That #Flickr is advertising as “New” the newly introduced “Upload” button in their primary nav. is what makes #Yahoo! doomed.

That Upload button is the most significant software upgrade in the last 24 months. #Flickr #Yahoo!

Reading Gizmodo’s article on a similar subject just now, I was quite close to the mark.

Since Flickr was bought by Yahoo!, there have been few technological developments that are visible to the end user. The odd screen may have received a makeover, and I think I can now see other people’s photos on maps. But beyond that, there’s little.

In fact, the main difference to me is that I was forced to start paying for the service (on 30 July 2008), as I needed to upload more pictures than the free account allowed. I don’t resent this. All services should be paid for.

What I resent is the lack of focus on me as a user by Yahoo!

I’d love to be able to log in with other systems’ credentials.

I’d love to be able to allow my Facebook followers automatic access to my protected photos.

I’d like a much richer interface for seeing my friends’ photos.

I’d like to be able to upload videos more than 90 seconds in length.

I’d like all photos taken on my smart phone to automatically upload to Flickr when in WiFi range, and for these only to be accessible by myself.

I’d like a much improved interface into my own photostream—timelines, montages, albums.

I’d like my geotagging of my own photos to have a positive impact on me, rather than merely fuelling other people’s views of the world.

Instead, I have none of these features. Instead, I have the privilege of losing access to all bar 200 of my photos if I ever stop paying.

Flickr will not die. Certainly not for a long time. Instead it will live a long dull life. Its user base will remain uninspired and unimpressed. And its functionality will creep forward while those around it bound past it. I wonder whether I’ll be a part of it.

The G-Wiz is probably the best-known of our all-electric vehicles. Its maximum range is 48 miles, requiring 9.66kWh of electricity, or 4.96 miles per kWh. This, I’m guessing, is in its most fuel efficient mode.

Coal-based energy production emits 950g of CO2 per kWh. So at maximum efficiency, a G-Wiz powered by coal-produced electricity emits 191g of CO2 for each mile driven.

Now take my Mazda 3, offering roughly 39 miles per gallon of petrol. Under the ‘perfect’ fuel/air mixture, petrol burning produces 2.36kg of CO2 per litre, or 10.73kg per gallon. This equates to 275g of CO2 for each mile driven, 44% less carbon efficient than a coal-sourced electric car.

A petrol car that can achieve 56mpg will have the same carbon production as a G-Wiz, assuming the G-Wiz’s energy is sourced from coal.

Electric cars are not in themselves environmentally friendly. But they give us options for fuel production that petrol cars don’t afford us. Once you have a petrol car, driving it will result in a pretty constant impact on the environment. With electric cars, we have the future choice, policy allowing, of sourcing our energy cleanly, therefore reducing the emissions for which an electric car is responsible.

But don’t assume that driving an electric car makes your journey environmentally friendly by default. Because it doesn’t.

• Formal documents: All grammatical rules apply. Period.
• Emails: All grammatical rules apply, albeit often in a friendlier style than that of formal documents. Content is often less formally positioned, without compromising grammatical standards.. Text-speak unacceptable.
• Blogposts: Yet more informality. For example, the previous sentence wasn’t strictly a sentence. But it’s acceptable in blogposts. Text-speak unacceptable, unless being quoted.
• Tweets: Correctly cased, but abbreviations are welcome, as are incomplete sentences, owing to the limited real estate. Text-speak acceptable.
• Instant messenger: All lower case. Sentences optional. Punctuation similarly optional. Text-speak actively encouraged.

What are your rules?

America’s public holidays are inspired.

• New Year’s Day: The start of the new year.
• MLK Day: Martin Luther King’s birthday, on the third Monday in January.
• Presidents’ Day: Technically, this is still legally termed “Washington’s Birthday”, although it never falls on 22 February. It is held on the third Monday in February and is widely acknowledged to be a compromise between Abraham Lincoln’s birthday on 12 February and George Washington’s birthday on 22 February.
• Memorial Day: The last Monday in May, to commemorate the war dead.
• Independence Day: Celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, 4 July.
• Labor Day: Celebrating workers and the labour movement, on the first Monday in September.
• Columbus Day. The second Monday in October. (He first set foot on the landmass on 12 October 1492.)
• Veterans Day. All war veterans are honoured on 11 November, the date on which the Armistice was signed ending World War I.
• Thanksgiving Day. Giving thanks to the autumn harvest.
• Christmas Day. Celebrating Jesus’ birthday.

In the UK, we have much more bland holidays.

• New Year’s Day: See above.
• Good Friday: Jesus’ crucifixion.
• Easter Monday: No real significance, beyond being a day after Easter Sunday.
• Early May Bank Holiday. Loosely associated with workers, similar to the American Labor Day.
• Spring Bank: Celebration of the Pentecost festival.
• August Bank Holiday. A holiday devoid of any meaning, it seems.
• Christmas Day. See above.
• Boxing Day. Celebrating Jesus’ hangover day, I guess.

I’m not bothered about having two fewer than they do (although their spacing throughout the year could do with some work. What bothers me is that they have little concept of character. Two of them (Boxing Day and Easter Monday) are simply extensions of other significant holidays. While the three dates in May and August might as well be celebrating my birthday.

The landing of MV Empire Windrush (22 June), Shakespeare’s birthday/deathday (23 April), a local celebration of our respective countries’ saints (various), VE Day (8 May), Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s birthday (9 April). These would all be worthy holidays.

Or how about Sir Isaac Newton’s birthday: 25 December. Oh, wait.

It was, I’m sure you’ll be aware, ”all request Friday”, so he put in a request for Scarlatti’s Sonata in G major, K. 201, via their website I expect. Whether the request was played, I’m not sure. But that’s not the point of this post.

Each weekday evening at 6pm, Radio 1′s Greg James opens up the airwaves for the ten-minute takeover, for which listeners can text in with their requests. Greg allegedly plays three random requests that are stored in Radio 1′s music system. Each evening, I text in my request. To date, these attempts have been futile.

Both of us, if we cared to, have access to Spotify or Napster, allowing us to choose whatever track we might want to listen to whenever we might want to listen to it. And streaming aside, the tracks we want to request are likely already in our respective music collections. We could choose to play them directly from our digital devices of choice.

But we don’t. There’s something collaborative about radio, internet-based or otherwise. In regular listening mode, there’s a lovely thought that other people are enjoying the same thing as we’re enjoying at exactly that moment. And with successful requests, that thought becomes ever more delightful, knowing that other people are enjoying the music that we’ve chosen. (My friend Kate today downloaded Now (That’s What I Call Music) 1982 (Disc 1) off the back of a Facebook comment I left on her husband’s wall detailing its track listing. That made me happy.)

No matter the extent to which on-demand content infiltrates our lives, and in spite of the benefit it brings to our lives, we will continue to reach out to broadcast entertainment media, both to enjoy their unpredictability (please don’t counter this argument with “iTunes Genius”) and to join a community of other listeners.

The account uses your location to give you advance warning of the International Space Station passing overhead. It only alerts you of the passes between dusk and dawn, those that are visible to the naked eye.

Before I stumbled upon the account, I used to occasionally pop along to one of the many tracker pages that showed the path of the station, to see whether it was in the vicinity of London. On one such occasion, I was lucky. Sat in Starbucks with my daughter as dusk fell, I hit the bookmarked site and discovered that it was going to pass over Croydon in around 20 minutes’ time. We finished our drinks and my shoulders carried her to the middle of Clapham Common for the 5.20pm fly-by. Beforehand, I tweeted the passing to allow friends to enjoy it too.

From around 5.15pm, wind brought an abundance of cloud into what was a relatively clear sky, and our skyward gazing was fruitless. My friend Simon thanked me for treating his family to an awesome fly-by. Mixed feelings.

(On a previous occasion, we had about five minutes’ notice and my daughter and I ran/were dragged from the Windmill pub to the middle of the Common like crazed fools, and were treated to a fabulous sight.)

But the chances that it would be passing over at or around the time you checked were remote.

With the Twitter account, I know when it’s coming over. In advance. And that’s lovely.

Tonight, it was due to pass over at 2015. Before dinner, I looked out of the loft skylight and there it went, moving east-north-east, taking three or four minutes to journey from horizon to horizon. It glimmered in the dusk, its six occupants whizzing round the planet every 92 minutes and 24 seconds.

There is something simply magical about the ISS. And knowing in advance that it’s coming over is similarly magical. And if you’re reading this? Get outside: it’s coming over London again at 2152.

But to me, reading an article signifies one or more of three things. You might have an allegiance with the newspaper publishing the thing that you’re reading; you might have an interest in the subject being written about; or the headline advertising the article (for that is what headlines do) might have grabbed you.

But reading an article does *not* necessarily signify that you agree with it, nor indeed that it’s worth reading. And this is what I have a problem with in such sharing.

The buttons that now adorn our articles and blogposts are useful. They invite us to make an active decision to share the content (or not) and how indeed to share it. But I find those technologies that automatically share with our networks the things that we are reading trouble me. Content with a catchy title will be read. Its being read will be shared. And this will cause it to be read yet more.

The key elements of the law change seem to be twofold: bringing forward to 20 weeks the “point of viability” that defines the time after which a woman cannot have an elective abortion; and bringing forward to seven weeks the point until which medication abortion pills can be prescribed.

I find that Twitter’s users, certainly those that I follow, lean further to the left than the average person. And so as you might imagine, reaction from some was fierce.

But rather interestingly, while some have debated the key elements of the change, some have picked up on what on first impressions might appear to be an odd definition of when pregnancy starts, in my view missing the point altogether.

The bill defines pregnancy as starting at the date of the last menstrual cycle. On average, this is two weeks before conception. What? pregnancy starts before the woman has been impregnated? How can this be so?

The trouble with this argument is that this definition is consistent with that used by every doctor in the land: Stateside and in the UK, across the entirety of the developed world, and, I expect, worldwide. Because while a human’s gestation averages 38 weeks, we add two weeks to this when referring to the length of the pregnancy. This effectively measures the journey of the egg, rather than that of the embryo, conception generally happening two weeks after the egg leaves basecamp.

So effectively, a woman could conceivably (ha!) be a virgin for the first two weeks of her naturally-conceived pregnancy, such is the measure we use.

If nothing else, the headline that pregnancy starts before intercourse has brought additional publicity to the bill, claiming that the bill is not only introducing new measures, but also changing the very definition of pregnancy.

While you may have issues with the bill, it’s probably best to focus on the fundamental changes it brings about, rather than the headline-writer’s rather idiotic interpretation.

But there are two technological advancements in particular that weren’t there during my childhood that to her are simply part of life. In fact, the absence of either one causes befuddlement on her behalf. They are: touchscreens, and rewindable TV.

If she needs the loo while watching TV, she will always ask, “Can you pause it?” And when we went to see my parents at Christmas, she was confused by their Freeview TVs not being pausable.

And similarly, my Kindle is an anathema to her. My wife’s iPad and our respective phones have conditioned her into thinking that all handheld devices react to touching the screen. When the Kindle doesn’t do anything, she’s bemused.

To me, as to many, there have been so many advancements in technology that it’s sometimes difficult to figure out where the most important leaps have been made. But instead of looking at what’s outstanding, maybe the key is to look at what seems like a no-brainer to the youth of today.

Meanwhile, Google is trying to make your online experience more simple and rich, providing applications such as email, maps, calendars, documents to make things easier; the likes of YouTube and Picasa to make things richer; and a kick-ass search engine to allow you to find exactly what you’re looking for.

And Apple is intent on providing a beautiful and simplistic experience when connecting with technology, both in the devices themselves and the interfaces that they support.

That’s the gloss. Here’s the cynic’s view.

Facebook is intent on ensuring that when people connect with other people or organisations online, they do it in the confines of Facebook. And in so doing, they will amass a swathe of data about you and sell it to the highest bidder, allowing advertisers to sell their wares to you, whether you like it or not.

Google is intent on ensuring that when people want to do anything online, they do it through Google. And in so doing, they will amass a swathe of data about you and sell it to the highest bidder, allowing advertisers to sell their wares to you, whether you like it or not.

Apple is intent on ensuring that when people want to enjoy media online, they do it through Apple. And in so doing, they will take a large cut of the profits involved.

There is a fine line between being perceived to do stuff that your users will love and being perceived to do stuff that will abuse the trust of those users. Ask Microsoft. And maybe treading that line most carefully will decide who wins the battle of the user technologists.

The war continues between the major players in the personal IT services market. To most of Joe Public, they will mostly see the veneer. They’ll see the shiny iPad, the beautiful way in which Google Maps helps them get to grandma’s house, the way in which they can now connect so easily with people who might otherwise be strangers. But behind the gloss, evil is going on.

In the 1990s, Microsoft became huge. And along the way it became hated. It tried to use its position in certain markets to push into others, often forcibly. Internet Explorer being packaged with Windows was one such foray. Maybe this hatred goes with the territory of being big.

Now we have, among others, Facebook, Google and Apple.

Each of them wants to own certain aspects of our online experience. Apple is doing so through hardware: the iPad and the iPhone. Facebook is doing so through software: its website. And Google is doing both: its swathe of applications now being complemented by hardware in the form of the Google Samsung Nexus, although this latter facet is being done through partnerships rather than directly.

But these companies, particularly Google and Facebook, are no longer inspired by making their offering lovely for the customer. (I genuinely believe they once were.) The companies have shareholders and these shareholders demand inordinate returns on their investments. And to do this, each company must milk its offering for all it’s worth.

In doing so, they will be perceived as being evil. They will open up your data to advertisers and use every opportunity to increase the value associated with your using their offering.

Arguably, the current king of the three is less into this business. Apple is about building beautiful hardware and operating systems. It’s less about building apps that can maximise the value of your interactions while using them. My betting is that with time they will move more and more towards this area over the coming years.

To use a mathematical analogy, there is, I expect, a maximum that the companies need to find. If they don’t push enough to maximise the value of our interactions with their services, then they will lose out to those players that do. And likewise, if they go too far in using that data, customers will become tired and go elsewhere. Finding that maximum will be the big challenge.

It’s going to be an interesting race to watch.