Life is grand

Yes, more Facebook. This time some numbers. We all like numbers don’t we?

Paul Francis used the new advertising tools on Facebook to figure out the demographics of Facebook users. Country and gender only so far but still very interesting. He came up with this data-set. United States of America is obviously by far and away the leaders but check out Turkey and my home country of South Africa at number 9 with six hundred thousand users. Ireland is further down at 167,000 users.

What is really interesting though is that every single country listed has more women using Facebook than men. From a “low” of 59% in the United States of America to 74% female from Spain.

So while the tech circles that created Facebook and co. are heavily male dominated the users of our social networks are mainly female.

I’ll venture a thought on this video; we are coming from an era of one to many media that has instilled the concept of a captivated audience. We believe that because someone is on the radio that what they are saying has greater weight than what our friend sitting next to us has to say on the same topic.

The world wide web doesn’t work the same way old media works. It is not just a different medium. It is much more than changing from radio to television.

When a previously captivated audience (TV) is unleashed upon a level playing field (web) mindsets have to change too. They have to accept that the web has not been resource managed as radio, TV, newspapers and magazines have to be. The web is infinite while a newspaper is finite.

Think of it this way. Who has a father or brother that shouts at the ref on TV?

Imagine taking all of those fathers and brothers who shout at a one-way TV and publishing their rantings for anyone and everyone to see. A whole channel dedicated to people telling off the ref.

You would probably laugh and shake your head. It is funny but it isn’t relevant or important to you. Or maybe it is because you agree with Joe Soap? Cool.

Now think of all the one-way things you currently criticise or talk about. Taxes, the government, the police, the supermarket, your mother in law, religion, your kids, their school etc. All of these things you think and talk about.

Now upload that to a web-page instead of letting it bounce off the screen of your TV.

You just became a “new media douchebag” as the video mentions. But here is the twist; you didn’t make anybody read it. You didn’t break into the TV station and dump Will & Grace to air your thoughts to a million captivated people. You made a new channel. You put your thoughts out there in a completely non-intrusive manner.

The choice is then up to those who read to choose what they read. It isn’t anybody else’s choice. It is their choice, your choice.

From here on in you can be heard but perversely you cannot make anyone listen. The old way was you had to get approval to be heard and then everybody had to listen. The old way was centralised authority and a captivated audience. The new way is distributed authority and an empowered audience.

So celebrate your douchebag-ness. You just made the world a better place. You strengthened the web of choice.

p.s. You didn’t have to read this.

When someone sends you an SMS with a number in it most phones let you extract the number and save it as a contact or call it immediately. It is a simple but really useful feature, especially when you use directory enquiries that text you the number.

Sadly, the iPhone SMS app doesn’t do this as far as I can tell. You have to jot the number down with pen a paper and then key it in or attempt to memorize the number until you get it into the contacts app.

And on a similar vein you can’t seem to send or receive business cards/vcards with the iPhone.

I’d far rather have these features than MMS and multi-recipient SMS added to the iPhone.

Anyone developing or thinking of developing an OpenSocial container plug-in for WordPress? Your blogroll is your social network and you could then host OpenSocial applications in your blog quite easily.

we may overlook an object that is superbly designed, wickedly functional, infinitely useful and beloved more passionately than any gadget in a Best Buy: the book. It is a more reliable storage device than a hard disk drive, and it sports a killer user interface. (No instruction manual or “For Dummies” guide needed.) And, it is instant-on and requires no batteries. Many people think it is so perfect an invention that it can’t be improved upon, and react with indignation at any implication to the contrary.

Apart from rent and food I probably spend more on books than anything else each year. More than music, more than my beloved cameras, more than TV and broadband. I love to read and have loved it since before I could even read properly. Back when my mom and dad read my sister and I bed time stories, back when I tried to read the names of stores and streets as we passed them in the family car.

I really do love to read and books have been the best way of reading. Laptop screens don’t cut it, PDAs neither. Printing out books, which I have tried, is a frustrating experience too.

But the above quote isn’t true. They burn easily. They tear. They fade. They rip. They get wet, ink smears. Loose one flimsy page and you can miss an important part of a story. They get left behind on bus seats. They aren’t made for hours of reading with one hand, spine bent back and your other elbow getting tired pressed into the bed. They require an external light source.

Loose it and you have to buy it again. Books are horrible to back-up as any kid who tried to scan an entire book will tell you. Leave it at home in Cape Town and you have to buy a new one if you are in London. You can’t just log in to the nearest computer terminal and download your copy.

The interface isn’t “killer.” Finding a specific page is either long and linear or a hit and miss affair. Finding a certain phrase or paragraph is near impossible. Most fiction books do not have a contents or an index. You need two hands to turn a page and pages get stuck together such that you are half-way through the sentence and realise you just missed two pages. Want to quote a paragraph? You have to type it out letter for letter.

They may be more reliable than a hard-drive but only because they are immutable and printed in the tens of thousands and spread throughout the globe. As we jack-up to the internet we will find electronic data will be come more reliable.

Want to carry ten books for an extended holiday? Better back a separate bag for them. They weigh a ton en masse.

What happens when you want a new book? Music you can download. Books you have to get delivered or jump in the car to get to your nearest book store.

And you do need an instruction manual for books. All of us reading this spent many years learning to read. English of all languages is a language you never stop learning, you can be fluent and still get it wrong, still misread a sentence.

I do love to read and I have a real soft-spot for well bound, finely printed, nice smelling books. But I do hope Kindle and other eBooks solve the problems and begin a new era of reading.

p.s. $399 for Kindle is a good deal of money. $9,99 per book is reasonable though.

Can you imagine what is going to happen when the data of our personally mapped genes become available to our social networks? Nature vs. nurture maybe but our genes define a good deal of our responses, our predispositions and our trends in life.

Forget Facebook folks. It will be GeneBook.com in the coming years. Just upload your data and your network evolves itself.

Spotted this handy little feature in Mac OS X today. Have a look at the bottom left icon in the screenshot above. It is a file being downloaded by Safari and right there in the thumbnail you can see a progress bar that shows how much of the file has been downloaded.

I’m not sure if this is specific to Leopard but it is a nice touch. One of thousands that Mac OS X has and that makes it a great OS.

In Inbox 2.0 the New York Times reports that Google and Yahoo! are looking to enhance their online email systems with social networking features. Instead of having to belong to Facebook and import all your contacts from your email application your email application becomes a Facebook.

The interesting angle on this is the rich data from your email history that surrounds your contacts. Those you email frequently, those that email you often, those you ignore, those you forward to other contacts, the spammers and so on. With data mining you could even see whose email you treat with more importance by looking at response times (if boss reply now, if mother reply in three weeks is my trend. My poor mother.)

A lot has been made out about the death of email due to spam and also the new generations switching to messaging features in social network sites, instant messaging, Twitter etc.

But I still use email a good deal. So do most business people and most of the older generations. I am also confident that the newer generations are not “avoiding email” but simply using the closest thing to hand. Email needs to get back into the center of their communications.

One problem I see with the Inbox 2.0 strategy is that I do communicate elsewhere and via other means. Comments on blogs, posts on forums, posts on my own blog, links in Delicious, photos on Flickr, instant messages, Twitter, YouTube videos and, in the converged future, SMS and voice.

Any kind of Inbox 2.0 is going to need to include a much wider range of methods than just email and IM. Thankfully most of the alternate methods have an email address at their center, often as your login ID.

I’d look forward to GMail, my preferred email client, offering richer social network features. But to be truly Inbox 2.0 it had better include my Flickr photo stream and my friends Twitterings.

(Thanks to John Collins for the link.)

RapLeaf is meant to be an online reputation system. Look up a person and find out their reputation.

So it bothers me when a reputation system starts sending out a sickly sweet recruitment email that had me hitting the Spam button in GMail:

Dear Paul,

I have to admit, I’m a beneficiary of Rapleaf’s referral award system. I referred a friend who’s now working here at Rapleaf and the company deposited $5k in my bank account (which coincidentally disappeared by the time I got back from Vegas).

For a kick-ass engineer, we figure $5,000 is nothing…so we up’d it to $10,000. Better yet, $10,007. Its unusual and it’ll catch people’s attention (it got yours i bet). And besides, “10,007” is the first prime number over 10,000…did you know that? (usually only ubergeeks pick up on that…if thats you, lets talk).

If you have a buddy that’s a software engineer, have them check out our jobs page and make sure they mention that you referred them when they apply:

http://blog.rapleaf.com/jobs

Or shoot an email to jobs@rapleaf.com (or reply back directly to me) with their contact info.

Best,

[blanked]

Rapleaf

p.s. – In theory, you could earn $1 billion dollars if you refer 100,000 people we end up hiring. Think about it.

Yes I am a developer but no I am not a moron. Rapleaf is going to hire 100,000 people and send me a billion dollars eh? I’m getting Amway pyramid scheme hallucinations right now.

Here is another reason Facebook and OpenSocial style “walled application gardens” are a bad idea for the web:

some developers’ applications are getting perpetually stuck in the directory approval process.

Since when did web application developers need approval to launch applications? Since Facebook (and Ning and now OpenSocial.) Since we started thinking it would be cool to build proprietary platforms on the web and host applications in them. Platforms controlled by some pretty young and naive guys and their terms and conditions. Platforms which are going to be bought out by the likes of Microsoft or News Corp and have terms and conditions changed by old and jaded lawyers.

We are just emerging from a world of corporate control of our media and communications. And now we are jumping all over putting our applications inside a corporation’s platform?

We have an open platform controlled by nobody*; the world wide web running on the internet. Use it.

* to a degree