Customer service is very important to me. As a discerning, paying client, I expect the best service available at all times and get extremely disappointed with any less. I always try to be a good client and like to think that I achieve that most of the time.

Recently, I ordered a shirt from buyolympia (The Incident, coincidentally (yeah, you heard) is a brilliant splice of 8-bit graphics and chiptune that you owe yourself and your iOS device). It was delivered promptly, which was surprising as the delivery was cheap and the company is US-based. Excited like a child, I tore open the packaging, only to discover that I had received a women’s large shirt, instead of men’s.

I contacted Neven Mrgan on twitter with details of my order and received an email from buyolympia offering to send another shirt if I post mine back and giving me the option of choosing another shirt from their range as compensation. This was the first great response. I have no interest in getting more than I paid for from anyone and, seeing as this was clearly an honest mistake, I was happy to let it go with having just informed them of the mistake. I have a wife who likes wearing baggy clothes (and American Apparel shirts come up small anyway), so it’s not what you’d call a loss. I’d just donate the shirt to her (grudgingly – it’s a cool shirt!).

A week or so passes and Sudo rips a package through the letter-box. Surprisingly, it’s from buyolympia. I felt kinda guilty, or maybe like they didn’t receive my response or something, but upon opening said package, a new shirt and the following message fell out.

This made my day. There was absolutely no need for them to do this – Neven’s shirt was my first purchase through buyolympia and they have no obligation to me, but the note and gesture has put them near the top of my “Oooh-I-want-to-buy-a-shirt” URL list, so they’re bound to see some more of my money.

Kudos to them. Hopefully my good experience will get some of my friends on their site as well!

The internet is full of cool, free stuff for you to play with. Some of it is made by cool geeks who don’t want anything in return, some is made by businesses who claimed your soul in their terms agreement. A few are cool geeks who becamse businesses that had to make money, and therein lies a problem.

How do you go from being some guy in his (or her, whatever) room, to some guy in a small office, to 400 guys in a crazy loft in San Francisco smashing their heads against the wall trying to figure out the least offensive way to make money from this brilliant thing they’ve created.

If it’s not already obvious, this is loosely based on Twitter. Twitter always seems to have struggled with making money. Sure, you can sell search data to Google and Microsoft, but that money isn’t going to cover everything. You could even get some investors to give you a boatload of money, but they’re eventually going to want to see some sort of return.

Once you’ve exhausted those avenues, it’s unfortunate but, you’re going to have to turn to your users. This presents a problem. Users hate it when you make money from them. Even if it doesn’t cost them anything at all. Show some adverts (some people – yes you, Gawker – take this way too far) and people moan that you’ve sold out. Start charging and you might as well have broken into someone’s house and just started taking their stuff.

It must be incredibly frustrating when a bunch of people are selling an app to use your service and making decent money from it when you can’t make income no matter what you try.

If it were me, I’d do what Facebook is trying to do. Get a load of businesses on board and promise them good advertising. When I say “good”, I mean advertising that might actually work. When I use Facebook, I see ads for stuff that relates to what I talk about and what’s in my profile. I probably see ads my close friends would see, too. That’s the only way I can explain some of them! Facebook ads don’t annoy me – I trust them. It’s all based on things I willingly tell them, so why wouldn’t I trust them? I’m a pretty reliable source when it comes to the things I like.

This seems to be what Twitter is doing. I don’t know how much real value there is in trending topics. I think they’re pretty useless, personally. As soon as something gets popular, it gets spammed and becomes pointless. Spam notwithstanding, there could be real value in selling trending topics. In order to do this, Twitter needs to put them in your face. They need them to be in pride of place on their website, on any native clients, anywhere. But doesn’t it make people moan?! God, take away people’s faces and their predisposition to whining about inconsequential shit goes through the roof, doesn’t it? The entitled rage at the #dickbar in Twitter for iPhone is just mind-bottling. Seriously; 1. Who is really that angry about the #dickbar? 2. Is Twitter as a service not worth it? I mean, they’ve got to try and make some money, haven’t they? If you’re not going to visit any of that stuff, just don’t. At least let them try to make money because, if they can’t, the service will disappear. Sure, you’ll move on, but Twitter is a job to some people and, as such, they rely on it to live.

Personally, I’m a fan of Freemium. Show ads, offer subscription. Remove ads if people subscribe. Replace one revenue stream with another. I happily subscribe to Instapaper (I would pay more for this) and Flickr (though I sense Yahoo! isn’t long for this world, so we’ll see what happens there) and I would pay for Twitter and Facebook, too. It wouldn’t need to be a lot, either. Marco Arment charges $1 a month. With Facebook’s 500,000,000 users or whatever it is, even if 25% of those people paid a dollar a month, that’s a decent guaranteed income for just being yourself.

I realise that willingness to pay for a service puts me in the minority. You only have to look at App Store reviews to see that. Before I bought Tilt to Live for iOS, I was reading the reviews (of this 59p, 99¢ game that is fucking awesome, by the way. Seriously, you’ll get your 59p’s worth in the first hour of play) and people were outraged by the fact that One Man Left added a game mode and were charging the same again for the new mode. 59p that you don’t even have to pay, and would-be 5-star reviews became 3, 2 and 1-star. Unbelievable.

I suppose what I’m getting at here is that people don’t spend enough time looking at something’s worth. If it’s always been free or cheap, it should always be free or cheap. Nothing should ever change, even though your users don’t pay, they’re damn sure going to throw their toys out of the pram if you change anything and demand that you put it right-the-fuck back.

I say fuck that. The people who created this awesome thing that you love are probably only going to try to change it for the better. Even when they’ve got to start doing something a bit lame to make some money, they’re going to do it in the best way they can. This isn’t only so that they don’t piss off their users, but so that they don’t ruin the thing they created. Chances are, if you love it, the people who made it and spend their lives improving it love it way, way more and don’t want to be the cause of it properly sucking. Stop fucking moaning about free things – this is the world; we’ve all got to make some money at some point.

Bitching online is stupid. With that in mind, every time Seth MacFarlane says something in public it makes me wish I didn’t love American Dad and Family Guy. They’re both hilarious. He’s really not.

In his own, immortal words as Roger; what a douche.

Guys, this bickering has got to stop. The problem you’re having is that you’re both as good and bad as each other. This could go on forever, but I detect that you’re also both equally stubborn and have reached an impasse. This is why I have decided to try and make a couple of things plain to you. I really hope it helps.

Apple; you make amazing computers. Your hardware is sturdy and reliable, and when it’s not reliable you have great customer services to back it up. Your operating system is Unix-compliant, attractive, relatively stable and easy to use. Your phones are well-made and have a pretty decent OS, which is improving at an acceptable rate. You as an entity are the only weak link in the chain. You are the overbearing mother of the technology world; you refuse to ever let your products truly go to their new owners.

Without the indie software scene, OSX would be nothing. Sadly, some parts of the OS are so frustratingly closed that some things become almost prohibitive. The software you build and sell is fit for purpose (on-par with industry in some cases, below in most), but not nearly adequately varied to rival Windows or Linux.

When you released your phone, it was like the popular girl in school – looked so good in every way, but forced to spend more than 10 minutes with it and you wanted to smash it against a rock. Then came the App Store, and things were good for a while. You still, however, refused to let go control and some trivial things became impossible. This prompted an incredibly talented and generous group of people to start hacking the device so that people were free to use it as they wished. This was, after all, their right (regardless of terms and licensing – you part with outrageous amounts of cash, the right is yours!). You struggled for a while, but now you seem to have given up, which is nice. Thanks.

All of this meandering leads me to the crux of my point. You might be able to pull the wool over some people’s eyes regarding Flash on your devices, but you don’t fool me. I hope your hypocrisy left a horrible taste in your mouth when you wrote your letter to Adobe. If you think that any piece of Mac hardware or software is open, you must be kidding yourself as well as everyone else. How dare you preach openness whilst you supply us with phones and iPods that you can’t even change the fucking battery in?! How dare you preach openness when I have to run the risk of rendering my phone useless just so I can install software I want on it?! How fucking dare you preach openness when you actively and vocally restrict Flash from being installed in any capacity on a device that I own?!

And another thing; HTML5 may well be relatively open compared to Flash, but if I want to use HTML5 video, I guess I’ll be needing the H.264 codec (at time of writing). That famously open source codec. What’s that? It’s not open source? So Firefox (truly open) will never be able to support it? Sounds great.

Before you preach openness, maybe you should do some research into what that actually is! Give your devices to your customers and let them do what they wish. If I want to deplete my battery in 10 minutes using Flash and all my simultaneous processes, that’s my prerogative. If I want to consequently complain, you’ve got leverage to tell me where to get off! Honestly, sometimes your smug sense of superiority makes me hate you and everyone who makes excuses for you.

I hope I’ve made my point.

Onto you now, Adobe. This will be shorter.

Hey, Adobe. I see you’re getting all upset because Apple won’t let Flash run on their mobile devices. That’s pretty annoying for everyone involved. Whilst I disagree with their methods, I am totally with their justification. If you can’t even write a Flash plugin for a device with 2.66Ghz Dual Core processor, 4GB RAM and 512MB graphics memory without resorting to slowdown, memory hunger and frequent crashing, then you shouldn’t be writing plugins for devices with a fraction of that power. Seriously, Flash is the number one reason I scream at my laptop every day, and I’m almost certain that there’s plenty you can do about it. I wonder why you don’t.

I heard that Apple also now ban apps from being distributed using their nice, open App Store if they’ve been compiled using IDEs you wrote. Man, that sounds just like something they’d do, but have you ever actually used one of the apps compiled with your IDE? As a technical exercise to prove it’s possible, you’ve nailed it. Go you. But try using one. My God, it borders on harrowing it’s so terrible.

Your problem is really quite similar to Apple’s when you think about it. You give developers all of these great tools that can theoretically do amazing things, then you totally screw them by making a horrendous platform for their use. This subsequently screws their users, too, because people just don’t want to use apps that frustrate them. I’m now at the stage where I close any website that looks like it’s full-Flash. It’s that bad.

In case I haven’t made it apparent what might help you – make Flash better. Make it not crash browsers and eat memory and slow computers down all the time. I know it’s not as simple as that, but if anyone can do it it’s you. Seriously, no-one else could because, well, they’re not allowed!

And now, to my avid reader. There you have it; Apple and Adobe are just as bad as each other. So bad, in fact, that it’s created a convenient little blind-spot to badness that both of them can live in until the mighty Google comes along and sells the world to aliens after America accidentally signed it over to them without reading small print.

If you really care about open, buy an Android phone. Wait, that’s Google. Buy a Palm. Wait, that’d be a pointless waste of your time. Uhh. Sell all your stuff and go live in the woods with hippies and the squirrels so that none of this inane shit really even matters any more.

The problem of paying for reviewer attendance to events by hosts is a constantly hot topic, in games especially, it seems. Capcom are the latest to throw light onto the subject, hosting an event in Hawaii and paying for some to attend. This is such an irritating practice, because the skeptic in me will always think the reviewer is communicating something entirely separate from their review score when they’re reviewing. A low score says nothing about the game, but instead that even if someone else is paying, they haven’t been bought. A good score says either “I’ve been influenced by this awesome trip, and I’m giving a good review so the freebies keep coming” or “This was a great game, buy it!”, making the score completely untrustworthy!

As a (relatively) normal person, I don’t see why games companies have these events. I mean sure, a great willy-wave is fitting every now and again (especially when you’re knocking out an awesome game soon) but you’re making it impossible for reviewers to effectively communicate to their audience. You’re subsequently breaking the review process and cheapening your release!

I, therefore, propose that if a company has a game to review they send a copy to the reviewer and have them review it in the way they would normally play a video game (if you’re from Hawaii, and you usually play on a beach with hula girls and piña coladas, lucky you! (nationalist stereotyping aside)). Using this method removes peer and corporate pressure, as well as the temptation to be greedy from the review process. If you’re a reviewer, either pay for your own ticket and disclose that even though this could’ve been a subsidised event, you’ve integrity. Your review will serve your audience much better!

Thanks.