Sharing geo-based data as part of people’s usual social media is becoming more popular. Location based services like Gowalla and Foursquare have encouraged people to be more open with their whereabouts, allowing them to publish to Twitter and Facebook. Add the improved map feature on Flickr and the iPhone into the mix and we’re one step closer to seamless, timely, location-based information and images to share with our friends and family on the most popular (and/or appropriate) social media sites.

I don’t like doing major iPhone updates as there hasn’t been an update yet where I’ve not heard stories of iPhones crashing and generally being worse than before. Fortunately, I’ve managed to avoid any problems and get to experience the new features as though I’d opened a brand new iPhone!

I’ll be honest, the update last year wasn’t all that great in my opinion, the features I found useful day-to-day could have probably been counted on one hand. Since hearing about the new features of iOS4 I’ve been waiting in anticipation to play with the new features and already putting together a small list of things I love about it…

Folders

Folders is an easy one to start with as they’re pretty self explanatory. Basically, iOS4 allows you to group your apps together making your home screen less cluttered and more organised. The automatic naming of folders (using the apps you’re grouping to find their common category eg. Games, Social etc) makes the process quick and easy to do.

5x Optical Zoom

My experience in the past with Digital Zoom on any kind of camera has been less than fun. The results were often poor and pixelated making it about as useful at capturing an image as a Rhino with a paintbrush.

With it’s reputation already tarnished, I wasn’t expecting much when I took a few test shots and for a moment I was again left disappointed. I opened the camera app and pointed it to a random subject and zoomed in. The onscreen representation was pixelated and poor quality at which I huffed with disgust, then I went into my photo album to check the end result. The image was good quality and relatively sharp for a digitally zoomed image. My opinion of digital zoom was swiftly changed, it can be done!

Photos and Places

The photo album on iPhone has gone pretty much untouched (as far as I can tell) for the last few years so I was pleasantly surprised to see that Apple started to use geo-tagging in a way that’s useful to iPhone users. When browsing your photo album there is a new icon named “Places”, touching this brings to you a map view. Geo-tagged data is retrieved from the photos stored on the iPhone and applied to map based on where they were taken. I think it’s a different but useful way to view photos. With this feature I can quickly find photos I took at my wedding venue,  a friend’s wedding or on a recent trip to London.

Personally, I think Places is the best improvement I’ve discovered so far. It gives additional functionality and an alternative way view photos while encouraging iPhone users (whether they know directly or not) to apply more useful data into their photos, which in the fast world of the Web could lead to new and interesting applications for viewing photos.

The very first record I ever bought was Come On by The Rolling Stones. It was 1963 & I had to stand in a queue to take my turn to sit in the booth at Valences on the Headrow, Leeds, headphones on, buzzing with excitement, joining the revolution!

My pleasure, listening to the Chuck Berry composition belted out by the greatest Rock & Roll band ever was my heaven. I rushed home (2 buses) to play my first record on my best pals Dansette record player.

His dad was a dustman, he had everything my parents could never afford. I think the original purchase price was circa 3 shillings!!

I still have the record, in it’s original Decca sleeve!

Now, just turned 60 & still a rocker, the technology that is available to keep me informed & entertained is vast & accessible via the web.

This weekend I reviewed & downloaded, from iTunes, the brilliant 1972 album Exile On Main St, onto my iPad.

I synchronised it with my my iPod, plugged it into my Bose dock in the garden & enjoyed great memories whilst enjoying the sunshine in the garden, It was simple & timely.

I have enjoyed a ‘Stones’ weekend, watched ‘Keef’‘, my favourite Stone, playing ‘Happy’ on You Tube.

I recently watched An Imagine Special on BBC 1, The Stones in exile, the making of the brilliant Exile on Main St album. I will watch it again on iPlayer tonight & later this week I will listen to Front Row – News from Cannes – Exile From Main St reviewed by Tyler Perry

All in all the accessibility of solutions via the web has transformed my personal time & enlarged immeasurably my choices.

My next step is to rid myself of the clutter of CD’s & go ‘Cloud’ based with spotify.

European law is now going to be tested to, in effect, allow people to opt-out forever from being watched on web-sites and with the introductions of Google’s new secure search engine (why exactly did it take them so long to introduce it?) are we seeing the beginning of the end for Google’s free web analytics (and more importantly, the hundreds of other uninspiring client-side, me-too, analytics applications that are peddled by myopic organisations). Clearly the Register think so.

It is interesting to see Google effectively “switch sides” on this and move closer to loving it’s users and somewhat leaving it’s corporate customers out in the cold. Yes, they will say that Google Analytics is free and provided “as is” but so many organisations have (maybe rashly) decided to use it as the standard reporting platform. What are they going to do now, I wonder? The ball is gaining some momentum with a company providing a browser plug-in to disable GA from your session. How long before that is a standard part of the browser and requires opt-in to activate it?

The recent furore over Google’s grabbing of personal data during the StreetView programme, Facebook’s alleged abuse of personal information and now the forcing of explicit opt-in for any cookie will change the game. Cookies are not evil, many organisations put them to really good and productive effect so the challenge for organisations now is to show really good reasons why they should track visitors and do so in an open transparent way and really add value.

Oh, and stop using random free services that are not well understood and have huge privacy issues – it’s just being lazy and treating your customer rather shoddily.

I had the good fortune of being the one who had first dibs on the little critter so like a child at Christmas I opened it up, threw away the “Start up guide” (who needs them really) and fired it up. Aside from the physical device itself, the interface is a thing of beauty. Yes, the home screen does resemble the iPhone but as an iPhone user, that meant instant recognition of the User Interface (UI) and within a minute (literally), I had email, contacts, calendars and bookmarks all synced from my MobileMe and GoogleMail accounts. Obviously, this is in part due to the transferability of account information afforded to us by cloud computing.

I spent a bit of time getting reacquainted with my Inbox using the Mail client, responding to email, filing etc and the whole process feels like a seamless linear task. Holding the device landscape you get a fairly conventional layout displaying the contents of your inbox (or folder if you’re looking through your stored mail) with your selected email on the right. Turning the device to a portrait position allows you to focus on your chosen email, hiding the inbox/folder contents within a button in the top menu bar allowing you to access the information when you need it.

Of course I was still working so I did have to put it down and get on with other things but I periodically took a short break to browse various websites, reading blogs and news items and for me this has been the most eye opening experience so far.

I take a great interest in web design and read many blogs which are (like my personal site) designed in a way that each article or blog post is individually designed to fit the content, much like printed magazines, and I think the iPad makes this type of implementation really stand out. Ironically, they seem to resemble magazine articles more than blogs or websites.

This isn’t limited to design based sites either, all the sites I visited had a fresh new look about them, they suddenly became easier to navigate and information was more digestible. I must point out, this opinion is based on the orientation of the iPad being held portrait. Bizarrely, turning it to landscape, I think sites become normal again.

Room with (more of) a view

The problem with landscape is the orientation is the same as what we’re used to on computers, it’s the same letterbox shaped window with the site’s header, navigation and maybe the top 5 lines of body copy.

Turning it portrait opens up 50% more screen real estate which gives you a much better view of the information available on a page allowing your eye to digest more in one go. This view is very subjective and many sites I visited I was already familiar with the site’s layout and structure so others may (and will) have a different opinion on the matter. One thing for sure is if tablet computing picks up speed and becomes as ubiquitous as smartphones, it’ll add a whole new dimension to the fun debate of “the fold”

There are obviously downsides to getting to play with this early, namely the absence of the iPad app store (it’s currently only open in the US). My first 24 hours with the device was limited by what you can do with it’s native apps, which to be fair is quite a lot, but the real test will be when apps become available and I can test out the apps I use regularly on my iPhone to see how they fair.

Overall my opinion is set, I want an iPad of my own that I can carry around with me. I’d love to hear your opinions on the device, have you got one early? What do you think of it? What impact will it have on our day-to-day lives?

We made the mistake in 2008 of asking our clients what they wanted and the outcome was a long, quite dull, list of me-too type functionality with a smattering of bells and whistles. As a result we probably lost a year of moving the game on. Shame, really. The good news is that we are back on track with VITES 3.0 due for pre-release in the summer. It will be slimmer, more focussed, better and easier to deploy.

Like Mark Cuban, we suffered the fairly common problem of listening too much to our customers. Whilst that would, on the face of it, seem to be a good thing it divides our effort between our vision and what clients (think they) want. By all means listen to what they want to do and come up with a solution.

That might sound arrogant but as Henry Ford once famously said “if I listened to my customers then I would have built a faster horse”.

Our office, in Yorkshire, geo-locates to various districts of London or  Manchester and never actually where it is. My home is located 30 miles away from where Google thinks it is and today, in the East Midlands on the train from Leeds to London it has me located in Sweden.

This is a minor inconvenience for me but for some of our clients that use geo-location for advertising it must be really hurting them by showing totally inappropriate “localised” adverts.

It’s a completely free, global, web service that pairs members of local groups who have things they want to get rid of with people who can use them. Apart from being a rather a nice thing to do, it keeps usable items out of landfill sites.

Simply visit www.FreeCycle.org, find and join your nearest group. Either post an OFFER of an item that you no longer need or a WANTED message for something you are seeking. The giver decides who will receive the item and the recipient collects it.

You do not need to have given something to take something, the ethos is simply to prevent waste.

The UK now has 494 local groups with more than 1.7 million members, this Freecycle evangelist and regular user being one of them. Why not be another?