I’m an off-and-on user of social media, and honestly, that’s mostly been off for awhile. I’m creeped out by the location-aware-always-on services that have been coming into vogue recently. The trouble is, social networks are just to useful and convenient in this day and age. Working in IT, people assume that I have a presence online, and that I carefully maintain and manage it. One of the easiest ways to look into your presence is to simply google yourself.

This blog (and it’s associated photoblog) sort to the top, thankfully. Then twitter, LinkedIn, flickr and the rest. Oddly, my Google Profile shows up at the bottom of the page, and due to the number of search results returned, people will have to scroll down to see that profile. Either Google doesn’t want to have people think it’s a bully by raising the relevance of it’s own tools, or there simply aren’t a lot of links to my profile in the world. Well, links, along with the rest of the special sauce that Google uses to derive search rankings.

What’s missing, notably, is my Facebook profile. I’ve disabled external searching for it, and I’m happy to see it’s not in the results. I’m not really keen on anyone walking into the conversations I have there (although I always make sure to sanitize what I write, as the internet is forever). If people really want to see what I’m saying there, they can go look.

The other thing that’s missing is FourSquare, or any other location-based social media. I don’t like the idea of telling everyone where I am at all times, although sometimes it can be amusing to use to my own ends. More on that later.

I’m getting really tired of HDR images. It’s all the rage these days, but it looks like crap most of the time. Apple even jumped on the bandwgon and put HDR into the iPhone Camera application, and the results range from decent to… well, not terrible, but not good either. Now, a group called sovietmontage has figured out a way to do HDR video using a pair of Canon DSLRs.

Come on people. Do we really need the HDR look for video?

It’s time to dredge my memory for my best Nagios-related anecdote, as the Nagios folks are handing out a free iPad to the best (true) story. If they didn’t have the requirement for the story to be true, they’d be blown away by the time my awesome Nagios event handler script totally saved the day when we had that zombie-vampire-robot infestation in the data center.

Really. It handled that invasion event. Like a pro.

You may have noticed that the blog, Shufflegazine, that I write/wrote for is no longer online in any meaningful sense. The site has links to the twitter feed, which has been “protected”, and to the centimetercube website, which has links back to the defunct page. I’ll update again when the site is back online.

I think one of the main reasons we haven’t seen the iPhone on Verizon (and why that’s not likely to change in the near future) is Verizon’s insistence on disabling all of the cool bits of a phone. They then charge you for those very same abilities, often in a degraded fashion. The first (and last) time I considered buying into Verizon was back in 2006, when the RAZR was a cool phone. I went with Cingular/AT&T and imported a phone from the UK, as the RAZR had all the interesting parts of bluetooth turned off – file/contact sync, etc. Because they wanted to force you into using their paid services. All I wanted to do was to backup my phone’s addressbook, and over that, they lost a customer.

Once people figure out how limited Verizon Android phones are, I wonder how long it will take for Android users to switch networks? Once their service contracts are finished, that is. ETF fees are the devil.

(Yes, I know AT&T is also the devil, in many, many other ways. All phone carriers I’ve dealt with deserve scorn.)

An old boss of mine took the time to drill into everyone’s head that he expected us to use the right tool for the job. He may have tools he preferred using, and he would often poke fun at tools he didn’t use, but he had respect for the tool that got a job done the most efficiently. I was thinking about this ethos when I logged into my Twitter account with the command line client, ttyttter. Don’t get me wrong, I love ttytter… but I’ve stopped using it.

Almost all of my twittering (which is mostly reading the people I follow, to be honest) is done on my iPhone. If I’m at work, and need a short break, I fire up the phone. Same when I’m at home, or on the bus, or whatever. Even when sitting in front of a computer that arguably more capable in every way, I still use my phone. It’s always handy, and most importantly, it remembers my place wherever I am. I don’t have to scroll back and try to figure out what I’ve just read, or get ahead of a joke or comment stream because I started at the wrong place. It’s nice to have it all on one device.

I’ve also found that this applies to Facebook. The only thing I use the full web app for anymore is blocking stupid applications, which is simply faster with a mouse. Other than that, Facebook for me is primarily a iPhone app.

What else do people find they prefer the phone version of?

To be entirely honest, I’m not sure we need another social network. I’m almost sure we don’t need another, but that didn’t stop Apple from trying to fill the gap where MySpace has arguably failed. MySpace, when it was new and shiny and people still used it, was a great resource for local bands to get fans and groupies. They could release music, tour photos, and whatnot, and a lot of people used it for that function. However, it’s really gone the way of Friendster, and has fallen into disrepair. Possibly it’s because most people who “designed” sites on MySpace enabled auto-playing of horrible music, and had flashing crap all over their pages that made me think I was about to have a tonic–clonic seizure.

Regardless, Apple has decided to have a go at the social networking thing, and as they have few hundred million iTunes users in the world, they do have a pretty good start. However, they have to convince people to use the service. So, I’ve got a few suggestions:

1. Allow users to like imported music – that is, music they have ripped from their collection. It’s incredibly irritating to try to setup the “music I like” icons if the album you want isn’t on the store yet.
2. Allow users to mark albums they have imported as purchased in the iTunes Music Store. This is a partial fix for the previous complaint: I don’t want iTunes to recommend something to me for purchase that I’ve already imported and setup with correct metadata.
3. Allow users to “follow” any artist on the store – even if the artist doesn’t have a profile setup yet. They Might Be Giants don’t have a profile as of yet, but I’d like to be able to say “hey, I like these guys enough to follow album releases and whatever.” Can’t do it until they set it up, which is really frustrating.
4. Allow a finer-grained control of who can see what – I don’t want to show everyone my musical purchases, but I’m ok showing them the bands I like. I’d really like to have the ability to create groups to put people in, and be able to adjust privacy settings for each group.

Well, that’s all for now. I’m sure I’ve got more good ideas for Apple to ignore in here somewhere.