Is there still hope for BlackBerry? Can Lenovo make a dent in the tablet market? We don’t know the answers to these questions, but are willing to speculate wildly. This week Andy Hadfield, Simon Dingle and Steven Ambrose discuss the Lenovo K1 tablet, Samsung pulling the Tab 7.7 from its stand at IFA, the Amazon tablet, app stores and operators, iOS 5, the launch of Telkom Business Mobile, Evernote acquiring Skitch, Google shutting down old projects, and more…

Shuttleworth is a South African philanthropist and internet entrepreneur who started the company Thawte in 1995 and went on to sell it to Verisign at the turn of the century in a US$575 million deal. He then became the second ever self-funded civilian astronaut traveling to the international space station as a member of the Soyuz TM-34/TM-33 missions. Upon his return to earth Mark formed the Shuttleworth Foundation and Canonical.

Simon Dingle recently authored a chapter on Mark Shuttleworth for the book South Africa’s Greatest Entrepreneurs. The publication will be available in September 2010.

Use the audio player above to stream the interview or click here to download the mp3 file.

In the Web 2.0 echo-chamber  bad ideas spread fast. This time nodal sparks came from web celebs like entrepreneur Jason Calacanis and online broadcasting demigod Leo Laporte – both of which I have the utmost respect for, and both of which are proponents of the anti-Facebook movement.

I also respectively believe they’re taking things too far.

Calacanis is known for jumping to conclusions and he’s been wrong before. A great example of this was his Twitter attack on the New York Times’ David Pogue for daring to publish books on products from companies he writes about in the ‘Times. He attacked Pogue’s integrity and my opinion that he was wrong in doing so isn’t just an assertion – but listen to Pogue defend himself in TWiT episode 213 and decide for yourself.

Calacanis is clearly a principled guy who feels strongly about things. I’m the same and have made bad calls on that basis before too, so it would be hypocrisy for me to criticise him too harshly. But I believe he’s wrong about Facebook.

That Zuckerberg is an awkward kid with a track record of doucheness is undoubtable. He has been presented as such from all quarters and even the movie about the birth and rise of Facebook apparently casts him as ruthless and untrustworthy, amongst other things.

But so what? I’ve met some hard hitters in the tech space, including CEOs of large companies, and I can assure you that being ruthless is a common trait amongst almost all of them. Being untrustworthy, on the other hand, is a common trait with young men in general and Zuckerberg was very young indeed when he allegedly knifed business partners in the back. Raise your hand if you went through your teens without doing anything stupid… I didn’t think so.

If you’re going to quit Facebook because its leader is an arrogant know-it-all with weird preoccupations and because the company isn’t in full adoption of the open approach to privacy and technology in general then I would tender that you should be selling all your Apple products, deleting Windows off your PC and getting rid of all your gaming consoles. No more Kindle books, and you should probably sift through Google’s user agreements too. And good luck finding a mobile phone and network to use it on.

The fact is that Facebook is a great and useful service irrespective of its CEO being a douchebag (which may or may not be true). The privacy thing also isn’t as big a deal as some will tell you.

I’ve always been very wary of online privacy and have implemented advanced controls on my Facebook account since it was possible to do so. I have groups of users and I control who can see what. For example, I don’t let anyone except really close friends and family see most of the pictures and videos of my kids. Those settings have persisted and Facebook hasn’t changed them. My account is still as secure as it was this time last year.

The problem Facebook has is that it does privacy too well. It allows for advanced control of your personal content and I’m yet to see another service come close in terms of the granularity it allows. As with any feature in technology, if you don’t apply these controls then it’s you that has the problem, not Facebook. The user is still in control of what the public gets and what stays private in terms of specified user groups and networks.

Because it does this better than most, people expect Facebook to shine at privacy. They don’t care that Twitter is completely open because it’s always been that way, unless you have a locked account.

I am not suggesting that Facebook is faultless, however. The company certainly has played hard and fast with the information of people who do not lock down their information and accept the default settings. It also clearly plans to leverage its situation to make money. But I’m not sure those are malicious actions. God forbid anyone makes a profit, right?

My suggestion is that everyone takes a deep breath and calms down. Facebook is no more or less evil than any other company trying to drive a profit. We could pick out individuals from any organisation and form opinions of the company as a whole based on that one person – but this is shortsighted and infantile as far as I’m concerned. Zuckerberg is the baby and Facebook is the bathwater. Let’s not throw them both out – even if Mark has been peeing in the bath.

There are way more people involved in the creation and running of the company than just the CEO.

I’m all for open software and networks. I believe the guys over at the Diaspora project are on the right track with their plans for a “privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network” and I can’t wait to see the fruits of their effort and funding. But for now Facebook is still a useful tool to me. I have no privacy concerns because I’ve taken the time to set things up properly. I don’t approve of everything the company does, but I could say the same for all the other providers whose products I use on a daily basis including Twitter, Sony, Apple, etcetera.

And, it bears repeating: if you accept the default settings then you can’t complain too loudly when they change. Lock it down like I did.

I had an enlightening discussion with science fiction author and digital rights activist Cory Doctorow in Croatia in 2008 where we discussed his abandonment of the Mac, amongst other things. Cory, who has a tattoo of a Mac on his right bicep, found himself at odds with Apple as a company in recent years and switched to Linux. I asked Cory how he was enjoying Ubuntu Linux, which he runs on a Lenovo laptop.

“I’m extremely impressed with Ubuntu,” he said. “But less impressed with Lenovo as a company.”

The problem? Lenovo’s user agreement for their laptops. The reality is that if you look at most technology companies closely enough you’ll find something to disapprove of. Sometimes you just need to consolidate that in terms of the advantages offered by the technology itself. Cory still uses Lenovo products. And I still use Facebook.

And no, I won’t be deleting my account today. Spare me the hype. I’d go so far as to say that most of the people who have been swept up in the anti-Facebook togetherness are ignorant as to exactly what it is they’re protesting.

But, if you do want to get rid of your Facebook account, check out Seppukoo – a service that aids you in your virtual suicide. And ra-ra for taking a stand.

Google Search is one of the last major international internet services accessible in China after the government in that country banned Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and several other sites in 2009, making them inaccessible to local internet users.

Google begrudgingly agreed to play ball with the great firewall of China in order to officially operate in the country, but after some of its users’ accounts were hacked – apparently from within China – Google said it had had enough and would pull out of the country if internet filtering was not relaxed.

I travelled to Beijing last year as a guest of Lenovo and got to experience the Great Firewall firsthand. It was eery not being able to access Twitter or Facebook, but I soon found ways around this. One method was to use SSH tunneling and apparently VPN access works well too – some companies are even making money out of selling this kind of access to internet users in China.

Another less obvious method was to use the browser on an Amazon Kindle. The Kindle connects wirelessly to cellular networks around the world thanks to roaming agreements with AT&T – Amazon’s network partner. Using the Kindle Browser I could hit Twitter, Facebook and other banned sites. The Kindle experimental browser is terrible – but it worked. And it’s free.

Obviously there are ethical issues with content filtering and I don’t believe governments have any right to apply such controls, but the reality of internet usage in China is that the filtering isn’t a big deal for users. I’m reminded, again, of infamous libertarian and computer scientist John Gilmore’s quote – “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

Google will still be accessible from China, but will not have a dedicated Chinese service, which is the gist of this latest news. This will provide new incentive for the Chinese to provide their own services, just as they have come up with their own alternatives to Twitter and Facebook.

I live in a country with problems-a-plenty, but at least freedom of speech and censorship laws are progressive and protected by the constitution.

A colleague recently asked me how to manage Twitter so that it remained useful, but was less of a distraction. “How do I use Twitter productively” is also one of the top questions I am asked when speaking about social networking. I’ll give you the list of recommendations I usually respond with – but note that these are more aimed at personal Twitter users and do not necessarily apply to using Twitter as a business, for example;

• Get real. You’re smart. And perfectly capable of coming up with the best ways of using Twitter so that it becomes your bitch instead of just another waste of time. Some of my suggestions will work for you and others won’t – but they’re all based on treating Twitter like a tool – not just for work, but socially too. Remember that you own the tool, not the other way around. Tool.
• Schedule and automate your tweets, but only when doing so will not be annoying to your followers. Hootsuite will allow you to schedule tweets to send at a later stage and the Twitter Tools plugin for WordPress can be used to automatically tweet when you update your blog. Scheduling is good; sending tons of tweets all at the same time will bug your followers. It makes more sense to spread them out. By batching your tweets at dedicated times you’ll also be less likely to drop by Twitter during the day. That said, don’t irritate your followers – DO NOT narcissistically send a tweet out with every mundane or arbitrary blog post you make and don’t schedule pointless minutiae. Some things will make sense to schedule and automate and others won’t.
• Integrate your Twitter and other social network accounts with a service like FriendFeed that allows you to monitor multiple social networks from the same place. Then instead of wasting time visiting Twitter, Facebook and other services via separate applications and websites you can track it all from one place and save time.
• Ignore. If you use a Twitter client that activates Growl or other notifications whenever there are new tweets in your feed, disable the pings and visual clutter, or set it to only notify you when someone mentions you or sends you a direct message. If you use a Twitter client on your phone only activate push and other notifications for direct messages. Get rid of the sounds and pop-ups so you can stay focused on what you’re doing. It’s probably just John saying “OMG LMFAO – @othermoron  ur 2 awesum. LOLZ” anyway. Of course, if your job is to run a Twitter feed then this doesn’t apply to you. Condolences.
• Weberise. Consider accessing Twitter via the Web, either by using the Twitter site directly, or via a web-based client like Hootsuite, instead of with a non-web application. And, more importantly, close the website down when you aren’t actively using it. When you don’t have a dedicated application running your attention will be directed to Twitter less often. Hootsuite is probably better than anything else you’re using anyway.
• Dedicate time in the day when you will check on Twitter. Set up a schedule, this could be once an hour or twice a day – whatever works best for you, and stick to it. I know this sounds lame. I hate timetables. But it works, if you’re disciplined. And, again, if your job is to watch a Twitter stream for your company then this obviously doesn’t apply to you.
• Mobilise. If you aren’t already using Twitter on your phone then you’re probably reading this as a printout – get with the times, grandpa. There are tons of great Twitter clients available for your phone. If you’re on the iPhone then check out Twitbird Pro, Tweetie or the Hootsuite app that integrates with the website. If you’re on a BlackBerry get OpenBeak (formerly Twitterberry) or ÜberTwitter. If you use a Symbian S60 device, like many Nokia models, then try Gravity. Some of these apps will cost you money, but it’s worth it. Alternatively use the Twitter mobile website .
• Don’t mobilise. It’s bad enough that you use Twitter all day on your computer – now you’re hauling it out while having supper with your family and watching Avatar? Put that thing back in your pocket, freak. And only use Twitter on your mobile when it makes sense and is socially acceptable to do so. If you and all your friends / family are geeks, then whip it out and go crazy. Whatever.
• Unfollow. Only morons follow all their followers. It’s the quickest way to build up follower numbers and also to make sure your feed is polluted with spam about Britney Spears getting naked. Who cares how many people follow you if 80% of them are spam-bots and douchebags? The less people you follow, the less of a distraction Twitter will be. If you must follow tons of people, and I can’t imagine why, then use a Twitter client like Tweetdeck that allows you to group people, and make a group of users whose tweets are actually worth reading. Then ignore the rest. Stop complaining about how people use Twitter and just unfollow them if you don’t like it.
• Variety is good. If you follow all of the above steps you will likely end up accessing and using Twitter from a bunch of different places. This can be irksome to minimalists like me – but get over it. It’s good to integrate Twitter into the rest of your life instead of the rest of your life into Twitter. However, if you want a single Twitter client that will enable most of what I’ve recommended, check out Hootsuite. It rocks. It also integrates with Facebook, allows for scheduling, is web-based, has an iPhone app and has other powerful features. Best of all, the web application is free. And no, I don’t get commission from them. Yet.

These are just some of the ideas I have for using Twitter productively, and will probably post more in the future. I’d love to hear your tips too, so comment away.

See you on Twitter, smarty pants…

I’m not sure why I wrote the above paragraph. It was supposed to be an introduction to a story about a new service called Web 2.0 Suicide Machine that lets you use API connections to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social network services to lock yourself out of them and delete all your contacts. Commit online social hara-kiri. Pretend that my introductory paragraph gave you a compelling reason to want to do that. Which it doesn’t.

Socialsuicide.org – the site that hosts the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine – is the work of an Austrian-born developer named Gordan Savicic. He wasn’t breaking any rules as far as I’m concerned – but Facebook accused him of scraping information or something, and banned his application. It still works for some other services, however.

Simply visit Suicidmachine.org and agree to it accessing your social networks via connect APIs, or give it your username and password for all the social networking sites you would like to destroy your profile on and it will start by changing your password, so you can’t get back in, and then it’ll delete all your contacts, while you watch. Your psycho ex-girlfriend who won’t leave you alone? Gone. That strange motherf*#ker who acts like he knows you and comments on all your pictures? Muerte.

I can imagine it being rather satisfying. But I’m not going to do it.

What would make Suicidemachine.org more useful, however, is if it deleted your account completely and removed your information. Now that could be a useful service. Kind of like Google’s Data Liberation Front that helps you get personal info in and out of Google.

The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine says it can delete your stuff in under an hour whereas doing it manually would take almost ten. I’m not sure about that, but you can see it in action in the video below.

So if you’re gatvol of social networking then give the Suicide Machine a go. If it hasn’t been completely banned yet.

The competition is heating up for Apple in the phone space. Most of the touch-phone products that claim to compete with the iPhone are rubbish, but Palm recently unveiled its Pre, complete with new operating system WebOS and implementation of some of the features, like copy and paste, that the iPhone doesn’t have.

Apple was recently awarded a patent for multi-touch however, and it may be able to use this to block the Pre from going to market. I hope that doesn’t happen because competition is a good thing.

Herewith my list of must-have features that the iPhone lacks. With these features the iPhone would be the perfect smartphone for me:

• Copy and Paste: This is something you either need or you don’t. And I do. I use my iPhone for Twitter, Facebook and a range of other services where it would be incredibly handy to use copy and paste – for example, for snipping a URL and pasting it into a Twitter message. It would also help getting around the fact that you can’t forward contacts from your address book, which brings me to my next salient quibble:
• Forwarding contacts from Address Book: On just about every other phone I have owned (even the really old ones) it has been possible to forward contacts from my Address Book as SMS messages. The iPhone just doesn’t do it. Perhaps the whole question of what format to send the contact details in has put Apple off, but vcard is a widely accepted standard, and I would even settle for just plain text with a name and number. It could even ask which number I wanted to send if more than one is saved for a contact.
• Forwarding text messages: The iPhone also does not allow users to forward SMS messages from their inbox – another feature most other phones support. I personally wouldn’t use this feature much, but I feel it should be there.
• Flagging email: I use the iPhone’s email client extensively. I think it rocks. Using an IMAP connection to my Gmail account means I am always up to date on my Macbook, phone and anything else I choose to view my mail with. But I can’t flag mail on the phone – and I wish I could.
• Trial applications: The App Store is the best thing about the iPhone and the prices are more than reasonable for the most part. But I really need to try out applications before I buy them, especially for the more expensive products. Sure there are ratings, but just because 10 other people thought this was a four-star application doesn’t make it the right one for me. Even a 24-hour trial would be OK – but I must be able to try before I buy.
• Respect for South African users: This is my biggest gripe. We can’t use Google Maps for navigation or directions in South Africa because Google doesn’t have good data for our road network. There are no games in the South African App Store because Apple refuses to pay the relevant licensing costs to make them available in the country. The podcast directory is also blocked to South African store accounts – there is no reason for this, it is just an error that Apple can’t be bothered to fix. And yet I have it on good authority that Vodacom has sold almost 50 000 iPhones in the country and the iPod does better in SA than it does in some European territories. I’m tired of being treated like a second-rate citizen because Apple can’t get its act together in developing markets. Apple: we love your products and we buy them en mass. It’s high-time you gave us some love. And while you’re at it, can we please have music in the iTunes Store too?

My only other gripe is with iPhone application developers who don’t use notification and push services to keep the apps on my phone up to date. This is a brilliant solution that Apple has offered developers, unless I’m missing something. The Facebook application, for example, could receive updates from my account and push these down to my device where I would be notified, instead of me having to open the application to see if I have new notifications. Perhaps any app developers reading this could explain to me why nobody uses the service? Fring? TwitterFon?

It’s only fair to also include a list of things I DON’T miss. Some people complain about these, but I regard them as non-issues:

• MMS: Get over it kids – you don’t need MMS. You might think you do, but you don’t. If you take a picture with your phone I’d rather that you email it to me. The iPhone has a great email application and I can’t understand why you would want to use MMS instead. MMS is a horrible standard that hardly ever works properly and is used to send annoying adverts from network operators. Not only do I not miss it, I don’t want it. And if your phone can’t do email then it’s time for an upgrade anyway.
• Better camera: As cellphone cameras go, the iPhone’s is good. Megapixels don’t mean much if you have a crap lens and the 2 megapixel camera on the iPhone will take better pictures than many other phones with 3.2 or even 5 megapixel cameras that have shoddy lenses. The lack of a flash doesn’t bother me either as I am yet to see a decent implementation of a flash on a phone – they’re usually little LED lights that achieve very little besides perhaps giving snipers something to aim at.
• Persistent applications: There isn’t much to say here. I don’t really need to run more than one application at the same time – but I do need iPhone app developers to start using notification and push services from Apple that would allow for notifications to be provided even if the application isn’t running. Windows Mobile phones let you run more than one app at a time, as does Symbian – and it’s messy. Memory is constantly full, it makes the phone run slower and remembering to terminate applications which otherwise stay resident is a ballache.

I’ll be at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona next month and look forward to hunting down the Palm Pre and comparing it to the iPhone. For now, however, I’ll stick with Apple. I love BlackBerry devices and the Nokia E71 is one of the hottest phones I have ever used, but the iPhone still reigns supreme in my universe. Each to their own.

This week’s issue of Finweek features my first ever cover story, which I am suitably excited about. The article looks at trends in Web2.0, social networking, mobility and communications, attempting to distill the value they hold for business and explore the dynamics of integrating these in the workplace.

I get the feeling that these technologies are reaching a tipping point in South Africa as I notice an increasing amount of people exploring the world outside of Facebook and move into services like Twitter, using them not only for the social side of their lives, but also for business.

Pick up a copy of this week’s Finweek and let me know what you think.

A few weeks ago I posted about Flock – a browser based on the Mozille engine (like Firefox) that mashes up your social networks. Flock does a decent job but still needs lots of work and I found that it was pretty bad with keeping Twitter updated. This, of course, could have more to do with Twitter’s recent server overloads than Flock as such. Nevertheless, while Flock came close, it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for.

I also tried Mugshot from Red Hat – but Mugshot is better at showing other people what you’re up to on all your social networks, not the other way around.

I still need something that allows me to mash-up my friend’s feeds from the various networks, so that I can view them all in one place. I’m hoping that a future release of Flock will answer that requirement.

But for posting to all of my networks what I need is a way to ‘carpet bomb’ them all with my updates.

Enter Ping.fm. This new service collects your credentials for each social network you subscribe to and then allows you to use a range of web applications or your instant messenger to jet out messages to all of them.

Ping.fm is currently in beta testing, but if you write to the developers they will send you a promo code to get you started. I have a code that I will send you if you drop me a mail. If you’re a social networking whore like me then it’s probably worth checking out.