Facebook is the Windows of the Internet

Oh yes it is. Me on Techradar:

Social networks also benefit from lock-in. I hate Facebook: I hate its horrible UI, its overly complex privacy settings, its photo albums, the algorithm that seems hell-bent on hiding important and interesting updates. Given the choice, I wouldn’t use it. Unfortunately I don’t have a choice, because for now everybody I know does use it. Cutting off Facebook would mean cutting them off.

Sooner or later, though, a strategy of “ha ha! We’re the only game in town!” will bite you in the backside.

Facebook is coming for your children

I do a wee news roundup for Techradar each week, and this week social networks were the main story. Facebook, it seems, is coming for your children.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t like the way the US Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act prevents Facebook from giving accounts to under-13s. But it’s not because he wants to make money from advertisers desperate to target the elusive and big-spending pre-teen market. No sirree.

It’s because getting the wee ones on Facebook will make them clever, or something. “In the future, software and technology will enable people to learn a lot from their fellow students,” Zuckerberg says.

Remember the adage “If you can’t see what the site is selling, the product is you”? That’s Facebook – so when Zuck says he wants kids on Facebook, I have a mental image of children being fed into mincers and made into sausages. I know I’m not Facebook’s biggest fan – I’d love to write a column called Fuck Zuck where I make appalling and libellous comments about whatever annoying thing the Facebook founder’s done that month – but when a company whose business is selling your life to advertisers says it wants your kids, my Sinister Detector tends to go off the scale.

According to Reuters, Zuckerberg is now “contradicting some media reports”: ”some time in the future, I think it makes sense to explore that, but we’re not working on it right now.” What he isn’t doing is changing his position. The comment that kicked off the “coming for your kids” stories was: “That will be a fight we  take on at some point.”

He isn’t saying Facebook doesn’t want your children. He’s saying Facebook doesn’t want them just yet.

Cloud computing and Pippa Middleton’s arse

Me, on Techradar, about Google’s brand new Chromebooks:

Ah, says Samsung. “With nothing stored directly on the Series 5, malicious spyware, trojans and viruses are a thing of the past.” They’re a thing of the past on my Windows 7 PC too, because I’m not an idiot who opens unsolicited files that claim to be details of tax refunds or photos of Pippa Middleton’s arse.

This is why some of us worry about copyright cops

When people like me get worked up about ISP censorship, national firewalls and other wonderful ideas, it’s not because we condone theft. It’s because the people who do the censoring are often idiots. Here’s yet another example: the UK Music Publisher’s Association (MPA) managed to get an entire public domain music site taken offline because it – wrongly – believed that the site was hosting an illegal music score.

“You’re all our bitches now”

Good news for the BPI: BT and TalkTalk’s appeal against the Digital Economy Act has been rejected. It turns out that the Act is perfectly fair and decent and nothing to worry about whatsoever.

Amazingly, I have an opinion about that.

“Shareholders and customers of BT and TalkTalk might ask why so much time and money has been spent challenging the act to help reduce the illegal traffic on their networks,” BPI boss Geoff Taylor said. “You’re all our bitches now.”

OK, he didn’t say that last bit. But it’s true all the same. If BT and TalkTalk don’t appeal, we’re stuffed.

Record labels demand all the money in the world. Literally

Here’s one for fans of idiocy and greed: in their case against file sharing network LimeWire, record labels are demanding sums of money that could exceed $75 trillion.

The entire planet’s gross domestic product is $69 trillion per year.

What are they thinking? Let The Register explain.

The idea that the industry could ask for trillions in damages apparently springs from a previous success against Usenet in 2009, in which copying of a relatively small number of works (878) was multiplied by the maximum penalty to arrive at a damages bill close to US$6.6 million.

Will Twitter get shitter?

Twitter is five, and like all good five-year-olds it’s about time it paid its way. Me, on Techradar:

I was in Glasgow’s famous Sauchiehall Street on Saturday night. If you haven’t been recently, it’s like a Hieronymus Bosch painting where the demons wear too-short skirts or G-Star Raw. It’s genuinely unpleasant, a seething mass of drunken, vomiting and occasionally fist-fighting imbeciles.

If you need proof that a significant part of the human race is as dumb as rocks, I can give you the postcode to prove it.

Or I can let you see Twitter on my phone.

Why should you pay more to use your iPhone as a portable hotspot?

The latest iOS update enables you to turn your iPhone into a wi-fi hotspot, sharing your 3G connection with other devices – and even though iPhone data plans are capped, you still need to pay extra to use the feature. Why could that be? I think I know the answer.

There are only two possible explanations.

One, iPhone data is a different shape from Android data. It’s triangular, or maybe octagonal, and it gets stuck in the internet tubes.

Or two, the networks are bastards.

‘Contribute to my website’ is the new pay to play

The nice people at .net magazine have a spanking new website, and one of my pieces is on it: “What are words worth”, where I… well, you saw the headline.

In the age of social media and user-generated content, suggesting that your name on someone else’s website is “exposure” is like suggesting membership of the HTML Writer’s Guild will boost your chances of getting a well-paid agency job.

Content farms and Google results

A wee piece by me on Techradar:

Google’s success has created a new kind of industry. Content farms are firms who produce what Google’s Matt Cuts calls “shallow or low-quality content”.

Cutts is a funny guy, and his screenshots show the parody site The Content Farm, but the point is a serious one: often, when you search Google for something, you don’t necessarily get content that’s been created for you; you get content that’s been created for Google’s search algorithm.

There’s nothing unethical or illegal about content farms – they’re not wicked, or dishonest, or evil – but their prominence in Google results means they can be an enormous pain in the backside.