So much so, in fact, that we despaired that such a service might not exist. And what do you do if something doesn’t exist?

Build it yourself.

The Criteria

The first thing that we had to do was lay out some pared down success criteria — what are we trying to accomplish, no frills? We can always tinker and add things later.

The first thing we do is throw out “automatic”. Automation can happen later after proof of concept.

What we need is:
1. A way to copy a set of songs to my phone, without having them connected by a cord, or on the same WiFi network.
2. A way to copy metadata back to my computer, to update information on what songs have been played on my phone.

The Ingredients

With two simple steps, we now need to gather our set of ingredients to set it up.

Cloud space

We cannot simply load data directly to the phone, unfortunately — an intermediary is needed. Options here are endless, but for a proof of concept, I chose to use Dropbox.

The Big Bad Blog has had issues with Dropbox in the past, and didn’t feel entirely comfortable about this. But as the most popular service of its type, it means that there’s a plethora of tools out there to use.

If things work, goes the logic, either utility will trump ideology, or alternative cloud storage can be found.

The clients

With storage space figured out, the next question is how to upload from the computer, and download from to the phone.

On the PC side of things, I went with Dropbox’s own client. Easy to use, with the benefit of being pre-installed from a brief past flirtation with the service.

For my phone, I downloaded Syncness from the Android Market.

Metadata sync

Which left us with sending the metadata back to my computer. Here I chose to use last.fm.

Last.fm is not just an internet radio — it will also listen (or “scrobble”) to everything you play on your computer, phone, or iPod, and keep track of it. Information on what is played can then be imported back into MediaMonkey, to update the play counts and dates on my computer.

The Test

So how did it all work?

Initial, small scale tests of all three systems worked like a dream. The upload, download, and metadata sync all went smoothly. And we were ready to roll.

And that’s when the shit hit the fan.

I tried to make a larger scale synchronization — not my entire playlist, or a multiple gigabyte load, or anything of that sort. One hundred songs; something that might be typical of a weekly scheduled sync.

It took three hours to upload the songs to Dropbox. And another hour and a half to download them — over WiFi, no less.

This was simply too long. The entire point of this was to create a process that did not require manual intervention. And while all the individual pieces can be automated, making sure that the individual pieces weren’t interrupted mid-sync would require that the synchronization was always kept in mind.

The Verdict

We can see why nobody seems to be offering the service that I’m after — it would just run too slowly to be viable. Hence the concentration on “cloud players” that don’t bother to try to move music onto your own device.

It goes without saying that having music on your device is better — it can hold better quality files than can be managed by streaming services, it can play that music anywhere. Underground, on an airplane, in a foreign country without internet access. The music is just there.

Our bafflement at the lack of a cloud synchronization service has been morphed into an understanding through this process. The companies in the cloud player market are actually building their problem — an inability to provide proper synchronization — into their services as a central, “positive” aspect.

In a couple of years, after everybody has been convinced to stop synchronizing, the technology will have finally arrived and all the same companies will start to convince you to sync your music again.

And so it goes.

(Previously: Volume I and Volume II)

In this week’s episode, we search for the most likely default …

In search of the Big Cloud

Having decided already that our answer almost certainly lies in that recent buzzword, cloud computing, our first task is to identify the appropriate default cloud configuration for us. While there are certainly hundreds of enterprises out there of various sizes, all trying to ride the cloud computing wave, we decided to start by looking at three options: Amazon, Apple and Google.

Why these three?

The decision to limit our initial investigation in this way was a rather simple one — these are three companies that are big. None of them will just disappear tomorrow, and all seem likely to offer some sort of solution. The solution found here might not be our ultimate solution, but it will hopefully provide an interim solution and a fallback point if things go wrong elsewhere.

Amazon is a huge online retailer, with hugely successful MP3 and Android App stores. On top of this, they’re a big player in the cloud space, providing hosting services for a large number of extremely popular websites. My Kindle experience has been positive, with a pretty slick book-delivery system.

And Amazon launched their “Cloud Player” some months ago to much fanfare.

In short, Amazon looks like a solid bet to have a solution.

Apple announced their iCloud service recently. And while we fear that it might require iTunes (a non-starter) or an i-Device (rather than an Android), Apple also has a couple of things going for it. As the proprietors of the world’s biggest online music store, they are in as good a position as anybody to work something out with music publishers.

And for all their faults, Apple has a history of redefining markets they enter. They did not make the first, or (arguably) the best, PC, MP3 player, smart phone or tablet. But they completely changed the landscape for each of these. Apple could well have done something that (once again) has left their competitors scrambling to catch up.

Google has had betas other than Google+ running in recent months. One of these is Google Music. Google are the craftspeople behind my phone, and I am quite impressed with their operating system, and the easy cloud synchronization of my contacts and photos.

Step one: Google

My first stop, I decided, would be Google.

That stop looked like this:

Which is a shame, because the service itself sounded alright — sure, it’s a streaming service (rather than an outright synchronization), but at least it streams your own music collection (rather than random songs Google has decided you might like). And it caches playlists to your phone, reputedly, allowing for them to be played when your connection fails.

Are those playlists “smart”? How is metadata synchronized?

Well, these are questions we cannot answer, because we could not test the service. Alas.

Step two: Amazon

With Google unavailable, our sights are turned to Apple and Amazon.

Our well-documented dislike of the former combines with a strong desire to never download iTunes again to make us jump towards Amazon as our next-best-bet. Amazon is a service on which we can pin high hopes. Their service is not in Beta, and they have an associated MP3 store.

If Google ticks some boxes and isn’t even available, surely Amazon will be better!

Alas, no.

Amazon does not do smart playlists — their create and manage playlists instructions clearly do not mention managing playlists in any way other than manually. And all mention of actually downloading music to a device (rather than streaming) is by song, meaning that even if smart playlists could be maintained, they could not be synchronized.

And here at the Big Bad Blog, we tend to organize our music via smart playlists.

But more importantly, Amazon (like Google) is available only to customers in the United States, leaving us here in Britain out in the cold again. They also only support a couple of music formats, although with the two formats being MP3 and M4A, they do reflect the majority of my current music collection.

Finally, music cannot be uploaded from a phone — that Amazon-bought MP3s are automatically on their cloud drive does provide a bit of a workaround there, but it’s still pretty poor. I want music delivery to be independent of the purchasing mechanism.

In the end, Amazon doesn’t seem to be able to tick any of my boxes. As they say, it’s a cloud player, rather than a cloud service. Amazon streams and sells, they don’t sync.

Oh, and they won’t even stream to me.

Step three: Apple

With the two best options of “fallback option” off the table, we turned to the evil empire.

Check #1: Will iCloud work on an Android phone? No.
Check #2: Will iCloud work with music for customers outside the United States? No.

We did not bother to look at the remaining features of the service. By this point we had a headache.

Conclusions

Our initial investigations have left us without a synchronization mechanism.

Indeed, it seems that jurisdictional legal issues – to whit, the music industry being firmly set in the 1990s, and insisting on geography-dependent distribution over geography-independent distribution systems. In the end, all I want is music on my computer synchronized with music on my phone.

This seems perfectly reasonable, and is doubtlessly legal. However, the recording industry’s zeal in pushing for unintuitive copy protection laws and tendency to sue their customers (or those offering services to their customers) for daring to find alternative distribution technologies clearly has even those corporations with a similarly large stable of lawyers acting cautiously.

Here at the Big Bad Blog, we suspect that any solution we find will be expensive — due either to having to pay the record companies (but probably not the musicians) big bucks to avoid lawsuits, or having to pay lawyers to fight those lawsuits.

What a pity.

What’s next?

Next week, we attempt to circumvent the local nature of global services with a DIY solution …

But, mostly, I’ve been fiddling with my phone.

One of the reasons I enjoy my Android phone so much more than I enjoyed its Apple predecessor is the freedom the Operating System gives to customize the device. While both the stock Apple and Android experiences are excellent, only Android embraces users who wish to go outside the stock experience to create one of their own.

This fiddling brought me full circle back to my current music problems, and also made me think that I was approaching music in a wrong way.

The Cloud

What’s that wrong way?, you might ask.

“Tethering” would be the reply.

Rebuilding my phone made me note how well almost everything I use on my phone is kept in synchronization with great ease. From contact information to calendars, backups to books to bookmarks and beyond, everything on my phone just synchronizes with any and every other connected device I might use.

I set it up and forget it — if I enter your phone number into my address book on my computer, I can dial it from my phone the next time I need it. If my phone dies tomorrow, yesterday’s backup files are sitting on my computer. If I take a photo, I can find it on my computer without needing any direct connection.

But music? It wants my phone to be tethered to my laptop, via WiFi if not an actual wire.

And it occurred to me that this is wrong. This is how Apple set things up when they came out with the iPod a decade ago, and nobody ever bothered to make it better.

Until now, of course — now the cloud is all the rage. Nevermind that we all signed up for Yahoo! mail back in the late ’90s, technically a cloud service.

So I took the plunge.

Out with Apple

And a plunge it was — I didn’t figure out what was going to do, and then get rid of my old system. Instead, it was out with the old, despite “the new” being yet unidentified — without knowing what I was going to do, or how I was going to make it work, I deleted the evil that is iTunes from my computer.

It wasn’t needed.

It wasn’t wanted.

It isn’t missed.

In its place has come MediaMonkey. It is fantastic by comparison to iTunes, and I’ve been enjoying playing around with my music collection for the first time in years — organizing it, modifying scripts, and generally playing around.

Ten years ago — before I joined the iTunes collective — I really enjoyed compiling and organizing my music collection. Playing in MediaMonkey generates a similar feeling.

Is it that it’s a new toy? A better toy? That I’ve just reminded myself of how I enjoy this sort of thing?

I couldn’t say. But MediaMonkey already gets my hearty endorsement, in any case.

Getting cloudy

While getting rid of iTunes was easy, it seems that moving to the cloud is a bit more challenging, however.

Over the next few days — or perhaps weeks, given the speed at which I seem to be writing of late — I’ll go through my attempts to synchronize music through the cloud. We will see what works, and (mostly) what doesn’t.

Suffice it to say that the piece that I thought would be the easiest part of the journey has, as it turns out, been the rockiest.

I loved that iPhone.

And it connected to my computer with a little special cable, where an Apple program called iTunes would synchronize it. iTunes held — and still holds — my entire music collection.

Then things started getting sour.

It began even while I was still in love. Apple wouldn’t let me just turn on my own fucking phone that I had just bought. No. I had to wait until I was home, install iTunes and perform an initial synchronization.

And they wouldn’t let me just install iTunes. They had to try to add their MobileMe service (and later their Safari browser). And not just the first time – they would ask me with every iTunes upgrade that would ever come out.

And they wouldn’t let me put whatever I wanted on my phone. Only specially-approved-by-Apple software could go on a device that I paid hundreds of pounds for.

But I didn’t care. My iPhone was so shiny.

It turned out, however, that these were not glitches in the Apple paradigm; these were instead indicative of Apple’s approach to doing business. And as Apple continued down this road, I decided to stop supporting them with my money. I would cut them out of my life, hardware and software alike. For Steve Jobs & Co., there was no more time, money, or space (real or virtual) in my life.

The iPhone was dutifully ditched for an Android, and this blogger has not looked back. (Well, he has, but he’s had a big grin on his face about the decision.) My other piece of Apple hardware — an external hard drive — was given away.

But there remains one problem: iTunes.

Unbelievably, it remains on my computer — I use a wonderful program called iSyncr to synchronize my iTunes playlists with my Android phone. It works wonderfully, this system of mine. Except that it keeps Apple software on my computer.

And I desperately want to be free of Apple software.

At first I went to DoubleTwist, which is billed in every corner of the Internet as a “must have” Android app, and the Android version of iTunes. It was awful.

Cory Doctorow wrote on BoingBoing about Miro, so I gave that a try. Not only did it lack the functionality I hoped for, but Miro is additionally so full of advertising (and so pushy about its advertising/requests for donation) that AntiVirus software flags it as a virus. It makes Apple’s proprietary formats and DRM look pleasant by comparison.

Frustration was setting in — the both consensus iTunes replacement and Internet Freedom Fighter recommended options did not pull their own weight. So I turned to a dear old friend: WinAMP.

And while we were creeping closer to a proper solution, it still lay just beyond our grasp. WinAMP was by far the best music player used thus far — it worked wonderfully. Yet it still did not synchronize song metadata in the manner that I was hoping for.

Could nothing match iTunes? How is it that a piece of software first designed in 2000 is still the best option for synchronizing music more than ten years later? Surely this shouldn’t happen.

If you are looking for somebody to copy Apple, I thought, look to Microsoft. Windows Media Player was dutifully booted up. It was as bad as I remembered it being, and even refused to recognize my phone as a device to which music could be synchronized.

My last, best hope was MediaMonkey. My research told me that it was the refuge of insane music hoarders, the best tool out there for managing a music collection on your PC. And surely the best music manager in the game must include easy synchronization with the most popular mobile Operating System out there.

Right?

Wrong.

MediaMonkey was breathtakingly efficient at adding all my music, pulling in every rating and playcount from iTunes. It had an answer to everything.

Except a friendly solution to Android synchronization.

It’s strange, because I am not even using iTunes to synchronize anything — I use a third-party tool in order to synchronize over my WiFi connection easily and painlessly. If iSyncr can be built for iTunes, surely it can be built for MediaMonkey.

But in our world full of crowdsourcing, filled with super-intelligent app-writing geeks, the application doesn’t seem to exist.

And I’m still stuck here holding one last rotten, stinking Apple.

Still, I had started to feel a little troubled about it. They were, quite literally, 30% more expensive than their closest rival (from what I could tell), with less network coverage. The internet went from “unlimited” to a 500 MB cap, which started to become a problem. But still, I kept on as a paying customer … until they started censoring the Internet.

So I began to search for a new mobile provider. And a month later, we’re moving to a whole new age.

Let me walk you through it.

My profile

When we look at plans, it all hinges on how I use my mobile service, naturally enough. Plans that work for me do so because they give me enough for my purposes, plus a little buffer. Were I to get 1,000 minutes a month, 900 of them would often go wasted. Not all these plans are necessarily good for you.

I tend to use …

• About 100 minutes a month of talk time. If I’m making a lot of calls, this can get up over 200 minutes. I have only once made 300 minutes of calls in a month. (In related news, my 16-year-old self wonders how I function in my 30s.
• About 10 text messages a month. Seriously. Why send a text message when you can send an email?
• An unknown amount of mobile internet. These days O2 sends me a monthly warning telling me that I’m approaching my limit, and I purposely avoid using my phone’s more bandwidth-heavy functions when I’m away from a WiFi connection. 1 GB a month would probably allow me to relax, but I like to think of myself as “cutting edge” in this area (even if it’s not true), so unlimited internet is definitely preferable.

In addition to my basic needs, there are a couple of principles.

• I will not look at Orange, who chased me away to O2 in 2008 by practically daring me to leave the service. While O2 could someday stop censoring the Internet, and win me back, Orange will never have me as a customer again after treating me like crap.
• I will not sign a contract that is longer than one month in length. Long contracts are for suckers — they take away the phone company’s motivation to take care of you every day. Instead, they need to look after you only when your contract expires. I refuse to be locked in again.

A final piece of criteria is the attitude towards customers. Part of this is customer service — what O2 excels at. The second part is an approach to doing business which puts the customer at the centre of the puzzle. It is with this second piece that O2 has failed. The cap on internet usage and the censorship of certain sites shows me the path they have chosen for their customers is to limit us in ways that are convenient to O2. I would, if possible, like a company that tries to enable me to use their network as I please. One that wants me online with their service, rather than paying a bill but attempting to avoid using my phone where possible.

The candidates

A search was performed, and candidates emerged.

T-Mobile

The Plan: 350 minutes; 300 texts; 500 MB. £15.32
Good: It’s cheaper than O2.
Bad: Bad service. Too little internet. Coverage maps have gaps near my home.

The first place we looked was T-Mobile. Their plan is basically the same as what I have from O2, more-or-less, for about £5 cheaper. Online reviews suggest that their customer service is terrible, even after taking into account that most people write about customer service online in order to complain about slights, real or perceived.

On top of that, their service map shows huge service gaps in my neighbourhood, which would be a pain in the ass.

Virgin

The Plan: 350 minutes; unlimited texts; 1 GB internet. £15.32
Good: Customer service.
Bad: On the T-Mobile network.

I’m still not sure how this works. Virgin uses T-Mobile’s network. Gives twice as much internet, the same number of minutes, and better customer service. All for the exact same price. Anybody who buys the T-Mobile plan must be nuts.

Still, being on the T-Mobile network means large network gaps near my home, so while they appear to be an attractive option, not for folks in my part of town.

Three

Plan 1: 2000 minutes; 5000 texts; unlimited internet. £25.
Plan 2: 300 minutes; 3000 text; 1 GB. £15.
Good: Potential for unlimited internet.
Bad: Cost of unlimited internet; network coverage.

There were two plans from Three that were both intriguing. Of the major carriers, Three was the only one that provided an unlimited internet plan on a one month contract. At £25, however, it was also the only plan that would have me paying more than I pay right now. The other Three option that was interesting was one that looked just like Virgin, but with out the hole in the network around my house.

Three has two problems. The first is a negative perception of its customer service. It had very mixed reviews on this. Normally I would consider mixed reviews to mean good, but this time one of the bad ones came from somebody I trust.

Possibly an unusual bad experience, yes, but troublesome all the same.

The second was an across-the-board problem reported from all directions. Three seems to overstate the extent of their network coverage. While they purport to cover as much as anybody else, online reviews simply suggest otherwise.

Giffgaff

Plan: 250 minutes; unlimited texts; unlimited internet. £10.
Good: Uses O2 network; customer centred; inexpensive; good customer service
Bad: Uses O2 network; pay-as-you-go

I actually looked at several smaller outfits, but Giffgaff impressed. They run on the O2 network, which is a bit of a pain given the reason for the change, and the fact that O2 can still censor my Internet. But Giffgaff is not run with that same philosophy, so it makes the problem easier to bear. (Also, it is less than half the price.)

On the other hand, my area of town seems to have coverage issues with several providers, but my mobile signal with O2 has never been a problem. O2 also has the fastest 3G connections in the country, which is not a bad thing.

The only thing that’s strange about Giffgaff is that it is an exclusively pay-as-you-go network. You can “top up” with a contract-like deal, however — the £10 one above being a good fit for me. Between that and auto top-ups, it isn’t as bad as my previous experience with pay-as-you-go would lead me to believe.

So what am I doing?

It should be obvious from reading the above, I think.

I’ve gone Giffgaff.

If you’d care to follow me to Giffgaff, you can do so by ordering a free SIM here. Full disclosure, if you order a SIM through that link (and activate it), I get £5 free credit. But so do you, so everybody wins.

And how did O2 take my departure?

Like champs, I must say. Another awesome customer service representative took my cancellation call, and was classy and polite about the whole thing. She was so nice, I couldn’t even bear to rant about the whole internet censorship thing.

Which is almost too bad, really.

Our circles need to intersect.

Which is to say that we expect to be able to combine our circles in two ways: as a Union and as an Intersection.

We want to be able to do this:

When we choose to share something, we want to have a full set of options:

• Share with our guitar playing friends.
• Share with our keyboard playing friends.
• Share with both our guitar and keyboard playing friends.
• Share with friends who play instruments that fit in both the guitar and keyboard families.

More seriously, I have a circle for “friends”, and a circle for “people who live in London” — if I want to share with “friends in London”, I need to … create yet another circle.

Fix this, Google.

We like it.

We like it better than Twitter. We like it better than Facebook. And — if others take to it, we will likely end up abandoning these services for the world of Google.

Plus versus Twitter

Google Plus is like Twitter.

The core functionality of each service is to allow for short status messages, readable by others on the service who follow the user. Following another person on the service is not symmetric – that is to say, there is no need to follow somebody back. Any public postings by a person are visible to anybody who follows them.

Why Plus is better

Google Plus has several advantages over Twitter:

• Built-in photo service. Twitter users use yfrog, twitpic, and other services to include photos in their tweets. This has two effects – first, users have to actually leave Twitter to see what’s being posted; second, the content becomes distributed across multiple platforms. The availability, security, and terms of service involved in a Twitter account involve several extraneous accounts that the Twitter user might pay little attention to.
• Nested conversations. Interaction on Twitter is messy. The option to follow a conversation is very hit-and-miss, and conversations involving one or more party that you do not follow might be invisible or semi-visible, depending on who is making the comment, and who is being tagged first. Nested commments? Yes, please.
• Privacy. While we are not fans of people who lock down their Twitter stream, it is nice to be able to easily flip between public and locked-down posting.
• Save your stream. Google+ has easy downloads of everything you’ve put there. Back it up. Save it because you’re leaving. It’s a strong indicator of both confidence and an intention to leave you in control of your own content.

Of course, Twitter does have some aspects that Google Plus lacks:

• Trends
• Hashtags
• A general feeling of being public – Google Plus seems confined to Plus users

These are three things that don’t apply to us at the Big Bad Blog. We have clicked on a trend twice. Both times, we shook our head and closed the window. We didn’t stay long.

We don’t use hashtags, except as jokes. Hashtags are an ugly little piece of SEO; people begging to have people read their Tweets. They seem desperate. We are happy to use a service that doesn’t litter our stream with them.

And the “feeling of being public” is really a lie. How many non-Twitter users search through Tweets? How many people search for Tweets at all?

In the end, Google Plus performs the core Twitter functionality — it allows asynchronous following and easy public posting, without Twitter’s limitation of being a text-only medium and the forced solutions that requires. The only thing we would miss about Twitter is the forced brevity and creativity that a 140-character limit provides. Google+ probably has a limit, but so far we have been in no danger of hitting it.

Plus versus Facebook

Google Plus is like Facebook.

Both of them allow you to form connections with family, friends, nearly-forgotten acquaintances, and even strangers. You can then share with those people the minutiae of your life, photos of your dog, and all 225 out-of-focus photos that you took at the bar last night and then posted to the Internet without even checking whether or not any of them were good first.

Why Plus is better

Just like with Twitter, Google Plus outperforms Facebook at its own game.

• Better photo service. Picassa combines with Google Plus quite nicely. It’s easier to upload photos, and easier to navigate through photos (yours and those of others).
• Better geolocation. Facebook started their geolocation in a horrible way, essentially invading the privacy of their users. It doesn’t seem to have ever caught on the way FourSquare has. Google is the maker of Google Maps and the Android mobile Operating System. Their check-ins work well.
• No selling your location to advertisers. Google is the advertiser. They may use your location in presenting ads, but they are certainly not sharing your information with anybody else. It’s way too valuable. Your information stops at the Google doors.
• Save your stream. Google+ has easy downloads of everything you’ve put there. Back it up. Save it because you’re leaving. It’s a strong indicator of both confidence and an intention to leave you in control of your own content.
• Privacy. Last, but absolutely not least. Facebook has a privacy issue seemingly every other week. Google has been on the receiving end of your embarrassing search terms and private emails for years, with nary a peep. Facebook requires you to scratch your head, and search through every nook and cranny to turn off all the privacy violations to which you have been opted in. Google makes it easy to navigate to your privacy settings, and easy to understand. If you see no other differences, you should jump from Facebook to Google for the privacy implications alone.

Of course, Facebook has several things that Google doesn’t have … yet(?).

• Farmville. Or Mafia Wars. Or whatever-annoying-game you’re playing on Facebook. Third party apps aren’t there.
• Events. Facebook’s big leg up is their Events mechanism, which isn’t on Google. However, it can only be a matter of time before Google Calendar is integrated into Plus.

Here at the Big Bad Blog, we won’t miss the third-party applications. And, in fact, we hope that they stay off Google — though we might not be so lucky. We would miss the Events on moving to Google Plus, but don’t think that’s the end of the world. Plus, we feel that Google Calendar will be integrated before long, and that events will not just be available, but will sync to our phone.

Why Google Plus is better

Beyond the feature set, Google Plus has three main advantages that have us excited.

First, they encompass the functionality of both Twitter and Facebook. Twitter is an open system — users broadcast to the world at large, and hope somebody is listening. Facebook is a closed system — users broadcast to a bunch of people they know.

Google Plus allows both kinds of interaction. It follows Twitter’s non-synchronous pattern of Followers and Following, allowing users to broadcast publicly to anybody who is following them, or to limit their broadcast to those people they are following (or a subset of those people). The controls to do this are intuitive, easy, and quick to use. The result is that the core functionality of both Twitter and Facebook are achieved through a single service, making each of them more appealing, and the choice of where to post less of a headache.

Second, Google Plus is mobile. Yes, Twitter was based on the mobile phone SMS. Yes, Twitter has been integrated into Apple products. Yes, Facebook has mobile applications for every platform. Yes, there are phones with Facebook integration.

These things are not like what Google has. Google has built both the social network and the mobile Operating System. They own both; they can be aligned. Apple and Twitter will not always agree on how things should be done — just like Apple and Facebook have disagreed in the past. Facebook is not getting into the mobile OS game, or designing phones.

Apple and HTC having integration with these services are gimmicks and marketing ploys. Only Google will offer a truly integrated experience.

Third, Google Plus is built on Google’s existing services. Yes, there is a lot of integration left to go, but let’s not pretend that Google Plus won’t have events tied in with Google Calendar, and won’t manage to tie in Google Apps to the service. Google is more than a search company, they are a cloud computing company. They have been since Google Mail began.

Facebook? Facebook was built in 2004, as a Web 2.0 type of project — Web 2.0 being a term first coined in 1999. It is a website. It predates the iPhone by three years, and was built before anybody other than Steve Jobs was imagining a miniature computer in every pocket.

Twitter? Twitter was built in 2006, not so much as a web site, but as a web service that could function through the mobile phone SMS. That’s why you’ve got 140 characters — it’s what they could fit in a text message. When you followed somebody, you would receive a text message from Twitter when the person you were following texted Twitter. Genius.

But today, we have smart phones. And upload photos. And geotag our location. And all these things are being built on top of Twitter’s SMS-based architecture. Mobile functionality is being forced onto Facebook’s website, first conceived when the web wasn’t mobile.

Google Plus? Built in 2011, by a world leader in cloud computer and mobile Operating Systems. It’s less than a week old, but it’s already clear that it’s going to leave these services in the dust.

So why are we still on those old services?

Google Plus is lacking one thing: people.

Right now, we’re updating twice on Google+ for every update on Facebook or Twitter (links to the blog and Flickr aside). Eventually, so the theory goes, Google+ will hit a critical mass, and we will leave Facebook and Twitter and do all our social networking on Google+.

We encourage you to switch now. We breathlessly await your arrival.

Image is XKCD by Randall Munroe.

Recently your Dropbox has been feeling kind of lonely

As a reminder, Dropbox lets you:

* Get to all your files from any computer or phone.
* Share documents, photos and entire folders easily.
* Restore your stuff in a snap even if your computer melts down.

If you need a refresher course, check out our tour.

We hope you come back to Dropbox!
- The Dropbox Team

How cute — even a smiley in there!

We thought about replying directly, and thought of removing ourselves from their mailing list, but in the end went for a third option: replying in public.

Dear Dropbox,

No. I will not “come back” to your service.

You might have noticed that I have never actually placed anything into my Dropbox. It was always a service that I used to receive data only. I was never sure, you see, what to make of you. Cloud computing makes me nervous, you see. It means that somebody else has my data.

I use the Internet quite a bit, but generally assume that everything I put online is public (with the exception of my credit card data, which I am often forced to take a risk with).

My lack of faith in cloud computing has recently been reinforced — by your own company. Not only did you lie about encryption and accessibility to your customers, but you make such basic security errors as forgetting to lock users’ accounts, thereby allowing anybody — anybody — to log onto them.

I’m not sure that there’s any information on my computer that people would want to steal. But if there were, I am confident that it could be stolen from your service. I do not think it would even take much in the way of expertise.

I am still waiting, patiently, for somebody to convince me that cloud computing with data that is personal and/or private is safe, secure and private. Rest assured that it will not be your company that convinces me. I am certainly not coming back – I was pretty much never actually there in the first place.

Kind Regards,
Mr. Topp

This website contains potentially offensive material, said the warning. You may only pass if you give us credit card details. To confirm your age, you know.

(I’m paraphrasing; the actual message had been parsed through multiple boards of lawyers and marketeers.)

My initial reaction was that my connection had been hijacked, and I had been redirected to a credit-card-number harvesting operation. I mean, if I ran a credit card harvesting operation, that’s exactly the sort of thing that I would write on my website. Besides which, I have viewed material that was in a similar category of “objectionable” on my phone before. And my phone company knows my birth date, hence my age. Why would they need my credit card number to confirm it?

Totally a scam.

But when I attempted to confirm that it was actually a scam, I was shocked that O2′s own support page describes exactly what happened:

To protect children and young people, some types of content are classified by the mobile industry as suitable only for people aged 18 or over. You will need to verify your age in order to gain access to such content.

If ‘Parental Control’ is activated on your mobile and you don’t want it anymore, you’ll need your PIN to remove it. If you don’t have the PIN that you set-up on activation, you’ll need to verify that you’re over 18. You can do this either via WAP/WEB, by visiting an O2 store or by contacting Customer Service using the ‘Email us’ or ‘Call us’ link below.

This is necessary to ensure that children and young people are only allowed to access WAP/WEB content, which is suitable for all ages.

To verify your age at an O2 store, you’ll require official documentation such as a passport or a photocard driving licence. To verify your age remotely, you’ll be asked to enter the following details:

Initials

Postcode

Credit card details

Email address

We need to confirm that your card is valid and that you are who you say you are and, for this reason, £1 will be debited in order to process this. This can be paid for with a credit card that is registered to yourself. Once this transaction is complete we will reimburse you with £2.50 on your Pay Monthly account or to your Pay & Go credit.

I also confirmed that they do, in fact, know my date of birth. Assuming they can do basic maths, or own a computer, they can presumably make the determination that I am over 18.

While the possibility of a quick and easy £1.50 are obviously tantalizing to the average adult during these days of austerity, I am nevertheless aggrieved.

First, that somebody else is deciding what I can and cannot view through my own internet connection. Once my ISP starts saying “sorry, we do not want you visiting that website”, where does that end? Will negative reviews of the company be off limits? Can Bob’s Boot Boutique pay O2 money to place Buck’s Boot Bonanza on the block list?

And who is this person deciding that the page I was visiting contained material flagged as inappropriate? Is there something particularly grievous about visiting a comic about an owl? Is Dilbert blocked too?

Even should I be visiting pages about breasts and the women who expose them — such pages are also blocked, it’s not all about owls — the person making these calls does not share my values. Otherwise the restrictions would be limited pretty much to child pornography and photos of Yaks. Which, I suppose, would also include Yak Porn. Which is not blocked.

Second, having decided that only customers above a certain age are permitted to view these pages, O2 then completely ignores the birth date that they have had on file for the last three years, and instead ask me for credit card details. At this point, rather than being a service they provide (unasked) for parents, it instead becomes an extra chore for me … and I am apparently paying them to force me to do it.

Finally, the manner in which they set up this gateway makes it look like a scam. Much like banks that cold call you, then ask you for your confirming details (what’s your secret word?) before they will talk to you.

O2 possesses sufficient detail about me to debit money from my bank account and send me bills, and a good deal of other personal information about me besides. Things that I wouldn’t necessarily want to share with hackers or identity thieves. And they are training their customer base to see this sort of interaction — oh look, a webpage I didn’t intend to go to. They want my credit card details! — as something that is normal and OK.

Fuck that. Fuck them.

O2, you’re fired.

I have long hated that you took away my limitless 3G data plan, though I never really butted against the new cap. In principle, I will sooner-or-later really like some sort of bandwidth-heavy phone application, and you will have screwed me over.

But that was OK. I only have to give you a thirty-day warning that I am leaving.

Now you have piled on — censoring my connection, too? Encouraging your customers to play fast-and-loose with their credit card information online? Not realizing that you already have every pay monthly customer’s age on file?

It’s too much. I refuse to be your customer any longer.

Where to go?

With O2 out the door, the question becomes — who will I choose as my next provider?

Cost and coverage will play into the calculation, of course, and here at the Big Bad Blog, we are quite comfortable making these kinds of comparisons. But what we really want from our mobile phone company is decent customer service.

Things go wrong. We understand this. We want a phone company where you can call somebody about it; a person who will listen to your problem and has the authority to take corrective action.

Foreign readers may be unaware exactly how rare this is here in the UK. BT’s customer service will not listen to what you say, and claim that you that you need to pay a £175 fee because the phone you are calling them on is not connected to the grid. Sky’s customer service will listen and say “that sucks. We should fix it. But we can’t. I’ll get fired if I pass your complaint along to somebody who can actually fix a problem.” Orange’s customer service will listen, say “that’s awful, I’ll fix it for you,” and then not fix it.

But O2 is different — this is why I have been with O2 for so long. Each and every time I called customer service, I got an actual person. That person listened to my problem, and either fixed the problem while I waited or told me “I’ll take care of it. This will fixed by Tuesday.”*

But O2 cannot be the only ones with good customer service, and good customer service doesn’t matter if the service itself is disappointing. Your blogger has already been unimpressed by Orange, and has been told that Vodafone has similar issues with censorship. What mobile phone provider would you recommend? Why would you recommend them?

*Or some other day in the near future.

Hey, @mrtopp ! Talk tablets to me!

This was not the first time the question has been posed to me. The answer was the same as always — I wondered why the tablet was an object of desire in the first place. The last time I asked that question, it came from my mother. She wanted to read books, so I suggested the Kindle. Why not choose a device designed with only the reading of books in mind, if reading books is your goal?

I am also reminded of Kyle Cassidy’s excellent piece about finding a function for his iPad. The recipient of a free iPad, he had no imagined function for it, and it became a glorified eReader.

Cassidy waxes on about it, and electronic books are truly fantastic things, but I cannot help but think that all experience and reports indicate that backlit devices are less pleasant to read from than e-ink, and the price difference — particularly if and when 3G connections are added in — makes the iPad quite a waste of money if you just read books.

Which is quite the digression, as Cassidy received his for free.

This request was coming from a different place, however — with summer travel planned, Seonaid is looking for a device to keep her in touch, and the world of tablets is less expensive than the world of annoying dongles for her bulky laptop. (An aside: Seonaid was surprised by this, I am not. The dongle market is probably saturated; people aren’t really shopping around for them in large quantities. Tablets are new, and flying off the shelves, and the phone companies are forced to offer cutthroat rates as a result.)

Generally speaking, my answer to “should I get a tablet” is “no”. They have no discernable purpose. They are large mobile phones — literally. They run the same applications (mostly) as their phone brethren, using the same interface and the same operating system. They do not strike me as something that somebody should need immediately.

On top of that, the devices are all first generation. The iPad II is not really a second-generation device, just Apple sticking a dual core chip in the first gen iPad, in an attempt not to be outclassed by Android devices. The iPad 1.5.

And Android? Blackberry? It’s first generation all around. If you’re on the fence, don’t buy one. First generation buyers who are not intentionally first generation buyers rarely feel happy about their purchase in the long run.

As far as usefulness goes — well, your iPad or Xoom cannot do anything an iPhone or Android phone couldn’t, though it ought to accomplish the same tasks more quickly, and on a bigger screen. For all the “it’s so fast!” comments I have seen, and all the photoblogs I have read that praise the latest photoshop-esque applications available for these devices, take a look at any tablet specification and tell me if you would even consider buying a PC with those same specifications.

If so, I have a computer from 2001 that I would like to sell to you.

Tablets have all the functionality and power of a mobile phone at present, and their major function (as far as this blogger has witnessed) is on the daily commute — to make it either less boring, or more productive.

The bottom line

If you are hell bent on ignoring our advice, and buying a tablet anyways, there are essentially two options:

Option 1: The iPad

First generation — not the iPad II.

Right now, nobody has a plan for tablets — or, at least, nobody has made a product that indicates that they have a plan for tablets beyond let’s make one of these tablet devices that seem so popular. Apple thought there was a market waiting to be tapped … and they were right. And so far, everybody is just trying to copy the iPad, mostly by making their own giant-sized Android phones.

So why go for an imitation? Until another company can provide something other than savings due to an inferior build, why go with anything else?

With the iPad II out (same product, new box), the first generation one can probably even be found at a pretty good bargain these days. If you need a tablet, you will have trouble finding a better product at a better price.

Option II: Android

However, if you’re thinking about your long-term tablet experience, Android is the way to go.

A tablet is a computing device, and a computing device is only as good as its software. There is no way that tablets remain oversized phones forever, and no way — in the near future — that they pull a laptop and become our new primary computing device. So where will it land?

I wouldn’t profess to know, but you can bet that if Android’s open-source development model doesn’t get there first, it will be there seconds after Apple and provide more versatility. Throw in the fact that you can run an Android device without registering it via your computer, and Apple’s well-known iPhone signal issues (what’s that I hear you say about 3G coverage?), and we are suddenly approaching a handful of reasons to prefer an Android device.

Which Android device, I couldn’t say. I’m not buying one, so specification measurement is not a game I care to play these days.

Keep in mind that every Android tablet currently on the market is just a copy of the iPad, so you’ll be better off in the short term with Apple. But the long-term bet, at least in this corner of the Internet, is on Android.