The Twitter freak show

Monday, August 17th, 2009

PC Pro’s online overlord Barry Collins is, as we speak, trying to be on holiday. This is something he’s not very good at, as evidenced by the fact that 12 minutes after the official start of him not being here, he emailed me about being here. The worst part of this is that he’s actually getting better.

However, in an attempt to prove that he really was going on holiday and wouldn’t be doing any of the things he’s so obviously doing, Barry handed over the keys to PC Pro’s beloved Twitter account, which he nourishes with the sort of obsessive care that even Gollum would consider a little excessive.

Before he “left” Barry instructed me to install Tweetdeck – which is essentially a window wiper allowing you to make sense of Twitter’s endless word rain. He couldn’t have done me any more damage if he’d stirred heroin into my tea. Once installed, Tweetdeck demands all of your attention and I’ve actually developed a tweet twitch from constantly flicking my glance to my second monitor looking for updates. What’s worse is that most of what flashes on my screen I don’t care about, and would live happily without ever having read.

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Twitter goes down (again) but will it soon be counted out for good?

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

Earlier today (Tuesday 11th August) Twitter went down, albeit briefly for around half an hour, with the official status blog reporting first “a site outage” but then changing tone later to say it was busy analysing traffic data to “determine the nature of this attack”.

Of course, while the Twitter servers may well have been up and running in under an hour of going down, the same cannot be said of third party applications which took considerably longer to recover it would seem. Not, it has to be said, as bad as last week following the 15 fat Russians in a revolving door DDoS attack which saw the Twitter service impacted for days and some third party apps struggling to get back up to speed for days after that. (more…)

The scandal that is Microsoft’s Windows 7 pricing in the UK

Friday, July 31st, 2009

So, how much bad news can you take in one lump? Because we’ve just received news of Microsoft’s Anytime Upgrade pricing for Windows 7 in the UK, and it makes for about as much jolly reading as a Stephen King novel.

And just to make things even worse, we’ve now had confirmation there will be no Family Pack of Windows 7 until “at least” 2010. So, if the worst comes to the worst, that means it could be 2011. Or later.

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Microsoft, Windows 7, the EU and common sense

Monday, July 27th, 2009

The world’s gone crazy. Surely Microsoft can’t have decided to do what’s been blindingly obvious to the rest of the world for eternity and – gasp – offer users a choice of web browsers when they install Windows 7? And thus, in one fell and seemingly easy swoop, appease the EU and its browser-producing competition?

But by jingo it has, at least if today’s news story (Microsoft to offer browser choice with Windows 7) is to be believed. During installation, you’ll get the choice of five (Internet Explorer, Opera, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Apple Safari), rendering the EU’s objection of Microsoft exploiting its monopolistic position irrelevant. (more…)

Uninstalled software shouldn’t hijack your browser

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009

Finding myself with an idle 20 minutes on the train to work this morning, I decided to give my laptop a long overdue spring clean (it’s July, after all).  I started by uninstalling a handful of applications that have served their purpose.

Once removed, no fewer than two thirds of them (yes folks, that’s two out of three, but I’m building for dramatic effect here), arbitrarily fired up my browser and sent me to their websites to fill out a survey demanding to know why I had the temerity to remove their software from my system. Bloody cheek.

Software that automatically fires up your browser and sends you without warning to a strange website is a hair’s breadth away from malware, in my book. And how long will it be before genuine malware writers find a way to adjust that URL, and send unsuspecting uninstallers off to a site that automatically executes something far nastier than a customer retention questionnaire?

The fact I’ve chosen to uninstall a piece of software means that application should no longer exert any control over my PC, let alone fire up my web browser on its way out. If software companies can’t be trusted to act responsibly with their uninstallers, then Microsoft needs to take that power away from them.

Is it right to censor Wikipedia to save a life?

Monday, June 29th, 2009

David Rhode is a double Pulitzer-winning journalist with the New York Times who just escaped seven months as a captive of the Taliban – yet you won’t have heard about it.

It’s extremely newsworthy, but coverage of the kidnapping would have made Rhode a more valuable hostage. The higher profile the captive, the more attention the captors and their demands get – and the lower the chance of a happy ending.

In situations like this, news organisations often agree to hold off on reporting certain events. They lose a story in the short term, but a reporter gets a better chance at coming home.

In any case, for better or worse, everyone gets their story eventually.

This mutual cooperation used to be relatively straightforward to organise – journalists, especially war correspondents, are a pretty cliquey bunch – but it is one of the long list of things that have received a thorough shaking-up in the internet revolution.

Wikipedia, in particular, was a major problem.

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Bargain of the day: Windows Vista Home Basic for £137.01

Friday, June 26th, 2009

While Barry Collins was researching his free upgrades to Windows 7 news story, he stumbled across possibly the most ridiculous offer I’ve ever seen: you, my lucky, lucky friends, can download Windows Vista Home Basic from the Microsoft UK store for £137.01. Excluding VAT.

Now before everyone rushes off to bag this bargain, I should point out that you can also buy Home Premium for £166.37! Obviously excluding VAT again, Microsoft has to make a living you know.

A quick trawl online reveals the going rate for the full version of Vista Home Premium is around £130 inc VAT – and you can buy it for less than £90 inc VAT if you’re willing to opt for the more restricted OEM version, which is tied to the motherboard you first install it on (so if you build a new PC, you’ll have to buy a new copy of Windows).

So, taking away VAT, Microsoft is charging a premium of over £50 if you buy direct from its store. It would be amazing to discover just how many sales it’s made for these two excellent picks, but sadly I don’t think I’m going to get much joy out of Microsoft on that one. My guess? A princely zero.

How Habitat annoyed the Tweeting masses

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

Yes, it makes extremely comfortable and effortlessly trendy furniture, but it doesn’t get social media.

Habitat is in the middle of a disapproval-a-thon on Twitter right now, after the company, or someone acting on its behalf, added Iranian election hashtags to tweets about its “totally desirable Spring collection”.

Well, the idea was to attract attention, so it worked. In a way.

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Swearing, blasphemy and pranks: why Facebook shouldn’t trust its users

Monday, June 15th, 2009

The Great Facebook Rush occured over the weekend, as the site opened the floodgates for unique username registrations.

If this is the first you’ve heard of it, bad luck. Get used to being facebook.com/827430mvmhd9mdleek3.

I briefly considered waking up at the crack of dawn to snag matthew.sparkes, but I opted instead for a few hours more sleep.

To the man with the well-trimmed beard who got there first, enjoy. I certainly enjoyed my lay-in.

“Think carefully about the username you choose. Once it’s been selected, you won’t be able to change or transfer it,” warned Facebook.

Well, people did think carefuly. And the results were chaotic, stupid and entertaining in equal measure. Here are some of the high/lowlights. (more…)

Exactly how many people can you really follow on Twitter?

Friday, June 12th, 2009

I’m sure I can’t be alone in having a passionate love/hate relationship with Twitter. I steered clear of it for a long time, believing it to be a timesink and unwelcome distraction to my already communication-filled life. And now that I have joined the throng – as has PC Pro via @pc_pro – I haven’t really moved away from that point of view.

The problem is that the stream of information moves so fast. Even using the quite impressive TweetDeck, I find it impossible to keep track of the endless streams of communications happening. And the thing is, it’s not that I don’t want to hear what the likes of Jack Schofield at The Guardian have to say, but, well, he says so much! As do the numerous other friends, colleagues, influencers and publications that I follow. (more…)