Facebook Wants To Be Your Home

​Om Malik is bothered by Facebook Home, and well he might be. Facebook's big announcement turned out not to be a phone but a step towards its own branded OS which puts the big blue F front and centre on your Android phone, and integrates a bunch of the social media advertising company's services into your lock screen. It'll probably go down a storm with the (twenty-something?) audience that lives on Facebook, but it ought to set alarm bells ringing for any of us who are uncomfortable with just how much information we're giving (for free) to a company that has done a fantastic job of giving advertisers more ways to sell us things.

As a friend pointed out to me a while back, most people really don't care about privacy as long as they get cool stuff, and it'll take regulators, governments and privacy advocates to really make a difference here. I'm optimistic though that that might well happen. It's recently come to light that a major reason for Google's shuttering of Reader was the expectation of onerous privacy regulation, and I'm certain that Facebook's land grab for your home screen has regulators and lobbyists going through the terms of service with the finest of fine tooth combs.

When Listening To Media Pundits on Apple, Consider Their Past Record

As we hit the third anniversary of the iPad's US launch and consider just how it's transformed the computing (and education) landscape, it's worth remembering what the prevailing tech/media view of it was at the time. Enjoy your 20:20 hindsight, and then remember that these are the same people telling us now how Apple has lost its touch, and how it needs to emulate Samsung to succeed.

​The UK release of iPad didn't come until the end of May 2010, and I picked mine up on the first day. As I hit my own three-year anniversary using it, I'll be considering just how it changed my own computing patterns, and how it's evolved over that time. Tune in soon for more, including a special podcast on three years with the iPad.

Shifting Up

It's the long public holiday weekend here in the UK, which both puts a few things on hold and clears some space to get a few things done. One of the things I finally managed to do was to acknowledge that the iPad mini has become my primary computer and to upgrade from the WiFi-only model I bought on release day to a WiFi-plus-cellular model.

All of my previous (full size) iPads have had cellular data, despite friends telling me to either tether them to my phone, or to pick up something like a Mi-Fi, so it was a bit of an experiment to see if I could manage with the WiFi entry model. Even buying a mini in the first place was an experiment, and I had no idea that it would quickly become my device of choice.

So, I've been tethering the mini to my iPhone pretty much every day when office wifi dies on me, or when a cafe doesn't have a decent network. While tethering works well It also shortens the phone battery life and eats up data on my phone plan (precisely the reasons I didn't consider doing this in the first place). A pretty good offer from EE—the combined Orange/T-Mobile carrier that recently became the UK's first provider of 4G/LTE—convinced me to trade up to a 32GB cellular model (having always had 32GB models in the past meant that 16GB was a tight squeeze for me).

The verdict? LTE is a joy. I'm turning off wifi in cafes this weekend because its slower than the cellular connection. While it's not available everywhere yet, I can see it rapidly becoming one of those things that you just can't imagine life without (a bit like 3G has been for the last few years). Trust me, when this is available everywhere (and when competition pushes prices down and speeds even higher) you'll start to hear of people who don't even have wired home broadband anymore. First it'll be students living in rented student accommodation and the like, but then they'll move into apartments and won't bother with cable and satellite, or with computers that don't have LTE built-in. Then, the rest of us will start to come around, just like we did with mobile phones instead of landlines. Slowly, everything changes.

It's Alive!

This morning we sneaked out a pilot for a new podcast. It's Alive! is the brainchild of the evil genius behind Agents of Evolution and the creator of the Matticus Tattooi channel on YouTube, and comes from the darkest heart of England's Black County, the land that spewed forth both Frankenstein director James Whale and some of the world's finest heavy metal (in both senses). It's Alive! is a movie podcast, with the emphasis (so far, though not exclusively) on fantastic cinema. It's a different vibe from other shows on Futurilla so far, and I'm really looking forward to seeing how it develops. Great too to have two new presenters on our baby network—big welcome and thanks to Stuart and Matt for bringing the show our way.

Forecast is Amazing

I haven't posted about specific web apps or services here much yet, but Forecast is worth drawing to your attention. I always wanted to try out ​the Dark Sky iOS weather app, but it was US-only. Now the Dark Sky team has developed a complete global weather application as a web-app. It works beautifully in Safari on Mac and on iPhone/iPad, with delightfully smooth animations (and a great Time Machine feature on desktop browsers that lets you check weather on a given historical date). I could stare at Forecast's updating near-term weather predictions for hours.

I'm generally a bit sniffy about web apps–I'd much sooner have a native app–​but if this is the standard we can expect then I'm just fine with that.

Japanese iPad Applications

Applications unique to Japan are blossoming here thanks to Apple's (AAPL) iPad. In the absence of a popular home-grown alternative, domestic app makers have come up with some unusual -- sometimes inspiring -- approaches. "The fishermen in Hokkaido are using the iPad to record where they have fished to avoid over-fishing. In Saga prefecture, all the ambulances uses iPad to quickly locate where the patient has to be transferred. In Kobe, physicians using iPads during operations," says Tokyo-based tech consultant Nobuyuki Hayashi. "I could name another cool 50. There is almost nothing on Android tablets."

As William Gibson has said: "The future is already here, it's just not very evenly distributed".

What's Wrong With Free?

Back in the early 2000s it was de rigeur to talk about the rise of the free, about how digital was pushing costs down a curve towards zero, and how advertising revenue (or paid-for higher tiers of products) would turn the bulk of software into online services that most people would never need to pay for. In many ways this turned out to be true: The majority of emails I get these days are from people using Gmail (and to a lesser extent Yahoo Mail), and even more of our daily communication happens via Twitter or Facebook. We rely more and more on the availability of services for which we don't directly pay anything.

Most of us probably feel ok with this state of affairs. Anyone who started using email after about 2004 most likely isn't accustomed to email (or the bulk of online services) being something that come with a price tag attached, and the rest of us have grown used to getting numerous email addresses, blogs, and social media services at zero cost, or bundled with connectivity. But there's a problem with free, and it's one that's been highlighted in recent days by Google's decision to shut down its Google Reader service: If the provider of a free service decides that it's no longer critical to its business model, it's likely to just disappear.

Of course, paying for a service doesn't guarantee that it'll be there forever, but it does at least give a company a more compelling reason to support, develop and sustain it. It also tends to ensure that the relationship with the company is clearer: I pay for a service, you provide it. We all know by now that if you're not the customer, you're probably the product (though not everyone agrees), and I certainly feel a whole lot better about trusting something when I've paid good money for it. I'm pretty sure that Flickr wouldn't have survived the turmoils at Yahoo if it didn't have a solid core of paying users.

A quick tally of the critical online services I'm paying for: Photo storage (Flickr), Email/Syncing/Cloud storage (iCloud paid tier), File storage (Dropbox paid account), Domain hosting/DNS/mailboxes (Hover), computer back-up (Backblaze), web hosting (Squarespace), file hosting (Rackspace). I also throw some cash over to Instapaper to get my web reading lists in sync, and there are a bunch of other services where I'm on a free tier right now, but have from time-to-time been a paying customer, depending on my workflows (Evernote, Skype, Backpack, Highrise, Basecamp).

I'm not suggesting that this approach is the only one. Nevertheless, I'd recommend reviewing which services you rely on, asking yourself what you'd do if they went away, and what alternatives you might have that make you the paying customer.

Google's Kill Rate Dissected

Thorough piece by Charles Arthur in The Guardian looking at how long Google has kept its various free services and APIs running. This isn't the reason I've generally avoided trusting my data to Google services, but it's a compelling one nonetheless. To think I used to worry about Flickr going away, and shuddered at the thought of having to use Picasa. I'm feeling a lot better about that now.

Constructing Re:Sleeves

On Monday the MA course in Visual Communication at BIAD played host to Ben Waddington—design archeologist, historian and storyteller—who took the opportunity to open up some of the thinking behind the Re:Sleeves project. Ben has an incredible ability to take observations, details, coincidences, and to weave them into cohesive narratives which navigate their way through a landscape of shaky evidence and solid insights. The "lies in service of the truth", if you like. (Actually, Michael Haneke is a good reference point, as Ben's approach reminds me of that of the 'unreliable narrator' who talks us through Haneke's magnificently truthful film The White Ribbon.)

Ben's lecture is now available here as a special 'extra' edition of Re:Sleeves, along with a PDF of the presentation slides that you can listen along to if you're so inclined. It'll be hitting the regular Futurilla Radio feed soon.

Barnbrook on Bowie, Simplicity, and the Ethics of Design

Jonathan Barnbrook's talk at The Herbert Art Gallery on Thursday evening was timed to connect with the Caught In The Crossfire exhibition, so I'd assumed that he'd focus on his work as a graphic agitator and ethical designer. It was a surprise then that he was prepared to talk in such detail about his work with David Bowie, and in particular the process of designing (and un-designing) packaging for The Next Day.

​It's quite likely that the design for TND has polarised reaction more than any sleeve in the last few years. I fully expect to see it in both "Best of 2013" and "Worst of 2013" lists at the end of the year, and that speaks to the single-mindedness of its aesthetic. Having had a peek at the design process, and at the roughs that were offered up to Bowie along the way, it feels more than ever like the only possible solution to the brief, and that's something that I think characterises the very best design outcomes. Think about how obvious something like the design for the original iPod seems after having used it for the first time, or how the minimal-button-large-screen design of the iPhone has come to define an entire industry. Great design is both completely unexpected and totally obvious in hindsight.

​Barnbrook's passion for working with Bowie–a musical hero only after the fact–is also crucial. "Only design for the artists you like" is a mantra that many might consider luxurious, but it's entirely imperative to producing effective work, and might be extended to "only work on solutions to problems you care about". Without that central commitment our work as designers is absent of meaning, and we're taking up valuable space on a team. In Barnbrook's work it's become a central tenet that connects his activism with his more commercial passions; a guiding ethos that is at once challenging to apply consistently and necessary in order to live and function as a designer in society.

Doom Ray Weekend Edition

Recording podcasts to schedule is never easy, especially when ​you're waiting for something you want to talk about. This week's Doom Ray was moved at short notice to Sunday evening so that regular host Kyle Jobson and I could talk about the Spring Memorabilia show at Birmingham NEC, but I think it was worth the wait. The sheer creativity and passion of some of the people we spoke to there was staggering, and we're already setting up future shows to cover them in detail. In the meantime we hope this will whet your appetite.

Re:Sleeves Episode 2 is Online

Ben and I recorded the second Re:Sleeves show this morning, and it's now online for your listening pleasure. This fortnight's topic is a real treat for me: The sleeve art of the hugely influential US band Swans has long been almost as significant as their music, and demonstrates how—at its best—sleeve design is inseparable from the music itself. Hope you enjoy our chat as much as I did.

Remember, you can subscribe to all the Futurilla Radio Podcasts via iTunes.

Web Strategies for Creative Enterprise, redux

Over the last month I've been adapting and redelivering the Web Essentials material to this year's MA Visual Communication students, and to selected undergraduate classes too (final year Theatre & Performance Design, and second-year Graphics). ​It's always interesting to get a sense of the continued relevance of the material as time progresses, and to figure out how we need to adapt our strategies to the new realities. I wanted to capture a few of the key observations, and over the coming few weeks I'll try to make sense of them.

1. The digital native is still not what we expected, and probably never will be.
2. Requiring students to set up a blog for their course makes less and less sense (unless it's a blogging course).
3. There's a long tail of networks and services developing, but it's still fragile.
4. The network-awareness that enables students to make imaginative leaps is emerging, but slowly.
5. Confusing the strategy with the goal is still widespread, and our assessment makes the problem worse.

Much more to say about this soon. In the meantime get in touch here or via Twitter if you've insight or questions on applying online strategies in your own teaching.

Reading the Future of Photography

Longtime friend (and colleague in a number of businesses) Mike Priddy flew back to the UK this week from his adopted home in The Netherlands, and we caught up by taking a trip to Birmingham's annual Focus On Imaging expo. One of the reasons for visiting the show each year is to try to take the temperature of the industry, and to get a sense of where it thinks it's heading. In previous years we've noticed swings towards (and then away from) ink-jet printing, to and from compact cameras (and back again), and the ebb and flow of services to photographers. This year seemed to me rather inconclusive, as if the industry is unsure about where it's left by the confluence of smartphone photography, digital printing services, ebooks, compact system cameras, large-sensor DSLRs, and digital video. Chinese companies offering remarkably good value accessories were in full force, elaborate wedding album vendors were everywhere, and the spectre of the devastated UK photographic retailing market hung silently in the air. 

​To coincide with the show, and to take advantage of Mike's visit to the UK, we used the opportunity to record a pilot to what will soon be a regular Futurilla podcast. You can hear us talk about some of the developments in digital photography, and some potential future directions, in the Resolution pilot episode.

The Re:Sleeves Podcast

I'm delighted to welcome Re:Sleeves to our fledgling podcast network. Historian, explorer and storyteller Ben Waddington and I have been hatching this one since spring 2012 when we started sharing our mutual fascination with album sleeve design. About a month ago we resolved to make it a podcast, and last Friday we recorded the first of a planned fortnightly show. Our first discussion is focused on the evocative sleeve art for Bowie's three-LP 77-79 run of studio albums; Low, Heroes, and Lodger. We very much hope you enjoy listening as much as we enjoyed recording it.

Futurilla Radio

A couple of weeks ago we quietly added a second horse to the Futurilla stable: The Doom Ray podcast sprang from the brain of recent BIAD alumni Kyle Jobson, who also collaborated with us on the iBooks project. Kyle's a self-confessed geek and lover of all that geek culture entails, so it was pretty much a no brainier to schedule and record a weekly call in which he could let off steam on games, films and comic book culture, with me acting as a co-host and as someone to bounce ideas off. So far we've talked about The Dark Knight Returns, House of Cards, Ni No Kuni, PS4, and a bunch of films that Kyle's selected for BIAD's MA film screenings. Last week's show on Terry Gilliam's Brazil was, in my humble opinion, the best yet, and if you haven't listened to Doom Ray yet, you should start there.

While we've wanted to do a Doom Ray podcast for some time (indeed we started with a pilot episode last year), we began planning in December to try and do it in a way that we could learn from, with the intention of getting better at the business of recording and distributing audio media, and of learning how we might scale and extend it to other topics. In the course of our daily work we come across lots of fascinating, informed and opinionated people, and we'd love to find a platform for more of them. Some of these people get invited into BIAD to give lectures (which we're generally poor at capturing), some of them become trusted advisers and eventual collaborators. Audio is a fast medium for capturing and disseminating these various conversations and dialogues.

Doom Ray has been then, the beginning of this learning process. We've begun to put in place, test, and iterate the workflows and processes that allow us to record, process, and distribute podcasts. We've made (and will continue to make) lots of mistakes, and to learn from them (quickly!). It's hard to practice this stuff in private, and we've had to launch the show quietly into the public domain in order to make the experiment real, though the focus has definitely been on learning as a team, rather than on building an audience. We've told almost no-one about the shows up until now, though we're still getting a handful of downloads (we're building for scale nonetheless—it's absolutely our intention to be able to deal with a large number of listeners for future shows).

So, now we're moving into the next stage by developing a second show. Again, it's an idea that we've been discussing for over a year, and in that time it's moved from being a written project to an audio one. It's taken a month to think through what we needed in terms of recording a pilot show, and developing a strategy and timetable. We're very excited about the topic and the format, and we've got some big new things planned for this one. I'll be sharing more details as the week progresses, both here and on twitter (@sharl).

Switching →

Great, so you can quickly switch accounts, but why would you want to, especially if you’re just one user on one Mac? Here are a few possible instances for using multiple accounts, beyond the parents-with-kids scenario.

Smart advice from Macworld. I'd add one thing: Having Guest login available means you can allow someone else to use your Mac to get something done, with no danger of them accessing your files, screwing something up, or leaving their passwords and cookies in your web browser. When a guest account logs off, all the session data is deleted.

Pecha Kucha Preparation on the iPad

So, I had to turn a 40-slide twenty minute presentation on our electronic book approach into a 20-slide Pecha Kucha to last 6 minutes 40 seconds. Having never done one of these things before I was pretty uncertain about how to tackle it, so I turned to local design history sleuth, and Pecha Kucha veteran, Ben Waddington for advice. Ben's recommendation was to write two sentences per slide, and knowing my own tendency to use 100 words where 20 would suffice, I decided to double up on his advice: I figured that if I limited myself to a single sentence for each slide then I could afford to expand (or drift off the point) where necessary.

I'd built the original presentation in Keynote on the Mac, but had already tweaked it for iPad so I could reliably deliver the original presentation in a PC-centric department, and I wanted to stay on the iPad for the whole of the process, though I'd have to deliver the slides to the event organisers for conversion to the auto-running PowerPoint show they were using for the Pecha Kucha.

Getting the 40 sides down to 20 was relatively straightforward. Eliminating partial builds took 4 or 5 slides out right away, and a similar number of slides had information that was either unnecessary in the context of the event or impossible to explain in 20 seconds. Duplication and 'reinforcement' slides took care of another 5. In the end, only 5 or 6 slides were actually painful to cut, but I reckoned I could fill any interested audience members in on the relevant points after presenting, either in person or by email. Mailing the presentation from Keynote on iPad was straightforward, though the organiser's email server initially choked on the size of the file and I had to use Dropbox to get it across to them.

I'd allowed myself about two hours to write a single sentence per slide, and I wanted to do it right in the iPad. I'd sketched out some ideas in the Notes app the night before the presentation, and then sat down over breakfast on the day of the (lunchtime) presentation with wifi and coffee to whip it into shape.

There are still reasons to complain about multitasking on iOS, but it's mostly because of habits built up through desktop use. In practice moving between Keynote and Notes is pretty smooth (I use the four-finger swipe to go back and forth) and I had the basic numbered points down in about an hour, with most of the time spent working on the right way to précis some pretty involved stuff into 30 words or so.

I hadn't really decided in advance how to handle my presenter notes. I decided pretty much on the spur of the moment to build a separate Keynote presentation on the iPad with my notes on individual slides. Keynote on iPad was perfect for this, though I'd love an app that could take numbered notes from the clipboard and send them to Keynote for automatic conversion to slides. iCloud comes in for a fair amount of criticism too, but it's perfect for things like this: My notes presentation was on my iPhone pretty much instantly, and I could hold it in my hand as a reminder during my presentation.

Years ago, before PowerPoint (and then Keynote) handled proper dual screen presentations with presenter notes, I used to jot down my slide topics on a sheet of paper as a reminder of what was coming up and of what I wanted to say. Moving to iPad for presentation (where presenter notes are handled less well at the moment) requires kind of switching back to some of those approaches. I'm convinced that I can refine this kind of workflow, but I'm also looking to see how Apple's increasingly twin-platform approach itself develops over the next few months. Soon we'll have a good idea of how the next version of OS X is shaping up, and with it some possible clues to how a newly-unified development effort might play out on iOS too.

Technology in Education event: iBooks on the Rise

Last week colleagues at birmingham City University held a Technology in Education event, and I was invited to talk about our approach to building iBooks to support classes. The presentations were pecha kucha style, and I wasn't thrilled at having to cram a topic that ordinarily takes at least 20 minutes to explain into just 6 minutes and 40 seconds, but I thought it might be fun to try.

Aside from the process of compressing the material which I'll write about on another occasion, my main take-away from the event was a realisation of just how many of my colleagues across the University have begun actively developing iBooks for iPad. The projects vary in intent and scope, but we've moved a long way from when I was talking iBooks last early summer, and meeting quite a lot of resistance.

I'm going to be digging into the specifics by talking to some of the people running these projects on a new education/tech/design podcast we're preparing now, but a quick poll seems to indicate that the widespread ownership of iPads and the extended usefulness/connectedness of these devices in the classroom are major factors. I'll have some figures to share soon.

Virtual Valentine

"The age of secretive mandarins who creep on heels of tact is dead:

We are all players now in the great game of fact instead

So since you can't keep your cards to your chest

I'd suggest you think a few moves ahead

As one does when playing a game of chess"

Momus, "The Age of Information"

Sunday January 10th 2013.

It's The Year of The Snake, both here in the UK and in China. At 4pm GMT yesterday it was midnight in Guangzhou. My partner was celebrating the Lunar New Year with her cousin, while brothers, aunts, and mother slept in the scattered rooms of the house, its tiled floors swept and shrines prepared for the rituals which bind them to millennia of tradition.

She'd travelled the three hours from Kowloon by Ferry along the waterways which connect the Zhujiang River Estuary to southern China, and which in turn flow into the two-thousand year old canals that irrigate land and provide trading routes. She'd reached Hong Kong by Airbus A380, flying at a speed of around 900 km per hour.

The family television flickers with images of the fireworks which are lighting up the capital city 1,336 miles away. I am almost 6,000 miles away, connecting through Apple's servers in San Jose, about a 2.4 seconds journey from the iPod touch in Chun's hand. We're chatting about the cake she ate, and the one I'm about to eat, and about sticky rice dumplings.

Earlier the same day she'd called me on FaceTime and showed me the rooster that was loosely tied up in her aunt's house and which had woken her with its crowing. It was night-time in Birmingham, and the sound rang loudly around my living room at about 343 metres per second, probably disturbing my neighbours. By now that bird is most likely in a hot pot.

The Universe might have been expanding for 13 billion years or more, but human distance has been collapsing since at least the introduction of the railway. My lover might be fifteen hours away, or a 2 second journey between our mail servers, but I can still blow her a goodnight kiss at the speed of sound. We're able to be both further away and closer together than has ever been possible before. When we're half a world apart we exchange more inconsequential and private thoughts than we do when we're in the same room. It's as if we compensate for the lack of physical presence with increased transparency. We all say things online that remain unsaid in 'real' space.

From IDD calls and email to IM and Skype, and stretching back to the telegraph and beyond, technology has seemingly been on a centuries-long trajectory to annihilate distance. Lovers have endured periods of extended separations for all of human history, but we've never before been able to perceive so many aspects of each other's presence in the world while being so far apart.

The Internet has made long distance relationships more likely, and perhaps more sustainable, than ever, but it's also inserted itself into all of our relationships in ways that are less obviously progressive. Facebook has been the most visible example where the ease and fluidity of information sharing has created new tensions in less-solid partnerships, but pretty much all of the new platforms aggregate and share data in ways that rewrite our expectations of privacy. I read what you said on Twitter, I checked your tags on Facebook, I watched what you watched on YouTube. Trust has been redefined, and now seems to demand backup from facts.

In the end, this collapsing of space isn't new, and we've measured distance in time between points for most of our civilised history. What's new is our ability to maintain these low-level, almost trivial connections on a continuous basis. The kaomoji arriving in my Messages app is like a gentle touch of the hand, a privately passed smile that just says I'm still here and you're important to me. We occupy multiple spaces simultaneously, and we're no less here for being there. It's not that our attention is elsewhere, it's that it's everywhere.

A quick check of Find My Friends reduces ten thousand kilometres to a one-second scroll in an inch-square window. The ongoing dynamic of a trans-continental relationship now seems punctuated more by the relentless to-and-fro of time zones than by physical distance.

Today is Wednesday. By the time I sleep tonight it'll be Valentines Day in China, though they're still enjoying family gatherings for the new year. I'll be in Birmingham UK, but I'll also be just a fraction of a second away from my partner, in the cables and routers of the network, glowing on the display of the iPod on her bedside table.

This article was first published by Birmingham City University Views on 13/02/2013.

Buy Momus's The Age Of Information on Amazon.co.uk