Yesterday (16th Feb) Apple released a beta of Messages for Lion (Mac OS X 10.7) users, a core feature of Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8). Messages give OS X users the access to the iMessage system giving communication between OS X, iPad, iPod and iPhone in any combination.

iMessage works in a similar way to a SMS or IM message in that messages are sent to a iMessage address, be it a phone number or a verified email address. The sender of the message also sends their Caller ID to the recipient to create a communication stream. Meaning that the same sending location receives the returning messages.

Problems occur when devices such as iPad, iPod and OS X cannot receive phone number iMessages, meaning that when messages go out from such devices a different Caller ID is give. This creates another stream resulting in 2 communication streams between a single pair of individuals. Potentially very confusing. The target of these 2 streams become indistinguishable. How does the end user know which way the messages are being sent? Messages targeted for the phone may be sent to the desktop or iPad resulting in these messages being potentially missed for long periods of time.

Solutions.
iMessage needs a status indicator and a device logo to help users identify which streams would work, falling back to SMS when theres no other option.
iMessage addresses need to be consolidated to a single contact card.
Possibly a single stream between individuals rather than addresses, with a switch icon to identify where the message is being received – gets confusing though.

Finally, allow none iPhone devices to receive phone number iMessages.

I can only assume Apple have seen these problems coming. I do hope however that It’s not a solution as part of iOS6 – leaving many iMessages out.

I’m interested in what your real opinions are on Facebook, I know Facebook is hated around these parts by almost everyone – me included.

Personally I see Facebook as a hugely powerful platform with significant reach (at 750m active users, you can’t simply ignore). Facebook has some of the greatest minds working for them, not forgetting Zuckerberg himself. But they can’t seem to pull their shit together and make a product that not only delivers on the social aspects and business interests. Every step of the way Facebook cannibalises the social dynamics by introducing more noise into the UI. Yesterday I got shown a screenshot of what the new Facebook homepage looks like, I nearly threw up. There was literally nothing on that page that was remotely interesting. X likes Y, X is friends with Y, and “top stories”.

Facebooks F8 event is later today and they have promised changes and new features and usually I couldn’t careless, but the rumours of social music features has peaked my interest. I would love to see Turntable.fm (my hot startup pick for 2011) to be right within Facebook. (Google+ have really missed the beat on this one!)

Also, earlier today Colour was removed from the App Store, I can only hope that Facebook have acquired them. Location based photos have so much potential – and relevance to Facebook.

Overall what I hate about Facebook is their disregard to their users, bad UI and UX and their simple inability to show me relevant information from my social graph, what about you?

First off I’m going to presume you already know about the iPhone Tracking scandal, if not you can read about it here.

Innocent
If it was the Windows Phone or Android platform logging all of your location requests rather than the iOS would it be more of an issue. I think so, too many consumers see Apple as the good guys and automatically presume that this is an honest mistake. Where as with the other two, you cant help but think its malicious. I do believe this ‘feature’ was never intended to be exposed in such a way (explain more soon). But the fact that it has existed for a few years now in one way or another shows that Apple are aware of what it does.

So what?
This is the exact response that you get when you bring up this tracking issue, and for the most part I agree. I don’t particularly care that my location is being stored, and most likely never even open by anyone other than the device itself for its intended purpose. But for me that’s not the issue.

Data
Oliver points out how your Call details and SMS messages are stored on your phone, well, you already know that information is store, and you know if you wish to get rid of a message or call history you can go straight in and remove them. Not with location, nobody knew that their location is being stored in PLAIN TEXT on their handset constantly, not only was it a couple of recent locations you may have been to but your WHOLE history. (Limited to mostly cell towers and only when location services is on). Which brings me onto the privacy issue.

Privacy
Everyone is entitled to privacy and in my eyes this breaches it. Oliver points out that services like Foursquare and latitude. They both take your location and store it to provide you a service. The difference here though is they are 100% opt in, to the point where you chose which exact location spots it stores (You can even remove them online). If you use these apps you know for the most part what’s going on with your data and you know that you are handing out the data.

Oliver also points out Facebook and Twitter as an argument that privacy no longer applies, while I also agree overall. Facebook and Twitter are still both 100% opt-in services. You decide what personal information you add to these sites (Name, Address, Phone Numbers, etc etc.) and yes, by using these services you cant assume that it will stay 100% private. For me though, I don’t expect my phone to be logging all of my movement without me knowing, storing in plain text, and if I backup my phone to my computer (can’t really avoid it) its also stored there.

Just because you don’t have anything to hide, don’t presume that everyone else wants to live in public too.

Quick summary for those who don’t want to read the whole blog posts I’m responding to.
Louis points out that how in reality we use very little of our huge physical media collections that we used to own. He also points out how services such as Netflix and Spotify have changed how we consume content, arguably leading to an all digital society.

So I want to respond to this post and argue that while all digital is great for convenience and for most people it may be more than suitable. We as a society are really not really for dumping all those CDs and DVDs for subscription streaming.

Most of what I will write is more related to movies and TV shows as music has pretty much been solved over the past few years. (Increase in bandwidth and competition)

Subscription vs Purchasing
On the very basic level, Subscription is essentially paying a monthly fee in exchange for ‘unlimited’ (as in selection and access rather than length of time) access for that month, usual at a low cost.
Where as purchasing is you exchange a fee for the product that you then ‘own’ (EULAs may disagree but I’ve yet to see any proof that they will hold up legaly).

Internet
The internet is not ready for everyone to start streaming all of their content. Simple. Not only is dial-up usage still horrifically high (not so much the richest countries, but emerging economy’s will struggle). Where there is ‘high speed’ internet access (of atleast 2mb) there’s not enough bandwidth to stream realtime (see issues with storing for the other side).

Quality
Quality is a huge factor and selling point for physical media second to the actual ownership of the product (resell & lend to a friend just two of the selling points)

A DVD at retail is around 8gb of data with around 3 hours of content not only would you need around a 8MB internet connection, you might need to watch out for caps, throttling and all the other nasty things ISPs do to oversell their services.

So at this point you may be wondering about compression and such. Well if streaming services are going to replace physical media they need to have at-least the same quality if not better otherwise the whole idea will just not work. Imagine going back from enjoying full CD quality of Vinyl to 192kbps steaming (as audiophiles weep).

Storing
So if streaming high quality (read DVD – 2000s) is tough for most consumers; how about storing? Aside from the potential legal and inevitable DRM annoyances that will need to be implemented (to a point where you may never get to play your media in the same way you could with a disc). The consumer would need a safe way to store this media. TVs cant really do this at this stage. Computers could no problem, but its hard to get that content then onto the TV (Home DLNA doesn’t really cut it ‘yet’). DVR is the perfect device for this, providing there is enough space on that for all the films you wish to download. What about backing up if re-downloads are not allowed? (eg. iTunes).

As it stands dropping all physical media does not work. Sure if you just want to watch a film or listen to some music whilst you work. But you are seriously compromising on quality – what the producers of this entertainment work towards.

We are already stepping towards an all streaming society and in the long run I can see all media being available online in high quality with a touch of a button. With physical sales being sold though specialist stores (LPs now). Just not yet.

Quality is how the industry (Music, Film and TV) differentiate themselves from the pirates. Removing the selling points just make pirates look even more tempting.

First off though, I would like to say that SEO has its place in the web industry. Not only is it useful, but its a must for any website to atleast be aware of what SEO is all about.

As SEO stands, I see paying a third party to take out this service  is a risk. How do you identify who employs good and bad practice? Its more than feasible that top results for SEO services may have been acquired through bad practice. May not seem that important now – could argue that you may get the results you want. But will these results last if they are built on bad foundations.

But, What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation or SEO as its most commonly known, is the practice of modifying and promoting a website to improve its ranking and position in search results. Simple really, but theres alot of bad practice to ‘cheat’ high results – which may end up being removed from search engines entirely in the most serious cases.

Basics
All web pages need to be assigned a rank/value to determine the quality of the page to compare against queries to sort whats most relevant.

Only relevant pages are returned, so including text and information that you want to be found increases the hit rate.

Bad SEO Practice
Bad SEO is pretty important and where my biggest hatred for the SEO industry as a whole. They take your money (can be tens of thousands) and employ ethically bad methods.
Each one of these bad practices is based on legitimate algorithm decisions which makes it hard for search engines to identify whats good and bad, but importantly when it determines bad precise, penalties will apply.
Most common bad practice is the link farm. Link farms force backlinks and trys to associate a keyword or phrase to boost this as a relevant result for the page.

Good SEO
If you are looking for SEO, work with your Web Designer/Programmer or whoever manages the website itself to ensure basic SEO elements are implemented (eg Meta Tags, Short & Descriptive page titles, Alt text on links and images and most importantly GOOD CONTENT). If you happen to have someone helping with marketing, get them to help with the approach and consider SEM (Search Engine Marketing) over paid SEO services, and no just buying AdWords doesn’t really count.

Branding
Don’t forget, SEO is not the only thing that creates a successful website/business. Theres branding, products and service that all come into one. A great website does not make a crappy product successful.

My plan is to start a blog about things I’m doing, what I find interesting but also what-else is going on out there that should be noted. I’m hoping I can do this in an interesting fashion rather than “I just ate a cheese sandwich”, or “Here’s a funny cat”.

Aside from the blog, there will be pages for my Resume (edited for web), for those interested, and pages for my projects I’ve created or been a part of.

Comments and criticism  are very much welcome as this is my first proper attempt at a full blog.