Switching to O2 has gone smoothly. Best part was not having to speak to a call centre; it was all done over the web and I'm being billed correctly. Oh, and I can see correct information about my account via the website, unlike Orange where bills from months previously would sometimes pop up for no explicable reason. Things like that do not instill confidence.

I took a look at O2's Bluebook service yesterday. It's not a bad idea; you can store your contacts online in case you lose your phone, it saves all the text messages you send or receive to your account and you can upload media from your phone and keep a blog. The problem with it is that it's poorly executed. I can see that O2 probably have the idea that getting people to be social on their site is good for their brand but I don't think it's going to be successful.

Take the blogging as one example; if I'm going to be bothered to blog then there are better platforms out there that don't moderate what I want to post. This is a stupid move, it's far simpler to have a 'report offensive content' function on the site and let the users do their own policing. I wonder what would happen if you posted something negative about O2 and something positive? By all means allow people to host a blog but why not provide a widget that allows me to post to a blog I already keep, or a sidebar widget that allows for microblogging via text for free. It all needs to be shareable and not restricted to the O2 site. When are the phone companies going to figure out that the web bloomed because it wasn't a walled garden? All their past efforts have been doomed to failure because someone who makes decisions doesn't grasp this. There are sites out there that already do a lot of this stuff much better than they ever will; let them do the heavy lifting and let your users have a much richer experience.

1 original comment:

Like the new look man! I’m all tagged up
Comment by Jawils — 6 April, 2008 @ 5:55 am

No politics in this post, just two simple inconsequential pleasures I've experienced recently. The first is my purchase, at long last, of a Le Creuset pot to cook in. If you haven't experienced their cookware then I suggest you buy one of their cast iron pots. They're expensive and you wouldn't want to drop it on your foot but they are, for all practical purposes, indestructible. You can justify the expense with the knowledge that this item will last you the rest of your life and will make the food you cook in it that bit more special. I use the pot on the hob to start cooking in and finish things off in the oven. Let things cook slowly and develop their flavour. Yum yum.

The other is watching TED talks on my PSP. I'm keeping a few handy for when I have twenty minutes here and there.

Update: I've had a problem with a couple of the talks I've downloaded. Some play fine, others aren't recognised. Does this have anything to do with what I've read about the PSP's playback requiring the header of the MP4 file to be in a particular format? When I get around to it I'm going to try converting the file with ffmpegx and will post how I get on.

Prince Henry of Wales was secretly deployed to Afghanistan and the media was complicit in not reporting what was going on. The subsequent furore and accusations of this being an exercise in public relations distracts from a comment that Prince Harry himself made in a subsequent interview:

"There were two injured guys who came back on the plane with us who were essentially comatose the whole way... one had lost two limbs - a left arm and a right leg - and another guy who was saved by his mate's body being in the way but took shrapnel to the neck. Both out cold throughout the flight."

We hear on the news when a member of the armed forces is killed but only occasionally do reports of the horrifically injured surface. I doubt if the Prince had mentioned it these two soldiers' return home would have been in the papers at all. That is the real and unforgivable complicity on the part of the media. Not the rehabilitation of a Prince as a 'hero' but of the ongoing human cost of war, both borne by British soldiers and inflicted upon the Afghan population. Then there is our own complicity. The cost of 'operations' in Afghanistan and Iraq could be as high as £3.3bn this year according to the Commons Defence Committee. Once again the British taxpayer acquiesces to funding ongoing misery and suffering for unspecified reasons.