Internetters. I am in a bit of a conundrum. See, I’m thinking of giving up Facebook. What’s that? That’s not big? I should shut up? Just sit down. You’re getting spittle on the screen.

Facebook really annoys me. What is it? Basically, it’s just a big meeting place where people are meant to socialise. I guess you could say it’s a network where people are social. A social network. But it’s not, is it? On Friday and Saturday nights, it’s just you and the other folk who have stayed in, either optionally, or more likely, because we have nowhere else to go. It feels like a waiting room, with all the outdated magazines being the wall posts people have written to each other, that you’ve read at least six times already, as they’re deemed ‘top news’. Personal jokes that you couldn’t possibly understand, meeting times for the next days. The sort of thing that has no relevance to you, but are there on the main page.

Later, the outgoing, popular people arrive back from whatever function they’ve been to and make sure everyone knows about it. There’s photo albums with 200+ photos in, which, naturally, you analyse each one to see how much fun was going on, who did what and which people were there. You know more about it, than the actual attendees. You then compare the guest’s social standing to your own, and conclude whether it was just that you weren’t invited. ‘ Thanks Gran. You invited Aunt Carol but not me.’
Another irritating thing is that people, more specifically of the female gender, are actually putting what’s on their mind in the ‘What’s on your mind?’ box. That’s not what it’s for! Just put something that’ll make the reader smile: an amusing incident that has happened to you today; a link; your take on the current affairs; the fact that your dog pissed on the new sofa etc. I, and the majority of your Facebook friends, do not give one solitary shit about the fact that your current boyfriend is ‘being a wankaaaaaa :@’. This is usually followed by about 10 females agreeing and slagging off the whole male population. If I wanted this, I’d watch Loose Women.

And while I’m at it, song lyrics. You didn’t compose those lyrics. Some Record executive in a suit did and then passed them onto JLS to croon. You’ve simply listened to radio 1 and typed down the first chorus you heard. That’s fine, but credit the composer.
For a start, I think it’s going the same way as Bebo, in our age group. Actually, it’s becoming more popular, but my peers seem to be disowning it and seem to be living their lives. More likely, it has always been this quiet, but during the exam period, it received a massive boom, due to procrastinating posers faux panicking about their upcoming Maths paper. Scared you’re going to do badly? Then get off Facebook, and revise, you arsehole.
For all its flaws, it does offer free communication and has made arranging and advertising events a lot easier. It has completely revolutionised the way we socialise, probably for the better. I’m not going to blame social networks for the fact that I’m painfully shy, as I would be just the same without them. Also, in the years to come, we will have all these photos and videos on here to reminisce over; a luxury that our previous generation would have loved to have had.

I think I’ve convinced myself that if I quit I’ll spend time doing real and worthwhile stuff, like building a real farm or starting my own Mafia gang, rather than just do it virtually. I probably won’t, but it’s the thought of it.

So I just got back from a long weekend away. Aside from the actual holiday itself, which was rather uneventful, to say the least, it was very exciting. Let me explain.

In the iPhone adverts, they like to show all the practical uses for the apps, and the examples are always cool city types called 'John Appleseed' calling someone to meet for coffee, Twittering about his coffee, adding his coffee dates to his calendar or finding the café on Google Maps. This is all very clever because it shows off all the cool things you can do on a iPhone, while quietly associating Apple’s products with the lifestyle of cool, city people - making even people like me, who live in a county which doesn’t even have a city in it, buy in to this lifestyle that they are in no way associated with but want to be part of, as it allows them to create a flimsy facade of self-worth.

I've only ever used Google Maps to look at my house from above, and once to see how far it was from Lands End to John O’ Groats, never any of the trendy city things that Apple promised would happen to me when I bought it.

So when I went on holiday you can finally see, after that monstrous digression (I do apologize), why I was excited when I went away. I was in an unknown town, and I could use Google Maps to find the local coffee shops!

I tried it. There were none. The 'town' was called Nettlecombe: it had a population of 70, and the only building that wasn’t someone’s house or the church was a pub called the Marquis of Lorne. I went there, but they didn’t sell Coffee, only beer. And no one was called 'John Appleseed', just Ted, Robert and Enid. Really.

Now, as I have never searched Google Maps before, only navigated it manually, I have never entered a specific location. And without doing that, I wasn't to know that StreetView had been added, as that is the only way of getting the StreetView button to appear. So when I searched for 'Nettlecombe', I was amazed. The little yellow man appeared, so I tapped it, hardly daring to believe, but lo and behold there was the hamlet I was staying in, indexed by a US technology giant and immortalised forever. The fact that they had been down this tiny country lane, and every other country lane in Britain for that matter, blew my mind. Now I had the luxury of having it blown again by the fact I could walk around the world on a device smaller than my hand.

I’m beginning to sound like some insufferable middle-aged uncle type with all my talk of ‘the wonders of technology these days’, but I am serious. That’s a lot of power Google and Apple are putting in our hands and it all has to come from somewhere. There’s sci-fi novels where in the future the earth is run by big companies called InudstrialCorporateSoft, with smoke billowing out of the chimneys of their factories while crows call ominously from the rooftops and a thick, grey fog floats in, but what’s really happening is a company with a silly name, a logo in primary colours and a joke app for translating from animal to human is fooling everyone with its jolly front, it’s ‘don’t be evil’ (no capitals obligatory on pain of death) slogan and offices full of lava lamps, bean bags, sushi bars and generally the happiest coders in Silicon Valley, into thinking that it just wants to ‘organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful’, when really it wants to enslave our souls.

I know I’m not the first person to raise concerns over the worrying power of Google - in fact I’m probably the last - but it needs to be said as many times as possible. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, but there seems to be such a thing as a vast array of entirely free software for every aspect of one’s life with no expense other than having to see a one-line advert about how you should buy the thing you just searched for. The price has to be paid somewhere, and it’s paid in the form of having your personal details harvested for profit.

Last week, to the outrage of the blogosphere, Facebook announced their new OpenGraph API, which allows apps to collect your information. Previously, if you were marked as ‘Single’ on Facebook, it might send you adverts for dating sites. Now, it goes a lot further.

Say you visit the BBC website, find an article about how endangered the pandas are, and post a link to Facebook so everyone can see the problem. OpenGraph will now record this, and start sending you adverts about adopting a panda. If you posted a link, chances are you care about them, and so this all becomes scarily powerful. Also, you might now be suggested to get a baby panda on your FarmVille or Mafia Wars or whatever else it is you waste your life on.

What I’m trying to say is information comes at a price. And that price is privacy. Now personally, I’m not fussed. These companies are welcome to my data; I’ve got nothing secret or exciting going on in my life, I’m just a normal guy. If Google and Facebook and the rest really care about knowing what I’m like, then they’re welcome to. I’ll block the Ads they send at me, and continue to use their services until I die of being sucked into a vortex of corporate servitude.

It’s too late to be anarchistic; we gave up fighting years ago. Just enjoy the convenience and lifestyle that these products bring, and try not to think too hard about it.

Works for me.

So URL shorteners are everywhere. In this age of incessant tweeting, they've become a necessity and a very handy tool in a whole host of other situations. But as people try to cram extra words in to that 140 character limit, the shorteners are getting shorter.

It started with TinyUrl, which set the ball rolling. But then came Bit.ly, which was shorter, and then Twitter made it its default shortnener, so it’s usage skyrocketed, and it’s now the most used one at the time of writing. Since then, I’ve been interested to see how far I can go with it, and I’ve gone through, from TinyUrl, to Bit.ly, then to Is.gd, then J.mp, and when I thought it could go no further, along comes 'to./'.

Yep, you read that right, a website with no extension. It's run by the people who own the .to domain, as in www.example.to, and it’s the only one I know of with nothing after the dot. Actually, it creeps me out a bit, it just looks wrong. But at the same time, it’s awesome. Until we get a one letter domain extension, it’s the shortest possible, but this creates a problem.

It generates 4 letter codes, to keep it truly short, for example ‘to./a1b2’, where each character can be any letter or number. This means you get 36 values each time, which gives a total of just over 3 million combinations, with the 4 characters. This may seem like a lot. But bit.ly gets used on average 6 million a day, which means if to./ ever got as big, it’d run out of URLs in half a day, and then, they'd have to get longer, to create more combinations. All this entirely defeats the point of the self-proclaimed 'Nanourl', so don’t go telling anyone, or this whole thing could die in less than a day. Ok, so if they added one character they would get over 100 million combinations, and a 9 letter URL is still pretty short. But even that would only last just over a couple of weeks.

So let’s keep it to ourselves. Because I love to./, and I’d hate to see it die. You see, it has very little else going for it: a horrible interface; no analytics of how many clicks your shortening has got ect, no custom codes, none of the numerous other frivolities of the other shorteners, and it needs it shortness to have any purpose. It’s so minimalistic, it does its job perfectly, and it really is the shortest it’s currently possible to achieve. So use it, love it, and please, keep it quiet.

Microsoft's shiny new input device, Natal, has been circulating around the blogosphere for a few months now, and it's looking very interesting from where I'm standing. Interesting as in, I really want to try it, and interesting as in, I really want to see how it turns out. Will it be the raging success that Microsoft would love it to be? Or will it go the way of the Wii, great for a while but slowly fading out of fashion as the novelty loses its edge?

The way I see it, Natal has two audiences, both of which have very different desires and requests: there's the casual market, and there's the hardcore market. Now, normally I would object to gamers being classified in such black and white categories, but it makes a bit of sense here.

Casual gamers are, on the whole (in other words, please don't shout at me if these don't fit you), the girls, the younger kids and the older adults. Common sense would seem to suggest that this crowd would be highly receptive of the concept of motion tracking, as proved by the phenomenal popularity of the Wii, which has consistently outsold all of the other current-gen consoles, mostly down to casual gamers. The game prototypes that we've seen so far for Natal seem to reflect this; games such as a 'hole in the wall' style human Tetris and a gesture based painting application would hold the attention of the average 19 year old guy for about 10 minutes at most, excluding parties.

The hardcore gamers, on the other hand, are an entirely different bunch. I think most of them would agree that what they want is not a complete overhaul of all the concepts that gaming has built up over the last few decades, but an improvement on existing themes. Hardcore gamers are a tricky bunch to please, and Microsoft has their work cut out marketing Natal to anyone with a more than trivial relationship with shooter, strategy or competitive games.

As long as the response time and accuracy of the system is kept within good limits, which Microsoft assures us it is (although they would, wouldn't they?), I assume the hardware side is not going to be an issue. What will make or break this peripheral is software.

Natal can learn a lot of valuable lessons from the Wii in this respect: full of promise at launch, the Wii emerged with a bang and a slew of excellent titles including Twilight Princess and Wii Sports – a small but nonetheless revolutionary game. Sadly, today, I have not bought a new game for my Wii in over a year and very rarely turn it on, and even then only if friends are over. I just haven't been able to find anything new or exciting for the sad little gloss-white box in the corner of my living room. Instead of genuine creativity and originality, all developers manage to spew out onto the shelves are the same regurgitated Wii Sports clones, badly made puzzle games and samey platformers. Even Nintendo, normally an oasis of real innovation, has only managed a paltry Super Mario Bros. rehash as of late. The Wii Motion Plus addition to the controller does seem to be promising, but again, only if Nintendo can get the developers behind it, spending more than a month or two on each game they release.

Natal, though, is quite different to the Wii controllers. The Wii has to attempt to work out what you're doing simply by measurements of where your hand is moving, whereas Natal can literally see your entire body, in 3D. If it's really as accurate as Microsoft say it is, that could make it infinitely more powerful in terms of gestures. On the other hand, the Wii remote has real, physical buttons: much faster and more reliable in terms of direct input. Natal could, obviously, be used in conjunction with the existing 360 controller, but then that doesn't exactly allow you much freedom for actually moving and interacting with the game – making it slightly less useful.

One thing I would really love to see is head-tracking, which basically detects where your head is and changes the camera angle based on your angle to the screen – making it look a lot more 3D, without any new equipment needed. Check out the link above for an example using the Wii, made by the awesome Johnny Chung Lee who, I hear, interestingly enough, is on the development team for Natal. Fingers crossed on that one.

In the end, I think the most successful and useful implementation of this technology for both casual and hardcore gamers will be one that doesn't attempt to completely replace the input method, but simply enhance it. Something like head-tracking (hint, hint). Features like voice and face recognition would be fairly cool as well.

Oh, and while we're on the subject, Microsoft, if you give it to us PC gamers too then we might be prepared to forgive you for the abomination that is Games For Windows Live. Maybe.

I don't know how many of you use Spotify, the (partly) free and very wonderful music streaming service, but I really think they're missing a trick with their advertising. For those unfamiliar, Spotify offers a free version of their streaming service interspersed with adverts.

Now I don't know about you, but I don't think blaring a loud 30 seconds of hip-hop overlaid by a nasal man telling me about car insurance to someone fifteen minutes into a Mozart concerto is going to help anybody sell anything. Neither, I think, will showering me with the lilting melodies of Ludovico Einaudi ten minutes into a Pendulum album.

Google has shown the world how targeted advertising can transform a business model, so why isn't Spotify capitalising? Spotify has placed itself in an almost unique position in the music industry in that it could, if it tried, deliver relevant adverts to listeners, based on the music they've just chosen to listen to. Everyone wins: listeners get ads that they could genuinely have an interest in, advertisers get better value for money with their ad campaigns and Spotify get more advertising revenue as a result. It's simple, put the ads for teenagers with the teenager music, the ads for classical music with the classical music, and the nasal-voiced ads with the nasal-voiced music.

It makes even less sense when you listen to Spotify's own adverts, in which a cheery Roberta tells us that they're "dedicated to making sure the right ads get through to the right people... making sure people aren't bombarded with ads that weren't meant for them". Well, sorry, but that's not what it looks like from here. And stop playing that damn advert, by the way, it's past its sell by date.

Come to think of it, why aren't commercial radio stations taking advantage too? Sure, the music wasn't specifically chosen by the listeners, and adverts are targeted in the sense that they are generally aimed at the target audience of that particular station, but I think they could definitely do better. How's about the advert for the new Black-Eyed Peas album coming straight after the new Black-Eyed Peas single plays?

Think about it.

Here at the RandomTales offices, we spend a lot of time on computers. When you run websites, it's a bit of a prerequisite. At the risk of sounding like some horrific bit of product-placement, we really couldn't do our jobs without our beloved Adobe and thier excellent suite of tools, so naturally, when we first heard of a new version of Creative Suite, we were very excited.

News of the specifics of the fifth iteration of this software has been circulating the rumoursphere for a long time now, so this isn't some insider info, sneak-peek gossip style article. Hell, Adobe officially announced it back in October last year at their MAX event. Nonetheless it has some really cool features that we're all very excited about, and so I thought I'd do it the justice of an article.

I use Photoshop more than any other program, and some of the new features really are awesome. One is 'wet' brushes, reminiscent of Corel's Painter application. If you run a brush through a blue and a yellow area, a green streak will appear, just like if it was real paint. The further you move the brush, the duller the colour will become, as if it was drying out, just like real paint.How much of a place this messiness has in Photoshop's pixel-precision environment is debatable, and its practical applications could be limited, but its a nice idea nonetheless.

Staying on the topic of brushes, they've gone 3d. you have an image of a paintbrush you can rotate in 3d space, and the brush tip shape for your 2d canvas adjusts accordingly, becoming narrower the more vertical you have it, and splaying as it is tilted down. This is a more practical feature, and should really offer some great opportunities to tweak your brushes to perfection. They will almost certainly work with the latest generation of tablets, where the brush changed its angle as your tablet pen does, giving a really realistic paining experience.

A final, and most impressive feature, is the new warp tool. Looking similar to the puppet system of After Effects, it allows you to build a skeleton on any image, and pose it to any position, bending it around the joints you create.

Seeing it happen makes much more sense than my description, so click here to see a video.

Flash will also gain an export to iPhone function, meaning many more people will be able to create apps. Apple will still have to approve them, of course, but it's an exciting development for the platform.

All in all, CS5 is looking mighty impressive and we can't wait to upgrade. Adobe usually announce about 6 months prior to release, so it should arrive about April.

Here's hoping for some inbuilt fractal interpolation...

So, the so called 'iPad' has landed, with much fanfare and frivolity, into the hectic scene that is the world of technology, with many a chorus of “What, no camera?” and “Eww, huge bezel”. Was it worth the hype? Well, the majority of the blogging world seems to think so, crooning at the mere mention of the phrases “near 180 degree viewing angle” and “ten hours of continuous video”. Pretty much every tech news site in the world has been filled with spam-like, repetitive posts detailing feature lists and hardware specifications.

But I'll be honest here, I can't see what the big fuss is about. Yes, it's Apple. Yes, it's a sleek, well designed interface. And yes, it will undoubtedly be horribly popular, spawning a new wave of irritating fanboys with nothing better to do but spout silly arguments for their technological viewpoints whilst they wait for their next Silicon Valley grown fix. But apart from that, and disregarding the horrible name, is it really anything we haven't seen before?

As far as I can see, the only new things that the iPad is bringing to the tablet scene are: simple integration with your existing media library; a nice, Apple style user interface; and an ever expanding online media store, which now includes books and other print publications. Don't get me wrong, that's a nice little list there, but it's the exact same list that came with the original iPhone back in 2007, with the exception of iBooks, which will be making its way to the iPod Touch and iPhone in any case. No, what we are looking at here is not a ground breaking, revolutionary device like the iPhone was, and in some ways still is, but more of an upgraded iPod Touch.

I'll concede some things here. I love my iPod Touch, and the sound of a brighter, clearer, larger screen with the same multi-touch functionality is great. 3G would add a lot to the device for me, being able to read blogs and look things up on the move would be a welcome addition for sure. And the new ebooks, whilst I still feel that a real book is far better for travel and long periods of reading, would work well for shorter articles and with the ability to update content on the fly. But on the other hand, the ebooks will be onto my existing iPod soon, and although 3G is great, it's really not worth $30 a month for me (knowing the UK mobile providers, the poor dears seemingly unable to convert currencies by themselves, that'll probably translate to £30 a month anyway).

So, onto that great big beautiful screen. Well, that's brilliant, but it comes at a price: portability. The iPhone was great because it packed all of that media, information and application power into something you could fit into your pocket and pull out whenever you wanted. The tablet... well, can you really imagine taking it out with you every day in case you wanted a read of the New York Times on your lunch hour or on the train? It's just too bulky to be really practical on anything but long journeys, and if that's all you're going to use it for, can you really justify the price tag (and monthly fee if you want 3G included)? Sure, you could use it at home, but I think the majority of the target audience of the iPad already has a more than capable desktop computer sitting at home, and let's be honest, most of these media features are old hat for the humble desktop PC if you know where to look – and for less cash, too.

So, let's round it up. Apple wants me to pay $499 for a device that sounds like a brand of sanitary towels, has the exact same features as my iPod Touch 1G with the addition of more processing power, extortionately priced 3G, a larger screen and reduced portability. Oh, and don't forget the fact you can use it as a digital photo frame.

Brilliant.

Facebook, as helpful as ever, has just informed me that "Frankie has unlocked extra questions on 21 questions!". As the slightly dismayed looking squirrel in the icon tells me, "The extra questions make the game more fun!" Oh, the joys of technology. Apart from wondering how the game can still be called 21 questions with the inclusion of this wondrous addition, I can't help but feel slightly depressed by this small update.

This is what passes as entertainment these days, then, is it? God help us all. Now, maybe I'm being presumptuous here, but isn't Facebook, as a website, all about bringing people together and giving them another means through which to socialise? The fact is that most of these addons and applications that have been flooding into my live feed the last few months have not, in any way, been connected to the main aim of Facebook: social networking. A large proportion of them seem to be targeted at cultivating the "sitting at your monitor playing pointless games when you could be doing something much more productive" audience.

This irritates me.

And yes - I'm acutely aware of the fact that I'm just as much of a culprit of this idle sitting around doing nothing on Facebook and similar sites as anyone else, but, in some ways, that just makes it even more annoying to me. Perhaps the fact that these mindless games have also managed to wheedle their way into my own free time, even though they are so intensely irritating to me, is what fustrates me so much.

It's one of the areas which I actually think makes Twitter a very good tool as social networking sites go - it knows what it's for, and it sticks to that. It doesn't try to be some kind of arcade or advice centre, because that's not what it was designed for. Apps have watered down the actual content of Facebook, which is the people, the views and the opinions.

However, there is one genre of application that I believe trumps even 21 questions and its kin in its ability to grate on my senses, and that is what I like to describe as the "Look at me" quiz.

What colour eyes do you have? Which member of JLS are you? What flowr r u? If YoU wErE a SmAlL sOuTh AmErIcAn GoLdFiSh, WhAt WoUlD yOuR nAmE bE?

What possible useful information could anyone possibly hope to gain from this genre? In my opinion, a quiz can have only one aim: to find out how good you are at something, usually in competition with someone else so that whoever wins gets the right to lord it over everyone else and generally be an arse about it until they are beaten at something else by someone else. Now, I'm not sure, but I don't think these particular quizzes manage even that (in my opinion fairly boring) objective, since the outcome is not on a scale; there's nothing to measure your success against anyone else's success.

Worse than that, they're simply innacurate. I mean, how can a computer program possibly guess the colour of your eyes without actually having a picture of you or a sample of your DNA? It can't, and the thought that a large amount of Facebook users can be fooled into thinking this is a worthwhile use of their time is a saddening one.

No, these apps have no purpose, they are simply there to post on your page and say "Look, world, I'm still here, I'm still doing something and I still want you to look at me", in that snobbish way we have of thinking that what we have to say is worth listening to.

In the end, I think these apps detract from what Facebook is all about. If the aim is to get people to talk to each other and connect, surely the main attraction shouldn't be solitary games and the boosting of already inflated egos. While I'm at it, is it not more productive towards this aim to, instead of sitting at your computer with the vague illusion of social interaction, go out and actually do some real socialising?

Just to clarify, this particular rant is not directed soleley at Facebook or its users and applications; I've got plenty of more specific gripes in reserve. These points could just as well apply to any social networking site with similar features, but it's a good example. I'll save the Facebook groups feature for its own post.

I hope you're fans of zombies. We've all played the games, L4D is a great example of one, but have you really seen how an infection spreads across a city?

This outbreak sim is a cool little flash game where you control the infection. Using an image from Google Maps, of Washington DC I'm led to believe, you can watch say 50 zombies shamble around, or smash through the city with 2000 fast moving zombs. Not only can you control the rate of infection and the horde, but also what percent of the civilians have weapons and how accurate they are!

I've been playing around, and this is a really neat time killer, with a playable version coming out in early 2010.

Peace zombie freaks,

Sam