A Flickr of interest

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This morning’s Observer column.

At a Royal Society symposium on web science this week, Tim Berners-Lee let slip an interesting observation. Many people, said the web's inventor, no longer make a distinction between Facebook and the web. My guess is that these people are mainly teenagers – those whose experience of cyberspace is coloured by the fact that the first thing they encountered online was social networking. They started with Bebo and MySpace and then graduated to Facebook. And there they have stayed.

So, for them, Facebook is where it's at. That explains why they no longer use email, for example, except – grudgingly – to collect official communications from school or college. Most of their electronic communications are routed either via text messaging or Facebook updates. Almost all teenage party invitations now come via Facebook, which has also become the logbook of their lives. When it was announced a couple of weeks ago that Flickr, the photo-hosting site, had hosted its five billionth picture, someone pointed out smugly that Facebook already has over three times that number…

The antisocial movie

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Jeff Jarvis has been to see ‘The Social Network’. He didn’t like it. Here he explains why.

The Social Network is the anti-social movie. It distrusts and makes no effort to understand the phenomenon right in front of its nose. It disapproves—as media people, old and neonew, do—of rabblerous or drunk or drugged-up or oversexed masses doing what they do. Ah, but its fans will say, it’s really just a drama about a man. But that’s where it fails most. It can’t begin to explain this man because it doesn’t grok what he made—what he’s still making “We don’t even know what it is yet,” Zuckerberg says in the movie, “It’s never finished”.

The Social Network is the anti-geek movie. It is the story that those who resist the change society is undergoing want to see. It says the internet is not a revolution but only the creation of a few odd, machine-men, the boys we didn’t like in college. The Social Network is the revenge on the revenge of the nerds…

Bang on cue, here’s the WSJ [old media] piling in to make Jeff’s point. The paper just loves the movie. “The film’s substance”, it gushes,

lies mainly in its convoluted tale of vast ambition—an ambition oddly disconnected, in Mr. Zuckerberg’s case, from a desire to make money—spectacular success and bitter betrayal. Not since “Apollo 13” has a mainstream motion picture conveyed so much factual as well as dramatic information with such clarity and agility. First Mark moves beyond—or pilfers the intellectual property of—three upperclassmen who’d approached him for help on a website they called Harvard Connection. Later the newly-minted young magnate has a painful falling out with Facebook’s original business manager, Eduardo Saverin: he’s played with great subtlety and rueful charm by Andrew Garfield, who’ll be seen as Peter Parker in the next “Spider-Man.” While the movie’s prevailing mood is excitation—hardly a moment goes by when someone isn’t having a brilliant idea—its dominant mode is litigation, thanks to one suit on behalf of those Harvard upperclassmen, and another brought by Eduardo.

Dave Winer went to see the film. His typically sensible notes are here.

Taking the tablets

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Now it’s BlackBerry’s turn. The New York Times report explains:

The introduction of a tablet computer will not end criticism from some analysts that R.I.M. is now playing catch-up with Apple. But in a bid to distinguish the PlayBook from Apple’s iPad, Michael Lazaridis, R.I.M.’s co-chief executive, said that the new tablet contained several features requested by corporate information technology departments.

In an address to conference attendees, Mr. Lazaridis called the PlayBook “the world’s first professional tablet” and repeatedly emphasized that it was fully compatible with the special servers that corporations and governments now used to control and monitor employees’ BlackBerry devices.

While the company offered some specifics about the new device, it left many questions unanswered, most notably the tablet’s price. The company was also vague about its release date, indicating only that it would be available early next year.

Among the PlayBook’s novel features are outlets that allow it to display material on computer monitors or television sets, but Mr. Lazaridis made no effort to use them during his presentation. As animations showing the device’s features appeared above him on a giant screen, he did little more with the PlayBook in his hand than switch it on.

“It’s a very real product,” said Charles S. Golvin, principal analyst with Forrester Research. “But obviously it’s very much a work in progress.”

Lady of the lake

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Lakeside view, originally uploaded by jjn1.

Taken on Friday at one of my favourite golf courses — Killarney. It wasn’t clear whether this lady was a golf widow or just someone who wanted to drink in the entrancing view on a perfect late-September day. Not that it makes any difference. It was a nice moment, either way.

Larger version here.

Apple’s Suez canal

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This morning’s Observer column.

At the centre of the Appleverse sits a single, crucial piece of desktop software – iTunes. You can do very little with an Apple device without hooking it up to iTunes. Until now, this has given Apple a key strategic advantage over all other competitors. But, as Britain discovered with the Suez canal in the 1950s, being unduly dependent on a single strategic asset can also have serious downsides.

The problem is that iTunes is now a pretty ancient piece of software. When it first appeared in 2001 as a reworking of SoundJam, a program Apple bought from a Californian company in 1999, it provided an elegant way of doing just one thing: getting songs from CDs on to your computer’s hard drive. But over the years, more and more functions have been added: first the management of iPods, then the Apple online store. Then iTunes became the conduit for managing one’s iPhone. The latest addition is the Ping social-networking function.

This is what the industry calls “feature creep” on an heroic scale…

Hasselblad H4D-31: medium format digital for downsizing millionaires

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At Photokina today, Hasselblad introduced the H4D-31, a camera that actually makes digital medium format photography considerably more affordable (albeit still pretty darn expensive for a “young photographer”).

The camera weighs in at 31 megapixels rather than 40, but the 22.5% decrease in resolution translates into a generous 35% decrease in price: the H4D-31 costs about $13,000. You also get your choice of a 80mm prime lens or a lens adapter that allows you to use V-System lenses you already own.

Hmmm… That’s only £8,300 in old money. A snip, dear boy, a snip. A mere bagatelle, as Bertie Wooster might say. Form an orderly queue.

[Source]

Me no Leica

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… as Dorothy Parker observed in reviewing Christopher Isherwood’s play I am a Camera.

This latest nonsense (a ‘skin’ for the iPhone 4) presumeably stems from Steve Jobs’s throwaway remark, when launching the phone, that the device felt “like a Leica”.

You can buy one here if you insist.

The Principal’s Nose and other stories

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The September 6 edition of the New Yorker has a lovely piece (sadly, behind a paywall) by John McPhee about this year’s British Open, which was played on the Old Course at St Andrews. At one point, McPhee walked the course with David Hamilton, a noted golf historian, who drew attention to

certain “Presbyterian features” of the course — the Valley of Sin, the Pulpit bunker, the bunker named Hell — pointing them out as we passed them. St Andrews’ pot bunkers are nothing like the scalloped sands of other courses. The many dozens of them on the Old Course are small, cylindrical, scarcely wider than a golf swing, and of varying depth — four feet, six feet, but always enough to retain a few strokes. Their faces are vertical, layered, stratigraphic walls of ancestral turf. As you look down a fairway, they suggest the mouths of small caves, or, collectively, the sharp perforations of a kitchen grater. On the sixteenth, he called attention to a pair of them in mid-fairway, only a yard or two apart, with a mound between them that suggested cartilage. The name of this hazard is the Principal’s Nose. Hamilton told a joke about a local man playing the course, who suffered a seizure at the Principal’s Nose. His playing partner called 999, the UK version of 911, and was soon speaking with a person in Bangalore. The playing partner reported the seizure and said that the victim was at the Principal’s Nose bunker on the sixteenth hole on the Old Course at St Andrews, in Scotland; and Bangalore asked, “Which nostril?”

It’s a lovely piece, in all kinds of ways. And very good on the touchy subject of the seventeenth hole, which is almost as fiendish as the fifth in Lahinch.