the record store as we once knew it will surely have disappeared from the average High Street for ever.
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Posted on Monday, October 18, 2010 7:25 PM
It's fair to say that few people expected a film about the creation of Facebook. We've been getting used to the idea of hit websites for about ten years now, and there can be little doubt that Facebook is now as big as it gets: the site registered its 500 millionth user over the summer. But let's...if you'll pardon the expression, face it: websites just aren't very cinematic, are they? No explosions, no car chases, no gratuitous sex scenes. 'The Social Network' unsurprisingly features none of those things but still spins a surprisingly gripping story from the protracted birth of the world's biggest social network. And a surprisingly bleak one too, for all Facebook's claims to be focused on friendship and connection. Drenched in sombre tones of blue and grey, the film is centred around the twin lawsuits faced by Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg, who begins the film as an intense, awkward Harvard undergraduate in a Gap hoodie, and ends it as the world's youngest billionaire. As the site skyrockets, he finds himself sued both by alienated Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin and athletic twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who as fellow Harvard undergraduates hire Zuckerberg to work on their own social website concept and then accuse Zuckerberg of stealing their idea. In a truly eye-popping special effect, the twins are both - seamlessly - played by actor Armie Hammer. Directed by David Fincher, (Zodiac, Fight Club, Seven) and written by Aaron Sorkin (creator of popular TV show The West Wing), the film hums with zippy dialogue and leaves the viewer with a vivid sense of the incredulity and adrenaline that must have accompanied the characters' journey from coding a small site for students towards global domination and the status of 'accidental billionaires' (the title of the book on which the screenplay is based). The final scene is striking: alone in the Facebook office, Zuckerberg, as memorably portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg, sends a Facebook friend request to the girlfriend who dumped him at the beginning of the story, and then sits, repeatedly refreshing his profile page, waiting for the confirmation that may never come.
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Posted on Monday, September 27, 2010 7:32 PM
What is Twitter? There is, of course, no straightforward answer to this question, something that may surprise those who still associate the site with banal observations about lunch and last night's TV. It is part micro-blogging service, part news network, part RSS feed, part part instant messaging system, part social networking site…and part medium for the direct and uncensored pronouncements of celebrities. In today's Guardian, journalist Sam Leith takes a funny look at this little discussed element. It's all true, I'm afraid. Out there on the wild Twitter frontier, many of the very and mildly famous talk directly to their public, iPhones and keyboards bypassing the squadrons of PR officers and journalists who normally mediate their every public utterance.And you can talk back to them. Getting a response is another matter, of course. Your chances are inversely proportional to the number of followers they have: good luck getting a reply from Lady Gaga with her 6,522,955 subscribers! Over the last year, I have tweeted a few of the mildly famous for various reasons and received responses from some: Arthur Matthews (co-writer of 'Father Ted'); Mike Scott, lead singer-songwriter of folk rock legends the Waterboys; and Guardian columnist Lucy Mangan. But it is a hit and miss affair. By some curious quirk of Twitter psychology, you seem to have more chance of getting a response from tweetin' celebs if you are rude to them. Not that I would ever advocate such a thing of course! I have sent polite (but I like to think mildly engaging) tweets to both author/ presenter/ chronic Twitterer Emma Kennedy and producer/ writer Steven Moffat and got not a squeak in response, only to then seem them engaging in extended 140-character jousts with anonymous tweeters who had been less than complimentary. Last year, the UK's near-official King of Twitter Stephen Fry (a modest 1,815,929 followers) even had a minor meltdown when someone suggested on Twitter that he was 'boring'. Tsk, celebs, eh? |
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Posted on Tuesday, September 21, 2010 6:52 PM
Anyone visiting the Twitter website this afternoon was in for a strange time - bizarre errors complaining of retweets you hadn't attempted and messages you hadn't tried to send cascaded off the page. Tweets that sounded like the kind of thing C-3PO might utter after a severe knock to the head suddenly cluttered feeds. And if you merely moved your mouse over one of these streams of apparent gibberish, you ran the risk of being redirected to some very dubious sites. Mystery hackers had exploited exploited a flaw in the site's architecture to unleash 'worms' (self-replicating pieces of malicious software) written in programming language Javascript. The drama is now over. Twitter has patched the vulnerability and it is once again safe to tweet. But for an hour or so this afternoon, the worms rampaged and we remembered that even the world's biggest websites are sometimes vulnerable.
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Posted on Tuesday, September 21, 2010 6:50 PM
Earlier this month, the technology world shifted beneath our feet, but it was a quiet earthquake and didn't make many headlines. According to fresh data from market research comScore, for the first time ever US surfers spent more time on Facebook than Google during August. Yes, towering titan of the Internet Google, fueled by a near monopoly on internet advertising, is now being attracting less eyeball time than six year-old Facebook… Next month, meanwhile, sees the release of ' The Social Network', a film about the creation of…you guessed it. 'You don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies' proclaims the dramatic tagline.Perhaps unfairly, no one has yet announced a film about the birth of 14-year Google.
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Posted on Wednesday, September 08, 2010 3:31 PM
Spend any time in certain corners of the Internet and you'll soon find yourself absorbing a whole new dialect. At first the thickets of unfamiliar acronyms whack you between the eyes with all the force of an awkward branch in the bushes. But it may not be long before you're talking the language too. AFAIK, LMAO, IMHO, BFN and dozens of other online acronyms will cease to be a mystery. "OMG", you'll suddenly find yourself typing. 'PWND! TTFN, dude. Laters.''
LOL is by far the most common slice of internet slang. It stands for either 'laugh out loud' or 'lots of laughs', depending on which definition you subscribe to, and in a surprisingly short of space of time the phrase has embedded itself so deeply that it has begun to mutate into different forms and meanings. Not so long ago, someone used the word 'lollery' in a tweet addressed to me. The gentleman in question meant, of course 'something funny'. For others, 'LOL' has lost its original strength - it literally meant 'I am laughing as I type this' - and become no more than a casual conversational punctuation mark meant to suggest general friendliness: the equivalent of a smiley or that distinctive northern expression "I'm not being funny, but…" (Translation = 'I am about to say something mildly controversial but don't take it amiss, I'm still a nice person really'). It's surely only a matter of time before LOL migrates from the screen into speech and people start saying 'LOL' IRL. K3wl! |
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Posted on Wednesday, September 08, 2010 3:29 PM
I have an iPad. There - I said it.When the shiny Apple tablet was announced, some commentators grumbled about the apparent pointlessness of the device and there is some justice in this: it doesn't have an obvious primary function like the iPod or iPhone. Pre-announcement rumours suggested an e-reader of some kind - an iPod for books and magazines. That turned to be only half true. Inevitably, perhaps, we got a multimedia device that offers e-reading as only one of many features, a tablet computer which eschewed the conventions of existing e-readers. The screen is full colour and backlit, for example, unlike the black and white 'e-ink' of the popular Amazon Kindle, which is designed to imitate real paper. But the iPad makes a lot of sense when you pick one up: it is a very tactile device - light but with a reassuring heft. Listen to music or watch a video and feel the aluminium back vibrate softly beneath your fingers. And while opinions differ on the usefulness of the iPad as eBook reader, its screen and shape makes the tablet undeniably ideal for other types of reading, a prime example being newspapers and magazines. A lengthening list of titles we have all seen on the shelves of WH Smith are now available for the iPad. Sometimes these are no more than unimaginative reproductions of the print edition but just as often the developers have taken advantage of the new options open to them and incorporated innovative interactive elements. But why stop with magazines that already exist? Why not, in fact, really utilise the possibilities of this kind of device and create unique, constantly updated personal magazines from the user's favourite websites and social media accounts? That's the truly original leap taken by the developers of iPad app Flipboard, a so-called 'social magazine'. Users enter their Twitter and Facebook accounts or favourite RSS feeds and then casually browse them on flippable, virtual pages - but the content from each source does not appear as the familiar static line running from top to bottom. Instead each tweet or update is laid out across the pages in varying columns like stories in a magazine or newspaper. Pictures are no longer just links - instead they are reproduced and incorporated into the layout just like illustrations in a print publication. Similarly, the first few paragraphs of linked stories are pulled through into the layout. The first time I opened Flipboard and began to flip through the virtual pages, my jaw dropped. It was one of those startling but instantly intuitive paradigm shifts that come along all too rarely. I have been a keen user of Twitter since April last year and have accessed my feed through a variety of different apps: Seesmic, TweetDeck, Echofon, Tweetie, TwitBird…but the experience is always fundamentally the same: a descending list of tweets, some with clickable links of various kinds, most without. Only Flipboard has brought a completely new experience to the everyday act of checking my social media accounts. Why shouldn't scanning tweets be just like reading a magazine? |
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