“[News Corp] have tons of unsold inventory of ads right now. They dont need new traffic. BAck in the day search engines were a great way to discover new websites as sources of information. Today, that is no longer the case. Fox wants you to come to them as your destination. Just like they do for Fox News on TV. If you cant get to them through Google, you have to make a choice. Go to them directly, which they hope will become a habit, or ignore them. While they know they might lose some people, losing some visitors wont cost them money because they have excess inventory. On the flipside, they know that viewers that go directly to foxnews.com and other newscorp sites will be visitors that are far more engaged and committed to their site. That is more attractive to advertisers.” (My emphasis)

People who haven’t worked in publishing, or who have been the kind of journalists who divorce themselves from the business of publishing, very rarely get this. More traffic does not equal more revenue. A niche where you can demonstrate you are getting a particular target market and engaging them deeply is much, much more valuable.

And he’s right about Twitter, too. The percentage of links that I click on which crop up on Twitter is very, very high. My friends are my filter, which means that when a link crops up I already know it’s likely to be interesting and relevant to me. The human “editors” in my friends list perform far better filtering than any machine algorithm does – which is why Twitter outperforms Google News easily.

(Picture of Rupert Murdoch from World Economic Forum.)

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“The Droid has multi-touch support in the OS, but doesn’t use it in the UI. “

Why is it that in every post about Android, John Gruber mentions its lack of proper multi-touch, yet he doesn’t mention the complete lack of multi-tasking in every post about the iPhone?

Just asking, you know.

Technorati Tags:
John Gruber, iPhone, Android

Does anyone know what the point of this is? It looks like lots of Twitter accounts (bots?) reposting exactly the same message. There’s no links to anything. If you go to their pages, there’s no dodgy links either. So what’s going on?

After a couple of weeks, a story about some Windows 7 security issue prompted him to install Microsoft Security Essential (free, not bad security software). He posted about the experience, and has promptly been jumped on by a bunch of sneering Windows folk, with comments like “totally pointless article” and “He’s clearly a Mac fanboy. Any further articles are totally pointless. He’ll choose a Mac no matter what windows 7 does.”

Now read his post, and there’s nothing there that’s actually wrong – and unlike some Mac commentators, Chris’ writing is entirely reasonable. He’s not jumping up and down and lying about security, which I’ve seen some Mac zealots do. But it appears Chris’ (entirely factually accurate) post has hit a raw nerve with some of the commenters there.

No matter what the reasons, malware is a problem for Windows users in a way which it just isn’t for Mac users. Now I’m largely on the side of the epidemiological theory: Macs are less of a target because there’s less of them, and because there’s less of them it’s much more difficult to spread malware. Malware is a lot like disease: it takes a critical mass of vulnerable people in a population before a disease can spread effectively.

But what the commentors have ignored is the key point that Chris is making: anti-virus software isn’t (and never will be) 100% effective, and different packages protect to different degrees. While Security Essential is a decent package, as PC Pro’s review points out, there are some kinds of malware against which it will offer little protection.

The point is this: if you’re a naive computer user, you need to know not only to install malware protection on Windows, but that not all packages are equal, and how to differentiate between them. Unless you read computer magazines avidly, you might not know any of this.

And that, in my book, is another reason just to get a Mac if you’re not a geek. The Mac’s lack of significantmalware might not last if it ever gets to 20, 30 or 40% installed base – but until it does, take advantage of the lack of worry.

Android

Ahh, the gentle, warm embrace of the Googleverse. Who could resist? Well, me for a start. While I like some of Google’s apps, I tend to sneer at them a bit too. Outside of search, a lot of their technology is… well… actually pretty lame.

Android, though, seems to be gathering some momentum. Every phone maker other than Apple seems to either have or be planning an Android phone. While the first lot of Android phones were more than a little clunky, the next wave looks a lot more appealing. And the hardware is finally up to the speed of the iPhone and Pre. Certainly, hardware development on Android is outpacing the iPhone.

And – wonder of wonders – Android multitasks. Yes, this means you can end up running too many apps at the same time and consigning your battery to an early grave, but as I previously said, that should be my choice to do if I please.

What’s bad about Android? Mostly that the number of applications is, at the moment, small. But as John Gruber pointed out, what matters is not the number of apps, but the quality. Sadly, there are few stars in the Android app world, at least not yet.

However, does this matter so much to me? After all, I have a perfectly good iPod touch which can run most of those lovely iPhone apps. And having a separate media/games/stuff player makes sense for me: I want my phone to have enough battery left to do real work, like email, calls, and, erm, Twitter. Running out of battery and missing a call because I played Championship Manager till my eyes bled would be a bad thing.

Sure, it’s less convenient to carry two devices – but it’s really not that big a deal for me.

Until I have one of the newer Android phones in my hand, though, iPhone will be a safer bet. I know iPhone, it’s good points and bad. Android is less-known territory – and that, on its own, makes me err towards iPhone.

Palm Pre

I want to love the Pre. And there’s a lot to love about it. The fact that apps are HTML, JavaScript, and so on makes me happy (and no, before you say it, they are not “web apps like on iPhone 1.0″. If you don’t know why they aren’t, go read a book or something.)

The screen is lovely. The pebble shape is lovely. The charger thingy that works without wires is lovely, like a little bit of magic.

There’s only one problem: the keyboard blows. Badly. I’ve tried it and I know damn well that I would just not bother typing anything longer than 140 characters on it.

That, on it’s own, is probably enough to rule out the Pre. Sorry, Palm.

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iPhone 3GS

Let’s be clear: I like the iPhone. Compared to everything that came before it, it’s a wonderous thing of amazement. There’s the responsiveness. You touch it, it responds, and you almost purr with pleasure. Yum. This thing was designed by someone who really, truly understands that the most important thing about a touch interface is how it responds to being touched. Sounds obvious – but try any one of the competitors, and you’ll quickly see how few companies have really got this fundamental point.

But… I’ve run into some walls with the iPhone. Things which actually have begun to drive me what can only be described as “batshit crazy”.

First, multitasking – or rather the lack thereof. I cannot begin to describe how painful the lack of multitasking is. I’ve used an OS with multitasking that I’ve forgotten what computing was like before it. Or rather, I had forgotten it – until the iPhone.

Using iPhone is like taking your lovely new MacBook Pro, ripping out Mac OS X, installing System 6, and disabling MultiFinder. But still letting you run the powerful lovely apps you’re used to. Just one at a time. It’s dark ages computing – and I’m bored of it. The novelty has worn off. I can multitask – why can’t my phone.

I don’t care that I might do terrible things – like making my phone run at less than optimal Jobs-dicatated performance. It’s my phone – treat me like a grown up and let me do it.

Multitasking is the big beef, by it’s by no means the only one. There are plenty of elements in the iPhone which are half thought out, or just plain half baked.

Take email. Like a lot of people, I have work and personal email accounts, and I check both a lot. And on the iPhone, the elegant, minimal iPhone, it takes four taps to get from one inbox to the other. By happy coincidence, that’s the same number of taps it takes to type “suck”, which is what the iPhone’s email client does.

This “make ‘em tap” approach is elsewhere, too. Tethering, for example, takes five taps from Home Screen to turning on, and the same five if you want to turn it off – which is, of course, what you should be doing. This should be on the home screen, but it’s not. It’s almost like the developers were so pleased with how well tapping and scrolling and touch generally worked, that they decided to make you, the user, do more of it so you’d appreciate just how responsive the interface is.

Worse yet, no developer other than Apple can create the simple app to do it, because that is a Part Of The OS Into Which Only Apple Is Allowed. Thou shalt not mess around with those bits, sayeth Steve.

And that’s a great example of the other great flaw of the iPhone: developers cannot fill in the bits which Apple doesn’t do right, if it means digging into some bits of the system. Leaving aside the fact that the App Store is broken, what developers can do is firmly in Apple’s control, and the company keeps tight reign on where they’re allowed to poke. Want the ability to link up an external keyboard to your Mac? Can’t have it – not because developers don’t want to make one, but because Apple won’t allow them to do it.

But… having said all that… the iPhone is still my front runner. Why? Put simply, because it’s the path of least resistance. I have lots of Apps, which I like, and I’d need to install and run some of them on my iPod touch if I didn’t have an iPhone. And that touch interface really is seductive. So for all my complaining… maybe iPhone is my best option.

In part two, I’ll look at the two other contenders: Android (of some kind) and the Palm Pre.

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Reason 1: Malice

Apple rules the app store with a rod of iron. It has rejected the app because it really, truly wants to “protect its trademarks” and will punish those that fail to obey.

However, one of my general rules in life is that you should be reluctant to attribute to malice something which can be explained by out second option…

Reason 2: Stupidity

Apple is stupid. Something has gone so badly wrong with the management of the app store that it’s employees aren’t capable of making a simple decision like this and getting it right. Option 2 sounds the most likely one to me. But essentially the end result is the same: an app store which is increasingly a poor experience for developers, which is something that will ultimately show in the quality of the developers it attracts.

The App Store is broken. Now, Apple, you need to fix it.

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The biggest consequence of this is, obviously, that anyone who wants to roll their own netbook running OS X is going to have to stick to either 10.5 or 10.6.1 – or, for the hardcore, hack future versions of OS X to run a stock 10.0 kernel.

Of course, Apple is under no obligation at all to support hardware it doesn’t use. But some will undoubtedly take this as a sign that Apple wants to kill off the Hackintosh community.

I don’t buy that, for a couple of reasons. First, the netbook market is probably the one which Apple has the least actual interest in. When someone runs OS X on a £300 netbook, they’re not doing it to replace a potential Mac purchase. Lost revenue to Apple from netbooks is probably as close to a rounding error as you can get.

Second, no sane company would tinker with the kernel of its operating system just to disable something of no commercial consequence. It’s one thing playing around with iTunes to stop the Palm Pre syncing. It’s quite another to mess around with code which you absolutely, 100%, need to be reliable.

It is, however, a shame.

UPDATE: Well, it looks like support for Atom is back. Which rather puts the kibosh on the conspiracy theories, I think.