Who is the product? Who is the customer? Do you even care?

Facebook, how big?

Facebook has obtained more than $500M from investors to grow facebook.com to the size it is today, and has not taken a single penny from any of its users. In order to pay back the investors for their extraordinary risky investment, the investors must be looking for something like 10x cash back.  That’s more than $5 billion! Of course it’s currently valued at over $50B. Just hold that thought for a second.

Now a second thought: billions of people can use email and not have to be part of one, single, organisation. How can that be?

Email is essentially a protocol. It’s called SMTP and is described by various RFCs. Any server that supports the SMTP protocol can advertise its MX record via DNS and receive email for that domain. Any client that ‘talks’ SMTP can send email to any SMTP server (it can reach). In fact, the SMTP client (or email client) can talk to its local SMTP server which will then forward on the email to its final destination.

This is, of course, a distributed system.  Due to an open protocol anybody can set up an email server and play in the big email ecosystem. Of course, the original inventors of the SMTP protocol didn’t envisage SPAM as we know it, and thus it was designed for a naive, friendly, co-operative world, where email users wouldn’t spam each other. i.e. academia.

Facebook is set up as a business. It has its customers’ interests to serve so that it can be a profitable company and return its investors money and provide a return for its financial stakeholders. The problem is, is that Facebook users are not the customer. They are the product that is sold to the actual customers who (I suspect) are advertisers. Thus, Facebook’s values aren’t necessarily aligned with their users, which means, almost inevitably, privacy is not Facebook’s key concern.

So if with Facebook, the users are the product, what are they actually selling? The social graphs its users create, along with the logged minutiae of the their lives, could just be the product that Facebook is, and will continue, to sell to advertisers. Your privacy is Facebook’s product. Your social graph (in theory) has value to advertisers. Do you want to exchange your privacy to multitudinous corporations for free access to, well, Facebook?

But the main problem with Facebook is that, in order to do Facebook with somebody else, you have to have an account at Facebook.com. It’s a closed system. Notice the difference to email? I don’t have to have an account at (the fictitious) email.com to send emails to other people. That would be absurd!

History has a habit of repeating itself. Remember CompuServe? AOL? MSN (pre-internet)? CIX? These were all silos. CompuServe had special pages only subscribers could see. Of course, they all went the way of the dinosaur, or were heavily modified, because the Internet was more useful. And Facebook is simply a better CompuServe or AOL.

Still, you may ask, “what’s wrong with a better AOL or CompuServe?”

Proprietary Silo vs Open Data and Open Protocols

Before answering that question, let’s consider what the alternative to Facebook or Twitter would be like. By way of analogy let’s look at Twitter vs status.net.

Twitter and status.net basically do the same thing: they are broadcast micro-blogging systems that let you send the equivalent of an SMS over the Internet to your followers. The best known example of status.net is identi.ca.

If you want to be part of the Twitter-verse you have to get an account at the sole provider of twitter-ness: twitter.com. Every tweet you send goes through twitter.com, is stored there, analysed and also provided to other (rich) organizations via the Twitter fire-hose. Not a great deal of privacy there, apart from the notional privacy that you can ‘protect’ your account. It’s still going through twitter.com.

status.net is like Twitter except that it is both an Open Source project and a Open set of Protocols. The difference is that status.net is like email; it’s a protocol that anybody can implement. You could subscribe to any status.net server and still be followed by any other status.net user in the world. Therefore, your tweets, or rather dents would only go through the distributed servers, the same as email today.

Another advantage of a distributed network is that it’s more resilient to failure. Twitter went down on Christmas day because every tweet goes through twitter. Email didn’t go down, except maybe a few distributed nodes did – but email didn’t fail en masse.

So back to Facebook and silos? I definitely want to put an activity stream (or lifestream) on the web. I currently use twitter for that because so many of my friends do. I also want to be able to put the odd photo up, publish a free/busy calendar, and enable old friends and new ones to find me and get in contact. But I don’t want Facebook to own that information. I want to own it. I want it under my own control, possibly in my own appliance running somewhere on the net. A distributed system that talks to other systems to exchange the data all under my control, with my privacy settings which won’t suddenly change because an over-arching corporation needs to sell more of my privacy.

Of course, it is coming, and there’s even some competition in the space. onesocialweb and Diaspora are both trying to solve the Facebook problem. The Freedom Box project, inspired by Eben Moglen, is also trying to work in that space. These will be tools that work in a distributed fashion.

When will it displace Facebook and Twitter? I think the jury is definitely out on that one; AOL, MSN, Compuserve, MySpace: the Internet is littered with the corpses of previously all-mighty corporations that owned the space.

Personally, I want Facebook to fail. I want a future where people control their own information. I want the semantic web and the power of pull, not the push-web. I want my appliance with my data and my control and I’m prepared to pay for it. I guess I’m going to have to wait a bit!

Some context is probably required: The IET is a relatively large professional organisations serving mostly electrical and electronics engineers with a smattering of other technology people. There will, of course, be some networking that takes place within the confines of the Institution.

However, do I really want my activity stream to be confined in MyIET, rather than at identi.ca or twitter? No, is the honest answer, but I also think that what the IET have added to MyIET is symptomatic of a wider issue. Actually, I don’t really want it in twitter either, except that it has the network effect. I’d rather it was in identi.ca.

The issue is silos. MyIET is yet another social networking silo. If you put your data into the MyIET silo can you easily get it out? In this case, the answer is a resounding ‘no’. There doesn’t appear to be any options to export your status feed, comments or other data that you put into the site.

My ideal would be that my activity stream (or status updates) are held at a location of my choosing. They would probably be split into a number of categories, one of which might be IET related or business/professional related. And then I would configure the IET portal to pull my activity stream to it. Then, I would control the activity stream and what I do with it.

This is, of course, a federated social network. Oh, and OneSocialWeb are doing just that.

I’d like a new phone. Unfortunately, virtually every phone released these days running Android 2.2 (Froyo) also runs some kind of customised interface. Motorola has Motoblur, HTC has Sense, and who knows what Samsung has, but it isn’t stock Android. Is it so much to ask to have the stock Android experience? Apparently, it is.

I’ve seen rumours that Google is pushing handset makers to use stock Android 3.0 rather than put their own interface on it. Here’s hoping. So, since my phone is almost out of contract, I thought I’d root it (which voids the warranty), and put CyanogenMod 6 (CM6) on it, which is basically Android 2.2 (Froyo) with a few enhancements. CyanogenMod has done some incredible work and it is well worth checking out whether your Android phone is supported.

Now I was quite nervous about messing with my phone. It has some paid apps on it and I’ve spent 18 months with it, customising it to my requirements. However, I’d heard such great things about CM6 that I was really looking forward to it. And, I must say, it is so much better that 1.6. Seriously, if you have an HTC Magic, then just read through this post, read the linked sites, and go for it!

Now the following is specific to UK HTC Magic devices, but the links indicate what to do for other phones. The steps are:

1. Check your phone really is a HTC Magic Sapphire PVT32B
2. Root your phone
3. Backup your applications/data (although I could’ve missed out this step)
4. Backup your entire 1.6 stock ROM
5. Backup your whole SD Card
6. Install CM6
7. Install Google Apps (so you can get Market, GMail, etc.)
8. Re-configure the device for UK Vodafone
9. Re-install your Apps from Market (and restore your data if you need to).

Now, I don’t really keep any data on my phone that isn’t in the Cloud somewhere. It is either on Google, Dropbox, or I copy it off the SD Card and stick it on my laptop. However, you may need to do Step 9. “restore data” if you have kept a lot of data on the phone. I didn’t have to because I use Google for my mail, contacts, calendar, etc. which simplifies the process. This was a conscious decision about 6 months ago to simplify my life. But I do have automated backups of all my data on Google.

Assumptions

• You know how to mount/read your SD Card in your phone in your OS
• You don’t panic if things don’t go exactly according to plan. You might need to search forums if your experience doesn’t exactly match mine. I certainly had to because mine didn’t exactly match some of the other tutorials.
• This is not a tutorial; it is a summary of what I did to get my phone running CM6.
• It’ll be useful if you do this where you have WiFi because when you wipe the phone it will (temporarily) not have the settings to access data over 3G on the Vodafone network.  It’ll also be quicker!
• I may have forgotten a few items whilst writing this. I had the following unusual options enabled on the phone:

1. Settings->Applications: “Unknown Sources”: ticked
2. Settings->Applications->Development: “USB Debugging”: ticked

Step 1: Check your phone is the same as mine!

My phone is a UK spec Vodafone HTC Magic 32B with 192MB RAM. I verified this! In the USA this phone is also called a MyTouch 3G/ION.

To check your phone is the same as mine you need to reboot your phone into fastboot. Shut your phone down and then hold down the ‘Back’ button whilst switching the phone on. You’ll then get a display which has this on it:

SAPPHIRE PVT 32B SHIP S-ON G
HBOOT-1.33.0004 (SAPP10000)
CPLD-10
RADIO-2.22.19.26I
Apr 9 2009, 23:30:40

The key part is the ’32B’ above which I’ve highlighted. If you don’t have the same as mine then you’ll need to follow a ’32A’ or other set of instructions. (Thanks to Ralph Slooten for the idea on showing the fastboot).

Step 2: Root your phone

This is really simple.  Search market for Universal Androot. Install it and launch it. Press “Root ”.  After a short while your phone will be ‘rooted’, which means that applications can (with permission) access anything on the phone’s filesystem. This is important as you can’t install the other tools without.

Note that you will void your warranty on the phone by doing this. Mine’s so close to being out of contract (5 days), and I’ve had it 18 months, that this didn’t worry me. It might worry you though!

Step 3: Backup your applications/data

Now you’ve rooted your phone you can back everything up on it. Search for ‘Titanium backup‘ on the Market. Install it, and run it. It will ask for root privileges which you should allow and tick the box to always allow Titanium to have root privileges.

Then you need to click on the ‘Problems?‘ button and do the upgrade for BusyBox. If you don’t then Titanium Backup won’t work.

After that, use the ‘menu‘ button, select ‘Batch‘ and click the ‘Run‘ button next to “Backup all user apps + system data“. This will make a full backup of all your user applications (but not the current stock 1.6 ROM) and all the data on the phone to the SD Card.

Now mount your phone to your computer: plug in a USB cable, connect it to your handy laptop, wait a few seconds for your phone to recognise the link, pull down on the status bar and select the little USB symbol and connect it to your computer.  Then copy the TitaniumBackup folder off the SD Card onto your computer.

Step 4: Backup your entire 1.6 stock ROM

Next we make a complete backup of your current Stock 1.6 ROM, data, apps … basically everything. Get this right and you’ll be able to return your phone to its current state.

So why do Step 3 at all? Mostly because:

• I’m paranoid
• It’s a useful thing to do for the future too.

To do this step we will be using ROM Manager by the @koush. This really is an amazing piece of software and makes it very easy to try out custom ROMs.

I used this guide to perform the backup. Please go and read it for background information and to familiarise yourself with the screens. The essential steps are:

1. Install ROM Manager – search for it in Market.
2. IMPORTANT: Work with a fully charged phone.
3. Unplug the USB cable.
4. Install the Recovery Image using the top option in ROM Manager. The PVT 32B (i.e. the Vodafone UK HTC Magic) is known as a MyTouch 3G/ION to ROM Manager.  Do not select the “HTC Magic” option or you will flash the wrong recovery image.
5. Then select “Backup Current ROM”.
6. After the phone has rebooted and backed up the ROM, it will boot back into your normal stock Android 1.6.

Okay, now your current ROM is backed up to the SD Card.

Step 5: Backup your whole SD Card

I said I was paranoid didn’t I? There is a small chance that the SD Card will get corrupted when flashing a ROM so it’s prudent to back-up the SD Card:

1. Mount it on your laptop/computer.
2. Copy everything on the card.  I put it into a ZIP file.

This copies the current ROM you backed up in Step 4 onto your laptop/computer as well.

Step 6: Install CyanogenMod 6

Okay, finally you are reaching the exciting part, but I just want to make something clear:

This step involves wiping everything from your phone, just like a factory reset. The SD Card should be okay, but all your applications and data are going to be wiped from the phone. You will be able to restore your paid for apps from Market, but there won’t be a record of what you have installed.

I would (and did) at this point make a note of what apps I had installed so I could re-install them afterwards.

Next I read [Complete Guide] How To Flash A Custom ROM To Your Android Phone With ROM Manager + Full Backup & Restore.

Note: The stock Vodafone 1.6 Android seems to re-flash the recovery image to a stock image after each re-boot. This one caught me out. So you need to re-flash the recovery image after each reboot into the stock OS. The CyanogenMod ROMs (and other’s apparently) don’t do this.

Therefore, as we have already rebooted into 1.6 Android (to do the ROM back-up) we need to convince ROM Manager to re-flash the Clockworkmod recovery image. Unfortunately, at the time of writing the ROM Manager incorrectly reports that it is flashed: it isn’t and you can prove it by trying to reboot – you’ll end up with a large ‘!’ warning triangle on recovery boot (hold ‘home’ button when powering on).

To convince ROM Manager to reflash the clockworkmod recovery image, just scroll to the bottom of the ROM Manager app and install the aron_RA image. After that is installed, re-install the clockworkmod recovery image, but using the option at the top again. Now you are ready to flash the CM6.  (Thanks to this thread at clockworkmod forum.)

Now we pick up on the instructions at Upgrading from CyanogenMod 4.2 to CyanogenMod 5/6. We’re not really upgrading, but it works well.

If you bought the ROM Manager application you can probably browse for the ROM. I didn’t because I wasn’t sure if it was going to work. I am going to buy it now because it does such a great job and I want to support its development.

So this is how it is done manually:

1. On your laptop, download the latest (in my case CM6) ROM. This is the CM6 ROM in the section “CyanogenMod for the HTC Dream & Magic” on this page. The MD5SUM for the ROM I downloaded is: 35b6603227aea922c28284ef8d269015 and the filename is: update-cm-6.0.0-DS-signed.zip
2. Also download the tiny MDPI version of the Google Apps for CyanogenMod 6. Again the MD5SUM is d21e9a3597b7f03f9e623c8e5b9a9caf and the filename: gapps-mdpi-tiny-20100917-signed.zip
3. Next copy these two zip files over to your phone’s SD Card. Anywhere is fine, but I placed them in the top-level directory in the SD Card.
4. Ensure the phone is fully charged.
5. Disconnect it from the laptop – i.e. unplug the USB.
6. Run ROM Manager and select “Install ROM from SD Card” (see images on this helpful page!).  Select the update-cm-6.0.0-DS-signed.zip file.
7. Ensure you tick the “Wipe Data and Cache”.  There is no need to select/tick the “Backup Existing ROM” as you have already completed that step above.  Incidentally, the reason I split it was so that I could copy the backed up ROM off the device before flashing the new ROM.
8. Click “ok” and it should flash the ROM.

The phone will reboot into the recovery image, flash the new ROM, and then reboot again. It should now be running CM6.

Okay, now you have CM6, we still need to put the Google Apps on the device and get it back onto Vodafone.

Step 7: Install Google Apps

This is so you get Gmail, Market and the other Google Apps.

1. Run ROM Manager and select “Install ROM from SD Card”. This time select the gapps-mdpi-tiny-20100917-signed.zip file.
2. Ensure that neither of the two tick boxes are selected (“Wipe Data and Cache” nor “Backup Existing ROM”)
3. Click OK.
4. The phone will reboot and install Google Apps.

When the phone reboots this time it will go through the Google Apps set-up.

I have two Google Accounts that I wanted to use with the Phone. One is a Google Apps account (i.e. a paid for hosted account on Google for my domains), and the other is a typical googlemail/gmail account. As Market can only be used with your ‘regular’ Google account, I did the set-up with my regular account. This means that Market will recognise your paid apps.

The Froyo 2.2 Gmail, Calendar and Contacts programs are multi-account aware and can be configured with both the regular account and the Google Apps account. This essentially solved my problem with 1.6 (single accounts only).

So my recommendation is to set the phone up with your regular Google account and add the Google Apps account in the Accounts section. Note that Reader isn’t multi-account aware and will only work with the primary account on the device.

Step 8: Re-configure the device for UK Vodafone

Navigate to Settings->Wireless & networks->Mobile Networks->Network operators and select “vodafone UK”.

Then go back to Settings->Wireless & networks->Mobile Networks->Access Point Names and select “Vodafone UK Contract I…” (Internet).  i.e. ensure that it has the green dot next to it.

Your phone should now be able to go back onto 3G.

Step 9: Re-install your Apps

If you now go to Market, it should synchronise and show you your paid apps that you have previously bought on your primary Google Account.

As you have wiped all of the data on the phone (not the SD Card), you’ll either need to re-sync the data (all the Google Stuff), or restore it using Titanium. I’m just progressing through this now.

Other things I had to do

Some final, hopefully useful, things I had to do:

• I used ROM Managers ‘Fix Permissions’. It didn’t do any harm and I thought it would fix the next problem.
• My Google search widget on the home screen failed.  After Googling it, I discovered that it is a fairly common problem after reflashing a device.  Just delete it and put it on again and it should work.

And Finally …

Well that’s it. The recovery image being replaced on Stock 1.6 held me up for a bit and I had to do a load of reading to get it right. So far everything seems good on CM6; it’s seems faster, it is smoother and it has multi-account support.

I also must thank that amazing work of the CyanogenMod team, ROM Manager and all of the people testing these ROMs.  Without them we would be stuck on carrier or manufacturer ROMs with no hope of upgrade.

The following is a list of links that may prove useful to you:

• Full Update Guide – HTC Magic (32B)
• Universal Androot
• [Complete Guide] How To Flash A Custom ROM To Your Android Phone With ROM Manager + Full Backup & Restore
• [Complete Guide] How To Fully Back Up And Restore Your Android Phone Using Nandroid Backup
• ROM Manager
• Can’t Reboot into Recovery on MT3G w/ ClockworkMod 2.5.0.1
• Fastboot (a description)
• Rooting your HTC Magic Android Phone with CyanogenMod
• Titanium Backup
• HTC Magic page at Wikipedia
• CyanogenMod Wiki
• Android at Wikipedia

There’s just something very wrong with the banking industry. In virtually every other industry corporate failure (or basically going bust) is the market punishing poor decision making by that organisation’s management. It’s a good thing. A company makes some bad decisions and the people in charge get feedback about those decisions in their company losing customers, money, both or even just going bust. A company making good decisions is rewarded in the market and keeps going.

And a company going bust is actually good feedback; it’s doing something wrong in the market. The people working in it should be released back into the labour pool where they can be employed by other companies that are making the right decisions in the market. This, of course, requires a near-perfect market where lots of little companies are providing services in the market.

However, in the UK, Northern Rock, RBS, Lloyds et al. made incredibly poor decisions about how to invest their money.  The lost staggering amounts of money on their little pyramid scheme when over-inflated property prices crashed and mortgages were defaulted on by people who should never have been given the mortgage in the first place.  Pure Greed.  But it would’ve been okay if their gambling had paid off.  They didn’t, and the banks didn’t get to feel the pain of their mistakes.  And that’s because, we, the tax payer bailed every-last-one-of-them out.

So they’ve learnt nothing. In fact they’ve been rewarded for their incompetence. Not only do the banks get to lose bigger-than-telephone-number amounts of money, but they now know, if they do, they’ll simply get their customers to bail them out one way or another.

What’s the solution? I don’t know, but one method might be to make them small enough so that when they fail, we get a ripple and not a tsunami. And maybe regulate them so that the gamblers don’t get to take down the mortgage providers, day-to-day business providers, and the consumer/retail banks. Obviously, it’s more complex than this, but it might be a step in the right direction.

CONTENT You shall retain ownership rights in information or other content that you upload, post or otherwise transmit to or via your use of Twidroyd (“Submissions”); however, by making your Submissions through Twidroyd, you grant Licensor a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, reproduce, edit, translate, reformat, distribute, modify, transmit, prepare derivative works of, publicly display and produce the Submissions in connection with the enhancement of the Twidroyd service or otherwise in connection with Licensor’s business. You agree that these licenses include the right for the Company to make your Submissions available to other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with the Company for the syndication, broadcast, distribution or publication of such content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such content use. Such additional uses by the Company, or other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with the Company, may be made with no compensation paid to you with respect to the Submissions. We may modify or adapt your Submissions in order to transmit, display or distribute it over computer networks and in various media and/or make changes to your Submissions as are necessary to conform and adapt that content to any requirements or limitations of any networks, devices, services or media.

This is a bit like Microsoft saying, “If you use Word to write something then you grant us a license to it.”  Or Bic saying if you use their biros then they get a license.  Or perhaps your paper manufacturer.

It’s also really sneaky.  They don’t do it upfront and tell you that they want this right; they hide it in a EULA and in the Terms and Conditions.

So, this was happened when they were bought by Tweetup?  So let’s look at their Terms. Sure enough, hidden in their Terms is:

You agree that these licenses include the right for the Company to make your Submissions and, if applicable, User Content, available to other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with the Company for the syndication, broadcast, distribution or publication of such content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such content use.

Again they are hiding this.  I guess they want to use all the ‘tweets’ to try and sell them or the intelligence/analysis that they contain.  And they are a commercial company and so want to make money.  I have no problem with that.  My problem is that they aren’t being upfront about it.  And I guess they aren’t being upfront about it because they suspect that most people don’t really like the idea that their stuff (even if it has no individual value) is being sold.

Perhaps we should start paying for these services and really know what is happening to our data, rather than thinking everything is for free, and thus effectively forcing companies to do this type of thing?

Now I just need to find an alternative.  And ideas?

Apparently, said buskers have to audition for a place in the city so that they can play! This is to ensure that they are up to scratch and fit with the city.

I’m frankly astonished that councils would have a busking policy, auditioning buskers, probably having an council officer administer the policy and then having various people checking that buskers have a license. What a waste of money. Let the market decide. Bad buskers will not get any money and move on. Good ones will earn money and stay. The public can decide.

Thankfully, Newcastle upon Tyne has a sensible attitude; apparently, it doesn’t believe that busking is something that should be licensed.

Don’t get me wrong; I think Alexander Hanff does great work campaigning on privacy issues.  I just wonder if, in this case, he’s seeing stuff that simply isn’t there.

For anyone who doesn’t know, Googlegate is about Google collecting un-encrypted WiFi data whilst roaming the streets with their StreetView project. Apparently, according to Privacy International et al., they have been doing this with criminal intent to record the bits of data intentionally so that they can find out more about us.

It appears that, whilst driving along, the software listened for WiFi broadcasts, discarded ALL those that were encrypted, and stored the packets, in entirety, of those that were not encrypted. This, according to conspiracy theory, means they knew that they couldn’t use the encrypted ones, and therefore were intentionally storing the unencrypted ones, even though they could have got the SSID from the encrypted WiFi broadcasts. This is the smoking gun.

Personally, I have no idea what Google were thinking, but I’m going to hazard some guesses.

WiFi access points. What kind are generally encrypted and what kind are generally open? Most home routers supplied by networks to consumers in the last few years are almost always encrypted now. If you buy off the shelf then you have to make a choice on whether to encrypt. Every Starbucks, hotel, cafe, airport, and other public access WiFi is unencrypted. Unencrypted WiFi seems like an invitation to join it, doesn’t it? It’s providing a service that you can connect to.

If I was writing software I’d probably make the decision that if anybody bothers to encrypt their WiFi then they probably don’t want their SSID used either. Hence I’d discard those packets. Also, for my roving software, to keep it simple, I’d probably just store the whole packet and pull out the SSID later during analysis. Storage is cheap. It’s easier to do, and you’d want your 24/7 software to be simple just so that it stands a better chance of not crashing. And, if it’s simpler, then it’s quicker and cheaper to write and test. Particularly if the brief is: “collect the SSIDs and geolocations of unencrypted WiFi stations”.

Why collect the SSIDs in the first place? Android phones and location services. It seems to me that it’s simply about better location services and getting more accuracy. Cell towers + SSIDs helps to place you on the map.

Should Google be collecting all this data in secret? No, I don’t think so. Are they an evil company? No, I doubt that too. Are they a large (huge?) organisation intent on making a profit? Damn right, and that’s something we should worry about. Have they got a good privacy record? Not really, especially after the Buzz debacle. Should we watch them like a hawk? Definitely. Was Google stupid? Without a doubt. But are they criminal?

My wife talks about ‘cock-up or conspiracy’. It’s a bit like ‘never attribute to malice what can adequately be attributed to stupidity’. I think Google cocked up, not that it was some conspiracy to collect our WiFi transmissions and analyse them. Still, paranoid people tend to see conspiracies everywhere.

But then Gmail arrived, in beta, and, for me, changed the game.  And now with spam levels rising ever higher, I’ve finally reached the point where my poor little virtual server isn’t powerful enough to deal with all the spam that comes with mail domains I have since 1999.

These posts are about a journey that I’m going to make in transitioning from my own server to a Google Apps Mail account.  On the way I have to:

• move about 7GB+ of mail that is sorted into lots of different folders
• back up the mail from Google every day using an IMAP sync tool
• migrate 6 different domains so that I can receive and send on those different domains
• move my wife’s accounts and domains as well

And all without losing any mail on the way.  Or at least finding out I’ve lost mail on the way.

Why Google Apps Mail?  I’m driven by the nice user interface, tagging, searching and the fact it will just work on my Android phone.

It’s going to be a three step process:

1. Move spam processing off the server
2. Forward mail to Google from the existing mail mail server
3. Change the MX records to move them to Google.

This still means that I can change back to my own (or other server) at some time in the future.  Probably that move will happen when we can have the ability to easily run email server appliances in the cloud.  Until my decentralised dream becomes a reality I’ll go with Google.

Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting opinion piece on the iPad recently over at BoingBoing about why you shouldn’t buy and iPad.  I found it via Slashdot, where many of these articles tend to get mentioned.  Many people have already commented on his post, analysing his position, arguments and thoughts;  I’m not going to – just Google and read a selection.  But it did set me thinking about Apple and their impact on how they are guiding consumers to view technology.

Those that know me, know that I avoid Microsoft wherever possible, will never buy from Sony, and I am coming to the same position on Apple.  I’ll kick off by quoting Doc Searls  from his “Prisons vs. Horizons” EOF page in the May 2010 Linux Journal:

“… the iPhone is a silo that stands on one company’s closed OS and hardware. It is equipped with a slick SDK, rules galore about how products should run and developers behave, and a single retail sphincter – the iTunes ‘store’ …”

If you own an iPhone or iPad you have precisely one place where you can get your apps: the iTunes store.  That’s it. There is no where else that you can get an App and install it on your device.  And Apple has absolute control over what goes into that store.  And, it seems, it has a pretty arbitrary decision making process for allowing apps into the store.

Several things are fairly well known:

1. If the App competes with something from Apple, then you won’t find that App.
2. If it is digital content then you can only buy it from Apple.  i.e. music, books or just about anything else.
3. If Apple decides they don’t like it then you aren’t going to find it.  Witness Steve Job’s latest outburst: Want Porn? Buy an Android Phone, Steve Jobs Says

Now, I’m not saying that you should go out an buy porn, but to have Apple dictate that you can’t have it, and shouldn’t have it?  It’s like Disneyland as Ed Felton at Freedom to Tinker wrote about.

It does not matter how good Apple products are if you, as the user, are not free to do what you want with it.  Yes they are nice shiny boxes. Yes, it’s a lovely Disney experience. But there just isn’t enough control left in the hands of me, the user.

To me, Apple with the iPhone and iPad are the AOL, Compuserve, and MSN of the Internet era: walled gardens, silos or prisons where everything is controlled by one entity.

Apple, for the consumer, is about a choice: as a user of the iPhone/iPad/etc., you have Apple dictate what you can do with the device, what apps you can use, where you can buy your content and even whether you can have Flash applications or not.

If that’s the choice, I think I’m going to choose something else.

T5 Experience for Transit Passengers

My wife and I got off the plane at 6.45 am on Sunday morning.  After queuing and being checked for over an hour we finally made it into the Terminal ‘proper’ at around 8.00 am.  That’s an hour and a quarter to clear immigration.

There were four queues to negotiate when getting off the plane at T5. They all took place in a hot, airless, basement of the terminal.  Not very welcoming to foreign passengers.

• The first queue was to actually get into the hall where we had our boarding card checked. Essentially, we were transit passengers.  This queue split us into UK passports and everybody else. Luckily, our UK passport queue seemed shorter than everybody else – god knows how long they had to wait.
• The next (for us) fairly short queue was to get our passports checked. Everybody else seemed to have very long additional waits to get their passports checked.
• The third queue was to get our pictures taken.   This took a LONG time. I wonder how long they keep the pictures.  Knowing the previous Labour government, probably ‘forever’ is the retention time.
• The fourth, final, tedious, queue was to get our hand luggage scanned. Luckily we weren’t the lucky few who got a very, very personal pat down from the security staff.

And all this took over an hour.  It is was also staffed by grumpy, bored, unsmiling security staff who treated is like cattle to be processed.  And the joke is: we paid for this as part of our plane ticket price.  We were the customer.  You’d never know it.

We were finally ejected from the security circus into a shopping centre. Not a calm place where you can relax between flights or before setting off on your first one. Nope. An incredibly busy, over bright, shiny, steel and glass edifice with widely spaced shops and hardly any seats. A place where the restaurants are not grouped in one place, but are scattered to the four corners of the Terminal. Choosing a restaurant means walking the entire length of the terminal, passing the oh-so-important shops of course.

After waiting over an hour in the queues, we also needed to use the toilets. Considering the sheer quantity of people that were stuffed into T5 it was a surprise that there weren’t more toilets. There were long queues at both the ladies and gents toilets. This is the first time I have experienced that at an airport here or abroad. You’d think that, when designing a terminal, you would get something as basic as the number of toilets for the expected number of people in the terminal.

Leaving the terminal to get on to a plane was also tedious. We were checked twice at the gate and again stood in a slow moving queue. The main culprit this time was having our photo checked. Then we had our boarding cards checked before getting onto the plane.

Finally, because Heathrow was so busy, after pushing back from the terminal, the plane was still trundling around the airport 30 minutes later before finally taking off 20 minutes late. Normal day at Heathrow I suppose.

Design Goals for Terminal 5

It’s not entirely clear what the design goals for T5 were but the outcome for us was not a particularly pleasant customer experience. It feels less like an airport terminal and more like a shopping centre which happens to have air passengers in it. Maybe BAA were more concerned with maximising revenue per passenger and less concerned with comfort, relaxation or a calm, friendly, passenger experience?

I’m going to compare Schiphol Airport near Amsterdam with Heathrow because I have had experience with both. It’s like comparing apples and oranges. They are so different that the only thing they seem to have in common is that they are both called ‘terminals’. Being in transit at Schiphol goes roughly like this.

1. Get off plane
2. Walk for 5 minutes or so to the centre of the terminal.
3. Make a choice in whether to eat, shop or relax.
4. Go to the appropriate zone
5. When ready to the gate
6. Be checked at the gate which includes the baggage check, passport check and boarding card.  This doesn’t seem to take very long at all.
7. Get on plane and depart.  From push back you are in the air within 10 minutes.

Each airports apparent attitude to security and their passengers results in very different passenger experiences. Whereas Heathrow is completely paranoid about security, Schiphol, to me, seems more pragmatic. Heathrow tries very, very hard to ensure everybody in the terminal has been checked before you get in.  At Schiphol they check you just before you get on the plane.

One of the problems with Heathrow seems to be the requirement to photograph everybody coming into the terminal and then check it on the way out. The results in delays and long queues aside from being an invasion of privacy. The overly paranoid security policy at the airport creates the rest of the delays. Besides, it’s theatre; Bruce Schneier has a lot to say on this.

T5 wants passengers to shop ’till they drop? Schiphol thinks it’s optional. T5 doesn’t want you sitting down? Schiphol provides relaxation couches around the airport. T5 makes you walk past shops whilst trying to choose where to eat. Schiphol puts them all in the same place. And Schiphol never seems to have queues in their toilets.

In summary

Heathrow T5 fails because it is designed with lots of security theatre and as a shopping centre. That’s the security processes that make us feel safe without actually doing anything about security. Long delays and miserable, bored and unfriendly security staff aren’t going to make passengers feel welcome. The apparent emphasis on extracting cash from travellers rather than giving them somewhere to relax isn’t going to help either.

I’m going to avoid Heathrow T5, which also sadly means British Airways, in future.