Unless you’ve been walking around with your fingers in your ears while humming “nah-nah-nah” you’ll be aware that Facebook recently announced a major new change to how profiles are viewed and managed.

Thanks to a tip off from Tom Ford, I was able to enable a preview of this feature on my own Facebook account .

My initial impression is that it’s technically very clever and it’s an impressive and immersive way of displaying your life and “fixes” many issues with social media in general. Social media is currently quite disposable. Twitter only keeps your last few thousand tweets as searchable and until recently it was almost impossible to view old Facebook updates.

The new timeline neatly overcomes this problem. I was able to go back to the 15th December 2006 when I joined Facebook and read all my updates. As an aside, it’s funny how things have changed. A lot of my updates were simple phrases “is enjoying Christmas”, “is working”. Ah, the heady days before lengthy COPY AND PASTE status updates.

A quick scan down the timeline reveals that Facebook has automatically added some events, such as my sister and sister-in-laws birth. It didn’t mention Luke’s birth even though he has a Facebook account and I’m down as his father. I assume this is because Facebook won’t add details of anyone under thirteen automatically.

Fortunately, you can add as many new events as you want. You can add the births of your children, anniversaries and you can even tell the world when you passed your driving test if so desired. There’s a neat little interface that allows you to do this near the top of the screen.

 I figured the 90s were looking a bit bare apart from leaving school and college so I decided to add my driving license which was simple enough. And yes, that antiquated motor vehicle was actually my first car.

“Pow!”
“Thwap!”

That’s the sound of Google+ and Facebook slugging it out for our continued patronage.

If you’re not a geek then you could be forgiven for not knowing much about Google+. It’s a brand new social medium which takes the best from Twitter and Facebook and rolls into a really flexible “life stream thingy” (that’s patented). It allows you to manage your friends into ‘circles’ and you can then share status updates, videos, links, etc with the whole web (public) or specific circles or even a fellow user or two. It’s a great interface that gives you a lot of control over who can see your errant ramblings on the weather and laborious discussions on what you had for dinner the previous night. That’s the blue corner.

In the red corner is the giant hulking beast Facebook. It seems like it’s been around for ever and nearly everyone in the world has an account and even some of their pets. It’s undergone a lot of interface changes over the years but none so dramatic as the recent update which totally changes its structure from a friend-to-friend walled garden to something more pragmatic and open.

In fact, Facebook want you to start posting publicly to the whole web and spend less time communicating with friends in private. The new controls closely follow Google+ in that you can select to share your stuff with friends, friends of friends, specific lists or the whole web.

The key point about “the whole web” is that anyone can read your updates even if they are not your friend on Facebook. To make it more convenient, you can now allow people to subscribe to your public updates even if they are not your friend. More on that in a minute.

All these changes push you to share more to a wider audience and to encourage you to start subscribing to people who are not your friend. Currently, a lot of celebrities have Facebook pages so they can interact with their fans without exposing their private updates. With this new model, they can allow people to subscribe directly to their Facebook account and select which updates to share with their subscribers. In fact, Mark Zuckerberg is doing just that: he’s converting his fan page fans into subscribers.

So, you’re now subscribed to every famous person you can think of. Your friends are still posting Farmville updates and talking about the weather. How do you cope with all that noise in your news feed? Well, Facebook have considered this already and have turned your old list of status updates in reverse chronological order into a little hub of recent activity. It uses its own algorithms to select “top news” and will show you most of what your friends are posting.

Hate! Hate! Hate!
I must admit, my first reaction to this new change wasn’t great.

A quick scan through my friends revealed the same “I HATE THIS!” feeling. Everything changed in a blink of an eye. Facebook was telling me what it thought I should read! How dare it! Sulkily, I just wanted my old list of status updates in reverse chronological order. Most of my friends shared the same opinion.

Lists to the rescue!
Then I discovered lists and realised that you can still have this format. I wrote a quick blog about this last night. In short, you can set up a new list and add friends and pages. When you then view this list you get the updates in reverse chronological order as normal. I would urge you to set up some lists and try them out. It’s a great way of reading updates from people you really want to hear from. It does take a bit of getting used to but I think in the long run it’s a good move by Facebook. You can re-order the lists and even add it to your ‘Favorites’.

Allowing Subscribers
If you want to allow subscribers, then all you need to do is view your own profile and select “Subscriptions” from the left hand menu bar.

Once you allow subscribers, you can edit the subscription settings to set who can reply to your public updates, which notifications you get and how to limit friend requests.

I think this is a great feature and I’ll definitely be making use of this. It also encroaches on Twitter’s niche by allowing non reciprocal  followers.

Give it a try, you might even like it! It’ll definitely promote more activity and more data in your news feed. Just as well you can set up lists to cut through the noise.

So there you have it. Yesterday’s roll-out of the new changes certainly caused some uproar and confusion but once you learn about the subscribers feature and how to manage your lists I think you’ll be surprised at the flexibility you now have in terms of who you can share updates with.

Are you listening Facebook?
I would love a few simple tweaks to the system. First off, I’d like a way to select multiple people when adding friends and pages to a list. Something as simple as shift+click to capture many at once. I also think it would be great to have an “All” list by default and new friends and pages are automatically added to this list. You could even allow it to be the default ‘home’ page. This would appease those who dislike the recent changes.

If you press your ear to your monitor, you can hear thousands of people gnashing their teeth over the new Facebook news feed changes. For years, we’ve had a simple chronological list of status updates. I log in a few times a day to get a snapshot of what my friends and family are up to. I keep my friends list small so I don’t have a lot of noise.

Today Facebook unveiled a newly designed Facebook news feed. The reasons for the change? Almost certainly because of Google plus, but that’s for another blog entry. This new news feed is like an overview of your friends. The ordering is mixed up and it only shows what Facebook believes are worthy of showing.

I like things simple. I like to view a list of status updates in a reverse chronological order. Fortunately, you can still do this.

Lists
Facebook recently updated their list functionality. The idea is that you add people in lists grouped by common interest and you can then read just their status updates in a reverse chronological format. Once you get to grips with lists, you really won’t mind the new changes.

You can even add Pages to these lists very quickly. To do this simply:

- Click on the list you want to add items to from the sidebar.
- Click on the “Manage List” drop down in the top right of the page
- Choose “Add/Remove Friends” from the drop down box
- When the dialog box opens, click on the drop down box in the top left of the box and select “Pages”
- Select the pages you want to add and then click “Done”  - simple!

I’ve set up a few lists for family and local people and it’s a great way to read their status updates without noise in-between. You could even create a list for “All” and add all of your friends in that list. This would then give you a close approximation of the previous Facebook format. You could even bookmark that list link and use that as your default landing page.

You can use the “List Suggestions” box to quickly add people into a list. It’s really quite fast and you can add a few hundred people in a minute or so.

A great feature of these lists is the ability to filter out what each list displays. So you can choose not to receive “Games” updates in certain lists. Phew! Saves having to ‘hide’ each game as they sneak into your feed.

The new format combined with lists is actually more powerful and flexible than the old system. Thanks Google+!

Give it a try! It’s quicker and easier than setting up a new ‘I hate Facebook’ page or photoshopping a meme.

Update: I’ve written in more detail about the new changes here.

Are you happy? Truly happy?

Perhaps you would be if you had a better job or a more expensive car or more friends or won the lottery? You aren’t alone if you feel this way. Many of us do. The elusive promise of happiness is just out of reach. Indeed, most of us assume that how we feel is beyond our control. We’re but a small sail boat on the ocean of our emotions; tossed violently as the waves crash about us.

I recently read “The Art of Happiness” by the Dalai Lama and Howard Cutler. You’d be forgiven for thinking that the somewhat trite title revealed a tome filled with homogenised Eastern wisdom dumbed down into fortune cookie morsels; a tragedy of a self-help book promising a dozen steps to liberation.

What you actually get is a series of conversations and interviews between the Dalai Lama and an American psychiatrist which reveal candid and useful guidance on how to lead a more fulfilling life.

Western culture tends to be overtly pessimistic. Our media fuels our fears daily. A warming planet; economic crisis; epidemics; pandemics; diseases; et all. Freud’s pessimistic view has dominated modern psychiatry. We’re doomed to battle with our ego and id for the rest of our lives. Indeed psychiatry is more focused on making us less miserable than making us truly happy. A simple example of how we think is in how we treat ageing. Each wrinkle and grey hair must be eradicated lest it betray our true age. A booming market in creams makes empty promises of smooth skin and wrinkles plumped. Instead, we should consider wrinkles and grey hair as a celebration of a life lived and not something to fear. Fortunately the Dalai Lama has a more optimistic world view.

The Dalai Lama as a Tibetan Buddhism monk has spent his entire life training his mind and firmly believes that everyone has the right and ability to be truly happy if they are prepared to invest time and patience into training their own mind.

The Dalai Lama comes across as warm, funny and — cliched as it may sound — wise. Howard reflects on these conversations at various points in the book and uses his own cases to re-enforce the Dalai Lama’s teachings.

I firmly recommend this book to anyone be they happy or sad. It contains a lot of useful methods to really get the most from your own life and to, dare I say it, develop a spiritual nature.

The Dalai Lama’s basic rule for sustainable happiness is to develop a warm heart and compassion for others. He considers that all humans are born to be compassionate and to help one another. This may seem an alien concept to anyone who has been in a supermarket on a Saturday. To illustrate his point, the Dalai Lama asks one to consider a suffering animal in pain, You would have to have a very hard heart to not want to help it.

The book is broken down into rough sections which explore the topic and offers advice on how to improve your own life in this area. I’d like to share some passages which I found relevant or very interesting.

On Happiness

Whether we are feeling happy or unhappy at any given moment often has very little to do with our absolute conditions, but rather, it is a function of how we perceive our situation, how satisfied we are with what we have.

I found this statement to resonate. It’s easy to think about what you don’t have and never consider what you do. This is compounded when you compare yourself or situation to another. If you focused solely on what you do already have, you would certainly feel happier about your life and situation.

While we have this body, and especially this amazing human brain, I think every minute is something precious. Our day-to-day existence is very much alive with hope, although there is no guarantee of our future. There is no guarantee that tomorrow at this time we will be here. But still we are working for that purely on the basis of hope. So, we need to make the best use of our time. I believe that the proper utilization of time is this: if you can, serve other people, other sentient beings. If not, at least refrain from harming them. I think that is the whole basis of my philosophy.
‘So, let us reflect on what is truly of value in life, what gives meaning to our lives, and set our priorities on the basis of that. The purpose of our life needs to be positive. We weren’t born with the purpose of causing trouble, harming others. For our life to be of value, I think we must develop basic good human qualities – warmth, kindness, compassion. Then our life becomes meaningful, and more peaceful – happier.’

When you consider those that regularly donate their time and energy to a cause they believe in are generally more happy and content with their lives than greedy selfish people, you would find it hard to disagree.

On Self Reliance

Our modern Western society fosters the belief that you need to be self reliant. This tends to disconnect us from each other as we all try to move through life on our own. The Dalai Lama believes that we should develop a warm heart and willingness to help each other.

As the Dalai Lama spoke, I began to think about all the people involved in making my shirt. I started by imagining the farmer who grew the cotton. Next the salesperson who sold the farmer the tractor. Then, for that matter, the hundreds or even thousands of people involved in manufacturing that tractor, including the people who mined the ore to make the metal for each part of the tractor. And all the designers of the tractor. Then, of course, the people who processed the cotton, wove the cloth, and the people who cut, dyed, and sewed that cloth. The cargo workers and truck drivers delivering it to the store, and the salesperson who sold the shirt to me. It occurred to me that virtually every aspect of my life came about as the result of other’s efforts. My precious self-reliance was a complete illusion, a fantasy. As this realization dawned on me, I was overcome with a profound sense of the interconnectedness and interdependence of all beings. I felt a softening. Something. I don’t know. It made me want to cry.

Is our treasured self reliance nothing more than an illusion? Almost everything we do or touch is a combined human effort if you really think about it at that level.

On Pain and Suffering

If I’m unhappy, then I must be the ‘victim’ of someone or something – an idea that’s all too common in the West. The victimizer may be the government, the educational system, abusive parents, a ‘dysfunctional family,’ the other gender or our uncaring mate. Or, we may turn blame inward: there’s something wrong with me, I’m the victim of disease, of defective genes perhaps. But the risk of continuing to focus on assigning blame, and maintaining a victim stance, is the perpetuation of our own suffering.

This is a very common trait, I believe. When something unfortunate happens, it’s all too easy to become a victim of some external force rather than dealing with it.

But we also add to our own suffering in other ways. All too often we perpetuate our pain, keep it alive, by replaying our hurts over and over again in our minds, magnifying our injustices in the process. We repeat our painful memories with the unconscious perhaps wish that somehow it will change the situation – but it never does. Of course, sometimes this endless recounting of our woes can serve a limited purpose; it can add drama and a certain excitement to our lives, or elicit attention and sympathy from others. But this seems like a poor trade-off for the unhappiness we continue to endure.

I know that I am guilty of doing this. We tend to replay moments and exchanges and negative ones always receive prominence and it only serves to keep the pain alive.

‘So I think that to a large extent, whether you suffer depends on how you respond to a given situation. For example, say that you find out that someone is speaking badly of you behind your back. If you react to this knowledge that someone is speaking badly of you, this negativity, with a feeling of hurt or anger, then you yourself destroy your own peace of mind. Your pain is your own personal creation. On the other hand, if you refrain from reacting in a negative way, let the slander pass by you as if it was a silent wind passing behind your ears, you protect yourself from that feeling of hurt, that feeling of agony. So, although you may not always be able to avoid difficult situations, you can modify the extent to which you suffer by how you choose to respond to the situation.’

This is a key part of the book for me. How often do we destroy our own peace of mind by reacting badly to an event? We create that pain, it is not thrust upon us! This passage should be read and re-read until you fully understand the power of simply changing the way you react.
One of the key points the Dalai Lama stresses is that to be truly happy you need to weed out your negative thoughts and concentrate on the positive ones. This can take years of training but it is a vital step to take. Most of us tend to focus on the negative. The things we’re not good at. The bad things that have happened. This is destructive thinking.

On Worry

‘It seems that often when problems arise, our outlook becomes narrow. All of our attention may be focused on worrying about the problem, and we may have a sense that we’re the only one that is going through such difficulties. This can lead to a kind of self-absorption that can make the problem seem very intense. When this happens, I think that seeing things from a wider perspective can definitely help – realizing, for instance, that there are many other people who have gone through similar experiences, and even worse experiences. This practice of shifting perspective can even be helpful in certain illnesses or pain.

How true this sounds to me. When a worry arises, it is easy to magnify it and allow it to consume you. Sometimes a shift of perspective is all that is needed to change how you feel. Indeed, the Dalai Lama’s thoughts on worry are very simple. “If there is a solution, then don’t worry. If there isn’t a solution, then there is no point in worry”.

I found the book to be incredibly insightful and gave me much to reflect on. The book doesn’t push religion. Indeed, a lot of the book is aimed at those who have no faith. The Dalai Lama offers his Buddhist training and insight in a simple to digest format. His notion of spirituality is simply a social conscience and a desire to help others.

The value of training ones mind to be calmer and more robust is obvious. Life is constant change. We get older and our relationships change. We will face many difficulties on our paths. A calm and robust mind will meet these challenges and be strong enough to cope with them.

As the Dalai Lama said: “A tree with strong roots can withstand the most violent storm, but the tree can’t grow roots just as the storm appears on the horizon.”.

I’m really enjoying a relatively new band from London called “Yuck”. I assume this was a reaction to other names band members suggested. Their sound hails from the 1990s and they really remind me of Dinosaur Jr and Belle and Sebastian.

A few of my favourites from their recent eponymous album:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Yesterday I received my 32GB HP Touchpad and after an hour or so, I wrote up my first impressions which were mostly good. The build quality was good and webOS had some very nice touches such as full multitasking and an intuitive way to browse open apps.

I spent a little more time on it last night and have some more observations.

Firstly, in use without a cover, it’s pretty slippery and quite hard to keep gripped when laying down or sitting up without propping it up. The back cover is made of high gloss plastic which flexes under pressure. The gloss surface makes it very slippery and I constantly felt my fingers slipping down in use. This is easy to fix with a case of course but compare that with the iPad and the iPad’s aluminium case is more tactile and easier to grip.

I like that the home button has a little light that throbs when you have new notifications even when the device is off. This reminds me of my old Blackberry Bold’s red LED and it’s very handy to see when there are new notifications without switching the device on. When you do have new notifications, they are listed on the home ‘lock’ screen.

In use, the OS is slick with the exception of odd periods of lag. I tried to link a few of my accounts to the device and it would just spin and spin for a few minutes before continuing. As mentioned yesterday, you get used to tapping and having no feedback while something loads a few seconds later.

I really like the task bar at the top of the device which is almost always available. From here you can quickly adjust screen brightness, view current notifications and toggle rotation lock and volume controls. Speaking of rotation, the Touchpad seems more sensitive to rotation than the iPad. Quite often I would move the touchpad a little while shifting seating position and have it rotate to portrait and I’d have to spin the touchpad manually to force it back.

I ran the system update application which happily told me there was a new version of webOS available (3.0.2 if you’re interested). It downloaded it over the air and then told me it needed at least 50% battery before it would even consider running the upgrade. When it had sufficient charge, it was a very quick process and much more enjoyable than the iOS updates which require a connection to iTunes and a goat sacrifice to prevent bricking (in my experience, anyway).

The HP App Catalog is very much modelled on the iOS app store and that’s no bad thing. It offers the usual tools; browsing via categories, recommendations or direct searching. As expected, it’s not as well stocked as the App Store but what is there worked well. I downloaded a Twitter client, charmingly called “Spaz HD” and the ever-present  Angry Birds. For me, having a list of strangely named apps that are “exclusive” to webOS and a lack of familiar names further gives the impression that you’re using a second rate device.

I asked myself the golden question: If the Touchpad was available 18 months ago and I had to choose between the iPad and the Touchpad, which would I have purchased? Yeah. The iPad. But only because I have an iPhone and an iMac so it makes sense to go native. If I were to base it solely on the hardware and software and remove all other factors? It would be a close call.

If the same apps were available on both platforms then there really isn’t much in it. webOS gives a richer OS experience in that you’re aware that there is an operating system tying together the applications whereas iOS takes a back seat and is largely transparent. This is why iOS is such a success. It’s not the most technically advanced. It’s not the most attractive but it works well, it’s intuitive and it doesn’t get in the way. In webOS I’d find myself in a settings page with no way back to the application without hitting the home key, swiping the page away and reloading. It constantly reminds you that you’re using a computer.

In many ways, I’d love to see webOS mature and see how it looks in a few years because I think it could have been a serious contender to Apple or at the very least a pretty solid second. Alas, we’ll probably never know. It’s certainly too late to take any decent market share with Amazon about to enter the tablet market with a low cost device and Android maturing.

So what of my device? I’ll probably sell it on if my family don’t want it. There’s zero point in keeping it if you have another tablet already. It does what every other tablet does but with less available apps and that is why HP made the decision to pull it.

I was lucky enough to be able to purchase a HP Touchpad during their recent fire sale. I’m sure you’re all aware of how 42 days into the launch of their new ex-Palm webOS powered tablet HP pulled the plug and slashed the retail price for remaining stock.

I haven’t had a lot of time using the device but here are my first impressions:

HP have clearly sought inspiration from the iPad. This is inevitable and expected. The packaging is very Apple like with a very high level of detail in the box and pull outs. The inner carton slides out to reveal the Touchpad. Underneath the Touchpad is a small box that pulls out of the tray.

The supplied cable and power point is manufactured to a high quality and has been designed to look attractive which is another detail that Apple are famous for. The Touchpad uses a standard mini-USB which is welcome for those who have a box full of proprietary cables. We’re looking at you, Apple.

After powering up the device, you’re encouraged to register a webOS account and then you’re free to explore the device.

Unlike iOS, webOS takes a top down approach much like Blackberry. You register services such as Facebook, Skype, etc in the individual apps (Photos, Messenger, etc) and choose how deep you want the integration. For example, the front facing camera is used for video calling. Instead of having a native app to handle this, it asks you to register or sign into your Skype account. Once done, you can share your contacts in the phone book. This means that when you choose to video call a contact, you’re doing so transparently via Skype. The same is true of the Photo app. It allows you to link your Facebook account to import all your Facebook photos onto your device as if they were stored locally. This has its pros and cons for those used to iOS. The benefit is that you get a centralised experience from various different APIs as if they were native. On the downside, if you didn’t have a Facebook account or a Skype account, then you’d have to register each service manually. Similarly, you can download the webOS Facebook application and have it import your contacts and calendars into your Touchpad.

In use, the Touchpad is pretty slick. It can be unresponsive at times, though. You jab at an icon and nothing happens; there is no feedback your jab activated the icon or any loading icon which results in a few more jabs. A short while later, three new panes will open up. You quickly learn to jab and pause but it doesn’t inspire a huge amount of confidence. The animations are slick but are a little jerky at times. It seems petty to mention these things but it shows just how polished the iOS is.

The keyboard is quite spacious even in portrait mode. Everything is where you expect it to be. It has the numerals above the alphabet which was quite useful with the shift key accessing the special characters.

The notifications system shares an icon at the top right which is pretty neat. It allows access to all notifications that have been sent by the apps. This is much better than how iOS currently handles them and Apple are set to improve this in iOS 5.

When you press the home button on the front of the device, you’re shown all open apps as “panes” you can swipe left and right to select a different pane (and often a different app) and if you drag the pane up, it closes it. This is really great and intuitive in use.

webOS has true multitasking. You can start a video chat, open a URL, and go back to the video chat which still listening to the conversation. This again beats iOS’s current “pause and resume” style multitasking. As expected, though, if you have too many apps open then performance begins to suffer.

You might label me an iOS fan boy but you cannot deny that the iPad is the benchmark in this market. The iPad is a little slicker in use and has all the advantages of the iOS app, music and video stores. The HP hardware stands up nicely and the OS is smooth and intuitive. It’s all moot because HP have pulled the plug and it’ll be developed no further. I think this is a shame but ultimately the Touchpad was too late to take any market share because it looks a bit like an iPad, it smells a bit like an iPad, it costs as much as an iPad. But it suffers from not being an iPad.

I’ve been asked to take some pictures of the iPad alongside the Touchpad. I apologise for the poor photography. My dimly lit office, cheap lamp and iPhone 4 don’t make for a great photo studio when dealing with back-lit images. Anyway, here goes:

 The last picture is the Touchpad in an iPad 1 case. A good trick if you really want to confuse an iPad user.

I recently read 37Signal’s eBook “Getting Real” which outlines their philosophy on web app creation. I recommend that anyone writing web software or creating a web site service read it as it is a breath of fresh air and makes many salient points.

You can either purchase the PDF or read it free online.

Of course, it’s not a one-size-fits-all business plan for everyone and I found myself disagreeing with some of the points as I write distributable code that has to function under a variety of platforms and an greater variety of uses.

The general theme of doing away with the dogmatic meetings/functional spec culture is something that we already embrace at IPS. We don’t really manage from the top down and stifle creativity. We allow our staff to work alongside us and we encourage a strong point of view. We often have epic battles over feature ideas and the product is all the better for it.

For me, here are the most resonant chapters.

It Just Doesn’t Matter

Our favorite answer to the “why didn’t you do this or why didn’t you do that?” question is always: “Because it just doesn’t matter.” That statement embodies what makes a product great. Figuring out what matters and leaving out the rest.

There is a lot to be said for this attitude. It’s a fine line between not insulting your customers and not being seen as unhelpful or unwilling to embrace their ideas and really evaluating a feature request.

Start with No and Forget Feature Requests

Every new feature request that comes to us — or from us — meets a no. We listen but don’t act. The initial response is “not now.” If a request for a feature keeps coming back, that’s when we know it’s time to take a deeper look. Then, and only then, do we start considering the feature for real.

This is an excellent point to make. We get literally thousands of feature ideas and requests. We don’t immediately act upon any but we do take note when a common idea or concept comes bubbling up all the time.

Avoid Preferences

You’re faced with a tough decision: how many messages do we include on each page? Your first inclination may be to say, “Let’s just make it a preference where people can choose 25, 50, or 100.” That’s the easy way out though. Just make a decision.

Preferences are also evil because they create more software. More options require more code. And there’s all the extra testing and designing you need to do too. You’ll also wind up with preference permutations and interface screens that you never even see. That means bugs that you don’t know about: broken layouts, busted tables, strange pagination issues, etc.

This is perhaps the most resonant for me. Back in the early 2000s when dynamic websites were emerging you could impress your visitors by offering a plethora of settings. Change the font size, color. Change the page width, etc. It was a novelty and people looked for the number of settings you offered as some kind of currency for the value of your product.

Things have changed. The two most popular websites online have the least user preferences. Does Twitter allow you to reverse sort tweets? Does it allow you to change the number of tweets listed? Does Facebook allow you to drag and drop its widgets to customize your home page? No. Because no one wants to do it. Endless fiddling just makes everyone miserable. You are better off just making a call, sticking with it and encouraging people to learn that one way of working and be done with it. Anyone who has spent an hour trying to calibrate their monitor will know what I mean.

If you have a spare few minutes, go and browse the essays. You might find yourself nodding along more than you thought.

A book caught my eye the other day in Tesco. A fairly impressive looking hardback just released entitled “I Am Number Four” by an unusually named author. A quick scan of the dust jacket piqued my interest:

John Smith is not your average teenager. He regularly moves from small town to small town. He changes his name and identity. He does not put down roots. He cannot tell anyone who or what he really is. If he stops moving those who hunt him will find and kill him. But you can’t run forever. So when he stops in Paradise, Ohio, John decides to try and settle down. To fit in. And for the first time he makes some real friends. People he cares about – and who care about him. Never in John’s short life has there been space for friendship, or even love. But it’s just a matter of time before John’s secret is revealed. He was once one of nine. Three of them have been killed. John is Number Four. He knows that he is next . . .

When I got home, I purchased it on my iPhone’s “iBooks”. I wanted to share a few thought about the book and about reading books on your iPhone 4.

First off, the book. It’s the first in a series called “The Lorien Legacies”. It’s already been snapped up for a movie adaption and one wonders if the screenplay didn’t come first as it’s written like a novelisation of a film.
The premise of the book is somewhat imaginative. There are 18 life sustaining planets in the universe. The nearest to us is a planet called Lorien which is ten times smaller than Earth. It’s people are much like humans although much more advanced. Their planet is destroyed in an invasion by the Mogadorians; a cruel race who have sucked their own planet of resources. During the destruction, nine Lorien infants and their guardians are put in a ship and sent to Earth. The infants develop “Legacies” super powers (ability to become invisible, great strength, telekinesis, etc) and their guardians help train them. The nine infants are protected by a Lorien “charm” which means they cannot be killed out of sequence.

The Mogadorians follow them to Earth and set about killing them. The book follows “John Smith” (Number 4) and his guardian Henri. The Mogadorians have dispatched three children and are eager to tackle the rest before their Legacies develop.

The book hooks into the typical teen themes. Our protagonist is 15 and at high school. He is alien; an outsider developing super powers and falls in love. It channels Twilight and Harry Potter although it does have a few twists of its own. It’s pacey enough and the climatic scene is well executed.

I found the book to be a little lazy. As mentioned previously, it feels like a novelisation in that it isn’t very descriptive and doesn’t give much insight into internal monologues beyond some flashback sequences. It is very obviously trying to start a new franchise. The universe created is rich and the Lorien mythology is quite extensive and not everything is explained in the book which leads much unexplained. The Mogadorians are especially well formed and quite intimidating.

I finished it in a few days and it’s very much bubble-gum fiction but enjoyable nonetheless.

I have read a few books on iBooks now and I’m quite comfortable with it. The iPhone 4′s retina screen makes it perfectly clear and the adjustable brightness is a nice feature to have at night when you don’t want to broadcast a floodlight across the room.

My only complaint is a lack of a tilt lock like the Kindle app has. This prevents the app from going into horizontal mode as you lay back with the phone. I find myself having to hold the phone at an unnatural angle to prevent it from tilting. I’d also like the ability to “gesture” with the phone to turn pages. You can either slide the page (with a cool page turning effect) or tap on the left or right hand side to move backwards and forwards through the pages. It would be great to just shake it to turn pages to save having to tap the screen every 30 seconds or so.

Yes, it’s Monday; it’s the X Factor result show wrap up blog post!

If you were the talent booker for the X Factor and had to book two big names to perform on the result’s show who would you pick after crazy eyed Robbie and dead eyed Whitney spun almost as many column inches as Jan Moir? Surely you’d play it safe and book the two most non-threatening acts in the world? That’ll be why Sunday featured Westlife and Michael Buble. Surely you’d be hard pressed to find two cuddlier acts.

First up was boy band juggernaut Westlife back after taking a year off. Many think this is to rest and recuperate but I think it’s was because after nearly 10 years releasing albums of covers they needed to take a break to allow other artists to write, perform and release new songs for them to cover. This theory proved fruitful as their new single is, yes – you’ve guessed it, a cover.

As much as I would have enjoyed seeing Shane, Mark, Nicky and The Other One lurch onto stage singing out of tune and collapsing as a finale in their own vomit, it didn’t happen. Instead they sang rather nicely and I’m sure that all over Britain, nans were agreeing what nice boys they were whilst sipping their cocoa and practising their catcalls for that nasty Simon.

They were backed by a laser show even Jean Michael Jarre would have found slightly ostentatious. The neon light beams were quite distracting and constantly threatened to decapitate Shane. Or is it Mark? Oh, the one that sings the most. Not the one that always looks like he’s miming.

Phew. One act out of the way without dresses popping off or manic stares directly into camera 3.

Next up was Michael Buble. A man who proves that God is a woman with a cruel sense of humour. She gave him the voice of an angel, the face of a movie star and finished the package off with the ears from a Mr Potato Head.

Still, the man’s a charmer and sang his little heart out without troubling the tabloids. As nice as it all was, I really, really wish the Robbie and Whitney duet was considered. I’d watch every week for that.

Suspiciously man-like girl band “Miss Frank” and the cavernously mouthed and incorrectly spelled Danyl found themselves in the bottom two. Miss Frank proved that throwing a random rap into the middle of a song isn’t a successful formula and were booted out.

Louis sole remaining act “Jedward the twins” were saved proving that Britain is no longer taking the X Factor seriously.