The application essentially aggregates and presents back information in the form of a single web page based on a Twitter ID.  Mine is here.  Sounds simple, but I’m guessing the algorithms that drive it are quite complex.  And that’s what makes the offering so compelling.  They seem to find the articles that I find most interesting, those that I would have retweeted had I seen them on my Twitter feed.

In some respects, its charm is similar to that of Facebook.  The algorithms that determine what constitutes your Facebook homepage seem similarly complex.  How long does Facebook wait until it tells you the number of your friends that have recently connected to another person, for example?  And with paper.li, what factors determine whether articles are presented to you and the order in which they appear?

It’s lovely.  And useful.  If you’re off Twitter for a while, it’s a good way to catch up without being overwhelmed.

The upgrade will make contacts more usable, allegedly.  But as far as I’ve read, I don’t think it will solve my biggest gripe.

You see, I like order in my digital world.  I like my photos to be tagged and geolocated.  I like my invoices to be consistent.  And I like my contacts to be pure.  They are always saved as “Surname, Forename” (even my grandma, for Doherty, Pete’s sake).

Whenever I email someone new, either actively or as a response to an incoming email, they automatically appear in the All Contacts bucket, but don’t make it into the My Contacts bucket.  That’s good, because I don’t want what might be stray contacts making their way into the sanctity that is the My Contacts bucket.  But only by undertaking a comparison of the All Contacts bucket to the My Contacts bucket can I figure out what these wretched new contacts are, to make a decision as to whether to formalise them or bin them.

So on an ad hoc basis, I export My Contacts, export All Contacts, load both into Excel, do some vlookup jiggery-pokery and identify the delta.  I then go through those contacts one by one deciding whether to delete them or formalise them by transferring them to My Contacts and adding the necessary metadata (Surname, Forename etc.).

Frustrating isn’t the word, but it’ll do.

But the road is now a very confusing place to be.  Many years ago, bus lanes didn’t exist.  Now they do, each one operating during a different set of times, some allowing taxis and motorbikes, others not.  Many road junctions now come with two solid white lines separated by an “advanced stop zone” for cyclists.  Possibly for motorcyclists too—who knows?  (Whether it’s technically illegal for a car to stop in said zone is subject to some debate.)

We have green cycle lanes which have been around for some time and the newly introduced blue CSs.  But when the blue CS expands to encompass an entire car lane, the only such lane that allows vehicles to go straight on, heaven knows what the cars should do.

Meanwhile, single and double-yellow lines on the side of the road are now joined by double-red lines, a suggestion that double-yellow lines were not sufficiently stringent.

And big, red Cs also adorn our roads, indicating that you’re approaching/in the Congestion Charging Zone.

The road and its plethora of colours and markings make a confusing place to be.  And I’m a Londoner, supposedly well-versed in, and certainly well-travelled on, the asphalt underfoot.  What it must be like for a tourist is anyone’s guess.

Someone should really take a step back and redefine the business requirements that the road markings are trying to achieve.  And then come up with a revised stylebook to support their implementation.  For I for one am confused.

Earlier this month, BBC News launched its new offering.  While the information architecture of the site didn’t undergo a change, the navigation into that information architecture was turned upside down.  Side menus were moved to the top, while the navigational elements within the body of the homepage were unrecognisable.  And the site sucks on an iPhone where the previous site was easily navigable.  My review of the changes can be found here.

As is often the case with such wholesale changes, people reacted badly.  People don’t like change.  And when it’s something as beloved as the BBC website—an offering that has generated affinity and affection in keeping with its offline brand—the reaction to the change is all the more vociferous.  But usually this reaction calms down as people get used to, nay sometimes begin to prefer, the new offering.  (As an aside, I loved the previous redesign in March 2008 from the moment I set my eyes on it.)

With this change, there has been no such calming.  Three weeks in, the people who I know and trust still don’t like it.  It’s still confusing and unintuitive, and the BBC has ruled out reverting to the previous incarnation.

To address my frustration at the user experience of the site on the iPhone, I downloaded the newly launched BBC News iPhone app.  And I have to say, it’s lovely—at least in comparison to the disgrace that is the website.  And it also addresses head-on the Adobe issue, its video footage being accessible through the application.

But I’m still annoyed with the website from my laptop.  And I can’t see this going away.  And so for the time being, the Guardian will be the source of a greater proportion of my online news absorption.

On first impressions, I disliked last week’s re-branding.  So I allowed a week before passing comment, to allow it to grow on me.

It hasn’t.  And here’s my review.  The review focuses entirely on the News homepage.

First impressions were drawn to its overt redness.  It’s way redder than its predecessor, the header that houses the three main navigational tools lacking the subtlety of before.  (For reference, the “before” view can be seen in the link to its review above.)  And when news breaks, a further red strapline at the top only goes to accentuate this.  Maybe over time this will become white noise.  But for the time being, it distracts the eye and takes it away from the site’s content.  Embedding the navigation in the header is, however, successful in widening the real estate available for content though.

Now to the typography.  It comes across as amateurish.  The contrast in size between the clickable title of the headline news article and its summary is way too great.  And the very size of the title makes its on-hover underline plain ugly.  They appear to have moved from a Verdana-esque font to Arial, which may be more web-friendly but only serves to make the content less visible, to me at least.

The main news items are more difficult to absorb.  The pictures that previously accompanied the lead three articles gave context, allowing elements of the article’s subject to be inferred without the need to read the entire summary.  This sounds lazy—and maybe it is—but it is a symptom of how people absorb information nowadays.  I do like the tag showing which articles are “new”, as previously, a new story that was not deemed important enough to make the top three could easily be lost among the lesser stories.

The right-hand column interests me little. Maybe as video becomes yet more prevalent online, I will find myself clicking more over there, but for the time being, that column, above the fold at least, is almost redundant to me.  It’s very orange though.

Besides the Sport link in the top navigation, nothing sport-related makes its way above the fold unless a sports story makes mainstream news (e.g. yesterday’s Open result).  I think this is a crying shame, particularly given the BBC’s deserved reputation in this field.

Below the fold, I get lost in a heap of yet more confusion.  There isn’t sufficient visual distinction between the Also in the News section and Sport.  And the lack of any tags against any of the Sport headlines means you have to know your stuff and may result in confusion.  Surfaced articles such as Wigan sign Melbourne trio, without the Rugby League tag, will cause confusion.

The grey localisation box (after all, it’s location based rather than being based on anything any more specific about my person) is a half-arsed attempt at personalised news.  Down the right, again general confusion is the order of the day until you hit the familiar and loved Most Popular box, which straddles the second fold, on this laptop at least.

The lead stories from the site’s main sections (Business, Politics, Technology etc.) are stacked four abreast, lesser citizens in a homepage stripped of any sense of order.  And the iPlayer gets some airtime in the bottom right corner, almost an afterthought.

Look at the site on an iPhone, and as well as being unable to access any of the video content because of the Apple/Adobe stand-off, you’re confronted with a site that is difficult to navigate, with lots of vertical and horizontal scrolling and general difficulty getting close to any of the content.

Overall, the homepage is a mess.  It lacks structure, order and any meaningful visual differentiation.  And I miss its predecessor dearly.

In Huddle, if you want to edit a file, you lock it.  And when you’re done, you unlock it.  I find this far more confusing.

I understand the rationale for Huddle’s choice in nomenclature.  In locking a file, you are preventing other people from editing it.  And when you unlock it, those with permissions are again entitled to edit it.

But it would make equal sense to me if the terms were reversed.  I might unlock a file to edit it—just as I would unlock a bike to ride it—and then lock it when I’m done.

The terms they’ve chosen result in a slightly confusing user experience.

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 on the move.  I had left my client’s offices and was ready to a board a London-bound train.  I had an intermittent 3G signal.

My main source of news was Twitter, which was flooded with tweets on the very subject, as you might imagine.  I looked for more official news reporting by going to the iPhone TVCatchup web offering to stream BBC News.

I was looking for something more dynamic than textual news, but my bandwidth was insufficient for TV streaming to be any better than frustrating, tiny snippets interrupted by lengthy pauses, often broken entirely as the 3G connection disappeared as we wended our way through Essex stations.

I was after audio.  I wanted to hear the reporting and discussion that was taking place on BBC News without my connection grinding to a halt as a result of fat video content.

I’ve often thought that there are certain circumstances in which it would be great if such audio streams were available.  Soap fans could listen to EastEnders in the car on the way home from work.  And I could have had a rewarding experience listening to the news.  Maybe that’s what radio is for, but the technologists seem to have been better at making video content available than audio content.

I’d like to be able to choose a channel and choose which senses to satisfy.  Is that too much to ask?

I had my HMRC ID, and added the payee through my internet banking interface.  This was no mean feat, as the ridiculous number of facets of HMRC are so difficult to navigate.  (My VAT payee is “CUSTOMS AND EXCISE”, FFS.)  Anyway, I managed to find the appropriate payee for my corporation tax, and was ready to give them my company’s money, physically at least, even if emotionally I was far from being there.

I informed the interface that I wanted to transfer some money to HMRC, and it asked how much.  I then got an error, saying that it could not process single payments in excess of £10,000.

I called my business banking manager in an attempt to make the payment over the phone.  She informed me that they could not process single payments in excess of £10,000.  The consistency was beautiful, but the consistent message itself was shit.

The business banking manager told me that I could make the payment in a branch.  So I popped in.  And indeed I could.  The only way to transfer more than £10,000 in a single day to HMRC (or indeed any other organisation) was via a BACS payment.  Cost to me: £30.  Now I like paying tax as much as the next man, but I will not pay for the privilege of giving HMRC swathes of cash.

So I wrote a cheque, popped it in the post and a few days later, my account balance got the shit kicked out of it through the cashing of that one cheque.

The cost borne by HMRC in processing that payment was doubtless much greater than it would have been had I paid it electronically.  But the cost differential for me was too great for me to choose the electronic medium.

After April 2011, HMRC will not accept cheque payments.  My bank has not heard of this issue before (bullshit) and is investigating how it might address it.  I am not holding my breath.  Next year, I might just walk into 100 Parliament Street with some brown envelopes.

All too often, I will call a company to express my disappointment and displeasure at the service they’re offering, only to be reduced to a heap, rocking backwards and forwards in the corner of my living room, defeated by the interminable bureaucracy.

Below are some recent examples:

British Gas

I have an insurance contract with them (HomeCare) that covers my electrics, drainage, boiler and central heating.  I pay a handsome sum for the privilege.  I called on a Friday reporting blocked drains.  They deemed it a non-emergency so refused a weekend callout, but promised me an 8–10am slot on Monday morning.

No one arrived.  At 10.02am, I called asking their whereabouts.  I was told that no such slot should have been promised, but that someone would be with me before 6pm, and they would call giving one hour’s notice.  At 4.54pm, I called again asking their whereabouts, only to be told that they weren’t coming today.

I arranged for the problem to be sorted privately, and am awaiting their response on reimbursement of the invoice.

Lambeth Council

Last week, I arranged a bulk rubbish collection, of which I’m allowed four per year.  The guy arrived today and took away a rug and a bedside table, but couldn’t be arsed with the large carpet.  The operator couldn’t do anything about this because the ticket was still “live”.

A man with a van is coming tomorrow morning to take the carpet, costing me £50.

Virgin Media

In October, I signed up to an all-inclusive Virgin Media package for a monthly amount quoted to me over the phone.  After the service (including new set-top boxes) was installed, they started billing me 20% more than that agreed monthly amount.  On questioning, they apologised for quoting the wrong figure and told me that the correct figure was the higher amount.

I am still working out how this might be resolved.

Many of the people I speak to in these organisations are, in themselves, lovely.  They are polite, courteous and seem to want to help.  But the bureaucracy that surrounds them, through no fault of their own, prevents them from doing so.

You see, no single person is empowered.  Each department exists in isolation, calls passing between them but with no one having a holistic view of the customer experience, nor the power to manage that.  And often, as was the case today with Lambeth, the operators blame the process for their inability to resolve the issue.

Smaller companies carry more accountability, don’t blame their colleagues or sister departments and generally give a shit about the customer.  The above companies, as organisations in themselves, do not.  Even if some of the people therein do.