basking in technology

So I installed the new Headup app from Semantinet today, and it was nice and quick (including installing the latest version of Silverlight). It had a lovely intuitive way of finding all my content from various sites like Digg, Twitter, Gmail etc. It was a very pleasant experience.

Once I’d installed it all, I surfed around (do we still surf?) looking for the little yellow crosses on lots of sites; I didn’t get a damn thing. Pretty gutted as the Vimeo introduction looked pretty cool. I vented my frustration on Twitter and within 20 minutes one of the developers in Israel reminded me they are still in beta, and they’re still having some issues and that they’ve just uploaded some fixes – cue a warm and fuzzy feeling. Lo and behold, after a delightful fishcake lunch, I came back to my computer and everything seems to be working perfectly.

My single remaining issue with Headup (without delving too deep) is the claim it’s a semantic app. I’m not too well read on the subject, but this seems more of just a convenient in-page aggregator, I should probably stop talking though, I don’t know too much…and Marc will probably tell me I’m wrong.

birthday budget cuts

that's just the way it is.

Facebook is really quite popular, so inevitably any changes will be under the largest and most accurate of microscopes. When I signed up to be a Facebook (non) developer so I could see the new design, I thought it was cool, it did everything it always did, addressed a load of issues with the old design which I won't go into now, but have been well documented elsewhere.

Now they've rolled out the new design for the last how ever many months it's been I'm astounded at some of the outcry I've seen at the new design. Ironically, lots of petitioning and protesting actually using some new functionality of Facebook, beautiful.

I don't want to launch into too much of a rant, basically this is just a case of people not liking change, I've scoured some of the protest groups and petitions for some logical rationale of why they don't like, but no such thing exists. We're talking about millions of people, incredible.  I only found this list of top ten improvements.

My main point is, Facebook launched this new design in a very caring way, and it's backfired massively on them. It's allowed people to choose between the two options, and then taken one away... this kind of soft launch of new design and functionality can never work in a community based site. You don't see anyone whining about Myspace changing their design; because people aren't given the option.

Facebook should've just told people to "deal with it or leave". Controversial, right?

post #01

Howdy,

There's load of stuff I'd like to talk about here, but I've always been a touch too cynical about personal blogging to partake in it myself.

However, after seeing so many friends blog regularly, I thought I should really change my ways and get into a habit of blogging about Web and digital general communication issues I'm interested in. As well as syndicating a load more of my activity online day-to-day.

Hoping to set up a few things over the next couple of weeks, would be cool I could get some suggestions about what to populate this space with, aside from the obvious Twitter, Delicious, Facebook feeds etc...

Good day.