1. Spinning that your customers don’t care about privacy.
2. Obfuscating their controls and settings
3. Taking your data out of your control and selling it, anyway

The EFF have some good coverage.

I don’t know anyone who actually, actively likes using Facebook, so you’d think that the ground was ripe for a competitor, but sadly I get the feeling that most of the current competitors, would like to do precisly what Facebook is doing, if only they had the balls and the market power.

But there is some buzz building around some new start ups with very different models.One is Diaspora – a new start-up that aims to create a distributed, person-centric alternative to Facebook that puts – and keeps you in control of your personal data. I have invested through Kickstarter and if you care about this stuff, I invite you to join me.

“What’s that all about?” I asked.

“Oh” came the reply, “we have to do that to all colleagues when they leave the store”.

No, mate. If you have to do that, they’re not colleagues.

Is there an immutable law of business that states the more euphemistic the name you give to your staff, the greater the level of personal abasement you can demand? If you don’t trust them not to slip a USB stick down their pants, what makes you think you can’t trust them not to bribe their mate with the metal detector? In my experience, once you start to put limits on trust, sooner or later it becomes a game that can be worked, not an absolute moral imperative.

Recent encounters have been as follows: I went into my local store, saw a nice mirror with a good discount in the sale, chatted to the assistant about it and then said “I’ll go home, talk about it and come in next week if we want one”. I did, we did and so I went in on the following week only to be told that the sale finished at the weekend. Yes they knew last week. No, they didn’t think to mention it.

Sales people should get fired for not closing a sale with information like that.

However, two months later, the sale is back on – just for a few days it appears – so we order the mirror on the website. Or try to. It won’t take any cards. The error message says words to the effect of “card declined”. So L sends an email. Two days later we get an email back saying they will reply to our email by email within seven days. When we eventually get a reply (by phone, four days later in the middle of the school run) we learn the payment bit of the website was just broken, however, there’s no attempt to help us order the damned mirror.

“Oh, we’re having another sale in a few days, you could try again then.”

If I was shopping at Poundstretcher, then maybe – just maybe – I’d expect this. But Laura Ashley position themselves as purveyors of English Country Taste to the middle class, a bunch picky often to the point of obnoxiousness. If you want to continue to take their money, you’re going to have to be better than this. If someone from Laura Ashley’s retail training team reads this, might I suggest you take your staff to a Barker & Stonehouse store and see how it’s done. Better still, Leather Chairs of Bath whose handmade heirloom leather sofas cost less than yours?

And did I mention that the mirrors take TEN (or seven or nine, maybe) weeks to arrive?

You just give it a URL, such as missingpresumedfed.com and it generates a word cloud using a Java applet, with a range of colour and layout options. Cute. Now if only they would update it live…

Oh, Dear God.

It’s over 15 years since I started building commercial online shops, sites and spaces and while everyone – businesses, developers, retailers and  - most of all – users, have grown and learned a lot in that time, somehow a small minority keep returning to sites of our most spectacular failures. Most prominent in this graveyard of naivety, is the 3D Room.

Nothing chills the blood quite like the MD (or more usually, the Marketing Director), walking into the client meeting you’re having and declaring: “I’ve just had a excellent idea. What our shop/website/forum/AOL area needs as a front page is a 3D picture/space of our office/shop/warehouse/newsroom. If you want to read the news/check our timetable/look at our product you (simply) click on the newspaper/timetable on the wall/clothes on the rack.”

You then have to spend the rest of the morning explaining to a key executive of your client that awesome though his leadership powers and visionary business skills are, it’s unlikely that in the five minutes he’s spent thinking about this (or possibly ecommerce in general), that he has found the formula for success that thousands of other poorly, briefed executives have previously tried and failed so to do.

And yet the 3D room won’t die.

There are many reasons, but I think the main one is that most executives are immigrants in this new land, while their customers are increasingly digital natives.

Immigrants navigate this new world clumsily, without the benefit of native language skills. Their amazement at being able to do anything at all, suppresses the critical ability to think rationally about the the efficiency or usefulness of the feature in question. Immigrants navigate the structures and strictures of the digital world, slowly and painfully. There are few roadsigns for them to follow and like Alice through the Looking Glass or Milo in the Lands Beyond, their expectations can lead them astray more often than they realise.

So when they see a structure whose function they recognise, they jump on it like Elvis on a double cheeseburger. No matter that their customers won’t come, or if they do they will regard it with curiosity like a museum of Victorian plumbing, they’ll peer, scratch their heads and walk away. No matter that they have a nagging doubt that maybe it’s not good for them, they still chow down.

Worse still, the presence of something they recognise, stops them from plunging into the Brave New World where their customers live, so like expats in some overseas tax haven, they either cling to each other around the poolside bar in the hotel. Or they bunch together on the Tourist Bus, following the herd of other immigrants from one popular spot to another, without a thought as to whether this will be helpful to their business or their customers

[Here's a checklist. Does your business have any of the following: Facebook page? Twitter Feed? Product Blog? Flash games featuring product placement? Virtual shop in Second Life (counts double)?. While your website still has 28-day shipping, non-live inventory feed, English-only (call for shipping to Canada, no other foreign orders); email-only customer support (please allow 2 business days for a reply); no relationship with your retail stores (or actively competes with them) and no customer loyalty?]

Still, they’ll all be dead soon. Let’s just hope that unlike the town planners of the Sixties they won’t leave too many eyesores scattered around our native lands that we have spent time bulldozing to build anew.

BBC News, 23 Nov: Katie Price quits I’m a Celebrity.

BBC News, 24 Nov: Katie Price apologises for her behaviour since divorce.

Normally I try to swallow hard and keep down the rising bile in my stomach when I see corporate press releases masquerading as news on the BBC. I’ve come to expect it in the Technology section where rational discussion of technology and its effect on society appeared to die along with Tomorrow’s World back in 2003 (just about the time that the rest of the population outside of Broadcasting House started tuning in to this fact).

But, really. Have we now go to the point where an interview by a fake celebrity on a fake reality TV programme on another channel is worthy of a spot the the FRONT PAGE of BBC News Online?

Clearly, I’ve been out of the news business for far too long. Here am I thinking that deaths due to political violence in the Philippines, the head of the IMFs damning indictment of the state of the UK economy or the largest ever rights issue by a UK bank were important events, but no, all of them are missing from the front page of BBC News right now, while Katie Price not only gets a slot, but a picture, too.

Still, thank goodness the BBC newroom has found space in their lead story on Sir John Chilcott’s Iraq Inquiry to insert a Have Your Say box, to let us “Richard, UK” opine:

I confidently predict that by the end of this inquiry the British public still won’t know why we sent troops to Iraq or what advice the government was given regarding the war’s legality.

Hmm. Commercial messages masquerading as news, editorial choices masquerading as opinion.

As Nick Cohen said recently in the Guardian:

The paradox of the BBC’s strategy is that the more it spends on expanding into cyberspace the less it has to say.

BBC News Online appears to either be terrified of setting the agenda (because that would be elitist, maybe), or appears simply functionally unable to do so. After a proud tradition of the like of Dimbleby and Paxman standing up to political pressure, its management are allowing it to fall victim of the Curse of Hello!  - death by a thousand well-meaning, inclusive, edits designed to chase the clicks of the masses. It no longer leads. It barely follows.

Cohen ends by saying:

In this time of upheaval, the BBC has a public duty to invest and broadcast the journalism that others cannot afford. It is failing spectacularly to live up to its responsibilities.

Quite.

Two things became obvious as part of this process:

1. How easy it is to use Delicious Library and a barcode scanner
2. How the web has made Delicious Library look dated in the short years since it was created.

Because I am going to “go negative” in a minute, I should say that I love lots of things about Delicious Library. It’s easy to use, intuitive, you can hold a barcode up to your iSight camera (or use a scanner if you have one) and it searches the Amazon of your choice and pulls back the text, cover image and so on. If you’re the kind of weird, freakish, individual that actually sells books from your collection, you can do that, too from a drop-down menu. You can also check books out to people in your address book by dragging and dropping the books onto their name in the sidebar and it will put a note in iCal you remind you to remind them to bring it back. There’s no way I would have made this record (also great for insurance) without this ease of use and instant payoff of seeing your library magically appear in a virtual form on screen.

But… the digital world has moved on a lot since Delicious Library won its Apple Design Awards back in 2005. In particular, the blog has come of age, not just in terms of its ease, accessibility and acceptability, but especially in the interfaces it offers you to the real world.

WordPress is a clear leader in this kind of stuff: on this blog I have a great deal of control over the look, feel and presentation of the content. I also have some fabulous widgets that do other stuff that multiples the usefulness of the blog itself. So when I refer to a book, the link automatically shows it on Amazon (with my Associate number in, too). When I add a photo, it gets indexed and displayed in all the contexts I need.

By neglecting these kinds of features, Delicious Library misses out on using the web as the force multiplier for its own usefulness (and sales) that it could be. What was a neat trick back in 2005 (publishing your library to the web), now looks like like an unfinished afterthought (MobileMe, anyone?)

Of course it could be that these features are in, but the lack of a decent help system or coherent menu structure is obscuring it from my vision. Sort by author’s surname? No. Publish the library as a list? No. With your own template? No. Auto-add new books as a new post into your blog (eg: WordPress, Blogger, etc)? No. Or just into the library? No. Show the book’s in/out status on web? No.

Once again, there’s lots I love about Delicious Library, but I think there’s some simple stuff – already being done by others as a matter of course, that would make it the Best Personal Library on the Whole Darn Web.

+++

PS: If you’re a user of my cookbook library (you know who your are), I still have to add the 50 or so books for which Amazon does not have records (plus the dozen or so books I’ve bought since I did the Big Scan). So if you can’t find what you’re looking for, just ask.

1. Buy a copy of Delicious Library 2
2. Build yourself a blog (something good, flexible and easy, like WordPress on Dreamhost)

Delicious Monster dev team:

1. Show the user how to publish under their own template.
2. Show the user how to publish their custom list view of books (not just the bandwidth mashing visual one).
3. Allow the user to show which books are in and which ones are out (and when they are due back)
4. Offer the option to post new books added to the library as a blog entry automatically (supporting various blog formats)
5. Make FTP more reliable (or at least let the user increase the timeout settings)
6. Allow books to be sorted by author: Last name, first name (yes, I know why it doesn’t work with CDs, but the whole book world works this way and so DL should offer it as an option)
7. Write a clearer, more comprehensive manual/online help

Which boils usually down to some form of serif font and some form of san-serif (if you are lucky maybe you have a choice of two). Various things have been tried (font-family groups and so on), but with the addition of a new type of HTML tag (@font-face) that most new browsers can read, it’s possible to temporarily download fonts to your computer and view any font you wish. This was a bit technical and obscure, but now Typekit lets you easily embedded a wide(ish) selection of fonts in your website for anything from free (one site, two fonts), to $50/year (lots of sites, lots of fonts).

And yes, this font you’re reading is one of them. A real font, not a graphic (you can select and copy the text) and super easy to add either directly like this, or in your CSS.

Give them time, though. They only just came out of closed beta and the site is slow and a bit random. But, if it works, if the technology scales, if other font vendors sign up, then this will change the face of the web, for good, for better, forever.

The game was launched at midnight on Monday, and as I was awake and bored, I jumped in the car and drove thorough the fog to my local Asda store, itself not exactly central to anywhere. I was alone. When I arrived just after midnight there were hundreds and hundreds of people, many who had been queueing for two or three hours. In a supermarket. In the middle of nowhere (partly this was because of the woeful two-blokes-and-a-box distribution plan that Asda had – note to Asda and Sainsbury, if you want to muscle in on this market, sort your customer distribution out). Sainsbury, which opened at 7am the following morning apparently had a 300m long queue in the carpark (they had three-bloke-and-two-boxes, apparently).

There was no queue at all at my local computer game store where I bought it that day for £40 (two hours of queuing outdoors in November at 6am is not worth the £14 I would have saved if I had been able to get one of the limited copies available). But I am fascinated how Infinity Ward had managed to work up this level of enthusiasm in their existing customer base but not obeying the “rules” of computer game promotion. No downloadable demos. No early review copies. No leaks, other than some carefully-created gameplay snippets, Q&As and screenshots.

And the game? Is good, yes. Not transcendently good. Not paradigm-breakingly good. But it’s taken one of the best games of the last couple of years and made it noticeably better in almost every area. The scenery is better, the weapons now all play differently (not all assault rifles feel the same), the level are unfamiliar to me after one night’s play, but I think they could be truly great.

Or course it has faults. The single-player campaign is laughably short (although there is a new co-op game that I hear very good things of). acting is a bit over-blown and (even more) testosterone-laden that the first one, although the cut-scenes alone make it a better movie experience than every Steven Seagal flick you’ve ever seen.

Most interestingly, Modern Warfare 2 raises the quality threshold for Triple-A rated (ie: big budget) video games. Not just in the technical stuff, but in all of that mediacraft (plot, dialogue, graphics, physics – and bug testing let’s not forget that). Infinity Ward appear to understand online multiplayer better than anyone else, which is clearly where the market is going and I think we’re seeing the solidification of the video game equivalent of the Movie Studios, where the A-List make the big-budget stuff and the smaller producers make the straight-to-video (or TV) stuff.

Is this good or bad? I don’t know, but fewer, bigger, more mass-market releases also plays straight into the Top-20 Blockbuster mentality of the supermarket chains. Which should be ringing the alarm bells hard at the specialist high street computer game retailers like the lonely, empty one  from which I bought my copy of the year’s biggest game release on release day…