Are Twitter, Facebook et al killing our businesses?

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

I’ve always been of the opinion that if people do the job they’re paid for, and they do it well, then it’s irrelevant whether they spend some of their working day using services like Facebook and Twitter. But I must admit that a piece by Theo Paphitis in today’s Daily Mail does ring a few bells.

“Sadly,” he writes, “the addictive, all-consuming  nature of online connections means that the worst internet offenders are reneging on their part of the bargain.” The bargain being that they’re there to earn money for the business, and themselves of course. (more…)

A bad week for social networking

Friday, August 7th, 2009

All in all it has been a bad week for social networking. It started on Monday with the leader of the Roman Catholics in the UK, Archbishop Vincent Nichols, saying that social networking sites undermined community life and would lead to teen suicides.

His concern was that teens were treating friendships as a commodity to be traded – the fact that more people might follow someone you know on Twitter than follow you might be seen as a reason for suicide. One might have thought with the Roman Catholic Church’s attitude to sex, they might prefer social networking liaisons to real ones – but we better not go there. (more…)

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…)

iLife, Lemurs, and Me

Monday, February 2nd, 2009

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.

Caught by the Facebook fuzz

Monday, February 2nd, 2009

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 in the news. Constantly.

Monday, November 10th, 2008

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…)

Google puts on the Mail Goggles

Tuesday, October 7th, 2008

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.

(more…)

Do tech journalists have any friends?

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008

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…)

James Bond’s Facebook profile

Monday, September 29th, 2008

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.”

2 mins pass.

“James Bond has just uploaded a new album.” 

(more…)

Why I hate Facebook (but keep coming back)

Thursday, July 24th, 2008

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…)