I do not seem to be too sorry for not writing an update any sooner. This is probably because there are too many gadgets and news items to go through during the build up to the festive holiday. Through the shroud of the Blackberry messaging (BBM) failing alongside the playbook fighting to stay alive and the even greater darkness of the late Steve Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011), it seems we are all ready for a break.

In the latest reveal it seems that the Android platform have released more stats that suggest they could be catching up to Apples 1million App downloads. However somehow Apple are still seen the the cloud with eternal silver lining.

The latest update of Lion IOS combined with the iPhone 4S seems worth a blog of its own. The voice application Siri sounds really impressive but what seems even better is that iCloud is FREE and has the ability to sync up everything smoothly. I do hear those novices screaming wants new about syncing. The new service allows you to have everything synced without any clicks and in zero seconds! This is magically done by Apple uploading all your stuff to their servers at super speed and then allowing it to be transmitted to your devices even faster.

Apple explain to us
“iCloud stores your music, photos, documents and more, and wirelessly pushes them”
but fails to let us know about the security. The company has made something great and also made a greater friend with the local governments as crimes all around the world can now be resolved. It may not be obvious to you but it does seem like this is a digital age we are living in and its ever more becoming part of the George Orwell world where people are being watched. The iPhone allows people to be tracked on its own so the idea that iCloud can give away all of our details, communications and information for storage use, just to access them quickly, is actually quiet silly.

Its yet another step into instant gratification and ironically does suggest Apple is now playing the role of the creature that tempted Adam to eat the Apple that dropped nearby. It sounds really tempting but it equally does have the consequences of loosing many more skills that us humans do need to learn and develop.

In the world of the web and business, people are always buzzing around thinking about what the next big thing could be. The difference between these people is they they talk about it and some others help make the dream a reality. Ever since the dawn of cyber-punk we have managed to create a self-fulfilling prophecy where society gains the new products and designs that we are told are new.

The reality is that there is a lot of technology that is based on peoples ideas of the future. Rather than building new products we are handed the vision from ‘Space Odyssey” or given phones with touch screens that have already been designed and thought through by science fiction. The future supposedly will come to and end and when it does we will have to go back and live amongst the trees.

With this mentality of looking back on our roots and the things that have worked for us in the past, I have a new idea. We as children are taught to play but when we are older we do not recognise that we do still play, its just that we do it in different ways. Whilst we move through the urban cities to and from work, we all interact by moving around the city, and absorb the marketing artwork before us. My suggestion is quiet simple. What if we could now actually be tagged and use the marketing or objects around us to connect to digital media, weather it is social media or event visiting a site.

Once upon a time people complained about the files in their cabinet, and now we have hard drives to condense the space. By using technology we may have answered certain questions that allow us to live in more space and gain access to things more instantly, but why has nobody thought of complaining. Technology seems to have kept its shine despite the physical nature is still the same and the manual labour of the real world and the digital work is the same, only less strenuous.

If we continue to need our bodies for certain things and we increase the use of technology, how on earth do we actually have time to live online and use facebook? The answer for that is really quite simple. Whilst going to your local shop to buy a magazine, in the future, you have the chance to press the ‘like’ button and actually comment if you wish. Cameras could also start to track your eye movement so that marketing companies an talk to you directly each time you look at one of their products. This doesn’t mean up selling, it means that the digital cloud technology behind it will be able to tell you if your choice could be a good or bad one based on your income.

As a red blooded male its typical that I only want to go into a shop to but what I want, but all that can now change. If i see something I need at home, the voice from above may then remind me that I have been in the shop 17 times before and I liked this on facebook so much I tweeted about it and I also need to buy it because ive run out of it and need a top up!

What if we are now living at a point in time where we are actually at the tip of using technology manually and now we just need to find ways to make the cloud part of the real world. In being human, surely the point of living is to live. So when will we be able to live the life we want and share it effortlessly at the same time, seamlessly as part of the real world. My final question about the unknown future is; when will coffee shops get a big blue like button where people can just hit the button to vote, thus avoiding the need to spend time getting their device out, find the site, login, find the online coffee shop, find the like button, and like it !

This is a slightly stranger post that asks the question, do we need social media or does it need us. I think this is a stranger post than my usual because I have had time to reflect back on my real practises.

In getting busier I have found that I have been a little unhappy. Not because im over worked but instead that I am finding that I am too busy in the real world to tweet and facebook and generally get digitally social. Instead of spending time digitally mixing with people, im doing this in real terms. This is the fun stuff and it does not make me sad. What has made me sad is that as a consequence of me living my life, my klout score has dropped and some twitter folk have stopped following me. At the same time I feel im getting more responses because my less frequent tweets are fully loaded. So now im left bitter about life and how I need to manage digital life.

My reality is, and possibly your reality too, that I am actually good at being social and it does not matter about where or how this happens. In recent years I have had my own choices and feel that I can choose my own path about the things I like ands dislike. So the question then arrives to me at this point. Do I need to be digitally social? Well, it all depends on your field or work and how busy your personal life is. It doesn’t really matter, but it can make a huge difference to someone who needs to engage directly and feel confident.

In my busy period of neglecting some social media it seems that I have also missed adding photo albums of things I have been doing on Facebook. After a week or two my partner then decided to post those pictures on her Facebook albums. All I was left with was a buch photos that I was tagged in. Its almost like the digital world had began to remind me how rubbish I am being at keeping in touch. Having taken a brief look at my partners pictures I found that she had oddly become more social.

Here is the interesting bit. Not only did she seem more interesting and popular than me but she also had a full stream of information about “Big Brother” other TV programmes and was also following bands and festivals like Leeds Festival.

I seem to be happy, and so does she, so I guess social media does have a place in our world. But in all honesty I really believe that I do not need to communicate in that way, I just choose to. Having social media is a digital add on. To answer the second half, does social media need us..? Yes, of course it does. Without us the social media sites would be charging money. So the idea of it being a free social medium is non-elitist. This sits really well with a utopian vision and it also tricks us to into the feeling that we are all together when really we are not. I still have a lot of people to meet.

By engaging in social media I am only continuing my level of instant gratification onto a much more grown up platform. Not only am I becoming dumbed down but social media makes me feel stronger and more powerful about being dumbed down. How odd! To make matters worse, companies like Facebook are making money form me. Okay so thats not a bad thing, but its terrible if you consider that by wasting time in voyeuristic behaviour I am not actually learning in the way that I should be. The right way would be to get my hands dirty and engage with reality.

I hope that you have come to the conclusion, like me, that social media is a dumbing down tool that equals additions like drugs at times and that we do not need it! Social media most certainly needs us.

Around April 2010 there was a site called Diaspora that aimed to challenge Facebook (FB). In fact there seems to be a growing trend of people who have gone past the stage of talking about how FB uses our data to actually doing something about it. The real issue is that nobody has managed to make a real go of it until Diaspora.

The company started by saying interesting things like:

“What will happen once Facebook turns into MySpace or one of these big large companies goes bust but has, as one of its assets, all of your personal data and all of our personal data?

Our communication, our photos, our comments – it’s within their power to do what they please with it, and this is a problem that we should and will fix.”

The community-funded company went as far as trying gaining 6,479 backers who pledged a total $200,641. The road map to their success also includes FB integration and with the privay filtering being used, what better way to show us the progress they made.

Diaspora Message Propagation (pre-alpha!) from daniel grippi on Vimeo.

Showing off six Diaspora seeds on the internet receiving information from a mutual Diaspora friend in real time.

No page refresh, and without an XMPP server.

In all honestly, I now, in the year 2011 have any idea what is happening as I have only recently been to their web site hoping to test it out, only to find that I had to sign up for an invite. The journey to rival FB has either led to total digital nothingness or the real creators have invented an elaborate secret society, in which case you have to be a Templar or Mason.

WordPress over the years has been one of many digital factor that have helped create develop and shape ‘the web’ becoming ‘your web’ and further fulfilling the cyber culture prophecy of living in a ‘global village’.

The internet in general is now available through our phones and applications and also allowed other opportunities for better, more efficiently run browsers. The first real browser that I seem to remember would be Netscape where the loading sign was the star rising over the Times New Roman ‘N’ symbol.

So as we develop onwards, so we must forget and bury our past. In this case its Microsofts Internet Explorer. Over the years it has become clearer to many people, mainly the geeks who understand the pixelated heartbeat of how the web is run, how bad this browser is. Having said this, most people are still can only just about afford a cheap PC with windows on it, and by windows i mean XP upwards! So in many ways the digital culture is aiming for people to simply move over to the next best browser, Chrome FireFox (in my opinion).

As IE6 dies slowly it seems WordPress are now saying that it is “increasingly complex code trickery to make the WordPress dashboard work,”. In order to keep their product up to date they always bring out new updates. In the case on users viewing WordPress sites on IE6 it seems that even WordPress have now said “it just won’t function very well”.

Okay so may theres more to this story. WordPress have actually changed a few bits and bobs and spruced the dashboard up through 3.2, consequently it has meant they just cant support difficult to work with browsers that are now at the bottom of their list.

One day in the far future I am sure we will look back at IE6, maybe in a museum too, and say how wonder it was, until we learnt the truth. The strange thing is that even Microsoft have launched a global campaign to end the browser.

Its always interesting to see which company merges who whom. In this case both companies are fairly young and oddly enough do a similar thing. Its reported that SurveryMonkey have ‘acquired’ WuFoo.

SurveyMonkey
Everyone from activists, market researchers to local governments have been taking full advantage of SurveyMonkey for quiet some time with no real problems. In fact you could argue its been a success since 1999 when it was first founded. Like most large comapnies it also had a good leg up from people like Dave Goldberg, the former Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Music GM who joined as CEO in 2009.

Wufoo
WuFoo began as one of the first companies to graduate from Y Cominbator’s accelerator program in the winter 2006 under the company name Infinity Box Inc. To my memory, it was also on of the first few companies that created a brand based on the founders personal likes – Wh-Tang-Clan and Foo Fighters !

Finally…
Althoug not a lot was said about the deal we do know its worth $35 million. It seems that the personalised emails from the WuFoo camp states clearly that this is only the beginning and that the merging of the two companies is meant to strengthen and unite their existing services.

Whats also clear is that SurveyMonkey are not keeping still. Earlier in January 2011 sources say it acquired a 49.9 percent interest in Clicktools. When you take a look at that company and mix it up, I think theres still a lot more work to be done in the web world.

The Announcement!

It seems that everyone loves iphones, even iphone do judging by their latest advert “if you dont have an iphone, you dont have an iphone”. It seems that with every bit of good comes bad, and in this case it seems the iphone itself is imitating similar resonances to google, they are keeping your data!

Security researchers have now said that the iphone records everything including tracking where you go. The iphone boasts a marvel gps system that derived from military use. With the a temporary memory to drive the phone like a mini computer, it seems it can not only detect where you are but record this info on the phone. The only problem with this is that it does this really well, really quickly.

The longitude and latitude are used for getting your location it seems that Apple have either made a mistake of purposely left this door open. There are no application’s out there, other than that of a private detective, that require you to know the history of ones locations. The only suggestion would be yet another possible avenue for social media go go into. No real link has een made to Apple about them recording the info, its just on the phone. This does not stop anyone taking your phone for a short period of time and getting information far more accurate than the bookmarks on you TomTom.

From French site, NowhereElse.fr comes an infographic iPhone 5 Rumor Roundup.

French version site here French version is available here.

This may seem backwards but the answer is yes, and the real question is do you have to pay for it and do it regularly.

Ever since google came around it has been the bible for what number websites rank and how this relates to online marketing.

What is even more interesting is that many companies tell you they can rank you highly and get you to number one. The reality is that every web site can get there and then slip, therefore needed a regular optimiser to work on the site.

What these compaines fail to tell you is the SEO is really important and sandboxing is even more important. This is a process that sets up a new website and how it acts online, with a number of a sites activities monitored, sandboxing is the longer term process that gets and keeps a site in the top spots.

So what does this mean? In short, its all of the in bounding links and special stuff the SEO needs to do that must be taken into consideration and developed so that any website that is build already has a good strong structure. The SEO in many ways is easier to maintain and from there on doesn’t need that much effort going into it.

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