Herein you’ll find articles on a very wide variety of topics about technology in the consumer space (mostly) and items of personal interest to me. I have also participated in and created several podcasts most notably Pragmatic and Causality and all of my podcasts can be found at The Engineered Network.
New Apple Cafeteria: Don't Bring Your Outside Friends
Earlier this week it the local council in Cupertino approved a permit for Apple to build a massive 1,765 sqm cafeteria for Apple employees only. During the meeting a representative from Apple said the facility was being built “… to provide a level of security so that people and employees can feel comfortable talking about their business, their research and whatever project they’re engineering without fear of competition sort of overhearing their conversations.”
In other words - don’t bring your mates that don’t work at Apple - they’re not allowed.
When you work for Apple clearly they value secrecy in everything they do and therefore you must keep everything you do to yourself. Having held a position with similar confidentiality arrangements in the past I can understand that to some extent, but in those cases it didn’t matter where you ate or where you were: YOU JUST DIDN’T TALK ABOUT IT.
It seems just a little odd that Apple would be so strict with secrecy between their own teams about prototype products but then say that employees will be able to talk comfortably about their business in their new cafeteria amongst themselves. Surely many topic are still off the discussion list no differently to before? It’s far more likely that Apple will push its employees to use the new facility by offering discounts or other incentives in order to reduce the number of secrecy “slip-ups” caused by employees by ’lunching’ elsewhere with ‘outsiders’.
If you want to work at Apple tell your friends it might be a while before you can do lunch.
Wake Up Protest - The Fallout Will Be Worse
Some would say that any marketing campaign that gets headlines and publicity is worth its weight in gold. There’s no such thing as bad publicity the expression goes. When RIM Australia decided it was time to shake the cage they chose a rather loud, direct and disturbing way of doing it.
A few days ago a mob of people walked off a black bus in front of the Sydney flagship Apple store, dressed mainly in black with black signs in white writing saying “Wake up”. This was followed by some chanting of those two words, over, and over, and over, and over again. (In case you couldn’t read or somehow missed the 40 odd people standing on the footpath in front of you). They then meandered down the city streets in much the same vein. Finding this hard to believe? There’s a YouTube clip for that.
After considerable digging I’m having trouble tracking down the original source however RIM Australia issued a statement (by means unknown) on May 1 9:20 AM AEST, with Richelle Gillett Account Director from Spectrum Communications for Blackberry stating: “We can confirm that the Australian ‘Wake Up’ campaign, which involves a series of experiential activities taking place across Sydney and Melbourne, was created by RIM Australia. A reveal will take place on May 7th that will aim to provoke conversation on what ‘being in business’ means to Australians.”
The YouTube clip appears to be genuinely unrehearsed and spontaneous and with a busy Apple Store there’s no doubt that someone would have caught the mock protest on film. If anything I’m surprised it was just one person that posted it online. In any case marketing of this nature has been an ebbing/flowing trend over the past few decades where by some cryptic or partial message is pasted everywhere within sight and then people remember it by pondering - I wonder what that means? Then, days, weeks or even months later the public relations machine reveals what it meant and what product or service they are trying desperately to flog off.
I’m not a marketer and have no idea if this sort of advertising is effective in general but to look at the Apple Store “protest” in isolation you do have to wonder what their goal was. If it was to raise awareness of their “secret/reveal” but protesting in front of a huge Apple Store that would definitely get attention and in that way many people would wonder about it and it got their attention. However what did the marketing geniuses believe people would think of a company when it was revealed the way they advertise a new product/service was to yell at people buying the oppositions product literally to their faces?
It’s common enough in most industries to poke fun or even insult competitors but to do that to the customers that you are trying to win over seems a bit stupid. There are three broad categories of people that witnessed the ‘protest’: either directly or via the news/YouTube.
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Apple lovers. They will shake their head at RIM and chuckle at such a sad marketing tactic.
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RIM lovers. They will nod and agree - ‘Apple users should Wake Up that’s true!’ and they will still be buying a RIM device irrespective of whether the ‘protest’ ever happened.
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Non-committal to either Apple, RIM or anyone else. Further split this in two:
3A) That were in the Apple Store at the time: Presumably they were in the Apple Store to look at or buy an Apple product. (Yes, okay they could have been returning a defective product too). If I choose to be in an Apple Store, other people yelling at me telling me to wake up suggests that they think I’m stupid or brainwashed. Either presumption and I’ll dig my heels in and openly oppose whatever the heck they think they’re selling to me.
3B) They weren’t in the Apple Store but have enough interest in Apple to note that someone on the news/across the street was yelling at Apple: Target audience.
Although no-one can predict the proportions of people in the above categories I’d guess that RIM has offended more people than it has enticed by its marketing tactics. In the end the Wake Up ‘Protest’ made headlines, but the long-term fallout is likely to be worse than any possible interest the stunt could ever have gained.
RIM continues to make such bold predictions for their new products (refer image) but have consistently failed to capture interest in the current market. The general public are tired of the Blackberry and are switching to Android and iOS in droves. A stupid marketing campaign where RIM paid people to yell at Apple won’t help them achieve much if anything at all.
Twitterific vs Twitter and Why I'm Switching Back to Twitter
I had been a long user of the web interface of Twitter on the desktop and gave little attention to Tweetie although I had used it on the Desktop albeit briefly. I had used the original Twitterific on my original iPhone 2G many years ago and with the advent of TweetMarker functionality to the suite of Twitterific apps I shelled out the money and dived in: wanting desperately to keep all of my feeds in sync with each other as I regularly switch between my iPad, iPhone 4S and Desktop running Lion that sync is an annoying thing to deal with.
TweetMarker is a free/monthly premium service that allows applications that support it to “mark” a tweet as being the most recently read from your Twiter timeline, and/or the most recently read from your list of @mentions. Twitterifics implementation generally works however I found that syncing the mentions would never work properly - if I would read only the mentions then it would flag that most recent tweet as the most recently read and assume it was the same as for the main timeline. Interestingly it only exhibited this behaviour on the iPad/iPhone versions and not the desktop version. Fail # 1.
Another problem is that Twitter only permits the API to load 110 prior tweets in a single request. What this means is that if your TweetMarker is more than 110 tweets behind current you are presented with a button you need to tap/click to load the next 110 Tweets. Needless to say this is something that can and should be automated. Twitterific is not the only app that lacks this feature but it was a limitation I didn’t realise until I tried the app. There may be technical reasons why Twitter throttle the API requests to 110 entries per XX period of time but surely this is spaced in time such that you may request chunks every x seconds/minutes. It would be better to automate the process rather than leave it to the user even if there is a time delay in doing so. If the developer wants this to be an option you can turn on - that’s great. Currently it’s manual all the way until you reach your marker. Fail # 2.
The third issue was the connection errors. This had been becoming steadily worse over the last few weeks until the point of sheer frustration as the now familiar red error bar shows up on the bottom of the app saying “connection error” at nearly every refresh. Perhaps it was a genuine connection error? Alas no as the Twitter app (ex-Tweetie) on both the desktop and on iOS were tested on the same devices within seconds of refreshes on Twitterific and the Twitter native apps obtained the most recent tweets where Twitterific didn’t. Fail # 3.
The final straw is related to the connection errors: being unable to send a tweet from Twitterific. Several different errors would show including HTML errors, 403 error, API error when the same tweet was attempted from Twitter for Mac running in parallel on the desktop it posted fine and effectively immediately. The worst part was that there was no draft copy kept and if one cancels the error message then the tweet effectively evaporates into nothing. Fail # 4.
The connection errors and difficulty posting are very possibly not Twitterifics fault but their then their post indicates they’re blaming my slow network connection. Admittedly I’m on the other side of the world but with ping times to the Twitter servers on my ADSL 2.5Mbps connection at around 450msec worst case (usually under 360msec across 18 hops) it wasn’t too much latency between my place in Brisbane, Australia and San Francisco, USA at least. Besides, if it’s possible for Tweetie (sorry, the Twitter app) to work then why can’t Twitterific figure it out?
Another thought occurs to me: what if Twitter is prioritising it’s responses to third-party API requests? Another topic for another day. It would be interesting if that were the case. More investigation is needed there.
For now at least, I’m switching back to the native Twitter apps and will watch Twitterific updates closely and will try them again once their issues have been resolved. It’s a shame after the promise of synchronised tweets cross-platform will draw me back to them again. Maybe Twitter will buy TweetMarker and incorporate it? That would be nice.
Jokes In Good Taste, Popular Taste or Just Bad Taste?
At what point does a “joke” become a form of abuse? When is it okay to “have a go” at another race, minority group, sexual preference, country, people with disabilities or people from certain parts of your own country even? In most peoples minds it seems that the status quo is generally the gauge relative to the audience you are presenting to.
If you are standing in front of a crowd of hundreds of people from different ethnic backgrounds then a “joke” regarding one of their ethnicities is not going to go down too well. If there are enough of them you might get a minor uprising on your hands. If there aren’t enough in the crowd to cause an uprising it’s up to other people in the crowd to speak up and object but they will only do so if they feel like the rest of the crowd won’t turn on them.
It seems to be a balance of treading on cultural sensitivities relative to your audience, but many times presenters will pass off “jokes” or off-hand misleading, stereotypical or even derogatory comments in such situations as being a “joke” and it was perhaps taken out of context. Whether a “joke” is in good taste, popular taste or just bad taste a better question is why was the “joke” needed at all?
Why can’t people get through a conversation about a given topic without feeling the need to make jokes about other people based on stereotypes? What value does it add? It feels to me like it’s embarrassment-based “humour” whereby people chuckle at such comments only because they feel like the topic is off-limits or uncomfortable.
Many people would argue that if there are people in the audience that aren’t offended by your “joke” then that’s fine so long as most people aren’t. That logic doesn’t track for me. If you think like that then when does one cross the line? If you offend one person? Two? Ten? Twenty? At what critical mass does the number of people you offend by your “humour” become an issue? Isn’t it simpler to just avoid the commentary altogether?
The audiences grow larger, the demographics change and before long there’s no “joke” you can make that will not offend at least some person. What then? Do you become a straight, scripted monologue written in advance, reviewed by ten other people and read out like the news at 6pm? Certainly that’s what mainstream media have generally done. No-one is offended by the news for what they say at least.
With the advent of the podcast and individuals who have never considered these points of view are now exposing their opinions to a global audience of unknown background and experience. At that point it becomes impossible to predict who will take offence to what. Through download statistics it is possible to at least trace general locations around the world the podcasts are listened to but not a great deal else. So why then persist in making “jokes” about people from other countries for example when you know you have listeners from there? The most likely reason is that people listening to you are at much further than arms-length away. An auto-delete from your Inbox or a block on Twitter and away goes that voice(s) of dissent. You certainly aren’t going to be beaten by an angry mob for your comments and the only real retribution is that fact that you may have just lost a listener. I’ve heard it spelled out on one podcast that “they won’t change” based on offending people from other countries. No big deal? Let’s try it from another angle.
In the same way in a crowd people can put their fingers in their ears to drown out such “humour” the answer, “no-one is making you listen to that podcast” is just as odd as the suggestion, “no-one is making go to that rally to listen to that person speak.” Clearly you have chosen to listen to that person or that podcast and have made the effort to attend/download and listen to them speak. Should you expect more respect from the presenter for them taking your time? Your time is just as important as theirs - why aren’t they respecting your choice to listen to them speak?
Presenters that neglect a portion of their audience are disrespecting those audience members about whom the “joke” was made in an attempt to elicit awkward “humour” from those audience members that were not offended. Many of these “jokes” are based on stereotypes and sometime even oppose that persons own knowledge whereby they “joke” about something being opposite to reality because they think it’s funny.
It’s unfortunate that so many people in the world haven’t travelled to (and lived in) other countries, met (and become friends with) people from different backgrounds to learn tolerance and fairness and understand that some “jokes” are just in bad taste and are essentially pointless. The people listening that aren’t offended are going to keep listening anyway even if you hadn’t made your “joke” and those that were offended have been disrespected and will now stop listening. What did you achieve with your “joke”?
Now some people reading this will say, “I am who I am and I can talk about whatever I want” and may possibly even resort to the catch-phrase: “It’s a free country.” Here’s the thing: No-one is disputing that you can say what you want nor whether your home country is or is not ‘free’. What’s being disputed is whether or not it is simply the right thing to do to make “jokes” about other people for whatever the topic/reason/stereotype.
It’s easy to sit at home in your armchair and commentate on the world at large: other cultures, other places, other people. It’s harder to put yourself out there and open your eyes. I would love to travel more, see more, meet more people from around the world as I know enough to know my eyes are only just barely open. What’s sad to me are those people for whom they believe their eyes are already wide open. All too often they are ones sitting in the dark whose eyes, open or shut, both look the same.