Binary Balance

For what amounts to a long time in the short history of the Internet, Google has been a synonym for large scale. I vaguely remember a quote from a Google employee who – when talking about their work and just how early they need to start thinking about scaling a system up – said something like ‘One day you get something kind of working and the next day you have 5000 users’¹. There’s not many places where a developer is forced to deal with scaling issues basically from the very beginning of a project. Google developers must scoff at warnings about premature optimisation.

The amount of data that Google stores for people and about people is impressive, mindboggling, constantly growing and more than a little scary. The launch of Google+ adds a new dimension that depending on your perspective, could exponentially add to the scariness factor of the information Google is keeping on us.

Every now and again a horror story will come along which deftly highlights the fact that ‘customer service’ and ‘Google’ appear to be mutually exclusive concepts, at least as far as the general public is concerned. Accounts disabled, important data or one’s entire online identity lost, with no recourse. Certainly #FirstWorldProblems if ever I’ve heard one, but none the less I don’t think calling them horror stories is an exaggeration. Read more...

It seems that social media is everywhere today. Live tweet our show using the hash tag ‘#WhyJustWatchWhenYouCanCriticise’! There’s other websites as well as Facebook? But how do do your friends know about your inane comments on those ones?! One could be forgiven for thinking the read/write web is getting old hat these days. Web 2.0, how unfashionable an epithet for use by today’s modern web hipster. Read more...

There’s been a fair bit written about how people are noticing that the Internet is changing the way our minds work in subtle and perhaps disturbing ways. The gist of it being that the always on, fire hose of information that the Internet has become is turning us into ‘digital gold fish’ and could be the cause or enabler of such coined maladies as ‘Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder’ (somewhat tongue in cheek) or ‘Internet Anxiety Disorder’ (less tongue in cheek). The previous links are a little old, but the more recent articles on this subject are pretty much still saying the same thing. There was even a book written on the subject called The Shallows. Read more...

I’ve been working in the web industry for about a decade now. My first job was customer facing technical support for an ISP, but I soon moved towards web design and development.

Throughout my life and career, I’ve never kept a blog (until now). I almost exclusively posted on forums, mailing lists, chatted on IRC etc. under a pseudonym. I stopped really even thinking about it, it became just the way I rolled.

I only created a Facebook account in late 2007 mainly to see what all the fuss was about and to appease a friend who wanted to initiate me into the Transformers Archive. I got onto Twitter in early 2009. I suspect that I created a LinkedIn account only last year also. So what’s the reason for this impressively late uptake of some of the most popular online social networking sites, especially for a person who works with the web every day? Read more...