Facebook wants you to work for it, for free

Are you getting the impression that I’m not entirely keen on Facebook? Facebook Questions is its latest attempt to be like the AOL of the 90s, but more annoying and evil.

It’s a simple enough plan: make every single link on Google point to a Facebook page. Where’s the best place to buy a T-31 Modulator? Ask Facebook. What’s the best time of year to go turtle punching? Ask Facebook. How can I tell if I have a horrible bum disease? Ask Facebook. Have we always been at war with Eurasia? Ask Facebook.

This is the electronic book’s iPod moment

Amazon’s Kindle for £109.

I’m getting carpal tunnel surgery on Wednesday

So I’ll be quiet for a while, unless something annoys me so much I start typing with my face. I should probably buy some books and stock up on Monster Munch.

Gates are for fields and gardens, not scandals

This headline is in the (Glasgow) Herald this morning:

Bid to reveal Wendygate facts

Wendygate? Wendygate?

Antennagate was bad enough, but I think Wendygate may be the worst yet. The Watergate scandal, from which every -gate gets its suffix, was the name of a hotel. Adding -gate to something doesn’t make any sense.

“Flawed flagships and mediocre mid-tier mobiles”

All About Symbian is a website about, you guessed it, the Symbian mobile phone operating system. This devastating piece by Steve Litchfield looks at the flagship handsets running the OS and finds the lot of them lacking.

There are some pretty fundamental issues in the high end devices above, to be honest, some of which should have been caught by even a cursory examination by anyone with their head screwed on straight… it does rather seem as if Nokia and other Symbian partners have gone out of their way to shoot themselves in the foot, time after time – not one of the above is remotely close to being perfectly conceived (never mind implemented).

When your best friends say you’ve got a problem, you’ve really got a problem.

In other news, it appears that Apple is finally investigating the iOS 4 issues that render many iPhone 3G mobiles useless. Not only was the problem overlooked during testing – did they bother testing on the 3G? – but it’s taken more than a month for Apple to start investigating. That just isn’t good enough.

Apple’s going to bring iOS to the Mac

Never mind inventing a slightly shinier battery charger: Apple’s got big plans. I think they include giving Macs the iOS operating system, or something awfully like it.

It’s not just the Mac, either. I’m willing to bet that it’s coming to the Apple TV, too.

Apps would make Steve Jobs’ hobby much more appealing, and it would mean that all of Apple’s consumer products – iPod, iPhone, iMac, iPad and Apple TV – would share the same interface, the same apps and the same data.

The iPad as a family computer

I know, I promised I wasn’t going to go on about it but I think – hope – that this is interesting. Over at Business Insider, Henry Blodget moans that his kids are addicted to his iPad.

We got an iPad because we thought it might provide more peace and quiet during a long trip. And it did. Sometimes. When they weren’t fighting over it.

But now that the trip is over, we actually have to physically hide it in the house every day.

My experience is similar. The ladies in my life – Mrs Bigmouth and Baby Bigmouth – love the iPad dearly. My wife uses it to read the Guardian online (as promised, I cancelled the daily newspaper when the iPad arrived; news on the iPad is something I’ll come back to in another post reasonably soon), to catch up with friends and to join in on forums; although she hasn’t used it much for shopping so far, apps such as ShopStyle are superior to the traditional, browser-and-mouse shopping experience.

My daughter loves the Toy Story read-along books and various drawing, shape sorting and interactive apps. She also loves deleting my apps, which I can’t find a way of preventing: you’ll be amazed how quickly a small child can go from fingerpainting in Drawing Pad to zapping something important. Yet more evidence the iPad really, really needs user accounts.

Incidentally, whichever bright spark decided the way to clear colouring-in in the Toy Story ebooks was to get small children to shake a £400-plus computer should be taken into the woods and shot. It’s a disaster waiting to happen.

But I digress. What makes the iPad work is partly the way it’s been designed for touch from the get-go, and it’s partly the battery life. Even after hours of thrashing, I can pick it up in the evening and watch Top Gear on iPlayer without worrying that I’ll run out of battery life. If Microsoft or anybody else is serious about making an iPad killer and they don’t provide the same all-day battery life, they’ll fail. Tablets need to be things you just pick up and go with, not things you pick up and go “shit, battery’s nearly done”.

What the all-day battery gives you is a device that goes with you rather than a device that you have to go to. It’s an important distinction. I can’t use a laptop on the sofa, because I can’t get comfortable and using a trackpad to control the mouse is a nightmare. I can’t let my daughter near a laptop at all, because she’s quite keen on picking off the key caps – and even if I could stop her doing that, she’s too young to use the Mac OS or Windows to do the same kinds of things – painting, talking to animals, listening to stories – that she does on the iPad. The iPad is something you just stick on the side table or on the worktop when you’re done, and whoever wants it next simply picks it up and heads for the sofa, or the dining table, or the garden, or wherever they fancy going.

The result of all this, the problem with all of this, is that my iPad isn’t really my iPad any more.

This has never happened with any of my gadgets before. Mornings have become a finders-keepers game, with whoever gets their hands on it first ignoring the glowers of the rest of us. I only get to use it when everyone’s out, or when they’ve gone to bed. In an ideal world I’d have a second one just for me, and if I had the cash (which, needless to say, I don’t) I would buy a bigger, better one right now. It’s that good.

If you have a family and you’re getting an iPad, here are two words of advice.

Hide it.

Why you can’t find washing machine reviews online

In a MetaFilter discussion about dodgy reviews - basically press release blurb being passed off as an independent review – MeFi user JonnySeveral made an interesting point:

this presents a neat little example of the sort of poisoning of the internet information well that seems to becoming SOP now…

There are two predominant ways in which corporations appear to be subverting the greater availability of information on the internet. The first is by model spamming, whereby huge ranges of products with marginally different model numbers are released making obtaining information about any particular one much more difficult. As an example, go into a camera shop and you will find that many of the models (particularly budget ones) have absolutely no information available about them online.

The second strategy pursued is the one of which this incident would appear to be an example: get a tame website to pass off PR as a review. This one looks to be a particularly lazy attempt – the repeated mentions of the manufacturer and model seem designed for SEO, but there was almost no attempt to disguise this piece’s origin, or even make it read like anything other than PR fluff.

This is particularly dangerous in the age of the User Review, when so many of these tend to skew positive as people seek to justify their purchases and have so little with which to compare

The model number thing rings true: whenever I’ve tried to research white goods, which suffer particularly badly from this, I’ve given up in disgust. Between that and content-free AdSense pages stuffed with model numbers, it’s almost impossible to research some products online.

Gene Weingarten Column Mentions Lady Gaga

Via Word magazine, there’s this great column about the new world of journalism.

Call me a grumpy old codger, but I liked the old way better. For one thing, I used to have at least a rudimentary idea of how a newspaper got produced: On deadline, drunks with cigars wrote stories that were edited by constipated but knowledgeable people, then printed on paper by enormous machines operated by people with stupid hats and dirty faces.

The Facebook movie is just the start

Nevermind The Social Network; what if other websites were films? You know the jokes before I make ‘em:

Shit my dad says

Fictionalised biography of a man whose dad doesn’t care what anyone thinks. Starring Prince Harry.