February 2010
Often I come across those articles that tell me how I should use Twitter effectively in order to gain and retain followers and how to better engage the community. There are also the people that tell me what I should and shouldn’t be tweeting. To be honest it’s a load of bollocks.
If there was ever a battle for the Internet then Google has won, even if you don’t use any of the various apps and tools they have you more than likely use the Google search. For over 10 years now Google has grown from research project to Internet superpower and has no plans giving up any of the stranglehold it now holds on your online lives. Surely now something needs to be done to ensure the things Google does is in the best interests of the population and individual users, not the bottom line.
Supposedly the motto on which Google was founded, yet it seems on the way to becoming the multi-billion dollar company it is today they seem to have lost their way. If you leave aside all the apps and tool’s that Google produce you are left with their core business, the Google search. It’s become so ingrained in our daily lives that we now use Google as a verb to search online. Amazingly this seems to be something they disapprove of, yet I’m sure secretly love it.
Last week Brendan Dawes posted about the UK design scene and caused a rather heated debate. I was in total agreement with what he had written, but certain comments about positive noise rang true. Is it simply the way we communicate doesn’t allow us to feel as if we can give negative comments, or is it our own view of ‘if you can’t say anything nice, say nothing at all’.
This week a website was launched, it was mentioned on twitter and gained a few congratulations. Personally I didn’t get it, the design seemed too simplistic, certain elements of cross browser compatibility didn’t seem well considered and I thought the redesign was no great improvement on the previous iteration. In my opinion the site also looked as if it was designed in the browser, something that is gaining a lot of positive promotion on the web. In my opinion it’s since web designers have been working this way I’ve seen a lack of creativity in some instances, but this is a completely different argument.