After this interchange, I figure they don’t have the title, I can’t rent it and that’s why. It was really just a throwaway comment, because it’s the first film I’ve searched for that I haven’t been able to queue for reasons other than its release date not having passed. I have since received an email from a customer service representative:

Dear Jasper,

Further to our conversation on Twitter, unfortunately, “9″ is not currently available to rent from LOVEFiLM due to very recent problems with the supplier of rental copies. I‚m sorry for any inconvenience or disappointment this may cause you. If this situation changes we will of course let you know. To make it up to you we are crediting your account with a free rental.

Now, this is how you treat customers. I am on an unlimited plan, so an extra rental isn’t really going to affect me that much, but the gesture is the point. This shows me that, even though this isn’t a fault of theirs, they’re trying to show that they care about my experience with them, and (I hope you’re listening Panelfly and Sony Playstation – I know my updates are protected now, but they had weeks to respond before I did that!) ensure that every experience I have with their company ends with me being happy. You certainly nailed it again, LOVEFiLM.

But are these products really free? I mean, sure, you don’t put your credit card details into these things and there’s not a person sat monitoring everything you do and laughing when you put on some goat porn, but if you’re using Google DNS or Chrome then you can bet they have a record of someone at an IP you used doing it. And if you’re logged in to a Google product as well, you know all it takes is matching those IPs together and we’ve got a name and a face. So now, every time you turn on your Googleputer, there’s no reason NOT to show you a Google Ad for the latest installment of unmissable goat porn on your Google Desktop – you WATCHED it, so you must want to watch more! It stands to reason that when I have an email about Viagara in my inbox, I want to see ads for it too.

To me, that doesn’t make these products free. Sure, I use GMail, but only because I can hook it up to my mail client and forego the ads, I use the search because it’s fast and integrated with almost everything and I use GCal for work, but think about the type of data you’re giving companies access to before you actually use these “free” services. If you don’t know what DNS is, but you know Google’s is pretty fast – find out what DNS is before you tell a company EVERY SINGLE WEBSITE YOU VISIT, NO EXCEPTIONS. If you like the sound of a free operating system, think about what it means to give a company access to ANYTHING you do on your computer. I’m not saying this is the case, but if you don’t want to pay for an OS; there are plenty of amazing, free ones around.

Google has quickly learned from twitter that knowing about your users as in where they are or what their name is, or what someone said in an email isn’t worth nearly as much as knowing every little thing about our lives. Where you’re going to eat, what you ate when you got there, what you’re reading, what you recommend, what movies you like, where you work, what you do whilst you’re at work, all of that makes anything you’ve got with a screen and a Google product on the potential to be a tiny billboard for any type of thing that can be programmatically deemed applicable to you – and it’s not independently moderated – if someone finds out you like the sound of an iPad, you aren’t going to be getting legit ads on where to get one, you’re going to be getting shitty “GET A FREE IPAD IF YOU JUST GIVE US YOUR CREDIT CARD DETAILS AND MAIL US YOUR FIRST CHILD” ads. You’ve seen Google text ads, right? You might even use a plugin in your web browser to block them, so why open yourself up to have them put all over your life?!

It’s hard to blame Google for this, and they’re not the only ones. I mentioned Facebook; they’re getting just as bad, and they’ll probably end up worse, and this is why. You willingly tell Facebook EVERYTHING. Date of birth, who you’re related to, stuff you like, your employment history, political views, music taste, everything. You then proceed to give it up-to-the-minute information on all the stuff that’s catching your attention now. You’re a fickle idiot, and so was I until this all occurred to me. What’s potentially worse about Facebook is that you’re telling all of this stuff to them, giving them all your secrets, and they’re giving this data to anyone who knows a web developer. When you install an application, I bet you don’t read what they get access to – those little cancerous quizzes have access to “your Profile information, photos, your friends’ info and other content that [it] requires to work”. Do you really like quizzes enough to tell Johnny Nobody all that stuff about you? I don’t.

So, what’s the point in this? Mark Zuckerberg says that “privacy is no longer a social norm“, and I agree. Everything that you can write down about yourself can be leveraged to try and sell you something. Fair enough, it could be something that you might want, but I want that ball to always stay in my court. If I want to buy something, I’ll look for it. Eric Schmidt says that “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place“. This is utter bullshit. You’re entitled to have secrets and you should have secrets. Maybe don’t tweet about them, or post them on your Facebook wall, but they’re not secrets if you’re doing that. What Mr. Schmidt is saying there is “if you have a secret and you use one of my company’s products, I’m going to use that secret to get some scammer to try and sell you shit”.

Now, I’m not against avertising. It can be pretty useful. However, Google used to just be a box to search stuff in. Then it was a box to search stuff in with ads on it, then it was an online equivalent of everything you used to do on your desktop computer. Now it’s all that stuff from before, plus it’s got its own backup of the internet, and soon it’ll have phonelines. It’s always changing the game, and it keeps all that stuff it had from before. No matter how they decide to change the game up, they’re always going to know everything you’ve ever told them, whether you know they did or not. Same with Facebook. So, think about what you’re telling websites about yourself and who might end up knowing that stuff and, if in doubt, walk outside with your eyes closed and tell the first person you bump into what you were going to tell that website – if you’re comfortable with them knowing it then you’re OK!

I was linked to a quote on twitter by someone way higher profile than me, and it appears to have sparked a bit of a debate, so I’ll weigh in.

Honestly, I’m shocked that in 2010 I’m still coming across ‘web designers’ who can’t code their own designs. No excuse.

I 100% wholeheartedly agree with this. How can you possibly design for the web if you don’t understand the limitations of the platform? Sure, you can draw a picture of a website, but will it work? If you’re lucky. Not EVERYTHING you can draw is easy or even sensible to interpret to a website layout, so you’re really limiting yourself or risking a substantial backlash if your design process isn’t influenced by a knowledge of CSS, browser inconsistencies and all of the cool little things web browsers can and can’t do.

I have to work with quite a few people who are “web designers” but don’t know HTML and it’s the most frustrating thing. It’s so clear when you’re working with a design of someone who doesn’t know the platform.

A couple of responses were to do with top chefs not working in their own restaurants or product designers not making the products they design. That has missed the point entirely (which is odd, because the source of one of those comments is incredibly well-respected) – chefs CAN cook, and could do it beautifully if they wanted/needed to. Product designers MUST know about the production process of the product they’re designing – you couldn’t just sit down and design a car or an aeroplane without knowing about production, materials and the thousands, probably millions of things you need to know about the product and production process.

So, from now on, if I work with you in your design capacity and you don’t know HTML or CSS, you’re not a web designer, you’re a website picture drawer.

Fortunately or unfortunately, however, it’s caused me to look at the way I use and abuse social networks and the repercussions that has on my relationships with people. Taking the most frequently accessed, Twitter and Facebook; there are times when I basically have nothing to say to people in real life because they already know everything that’s going on in my life. They know that I tried and didn’t like Starbucks, they know what song I like at the moment and they know what I’m doing this weekend. With some people, this starts a bit of dialogue that would, otherwise, not be there for lack of social networks, but it’s really the same few people. That’s not to say that I don’t value the digital interactions I have with people, because I really do, but I feel sometimes like it cheapens physical encounters because there’s nothing to talk about any more.

From this, I could go two ways, I suppose. Either stop using social networks in an attempt to try and personalise communication with people (as opposed to spitting in a crowd and seeing who gets wet), or stop seeing people in real life. There’s obviously a happy medium somewhere in there, but I’ve never been good at finding that so I feel like I’ve reached a bit of a fork-in-the-road. What’s more, is I feel like I’ve already made my decision. I’ve not posted to Facebook or Twitter for the last few days and I already feel like I’m having better interactions with people. I don’t have to preface everything I say with “I don’t know if you saw on Twitter, but…”, which is rewarding in itself. And now, here I am having a characteristic, verbose brain dump with lots of words and no real structure.

If I was going to commit Web 2.0 Suicide, I wouldn’t want to do it permanently. I’ve only used these networks to get back in touch with people I haven’t seen for ages, or to continue talking to new people I meet – it would be counter productive. I think I’d try to be more graceful about it; leave a final message on each network with contact details and a desire to talk and hopefully stir up at least one proper conversation. Maybe I’m being non-commital and self-destructive (oxymoron?), but I keep feeling like the less effort you make to keep a relationship going, the less that relationship is worth. Social networks make relationships zero effort and, by extension, zero worth and I’m not satisfied with that.

Subject to major edits/rewrites/hypocrisy/reorders.

I’ve not checked this for ages. If you’re one of these people, thanks much for subscribing – it fills me with an unjustified amount of self-worth. I hope I occasionally do stuff that makes it worth keeping me in your reader.

Tonight, however, I am a hypocrite. I wanted to play with my new flash stuff, so I threw self respect to the wind and took my camera. As a side note, it’s just my luck (and maybe an omen) that my camera battery began to die when I took it out of my bag! Nonetheless, it reaffirmed my suspicion that you can’t take artistically viable photos of someone talking in a room where there are flipboards on the walls! My shyness resulting from disdain at flashing cameras at events like this have not helped at all, but for what they are they’re ok. With that in mind, here are some blokes talking about some stuff, maybe even pointing at a screen. Enjoy.

Dan Griffey, the organiser of OpenWeb

Kev Wilson, talking about the iPhone app development cycle. Turns out it’s pretty similar to any development cycle, but with the added loveliness of the App Store.

Jof Arnold telling people not to write iPhone apps for profit unless you’ve got an ass-load of money to plough into it, you’re doing it for a client who has an ass-load of money to plough into it, or you’re doing it for anyone who’s prepared to make no money from it!

Paul Boag, pointing out the obvious. With crazy eyes.

(Don’t get me wrong, Aaron’s great, he just case-in-point!)

I’ve Googled for ffffound.com invites and I’m not alone. There are literally some other people who want these invites, but are in the same group of uncool people who won’t get an invite to this site, and are forced to passively view the stream of great images collated by the individuals in the know.

This all got me to thinking, is it a good thing that I’m not allowed in this community? What do I have to bring to the table? The popularity of my blog is proof positive that my images aren’t universally appealing enough to garner popularity on their own, so who wants to look at images that I like? Do I have time to positively contribute to this site? “Yes”, “Nothing”, “No-one” and “No”. My favourite thing about ffffound is the fact that idiots aren’t allowed (and if they do get in, they low enough in numbers to not gain power in moronic numbers (see: Youtube or any blog with open comments)). This is further confirmed by the fact that weheartit is nearly an unbearable stream of pretentious rubbish, arty muff-shots (a middle-waste-ground between art and porn that does nothing for no-one, and should be stopped) and images from ffffound that I already saw on the ffffound feed!

I’ve been getting the feed from ffffound for a few days now, and there are around 50-100 images a day that are top quality, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s because they don’t let people like me in. I’ve nothing to share, except my view on shared images (which no-one cares about anyway) so it’s right I shouldn’t be allowed to join. If people like me were allowed to join, it’d just be another Youtube, and who wants that?! Not me, that’s who.

ffffound – do us all a favour – keep it exclusive, don’t let idiots in!

So, we finally have internet. Communication with our landlord seems to take forever (we’ve been here nearly 2 months!) but Sky will be completely installed by the end of next week. Can’t wait!

They give you this sexy little modem/router. Lovely.