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16th
May

The Google+ Conundrum

This entry was posted in Social on by .

I’ve got a minor confession to make: I actually really like Google+. I wanted to like it before, but some of the features announced over the last couple of days coupled with the redesign have moved the service into the “this is a nice product” category.

I’ve even actually used it(!) to upload some photos I took whilst I was in Scotland recently and sent them to some family. It’s nice, and it works well. I like especially how the photo-sphere photos I’ve taken are displayed in a panorama-style, with the option to switch back to “normal”, and whilst the auto-correction was a little over-zealous on some photos, it generally worked very well (and made Scotland appear misleadingly sunny).

The big cycle the platform is stuck in at the moment is that nobody’s using it, so there’s no “social” or “network” and thus nobody’s using it. Whilst well-done features such as the new photo sharing may start to change that, there are still big flaws in the accessibility of the platform, and this mainly comes down to the Circles system.

Circles works in principle, just not in practice. The mix of public, partially public and private results in a system which is confusing for non-geeks and frustrating for geeks. With the aforementioned photos I uploaded, I was never entirely sure how I was sharing, and had to check my profile in a logged-out window to make sure I’d set sharing correctly.

That’s a big stumbling block and for the foreseeable future is going to prevent Google+ from becoming mainstream. It doesn’t make perfect sense to a mass-audience and thus a mass-audience isn’t going to be persuaded to make the switch.

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6th
May

You don’t /have/ to be angry at the Daily Mail

This entry was posted in Creativity on by .

Earlier this afternoon I got back from a lovely ten-day break with family in the small Scottish town of Dunoon. I’ve got a lot of family heritage there, and it was great to see the place everyone’s been talking about for so many years, and when it wasn’t raining, the scenery was really beautiful (when it is raining you can’t see the scenery).

Not having a laptop, I was entirely reliant on my phone for all technological access, and on the whole, that worked well. I was slightly too constant in my checking of the battery level at times, but once I got past the idea that “it’s actually fine if the battery runs out”, I was quite happy being computer-less.

As one would expect, I did a little bit of writing when I was away, and for that I used a bluetooth keyboard I got on Amazon for 10 quid. I didn’t spend long writing, but when I took a quick look over it earlier on, I was slightly amazed how much I’d written in not-very-much-time.

And then I stopped looking over what I’d written and went on Facebook.

And then I decided there wasn’t interesting on Facebook and checked Hacker News again.

This continued for a good twenty minutes or so until I realised I’d stopped being productive entirely. I don’t really like Facebook, and I’d been on Hacker News already, but the mere option to check them tempted me. Had this happened when I was writing this on my phone? Nope; the single-task, app based interface doesn’t allow for it. On the computer, though, the temptation’s there and I’m all over the place.

For me, the big problem is the “Speed Dial” that loads up every time I load a new tab. This lists a bunch of websites I visit frequently, and it results in me visiting Facebook every time I open a new tab cause the button’s there. Another one of my big speed dial time sinks is the Daily Mail.

Reading the Daily Mail generally just makes me angry, but it’s also just bizarrely intriguing and I’ll frequent it… frequently.

I didn’t go on it once when I was away, and you know what? I didn’t miss it at all. It’s now gone from Speed Dial, along with Facebook. I won’t be absent-mindedly clicking those any more, nor will I absent-mindedly wasting time on them.

You don’t have to be angry at the Daily Mail, right?

#31: New Challenges Ahead!

Got to keep moving,
To keep improving, forwards -
And – innovating.

-

Unsure if this will look douchebaggey and pretentious in the morning. But what the heck.

In review: Haiku Every Day In April

As today’s the first of May, yesterday’s haiku marked the end of my fun little April project, Haiku Every Day in April. As the name suggests, over the last thirty days I’d planned to publish a haiku every day. I almost did that, with twenty nine haikus published over thirty days.

As I said at the beginning of the month, whilst I partially just wanted to get into the habit of posing regularly, off also hoped I’d improve slightly at my ability to coherently tell a story as concisely as possible, a skill that’s not just a necessity for me at work, but also pretty handy just to have.

So how did it go? For starters, I was definitely posting more. Virtually all of the haikus were written and published on my phone, which was great; whilst the WordPress Android app isn’t too great, it does the job. Being able to choose my post format from mobile also came in really handy – I published my haikus as ‘asides’, which made them look pretty groovy.

Whilst there was some improvement in my haiku writing over the course of the month, it was nothing too major and instead of becoming better at saying more in a haiku, I just became better at squeezing more info into post titles themselves. Still handy, but not quite what I was after

There’s also the slight issue that publishing every day over an extended period of time isn’t the best recipe for quality content. One haiku captured this – ‘Haiku Every Day Even If It Results In Poor Quality Haikus’. Still, whilst not all of the content was great, most of it was at least reasonably good, and I’d go go far as to say of it was quite good.

Overall, then, a success? Yeah, I reckon so. There’s no need to read too far into it as it was only a bit of fun and for one month, but there are some interesting lessons to be learned, as outlined in this post.

Writing haikus is quite fun, and I’m actually quite tempted to continue haikuing every day for another couple of months, but that might be slightly unwise, for reasons outlined above.

Still, just because something’s ‘slightly unwise’, doesn’t mean it should be scrapped – I’ll go for a more sustainable goal: reach one hundred haikus by the end of the year.

With 245 days left in the year, and 30 haikus down already, that’s a haiku every three days for the rest of the year with a couple of days to spare, which should hopefully allow me to get back to writing some longer form content here too, as well as ensuring I don’t encounter the problem of being obliged to post when I have nothing interesting to say.

I’d better get back to writing haikus, then! Onwards to a hundred!