I am not a Lemur. I’m sure you can tell that from my picture (and I bet someone like BC finds a lemur picture for this blog within moments): A recent tour of the new iLife ‘09 with Apple reinforced this easy bit of species-identification in just a few moments - but I’m not entirely sure that the conclusion to my investigations is entirely flattering.
But first - those Lemurs. Apparently, Lemurs don’t recognise Leopards. Instead, they simply maintain a count of the number of nearby Lemurs. If this should decrement by 1, they run up a tree. So much easier than bothering to look for spots in the undergrowth, and big sharp teeth…
How does this relate to iLife? Easy. Faces. iPhoto ‘09 Does Things With Faces, in photographs, automatically matching up your photo library so you can view all the pictures linked by having one person’s face somewhere in them. If you can’t work out who someone is, then you can throw the photo up to Facebook and wait for someone to tag it. If the tagged face you don’t know is in more than one picture, then you get another person tile in your by-people view.
This feature was shown to a room full of writers and analysts, and it went down like a lead balloon. Apple were a trifle crestfallen; and I think I know why. I strongly suspect that writers, as a tribe, do not have lots of those “family pictures” scattered around their phones, cameras, laptops et cetera. If I had just grabbed a copy of iPhoto ‘09 and gone home with it I would very likely not have found this smart feature in a million years - because the fewer people there are in a photo, the more I like it. All those family shots, I just don’t understand - I think of them as “here’s the same troop of Lemurs, with a tiny rim of the Arc de Triomphe in the background”, and all those gurning faces just don’t connect for me.
From the reactions of the journalists in the room, I suspect I’m not alone in that clearly dysfunctional reaction. Apple fortunately provided a pre-loaded library of happy models, smiling for the camera in front of a wide selection of the world’s landmarks, so you can see for yourself the rather bizarre Godley & Creme pop-video effect of scrolling through all your pix of a particular person, with their eyes and mouth locked in position in the middle of each snap.
It creeps me out, really. Especially when my nephew scanned in a load of black and whites from my parents’ photo album, which stretches back to the 1900’s - and iPhoto tracked people through 50 years of life, unerringly. I also still have a massive server here, as yet untouched, packed with several gigabytes of capture frames from a large factory CCTV system. I wonder how long iPhoto would take to find frames in that lot with faces in?
My suspicion is that Family type people will come up with some equally disparaging term for us loners, to balance out my “Lemur” tag, and will think this is just a brilliant tool for turning casual snaps into a lifetime’s documentary: but I can’t help worrying a little bit about what could be done with something this capable.
I stand before you a guilty man. This weekend I received my first ever copyright infringement notice, from no lesser authority than Facebook (Scrabulous, anyone?).
My crime? I posted a video collage of Christmas photos that I’d cobbled together in Photoshop Elements 7, for which I used a cover version of Take That’s Rule The World as musical accompaniment. (You have no idea how glad I am that snow has forced me to work from home today, thus sparing me from the ridicule of colleagues for my taste in background music. It’s my daughter’s favourite song, honest chaps).
The video had been up for weeks and was only meant to be shared with a few family members, but Facebook’s sharing options went awry and it ended up being distributed to my entire Friends list.
Presumably Facebook - or the music companies - have software that scans videos on the site, and my family photo montage set alarm bells ringing.
The site immediately removed the video and sent me the following warning. “If you upload another video that infringes on the rights of a third party, our system will again remove the content,” Facebook barked, with a mandatory tickbox ensuring I GOT THE MESSAGE. “This could cause your access to the Facebook Video application to be disabled, or your Facebook Account to be disabled.”
I wait for the £16,000 bill to land on my doormat with nervous anticipation. It must have been watched by at least 12 people, after all.
Facebook now claims to have 120 million users, and although the number of active accounts will be significantly smaller, it’s still a phenomenal figure. In fact, if Facebook were a country, it would be twice the size of the United Kingdom.
That sort of popularity is always going to bring problems. Just as a city experiences growing pains, with a rising population bringing a proportional rise in crime and drug problems, Facebook is starting to get clogged up with scammers, spammers and baddies of all descriptions. (more…)
Last week I opened Facebook to find the following status update from one of my friends:
“Ilana Drunk with love people with I love. I love m best friends who talk. Farmers weekly f***** hell.”
(And before the pedants start commenting about my over-zealous use of the asterisk, she was so inebriated she’d even managed to misspell the f word.)
I should explain that Ilana is a writer, and a bloody good writer at that, having had her first novel published by Orion and a second on the way. She’s not normally the type of person who litters Facebook updates with jibberish. But until someone fits a breathaliser to her mobile phone, she will probably continue to make a proper Charlie of herself with booze-laden Facebook updates.
We got talking in the office yesterday about Facebook, and social networking in general, about how the younger generation has a different set of standards on privacy. The youth of today…
We all have different ways of handling our profile pages; I won’t upload embarrassing pictures or let people swear on my Wall, while some others here (Bayon) are happy to talk in ways that would make a sailor blush, for all to see. (more…)
MI6 is hiring through Facebook. That strikes me as odd. If I was hiring somebody to work in an animal testing lab, I wouldn’t pop down to the gates on my break and grab the first Johnny with a plackard and bucket of red paint I could find, and yet MI6 seems to have done just this.
Basic requirements of a spy? Well, I’ve never infilitrated a secret lair that’s been fiendishly built beneath an active volcano, but presumably, discretion is one. And discretion is not something typically ascribed to Facebook users. I can see it now “James Bond is crouched on the thirtieth floor of a burnt out apartment block waiting to assasinate the President of Paraguay”
2 mins pass.
“James Bond has just assasinated the President of Paraguay.”
Before I get too much grief, I’m fully aware that I’m about six months too late to start jumping on the slam-Facebook-bandwagon, but it’s starting to annoy me so much I can’t hold in my stored-up anger any longer.
It’s not even that I want to use Facebook or even have an opinion about Facebook. The fact is, I have to use the darn thing if I want to keep on communicating with my brother. (more…)
Ironically on the day it’s announced that Facebook has never been more popular, I appeared to have stopped using it. I say “appeared” because it took me a long time to realise I’d given up on it, which is my friends fault, because they didn’t realise they’d abandoned it either.
I expected more. Not the sounding of trumpets and a rain of angel feathers necessarily, but very definitely a last straw. I really wanted a last straw. I wanted Facebook to introduce a Beacon mk.2 system that rummaged through my personal details, worked out my bank details and advertised them on an RSS feed, allowing some unwashed malcontent to nick the last and only tenner from my account. Or, a virus wave to sweep over the entire thing so that every game of Scrabulous became akin to dancing barefoot with Typhoid Mary in a gutter filled with used syringes. I wanted to storm away from its charms in a huff.
I wanted it to do… something. But it hasn’t, it’s just continued. And gradually myself and my friends have simply drifted away from it. A peaceable parting of the ways. It’s not that I don’t particularly like it, for a while there it was pretty much our entire social calendar. Every party was arranged, discussed and dissected on the walls. If somebody was telling me a story, it was common for them to give up halfway through with the line: “just go and look on Facebook, I’ve stuck all the pictures on there.”
The Great Facebook Rush occured over the weekend, as the site opened the floodgates for unique username registrations.
