As expected, the announcement was met with general disgruntlement as users complained at Mr. Zuckerberg’s allegedly evil ways.

Perhaps the most vociferous response that I saw came from Ben, a friend whose use of Facebook surpasses in volume that of all of my other 241 ‘friends’.

Ben was right on some counts. He thinks Facebook is great because it creates interaction between people, provides freedom of thought and expression. I agree, although the fact that such freedom is less regulated than the content of other online media such as newspapers is open to question. (Why is it OK to defame or be libellous on Facebook but not in online newsprint?)

But Facebook costs money. Every time you upload a new profile picture, that costs money. Every time you update your status or comment on coo over someone’s pregnancy news, that costs money. And every time you chat with your friends, that costs money. I have no idea what the operating costs are of Facebook, but you can bet that their storage costs alone would make many a grown man faint.

Don’t get me wrong, Facebook is not taking this decision purely to fund its operating costs. It is doing so to ensure that it builds a massive money-making machine. But whether it’s to make megabucks or whether it’s to cover its costs, the bottom line is that Facebook needs to bring in money.

And as I see it, there are four funding models that might be considered by Facebook:

• It can, like the BBC, be funded through taxation. This is a non-starter. I for one would be vehemently against the government funding Facebook, either through a specific tax or by contributing from its overall tax take. (This option was thrown in there for completeness, not as something to take seriously.)
• It might be run as a loss-making concern by a super-rich benefactor. This is a wonderful image but a pipe dream. It’s also somewhat short-sighted. The Internet Archive runs that way, but examples like it are few and far between
• It might be funded directly by its users, through a subscription fee. Alas, while people will happily pay nigh-on £1,000 per year for their TV service, I expect that they would baulk at a fraction of that cost imposed by Facebook. User numbers would be decimated, in the truly non-literal sense, and the fallout would be enjoyed by Twitter, Google+ and the next big thing
• Or it might be funded by other organisations.

Facebook has to go down path number four. And the most immediately obvious route to go down is that of advertising.

And I welcome that. As long as I am not duped into buying things that I wasn’t aware I was buying, then I see some advertising as a small price to pay for the value that Facebook brings. And if that advertising becomes too onerous, then I hope that I have sufficient nous to call it a day.

People need to stop seeing the web as something that’s run for free.

Every time an online venture tries to secure money, there is an uprising from its users. When Twitter introduced promoted hashtags, there was an uproar. When the Times newspaper introduced a paywall, there was an uproar. Gmail’s sponsored advertising made many of its users livid. And now Facebook’s expansion of its online advertising programme has prompted a similar response.

But with time, people see that the benefit of using the service outweighs the “cost” of putting up with advertising. And the users will remain. And if they don’t see that benefit, let’s hope they have the gumption to realise this and up and leave.

He bought the domain from Mr. Site a couple of years ago. However instead of them notifying him when his domain was about to expire, they chose not to. Instead, they took over the domain themselves. And while the title of the website stayed the same, its content was replaced with pseudo-medical content, with links off to medicines promising men the ability to satisfy women in the bedroom more than and for longer than they ever dreamed would be possible.

The reason for this is that Mr. Site are a bunch of cunts. (Apologies for the language, but I feel it’s justified.) Yes they provided a service at the outset. But they were more interested in fleecing my mate and whoring his brand.

Their activities were completely above board legally as I understand things. But their actions were wholly morally reprehensible.

He is now in email correspondence with the company to see whether there’s anything that he can do to retrieve his domain without paying a small fortune for the privilege. I expect this will come to nothing, and that his domain – part of which is his name – will evermore be filled with the shit that gives the internet a bad reputation.

My view is that in government this will take time. A long time.

In my experience, there are two factors that determine the level of IT integration that individuals do: the organisation’s size and the technical competence of its employees. For government, the organisations are large, and the average technical competence of its users is relatively low.

Small organisations rely on their employees to do some of the grunt work, to try rebooting printers (off then on), re-installing packages, configuring their wireless settings, reading some FAQs, Googling, consulting a discussion forum, etc. This is down to necessity. There often isn’t a dedicated IT function to call upon (or call) when problems are suffered.

Technical organisations that are larger also undertake self-help, but they do so out of interest and convenience. People would rather have a go at sorting out their own problems than log a ticket and wait hours, nay days, for their issue to be resolved.

Large organisations have processes. They have locked down machines. And users are directed towards official channels to resolve their IT issues. People won’t try to reboot printers, shake their toner cartridges, stop processes. They will instead reach for their phone and dial 4357 (HELP), or the equivalent number, raise a ticket and await its resolution.

And this behaviour soon becomes the norm. People won’t consider any other course of action.

Changing that model will be hard. My own experience suggests that upon integrating cloud-based applications, Departments’ IT functions immediately seek centralised system and service integration. And users follow suit, uncomfortable with calling this number for this IT issue, that number for that issue. There are exceptions, granted. But this is the norm.

The only thing that can break this model is austerity. In a bid to save money, will IT functions push more of the onus onto its users? I hope so. When some Departments pay upwards of £12 just to raise a ticket, there is a need for users to step up to the plate, take some responsibility for their IT, and, where necessary, to act as service integrators. But doing so, will need a huge cultural shift.

The IT function will demand the provision of an end-to-end service. And users will demand easy access to that IT service. And something will have to give.

If the Tier 1 IT service providers act as the veneer beyond the disparate system provision upon which the Departments rely, then that will come at an inordinate cost, cancelling out any benefits of the move to the cloud. And so users will have to step up, take some responsibility. IT departments will need to identify subject-matter experts locally in the business to act as tier one support.

It will be interesting to see what actually happens. My bet is that cloud will be hidden from the users from a service perspective, the Tier 1 providers will act as that veneer, and the TCO for the new model will be as much, if not more, than that of its predecessor. And IT departments will justify the cost by clouding (ha!) the issue in amongst others. IT is complicated, so we need the money.

Me: The new #VirginMedia combined modem/wireless router is flaky at best. So I’ve wired my Netgear router to it. All now good.

Virgin Media: Glad to see you’ve managed to find a combination that works for you Dan. PM

Me: Odd response from @virginmedia: Glad to see you’ve managed to find a combination that works for you Dan. PM

Virgin Media: With any product some customers will like it & have no issues, where others won’t. We’re just [happy] your netgear is working good. PM

Apart from not quite understanding the PM sign-off, I was more than a little perplexed. I was, in a very British, polite way, bemoaning some hardware that had been supplied by Virgin Media, for which I pay a handsome monthly rental fee. Their response congratulated me on my ingenuity and expressed happiness that I’d managed to find a solution that bypassed some of the functionality I was paying so handsomely for.

Had I had more than 140 characters to play with, and had I not been British and reserved, my tweet might have instead read:

The new #VirginMedia combined modem/wireless router is an utter bag of shit. While its modem functionality seems to work well, its wireless capability sucks donkey balls. On very rare occasions my laptop can connect to it, but it has always dropped out within a minute. (My iPhone behaves similarly, btw, so it doesn’t seem to be a client issue.) I’ve now resorted to connecting my Netgear router (fab, btw) to it using an Ethernet cable, and connecting my clients to that. It’s a much easier solution than bemoaning the issue over the phone and waiting for days for an engineer to turn up (between nine and six) to tell me that it’s a client issue.

To put that into perspective, the entire blog has recorded 2,349 comments across its 1,703 posts, an average of 1.38 comments per post. If I blogged to generate comment, I would have given up the best part of seven years ago.

Putting aside the 100-comment post for a moment, the next most comment-heavy post has seen 17 comments, and only six posts have hit double-figures.

The post that has stood out as an outlier is titled iTunes cannot read the contents of your iPhone [solved]. Its title is an iPhone error message that I encountered some 12 months ago, one that I researched and eventually solved. There wasn’t a single solution out there that I could use, so I wrote one.

And in so doing, I’ve helped 100 people who’ve suffered the same issue who were happy to comment. And, I expect, ten times that number who haven’t commented.

That’s reward in itself.

For those that are interested, below are the top seven posts by number of comments:

• iTunes cannot read the contents of your iPhone [solved]: 100 comments
• Grouping of phone numbers: 17 comments
• Pi to 110,100 binary places: 11 comments
• How are you? Not bad: 10 comments
• SUMPRODUCTIF: 10 comments
• Invention: Sellotape with a coloured tear: 10 comments
• The happiest day of my life: 10 comments.

Packages and products have been bolted together under a single login, and the administrative interfaces have been bolted together in a similar fashion. Separately, they probably made some sense. Together, they most certainly don’t.

Below is a list of the dashboards and administrative homepages that I’m aware of, how each is accessed and a brief description of what I *think* you can do from each:

• Account settings: This is accessed from the various product interfaces. Click on your username and hit Account Settings. It allows you to change your password and see the products that you’ve registered with
• Mail settings: This is accessed from the cog at the top of Google Mail. It allows you to configure your Google Mail experience. There are similar pages for some of the other product offerings, such as Google Calendar.
• Manage this domain: This is accessed from the Manage this domain link in the header bar of some of the Google products, such as Google Mail. It’s vast in its complexity, with settings pages for each of the products. It should be noted, however, that these settings pages are in no way related to the settings pages in bullet 2 above.

I kind of get it. I think the Manage this domain feature comes with me being, as it were, the master of my domain. I own osirra.com, so I am responsible for its master settings: what you can and can’t do in it, how Mail should be configured for each and every one of my three users (one of whom is four years old), how names and dates should be displayed, what logo to display (it took me an age to find that the other day), yada-yada.

Mail settings, along with its sibling settings pages, operates a level below this, allowing users within the domain to tinker with the lower-level features of that product: filters, look and feel, labels, forwarding and the like.

And account settings are specific to the user account, allowing you to change your password and access the products.

But the hierarchy is far from clear. And the navigational tools to drive you to the various admin. pages don’t do a good job in informing you what to expect, or whether you should be going there in the first place.

It took several weeks for me to uninstall Rapportive, a Google add-on furnishing me with additional information about people with whom I interact. I simply couldn’t remember where I’d added the feature, and couldn’t for the life in me remember where to deactivate it. I eventually managed to find it, but don’t ask me where—that information is long gone.

Maybe the cumbersome user experience is exacerbated by my very flat (and narrow) organisational structure. I am account owner, product user and domain administrator in my little world. But I can’t help but thinking that it would be similarly bad in a larger organisation.

Google needs to sort this out. I can’t go on like this.

The advertising is very aspirational. It revolves around content, predominantly email, to children not yet old enough to appreciate it. Content that can be looked back upon with affection years later.

Malcolm Coles speculated that it marked the end of Google.

Gmail advert on TV? Google’s finished then …

I fundamentally disagree.

Google is trying to give its core non-search offerings wider appeal. It’s trying to crack markets that are not yet enjoying its products, both those online and those offline. And, in my view, it sees TV as a valid and viable route into the latter. Just as it undertook a sizeable poster campaign recently extolling the virtues of Chrome.

The fact that Google carries advertising does not mean that it cannot and should not use other media and providers to advertise its offering. Just as Ask advertises on Google. And ITV uses posters to advertise its upcoming programmes.

I think this move is a sign of maturity from Google. It shows that they acknowledge that they are not monopolistic in the advertising space, and that they must exploit other media to grow their market share.

I like the adverts. And they’re likely to appeal, in my opinion, to the older market in which I expect they’re less well-established. (In no way am I suggesting that these two sentences are related, btw.)

First of all, what is avast? It’s, on the whole, a non-intrusive antivirus package that sits in the corner of your PC keeping it protected and safe. I pay for it, as I use it for business. But it has a free home offering which, on the whole, I recommend. Both of my parents use it, thanks to my recommendation.

But below is a synopsis of a couple of issues I’ve faced recently that have downgraded its reputation for me.

On 11 April, a new virus definitions file downloaded in the background to my PC completely destroyed my internet experience. Suddenly, I was unable to visit any http pages, although https pages could still be accessed.

Twitter was full of people with the same problem. The only immediate remedy was to disable the software (which freaked me out), go to AVG’s website, download the competitor’s product, and start using that. Which I did. To do so, I had to uninstall the avast software package.

I fully intended to go back to avast once the problem was fixed—partly because I was paying for the privilege, but mainly because I had developed a brand loyalty since initially subscribing to avast over five years ago. After a couple of weeks, to my word, I switched back.

My mum emailed me this morning asking for help. Her iGoogle homepage had lost all of its gadgets. This evening, I called her, hoping that she’d simply logged herself out, or had switched to classic view instead of the iGoogle view. The problem was not quite so simple. So I logged into her machine remotely using Copilot, and worked at solving the problem.

Nothing was coming up trumps. I tried restoring a backup of her Google settings (something I didn’t realise you could do), but still her gadgets wouldn’t appear beneath the picture of Bugs Bunny she’d chosen as her theme.

So I Googled the issue, and eventually happened upon one reporting a conflict between certain webpages and avast’s WebRep feature. Now I was aware of WebRep. Not the name, but the reality of it. It basically gives ratings of sites that you visit, or those that pop up in search results. It’s like a mobile phone signal icon, bright green, giving each site a number of bars. I’m not quite sure what the bars signify—site’s reputation, safety, something of that ilk, I expect—but it wasn’t particularly intrusive (or so I thought), so I never bothered uninstalling it.

Looking into it, it appears that avast had installed a Firefox extension on my mum’s machine on a recent update. And this was killing iGoogle. Likewise, I have had a Chrome extension installed. And as it turns out, this is the reason my Facebook and Google Reader pages have been hanging and running like dogs for the last few weeks.

Apparently, probably with my and my mum’s unwitting consent, avast installs extensions to Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer, and automatically checks for new browsers with the intention of installing sister extensions.

I have uninstalled the extensions on both of our machines, and our respective web experiences have, it seems, been sorted.

For the first issue, I completely forgive avast. We all have off days. And it seems that avast had one on 11 April. It would have been nice if they’d publicised the severity of the issue on their website (rather than a rather muted piece on their blog), but beyond that, I was happy that they fixed the issue quickly and I could get back to normal.

As for the second issue, I cannot forgive quite so easily. If a software provider wants to install an extension to my browser of choice, I want to be informed of this. And I don’t mean small print. I mean that I should actively decide whether or not this is something that I want to happen. I didn’t, and the impact was severe.

I’m staying with avast for the time being. But if there are any further issues, I’ll be hunting for an alternative.

But while connection to the LinkSys was strong and reliable, it seems that the onward wireless link was unstable. In short, I think that relying on two wireless hops was asking too much.

I was directed by Steve (megastar) to use a power-based connection. The idea is that the copper wires that support your house’s electricity are used to transmit data. I’m not sure that this is what Edison had in mind when he discovered electricity, but by golly it’s a fabulous idea.

I went ahead and bout the Devolo dLAN 200 AV Wireless-N Starter Kit from Amazon fr £89.99. It arrived on Wednesday and I installed it on Saturday.

The device consists of what look like two regular electric plugs, each with a small transformer-sized pack on it. An Ethernet cable, an Ikea-esque word-free instruction page and a redundant CD complete the box’s contents.

It’s sublime. You plug in one of the plugs near your router and connect it using the Ethernet cable. You plug in the other plug in the troublesome area of the house. The second device emits a wireless signal, the password for which is on the back of the device. You connect to this wireless network and the electricity’s copper wiring connects that device to the other one, which connects on to the internet via the aforementioned Ethernet cable.

So far so good. The only issue that had me worried for a while was that the 16-character password didn’t seem to work for Apple devices—iPhone and iPad specifically. It turns out that the hyphens separating each quartet of numbers that were not required by Windows were required by iOS. Odd UX fail by Apple there.

So now, the majority of the Whitehall Departments have a largely single-sourced model. HMRC is supported by Capgemini (under its Aspire branding); Defra by IBM; the Cabinet Office by Fujitsu, and so on. And these deals can last anywhere from five years upwards.

This is great. It means that the civil servants can focus on the task at hand, while IT support is at the end of a phone line, and the blame for glitches in high-profile IT problems can be outsourced to the private sector. Except it’s not that great.

A single-source model sounds wonderful. There’s never any doubt as to who to go to when you have a problem or indeed a requirement. But the problem is that this comes at a price. The largely Tier 1 suppliers enjoy the luxury of operating in what is effectively a monopolistic market for the term of the contract. And for this reason, prices go up. I heard only the other day of a large IT provider charging £28,000 (twenty-eight thousand pounds) to make two DNS changes on behalf of a Department. No matter how you do the maths, it’s incomprehensible to get anywhere close to this number in a rational world.

In the event that the commercial model allows the Department to award business to other providers, competition is introduced. But system integration almost always rests with a lead (Tier 1) supplier, and that Tier 1 supplier has a monopoly over this piece of the pie. So the lower price that might be secured by awarding the business to the competition will likely be counterbalanced by an elevated price for integrating that work into the Department’s IT estate, and so the Department loses out either way.

I wonder whether shame is the answer to all of this. If the general public was made aware how much the Tier 1 suppliers were charging for some of the basic IT building blocks—DNS changes, password resets and the like—would they be shamed into charging reasonable fees for such work? Or would the cost shift to other, less commoditised elements of their portfolio, less easily dissected through the Freedom of Information Act?

To start the ball rolling, who wants to ask the FOI question: Please tell the public how many DNS changes have been made in each Whitehall Department in the last twelve months, and how much was charged for each?