Facebook allows you to connect to people you know. It’s quite a personal thing housing pictures, thoughts and details that you likely wouldn’t want to give random people access to. So you’re quite discerning about those you invite to be your “friend” (for want of a better word) and those from whom you accept similar invites.

Twitter on the other hand is less personal. People’s profiles are generally quite vague and while many write about the minutiae of life, thoughts are generally not sufficiently detailed to tie to an individual. Its primary use, certainly among those people I follow, is to disseminate information that other people might find interesting.

This less personal feel that forms the basis of Twitter rather oddly promotes the creation of new friendships in a way that Facebook doesn’t. Facebook attempts to maintain existing friendships in a virtual world, and with its 500 millionth user recently signing up, it’s arguably rather successful in that mission. But the looseness of Twitter allows you to follow people you don’t know, strike up relationships with people you’ve never met and form alliances with those people based around common interests (and quirks).

With Facebook, what was real becomes virtual. With Twitter, what was virtual becomes real.

And this is what I love about Twitter. It extends your friend-base as opposed to enriching your existing friend-base. It’s almost like a social outlet in its own right. I can find people interested in Excel, in social media, in data mapping, in fatherhood, in iPhones, music, numbers and engage with them meaningfully on those very subjects.

Twitter, for me, is a river.  Every so often you step in and watch the flotsam drift by.  Sometimes there is stuff that you pick up and look at, rarely you keep it to examine later.  But what came before and came after is lost to the ocean of debris.

I love the analogy.  Your Twitter feed is like a river.  Whether or not you’re present to witness it, it keeps on flowing.  And for anyone following more than a hundred or so people, keeping up with every snippet every day is a pointless goal.

Instead, just as with a river, you pop along every so often—to admire the view, to watch the boats pass, to see how the sun is glistening on the water.  You might even take off your shoes and have a paddle.  But however often you go back, the river will always be flowing, there’ll always be something new to take in, and you’ll always be welcome to get your feet wet, skim some stones or dive right in.  That’s what I love about Twitter—and rivers.

It used conditional formatting up the ying-yang, with particular complexities around developing the interconnects between the boxes. While there were some macros to re-hash the incoming data, the visuals were all based on conditional formats which were at the time limited to a maximum of three (plus the default format) per cell.

All in all, it was awesome. (If I may say so.) If anyone out there has a use for it, let me know.

Over the course of my adult life, I’ve gradually settled on the regular contents of my bathroom cabinet.  Dax is my hair gel of choice.  I use Boots’ range of moisturisers and shave gel—the latter rather rarely.  Euthymol has become my toothpaste of choice.  And the Groom Mate Platinum Xl Nose has a lifetime guarantee—a fabulous product, if I may say so.

But I’ve rarely been happy with my underarm deodorant.  In the States, I settled on something called Speed Stick, which was fabulous.  But they converted it from a stick to a gel after we left, and after trying the latter I deemed it not worth importing.

So I used Gillette’s gel for a while, not being overly happy with it but neither being happy with any of its obvious competitors.  So on the way to Boots this morning, I turned to Twitter.  I asked for advice.  And advice I received:

• Seany_G: mitchum roll on. It’s all rubbish, but this much less so.
• gregnbaker: Mitchum!
• simoneverest: slightly delayed but ‘Clinique rollerball’ my pref… (sadly too late to inform the decision)
• Anonymity respected: I use the women’s stuff. Mum liquid roll on in particular. Those women don’t fuck about in this department.

I’ve gone for what I believe is a unisex Mitchum.  Three, actually.  It will be aired for the first time tomorrow, and the Twitter community will be kept informed as to its progress and my satisfaction.  Meanwhile, if any of my colleagues suffer any adverse effects, please update me accordingly.

I’ve never been happy with the concept of an SEO.  It’s basically someone who understands enough about how the internet works—or more specifically how search engines work—to advise on how best to write, tag and structure your web pages to get them naturally to the top of search rankings.

The offline equivalent would be some form of location specialist, advising companies where best to position their shops to maximise footfall.  But the online version has adopted somewhat legendary status, seeming to me to have invented an industry where one was not particularly needed.  The very existence of SEOs means that SEOs have to exist, to compete with their counterparts.

Seth Godin today wrote tangentially to this very topic, signing off with:

That’s one reason I resist the temptation to optimize this blog for traffic and yield. I’d rather force myself to improve it by having the guts to write better posts instead.

I’ve always agreed.  I need to make my service better and more attractive through its attributes and my reputation, as opposed to artificially improving my perceived quality by bumping my results up the rankings through clever tagging.

The very term search engine optimization makes my blood boil.  It isn’t about optimizing search engines.  It’s about frigging search engines such that they think you’re better than you are.  To me, SEOs are the scourge of the internet.

Has the person who decided to start putting adverts over the bottom half of youtube videos been found and shot yet?

I suspect the answer is no. And rightly so. For too long, the general public has been getting internet stuff for free, ignorant of the cost of providing the service and hell-bent not to pay anything towards it.

People are up in arms at The Times’ proposal to start charging for its content. But if that is what they must do to sustain their service, then so be it. Whether it’s the right commercial model—if there is such a concept of right or wrong in this space—remains to be seen. But you have to respect them for trying.

And the same goes for Google, despite my belief, one growing among my peers, that Google’s Do No Evil mantra is poppycock. Providing YouTube content to people is not free, irrespective of whether the content was a rights-free video shot by your mate. There is technology and people to pay for to allow that content to be served to the public.

Now if you asked the average YouTube visitor to pay for content à la Times, then they’d most certainly say no. (Actually, they’d most likely grunt judging by the state of the comments they leave on videos.) But ask them to pay for it indirectly through the medium of advertising and you have yourself an angry Gaz Beirne.

The free, ad-free world is unsustainable. Get over it. And along the way, get over yourselves.

I was worried.  So I did some research.  And I solved the problem thus:

• Downloaded i-FunBox which gives you control of the iPhone’s file system from your computer
• Searched the file system for a file entitled iTunesDB.  It appeared as 0 bytes and resides in a folder ending iTunes_Control\iTunes
• Delete it
• Disconnected the iPhone from the PC
• Reconnected

Bob was indeed my uncle and the job was a goodun.  This was the main source of my research.  Thank you.

For once, it’s not about shareholder value.  It’s seemingly about a personal vendetta.  Jobs hates Adobe.  And he’s doing everything he can to remove their very presence from Apple’s devices.

The interesting part is not this development specifically.  It’s the fallout from it.

There are already a bunch of sites that I frequent that use Flash as the platform for their video content.  The main one is the BBC, but this morning I tried to access the video footage of the  John Higgins scandal from the News of the World site and failed miserably from my iPhone.  Maybe such sites were waiting for Adobe to enable its video to be accessible from Apple’s mobile devices.  Or maybe they were waiting for Apple to enhance their own offering to embrace Flash.  Either way, it’s not clear that neither scenario will materialise.  So what will the content providers do?

They have two primary options, as I see it:

• Do nothing.  This will lose them the Apple market when it comes to media that they present in Flash format
• Do something.  Switch their allegiance by providing video content via another technology, thus allowing it to be accessed by Apple devices.

Selfishly, I hope they (particularly the BBC) adopt the latter approach.  Only time will tell how things transpire.  Meanwhile, Adobe must be seething.

Here’s my take on it all, which may cause some debate and disagreement.

The bill itself doesn’t overly concern me.  Among other things, seemingly its most controversial measure is to give copyright owners an indirect route to contact those suspected of copyright fraud.

Now in principle, this seems like an honourable and justifiable cause.  People are stealing stuff, and there are currently insufficient means for these people to be prosecuted.

The concern—or at least the concern that people are voicing—focuses around the possibility that innocent people will be prosecuted, either because of a questionable copyright claim or, more worryingly it seems, through innocent people’s wi-fi connections being stolen by neighbours or, as cited in the parliamentary debate, people parking cars outside people’s houses with their laptops on their knees.

As I see it, the internet is like a road system.  And we should use it within the confines of the law.  Our routers are akin to our cars, and we should protect them in a similar manner to the way in which we protect our vehicles.  And the measures that are being put in place are, in principle, similar to speed cameras.  They record that an incident might have occurred and notify the possible infringer of this occurrence.

If someone receives a speeding ticket in the post, as the owner of the vehicle it is up to them to identify the person who was driving at the time and pay the fine accordingly.  Why any different for router owners?

Places in which multiple people can access the internet, such as libraries, internet cafés, wi-fi hotspots, have an obligation to reduce the incident of criminality, or else ensure that they can track down those people who have—using means that they have provided—acted illegally.  In this guise, they are like car rental companies, who ensure that any speeding fines and parking tickets are passed on to the people who have perpetrated the crimes.

Underlying all of this debate and the negativity surrounding the bill, I think there is a more sinister dynamic going on, one that the analogous speeding ticket example has also suffered.  Some people feel that the law is an ass.  With driving, they feel that 70mph should be open to interpretation.  And with digital media, they see the money that Robbie Williams and Steven Spielberg make, and think that stealing from such wealthy individuals isn’t a crime in the true sense of the word.

I don’t concur with this view—stealing is stealing, and speeding is speeding.  And Williams and Spielberg are convenient examples, that deflect the attention from the smaller artists who lose out through illegal file-sharing.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I think the way in which the bill was rattled through parliament was wrong.  There seem to be weaknesses in the bill that have not been given the due diligence necessary and the deadline of parliament dissolving seems to have trumped common sense.  But nonetheless, I feel that the fundamentals of the bill and the principles for which it stands are sound, despite Stephen Timms’ thinking IP addresses are Intellectual Property addresses.

And now I await the wrath of the rabid Twitterati, who, it seems, have been successfully whipped into a frenzy, many of whom I feel have followed the crowd rather than forming their own opinions.  Just sayin’.

The base offering behind Google Apps is solid and wonderful. It allows you to manage your email for people across your organisation through a single, rich, web-based application. It gives each person over 7Gb of storage, 25Gb if you pay $50 per user per year. It allows you to sync, if you wish, back to Outlook or some other mail client while retaining a copy of everything you send and receive in the Cloud. (I’ve been using it for over four years and have used less than 3Gb of storage, without ever having deleted a single non-spam email.) My biggest bugbear with the interface is that I can’t default to Georgia, my font of choice.

Its calendar features are OK too. Google offers much of the functionality offered in Outlook, although there are some things that need development. I attached a couple of documents to a calendar invite the other day and found out that the documents come through as Google links (not great from my own branding perspective), and that these links could not be accessed through one of my clients’ firewalls. Probably not a problem for everyone, but they won’t be unique in that situation either.

But when it comes to the core creative tools—the competitors to Word, Excel and PowerPoint—Google doesn’t yet cut the mustard. For basic word processing, it’s fine. You can write a letter, do some nice formatting, write a proposal and the like. Some of the more advanced MS Word features are lacking—document review, for example—but the feature set on offer probably caters for 90% of requirements for 90% of users. All users will be frustrated at the lack of something they rely on, but in most instances, it won’t be a showstopper.

Spreadsheets are a different story altogether. Excel’s feature set is rich. Rich beyond words. There are things that Excel does that we take for granted, both in terms of core functionality and navigational behaviour. Google’s is not. It caters for some very base requirements, but beyond that, it struggles. I tried to copy and paste some cells from an Excel spreadsheet into Google Docs the other day, and it failed miserably to deal with ALT+Enter in-cell carriage returns.  It’s fine for your very basic spreadsheets: some contacts, some basic financial information. But anything much more complex: forget it.

As for presentations, I have no experience of using these, so can’t really comment.

I subscribe to an internal Google forum that notifies me whenever new functionality comes on board. A while ago, I was getting emails every day describing the new functionality on offer, each relatively trivial in itself, but slowly chipping away on the leviathan that is MS Office. Lately, the emails have been very few and very far between. I don’t know whether this is a strategic change in direction by Google or merely a temporary blip before further onslaught.

So in a nutshell, you should fall over yourself to get your email and calendar on to Google Apps. But for now, don’t throw away your Office licences.