Random thoughts, ideas and other things!

So Apple have done the respectable thing and granted Spotify into the App Store. Sure they had no choice really, it doesn't violate their terms and conditions or anything nasty like that. It's just a bit of a pain (for Apple) that a third party developer has done something a lot better than what they currently offer with iTunes.

Although having said that, people do like to have the choice between download and streaming media. Spotify is great for when you're in the office or at a party, you can just search and instantly stream the tracks/albums you want with little or no fuss. On the other hand, if you're in the car and are in a 3G blackspot, then obviously downloaded iTunes music will come into play.

In order to stay competitive with Spotify, Apple really need to have done with the thirty second track preview. I mean, even more than ever now. Including music videos too, I mean c'mon Apple, YouTube has been streaming music videos (albeit, maybe not legally) since day one. Sure they would need to fund this with advertising, but there could also be monthly paid tiers to dodge the ads (ala Spotify). You could then also then get a discount on the tracks you want to download.

The great thing about Apple's position is that they have the download option built in, natively. No need to roam over to other websites like 7Digital to download (which is what Spotify currently offer). Which means no need to register at another site and faff about.

It's pretty obvious to say that streaming media is the future, no doubt about it and Apple really need to jump on this bandwagon ASAP. Time to give the people what they want.

Okay, hands up who knows exactly what Facebook provides nowadays, is it a tool for tagging photos of last night's drinking session and embarrassing your mates? Is it an application nightmare platform? Or is it a news aggregator... Well, all three apparently.

When Facebook started it had one real focus, connecting people. It started off with Harvard students. This was closely followed by opening up the site to other students and then ultimately, everyone. This, in my eyes, is when Facebook peaked. It was great; it had a nice clean simple interface and allowed me to add all my friends without the fear of being attacked by vampires or zombies.

Now a couple of years on and countless shuffles and redesigns, we're left with well, I'll be honest, a mess. To me it is pretending to be something that it's not.

Looking at my Facebook stream now, it makes me want to pull my hair out (if I had any). I subscribe to a couple of feeds from various news sites and the presentation sucks. Real estate, my friends. I'll get my ruler. Okay a random article posted of Facebook takes up 8.5cm, Twitter with the same news post? About 1.5cm. That's a difference of 7cm. All I want is a headline and a link to the article, not a synopsis, not a thumbnail of a random image from the news page and certainly not information of how many people like it. Who really cares anyway? All this mixed in with updates from my friends.

Don't get me wrong, Facebook has a lot going for it, but it needs to focus on the awesome things that it does offer, the photo tagging system (facial recognition?), improving the ability to find friends, old and new and well, the video uploader (which incidentally really needs fixing). As well as cleaning up the presentation of their streams.

What with the purchase of FriendFeed maybe things will get better. It's not the product per se, it's the people who power it. There are some innovated and highly skilled members from that team, hopefully now with them onboard things can only improve. Here's hoping.

Peace.

Right, I think I'm just about getting there with the site. First of all, welcome and thanks for dropping by! I have set this site up as I have discovered, well, that I'm a terrible blogger. I never update it. But that's not necessary a bad thing, at least you don't have to read my random tedious crap (or not). Instead I have set this site up to bring all my social networks together. So as you would have seen from the homepage, I have my twitter, twitpic and last.fm accounts displayed, with no doubt more in the future. I will blog occasionally, but generally, what you see there is what you will get!

There are still a few glitches here and there, still working on the twitter steam so it will keep the tweets in the database, rather than constantly accessing twitter for them (thanks to DomZ for the script), but I think everything else is in working order. So anyway, thanks again for dropping by and enjoy!

Oh one more thing, this site isn't really tested with IE6, so you know, upgrade?

Dan