Some things that I read about last week…

1) 31% of Americans aged over 18 years-of-age spend 5 hours per day on a computer, tablet device or smartphone.

2) Anders Breivik, the man responsible for killing 69 people in a shooting and another 8 in a bomb attack in Norway, ‘trained’ for the attacks on ‘Call of Duty’

3) Want to grow your own food with almost no effort whatsoever? Then try out iGrow, a virtual allotment being offered by a farm in the UK. You pick what you want to grow using your iPad or other device, get someone else to plant it, water it and look after it and grow it and tell them when you’d like it harvested.

Yes, very convenient, but surely this misses the whole point about growing your own food, gardening or life in general. If everything is instantly available then nothing has any meaning. If something requires no effort then it has no value and if something is too easy there is no pleasure to be gained from it.

A while ago I was on an 11-hour flight on Upper Class with Virgin Atlantic and my laptop battery was down to 8%. I asked if there was a plug socket in the seat and the attendant said “No”. I then asked if they could recharge my laptop for me. “No, I’m sorry we can’t do that.” I don’t know about you, but I do feel that a socket – or at least the offer to recharge devices – is more important that what’s on the new menu or what’s showing on in-flight movies. But it gets worse.

What do I see in the newspapers this morning, but an announcement that Virgin Atlantic is allowing mobile phone use throughout some of its aircraft “to encourage business travellers.” We’ll here’s one frequent business traveller that will from now on be flying with someone else.

Can you imagine sitting next to someone from London to New York, let alone from London to Sydney that is either on the phone or has a phone that keeps going off when you’re trying to sleep? Long-haul flights are just about the only place left where there is still silence and you can actually hear yourself think.

I’m sitting in a rival airline’s lounge (Cathay) as I write this and my  gold Virgin Atlantic frequent flyer card is flying back to Virgin.

Is Facebook worth $100 billion? The valuation seems excessive – it’s more than Boeing is worth, but on some levels it could be seen as something of a bargain. Other tech companies such as Google and Apple are worth far more and many of the big trends are moving in Facebook’s direction. Global connectivity is increasing rapidly (from 1.6 billion online in 2010 to 3 billion in 2016 according to Boston Consulting) and the move to the mobile web also benefits Facebook hugely.

At the heart of Facebook’s success is surely a deep and long standing human desire to connect with other human beings. People like Facebook because Facebook makes finding new friends, or looking up old ones, easy. It’s also a fast and convenient way to stay in touch and share everything from party invitations to baby photos, which is probably why the website now accounts for one in every seven minutes spent online globally. Don’t forget that Facebook also knows an extradordinary amount about the minutiae of its users lives, which is why it’s able to target advertising so effectively (and why 85% of its revenue comes from advertising). The sheer number of Facebook users (currently 850 million and rising) and the amount of time users spend on the site (15.5 hours per month in 2011) means that Facebook is rapidly becoming the world’s de facto homepage with other companies increasingly linking to it because users have to login in using their real identities.

But what might go wrong for Facebook in the future?

The first problem the company faces is operational. How to scale a small start-up into a giant corporation? This shouldn’t be too difficult. The second problem is around regulation and this could be tricky. If Facebook continues to be successful it will, at some point, start to resemble a monopoly in the eyes of the US regulators, at which point there could be an anti-trust case. It happened to Microsoft and it could easily happen to Google and/or Facebook. The third problem concerns privacy. To date Facebook has been very clever about mapping the connections between people and what interests them and then selling this information on to third parties. Much of the time Facebook’s users have little or no idea that this is happening and those that do know don’t seem to care. But this could change.

The network effects that made Facebook so large so fast could act in reverse if users start to feel exploited financially or no longer trust what is increasingly seen as a rather arrogant and potentially autistic company. Recently, users were forced to adopt a new feature called Timeline and had to opt out if they did not like it. This created a few mutterings, as did the acquisition of Instagram and the use of facial recognition technology, but so far there are few signs of a serious Facebook fallout. But as the company grows larger there will be inevitable tensions between attracting users and getting them to part with their money. One also suspects that when it comes to privacy the company’s devotion to online openness will continue to cause it problems in the real world too.

So it’s the school holidays (again!). The sun is out. It’s warm. We have a couple of acres of woodland and one of freshly cut lawn. We have footballs, rugby balls, cricket balls, bicycles, a fire pit, trees to climb and enough air rifles to start a small war.

Where are the kids? Inside playing on the Wii.

I am very tempted to place an ad in a national newspaper offering all outside areas free to any family, or children, that would like to enjoy the great outdoors.

I’ll even cook the sausages.

I’ve just been in San Francisco and amongst other things heard the CEO of Twitter, Richard (“Dick”) Costolo, talk about he power of real time information, so here’s my twitter feed. The most interesting thing he said, from my point of view, concerned Twitter’s vision.

He said the vision (or mission) is to “Bring you closer.” But, as he said, that’s not even a proper sentence. Brings you closer to what? But, as Jack Dorsey pointed out, users should be able to finish the sentence for themselves. Brings you closer to… whatever you’re interested in.

This is clever stuff, very empowering and very democratic on so many levels, but my worry is still that what people are interested in, and what Twitter is primary used for, is still largely facile and vacuous. It’s largely bringing people closer to trivia, which, I’d argue, distracts them from matters of real substance.

Maybe this doesn’t matter. If 99% of Twitter users are only interested in Lady Gaga then so be it. At least they can connect directly with her thoughts without the obfuscating intervention of agents, PR companies, traditional media organizations and such like. You could argue that this is a positive development, although you could also argue that the removal of traditional gatekeepers is precisely why we are drowning in digital dross and narcissistic nonsense.

The 1% that are left are free to connect to whatever they are interested in, which could be links to great articles from the New York Times or how someone’s day is shaping up down in Palestine or Syria. It’s as facile or fundamental as you want it to be. This said, I’m still rather concerned about why people have such a need to connect to superficial celebrities or broadcast the minutiae of their own lives. Is this because their lives are so isolated or lack real meaning?

Did he make me want to start using Twitter? Not quite. I’ve changed my mind about Twitter, but not about using it myself. I’m already dealing with a deluge of digital data and having to tweet and/or read yet more information from Twitter feeds doesn’t feel like a good idea for me personally.

Here are a few of the other interesting things Dick said:

– It took four years for the first billion tweets to be sent. A billion tweets are now sent every 4 days (Quite interesting if you start to think of this in terms of a global pulse or instant snapshot).

– They are sitting on a huge volume of information, but extracting meaning from the data is extremely difficult. What they are getting good at is seeing where the tweets originate from geographically, in close to real time (You can bet the FBI and CIA are rather interested in this!).

– The migration from the web to apps is a really big trend. They are seeing 40% QTR on QTR mobile growth. (He didn’t mention location based services or location based intelligence and analytics, but he could have).

– Global growth in non-smart phones around the world (e.g. Brazil and India is significant).

– It can be difficult to figure out the difference between a trend and an anomaly.
(Difficult without hindsight. A trend is only a trend until it bends as they say).

– If you look at how businesses are successfully using Twitter (Virgin America was cited as an example), they have an authentic and consistent tone of voice that comes from the heart not corporate PR. (This is really fascinating. In one sense big companies have got to learn to let go and let their own customers develop the brand’s personality and tone of voice).

– Twitter innovates through experimentation (Practice pivoting & ‘fast failure’).

– Innovators need to feel uncomfortable all the time (Only the paranoid survive).

– He’s relaxed about revenue streams – they will come. (Build it and they will come).

Feel free to tweet all this, of course. 🙂

This is too cool for words – a way to integrate your iPad with a manual typewriter keyboard. I don’t even own an iPad, but may now have to buy one just to get this out on the train (or you can synchronize with a standard PC or Mac, but that wouldn’t be quite so portable). Does this mean anything? I mean why do I want one? Is it just a pure nostalgia trip or is it saying something about our relationship with modern technology? You tell me!

More here (including DIY build instructions) or buy complete thing here via etsy.