sxa's Technical Musings

Sunday, 28 October 2012

Facebook - in 2012 you've been pushing your luck

[Short link to this article if you need it - http://goo.gl/DQfz3 - or retweet me]

My previous post on Facebook may have seemed too harsh on some of it's users. To rebalance that I'm going to go into a bit more about what's REALLY wrong with the site to give those people some real things to complain about. Facebook has got a lot of stick over privacy concerns and other such things over time. In my opinion they've almost always responded and improved their security model to the point where I happen to believe it's now pretty good - they've got many things right, and that's why it's the only social site where I'm comfortable with not posting things publicly. The exception list for posts is something that isn't on any of the other major networks (e.g. share with "All friends except my children list")

But it's far from perfect, and recently it's finally started to irate me to the point where I have to wonder whether it really is worth sticking with the site at all. My current feeling is that the only thing keeping me there is the existing network, and that may not be enough to sustain it into the future. So what's gone wrong? Here's my personal list ...

Choosing what appears in your feed

You've probably already noticed this, but if you leave facebook with the default settings, then you won't get all posts from your friends and pages you've liked. I think this was a shocking decision (and along the lines of IE10's default of having "Do Not Track" enabled which Yahoo! is already ignoring, but I digress).

For some friends (i.e. those that are posting all the time and start seeming like spam) this change is a good one as it lets you filter out most of the rubbish and let you see other people's posts, but the filtering (Facebook's algorithms for this are called EdgeRank and are quite complex) should be something you opt into for certain friends, not have to opt out of. As per IE10, the default is wrong. Here's how to get back to having all of a particular friend's posts appear in your feed (at the time of writing, it may change):

Go to the friend's page
Click the 'Friends' button near the top
Click "settings" under "Show in News Feed" on the drop down list
Select "All updates" instead of the default which is "Most updates". Of course if you have an extra-spammy friend, you could decrease what you see of them by selecting "Only important"

For pages you've liked the same problem occurs, but it's harder to get around it. What you have to do is add the page to an "Interest list" that will show in the left panel of the facebook page. It will still only show you some posts from them in your main feed, but at least it will let you get all the posts if you want them. You could add all "companies" to a single list or separate them out into topics. Interest lists can also be shared with your friends as you build them up, so they can follow them too, although oddly you can't share a list with a custom subset of friends:

Go to the page that you've liked
Press the "Liked" button
Select an existing list name or click "New list" to generate a new one
Run through the panels to create the list
Add more pages to the same list (you can actually add users as well, thus along with sharing lists they've actually brought back the friend group concept that disappeared a while back)

After doing this, by clicking the list name under "INTERESTS" on the left, you'll be able to see all posts by the pages in that list. To be honest, the whole mechanism is horrible, but as far as I can tell it's a way of allowing facebook to charge companies to get more exposure news feed. Having said that, here's an explanation of the concepts used for choosing which items are important enough to show.

But it also creates more work for the end-users to follow the brands and companies they want, and that's concerning. It actually encourages brands to create "user" accounts and become "friends" with you as that's the only way you can see all the posts from the companies you've chosen to "Like" short of them paying facebook. I don't like being "friends" with businesses, but I'd understand it with what facebook is doing...

Spammers playing the system

I mentioned this in my last blog post, but there are too many "chain posts". Almost exclusively full of nonsense, drivel, lies, or things just designed to be a nuisance. Two types in particular are starting to annoy me.

Pictures being shared just displaying a few short words of text. Superficially this just takes up more space, but actually Facebook's EdgeRank filter which filters out drivel and decide what to show you tends to prefer images, and it appears that it's more likely to appear in my stream than if you just clicked "share" on some text quote.
"Look at this picture than write some word/phrase in the comments". Serves no purpose other than the same as the last point. People believing something clever will happen. It won't. The only real such trick with coments I know if is the one where you can insert control codes to expand stuff into names, and that's got nothing to do with images. Please, if you do something like that - remove your comment so others don't get sucked in. You don't want to be a nuisance to your friends do you?

These are the sorts of things I covered in the last blog. Misinformation. If you want to spread a serious fact, quote the source, don't just blindly repost something which is probably nonsense or which you can't back up, and definitely don't let an app post it until you've verified it's doing what it says it is.

Facebook's bleeding privacy settings

I mentioned facebook's good options for controlling privacy, but at some point over the last couple of months (I think) facebook has done something exceptionally stupid. If you share a post with a custom list of people you've created, it used to just say "custom" if one of your friends hovered over the permissions icon. Now it actually displays the full list of people who can see the post. I was utterly shocked when I discovered this. Previously, the exact list of people was hidden. Now it's not. The list name is, of course, still hidden (at the time of writing ... The screenshot on the right is an example from the first time I saw it. Note that if you use "Friends except ..." then it DOESN'T currently show the list like this)

Leaking your data to friends' applications

This is one that I'm including purely to highlight the option to fix it. It's something that shouldn't be necessary, but with all the scams and so on that people seem to click on (if you've ever seen a "free iPad" post or some outrageous video with a comment that your friend probably didn't write) it is, sadly, probably a good idea to tighten up on what your friends' dodgy apps have access to.

At present the options are under "Privacy Settings" - "How people bring your info to apps they use" - here is what it looks like by default:

Under there you can control what information from your profile is available to all your friends' dodgy apps - and given how many people click on the apps I suspect there's plenty of money to be made in building databases for identify theft. On that basis, I'd clear of the following checkboxes:

Bio
Birthday
Family+relationships
Current location
My status updates

Because if you keep them hidden from anyone who isn't a friend, you certainly don't want whoever put tog that ether some dodgy app to scam people getting access to that info.

Finding your friend's comments in the masses

There are a number of posts that go become very popular and get lots of likes and comments. While there's nothing wrong with things going viral, if you see a message that your friend has commented on such a post along with 334,410 others however, it isn't at all easy to find your friend's post. Facebook shows you the post they've cos too much to ask and all you see under the posmmented on, so why not include the friend's comment, and possibly the few before in case it's useful for context. No, apparently that's too much to ask and all you see under the post in your news feed is something like this:

And if you click the comments you just get the last few, not necessarily including your friend's one. By the time you've found it, you've likely lost interest entirely .

est making it available to opt-in?

Difficulty of sharing posts with links

Have you ever tried to hit 'Share' on a post with a web link? Unlike plain text status updates, if you share a link then it doesn't let you share the original post's text, which may in many cases be the useful part. Its no wonder people prefer to cut+paste bogus chain letters instead of using the share button (although, of course, such chain letters generally don't have reference links anyway)

The ticker - creating classes of users

Ahhh the ticker. The actual source of many of those rumours about facebook "leaking" information to your friends by making it more obvious to you when your friends comment on things etc. If you don't already know, the ticker is the "mini news feed" that appears in the top right of your page if you have it, and it can't be turned off. But get this - the ticker does not reveal anything you didn't have access to already - it just makes it easier to see. The same is, of course, true of the timeline which so many people complained about. It primarily just made the info that was already visible to people easier to get to.

But that's not what I have a problem with. I object to it not yet being available to everyone. For some inexplicable reason, unlike the timeline which has been rolled out to pretty much everyone now, the ticker is not. And facebook's FAQs just say something about usage amounts. Well I'm sorry, but the ticker would make the service more valuable to me. It's not on my account - I'm less likely to use your site without it. And what would be the disadvantage of just making it available to opt-in?

Recommendations on mobile

On mobile sites, speed is of the essence. You're usually on a low-bandwidth connection, and so getting the data to the device and rendered as quickly as possible is of utmost importance. I understand the need for adverts on a free site, and as I've said before I don't object to them so much. But what I don't want is to log into your site on my device and find the first screenful of data is filled with "recommended pages" and none of the content I want. Please facebook, put ONE advert on the screen, preferably at the top, not multiple "recommended" pages followed by a section of "recommended" friends. . That's not smart even if you ignore the fact I'm not sure I've added a recommended friend in years. That just makes me want to close the window and not scroll down to find out what my friends are doing.

Tuesday, 23 October 2012

Eben Upton Raspberry Pi Visit

[Short link to this article if you need it - http://goo.gl/YAUV4 - or retweet me]

An introduction for those not familiar with the Pi ...

Yesterday Eben Upton (the guy behind the Raspberry Pi foundation) took time out of his very busy schedule to give a talk in Hursley. For those who are not familiar with it, the Raspberry Pi (here is the FAQ) is basically a small credit-card sized computer circuit board with a Broadcom BCM2835 chipset and a 700MHz ARM CPU powered via a microUSB socket, HDMI+composite video output, stereo audio output, ethernet port, 2 USB ports, an SD slot used for booting the device, and another proprietary expansion port, and a high performance graphics subsystem that can decode video at full HD resolution with h.264 (MPEG-2 available at extra cost) hardware playback support in XBMC/OpenElec - all for $35 for the "model B" version. They were initially built in China, but much of the manufacturing is now in the UK and is therefore supporting the UK economy! Keyboard/mouse/power/screen/SD card are not included in that price, but many people will have suitable ones lying around to connect to it, which certainly suited me as the last thing I need is more of them cluttering the place up.

As someone who was interested in the project from some time prior to the launch it was great to see Eben in person, particularly as I'm someone who owned a BBC Micro and lost many hours to Elite (co-written by David Braben, who is also involved in the project). If that thought is making any of you feel nostalgic, why not try the ZX Spectrum port of Elite running in a java applet!) The Pi as a project is trying to bring back a bit of that sense of "playing" that the BBC Micro probably did better than any other machine of its time.
(Quick disclaimer: This article is a mix of things that Eben spoke about from the notes I took, plus a few extra pieces of background information and external links that I have added myself)
The detailed background to the original idea was something I had not heard in detail before. A director of studies at St.John's college in Cambridge, he was concerned by the declining numbers of applicants for computing university positions, as well as a drop in the quality of those applicants (basically changing from getting many people of the type who could likely already code in assembler for two different architectures to a smaller number who's experience predominantly "I know HTML" - people who would need more time spent educating them to get to a suitable standard to teach them further) This meant that it would take longer to get them to an adequate standard on the low level aspects of computing - or by throwing them at Standard ML programming for 6 weeks to make them depressed (I remember going through that!)

BBC Micro comparisons

I mentioned the BBC Micro in the opening paragraphs - earlier this year there was a "Beeb@30" event to celebrate 30 years of that machine, and here is a BBC article looking back on it. It hass been well documented that they did try to get the BBC branding on the device, but the "unique way the BBC is funded" means that it was nowhere near as easy for the BBC to support such a commercially available device as happened in the 1980s. Having said that, the ARM-designed processor used in the Pi (and probably, your mobile/cell phone) had is roots in Acorn (here is a brief history of ARM) who built the BBC Micro. And there is a - possibly somewhat indulgent - project to port RISCOS (the OS designed for the BBC Micro's successor - the Archimedes) to the Pi.
The other thing of note on the Pi is the GPIO port. Now one of the things that made the BBC Micro special was the inclusion of easy I/O on the device, through the "user port" and "parallel port". In fact even the "joystick" port was marked as an "analogue in" to plant the suggestion it's use could extend far beyond games. This allowed a good quality of control of external devices and responding to inputs, something that allows many more interesting control projects to be done with it. At school I did a prototype satellite tracking system using it! But I digress, the GPIO port on the Pi even looks superficially very similar to the user port on the BBC Micro. The most popular interface using it so far is the Gertboard. (I wish a could remember the name of the blue boards we used on the BBC Micro - anyone know?)

A squashed marketplace

Another good point raised by Eben was about where the previous marketplace for the BBC Micro and comparable machine has now in modern times. With the home computers of the 80s you powered them on and you got a command prompt for a programming language interpreter that almost begged you to start programming straight away - almost as though, as Eben said, you had to actively choose not to program! It was easy for anyone to go into their local computer store and make them display scrolling rude messages up the screen, and anyone owning one of those computers would have almost certainly had the knowledge to do so!
Nowadays it is less easy. Games consoles have taken over the high performance graphics market, with high barriers to development entry. It a similar story for the consumer tablets on the market at present - from a practical perspective the development needs to be done in another environment rather than on the device itself. Even most consumer PCs do not ship with any reasonable programming language out of the box. While that is less of an issue in the high download speed internet of today, during the 90s it took real will and effort to be able to program. The concept of having to choose not to program got completely lost. And that is some of the spirit that the Raspberry Pi is now trying to recreate. It does appear to be a bit of a gap in the market, even ignoring the Cambridge admission quality problem. There are real low-level boards around, but not so much of an all-in-one device like the Pi. And one interesting thought was that the aforementioned relatively simple ~~bloat-free~~ non-content-enriched RISCOS with the ease of switching to a traditional command line from the desktop, could rekindle some of the mentality from the 80s home computers.

Interest and getting to market

The amount of early interest in the Pi took the foundation by surprise - 600,000 views on Rory Cellan-Jones (BBC Tech correspondent) brief video with Braben - could that really be an indication of how big the market was for such a device? And could they deliver that many at the target price point, which was pretty much set at $25 from the start (At the time of writing only the $35 model B mentioned in the first paragraph - which includes a 100Mbit ethernet port, 2 USB ports instead of one and the 512Mb upgrade recently announced - is shipping). But the foundation has kept to the target price point for the units, and the 512Mb upgrade for the model B has not resulted in a price change. The other remarkable thing was the number of downloads - in the tens of thousands - of the SD-card operating system image for the Pi that was released some time before the device was even on sale, so no-one could use it!
The vendor partnerships with Farnell/Element14 and RS were important as it allowed them to move from being a risk-averse charity to more of an IP licensing company to get the number of units they were going to need. And it was a good decision. The first day on sale, as those like me who were up at 6am to order will be aware, was a bit of a disaster (and I blogged to vent my frustration at the time, questioning the motives of many of those buying and how it was pitched by some parts of the media). 100,000 orders were placed by the lucky people who even managed to get to the manufacturing partners (Farnell/Element14 and RS) websites. Both crashed badly under the load, preventing people from buying their resistors or other electronics from those suppliers, not just Pis! A lesson in robust scalable web sites for those two companies.
Another interesting point for those who have been interested in the Pi is that although most of them used in relatively rich countries such as the UK and will therefore make use of the on-board HDMI output (HDMI-DVI-D adapters can be had for under £2 on ebay if needed - make sure you get male/female as required for your setup!), the Pi also has a composite analogue video output. For me, this is convenient as it allows me to attach it to my in-car screen, but as Eben pointed out it also allows it to be sold in much poorer/emerging countries in the world, where second hand analogue TVs are still in use, and the Pi can give them a new lease of life for a price point far less than, for example, a tablet.
So it was good to have the talk from Eben, and I chatted to him about some other things afterwards. Fantastic to get his time, and of course this blog has been written in a browser running on one of my Pis :-)

Tuesday, 31 July 2012

Google+ - Top 10 things I'd like you to fix

[Short link to this article if you need it: http://goo.gl/Hx4bA - or retweet me]

It's been just over a year since I wrote my initial article with my first thoughts on Google+. So how have things changed in that year, how does it stack up to the competition, and where do I see the social network positioned? I realised it was about time to write this post after a couple of discussion threads such as this one that I was recently posting to. This blog is split into my top 10, and then some more comments. I'll start with a summary of my major original gripes and their status:

Sadly, post to "Circle A excluding Circle B" still hasn't been implemented as an option. For this reason, the privacy model is still not as it should be. Given Google+'s approach of "Circles by default" this is a silly omission, and something that Facebook manages to do properly, so despite a focus on Circles in the UI, the control not as advanced as the competition.
The lack of "Public Citcles" (i.e. allowing people to subscribe to particular topics you post on) is frankly utterly ridiculous. I want people to choose which of my posts they see - basically to allow my "followers" to filter my stream to include/exclude topics they want by adding themselves into my circles. Twitter similarly inexplicably have never implemented service-side hashtag filtering. Google+ could've made it a feature that would've been great for marketing. I've seen some people hack up an alternative by asking people to tag themselves in images to get added, but that seems, well, just a hack.
Where did the "feedback" system go? It was quite neat, but maybe that was only while the sytsem was invite-only :-\ Then again, my two main pieces of feedback were the first two bullet points and there's no sign there was any attempt to implement them.

So now to some new topics:

The mobile web interface is poor (try it if you haven't already to see what I mean). I've seen criticisms of the ones that facebook/twitter provide, particularly in terms of causing high CPU use, but to be honest I find them usable, especially Facebook's, and I don't feel like a second class citizen when using them instead of the official applications. And both are vastly superior to the mobile web experience of Google+. I can't even "+1" a comment on their mobile web interface, and that's a fairly basic function.
We need a posting API. At the time of writing there is a read-only one (Current APi is here), but not having a full API make the lack of a decent mobile web interface more of a serious problem. An accessible API is how most social sites gain adoption, and although we have the "+1" button that can be embedded on sites, there's still no way to directly "Share on Google+" button that people can add, making it harder than on other sites. Similarly, you can't easily cross-post things to multiple social networks as I can elsewhere. Sort it out google! Or are you trying to go straight to having a locked down API like twitter started trying to retro-fit in March 2011?
SMS interactions still aren't available everywhere (such as in the UK). This might otherwise be an helpful way around the lack of an API and a decent mobile web interface. The way facebook has implemented SMS notifications is superb (if a bit of a hack using multiple numbers)- you can "like" comments, subscribe to people, post comments or new entries all over SMS (and my current phone network, GiffGaff, don't count those as chargeable). Being in the UK I haven't seen the details of the Google+ SMS system, but I hope it's that good. And if it is, it would probably be better than using the mobile web page. I have SMS interactions on twitter too, not having them on G+ lessens the engagement.
For no clear reason that I've seen, iGoogle is being retired in November 2013 (the mobile version has already gone) iGoogle has been my home page for quite some time now, and when I compared it to the alternatives a few months back, it was still the best. More importantly, it had the standard google toolbar at the top, including the Google+ notification bar. With iGoogle always open in my browser, I would always get alerts in a way that was very effective. I suspect I'll be stuck with the aforementioned useless mobile web interface in a portlet on another portal system, an that is only likely to reduce my engagement on G+.
There's this nagging feeling in the back of my mind that many of the above problems - related to being open and social - might be because they want more control over the platform, which is of course always good for advertising revenue if you fully control the clients. Not only that, but it means they can provide an enhanced experience on their chosen platforms if they control the apps. That sounds good, but it reduces the social value of the network and ancourages platform lock-in, and while I'm generally a fan of Android, that's not a smart way to go overall, and it would be harder to support a social media site that turned out to have such issues. It's not good for the openness and platform-neutrality of the web, something I've always been a very strong supporter of.
The "Incoming" stream that used to be on the left sidebar was fantastic. It showed you the posts from people who have circled you. In twitter terms it showed you the posts from all your followers regardless of whether you're following them. I don't "vet" my followers/circlees. I might chose to follow back someone I know, but otherwise prefer to choose based on whether people are posting interesting stuff, and the incoming stream was a good way to see if you'd "missed" anyone interesting. It improved the social experience, and removing another differentiating feature reduces the value of the Google+ platform. Why can't we have it back?
It concerns me that most of the changes over the last year appear to have been based on trying to make it a bit "more like facebook/twitter" by copying things like cover photos, and trending topic lists. While some people may bemoan the lack of those things after being used to having them elsewhere, feature parity is not something that Google should be striving for, it should be feature differentiation. Ideally starting with some of the stuff I've described. Yes some of those I've mentioned are related to parity (for example in security/privacy options, which of the big selling points when Google+ lauched) but the items to gain parity need to be the less "fluffy" ones. Frankly, as key differentiators, all they have at the moment is hangouts (a great idea) and that's limited in what clients you can use for it, which lessens its value.

So there you go - a top 10 that Google+ would have fixed if I was in charge. I'm somewhat disappointed it hasn't happened yet ... I hope Google isn't losing interest.

So where do I see Google+ going? I have to admit that I am posting a bit more to Google+ now. I haven't changed my original opinion - I still don't believe for a second it's a facebook killer. Not just because it doesn't have the user base, but because it doesn't have the control I want. I want to keep my "public" posts and my personal ones separate, and that's best done on a separate network. I generally don't accept "friend" requests from work colleagues on Facebook, but I don't care who circles me (or who follows me on twitter). I prefer to keep that network and the communication on it to be more personal - more frivolous I suppose - as opposed to my public streams. It's like having a work/life balance, but more of a public/private life balance, and surely that's a good thing? Yes I could restrict in mostly the same way on Google+, but I don't want such a stream polluted with the more serious stuff I currently post on G+, and that could only be got around by making my current posts non-public - which I don't want to do. I suppose having a second "facebook replacement" account on Google+ for doing that might work, but it just wouldn't get the use for now with so few people using it actively, and it would still have all the other issues I've described. Ignoring a less-than-successful IPO, Facebook are still getting the trade so I think they can still be around for a long time to come.

Don't get me wrong though, I'm not planning to give up on Google+. The interactions tend to be of a decent quality on there. The frequency and length of posts I'm likely to continue to make on G+ is likely to be comparable to facebook for now - about 1/day and I think that's about right. More and it gets 'spammy', much less and you stop remembering to check it. And that number's about right for the length of posts likely to be made on there.

It also certainly won't replace twitter for me, unless they mess things up completely. Buzz had the potential to be an alternative but that was shut down. In fairness it wasn't being used by many, but with things like the twitter API lockdown concerns it would have been good to have a high-profile alternative. Integrating it with G+, in the same way as facebook's ticker, seemed like a good idea. Maybe Google were premature in giving up on that space. (Side rant: Why won't facebook display me the ticker? Always thought it'd be great for seeing, for example, music listens. My usage ought to be high enough - why are facebook always so secretive about the algorithms? Grrr)

I've seen reports that Google+ is gaining users, but regardless of whether that's true, to be honest I'm not seeing too much evidence that they're heavily interacting with it once they become users, and reports like this one from May 2012 suggest I'm not the only one seeing that. Certainly I can't say I've seen a significant increase in the number of times I'm circled or how many people are interacting. So it concerns me that, while people may have an account, are they actually sticking with it? It may be the original standard "twitter effect" where people start, don't see the point, stop, then come back. But I'm not sure Google+ has the draw for people to want to come back - will they actually feel they're missing out? Every so often I go back and flirt with Diaspora, if only to use it as a mechanism for cross-posting, and because the values of the project seemed good, but I don't know where that's going to go. I think they've implemented a lot of the basics I want more effectively than Google+ now though, but because of the model the data mining/search possibilities aren't going to be as good as the other systems.

So for now, with all of the above faults, I still don't believe Google+ is ready to take over the world in mainstream use yet. The changes and enhancements to the platform need to be ones that will aid driving adoption. And there is the other fact that many people have privacy concerns with Google overall that will turn them away without even looking at it. I admit the thought of having all my online eggs in google's basket isn't the most appealing.

But if you're one of the people already on it, you can find me at http://gplus.to/sxa.

Monday, 4 June 2012

Facebook social ads - what's the problem, and why do you "like" things?

[Short link to this article if you need it: http://goo.gl/rJYd6 or retweet me]

Recently (actually in the last 24 hours it seems) quite a few people have suddenly started spotting Facebook's "Social Ad" feature and are recommending people turn it off. If you haven't seen it, facebook's adverts at the right of the screen can show, alongside the advert, which of your friends have "liked" a particular product. The issue is that it's seen as an endorsement, but let's take a rational step back for a second and look at why do people "like" facebook pages in the first place? I think it's down to one of these reasons:

To follow what the page/brand has to say
To share a witty phrase or saying (seems to be dieing out now) with their friends
To express approval of something/someone and tell their friends about it.

In cases 2 and 3 the purpose is very much "to tell others" and it appears on your friends' stream when you do the "like", so that should be a non-issue - why would you be worried about having that same information placed next to an ad when your reason for liking it was to tell your friends anyway? Only in the first case could it be a potential problem. Maybe you chose to follow them to find out what a competitor is doing with social media, which would certainly not be an endorsement. But in that case maybe following them so openly in that way is a bad idea anyway. My view is that we all use facebook for free, and so there shouldn't be a problem allowing facebook to display adverts to us (I've spoke of my disapproval of AdBlock plugins in the past), so is giving more publicity on what you've chosen to "Like" (which can be found on your profile anyway) really such a bad thing? After all, Facebook has had "recommended pages" based on your friend's likes for some time now, and I've almost never seen objections to that.

It's just that now it's in a section explicitly marked as "sponsored" rather than recommended, and yet that seems to be causing a problem for people. And it's because companies are paying for particular ones to get higher priority. And why shouldn't they do that? People have given facebook those details, so why wouldn't they use it instead of making a "Like" seem like a one-off thing. If you disapprove of facebook being a business you should have taken your data off the site years ago ... and certainly after their recent NASDAQ IPO.

Anyway, if that hasn't convinced you the options controlling social ads are here (for now, until they next move it!):

Account -> Account Settings -> Facebook Adverts -> Edit Social Advert Settings

The only real counterargument is in exactly how the sponsored stories are displayed - slightly differently from the above image - with someone's name above it in some cases, almost implying they wrote the text along with the advert. I'd like to see facebook adjust that later since I accept it's a bit naughty, but realistically I'd expect most people would understand that these are just coming from people's "likes" and if you're going to "like" something questionable then it's you're own silly fault for doing that on facebook ...

So my feelings in summary:: There are far worse things that facebook have done in this area. Nothing about social ads breaks the privacy options you have (from what I've seen anyway, correct me if I'm wrong) and it's just prioritising the old "recommended pages" thing based on who is choosing to pay facebook (since you, as a user, aren't paying for it - someone has to) Take it or leave it. This is how the internet stays free, get over it.

Sunday, 6 May 2012

Mobile handset displays in 2012 and what was the point of the HTC Sensation?

[Short link to this article if you need it: http://goo.gl/t2vbt - or retweet me]

This is an article that may date badly, but what the heck - will be fun to read it back in a year's time? It's about various things - the HTC Sensation's choice of screen resolution, the importance of screen resolution and screen technology in general, and where the mobile industry is heading with the current crop of premium handsets. I think we may have reached a point where there's not much more to give, and if we're lucky we'll see more higher-end handsets appearing at lower prices...

I know a few people who purchased one of the HTC Sensation handsets. I never quite understood why. The only reason appeared I've heard involved an obsession with numbers. I've often heard comments similar to:

"The screen resolution is higher so it must be a superior screen."

And I don't buy it. Do a blind test between a Sensation (or for that matter any iPhone) and any of the WVGA (800x480) AMOLED handsets on the market and I can't imagine there would be much of a contest in terms of which screen most people would choose to have. The Sensation provides an extra 80 pixels in the larger dimension, 60 in the smaller (960x540 "qHD" resolution at @256ppi) and that doesn't compensate for the reduced clarity and contrast of the screen. (For those that don't know, ppi here isn't payment protection insurance despite your spam SMS messgaes, it's "pixels per inch" and tells you how many dots across the screen per inch of screen space - a rough indication of how well a display can reproduce detail). I never quite understood why, for a similar high end price, you wouldn't go for one of the alternatives to the Sensation... The Sensation XL seemed even more pointless at 800x480 and 4.7" - I guess if your eyesight isn't good enough, but would those people really be looking for such a device instead of a "proper" tablet?

A friend of mine who has one such alternative - a Samsung Galaxy S2 (SGS2) - as well as a Sensation in his family. When I was tweeting about screens recently he got in touch and agreed, and that's from someone who has experienced both for longer than most of us. There just isn't any contest - unless you're obsessed with raw numeric data and believing it's all that matters. Apple pushed that to it's logical conclusion - creating a screen for the fourth generation iPhone which was beyond what the limits of the human eye are with their "Retina" display (DISCLAIMER: Depends how far away you view it from) which gives another hike even beyond the Sensation (an extra 100 pixels in the smaller dimension - 960x640 - and the display is smaller thus increasing the dot pitch significantly to @330ppi). Would even the Sensation users really claim the '4 was significantly better for it? To be fair, Apple needed a boost because I always considered the first three iPhone displays (480x320 @ 165ppi) behind the times from the start.

HTC: At "One" with itself

HTC have now launched two new handsets - the One X and One S (quite possibly named from their takeover of "One and Co" in 2008 who were also responsible for the HTC Diamond design. The X boasts a rather large 4.7" screen and 1280x720 @312ppi resolution, and the S with the same resolution and screen size as the original Sensation. I tried both of them recently and if I'm honest I was a bit underwhelmed. The screens were certainly an improvement on previous ones (The S now has an AMOLED display) and they did feel smooth and responsive. But there was a definite lack of "WOW!" factor that there was when I first used an SGS2, and despite using comparable technology the display didn't look quite up to the SGS2, although you can never be sure if that's down to in-store lighting and settings on the display units.

I do wonder where the mobile industry will go in the next couple of years. What will the "next big thing" be? With Android widely regarded as being the most power hungry of the major mobile operating systems, will Samsung's rumoured Windows Phone version of the SGS3 hardware level up the war of operating systems? I'm not yet convinced by the SGS3 if I'm honest - the SGS2 was almost above the size limits I'd like, and the extra size for the 4.8" SGS3 screen just seems a bit too much. The 5" (although physically larger overall, and a lower WVGA resolution) Android-based Dell Streak didn't sell too well a couple of years back after all. So are the One X and SGS3 just going to sell to people who just like playing one-upmanship on the numbers games? Does Apple "master of giving the users just what they need" choosing not to increase the iPhone's screen size from the original 3.5" not give you, and their competitors an idea as to the answer? Although the cynical side of me says it would have been harder to put the "Retina display" marketing in place if they increased the screen size.

My historic views on mobile phone screens

A bit of personal history in my choices and feelings (feel free to skip this paragraph) there was a time when screen resolution was absolutely critical to me, but that was before we were at current levels - I had a Nokia N80 with an incredible (for it's time) 416x352 259ppi display six years ago. (For comparison my current handset is actually slightly lower at 251ppi, and both are a similar density to the Sensation), and that was a decision I made on the basis of it's screen resolution and physical size. The pixel density was about on the limit of what I considered sensible and useful, and even at the time I decided that I was never likely to need something higher than that 259ppi. That resolution just about made web pages readable - it made a real difference. It's worth pointing out here that the first three iPhones - introduced three years later - only had just under 5% more screen pixels than my N80. I believe that by WVGA you've reached a stage of, frankly, "adequate" and you start getting to the stage where that does not seem adequate, the app/web page designer probably needs a slap. It's also worth noting at this point that one of the reasons I defected from Nokia (this blog entry has more details of the other reasons) was because they couldn't supply a handset to replace the N80 with a resolution even the same, let alone higher. It's also notable that with the N80 Nokia had done what Apple subsequently did with the '4 - doubled both dimensions compared to the earlier 6600/6680 while retaining the same size. The natural successor was the N95 which had 320x240 @154ppi (I believe that was due to Symbian dropping support for the N80's 416x352 resoolution more than anything else) it took them til the Nokia 5800/N97 to put a 640x360 screen in (229ppi on the 5800, 210ppi on the larger N97 panel (A serious case of Nokia misjudging where the industry was heading as far as I'm concerned. At that point they were heavily on the back foot playing catch up. Worryingly the flagship Nokia camera phones (The N8 and 808 PureView) are still both stuck with 640x360 displays (210ppi/184ppi respectively) presumably still due to restrictions even in the latest Symbian revisions.

So that last paragraph was mostly to indicate that screen resolution has been very important to me, but now we're at a stage where other things make more of a difference. If you're happy to carry around a near-5" 720p device with you then be my guest, it's just not for me. And I'm yet to be convinced that it's for the mass market. I was personally a bit disappointed when Nokia announced that the Lumia900 handset which would resolve the two issues I had with the Lumia800 - lack of reverse camera and NFC - would be a larger unit with a 4.3" screen instead of 3.7"

A summary of popular devices

I've included most of the latest ones from the popular manufacturers, including the ones mentioned in this article, and some entries from smartphone history to provide comparison points. The Huawei G300 (from Vodafone) and the Orange San Francisco are both budget (<£100) WVGA Android handsets - and worth a consider if you're on a budget or don't need a contract (and if that's the case, consider using my GiffGaff referral link to get a free SIM). How do the ones you've owned compare?

List of most referenced smart handsets by increasing pixel count, then PPI. All data from Gsmarena
Handset	Resolution	Size	ppi	Released	Comparable screens
Nokia 6600	208x176	2.1"	130	4Q/2003	Nokia 6680
Nokia N95	320x240	2.6"	154	03/2007
Nokia N80	416x352	2.1"	259	06/2006
iPhone 1	480x320	3.5"	165	06/2009	All iPhones up to 3GS
BlackBerry Bold 9000	480x320	2.6"	222	05/2008
Nokia 808	640x360	4.0"	184	05/2012
Nokia N97	640x360	3.5"	210	06/2009	Nokia N8
Nokia 5800	640x360	3.2"	229	11/2008
HTC Diamond	640x480	2.8"	286	05/2008	BB Bold Touch 9900
Dell Streak	800x480	5.0"	187	06/2010
Samsung Galaxy S2 (SGS2)	800x480	4.3"	217	04/2011	Nokia Lumia 900
Huawei G300 (Vodafone)	800x480	4.0"	233	04/2012	Samsung Galaxy S/Nexus-S
HTC Desire	800x480	3.7"	252	03/2010	Nokia Lumia 800
ZTE Blade (Orange SF)	800x480	3.5"	267	Q2/2011	Nokia N900
Nokia N9	854x480	3.9"	251	09/2011
HTC Sensation	960x540	4.3"	256	05/2011	HTC One S (New) Moto RAZR
iPhone 4	960x640	3.5"	330	06/2010
Samsung Galaxy S3 (SGS3)	1280x720	4.8"	306	06/2012
HTC One X	1280x720	4.7"	312	05/2012
Sony Xperia S	1280x720	4.3"	342	02/2012
Samsung Galaxy Note	1280x800	5.3"	285	10/2011
KEY: Green highlight incidicates some form of AMOLED display

So where do we go from here?

So I've given the "cons" of where the phone industry is (and this blog came out of a multi-part rant of twitter where I came to this, possibly harsh, conclusion) but how about some "pros"? Where would I like to see the industry go? Nokia reckon it's a 41MP camera sensor in the 808, but even ignoring the resolution limitations already mentioned that's got no chance of really taking off properly until they put it in a Windows Phone handset (please, for once Nokia, don't let another manufacturer get the jump on you after getting the technology out there first!!!) The only thing I'd still personally like on my next handset is an integrated pico projector or a laser projection keyboard. Integrating them has been thrown around as ideas for a while but it hasn't taken off yet. I had one of the keyboards (bluetooth connected) for my earlier Symbian devices and it was really convenient to type on ... unless you were outside in daylight. And had a definite "Wow!" factor. Not much else is doing it for me at the moment. The SGS3 detection of whether you're "reading" and avoiding dimming/locking the display is the only cool innovation I've seen recently, although none of the reviews seem to have pointed out how it works in the dark since I believe it just makes use of the handset's reverse camera ...

Do you have any other sensible ideas? Are you salivating at the thought of the One X or SGS3? Did you buy an HTC Sensation, and if so was it fundamentally because of the bigger resolution numbers, brand loyalty, non-screen related features, or something else that made it beat the AMOLED SGS2 for you? I'm genuinely interested...

[EDIT: Here is an article on the differnet display technologies in use]

Wednesday, 29 February 2012

Raspberry Pi - a botched release?

[Short link to this article if you need it - http://goo.gl/Id4dW - or retweet me]

Let me start by saying I'm a big supporter of the Raspberry Pi project and have been following it with a lot of anticipation for a while, and I love the goals of this project and what they've done so far. Technically I think it's brilliant. However I'm afraid to say that the release of the first batch of devices to the public hasn't really gone as expected. It's also worth pointing you at the OSNews article which is very positive to the company, and less so to the two distributors.

They had said earlier in the week that they were going to make an announcement at 0600 GMT today (29th February 2012) and indeed they did - they changed to a static page (which stayed up - yay!) telling people that two distributors, the well known RS Components (Current Pi link is here) and Farnell Electronics (link here) were going to be shipping the first batch of 10,000 model B boards between them. The message said:

"We have ensured that both RS Components and Premier farnell will be taking preorders from the start"

Possibly not too surprisingly, despite Raspberry Pi taking steps to use other people for the ordering, and pre-ordering both servers were horribly unresponsive at 0601. RS was better, but when you got through it only showed a "Register your interest" page, no way to place an order (or pre-order). Despite this, there was a claim that "If you're only seeing "register an interest" on RS's site, you're on the wrong page" Now the instructions given (because Raspberry Pi seemingly weren't given the site's product' codes) were to "search for raspberry pi" ... something that appears not to have been tested before the message went out. For that reason I can't completely exhonerate Raspberry Pi for the ... well ... fiasco seems the best word.

Now I'm sure the conflicting messages were unintentional rather than intentionally to deceive, but it does point to a bit of a discrepancy between what they have publicised and what the message is from RS. I have no idea if it was a lack of communication, or a mistake on RS's part. I can only assume the former since it didn't get rectified. It did seem that Raspberry Pi weren't happy about it though. And at least one person who got hold of RS on the phone was explicitly told they wouldn't be taking pre-orders, and others were told by the suppliers that they wouldn't ship to individuals - again contrary to what Raspberry Pi were expecting.

What really concerns me is that many of the first batch of units won't go to the expected recipients (developers, and those who understand what it is) and with all the hype and interest today it's going to be less likely to determine who is a "developer" as opposed to and end-user person, but some of the publicity coming out to those who didn't know the history was along the lines of "Here it is running quake3 and acting as a media centre for £22" without the appropriate disclaimers:

Quake3 was specifically ported to ARM, other games won't work in the same way out of the box
The XBMC distribution shown as a Raspberry Pi Media Centre isn't yet available and the hardware only has the H.264 codec. Granted it's very widely used, but you can't consider it as something that can replace a normal media centre PC at present, especially given the fact that the CPU is relatively slow.

The Daily Mail referred to it as a "credir-card sized Wi-Fi gizmo" (it doesn't have wifi) It ended up on the HotUKdeals site (this thread, which has been flagged as spam and removed a couple of times now) with a load of people who clearly didn't understand what it was. Plus the site's generally supposed to be for special offers, not a device being sold at it's retail price... I just hope that those sorts of people aren't ones who were trying to buy them. I tried posting a comment on the HotUKdeals thread to clarify things since there was clearly a lot of unreasonable hype:

Please, everyone, bear in mind that unless you're a developer or have a proper use for it, then it's almost certainly NOT worth getting one of the first batch. Expecting this to suddenly be an answer to all your media center prayers is likely also naive - it's not going to do that straight away, and for one thing there will be very limited codecs available for it's hardware acceleration (although.it will include H.264). Also, other than the video decoding, it won't make for an especially fast "PC" - you're looking at the level of something from possibly about 10 years ago.

It's also, to make this clear to people who don't get it, NOT AN x86 SYSTEM, so it will not run x86 software. You will need ARM specific software. Unless you're interested in getting your hands dirty, it would be better to wait until there is more software available for it.

As per a previous post, I'm saying this to stop people expecting a fully functional boxed system from buying the damn thing and realising they can't do anything, and dumping it in a drawer. Let the people who will write the software get the first batch, then see if it's worthwhile getting one later.

It's also NOT a limited deal - there's just a limit on the first batch, so what the heck it's doing on here in the first place is a bit of a mystery.

And later on I posted again:

Please folks - if you haven't read my post on page 3 of this thread ... it's not an x86 PC. It's not going to run your windows games (Quake3 was ported to ARM), you can't stick a PC video card into it, XBMC has been shown working but there isn't an AVAILABLE distribution for it yet AFAIK, the video codec support is limited to H.264, and the original description on here says it has built-in wifi, which it doesn't. Also the price is the STANDARD price which you'll be able to buy from later as well, this is not a limited deal other than the first batch being 10K units. And it's JUST a circuit board with no power cable/case etc.

Don't order from the first batch unless you have a clue what you're getting yourself into. You're not going to suddenly get an amazing media centre by the weekend if you order this. Let the developers take them, and be able to use them.

I want the first batch in the hands of real developers who will play and make this do the stuff that everyone else wants. I suspect we have more than just developers trying to get the first batch, some of whom quite possibly either just want to make some quick money by reselling - which I feel is disgusting behavior towards a company registered as a charity (there's still no word when the first batch will actually ship, or when the next batch will be, which means anyone who hasn't ordered doesn't know if they should pre-order with Farnell, or wait for RS's allocation from the first batch) or they soon will realise, due to the things I've mentioned, that it's useless to them and stick it in a drawer when a real developer could have had it. I see one person, who I can only consider to be a waste of human molecules, has put up a batch of 10 they don't yet have for £95 each on ebay.

In fairness, there's no question that this launch has generated a lot of publicity for the device, which is great, although it means that when RS do start shipping it will probably have even more interest than this morning. Whether that's a good thing is probably still up for debate (who will be buying them?) but I still believe that the initial intention of getting the first units into the hands of technical developers is absolutely right, to get it ready when more of the end users get hold of it.

I still love Raspberry Pi - the device, the philosophy, and the goals, but this release has been a bit of a mess in terms of expectations, so I hope they'll learn appropriate lessons and get the distribution/publicity sorted out from now on, otherwise it won't do the company's reputation a lot of good. I wish Pi the best of luck. Maybe the warm-up to the release announcement was too much (which is how it ended up with the wider publicity beyond the technical community) but that's easy to say with hindsight. Then again, if you take the approach that "all publicity is good publicity" then it's far from a botched release, and being able to say they brought down two large electric component supplier's web sites sounds impressive.

I'll now get off my soapbox, and wait until I can get my Raspberry Pi :-)