Fear and loathing and Facebook

I don’t like Facebook. I don’t trust it. I don’t like the way it enables people you’ve avoided for 20 years to annoy you. I don’t like the way its privacy settings are so complex it needs an enormous article to explain them. And I don’t like its ambitions to enclose the entire Internet. There was a good example of that this morning, when it asked me to “Try Friend Finder”. All I need to do is give Facebook my email address and password.

Friend Finder has been around for a while, and what it does is simple: it uses your email account to email your contacts and tell them to join Facebook. I think that’s a step too far, and so do the German authorities, who may fine Facebook for breaking the country’s strict marketing regulations.

It’s no secret that when you use Facebook you’re its product, not its customer – its customers are the marketers who want to precision-target you – and yet I still have an account. If Facebook is so evil – and I think it is – why keep using it? Instead of keeping the “keep me signed in” button unticked and keeping your personal data to a minimum, why not just commit Facebook suicide?

The answer’s simple enough. It’s where my friends are. I’d much prefer it if they used email and Twitter, but they don’t, so I have a choice: put up with Facebook, or lose touch with people I don’t want to lose touch with.

A post on Metafilter - in a discussion about blocking Facebook Connect - last night expressed it perfectly. Over to you, Manjusri:

It’s like everyone I knew in highschool, and all my former coworkers and extended family decided to get together for a party. But for some reason they decided to hold it at residence of the biggest dick in highschool. Apparently they don’t see this guy as a dick, or his dickishness doesn’t rub them the wrong way. In any case I can either skip the party on principle or show up and politely warn friends about the host and enjoy the opportunity to reconnect with people. Just because I accept that this is where everyone is doesn’t mean I’m happy about it.

Can Microsoft make a must-have tablet?

Microsoft is “hardcore” about Windows Slates, consumer-focused tablet computers. Me:

The danger here is that Microsoft approaches Windows slate devices from the wrong direction. If Microsoft asks “how can we stuff Windows into an iPad-style device?” rather than “how can we make the most awesome tablet computer ever made, a machine so mind-meltingly incredible that Steve Jobs fills his pants when he sees it?” then all we’ll end up with is a bunch of slightly smaller tablet PCs.

Don’t get me wrong. I like Windows 7, and I quite like tablet PCs. But I like the iPad much, much more. It’s an amazing device, and that’s largely because Apple hasn’t just sawed the keyboard off a MacBook Pro and jumped around the place shouting “and that’s magic!” like a demented Paul Daniels.

Apologies in advance if your comment doesn’t appear immediately, or at all

The site’s suffering from one of those periodic spam floods that affect blogs, so I’m trashing around 40 to 100 junk comments a day. If you post something and it doesn’t appear immediately, or at all, please let me know – it may be caught in the spam filter or I may have deleted it by accident.

Get a free crime e-book this weekend (10/11 July)

Fancy a free book? Publishing firm Simon & Schuster is giving away a free ebook version of Loser’s Town, a Hollywood-set thriller by Daniel Depp. I’ve no idea what it’s like but it’s free, it’s a PDF so it should work on anything, and all you need to do is provide an email address, so you might as well get it while you can.

Here’s the link.

In other news, the new Tim Dorsey novel is much cheaper as an ebook than it is in print: the latter is £11 to £14 plus postage, while the Kindle edition is eleven dollars flat. That’s around seven quid.

I want to stick a rocket launcher in my magic trousers

Over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun John Walker has been publishing a list of do’s and don’ts for video games. Many of them made me laugh. Here’s the first bit. And here’s the second.

Do: let me carry more than two guns. Just when did we all decide that we weren’t okay with that element of unrealism in gaming? Sure, it can be set in the retro-future on a spaceship made of time, but god forbid we holster an improbable number of weapons. Especially if you’ll then let me carry hundreds of bits of ammo for all the weapons anywhere. Where am I storing those? In my magic trousers? And if so, why can’t I stick a pistol and a rocket launcher in there too? I want to stick a rocket launcher in my magic trousers!

Not all comments are welcome at the Daily Mail

I tried to comment on a Daily Mail article earlier. It’s a report about the inquest into the death of a young woman from a heart attack, and the report goes into quite a lot of detail because – and here is the “public interest” bit – she was sexually aroused and watching pornography when she died.

As one poster on Fark.com put it:

instead of simply putting up a brief article saying that she died of a sudden heart arrhythmia and that foul play isn’t suspected, they have to print every freaking detail down to her state of dress, the sex toys, the laptop showing porn, etc. Her family and friends are devastated by this, and now she’s been turned into an international joke because a bunch of reporters thought it would be funny to point at the woman who died fapping.

I tried to put a comment on the article – you should be ashamed of yourselves for printing this – but for some mysterious reason the comments system is running very slow today and spent several hours saying that no comments had been submitted. Now the commenting bit has been removed altogether. Funny that.

Apple’s App Store is two today

It’s easy to mock Apple – and I do – but the App Store’s had an enormous effect on software. So when I say app-y birthday, I mean it.

Being able to pick up apps for a few quid here, a few pence there encourages us to experiment, to forget our favourites when something brighter and better comes along – and that in turn means developers are constantly under pressure to raise their game, to create even better applications. Software hasn’t been this exciting since the online shareware explosion of the nineties.

So I got an iPad…

Don’t worry. Taking my cue from Richard Cobbett – who didn’t blog about his iPad on the grounds that there were probably enough reviews of that particular device kicking around already – I’m not going to go on about it other than to ask for one little feature. User accounts.

The iPad is a great family machine – I pick it up and use it for X, Mrs Bigmouth picks it up and uses it for Y, Baby Bigmouth grabs it from us to use the colouring apps – but user accounts would make it even better. At the moment we’re divvying things up, so I get the mail app for my email and Mrs B uses Safari; Mrs B gets the Facebook app and I promise to use the web version, and so on. I have no idea whether multi-user support is in the forthcoming OS update, but I’ll be delighted if it is.

The iPhone 4 antenna problems are not as bad as we feared

Anandtech has looked at this stuff in incredible detail.

The fact of the matter is that either the most sensitive region of the antenna should have an insulative coating, or everyone should use a case. For a company that uses style heavily as a selling point, the latter isn’t an option. And the former would require an unprecedented admission of fault on Apple’s part.

Apple’s dropped a bollock here. But – and it’s an enormous “but”:

reception is massively better on the iPhone 4 [compared to the 3GS] in actual use.

If you’re in a place with patchy reception – some people know it as “Scotland” – then the way you hold the phone makes a difference to the number of bars you see and the speed of your data connection, but the iPhone 4 gets a signal and can download data in places the 3GS can’t.

Stop putting bloody buttons on your websites

This man is right.

In the pre-Twitter/Facebook days, the “share” buttons across the web were simple static links. There were links above and below articles allowing the user to email, bookmark, or share an article across a variety of social networks, but they were static in that they were simple images with no realtime information baked into them.  On the other hand, today’s buttons have constantly-changing data showing, for example, how many times a story has been reTweeted on Twitter or Liked on Facebook.  This realtime information requires a separate call to each respective site to receive the current data.  This process takes time, and when a web publisher or blogger uses three or four buttons beneath multiple stories on a given page, each unique button has to load.

…Button Overload is beginning to take shape across the web. Often, I simply want to read a story that sounds interesting, and I don’t care if it has been liked 75 times on Facebook, reTweeted 45 times on Twitter, shared 5 times on Buzz, and that I can be the first to submit it to Digg.