In the past few days, British iPhone users have been bellowing into their phones in a range of timbres and accents that make them sound like they're auditioning for a place at Jon Culshaw's Elementary School of Impressionism. That's because Google have just launched a Voice Search facility for their Google Mobile App; it senses when you lift the iPhone to your head, it beeps, awaits for search data to emerge from your mouth - like, I dunno, maybe "BNP postcode search" and then presents the results on the screen for you. That theoretically saves you approximately 10 seconds that you would have spent keying stuff in on-screen, although in practice it only works if you adopt the kind of ludicrous transatlantic accent deployed by TV chef Robert Irvine (oblique reference there, I know, but if you don't indulge in TV cooking shows as much as I do, just replace "Robert Irvine" with "Dick van Dyke".)
According to Adobe, the company who have been behind it for the last three years, some 99.3% of desktop computers have Flash installed. We're all pretty familiar with the process; you visit a website, it tells you it can't display the content – but hey, it could if you installed the latest version of Flash, which it handily links to. You quickly install it, restart the browser, and bingo – your browser is now a willing receptacle for all kinds of content, notably YouTube and Google Video, but also a huge number other sites that employ it for navigation and animation. After all, if you're a website developer, and you know that nearly everyone visiting your site has some kind of Flash player installed, the temptation to make use of its vector graphics and video streaming capabilities is pretty irresistable.
But with more people accessing the internet on mobile devices, the ability to access all this Flash content is limited – and there's a battle quietly being waged to stop Flash having the dominance on mobile phones that it enjoys on computers.
You might wonder why your email is clogged up with hundreds of messages informing you that your sexual potency is to be found wanting. Well, the answer has emerged from a study at the University of California: it's because spammers need to send approximately 12,500,000 messages in order to get one positive response from a recipient.
I'm not sure about the ethics of their study, seeing as the researchers actually conducted their own fake spam campaign in order to assemble the results – but after they'd sent some 350 million email messages to gullible punters such as ourselves over a period of 26 days, they secured just 28 orders. Now you might think this a fantastic ratio, a testament to the power of spam filtering and the public's ability to identify a spam message and make the correct decision not to respond to it. But the Storm network – the colossal botnet responsible for a significant proportion of the world's spam – is still estimated to bring in some £4,430 every day, despite the miserable conversion rate. Which, by my rough estimates, means a billion spam messages sent every day by that one network alone. Terrifying.
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We're often told how valuable our personal data is, and how we ought to keep it all as close to our chest as possible in order to maintain our privacy, thus stopping people from stealing our identity, clearing our bank accounts and operating international drugs cartels under our name. But a couple of examples have surfaced this week of how anonymized data collection can be harnessed for the good of the general public. Researchers at UC Berkeley, along with Nokia, have just launched the Mobile Millenium Project, a voluntary scheme where GPS data from the mobile phones of drivers is used to collate a real-time traffic map of the area. And Google – presumably anxious to deflect criticism for using our search data to sling advertising back at us – is using the same data to plot outbreaks of flu across the US.
The popularity of Apple's iPod range has led to the similar dominance of the software it depends on to function: iTunes. From its beginnings as a humble, Mac-only music player back in 2001, it now sits on millions of computers – PCs and Macs – acting as not only a player, but as an essential syncing tool for every iPod, and the front end for the iTunes Store – far and away the most popular online music outlet.
But when any product asserts its total dominance of the marketplace, you can be assured that a group of programmers, somewhere, are probably working on an open source alternative. We've seen Firefox steal market share from Internet Explorer, we've seen OpenOffice lure users away from Microsoft Office; might Songbird be about to dent the ubiquity of iTunes?
The moment when mobile phones were first able to connect to computers – either via Bluetooth or USB – there theoretically opened up a cunning route onto the internet from your computer via the mobile phone's data connection. It wasn't long before the theory became reality; if you were away from home you could now link your laptop to your phone, and browse the internet while bypassing the pathetically small mobile phone screen. Positives: internet access wherever you had a phone signal. Negatives: slow speeds, and in some cases exorbitant data charges.
It's been about a year and a half since I wrote a column for The Independent about twitter.com. At the time, the general response from readers was that it felt like an lowpoint of irrelevant social networking, and that the constant flow of information was both unnecessary and intrusive. And unlike Facebook or MySpace, Twitter seemed as if it was probably destined only to be used by geeks, for the benefit of other geeks. But over the past few months, the service seems to have made a perceptible shift towards the mainstream. Of course, that might just be my own skewed perception from one very small corner of the internet – but its user base is undoubtedly expanding, and the service is feeling more valuable as a result.
News reaches us of a move by Vodafone to offer its customers the ability to change the system font on their mobile phones in exchange for £1.99 of hard-earned cash. As a scheme for getting people to part with money for something that costs the supplier virtually nothing, it's an ingenious move – particularly because it panders to our seemingly compulsive need to personalise or customise our phones and computers, despite them looking pretty good at the moment they were switched on for the very first time. Why do we have this insatiable urge to make things look so much worse?
If you're told that you have "unlimited" access to something, you'd be forgiven for assuming that you won't get a slapped wrist if you help yourself to as much as you fancy. "Eat as much as you like" buffets are just that; the restaurant staff may roll their eyes if someone returns to load their plate up for the sixth time, but there's not a lot they can do about it. Because that's what the sign promised on the way in.
Internet service providers, however, have a different understanding of the word "unlimited"; for them, it means "unlimited, right up to the point at which we limit it." Or, in other words, "limited". Acccording to Uswitch.com, 86% of us haven't really got our heads around this concept. And who could blame us?
Ever since the launch of the iPhone, its users have been whining vociferously about the fact that there's no built-in copy and paste function. When we all started using PCs or Macs, the simple act of getting a chunk of text from one place to another was among the first shortcuts we learned - and the slightly non-intuitive ctrl+V or command+V for dropping copied text into its new destination became second nature to us all. But with the launch of the iPhone, Apple deemed it, well, not particularly important. T-Mobile's forthcoming G1, which I was lucky enough to have a play with over the weekend, doesn't have copy and paste either. [EDIT: I was wrong about this - see video at the bottom of the post.] Which got me wondering: what on earth is the problem, here? And why, if these devices are being trumpeted as the ultimate interface between humans and the internet, don't they let us move text about, rather than having to key it all in for a second time?
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