The Kids: they’re laughing at us.

Compared to when I was growing up and a crappy Gameboy or impossible to tune in b&w portable telly were the heights of the technology accessible to the average teen, kids these days “don’t know they’re born” with their infuriatingly flippant use of PS3s, iPhones and what-would-until-recently-have-been-considered-witchcraft wireless broadband.

 Recently doing the rounds is a fascinating US study by The Pew Internet & American Life Project which “studies the social impact of the internet, focusing on topics including health, teens, and broadband”.

 It shows that kids are always online but instead of blogging they are on social networks such as myspace (come on, they’re too young to know better).

But does this herald the end for blogging, or is it just that they’re er.. kids, and  haven’t really got enough life/work experience to blog about yet? Plus they’re not in a boring full-time office job which is the time when grown-ups suddenly discover blogging and spend all day reading everyone else’s blogs and writing their own in a desperate attempt to distract themselves from the pointlessness of existence. Right?

Eventually the younger generation (x, y or z? I lose track) will get fed up of status updates and LOLCats and the like and get the sudden desire to sign up to a WordPress account and vomit out a lengthy essay about a minor indie band or technological development that interests only them for 3 of their mates to skim-read. I mean, why WOULDN’T you want to be a blogger?

They will realise that there is more to life than uglifying their myspace page with more useless flashing widgetry than a Dixons store in the run up to Christmas, and instead do the grown up, professional adult thing and sign up to a LinkedIn account that will forever lie eerily dormant like a cyberspace metaphor for their own stalled careers.

The kids aren’t using Twitter either. Some journalists seem to consider this as irrefutable proof that Twitter is uncool. I beg to disagree – surely it’s possible that us adults, though clearly cripplingly uncool in almost every way, with all that laughable experience, expertise and accrued knowledge, might actually know something that the kids don’t?

Yes that’s adults – that much ignored demographic, which the BBC’s iPhone department have conveniently categorised as:

Mobile First (aged 30-40), Social Animals (18-30), Mobile Lifestyle (25-40) and the Addicted (30-40).

Via The Register  (As The Reg point out, they didn’t mention what happens after 40 – presumably once over 40 people are too preoccupied with their impending death to have any interest in iPhone apps)

You see, these youngsters just haven’t realised the genius of Twitter yet. But they will. They will realise that they have wasted most of their life so far making inane X-Factor orientated chatter with their moronic friends, and instead sign up to Twitter where they can look at pictures of Demi Moore’s ass courtesy of her adopted son Ashton Kutcher or be the first to know that Jordan is auctioning off her collection of Peter Andre’s chesthair on Ebay.

So either you can read the report as:

• proof of a future where all adults will be perma-teenagers content with bullying, teasing and flirting with their peers on social networking sites from birth to infinity and beyond

• or you can see the differences as part of an overall pattern of people growing up and either settling for a cosily predictable Facebook account showing photos of their kids and weddings, or starting their own ineffectual digital megaphones through which they howl disaffected obscenities into the infinity of cyberspace (yes, a blog like this one).

And in the case of both, generally settling into life as a slavering, bedridden, and fundamentally uncool adult person.

Of course the internet is still in its infancy itself, barely old enough in the grand scheme of things to even have a bebo account. So all this is yet more pointless conjecture about what might or might not happen. Which let’s face it, is 90% of what blogging consists of. Maybe that’s why it’s going out of fashion.

This isn’t fanboy stuff, this is future of journalism/publishing/entertainment stuff. (via Mashable)

Today Google launched Buzz. On the face of it, it’s a fairly small (and pointless) update to make their gmail service more social. With the ability to update your profile from within your email provider, t’s a direct attempt to compete with Twitter. However what it clearly shows is they also feel a huge threat from Facebook, who are rumoured to be launching their own email service soon.

The full extent to which the big tech companies are fighting for control of the web has only recently become apparent to me. It might just be that I’m a newbie in the tech world, or it might be that the companies are showing their teeth more and more in the battle for top dog.

It’s easy as a consumer/user of their products to see these companies as benign. Many people fall in love with their products due to the positive effects they have on their lives, and their simplicity and ease of use. I for example, find Google apps extremely useful. Gmail works like a dream compared to hotmail (though I still use both), I use Google Reader for most of my online reading and google docs enables me to easily access pdfs and my own writing wherever I can get online.

I love buying physical books from Amazon because it’s such good value, it’s quick and they have pretty much every book I could ever want. And as you know, I enjoy using Apple’s products because of their slick, simple interfaces which are geared towards creativity (however since my Macbook died on me at the weekend I am beginning to like them a lot less!)

Facebook is ok I suppose. I’m not a massive fan of the overcomplicated interface, much preferring Twitter for its easy real time conversation, but it is convenient to be able to maintain an ongoing, “ambient” connection with friends and family who you might otherwise not see or directly contact very often (note: I have quite strict privacy settings in Facebook as I use it exclusively to connect with those people I actually know face to face in real life). But it is becoming so popular, especially with the younger generation, who reportedly rarely visit blogs etc but find all the info through Facebook that some have suggested it may effectively replace the rest of the web in the future. This I find extremely scary.

And so clearly, do Google. If people start using email within Facebook, and searching for info within Facebook, they may never leave and therefore Google’s market share would wither and die. 

The basis of capitalism (put very simply according to my basic understanding) is that everyone benefits from competition as it leads to more choice, as well as increasing value and decreasing prices. But there can only be one market leader in each field. Now I would like Apple and Google to continue to work together – having Google search and Google maps as the default on the iPhone works wonderfully. But with the launch of Google’s Droid OS and now an actual phone, and with Eric Schmidt leaving Apple’s board last year, there are rumours that soon Bing will replace Google as the default search. Certainly Steve Jobs makes his views of his competitors clear in his post-iPad rant as widely reported by the tech blogs.

Personally I would rather each company stick to what they do best and co-exist peacefully. Of course, they have to acknowledge each others existence and provide linked services because that’s the way the web currently works. But when companies get to this size, they have their eyes on the ultimate prize – taking over the world. And so Buzz doesn’t provide any integration with Facebook, though it can be linked to Twitter.

Below is a chart showing what I perceive to be the places where the battle lines have been drawn. As I’m mainly concerned with the web, I’ve not gone into the hardware side of things in any detail (I’m least knowledgeable when it comes to Microsoft – they are clearly still leaders in terms of hardware & software sales despite being somewhat of a lumbering dinosaur when it comes to innovation.)

Also it was put together fairly hastily so please let me know if I’ve left anything out.

Related articles elsewhere:

Google Just Declared War On Social Startups – Who Is Going Down? Via The Next Web

Facebook is the new threat to Google via The Guardian

Google Buzz: What It Means for Twitter and Facebook via Mashable

 Christ. I have iPad fatigue already and they’re not even in the shops. I have been debating whether to add to the ACRES of unending conjecture, speculation and in a select few cases, reasonably intelligent coverage but as I have talked about it a few times here I felt I owed you some amount of what American TV shows call ‘closure’. So here it is, all you need to know about the iPants in one handy place which you may or may not choose to ignore.

 WHAT IS IT?

 A huge bloody big iPhone (well actually iPod Touch as it has no phone or camera). It looks a bit daft held up, but it looks pretty cool on your lap pretending to be the New York Times.

 WHAT’S IT FOR THOUGH? I ALREADY HAVE A BLOODY IPHONE.

 Good question. Nobody really knows. Some have said it’s an upgrade of the portable TV. Some say it’s useless cos you can’t view porn.. I mean ‘flash’ on it.

I say, it’s a portable storefront, a touchable shop window, for Apple to sell you crap. If the iPod was their way to sell music on iTunes, the iPhone their way to sell you widgets and games via the app store, then the iPad has been designed to sell you both of those plus reading material via the iBooks store.

 My favourite sci-fi blog io9 called the iPad  ’Crap Futurism’ and much of what they have to say rings scarily true. They quote sci-fi author Karl Schroeder who says “what Apple has done (again) is seize the moment with a combination of a device and a business model . .” and the writer of the piece agrees that “the iPad isn’t so much new technology as it is a shiny, pretty doorway to a mall where you can buy everything from books to movies.”

 Not only that but as the article also points out, the focus is very heavily on consumption, not creativity. Lots of people are worried that if this is the future, it’s one controlled by Apple. The iPad will allow for very limited customisation and won’t run any of the programmes used by creative professionals such as adobe creative suite, or even the iLife suite which, though basic, made my MacBook such an attractive purchase. Twitter programmer Alex Payne agrees, saying that he probably wouldn’t have become a programmer if he had owned one as a kid.

 Let’s face it though, Charlie Brooker is probably right as always. 

 ”I don’t want to hear how the iPad is going to make my life simpler. I want to hear how it’ll amuse and distract me; how it plans to anaesthetise me into a numb, trancelike state. Call it the iDawdler and aggressively market it as the world’s first utterly dedicated timewasting device: an electronic sedative to rival diazepam, alcohol or television. If Apple can convince us of that, it’s got itself a hit.”

NEVER MIND ALL THAT, HAS IT SAVED THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY OR WHATEVER IT WAS YOU WERE WITTERING ON ABOUT IN THAT REALLY LONG AND POINTLESS POST YOU PUBLISHED THE OTHER DAY?

 Not that I can tell. It doesn’t seem, at first glance to offer anything new for the publishing industry, as in fact it makes web browsing so easy that it might even do away with the need for a lot of the paid apps necessary on the iPhone due to the small screen.

 According to Simon Jenkins in the Guardian, the death of printed reading materials has been greatly exaggerated, and Peter Preston for the same paper reckons the iPad is destined to be landfill, like so many ‘revolutionary’ gadgets before it.

 A PAD IS FOR WRITING

Clearly, this video by Peter Serafinowicz is a p*ss-take. But personally, I think the iPad might be quite good if you could write on it.

A decent handwriting conversion programme does not to my knowledge exist yet, but if I could write notes using a stylus that were cleverly converted to digital text (which could be used by multiple apps like iWork, Simplenote, WordPress etc), I could really see the iPad being useful for writers & bloggers, freeing us from the tyranny of the RSI inducing keyboard and mouse (multitouchscreens are probably even worse for RSI) and thus being more than just another way of consuming the web.

However the fact that a keyboard dock has already been announced makes me think this is some way off.

FiNALLY

As for its other obvious fault, apparently the ability to use more than one app at once may be on the way in the next iPhone upgrade (and therefore the iPad as they use the same OS).

So, in conclusion, do I want one? Yes. Do I need one or can I come up with a justifiable reason to get one? Not really.

Finally, Patrick Jordan of Just Another iPhone Blog, who I’ve written for in the past, was interviewed on ABC news before and after the announcement, alongside a couple of other Mac bloggers. I think he did a cracking job. And he’s already set up a sister site called – yes you guessed it, Just Another iPad Blog – so I will be reading that with great interest in case they can come up with a decent excuse for buying one…