Alex Muller

Last week, Tom wrote about how fairly new online services are affecting the way we communicate overseas. He’s right, of course. To me, the most interesting part is his third sentence:

For instance, it seems completely unreasonable that it should cost 10-20 pence for someone in the UK to send an SMS message’s amount of data to me in the US—of course negating the outlandish prices that are charged for SMS messages already.

The days of mobile operators being able to charge us way over the odds for communicating internationally are long gone. My two week holiday in South Africa is just coming to an end, so this is pretty timely: I’ve used about 400MB of mobile data this trip, which O2 would have liked to charge me something in the region of £2,400 for. Instead, I bought a local SIM card, put it in my unlocked iPhone and spent just under £20.

On previous holidays I might’ve sent a dozen text messages to keep up with friends, which would have cost something like £5. Indeed, my monthly bill during a trip to the US a while back was about double the usual figure. This holiday, I sent zero text messages. In fact, barely anybody has my South African phone number.

The difference, though, is that I did send 21 direct messages on Twitter and nine (slightly longer) messages on Facebook. And seven emails.

And the amount O2 are going to be billing me for roaming this month? £0. I can only imagine mobile companies are losing—or are going to be losing—a hell of a lot of revenue from lost international charges.

Facebook launched their Places feature in the UK around Friday morning. Spots like this one are all over my news feed already.

Oh Facebook, just when I didn’t think you could get any better at encouraging interaction on your site:

Face recognition. Finding faces that aren’t already tagged. Presenting them, ready-to-tag, to the owner. This is pure genius for getting people to participate.

From a BBC News article today, “Schoolgirl fell to death from bridge after sex claims”:

[St Edward’s School headmaster Dr Andrew Nash] said he had later been told of “unpleasant comments” about Holly which had been placed online and in text messages.
But that was not something the school knew about at the time, he said.
“Facebook is something we worry about because it is so completely outside of our control,” he added.

At least he’s honest.

A while back I posted about how Jack Waterhouse was causing a stir on Facebook. In case your faith in the average person has been somewhat restored since then, I thought I’d draw your attention to the latest group to spring up: “fuck praying 4 Haiti some thing needs to control the population”.

This is troubling on at least three counts (that I can see):

1. Facebook doesn’t seem to have sufficient power to deal with stuff like this cropping up. They’ve plastered links to ‘report’ posts all over the place, but there’s no indication this actually does anything.
2. There’s still no accountability here, even with this being linked to people’s online identities; it’s too easy to play the “ahh, somebody else did this using my account” card.
3. People exist who are actually this stupid.

Charisse Rosati writes:

Id like to thank the 7.0 earthquake for visiting Haiti, Thats a few less aids infected Peices of shits that will Invade our country with their filth and disease

Eloquent.

If you’d like to help people less fortunate than you, Google’s put a link to the crisis response page on their homepage.

Giggle.

Facebook status after Facebook status after tweet of… people complaining that there are absolutely no summer jobs. I guess it’s to be expected (note please, I haven’t used the R word), but the effect is still incredible to see.

Twitter Search: summer job

(A way to search/filter my friends’ statuses would be nice, hint hint Facebook)

Earlier this week, news that Nottinghamshire teacher Peter Harvey was arrested for the attempted murder of one of his students broke. BBC News is now reporting that he’s been remanded in custody.

Regardless of what you make of the story, it should be obvious that details are a little sketchy; things have only been going for a few days or so, and nothing major has got out yet.

Nevertheless, some people have managed to prove their stupidity by offering completely unwanted and idiotic opinions on social networking sites like Facebook. Here’s a couple that made me cringe:

Jack Waterhouse looks like a little shit that deserves beatings.

— from the Facebook group of the same name, by one Scott Haynes.

You are a hero to the average, respectable, working man. Kick these little gobshites back to their chavy council estates. Another fooking kid whose mother is sponging off the state

— Phil Mcavity

Jack Waterhouse is almost certainly a fresh-mouthed little smart arse that needed a good slapping. I blame the (single) mother.

— John Fitzgerald

Apologies for the language and distasteful comments, but I wanted to get this across. Why people think they have a right to do this on the Internet is totally beyond me – it’s not even like they’re doing it because of anonymity. It’s ridiculous; part of me hopes it’s illegal, because frankly I’d love to see what would happen if some of these people had legal proceedings taken against them.

Oh, I couldn’t help but update this post after seeing the latest comment on the original group, linked above:

He looks like a right cheeky shit , unaware of who his father is.. what the class put that teacher through was awful, no respect at all

That from Jake William James French of Coquet High School, Newcastle. No offence Jake, but if we’re judging based on looks—as I’d guess you yourself are—your profile picture doesn’t seem much better.

13^th July, 1am: I keep telling myself there’s no point arguing with trolls, and there’s no point arguing with idiots. I need to spend less time on Facebook, before it drives me insane. Joe Jimothy, from the lovely state of Pennsylvania, has this to say:

In my country we would have stoned him.

Really, Joe? Stoning’s legal in the US, is it? Moron.

So, tell me this… why has Flickr not implemented Facebook profile tagging on its photos, the same way it does with Last.fm or Upcoming events?

Tagging a photo with, say, facebook:profile=012345678 would add a link to that person’s Facebook profile, and could then be used (effectively in reverse) on Facebook profiles.

June 6th: Since writing this post, I’ve come across a really cool Flickr machine tag browser that you should check out.

I took the photo below as a bit of a joke (hey, Vaio stickers are a joke… right?) but it’s interesting to have a record of the "old" Google Reader which was on my screen at the time. When it recently changed, I remember quite a few people complaining at how the layout seemed less intuitive; now, of course, I’d easily vote for the new, cleaner look.

Sometimes, I guess you just have to get through a few days or weeks of your users complaining at change – especially in this fairly new space of constantly evolving online software. And other times, the change isn’t so great and your users might actually have valid concerns (hey, Facebook, look over here).