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• The Dumbing Of America - "The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation." The article is about the US but it's also increasingly true here. Depressing.
• New Indiana Jones movie is dreadful - Oh dear. Like many people I'll probably still go see it anyway…
• SMS costs more than using Hubble Space Telescope - "Text messaging [is] anywhere from four to 42 times as expensive as talking to the Hubble."

• Afghan Student Sentenced to Death After Downloading Report - Good to see that the invasion of Afghanistan has resulted in more freedom for the locals…
• Forget passports - teachers and kids are the new ID card targets - Despite the loss of personal data and despite the fact that they will not (and cannot) do what the Government says they will, the ID Card scheme is still not completely dead.
• The True Cost of SMS Messages - “How come technology, communication, and infrastructure is getting cheaper while the costs of SMS messages are increasing exponentially? My theory: SMS messages are transfered over air made of solid gold.”

• When is a pencil and paper better than a computer? - And here’s another piece about technology and voting in the States. This time (blatant self-promotion alert) it’s one that I wrote last year…
• Follow the Money - Daringfireball links to this “forgotten” Cringely article about the US voting system. He’s right: low technology can be the answer!
• Pointui, the definitive user interface for mobile devices. - Been playing around with this on my HTC P4350. First impressions: great. I love the fact that I am less reliant on the stylus — one of my main problems with Windows Mobile.
• Make the defence of Human Rights your New Year?s Resolution - “We must all try very much harder to support Human Rights from attack, whether that is from religious or cultural forces.”

I just realised that the story of my Belkin Wi-Fi Phone for Skype lacks any form of closure. But before we get there, let’s start with a quick recap in case you didn’t read the original review or its follow-up.

Last year, after realising that we had spent over £30 in a quarter on line rental but less than 50p on phone calls, we decided to get rid of our land-line and rely only on broadband and VoIP technology. After some thought we went for Skype and a physical handset that connected to our wireless access point. This seemed like a great solution as leaving a computer switched on 24/7 just so we could recieve calls on our SkypeIn number didn’t appeal.

The appeal quickly wore off when it materialised that the Belkin handset just didn’t work very well. Other parties complained of an annoying echo while we complained that it drifted on- and off-line, meaning that people had to be lucky and call us when it was online. It also exhibited stability problems, often crashing during a call or even while in standby. Belkin were actually pretty efficient about taking the handset back and replacing it with a less broken one.

We were initially quite happy with the new phone. It actually worked free of the power cable and people were able to call us on our SkypeIn number on a couple of occasions.

Unfortunately, the more we used it the more we noticed its flaws. For a wireless device, one of its biggest problems is the fact that you pretty much have to leave it plugged in all the time if you want to reach the end of your call without the battery dying. It was fine to unplug it when the call came in but the battery life in stand-by mode meant that even leaving it unplugged in the office for half a day would have been asking for trouble if someone rang.

Then there were the random hangs. Sometimes, as noted in my follow-up post, the time just stuck, the machine unresponsive. Actually, I tell a lie. If you pushed a button the back-light would come on, giving the impression that it was still alive, but it wouldn’t actually do anything, like make or receive a call.

Of greater concern were those hangs half way through a call. Typically it would happen after ringing a phone banking service and being kept on hold for an inordinate amount of time. It’s amazing that the phone is still intact after letting us down so badly. Actually, after a several such hangs during what was supposed to be a single transaction it’s amazing that all furniture, glasses and windows are still in one piece.

Now that I mention phone banking, there was another point where the phone would let you down. At the beginning of each call I was expected to enter my card number and PIN. Fine, but their systems never seemed to recognise the Belkin. Now maybe this is a localisation issue (we have to call both UK and US banks) and not something I can squarely place with the phone, but it was nevertheless a frustration.

In the end we dare not use the phone to make important calls, fearing that it would cut out at some critical juncture. Equally, we weren’t keen on using it to call family as they, understandably, were irritated when we had to call back three times just to complete a conversation. In the end it was a nice ideal that just didn’t work in practice for what we wanted it for, so a couple of months ago I put it on eBay.

Now we have our SkypeIn number forwarding to our mobiles, meaning that, like international roaming, we have a pay to receive calls. With the number of landline calls we get this is not a huge problem, but it’s sad that it currently seems to be the only viable method of using Skype without having a computer switched on 24/7.

Like the true Mac obsessive that I am, I was “tuning in” for all the news on todays press event.

Judging by the effect that the coverage is having on the UK store (see screen shot) it seems that I’m not the only one!

First impressions: I like the new iMac. I’m not likely to buy one (since a laptop is powerful enough for all my needs), but the glass/aluminium shell looks great, the new CPUs are fast and the price-points (in the US at least) look reasonable. Not so sure about the keyboard, but I guess it’s just a less mobile version of my MacBooks.

The changes to iWork seem fine. It’s shaping up nicely, but it’s still no Microsoft Office. You still get documents from clients that won’t open in anything else. Shame. And .Mac. Well, it was the price and reliability that made me switch and nothing has changed there.

On the “more likely to buy” list is the new iLife. The organise feature looks a bit like stacks in Aperture, which is neat. The other components I don’t use anywhere near so much.

Overall, it looks like a great way to bring the focus away from the iPhone — which you can’t even get in the UK yet — and back to the Mac.

Am I getting old? Perhaps. I’ve been using email since 1992 when I first went to university so I just find it second nature now. It’s got to the point where I organise my whole life using it and I get quite frustrated when I actually have to call someone to get something done that could more easily be done asynchronously¹. But that’s not how many people think according to ZDNet.co.uk.

The gist is that many people are now using websites such as Facebook and MySpace instead of email. In fact, they claim, teenagers only use email to talk to adults.

Is this the way of the future? Is it only old-age and inertia that’s stopping people like me from using MySpace exclusively?

I don’t think so. It’s not that I’m a Luddite. I do use instant messenger and I use my mobile phone more for text messaging than for voice calls, but there are a few issues that we need to work through first.

The first and most obvious is that of convenience. With email I can use one program (or check one website) to see all the messages that I am interested in reading. With FaceBook I have to check there, and then again on MySpace for my messages there and, finally, still my email just in case someone has mailed me directly or I have a notification from sites that don’t have internal messaging. That’s just a pain! History tells us that these closed systems do not last. Let’s have a look at a couple of examples.

Let’s look at email and how it evolved. In fact, it seems to have evolved in the same direction twice, first as technology allowed and second due to commercial “lock-in.” It started out as a way to communicate between users on a single machine. This doesn’t make much sense if you’re thinking about personal computers, but in the sixties and early seventies the concept of having your own machine just wasn’t a reality. As machines started to be linked together, so did the email systems. This wasn’t always easy as the different operating systems often had their own “standards” and some, such as Unix, often came with several incompatible implementations. After local networks were installed, people starting thinking globally and started plugging their networks together, creating the Internet².

Many of the PC vendors that had not been involved in earlier eras and the bulletin boards that catered for them³ went straight for the second tier, a proprietary system barely capable of talking to the outside world.  There were a variety of reasons for this. It was by design — not wanting people to exchange messages without buying their software — or laziness but either way the result was the same. To a certain extent that’s where we are still in the Microsoft world. Exchange will talk to the rest of the SMTP world, albeit reluctantly and, even then, it’s not one hundred percent standards compliant⁴. Meanwhile, the rest of the world, even companies famous for shunning technologies Not Invented There, are using industry standards to communicate.

And if we then step forward to the last decade and the progress of instant messenger software we see the same thing in the process of happening. We start with completely separate islands, where I can talk to other people on, say, AIM but friends on MSN are off limits. I either have to push my “buddies” onto the same network or use applications like Adium so I can connect to multiple networks from the same software. And then a couple of years ago we saw the first signs of interoperability, with a pact between Yahoo and Microsoft. And, increasingly, we see the uptake of open standards like Jabber which is used as the foundation for Google Talk.

So, in the case of both IM and email we started with competing, incompatible technologies that eventually merged into one unified, interoperable version. Is that going to happen with FaceBook and MySpace? I’m not so sure. After all, we already have “messaging” applications outside these social networking sites. I see both as more of a layer on top of traditional email services, acting as an intermediary when communication is first initiated.

I’m not anti-social networking (I am a member on LinkedIn) but I am keen than we don’t take a step back into the “dark days” of the Internet when we had AOL and MSN competing to keep their users separate from the outside world. Walled gardens are not what the Internet is all about; this kind of system only benefits the companies that own the various properties. Let MySpace do the social bit, introducing people, but let the experts, the proven IM and email systems, keep the communication going.

1. That’s to say, when I send an email you don’t have to be there to answer it. Unlike a phone call or an instant message where you do.↩
2. Okay, so I edited out a few details. I’m trying to show the general trajectory rather than every last twist in the story.↩
3. I’m including systems like AOL and Compuserve here.↩
4. Ever wondered what the winmail.dat files are when you open a message in an application other than Outlook?↩