Facebook started back in 2004 (5 years ago) originally for college students to connect with each other around campus.  Since then it has grown to an online community of millions of users and as such, certainly in my opinion, it is loosing its appeal all the time. Other social or micro blogging platforms, such as Twitter are starting to grow much faster and gain in numbers of users, with good reason.

So why am I starting to fall out with Facebook?  Well I suppose the number 1 reason are the moment is that it is just too complicated!  It has so many different applications and features, not to mention the adverts etc that when you are checking your news feed there is simply just too much going on in my opinion.  I think what I am really interested in reading is friends status messages.  I want to connect with friends by using Facebook to find out what they are doing and maybe even to look at photos of friends when they are posted.  However I am finding more and more than my news feed ends up full on content that just gets in the way, such as applications, games and quizzes that friends and connections have used. Don’t get me wrong I am not in any way having a go at people for using these items, my problem is with Facebook for not providing a quick and simple way of hiding all these updates, rather than having to hide individual ones.

Reason number 2 would have to be Facebook’s terms and conditions.  Firstly the fact that at the moment they seem to be changing all the time.  People are never going to know what terms they are bound by if they are revised on a monthly basis.  There are also some rather striking parts of the terms that I do not like at all.  For example this statement below which talks about the content that you post to Facebook:

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof

If that was not bad enough they even state in their terms and conditions that even if you leave Facebook then they still own all the content that you have placed on the site:

The following sections will survive any termination of your use of the Facebook Service: Prohibited Conduct, User Content, Your Privacy Practices, Gift Credits, Ownership; Proprietary Rights, Licenses, Submissions, User Disputes; Complaints, Indemnity, General Disclaimers, Limitation on Liability, Termination and Changes to the Facebook Service, Arbitration, Governing Law; Venue and Jurisdiction and Other

I suppose that my third reasons for falling out with Facebook would lie in the Privacy settings.  About a month ago Facebook changed the way privacy settings worked and in fact to their credit they gave the user a little more control of what could and could not be seen by people.  However what disappointed me was that to make these changes, all my privacy settings that were set up we reset to default, meaning that much of the content I had protected was no open to anyone.  It was fortunate that I checked in the privacy settings one time and saw that everything had changed.

Facebook seem to be more and more dictating what users can do and putting restrictions on things.  At least this is what I feel like.  It feels like their goal is to get everyones to share all their information with everyone and not allow the user to be in control anymore.

What are your thoughts on Facebook?  What about those terms and conditions?  Have you every had any problems with Facebook and if so how did you get them resolved?  I would love to hear people’s opinions on this one as perhaps it is just me?

Now I grant you that at close to £50 it is rather expensive for what it does.  It can take any SATA hard drive and it a USB 2 interface and mains powered.  However I thought it looked so nice, a miniture version of a Mac Pro that I just had to have one.  I happened to be on the look out for an external enclosure to turn my spare 500Gb drive into a USB drive that I could store all my videos on.

I have been encoding my DVD collection into iPhone movies that I am now storing on the external drive that this enclosure mounts. Works really well plugged into my Time Capsule so that it acts as a wireless drive and also looks really cool on the desk!

Back in the year 2000 I had yet to have my first job and the Internet was only really just getting going (hard to believe I know!).  It is strange to look back now at the type of websites that we were viewing back then.  Take a look at the screenshot below of the BBC News website on an article about the Sydney Olympics.

I can’t believe how old this site design looks now as well as thinking about the functionality that the site didn’t have.

I suppose we could also say that this has been the decade of the operating system.  How many of you remember battling with Windows 3.1 and then its successors Windows 95 and 98.  They have primitive graphics and very little in terms of graphical interface.  At the start of the decade saw the release of Windows 2000 in February of that year.  It didn’t take long for the next version, and perhaps the most famous version of Windows yet to be released, Windows XP.  XP was released in 2001 and is still the most used operating system today.  Windows then took a long time to get a refresh.  In fact all the way to 2007 before the much criticised Windows Vista was released and then of course this year (2009) we have had the much improved Windows 7.

But we cannot move away from the computer operating system without mentioning one (or two) others.  Mac OS X first hit the shelves in March 2001, with the first big cat edition.  This development of this operating system has paved the way for Apple to produce a number of successful products, and the latest version of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard is and outstanding edition to any computer, providing everything that you want from the operating system of your computer.

2001 was also a very significant year for perhaps the biggest and most desirable gadget of the naughties.  On the 23rd October 2001 the original iPod was launched.  Perhaps little did the world know what a profound impact this product and the music technologies behind it would have on the world today.  Of course the iPod has continued to develop over the course of the decade to provide us with different versions, sizes and functionality.  Eventually this lead to the release of the iPhone.  Another revolutionary product that is changing the way people live their lives.  Many other phones are now using the core ideas behind the iPhone but this product did truly change the way in which people work, communicate and entertain.  Not only that, but it will continue to do so for the coming future at least as the product develops further.

We can’t talk about this decade with remembering storage.  When I first got my first PC back in the mid 1990′s it came with a 100mb hard disc drive.  I then got a newer machine to take to university around 1997/1998 and that machine has a massive 500mb of storage.  To think that these days we are using machines that can hold in excess of 1000gb (or 1Tb) is amazing.  I walk round with my MacBook in my bag, a couple of pen drives and a portable hard drive and I have nearly 600Gb on my person, including my iPhone of course.  If in ten years storage has increased this much, what on earth are our computers going to contain in ten years time.  One thing is for sure is that with our hunger for digital media our storage needs are only going to grow and grow.

We have just come through a decade of technology were communication was through talk and text at the start and now we can have the Internet in our pockets and send digital media around the world at the touch of a button.  The changes that have taken place are rapid and it is going to be exiting to think what changes will take place through the next 10 years in the world of technology.

I was reading the other day that they have actually officially renamed the mighty mouse to simply the ‘Apple Mouse’ due to a legal dispute and perhaps this is actually worthy of what I consider to be Apple’s poorest product that I have used.

It is funny really because to all intents and purpose the product is good.  It is very good on batteries (I have had this one for 2 years and only put 3 sets in I think), has some excellent functionality, but it has one major flaw in the design that ruins the whole mouse really.

The one I have now is a Wireless Mighty mouse but previous to that I have had the wired version.  That broke because of the moues’s problems which lies with the scroll ball on the top.  Everything Apple is usually well manufactured but then they decided to put this tiny scroll wheel that just wants to gather dust all the time.  After my wired version broke I tried to get in the mouse to clean, after following the cleaning instructions and them not working.  I ended up smashing the thing to pieces because I couldn’t get inside and ended up using a Dell mouse for about 6 months.

I then got a Wireless mouse bundled in with  Mac Mini that I bought and again the mouse is great.  Excellent 360 degree scrolling and all the other features but it still has the tiny, weak scroll ball on the top.

I am writing this article today because today the scroll ball on my Wireless Mighty Mouse has also failed in the same way as the other one.  The problem lies in that you cannot scroll down for some reason.  Its wierd because it was the down scrolling with my other Mighty Mouse that was the problem.  Also after doing a search on the internet it seems that I am not the only one that is having the down scrolling problem.

So the question lies with which other mouse do I get?  I have been looking and leaning towards the Apple Magic Mouse which was out earlier this year.  As this doesn’t have a scroll ball on the top then perhaps it would be a good (but a little pricey!) choice.  Anyone got one that would like to share their comments?

It is very important to test sites in a Windows environment as the majority of the visitors to a site will be using Windows.  For example looking at the statistics for this site 68% of visitors were from Windows machines and the statistics for Equal Design show that 61% of visitors are from a Windows environment.  However please don’t confuse what I am saying here about what I wrote the other day about not developing for Internet Explorer 6.  I am talking here about making sure sites look fine on more modern browsers such as IE7 and IE8 (even though I hate them just as much!).

But testing sites in a Windows environment when using a Mac to develop sites is often difficult.  I have been pointed to a number of tools on the web, however all of which never seem to quite do the required job.  It was about 6 months ago that I learned about ‘Virtualising’ machines, which is what Parallels desktop does.  It creates a Virtual Machine on your Mac with the operating system you choose.  Off course in order to install an operating system you still need to valid discs and product codes.  You can also have as many virtual machines as you like.  For this reason I have installed 2 instances of Windows XP.  One with IE7 and one with IE8 so that I can test sites in both version to make sure they display correctly.

It has lots of really cool features, perhaps one of the best being the ‘coherence’ mode.  What this does is, instead of running the virtual machine inside its own window you can run the machine alongside all your other Mac applications which means that to someone looking at your computer they would never know that it is a virtual machine.  Also you can drag and drop files between the Mac and Windows environments as well as being able to copy and paste between the two.

It really is excellent value at just under £50 and I would recommend any Mac user who also needs a Windows environment to take it for a test drive at least as you can trial it for 30 days without charge.

The unit is a 12 month old Dell Inspiron 530s slimline desktop PC with the following specification:

• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 3.0GHz
• RAM: 4Gb
• Hard Drive: 300Gb SATA drive
• Graphics: 256MB ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT
• Card Reader: Built in 19 in 1
• Wireless: Wiresless PCI card installed
• Accessories: Mouse and Dell Keyboard
• Operating System: Windows Vista Home Premium

This is a really high spec desktop PC that is great for high end tasks such as video editing and working with large photographs etc.  However it will also run all the usual programs etc. and is good for web surfing with built in wireless antenna as well and running Office etc.

The unit is is excellent as new condition and comes with power cable and all the install discs that dell supplied with the unit.  The asking price for this system is £250.

Let me start by saying that Internet Explorer is a terrible web browser.  Why you might ask?  Well quite simply it just does not follow the rules that are set out by the W3C in terms of interpreting code into a web page.  What I mean by this is that you can develop a site that looks near on the same in all other browsers (such as Firefox, Safari, Opera and many more) but in IE6 it looks pants.  It just doesn’t handle transparent PNGs at all and floating elements never seem to display correctly at all.  And last but not least its old!

In fact one of the tests that you can run on a browser to test how ‘standards friendly’ it is, is called the acid 3 test.  When running this test on Internet Explorer 6 it scored a pathetic 12/100.  Firefox 3 scored 93/100 and Safari 4 scored 100/100.  Yet another reason why not to use or further support IE6.  Looking at my web stats for this site I  can see that 16% of users are still using IE6 and for the stats for Equal Design that figure drops to just 9%.  Numbers using it are decreasing and I believe that if web developers stop developing for IE6 these numbers will drop off massively.

There are many that argue web designers should still be developing sites that will display in IE6.  Their argument for this is that there are a large proportion of the web population that are still using IE6 – why I don’t know as it is free to upgrade or use a different, more modern browser such as Firefox.  People are not still using Windows 3.1 for goodness sake so why are people still hell bent on using a browser that is getting on for 5 years old.

So why do I think that we should stop developing sites for IE6?  Well the main reason is that the longer people keep their sites looking the same on IE6 then the less likely people are to change or upgrade their browser.  I mean if they see things looking OK all the time then they are less likely to take the time to get a more up to date browser to fix any visual elements that looks poor.  Therefore by making sites compatible with IE6 we are merely prolonging its life.  Lets take a stance to get rid of it once and for all and stop developing sites for IE6.