This is long and ranty. I haven’t done long and ranty for a while. Take it or leave it.

It was one of those “blinding light” moments - the moment when you finally turn to acknowledge the feeling that’s been kicking around for many months and realise “oh yeah!”

I finally discovered that I really hate Facebook.

It’s not like I’m the first - the most famous incidence being Jason Calcanis’s decision to declare “Facebook Bankruptcy” back in July, an event which trickled by without actively triggering my own epiphany. My realisation was prompted by a conversation with someone who recently heard a talk by a Facebook developer. The salient point, from the horse’s mouth, was that Facebook believe that their application is compellingly relevant to its users “because everyone you add on Facebook is someone you want to hear from.”

Evidently no-one on Facebook staff is being bombarded with the constant “Zombie requests”, Quiz requests, “rate your movies” requests and other effluvia which, post-trumpeted-API-launch, have become a veritable Face-tsunami. Furthermore, no-one at Facebook seems to know anything about psychology, social networks or the interaction between the two.

There are two major problems with the “all your Facebook friends are relevant to you” hypothesis.

Firstly, social networks tend to morph under the weight of human psychology into a Pokemon-like popularity contest - “gotta catch ‘em all” - you add everyone you’ve ever so much as exchanged glances with, and anyone with less than 50 friends looks like a lonely loser.

Secondly, it’s very hard to deny friend requests since it’s obvious that you’ve done so and it’s a pretty blunt snub. Even if you don’t care much about the latest “addee” in your stream, few people want to be seen by their former schoolfriends as an unfriendly snob, and even fewer people want to upset a professional contact who may be a key ally at some point in the future…

…which is why everyone’s contact list balloons over time - for many months I had only 8 contacts on Facebook; by the time of last night’s revelation, that had grown to 125. There are only three possible answers to this -

1. Bite the bullet, and reconcile yourself to the idea of coming across as an asshole.
2. Add people until your “Feed” looks like a cross between Toys’R'Us and a warzone.
3. Get the hell out of Dodge (my current preferred solution).

I’m periodically fascinated by how people view online life, and the differences in the boundaries that they set (or perceive) on the internet, versus that “other” life with the blue ceiling and the third dimension.

My curiosity was piqued again this weekend when one of my posts here attracted a totally unrelated comment asking a Flickr support question.

I’m astounded that someone managed to take a path from my recent occasional stints helping out on Flickr’s support forum, all the way to this place which (save for occasional posts where my personal interests or life experiences overlap with work) is totally unrelated to my place of employment.

I can very well imagine the route they took - they saw my posts on the forum, followed them to my profile, and followed the link from there to here before posting. But…

Okay, so I broke. It took twelve days, but in the end I just couldn’t wait any longer to get an iPhone into my life.

I’d rationalised against it for weeks before launch - “the keyboard looks like it needs some work”; “never buy 1st Gen Apple hardware”; “wait for 3G instead of EDGE”. But this thing seemed truly amazing - a whole new experience as far as mobile devices are concerned. Ultimately, I wanted in on the ground floor.

So I’m slightly late to the party, and possibly not adding much at this point (I really haven’t scanned the interblogwebnet to see what others are saying about their phones), but I wanted to write down some first impressions, partly for my own later reference, partly for any of the 5 readers of this site who might not have got their hands on an actual iPhone yet.

Getting the boring stuff out of the way first, yes, it’s amazing. The UI is fluid and responsive - the original MacWorld demo and the existent tutorials aren’t gussied up to make it look any better; it really works like that. It is, in short, a thing of utter beauty, and takes mobile usability to a completely different level.

There are several worries I had which have proved unfounded so far.

Battery life seems good. I’ve been using the phone exhaustively (hey, it’s a new toy) and haven’t run into any “argh, battery low” moments yet. We’ll see how it holds out in the long term.

The EDGE thing is less annoying than I thought it would be - the slight speed problems of the connection are more than made up for by the ease-of-navigation around networked content.

The keyboard is perfectly usable after about an hour of practice. In some ways tactile feedback would be nice, but… I’ve never found the teeny-tiny button keyboards on any smartphones to be any better.

All in all, if I was at Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola or Samsung right now I’d be sick as a dog.

That said, here’s the problem with being Apple. Their products are often so very nearly perfect. You can tell that a lot of very dedicated people have spent a lot of time applying a breathtaking eye for detail. The downside of this is that the smallest details which are forgotten (and there will always be a few) stand out so much more.

So, with the basic assumption that the iPhone is jaw-dropping, here are the niggles I’ve found in the first few days…

Excuse me for a moment while I indulge in a bit of stating the obvious, but I’ve just had one of those moments where I stand back, look at stuff, and say “oh. wow.”

We’ve come a long way on the internet in the past 2 years. So far so fast, in fact, that when you’re living in the centre of it all and incrementally immersing yourself in it, it becomes easy to forget where you came from.

I was thinking along these lines because I was just tinkering with my account on Upcoming.org, adding a new event to the database and subscribing to some others. Having added the event in question, I linked in a freely-available mp3 by one of the bands. That done, I finally got around to adding the feed of my events on upcoming.org to my iCal calendar on my mac. And then I tagged some Flickr photos from Hack Day so that they show up in the event’s entry on upcoming.org…

In less than 10 minutes, I’d told the world about an imminent concert, filled my personal, portable calendar with events which I’ll want to attend, and shown people another angle of an event which happened last week. And none of this required any complex scripts, hours of screen-scraping or data-munging. It was all accomplished with a couple of clicks and a little bit of typing.

I’ve been thinking a bit about geek conferences since “The Future of Web Apps” took place in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. Specifically, a couple of interesting conversational threads that it inspired.

The first was best summarised by Chris Messina in his piece “The Future of White Boy clubs” (executive summary: “far too many speakers and attendees at these things are white men; how do we change that?”).

The second cropped up in multiple conversations. For a lot of attendees FoWA was an odd conference, because they’d seen most of the speakers giving similar talks before, usually some time in the past 12 months. This isn’t a criticism of FoWA as such - what they built, very successfully, was a cheap, quick and engaging “Best Web Conference Speeches in the world… Ever!” album.

I personally found it very rewarding, but I’m a latecomer to the conference scene, and haven’t done the usual round of SXSW Interactive, Etech, OsCon, FooCamp/BarCamp, etcetera.

One conclusion you could draw from this is that a lot of ‘alpha geeks’ attend too many conferences; that there are only so many things to talk about. But conferences are hugely useful in providing ‘face time’ with creative people from all over the world, and every occasion provides opportunities for new connections and conversations. Maybe the problem isn’t the number of conferences, but the fact that they’re all focussed around listening to clever people talk about… stuff.

There might be a solution to all this, though, and I think I saw it pioneered this weekend on the main Yahoo! campus.

I feel like a failure.

Not because I’ve really failed at anything, but see, I have this enormous backlog of photos, reaching back to May of this year, and I just haven’t got around to adding them to my flickr stream.

Every time I get around to titling, tagging and uploading a few more photos I feel strange that the events depicted happened so long ago.

It is, perhaps, the price of an ever-more immediate world in which current events are photo-blogged the minute they unfold, and every current event is dissected and commented upon in thousands of blogs, as it happens.

We never had a modem at home (the call costs in the UK were ridiculous), so my first serious encounter with the Internet happened when I got to university in 1996. I spent hours in college computer rooms, falling in love with the endless reams of useless information and software which were already floating around the web.

In those days web search was a very nascent industry, and my first guide to the sea of sites was a weird little directory called “Yahoo!”. I was studying English Literature at the time, and natural nerd though I always was, if someone had told me that 7 years later I would land an engineering job with the very same Yahoo!, I would have laughed in their faces.

From Yahoo! I jumped to using Altavista, still owned by DEC at the time. And not long after, I remember the buzz of discovering my first online “meme” - the Babelfish translation service, and the hilarious things it did to texts when you translated them through successive languages and back to English.

Over the past three years I’ve been directly involved in working with all three of those early online inspirations, and it’s been an amazing experience which has taught me a great deal, allowed me to do work of which I’m truly proud, and inadvertently catapulted me 5000+ miles across the globe.

But it’s time for a slight change, and so today marks my first day working on something slightly different - as of now I am the latest engineer to join the talented and possibly slightly insane team at Flickr.

Now, I’ve been mulling this over for so long that, in fact, the “podcasting” goalposts have moved some considerable distance since I first heard the term and choked most unpleasantly on my morning cup of tea.

Which is just the first problem - what the hell is podcasting anyway?

For the sake of some brevity, I want to tackle two things which seem to fall under this latest abortion of a word:

1. Recording yourself rambling on about something, and releasing it on the web.
2. Using RSS Media Enclosures to distribute audio content.

The majority of my scorn is reserved for the former.

Tagging - it’s where the action is right now. At it’s heart, it’s like all great technology ideas; so simple that you wonder why it hasn’t been a mainstream concept for years.

If you’re new to it, tagging is nothing more than assigning keywords to a piece of content, usually at the point of publication. A good example is the photo site flickr. When I upload a photo to the site I choose some words which are appropriate to describe the picture. These usually take the form of place names, people or objects found in the photo.

This is all about simple yet rich metadata, and it’s suprisingly effective. On flickr, for example, it’s now trivial for me to go back and view all my photos of wood, or those depicting Half Dome in Yosemite.

Apply the concept across a diverse group of photographers, and you get a collaborative picture of Half Dome which is built from the combined micro-efforts of each photographer to apply the tag.

Tagging, of course, doesn’t just have to be about photos. delicious uses the same concept to categorise bookmarks, and we’re even starting to see blogging tools that allow users to apply tags to their posts.

As a descriptive mechanism and a search tool, tagging is incredibly powerful. It is not, however, a “folksonomy”. Here’s why.

I’m getting mellower in my old age. I mean, look at this place. Movable Type all over the place, photos and delicious links in the right-hand column… What is this, a blog or something?

Nuh-uh. You’re not even close. Still not a damn blog.

I guess that some people would probably accuse me of dabbling in mere semantics at this point, and I think, to be fair, they’d be correct. This site (particularly on the other side of the fence, where I write an irregular diary about relocating from London to Silicon Valley) has an awful lot in common with others which fall under the banner of “blogs”.

But the semantics of the issue are important to me.