Technology Rants

I’m surprised this has been implemented the way it has. I guess...

zoidy — Fri, 03 May 2013 16:00:35 +1000

I’m surprised this has been implemented the way it has. I guess you want to keep a product with momentum kicking along and not forcing it to fight with one arm behind its back. However, I would have assumed that as Facebook wishes to make itself the place for online identities, it would have used Facebook profiles for photo identities rather than Instagram profiles. It would have not only made it easier to tag people (as people would more than likely be using their real names rather than Twitteresque handles) but it also would allow people to tune their security settings rather than relying on Instagram’s on/off option.

instagram:

Introducing Photos of You

Photos are memories of the people, places and moments that mean the most to us. We have always sought to give you simple and expressive ways to bring the stories behind your photos to life. Your captions and hashtags capture the “what?” and your Photo Map answers the “where?” but until today we’ve never quite been able to answer the “who?”.

Today, we’re excited to introduce Photos of You and bring you a new way to share and discover stories on Instagram. When you upload a photo to Instagram, you’re now able to add people as easily as you add hashtags. Only you can add people to your photos, so you have control over the images you share. And it doesn’t stop at people—you can add any account on Instagram, whether it’s your best friend, favorite coffee shop or even that adorable dog you follow.

There will now be a Photos of You section on your profile. When someone adds you to a photo, you’ll receive a notification and the photo will appear in your Photos of You. Want to make sure you like the photo first? No problem: you can easily adjust your settings so nothing appears on your profile until you approve it. Before your Photos of You section is visible to other people, you’ll have until May 16th to play around and get used to the feature. You can find more information about how Photos of You works and how to control your visibility at help.instagram.com.

Instagram for iOS version 3.5 is currently available for download in Apple’s App Store, and Instagram for Android version 3.5 is now available on Google Play.

Facebook Home doesn’t matter, but its vision does

zoidy — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 16:30:15 +1000

Facebook Home doesn’t matter, but its vision does:

I can’t help but feel that twelve months from now we’ll look back at Home and wonder what happened to it. I could very easily be proven wrong as I feel this step will be either fully embraced or completely discarded, but I think the discarded option is looking more likely.

The question is do people really want to be fully immersed in social? I’m not so sure. I’m sure there are small demographics who do, those who are probably under the age of 25 perhaps, but from there on out there is more to a smartphone than social.

The biggest problem I see with Home is the pain factor the second you want to do anything different. Sure you can get to other apps, but it requires extra steps and because you use your smartphone so often, those extra steps really add up. Want to make a normal phone call? You’ll have to go digging. Want to use Instagram? You’ll need to go digging. Want to use a new widget to keep an eye on breaking events? You can’t do that.

No doubt Facebook will continue to evolve and improve the launcher, but at what point does it become so built out that it resembles the standard OS anyway? A Facebook compose widget on top of the home screen with a lock screen widget could roughly give you the same capabilities without the pain factor of being locked to Facebook’s world.

But hey, maybe I’m too old to understand this stuff.

In First 24 Hours Of 3.0 Launch, Path Made More Money Than Ever And Sent More Than 1M Messages

zoidy — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 09:42:50 +1100

In First 24 Hours Of 3.0 Launch, Path Made More Money Than Ever And Sent More Than 1M Messages:

Who on earth is spending money on whacky stickers they are selling? I really thought they would end up scrapping that approach and finding something else. But there you go.

The Torment of Choice: Switching Back to iOS

zoidy — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 16:00:24 +1100

I’ve been toying with the idea of switching back to iOS in times of recent and realise that most of the reviews I’ve ever read always try to steer you in the direction of which won wins. The sort of drivelling rubbish that is trying to make the choice bigger than it is or convince themselves the choice they have made is for the best.

My smartphone days started back in a simpler time of the Sony Ericsson M600i, made famous by the Bond movie Casino Royale. Running Symbian, it had a stylus and was great at reading emails and WAP web sites. It was more of a phone than anything else. It was roughly the same size as the iPhone 4 but without the heft. Compared to some of the Windows Phones of the time, it was simpler, but that made it better. It wasn’t a PDA pretending to be a phone, it was a phone pretending to be a PDA, and for the most part it was all I needed.

Then the iPhone 3G was released and I enthusiastically upgraded. Usage didn’t really change much at first. I picked it up, got email working and started to enjoy being able to snap pictures before I even understood the concept of a social network, things were simple. But as time dragged on, the iPhone got used more and more. I remember thinking out loud on the couch one day that it would be great if they made an iPhone that was just bigger for lounge use and then proceeded to complain that the iPad was just a big iPhone when it was finally announced. But at that stage the iPhone was filling the void of a computer or laptop, so I was growing more and more frustrated with its limitations.

After being disappointed by the mild update that was the iPhone 3GS, I changed tack and took a bet on Android. The Nexus One was a revelation in many ways; it had a 5 MP camera that was actually good (at least by comparison), it recorded better video and it hooked in so nicely to all of Google’s services not to mention being able to run apps in the background. This meant things were actually there when you clicked them, rather than just getting a push notification to tell you to go fetch the new item. Best of all it was actually a good phone as it was made by people who had made phones before. Maps was also a revelation, particularly with built in navigation even though it seemed to take an eternity to come to Australia. App support was lacking and the whole OS was prone to random pauses and poor touch response, but the advantages, at least in my eyes, made up for all the issues. The rate of improvement was vastly superior to Apple’s efforts and every new OS release was so drastically different as opposed to today’s iOS which still looks the same as my very first iPhone.

When it came time to upgrade my phone last time around, I was torn between the iPhone 4S and the Galaxy Nexus. New apps were still being released on the iOS first but Android went through a revolution with Ice Cream Sandwich that made it all look very appealing. In the end I couldn’t really decide and let fait plot the path. Apple were out of stock and the Galaxy was just restocked, so I ordered the Galaxy and was happy with my choice. I eagerly awaited the next Nexus device and when it came, I was tempted to put some money down to upgrade. It seemed like a no brainer, it was about half the price of what I paid for my last phone and now Android is taking over the world. It is on more devices than iOS and apps are even getting released there first. But when an iPhone 4S came into my possession I decided to give it a go to see how the other half (or third as the case may now be) lived. And now for the problem, I don’t hate it.

What Changed?
I have cursed iOS quite frequently in recent times, most voraciously when I first got my hands on an iPad. No back button, no multi tasking (yeah yeah fanboys, I know it does something you like to call multi tasking, but you are deluding yourselves), no ability to share data between apps, no customisation and no Google services. I had essentially purchased a tablet which would only be used as a web browser. But as time went on, things changed. Apple made small changes which made the iPad usable. They weren’t acts of genius, they were simply hacks and copies of Android, but they were enough to make the thing useful. Things progressed even further when Google got serious about building iOS apps. All of a sudden, my phone was getting less use at home than my tablet, and this is what has fundamentally changed the game.

Now that the iPad has come into focus as my primary device at home to get most things done, my phone has really just become a sidekick for quick access while watching television and while being out and about. This means that a lot of the pain I used to suffer on the iPhone has been removed, or at least shifted to the iPad. It doesn’t need to be a great multi tasking device, it can just do what iPhones do best and that’s focus on doing a single thing at a time.

What I Like
1. Notifications on the home screen - This is a feature I really like. I can easily hit the power button and instantly see if it is worth unlocking and dealing with.

2. iTunes - This is something that divides a lot of people, but I have no issues with iTunes, it is my primary music source. I buy music and I rent movies from iTunes, so iTunes integration on my phone makes a lot of sense. The piece which actually brings this together is syncing over WiFi which was always a problem back in my iPhone 3G days. Having to physically plug your phone into iTunes and have it go through the whole sync process was slow, painful and therefore never happened. Now, it happens in the background. Podcasts stay in sync, new music magically appears, all that works rather well.

3. AirPlay - I primarily use my iPad to push video to my AppleTV, but being able to push music from my iPhone to my stereo is particularly handy considering my phone is always on me meaning it is easy to skip a track or switch to something else while walking about the house.

4. Google’s Apps - From what I’ve seen, they are either the equal or better than the Android equivalent for the bulk of their operation. What I mean by this is, the stuff that you do all the time. Yes I can’t get the Gmail app to only alert me on priority emails and I need to wait for my phone to suck down the actual email when I click a notification, but for the limited use case I now have for my phone, it is largely a better experience. The only exception I find is when you have a particularly busy day on email, at which point the Gmail app becomes tediously slow compared to Android’s native Gmail client.

5. Idle battery life - When the iPhone is sitting in your pocket, it uses virtually no power.

6. Camera - The camera is great. While it won’t replace my point and shoot and won’t allow me to get any more shots than my Galaxy, the shots that it does get are just better in every way (except the ability to turn off geo tagging on an image by image basis).

What I Don’t Like
1. The walled garden - The whole app review process irritates me. I’ve been waiting for a Pulse update which landed on my Android device weeks ago to finally get approved and pushed through the App Store. It shouldn’t be that hard for reputable applications to push a minor update through.

2. Notifications - while I like the homescreen viewability, the way notifications work on the whole is really poor. Once they are on the phone, they don’t get cleared. I can go into the app in question and handle all the notifications it pushed to me, and they are still there. Particularly frustrating with email, but still a pain for everything else like Twitter and Google+.

3. No back button - I’ve heard Gruber and alike go on about how the back button is flawed, but it works more often than not in a way that you intended and it makes life so much easier. Having a button that is always in the same place ready to take you back is so much simpler than constantly having to scan the screen for a way to get back. Worse yet is when you are actually taken to another app. A typical example is Instagram. On Android, you click an Instagram link in Twitter, which launched the web browser which then launched the Instagram app. A few dabs on the back button and you are back in Twitter. On iOS, you click the link which opens a browser inside the app, you then click the “Open in App” link on the web page it loads to launch the Instagram app (after another popup asking you if that is OK to do so). To get back, you need to hit the home button twice to get the app switcher up, click back on the app you were in, then hit close on the web browser inside Twitter to continue reading your feed. It’s slow, painful and requires more thought that it should. And that doesn’t even factor in the times you hit the home button twice and just end up on your home screen because you haven’t done it right.

4. Things don’t happen in the background - This seemed to always hurt me when getting on a train somewhere. You’d get through your Twitter feed, hit a tunnel and realise you have nothing fetched in your read it later service. Why? Because for new items to download, you need to open the app. No push notification to tell it to download and no ability to schedule when such a download should take place. So the end result is, you need to remember to download what you need either before you leave or before you run out of coverage. Even on a good mobile network with large download caps this is a problem as you are constantly burdened with having to wait for things to download rather than the phone sorting it out in your down time and simply being ready to go when you are. Another example is Twitter, on Android I launch and start reading, on iOS I lauch, wait for it to load new tweets, and then start scrolling. It’s just slower.

5. Stupid connector - Why don’t these things use micro USB? I mean is it really that hard?

6. Battery life - While the battery life on idle is excellent, the second you start using the damn thing numbers fly like there’s no tomorrow. As I try not to bury myself in my phone all day this isn’t too much of an issue, but it does strike me as odd considering how well it holds up in idle mode (but then partly this is because of the aforementioned issues of basically doing nothing with that idle time).

7. A general lack of customisation - I’ll explain more on that later because it isn’t what you’d expect based on what most fanboys go on about.

8. Sharing sucks - Twitter and Facebook integration has improved the situation, but it is far from perfect. To send a web page to Instapaper I need to install some awful bookmarklet via some convoluted process. Why can’t I just hit share and send it there? Same thing goes if I want to attempt to save a PDF from email to send to Evernote. A very simple process on Android, but a painfully difficult task on iOS and I’ll bet beyond the abilities of most users.

What I’ll Miss
1. Google Now - This has got to be the biggest feature to be missing and potentially the one which gets me to stay or switch back to Android. While it may be limited in Australia, it still does a fine job.

2. Customisation - I’m not the type to make my phone look hideous by applying some crazy skin or tweaking the default app tray. I’m talking about a general lack of customisation on the app front. This seems to be a trend between iOS and Android apps. Where Android apps will give you the option to tweak how they behave, iOS is much more a take it or leave it approach. It is an approach which gels with their users who generally don’t know any better, but it can be frustrating when you know you could tweak it on one platform but can’t when you switch to iOS even though you are using the same app.

3. Google Music - The ability to stream and backup all your music for free is very handy.

4. Notifications that work properly - Apple copied Android’s notification system but missed the point. While they improved it via the lock screen display, they couldn’t get the notifications to hook into the app in the same way. I’m constantly clearing badges and notifications that I’ve already seen and dealt with on the phone already. It means you have to go through this constant cleanup process and really manage your notifications. And worst of all, there is no way to clear an individual notification, you can only remove them in bulk.

What I Won’t Miss
1. Touch response - This isn’t so much to do with scrolling, but with activating some gestures. Side swiping in Twitter to access quick shortcuts for example is quite difficult to get right, whereas on iOS I seem to never get it wrong. The same goes for page swiping in Pocket.

2. Unresponsive headphones button - Plugging in a set of headphones and hitting the button you’d assume would start playing whatever you were listening to last. I’m not sure if this is app specific, but this is hardly consistent. It works great once you have started some music app and want to pause and resume music, but it won’t work from the get go all the time. Having said that, iOS seems to suffer a similar problem with the Podcasts app, so looks like I won’t be missing this after all.

3. Random pauses and slow downs - This is something which has been hugely improved, but it still isn’t as good as iOS. I think this goes hand in hand with the touch response complaint, but tap the menu button on Facebook and you’ll see what I mean. It isn’t smooth, it stutters. Even the Google+ app does the same when scrolling from time to time when it needs to fetch new content.

4. Apps missing features - This tends to be specific to picture and video functionality. And while the big apps get it right, it seems to be a bridge too far for others. Typical example, Path still can’t record video.

What’s Going to Push Me To Switch
At the moment I’m on the edge of cutting my sim card to fit the iPhone. It’s a decision I remake every hour or so. What will push me over the edge will be the idle battery life, the camera, iTunes and the quality of the apps. Google+ is a better iPhone app than it is an Android app and that tells me it’s simpler to produce a high quality app on iOS then it is on Android. This in hand with continued gripes that iPhone users generate more revenue for stores and developers and it seems iOS is always going to be front and centre when it comes to app development.

But with Google constantly lifting its game and the prospect of Google hardware via Motorola on the horizon, I may yoyo on this decision before the first half of this calendar year has expired.

I find it incredible that for all the popup warnings in iOS when an app tries to do virtually...

zoidy — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 08:31:57 +1100

I find it incredible that for all the popup warnings in iOS when an app tries to do virtually anything, in OSX any app can decide to make itself launch on boot by default.

'Next generation' Samsung smartphones to ship with Visa NFC payment system

zoidy — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 16:00:20 +1100

'Next generation' Samsung smartphones to ship with Visa NFC payment system:

So on the day the Wall Street Journal have an article about Google becoming worried Samsung is becoming too big a player in the Android ecosystem, this news drops about them partnering with VISA for NFC payments. It’s hard to blame them when Google Wallet seems to have been stuck in obscurity for so long, but I can’t help but feeling this will cause a whole host of new problems for both Android and Google.

My 3-year-old nephew gets the Chromebook Pixel, why don’t you?

zoidy — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 10:18:59 +1100

My 3-year-old nephew gets the Chromebook Pixel, why don’t you?:

I originally dismissed the touch on the Pixel, but I sort of get it now

Opera Goes Webkit

zoidy — Sun, 20 Jan 2013 22:08:00 +1100

Opera Goes Webkit:

This feels like a good move.

Twitter for Android Needs Refinement

zoidy — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 15:27:00 +1100

Twitter on the Android platform has never been the most refined of tools. The most notable issue was when the Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android was first released. Scrolling in the app was an awful experience, it was slow and unresponsive. Of course, this is understandable for such a major new release, except it seemed to take weeks if not months for them to solve. To their credit, they eventually got it right, but it is frustrating no other refinements have really been made since. All updates on the Android system seem to function around new features, and while everyone likes a new novelty, it’s the core experience that is more important. Below is a wishlist of key improvements:

1. Fix image previews. I’m constantly having to click the image preview because it has failed to load the image. It seems specific to larger images and I know Twitter has taken uploaded image in-house recently, but it is annoying none the less and has been like this for quite some time now.

2. The back button regularly takes you out of the app when clicked once. It doesn’t seem to happen every time, but more often than I’d care for clicking the back button takes you back to your home screen. The problem seems to happen when you’ve received a notification which you’ve clicked on opening the tweet. You leave the app, come back to it later, click back to get to your timeline and bang, you are back on your home screen. Frustrating, as you then need to relaunch the app.

3. Direct message notifications do not open the message. This one is a bit of an oddity as it functions differently from the other Twitter notifications. Here you receive an envelop notification icon which appears to be too small and doesn’t look Twitterish at all. Clicking this notification doesn’t take you to your new direct message, but instead takes you to your direct message list, which would be fine if it refreshed the list for you so you could see your new message, but it doesn’t. Instead you are confronted by a list of messages you’ve already seen. You must then pull down to refresh the list so you can view and reply to your new message.

4. Random hangs when switching tabs. This one can really slow you down when while trying to do something quickly. Sometimes when you launch Twitter, you notice that your mentions tab is highlighted indicating you have some new content in there which you haven’t received a notification for. Clicking on the tab often causes the entire app to pause while the information is fetched. Adding to the frustration, often the same thing happens when you click back to your timeline.

5. Random reloading. This is very much along the lines of point 4. Often you’ll load the app with plenty of new tweets for you to begin scrolling for only for the app to hang while it refreshes your feed for reasons better known to itself. It isn’t the automatic refresh interval you set, nor is it the result of pulling down the list to fetch new tweets. It simply takes it upon itself to lock up and start loading.

6. Unresponsive keyboard. This one is really the biggest nail in the coffin. Typing in the compose or reply window is now really slow and often boarding on unusable. Like most issues in the Twitter app, it doesn’t happen all the time, but it happens rather frequently.

7. Moving the action bar down after loading retweets and favourites. This one drives me nuts on a regular basis. You read the tweet in your timeline and click into it to retweet or favourite, but just as your thumb hits the screen, the whole bar moves down and where the buttons used to be, there are now retweet and favourite counts which then takes you off to pull down the list of people who have retweeted or favourited. Swap the order or leave a space, either way, don’t make the buttons a moving target!

8. 140 characters. I get it needs to be short, but why not keep it the same as SMS and make it 160 characters. It always amazes me when I have to send an SMS how much more those extra 20 characters allow me to convey.

Don’t get me wrong, the Twitter app is quite good in may ways. The new card system that was introduced makes getting information out of Twitter and isolating the information that is important to you much more efficient (although when you compose you don’t know if this will happen so you don’t know if you need to introduce what you are sharing or if you can get away with just throwing in your own two cents). It’s a real shame Instagram opted out of this system (I now refuse to click on Instagram links as the experience has become cumbersome). But as Twitter (at least as far as I’m concerned) is the type of app you check constantly, these minor niggles add up fast and give the impression that you are always working around these subtle and not so subtle qwerks.

Instagram Drops Twittercard Integration

zoidy — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 13:00:55 +1100

Instagram Drops Twittercard Integration:

This is a step in the wrong direction for everyone. The Twittercard system has really made the mobile experience a lot more fluid so this may go so far as to stop people clicking through. I know I’ll have second thoughts about whether I can be bothered getting kicked out to the Instagram app to view a photo from my favourite band or random person I follow. For friends this won’t have such a great effect as I likely already follow them on Instagram anyway.

The question is what do Instagram really have to gain here? They were a great piece of a puzzle and now it seems some of the pieces are missing. They have already cemented their position as the place to go for visual breaking events like storms and unrest. Twitter only piggy back off that and really they would always struggle to compete on a pure photo level due to the network’s other abilities (expressing written opinions and linkings to articles etc). This will probably drive your photo like count up, but it is hard to become ecstatic over such things. I’m guessing the hope is that this will drive their own internal social network rather than being reliant on other’s.

Ultimately I think people who have joined Instagram on it’s own merits won’t be effected or care. They’ll continue to snap away without sharing externally. For Twitter users, it remains to be seen, but I’m with Sarah on this one, I think usage may drop off. Whether Instagram cares or not remains to be seen. But, if they suddenly find themselves as just another social image network and lose breaking events to Twitter, Instagram will surely lose some of it’s shine.

For me, Instagram isn’t the new Twitter. It’s a more functional Path

zoidy — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 10:33:21 +1100

For me, Instagram isn’t the new Twitter. It’s a more functional Path:

A good article from Lacey about her issues with Path and how the founder’s vision for a product doesn’t always mesh with how people use it.

I find this myself. I thought Path would become the central hub for people to use. People I know use Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, so I though we’d see all posts originating there so people who are close don’t miss events in the wider noise of the other networks while still being able to share with a greater audience on demand. However, this hasn’t proved to be the case. I find people are making a choice about where they want to share something and restricting it to the network. If people want to broadcast, they go directly to Facebook and Twitter, they aren’t posting in Path and selecting the share to Twitter/Facebook/Foursquare option.

I also agree with Lacey’s comments on Instagram taking the spotlight. To me, Instagram is about arty photography and crowd sourcing much like the founder’s vision but instead it seems to be a snapshot of people’s lives and that it’s real talent is simplicity and being able to share to Twitter and Facebook at the same time.

To me, Path needs to look at a share to Instagram option or a sync back from Instagram. I’d go with the former, as we all know what happened to Google Buzz when it allowed Tweets to be imported (although in no way was it it’s greatest issue).

Linus Torvalds Rants About Screen Resolution

zoidy — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 11:31:45 +1100

Linus Torvalds Rants About Screen Resolution:

Nailed it.

Follower counts: Psychology in design - Branch

zoidy — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 16:00:38 +1000

Follower counts: Psychology in design - Branch:

Justin Edmund raises an interesting question about what would happen if you removed the follower count from Twitter. It’s an interesting argument.

Most of the discussion focuses on how other’s would judge someone’s profile, but I’d rather explore the idea from the point of view of how it would change sharing behaviour for every day users (i.e. not corporates/blogs etc).

It may turn out to have a positive effect. I see too much over-sharing and I’m sure some of my followers will accuse me of the same. Sharing more tends to increase your chances of picking up more followers/likes/+1’s, but how does that really improve your experience? The simple answer is it probably doesn’t or perhaps does the opposite, but we all like to see those high numbers so we keep plugging away. What we end up doing is creating noise. No ones’s life is the richer for you sharing it and we drown out the important stuff.

Remember the days of people sending around funny emails? They were largely few and far between and it was a nice balance. But now go have a look at some of your social streams and try to figure out which posts you’d actually like to see and which are just there to make up the numbers, and I don’t mean things you find inoffensive and don’t care if they turn up, but things that have genuinely improved your life by helping you connect with others, learning something or making you smile.

Rumor: Google Changing Up Their Nexus Program, LG Optimus G Nexus Debuting In November, and More

zoidy — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 13:29:00 +1000

Rumor: Google Changing Up Their Nexus Program, LG Optimus G Nexus Debuting In November, and More:

Love the idea of a Nexus certification giving consumers more choices when it comes to hardware while still being safe in the knowledge they will receive timely upgrades.

This will probably make life a bit more difficult for the marketing departments as they won’t be able to brag about specific customisations, place all the focus on the hardware. This can only be a good thing. This should push hardware manufacturers towards great attention to detail and leaving the software to Google.

This will probably also keep the hardware manufacturers happy, with suspicions growing about Google favouring it’s own hardware company Motorola. Motorola may continue to produce phones in the manner it has previously, but it will also allow for a dedicated Nexus model. While I’m sure the manufacturers won’t be thrilled by this, it is a better option than the Nexus brand being solely controlled by the one manufacturer (i.e. Motorola).

Why I'm Doubling Down on Twitter

zoidy — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 20:12:00 +1000

At the moment I’m using a combination of Twitter, Facebook, Path, Foursquare, Google+ and Latitude and frankly I’m over it. Something needs to change so I’ve decided to embrace one network and treat the others as something I’ll glance at if I have the time, perhaps once a day, but that’s about it.

As you can see from the topic, my choice is Twitter. Allow me to explain why with a bit of a last man standing style breakdown.

Facebook:
Facebook gets the flick because it is a mess. The web site is plain awful, the mobile app isn’t much better and the sharing model just doesn’t gel with me. I know you can create groups within your lists of friends but you can only share to one group which mean if you like to share selectively you need tens of combinations to get the right mix. For example you may have a Close Friends and a Family group. But if you want to share to both with the one post you then need a Close Friends and Family group which now means you are maintaining 3 lists. Multiple that out and it gets too overwhelming to maintain. Truth be told you are probably best off creating one group you share everything with and just leave it at that.

I also don’t care much for the News Feed. This feature as far as I’m concerned relies on people’s ignorance to the issue. The last stat I heard on this front was that only about 30% of your friends see your posts. So already there is a problem developing. I’d be less concerned by this if it wasn’t for the fact that any page I like seems to be able to spam my feed at will. Apparently my friends posts aren’t important but random pages I like are.

It allows you to check-in to places but it doesn’t really enrich the experience. I can’t see what friends recommend or dislike, nor do I see any other relevant information. In truth I think Facebook made a point of this and decided that while they will leave this functionality in, they were relying on others to build on top like Foursquare have (sort of, but the nearby notification system in Facebook doesn’t seem to work unless you use their check-in rather than Foursquare’s).

Google+:
Oh how I wished this was the final solution. Stay tuned for my next post in a few weeks about how I’ve changed my mind and how I am now doubling down on Google+. But for now, it doesn’t quite fit the bill, although I will still be using it as my primary online photo library.

The first issue I have with Google+ is that the layout doesn’t lend itself to any sort of volume. It couldn’t really be used as a Twitter replacement as each post is so massive. I have a 27” screen and I can still only fit one or two posts on a page. So as volume increases, you are going to be rapidly wearing out the scroll wheel on your mouse. For reading friend’s posts, this isn’t an issue, but the second you try to load news or similar in it all falls apart.

I also think people are using it incorrectly (people should be able to use it how they want but, but it doesn’t really tie in with my view on how I want this stuff to work). Some people have simply swapped Twitter with Google+ meaning videos and shared articles constantly end up in there and completely drown out experiences and photos etc. They would never dream of using Facebook this way, but as there is a smaller audience in Google+, they are more willing to. This isn’t a problem in Twitter because a post is only a hundred off pixels tall, but in Google+ you could scroll for literally 5 pages and see nothing but unimportant sharing. I still yearn for a social network that separates the two, but my new hybrid solution seems to get the job done (details to follow).

Google+ also fails the check-in test in a similar way to Facebook. It’s messaging is no where near as good as Facebook’s and it doesn’t integrate with anything else (yet) like Facebook does with things like Spotify and Foursquare.

But its biggest problem at the moment is such a small percentage of people I know actually use it. One could argue this point about Twitter as well, but as it is better at being a source of information, it still wins out.

The Winner:
So enough negativity, what about the positives that come from using Twitter. For starters it has the best system of remembering position, and by best system I mean the other’s don’t have one. That means you don’t miss things. Combine this with a great add-on like Tweet Marker, and you can sync your position in the feed across devices.

This lead onto my second positive and that is the desktop app. Again, Twitter is the winner by default because the other’s dont have this. It is easy to glance and see if anything has happened by flicking to the app, having a scroll and going back to what you were doing. This is not the case with Google+ or Facebook. Google+ in particular has some strange feed behaviour where things that have been more recently commented on launch back up to the top of the page. I understand that it means more popular posts bubble up, but it means you need to keep scrolling past posts you’ve already seen to see if there is anything new that has gone unnoticed. Many posts have been missed because of this. With Facebook it is less clear what you are missing because not everything ends up in your New Feed so who knows what is going on there.

While it can be more difficult to have a discussion in 140 characters, you can have discussions with multiple individuals rather than bundling everyone in on the same topic. Often people are put off by strangers commenting on a friend’s post, but this isn’t the case with Twitter.

Finally I love the new notification system Twitter has built. I can choose to be instantly notified when someone makes a post. This is great because this was one of the issues with Twitter, in that unless you kept up to date, you risked seeing important stuff after the fact rather than relying on one of the strengths of the platform, real time information.

So there you have it, Twitter is where you’ll find me. Path also gets a work out for private stuff and is also used in tandem with Twitter and Facebook, but as it pushes events to me, it isn’t something I need to monitor like Google+ and Facebook. And that has made all the difference….

Daring Fireball Linked List: Dr. Drang on iMessage

zoidy — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 09:40:05 +1100

Daring Fireball Linked List: Dr. Drang on iMessage:

I’m not entirely sure I agree. BBM for starters started out in work communities where everyone was rolled out on a similar device/network and grew that way.

Secondly I’m not sure iMessage is as simple to setup as Apple would have you believe. Out of all my friends on iOS I’ve managed to connect with one and he’s what you’d call a tech enthusiast. I’m not convinced personal email addresses are the known entity any more with the introduction of Facebook. I think you are more likely to have someone’s mobile number than their email address (which happens to be tied to iMessage/Facetime).

And lastly it isn’t cross platform. This is why things like Viber, eBuddy XMS, Facebook Messanger and Google+ Messanger have an edge, particularly in the case of Viber and XMS as they use your mobile number and automatically discover contacts in your address book.

Motorola Announces Razr Smartphone

zoidy — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 08:02:13 +1100

Motorola Announces Razr Smartphone:

The Kevlar Woven back on this thing should make it tough as nails.

Amazon’s Kindle Tablet Is Very Real. I’ve Seen It, Played With It.

zoidy — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 15:31:05 +1000

Amazon’s Kindle Tablet Is Very Real. I’ve Seen It, Played With It.:

I think these might do quite well. Rather than building a generic tablet for a multi purpose use, Amazon will use it to showcase their offerrings and tightly integrate. In many ways this is similar to what Apple have done with iOS and the iTunes store.

Instagram Plans To Build an Android Version...Eventually

zoidy — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 14:02:05 +1000

Instagram Plans To Build an Android Version...Eventually:

PicPlz will finally have some competition on the Android platform….. eventually.

Best Buy Expects Sprint iPhone 5 in 1st Week of October

zoidy — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 12:30:05 +1000

Best Buy Expects Sprint iPhone 5 in 1st Week of October:

Not far off now!