Archives for July 2009

I've spent some time in recent days with Microsoft executives in the UK, and there's a surprising spring in their step.

Surprising, because these are not great days for the software behemoth, having just suffered its first annual drop in revenues in its history, as its major corporate customers cut back on their spending on products like Windows and Office.

But the executives I met were keen to stress a switch in focus from businesses to consumers. They appear to have woken up to the fact that Vista caused such a wave of disappointment among many users that severe damage was done to the company's image - and they say they're determined to do better.

They pointed to all sorts of stats showing how great an engagement their company had with UK consumers - 21 million Hotmail users; 17 million Messenger users; 16 million visitors to the MSN homepage each month. They enthused about some good reviews and record pre-order figures for Windows 7, due out in late October.

But what really seemed to have cheered them up was the reception for their new search engine Bing - now doubly important after the deal with Yahoo.

They claimed that it was delighting users and had enjoyed better traffic than expected. A quick call to Nielsen Netratings told me that Bing hadn't actually made much of an impact in its first month - 84% of all searches in the UK in June were done with Google while Bing had just 3.3% of the market. And while I had had a quick go when the new search engine was launched, I've since reverted to Google - a familiar pattern, I suspect.

But I decided to give Bing another shot, comparing it with Google on a few searches which seemed to reflect my interests today.

(1) Ricky Ponting Test Batting Average

Both sites gave Ponting's Wikipedia entry as their first result, but Bing gave more of the entry in its result, showing the Australian batsman's average at 56.31.

No great difference between the two.

(2) Mallorca beaches north coast

Google's top result here was about one particular resort - not very useful. But Bing found a site about the north-east coast, and a feature that allows you to hover over the link, and see some of the text, proving the site was worth a visit.

(3) Oldest TV in Britain

The first result in Google took me immediately to the BBC story last week about Britain's oldest working television. I then clicked on video, and found it surprisingly hard to find a working version of the short video piece we made, though it turned up eventually.

But Bing failed completely on its first page of results, showing all sorts of random links - everything from books about television and politics, to an article about Britian's oldest mother.

Then I clicked on video. It's the video search that is definitely Bing's best feature, allowing you to hover over each clip and see it starting to play before deciding which one you want.

My search threw up a bizarre collection of clips - mostly from Britain's Got Talent - though it eventually tracked down some shots of the oldest telly.

(4) Pound v Euro

Neither Google nor Bing produced instant answers on the current exchange rate. So I went to Wolfram Alpha for the first time in weeks, and found one good use of the computational knowledge engine.

So it's a bit of a mixed picture. Bing certainly has some nice features, but it's by no means clear to me that it does a much better job than Google. And of course it not only has to be better - it has to prove so much more useful that it overcomes the inertia of the 84% of UK internet users who search with Google.

It's always nice to see people happy in their work, but those Microsoft executives still have some work to do in turning their business into the cool, consumer-friendly brand they seem to think it deserves to be.

As you may have guessed from one of my searches, I'm now off on holiday for a couple of weeks. I'm sure there'll be plenty to catch up on when I get back.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

I was not intending to return to our story about Spinvox, and how its uses humans in call centres rather than computers to transcribe voicemails, unless there was a significant development. Then two things happened - first James Whatley, Spinvox's blogger-in-residence, otherwise known as Whatleydude wrote a lengthy post in which he described "a veritable maelstrom of accusations, misapprehensions and sometimes just plain lies", and promised to set the record straight. And then two new stories about Spinvox did come my way.

Whatleydude's post goes through five allegations - and dismisses each of them. I'm going to explain why we stand by our story.

1) "SpinVox uses humans to convert voicemails into text messages."

JW: No. SpinVox uses humans to step in when the automated parts of our service need help. This is not brand new information.

RC-J: Well, this is the very heart of our story. We believe - and we have seen good evidence to support this - that humans in call centres not only play a large part in transcribing voicemails, they do far more than just "step in" to help.

Former agents in Egypt have described the work, as have South African call centre workers, and as you'll see later, one customer has seen at first hand how it works. So yes, "Spinvox uses humans to convert voicemails into text messages" is entirely accurate.

2) "There is a Facebook group sharing confidential information from actual Spinvox voice messages."

JW: No. But there is a Facebook group sharing training information from fictional Spinvox voice messages.

To elaborate on this further, the Egyptian call centre in question "which used to work for Spinvox" was trialling our software as part of our constant efforts to better our service.
Funnily enough, Raya, the QC (quality control) house in question failed to meet all of the stringent standards during training and we never commenced work with them. Surprising that this same QC house is now leaking "data"? I think not.

RC-J: Spinvox told me last week - and I put it in my piece - that Raya, the Egyptian call centre in question, had never gone live, and that the pictures on the Facebook group were from a training session.

Now I've found an interesting article in a telecoms industry magazine, published in the summer of 2008. It's an interview with Tarek Kamel, Egypt's minister of communications, which includes this passage:

"What sort of companies are coming to Egypt to use the developing infrastructure? Kamel names one intriguing arrival: SpinVox, the award-winning company that is winning business with a simple offer to turn voicemails on mobiles into text messages, so that people can read them during meetings without interrupting the flow of conversation.
 
"SpinVox came to us with a request for a pilot of 50 seats. Our kids are listening to voice messages and transcribing them to text messages. It's an excellent service for those customers who don't want to listen to voicemail.
 
"We set up the pilot, and it works very well. We are ramping up to 2,000 seats in the next 18 months. We've proved the concept -- they challenged us with the price and we passed the test."

So Egypt's communications minister had no doubt what the service was about. And what did the Spinvox PR man say when the journalist who did the interview asked him about the project? Not that it was a trial which had failed to work but simply: "We have no facilities in Egypt."

3) "All Spinvox messages are listened to by human agents"

JW: No. As per fact one, Spinvox only employs agents to step in when messages need analysis and the machine gets to decide. However, the agents in question will only ever hear/see the specific parts of the messages that need work on. They never see fully automated message conversions because we don't send them on once they're complete.

RC-J: We never said "all" but "the majority". But the idea that agents only hear "specific parts" of the message always seemed far-fetched. If a message like "hey Jimmy I'm taking my car to the (indecipherable), meet me there," comes in, how's the agent going to translate "garage" if he only has "indecipherable" without the words around it?

Now have a look at this picture, posted on the internet by a Spinvox customer, Jason Sewell from the United States. Actually, he's a Vonage customer and signed up to the VOIP operator's "visual voicemail" service, without knowing it had anything to do with Spinvox. Then he got via e-mail the message you can see. Jason takes up the story:

"You get the audio too with this service - and that was in fact my mother-in-law calling to see how the kids were. When I saw the number in the e-mail I thought it was a scam."

He feared calling the number would rack up huge charges - but in the end a friend made the call and reported back in a strongly-worded e-mail (which Jason has forwarded to me) on the man who answered:

"The guy says he works in a call centre in Pakistan that is contracted out by Spinvox and they're all pissed [off] since they haven't been paid in two months!!"

Just how does that square with the idea that they never see full messages - or the assertion later in Mr Whatley's blog that all messages are "completely anonymised"?

Jason Sewell certainly isn't happy. "If an employee of Spinvox would go as far as to do this, maybe it's not a stretch to think they could go further - using information in voicemails to commit identity theft, for instance."

4) "How many messages are referred - in any way - to human operators during the transcription process?"

JW: Well I'll be honest with you folks, I've been wrestling away with this one most of today. I wish I could tell you, really I could. But this information is so business critical to our operation that we simply cannot share it.

I'm not kidding when I say that it would be the equivalent of Coca-Cola publishing their exact recipe up on their own blog.

RC-J: So they're still not answering that question - nor are they refuting the main charge in my story.

5) "Spinvox has broken its entry on the UK Data Protection Register (saying that does not transfer anything outside the European Economic Area)."

JW: Okay, so this one isn't easy, legal stuff never is. But it is factually incorrect. Bear with me.

SpinVox's entry on the Data Protection Register says that we do not send any personal data outside of the UK as a DATA CONTROLLER. This much is entirely accurate.

Information related to the owner of the message is defined as "personal data" and this information does indeed stay with in the European Economic Area (EEA). This is information like such as telephone number, e-mail address and so on.

DATA PROCESSING however is not covered (and is not required to be covered) under our entry in the Register. Converting voice messages is classed as "processing data".

"BUT! What about ALL that personal data in each and every voicemail?!" I hear you cry. Yes. Well.

Any messages that need analysis for further conversion are COMPLETELY anonymised before being sent out of Spinvox data centres to QC houses whether in the UK or otherwise.

RC-J: Well, neither of us is an expert on data security legislation, but I've already demonstrated that personal data (phone numbers left in voice messages for instance) is leaving Europe, in apparent contravention of Spinvox's entry on the data protection register. And when I contacted the information commissioner's office to say that Spinvox says it's processing data, not storing it outside Europe, they stuck to their original statement about contacting the firm.

Mr Whatley goes on to say that some of the world's biggest telecoms firms have been over Spinvox with a fine-tooth comb and are completely happy. But you may notice that in its home territory, this apparently shining example of British technology has failed to sign up with any of the big network operators. One of them told me, "[w]e thought there were data protection issues, and we saw no business model."

And the financial side is one area Mr Whatley does not examine. Four different companies which have dealt with Spinvox have now told me that they are owed large sums of money and are taking, or considering taking, legal action.

And then there is the staff. They were all - including James Whately - invited to take their pay for July and August in the form of share options not cash. But, by Spinvox's own admission, 50% opted to stick to cash.

I'm sorry for writing such a long post. But Mr Whatley has spent some time rubbishing our story - and his blog post merited a detailed response.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

Last week Yahoo rolled out a new front page to much fanfare.

At the time I reported on the sweeping changes the internet portal made to its shop window if you like...the entry point for some of the 570 million people who visit the site every month.

The killer approach is personalisation, letting users customise links to Yahoo and other services they use most frequently from news to social networks to e-mail to movies.

Yahoo described the overhaul as the most "radical" and "fundamental" makeover of the site since it began more than a decade ago.

Well now the insanely popular micro-blogging service Twitter is following suit. The changes are initially aimed at helping newcomers to the site navigate their way around and understand the brave new world of tweeting.

Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter blogged:

"Helping people access Twitter in more relevant and useful ways upon first introduction lowers the barrier to accessing the value Twitter has to offer and presents the service more consistently with how it has evolved".

He also explained that Twitter has changed and morphed from a:

"rudimentary social tool based on the concept of status messages" into "a new kind of communication and a valuable source of timely information. Also it's fun."

For the serious stuff think Iran, Mumbai, China and the Hudson River. For the fun stuff think Oprah, Ashton Kutcher and irrelevance. Sometimes for some and all the time for others.

What is most interesting about the makeover is the company's focus on search. As a real time search tool it is invaluable to a host of people from journalists to marketers and from big and small companies to anyone who cares.

The old home page definitely had an amateurish ring to it with its claim that Twitter was a way for friends and family to stay connected by answering one simple question "What are you doing?" Today the new home page presents a loftier aim and encourages users to "share and discover what's happening right now, anywhere in the world."

Certainly at least anywhere in the world where Twitter is being used but with an estimated 40 million worldwide users since the beginning of the year and the desire to reach a billion, it could be argued that Twitter is on the right track with that statement.

Join the conversation...or not. But if you do, be careful what you Tweet.

Amanda Bonnen knows that to her cost. Earlier in the year she tweeted that the apartment she was staying in was mouldy...and to her then handful of followers she said:

"Who said sleeping in a mouldy apartment was bad for you?"

Well the property management company that was named is not happy and has filed a lawsuit that accuses Ms Bonnen of defaming the company and are asking for $50,000 in damages.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

People leave Facebook every day so what should we read into the high profile exodus of Microsoft founder Bill Gates and home-making queen Martha Stewart?

Mr Gates said he quit because managing his profile became "way too much trouble". He also said that he had 10,000 people wanting to be his friend and that he really didn't have the time to sift through all those messages. Besides, he really couldn't tell who was the real McCoy when it came to his friends.

During an event in India, Mr Gates revealed that despite the amazing benefits that the digital revolution has wrought, some technology could turn out to be a real time-waster.

I am not sure if he remembered that Microsoft ploughed a considerable amount of investment into the social networking site or not.

While Bill might have removed his Facebook page, this very fun mock-up by PC World is worth a look.

And another well-kent figure has followed in Mr Gates' footsteps.

America's so-called domestic goddess Martha Stewart talked to the Daily Beast and said "I'm not knocking Facebook. We use both Facebook and Twitter (at Martha Stewart Organisation). They're very different tools, and I personally don't use Facebook. I prefer Twitter as a means of mass communication - it's the Wal-Mart of the internet."

She also said that the reason she prefers the micro-blogging service is that "I don't have to 'befriend' and do all that other dippy stuff that they do on Facebook."

On Twitter, Ms Stewart has over 1.1 million followers. But despite feigning social media nous, Ms Stewart must not be aware that Twitter has a rough worldwide band of users numbering 40 million while Facebook boasts over 260 million.

Twitter might be less hassle but if you want to reach the biggest possible audience, surely being on Facebook makes business sense at least? Or why not both, especially when it seems you have "staff" to take care of the task of posting on the site?

Perhaps the decision of Mr Gates and Ms Stewart to give up on Facebook speaks to something that affects the human psyche.

"While many users are very engaged, perhaps for some people it has become a place that is too noisy and cluttered," said internet analyst Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence.

On a more philosophical level, Mr Sterling told me:

"This reveals something that is hard to articulate, which is that maybe there are limits that have been reached by these people.

"It's the same if you go away for a weekend and there is no internet and pretty soon you realise there is a lot of stuff that is way more important that all the technology you are so involved in. People have to remember these are tools to communicate with and not confuse them with things in our life like our real world communities."

Less prosaically, I have a friend who has also quit Facebook for a pretty simple reason. In an e-mail, she told me "it feels like it's so over?"

For her at least, and for Bill and Martha, it is.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

For the founders of the streaming music service Spotify - and for those in the music industry who'd like to see it prosper - these are nervous days. They have submitted their mobile application to Apple's app store, and its success or failure could determine the future of the company.

Spotify has been working on a mobile version of its service for some months, not just for the iPhone but for phones on the Google Android operating system.

I can now reveal - having played with a beta version for a few days - that the version submitted to Apple will allow users to take their existing playlists with them on the phone and to search over wi-fi or a 3G network for new tracks - but there's another "killer app" to this app. It allows you to download songs or entire playlists so that you can take them with you on the phone - and listen even when you don't have a signal or a wi-fi connection.

It's a very clean and simple interface, which launches quickly, showing your playlists - or at least as quickly as your network allows. The beta version was a bit buggy, with occasional crashes, and there's one major downside - the iPhone doesn't let you run multiple applications so you can't do anything else while listening to your music. And streaming over 3G worked pretty well for me, until I hit a network black spot near my home. But being able to download a playlist to your phone over your own network before you go out, then listen to it despite poor or non-existent network coverage is a real bonus.

Spotify has not yet said how it will market the application, but my bet is that it will only be available to subscribers of their premium service. Which is why it's so vital to their future, because at the moment only small numbers of users are choosing to upgrade from the free ad-supported service to the premium ad-free version with extra bells and whistles.

Talk to people in the music industry and they'll be hugely enthusiastic in public about Spotify, then tell you off the record that they have extreme doubts about its survival because a free ad-supported model just doesn't look likely to pay its way.

They will be keen to see this mobile application launched for two reasons - first it might be the key to getting users to pay a decent amount for a streaming service, and second, because it might help them chip away at the dominance of Apple in the digital music market.

Which is where it gets really interesting. Because who has to decide whether the Spotify iPhone application can be allowed into the app store? Apple, of course. And last week Spotify didn't seem convinced that it would get a warm reception, with one executive warning that its application might get blocked.

That would be an extraordinary move, laying Apple open to charges of anti-competitive behaviour, and already Spotify is rowing back from last week's warning. A senior source has told me the company is now confident that Apple will approve the application, as it has already allowed other music services such as last.fm and Pandora into the store.

Of course the iPhone is still a relatively small player in the global mobile phone market. Nokia, for instance, now makes far more MP3 players - in the form of music-enabled phones - than Apple, although very few of its customers use them to play music. So getting a Nokia Spotify app out will be a more important hurdle.

But convincing the music-savvy iPhone crowd that it's worth having, and probably paying for, the Spotify app on their phone would show the world that the music service was on its way to discovering a business model and a secure future. If the" app" flops, however, it's going to be back to the drawing-board.

Update, 10:45: Spotify has now confirmed that while the app itself will be free, it will only be available to its premium subscribers. The company says it should be on the app store in a few weeks - we then may get for the first time some fascinating data on how many people are actually willing to pay for Spotify. Oh, and by the way, those BBC apps on my phone are not apps - just links to web pages. Sorry to disappoint you...

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

Hull is heaven. That must be what some people in the music and movie industries were thinking this morning. They've been pressing internet service providers to take strong action against illegal file-sharing - with very little success to date.

Then it emerged that a broadband supplier in Hull was going even further than the copyright owners could have hoped. Karoo has been disconnecting people without warning, for offences such as downloading a movie using BitTorrent. Never mind three strikes and you're out - the policy that France has introduced amidst huge controversy and the UK government rejected in its Digital Britain report - this was one strike and you're out.

No other ISP in Britain has gone this far, and when I called the Internet Service Providers' Association they seemed taken aback. Even the music industry body, the BPI, seemed lost for words, merely suggesting that it was up to each firm to decide how to confront this issue. I'd suggested that they might like to relocate their headquarters - and those of the major record labels - to Hull as a gesture of gratitude.

But, I hear you ask, why don't Karoo's customers will simply up sticks and choose another broadband provider? Well, they can't - Karoo is the only one in town, owned by Kingston Communications, the company with the white phone boxes that has long been an anomaly in the UK's telecoms scene. Kingston has a monopoly, and while in theory other firms could come and share its exchange, they haven't chosen to do so.

Then tonight, there was a U-turn. After a day of publicity, following the excellent reporting of this story by my colleagues at BBC Radio Humberside, the company changed its policy.

"It's evident we have been exceeding the expectations of copyright owners, the media and internet users," said its statement.

So there'll be no more instant disconnections - though customers who ignore three written warnings will still face temporary suspension. That's still a tougher stance than just about any other ISP follows.

So we've seen what happens when one company has monopoly power - it can decide for itself how to operate. But we've also seen how much power angry consumers can wield when they believe that an injustice has been committed.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

Our story yesterday about Spinvox - and the fact that much of its work in transcribing voicemails is done by humans rather than machines - made some waves. A number of users who had imagined that the service was all about clever software seemed mildly shocked and surprised to find out that they were often being read by call centre workers in the Philippines or India.

Others in the technology world said it had been known for years so what was the big deal. But Spinvox took the whole issue very seriously. Last night it put up a blog post describing my story as "incorrect and inaccurate" - but the company also invited me on a tour of its headquarters with the chance to see the technology behind its Voice Message Conversion System.

Christina Domecq, the company's co-founder came on the radio, talking to PM's Eddie Mair. He repeatedly pressed her on our central claim, that the majority of calls were read by humans rather than machines, but she maintained the company's line that this was a complex matter with no simple answer - the system learned as it went along, so that all of her messages, for instance, would be read by machine.

Later, she told the Guardian "The ratio of humans to messages and humans to number of users is very, very low." and "The majority of calls are fully automated."

Well I can only repeat what I've been told - and seen evidence to substantiate - that the majority of calls are in fact heard and transcribed by staff in call centres.

Christina Domecq also explained to the Guardian that as Spinvox ramped up from 30 to 100 million customers worldwide, it would be simply impossible to get human beings to do the job. That doesn't quite mesh with this quote from an interview with the paidcontent site, which has written extensively about Spinvox: "When we're going through massive growth, like we are now, we need more agents," she told the site in a lengthy interview. "A lot of Latin American dialects are new for us".

So what are they saying? That massive growth means the machines have to do most of the work - or that Spinvox has to recruit more call centre staff?

Late yesterday, someone pointed me to an advert on a site called offshoreexperts.com, where Spinvox appears to be seeking tenders for new call centre operations. It says that Spinvox "is currently in need of some significant support with our voice-to-text transcription services."

It outlines the nature of the work and then concludes:

"We would initially require you to provide us with c.50 agent workstations 24/7 for a 3 month trial, which if successful would lead to a 2/3 year long term commercial deal with significant ramp-up of agent resource numbers."

No very obvious sign there of a rapid move towards full automation.

And people I've spoken to in the speech recognition industry over recent days are largely of the view that Spinvox has set itself an impossible task. One firm also trying to provide a voicemail conversion service told me that if the company could really achieve the full automation to which Christina Domecq aspires, "it would be making money hand over fist." Its latest reported figures show it's a long way from that.

And Ian Turner, European MD of Nuance, the firm behind the Dragon brand of speech recognition products, told me a bit about his business. He explained a system where doctors dictate patient notes and prescriptions at high speed, and the computer-generated text is checked by a medical secretary.

That delivered very high levels of accuracy, he explained, but converting into text lots of different voices shouting down phone lines in different accents and languages was a much greater challenge: "This is serious deep engineering to build this stuff which takes years." And he said he'd seen no evidence that Spinvox were ahead of the game in this area.

Mr Turner also said that companies engaged in this work needed to be careful about data storage and transparent about their methods:"You have to be honest about this... in the current climate about data privacy, being transparent is absolutely critical."

By the way, I've written back to Spinvox accepting their kind invitation to come and see their systems close-up. But I've said the BBC would also like to see their overseas call centres. I'll let you know how they respond.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

It's a great British technology success story, using brilliant voice-recognition software to decode your voicemail messages and turn them into text. It's growing rapidly, and will have over 100 million users by the end of this year, to the delight of its backers, who include the investment bank Goldman Sachs.

It's created hundreds of high-quality jobs in the UK and elsewhere and employed some world-leading computer scientists at Cambridge University. That, at least, was how I saw Spinvox until recently.

But in the last few days, I've been given a somewhat different picture - by one current employee, and several others who've worked for the company in recent years. Most significantly, they've told me that the central claim of the company - that it's getting machines to translate audio into text - doesn't really stand up, because most of the work is actually done in call centres dotted around the world.

I have some confidence in those claims because I've seen compelling evidence that my own voicemails have been transcribed by humans, not by machines. I have been using the service for quite some time - indeed I've found it very useful - and been moderately impressed by the way that it translates the often garbled messages left on my phone.

But I have now seen the transcript of a number of my voicemails, including one from a major technology company promising a story, and another from the BBC's Occupational Health Department. What the logs of those messages appear to show is that the messages were sent to call-centres, where workers then spent a minute or so transcribing them.

Still wishing to be convinced that it was people not machines listening to my messages, I tried another tactic. It was suggested to me that if I recorded a message and then sent it five times in a row to my mobile, then a computer would provide the same result every time.

Well, my message (which you can hear below) was deliberately stumbling and full of quite difficult words - including my rather tricky name. But every version that came back to me in text form was radically different - and pretty inaccurate.

So unless Spinvox is employing a whole lot of rather confused computers to listen and transcribe messages, it sounds like the job was being done by a variety of agents.

Why does this matter? After all, Spinvox has always been clear that there is a human element in the work - though when it says it can call on "human experts for assistance", you might imagine Cambridge boffins rather than overseas call centre staff. But the fact that so much of its work still appears to rely on people simply listening and typing could have implications for its finances and its data security.

The information commissioner has asked the firm to explain why its entry on the Data Protection Register says no data will be transferred outside the European Economic Area.

Customers may ask whether they really want people listening in to private or commercially sensitive messages. The company insists all messages are encrypted and anonymised to ensure agents cannot identify its sender or recipient.

But it's the sheer cost of getting hundreds of people to do this work which is the biggest issue for the company. One of its PR men admitted to me that the basis of the business was that more and more of the work should be done by machines, rather than humans.

So part of the spinning of Spinvox has been true, in that it has enjoyed extraordinary growth by providing a service that many people have found very useful.

But is it a major technology success story, cracking the age-old problem of getting a machine to understand the human voice in all its glorious, cacophonous varieties? Not yet, it isn't.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

Twitter is one of those services that seems to divide people broadly into two groups. You either get it or you don't. You either love it or you hate it. You either use it or you don't.

Regardless, the number of people flocking to the micro-blogging service is going through the roof, even if they don't stay very long. There were 4 million users in the US in February; the last set of figures I saw said that it had grown to 20 million there, and to around 40 million worldwide.

Among the most visible users are the celebrities: from Oprah and Ellen de Generes to Ashton Kutcher and P Diddy.

The latest celeb to talk Twitter has been talk show host David Letterman with his guest Kevin Spacey.

The four-and-a-bit minute chat (which you can watch at the Twitter blog) is entertaining and I think there might be a few of you who will agree with Dave's assessment of the phenomenon.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

Are Sacha Baron Cohen and Bono - two artists whose previous products were huge hits - now finding out how quickly a networked society can give the thumbs down to something it finds sub-standard?

A friend from the music industry drew the parallel between the two. Sacha Baron Cohen's latest satirical outrage Bruno - the travails of a gay Austrian fashion designer - followed on the surprise box-office smash that was Borat. U2's latest album No Line On The Horizon came five years after How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, one of the biggest-grossing albums of all time.

But while Bruno was the top grossing movie in the United States on its opening weekend, receipts fell away very sharply from $14.4m (£8.95m) on the Friday to $8.8m (£5.5m) on the Saturday.

What's being blamed? Twitter.

In the old days, a cult movie would build its reputation over weeks, even months, by word of mouth. That, and a lot of smart marketing, is what helped Borat become a big hit in the States.

And this time around, the producers of Bruno could build on that last success, with a bigger marketing campaign and a series of stunts. But word of mouth now happens on social networks. So within minutes of emerging from the cinema, many of those who saw Bruno on the opening night were bad-mouthing it.

Here are a few examples I found in a Twitter search for July 11th, the day after the opening. "I liked Borat, but Bruno was just a retread." "my roomates saw Bruno last night. From what they said i doubt ill be going to see it." "Bruno was one of the stupidest movies I have ever seen.... What a waste of $30!" And, most damning of all, "BRUNO wasn't all that funny."

And with this movie right in the middle of the apparent Twitter demographic (many Facebook users would be too young for an adult-rated film), the comments appear to have had an effect - hence the abrupt fall in receipts on the Saturday, which would normally be a bigger night at the movies.

Now let's look at the UK sales figures for No Line On The Horizon compared with those for How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb. The 2004 album sold around 200,000 copies in its first week, whereas in 2009, U2 sold a very respectable 158,000 CDs - though that was after weeks of an unprecedented publicity campaign.

But Atomic Bomb kept on selling, with big leaps every week until, after five weeks, it had achieved UK sales of 822,000. But after five weeks in online and high street stores, from Amazon to HMV to Tesco, No Line on The Horizon had only crept up to 258,000 sales. In their fifth weeks, the 2004 album sold another 150,000 copies - whereas in 2009 U2 struggled to get to 10,000.

Now there are many possible explanations for that. The music market, as we all know, has changed radically in five years, and shifting any CD is harder. The album was leaked online before its release, and tens of thousands - perhaps hundreds of thousands - of potential customers got to hear it for nothing from the likes of the Pirate Bay.

Online retailers, like Amazon, were selling it very cheaply - for as little as £3 - and there is a theory in the music industry that lowering the price can actually damage sales by convincing people that you've got a cheap product not worth seeking out.

But here's another theory - that in a digital age where it was easy to sample the product legally, through services like Spotify, or through illegal file-sharing, word of mouth happened at the speed of light. And the verdict was that there were not enough decent songs on the horizon to make it worth shelling out for an entire album.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

Over the last few days, the debacle rather pathetically known as Twittergate has become a drive-by sport in the Valley.

Here's a recap, in case you missed the whole affair.

As my colleague Rory Cellan-Jones blogged the other day, a cracker called "Hacker Croll" did the nasty on Twitter, breaking into the e-mail account of one of its staff and then into a bunch of other accounts that are stored in "the cloud" using Google Apps.

The apparent motive behind the attack was to highlight how fragile the cloud is in terms of security.

It also underscored how easy it is to crack passwords and that everyone needs to rethink the practice of using the same password for all their accounts.

While that is all very important stuff to think about, I've also been enthralled by a spat the blog TechCrunch. It's a highly respected site and one that likes to cock a snook at anyone in power or authority.

TechCrunch was sent 310 documents stolen from Twitter. They contained all sorts of goodies like the names of people who had applied for jobs at Twitter as well as financial forecasts, the company's thoughts on Google and Facebook and plans for a reality show.

TechCrunch got it in the ear from users about its decision to publish these documents. Comments on its own site ranged from "poor form" to "not cool" and from "criminal behaviour" to "creepy".

TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington was upfront about his decision to publish and be damned, but when he suggested that he had some kind of greenlight from Twitter itself, co-founder Ev Williams tweeted about it and disputed that version of events.

It's been a crash course in ethics 101 and in a Twitpol, 54% thought posting many of these documents was not a good idea.

The question of whether Twitter will sue TechCrunch hangs in the air, though I doubt that will happen. I think Mr Arrington, himself a former lawyer, might relish the possibility just for the heck of it. He is that kind of guy and does not shy away from a bit of a barney, as is evidenced by his decision to publish.

Yesterday saw a new twist in the saga with TechCrunch writer Nik Cubrilovic detailing what he has called "The Anatomy of the Twitter Attack".

He explains how the attack took place and its dealings with Hacker Croll. He says he waited until Twitter closed the security loopholes before going public with just how Hacker Croll gained enough insight so as to hack into the company's secrets, or "underwear drawer" as co-founder Biz Stone described it.

The post also reveals that Hacker Croll has apologised to Twitter and said he did not want to profit from the information but:

"[H]oped that his intervention would show how easy it is for a malicious person to gain access to sensitive information without too much knowledge."

While we wait for the next instalment of this Valley story, those of you looking to pass the time could have a gander at a very funny game called The Ev Files. It is set in the Twitter HQ, with Ev Williams sitting behind a desk strewn with "top secret" files and throwing his iPhone at the head of his arch nemesis Mike Arrington in a quest to stop him publishing corporate secrets.

My highest score is, I think, a very respectable 10 - but I am working on it.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

Will I test your patience if I try to answer a few questions about the future of Apple's iPhone in the UK?

Is O2 about to lose its exclusive contract for the phone? Is there any truth in the rumours that Orange or T-Mobile or Vodafone are testing the phone on their networks because they are about to get a deal from Apple? And finally does anybody care?

The answer to the first question is no - at least not until November when O2's exclusive deal with Apple runs out. The second question has been put to me by a number of people wondering whether their networks are about to get the iPhone.

My answer? Well at least one of those networks has told me the rumours are untrue, but it seems likely that Apple is testing the waters with companies other than O2 before making its mind up about whether it wants to renew that exclusive contract.

And as for the last question, the issue is obviously of limited concern if you're not a potential customer - but it appears to be causing a frenzy of excitement amongst the different networks jostling for a deal.

And I've just met a man who was interested, not so much in the iPhone or who will sell it in the UK, but in the whole question of how mobile operators are handling the huge amount of data that phones like this are sending across their networks, a subject we covered recently here.

Michael Schabel is director of research at Bell Labs, the birthplace of some of the more important inventions of the 20th Century, and now under the ownership of Alcatel Lucent.

He was in town to push a product his company sells to mobile networks to help them manage congestion, but when I met him over breakfast he was marvelling at the complete transformation of the mobile web over the last 18 months.

Two things have happened - first, networks started pushing mobile broadband, then Apple invented the mobile app. (Yes, I know there were apps before the app store, but it was the iPhone that made them insanely popular.)

Mr Schabel told me the average iPhone user has downloaded 27 applications - "that's probably more than they have on their PC".

And of course that's been followed by other manufacturers. Michael Schabel showed me the Pandora application on his Blackberry, allowing him to listen to the streaming music radio service on the road, and told me there was no reason why we shouldn't all be streaming music and video to our phones fairly easily quite soon.

But that all adds up, according to Mr Schabel, to a "tsunami of data" and a radical change in the mobile landscape, and the operators are finding it difficult to cope.

Handling the bits and bytes flying around from all of this new mobile activity involves different skills from dealing with voice calls or from those needed to control internet traffic across a fixed line network.

Users of mobile networks can suddenly find they just can't get online - or use a particular application and yet to the operator everything on the network looks fine.

That, according to a research paper from Alcatel Lucent, is because the type of traffic can vary radically from one 3G cell to another. In one area a cell can be choked by streaming media, while its neighbour will suddenly be occupied by peer-to-peer traffic, perhaps involving people using mobile dongles.

And while a fixed line broadband supplier might simply opt to throttle back streaming video across its network, that's not going to have the desired effect on a cellular network.

To mobile customers, of course, the technology and the challenges faced by the operators are of no interest. They are now getting used to checking the cricket score, updating their social network status or playing an online game via their mobile phones. And if they find they can't, they will get rather cross.

Which brings us back to where we started. I'm sure Apple will indeed be looking at doing deals with other operators besides O2 - but it will want to be sure their networks are ready to handle that growing flood of data from all those billions of apps.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

Last week an event was held at the BBC to launch a landmark series of documentaries about the history and future of the internet.

It's a truly web 2.0 - or perhaps web 3.0 - project, which is meant to be shaped by an online debate during the production process. That debate includes a series of blogs - and I was asked to contribute this post about, well, blogging.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

Is it possible that the music industry has finally spotted the light at the end of the tunnel - and it's not the flashing light on the oncoming Pirate Express locomotive?

This week a big piece of research has come up with two startling conclusions - that illegal downloading amongst young music fans has actually gone into a decline, and that the CD is still the most popular format, even amongst teenagers, and is not ready to be sent to the digital graveyard just yet.

The research, by a media agency The Leading Question and a digital music consultancy Music Ally, questioned 2,000 music fans about their habits.

It found that 73% of them preferred CDs to downloads, and even amongst teenagers the figure was 66%. But what the industry will really latch onto is the figures from the same survey released earlier this week.

They showed that the percentage of fans file-sharing had fallen 22% in the same survey in December 2007 to 17% in January 2009. And the fall amongst 14-18 year olds was much more dramatic - down from 42% to just 26%

The conclusion drawn by the researchers is that habits amongst those digitally aware consumers who don't buy CDs are changing - they're moving from downloading illegally to streaming legally.

They're still not paying for online music then, but at least they're using legitimate services. And here in the UK, it's one business, Spotify, which is getting a lot of the credit for that change.

The ad-supported streaming service was among those involved in a debate in London last night about the future of music entitled "Who Pays the Piper?". Like many such events, it reached no firm conclusion.

On the one hand, the new media types trotted out their usual refrain about the glacial pace of music industry change - and showed a touching faith in the likelihood that advertising and gaming would pay for us all to have free music.

On the other, we heard a counterblast from Helienne Lindvall, a Swedish songwriter and music blogger, who lashed out at the Pirate Bay, YouTube and last.fm for profiting from music without being willing to reward artists.

Overall, there was a sense that progress was finally being made in the search for a business model which would work for the artists, the labels - and the fans. But there were a couple of sobering moments.

First the audience was asked who had used Spotify - everyone in the room put a hand up. But when we were asked who had paid for the premium service (unless that takes off Spotify is unlikely to have a long-term future) and just one hand went up.

And there was a sobering message from an American in the audience who claimed to have spent decades in the industry, from a spell as Little Richard's PR man to a role in a new legal version of Pirate Bay. "Everyone has overvalued the music," he told us, "it's not worth as much as content owners think it is." That seems indisputable - the days of the £15 CD are now a distant memory and music market deflation probably has some way to go.

But industry bosses think they've finally started coming up with services that might woo young users away from the likes of Limewire and Pirate Bay. All they have to do now is find advertisers - and consumers - willing to pay for the music.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

A leading technology blog Techcrunch said last night that it had been forwarded hundreds of confidential corporate and personal documents belonging to Twitter and its employees.

The information, obtained by a hacker calling himself Hacker Croll, was first mentioned on this French blog.

It apparently includes the names and food preferences of all employees, records of internal meetings, names of job applicants, confidential contracts with companies like Nokia and Microsoft, and details of staff salaries.

In other words, just about everything that Twitter would like to keep secret - and that rivals, and journalists, would love to get their hands on. The post on Techcrunch immediately provoked a firestorm, with many expressing outrage that the blog should even consider publishing this material, which appears to have been obtained by illicit means.

I spoke to the French blogger Manuel Dorne, who was the first to receive the file from "Hacker Croll" - who's apparently based in France. He told me the documents included credit card numbers and personal account details from Apple's Mobile Me service.

There were also details of plans for the French president to acquire a Twitter account - under the name @NicolasSarkozy. But Manuel Dorne said he'd made a different decision from Techcrunch, opting just to show a few screenshots of the material rather than publish more. "I don't want to cause damage to Twitter or to help their rivals," he told me.

Beyond the issue of journalistic ethics, the whole incident also raises interesting questions about the security of cloud computing. Much of the information appears to have been obtained by the hacker gaining access to Gmail accounts. So it appears that Twitter, like an increasing number of young businesses, was storing lots of corporate information on the servers in Google's vast data centres.

Now Google is stressing that there's no suggestion that its systems have been hacked - merely that someone has somehow guessed the Gmail passwords of various Twitter employees.

As a spokesman explained it to me, you'd feel furious at your bank if their servers had been hacked allowing someone to get access to your account, but furious with yourself if you'd given away your online banking details - or chosen a very weak password.

That's obviously true. But companies thinking of migrating all of their e-mail into the cloud might consider what Hacker Croll told Manuel Dorne about the motivation behind his Twitter hack:

"J'espere que mon intervention leur fera prendre conscience que nul n'est a l'abri sur le net."

In other words, he hopes his "intervention" will make Twitter wake up to the fact that nothing is secure on the net. Companies promoting cloud computing - from Google to Amazon to Microsoft - are all confident that their systems just cannot be hacked.

But if you allow your employees - including very senior members of staff - to send confidential information on cloud-based e-mail then you'd better make sure their passwords are super secure.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

For the last three years Gmail labs has been a playground for the company's engineers to float new ideas and see how users respond to them.

Everything about the project has been experimental with no promises made to users that any of these features would become permanent and enter the mainstream of the Gmail front page.

Gmail's product manager Keith Coleman told me:

"On launch day we had 12 things in labs and didn't really know if any of them would be popular or whether or not users would really use them.
 
"In the past we would have tested these features inside the company but Labs brought that to the rest of the world and let all users have input into which ideas are the best and which really work."

In Google speak this is called "dog fooding". I prefer "people power".

Today there are 48 labs features and they range from letting you customise keyboard shortcuts to translating messages and from seeing your e-mail offline to getting alerts to tell you take a break from e-mail and step away from the computer.

While Keith said it's not a popularity contest, the users have spoken and "tasks" is the first lab project to graduate to the Gmail shop floor.

It can be found on the left hand side under contacts and is a nifty wee application that lets you keep a tab on everything from drinks with the girls to your shopping list to a visit to the dentist. I haven't had long to play with it, but now I have even less excuse for forgetting stuff.

Google have cooked up a video to show off some of its capabilities.

Other features that look set to graduate include pictures in chat that shows the photograph of the person you are chatting to and something else called undo send, that I think might save a few blushes here and there. That functions allows you to basically unsend an e-mail.

At the same time Google has also announced that it is opening up Labs for its Calendar product.

There are only a handful of offerings there but at first glance they seem pretty useful in helping organise ones life...and boy one needs it!

The world clock will be really useful for me working on the west coast eight hours behind my London bosses and three behind my Washington editors.

As Google looks more and more to cater to its enterprise customers, Calendar product manager Ken Norton told me that "the other interesting news is that Calendar Labs will come with a set of APIs for customers to add their own features that are important to them but not to the wider user."

He talked of one customer who wanted to be able to know when he books a conference room if that room had a microscope in it. Obviously not a vital piece of information for all users and as Ken said it's something Google wouldn't build so it said "here are a set of APIs so you can create a calendar for your own unique needs."

Naturally enough I quizzed both men on the fact that they were making their announcements at the same time as Microsoft was telling its partner conference in New Orleans about its new free web-based version of its Office software.

While neither gent wanted to take that issue head on, Mr Norton pointed out that:

"The first thing that Labs speaks to is how quickly you can innovate in the cloud. In the desktop software world you have to ship updates.
 
"You can't put new features in front of users when you like. You are subject to the software distribution model. Our products were built in the cloud and we are always releasing new features to users on a rapid basis."

Last year I was one of a few journalists who were allowed inside the hallowed halls of the Gmail team to see what they were working on and hear the history of how the product came to pass.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

Has a popular revolt done for 118800? The controversial mobile phone directory launched last month, but has struggled to convince the great British public that it's a good idea to have your mobile number available for people to look up.

For days now the website has been down, and the service has been unavailable. And that's apparently all due to people power - a wave of angry users trying to get their numbers removed from the site has been too big for the company's systems to cope.

After the BBC's excellent Working Lunch programme gave prolonged coverage to the story before the launch, various e-mails began circulating, warning people about it.

Here's one:

"Maybe you have heard about this but early next week all UK mobiles will be on a directory which will mean that anyone will be able to access the numbers. It is easy to unsubscribe but it must be done before the beginning of next week to make sure that you are ex directory. We have all unsubscribed and you may want to suggest it to all your friends and family who have UK mobiles or they could be swamped by unsolicited messages and calls. Removal is recommended by the BBC - see link below. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/working_lunch/8091621.stm
 
The Directory of Mobile Phone numbers goes live next week.
 
All numbers including those belonging to children will be open to cold calling and the general abuse that less scrupulous tele-sales people subject us too.

Now there are a number of inaccuracies in this and other e-mails warning about 118800. For one thing, "all UK mobiles" are not on the directory - when the service was live I found it just about impossible to find anyone, and even the company behind it only claims it has around a third of all UK mobile numbers.

For another, the service involves sending texts to people whose numbers are sought out by users, asking whether they want to take a call, rather than "cold calling".

And the BBC is not recommending removal - that's not our job - though we have told people how to get their names deleted if they so wish.

Still, the campaign against the service has apparently gone viral, and that makes it very difficult for the business to get any more positive marketing message out - especially when its website is down.

But what's interesting is how violently people now feel about their privacy. In an age when many are apparently happy to share intimate details of their lives on social networks - even shots of their husbands in their swimming trunks - it seems that we feel our mobile numbers are uniquely private.

You can see the change in attitudes reflected in what's happened with the fixed line directory. Twenty years ago, being "ex-directory" meant being part of a rather exclusive club, but BT tells me that around 50% of people now choose not to have their numbers listed.

Why? Well maybe it's not paranoia about privacy, but sheer irritation at the wave of tele-marketing - callers telling you "we are in your area fitting PVC windows - would you like a free trial", or cold calls from automated systems telling you that you've won a cruise.

It's the direct marketing industry which has been the source of many of the numbers on the lists acquired by Connectivity, 118800's owners. But maybe it's their tactics that have made the idea of the service so unattractive to so many users.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

At an event in London last night, the writer, actor, and gadget fan Stephen Fry launched a surprisingly ferocious attack on the music and movie industries over the way they have acted to defend their copyright.

Even he seemed surprised, asking on Twitter as he left the stage: "Have I laid myself open to attack?" and: "Hope I'm not misunderstood. Such a pity if I get misrepresented as a 'help yourself and be a pirate' advocate."

After outlining the history of copyright, he went on to say that, in the entertainment industry's pursuit of the file-sharers, he suspects "that my business - the film business, the television business, the music business - is doing the wrong thing".

He described what he called the aggressive prosecution around the world of those who illegally download. It did no good, said Fry, to label these people as criminals.

He mocked "those preposterous" commercials on DVDs telling audiences "you wouldn't steal a handbag". He said he wanted to ask whether people in his industry are "so blind... as to think that someone who bit-torrents an episode of 24 is the same as someone who steals somebody's handbag".

There was more, much more.

Pirate Bay had been unjustly pursued, and the reputation of its founders had been smeared by the music industry. He himself had resorted to BitTorrent to get hold of a TV programme; mind you, it was an episode of House, featuring his old "partner in crime" Hugh Laurie, and he had already paid to download the series.

Sure, those who downloaded on an industrial scale for profit should be prosecuted - but if the price of downloads came down to a "fair" level, most people were pretty moral and would be happy to pay. He went on to compare the music industry to "big tobacco".

The event was the iTunes music festival - Fry was the warm-up act before a gig - and the young audience loved what they were hearing, with applause ringing out in the Roundhouse as he laid into the big corporations which profit from the current copyright arrangements. Corporations like Apple, the sponsors of the festival.

Stephen Fry is, of course, far too smart not to see the ironies inherent in a wealthy middle-aged celebrity coming over all rock 'n' roll and free love about the piracy issue - he conceded that many of his creature comforts had been acquired with the profits from products ring-fenced with copyright protection.

Someone in the audience pointed out that the tickets for the event told us that we were not allowed to use recording devices - an instruction ignored by just about everyone, with the encouragement of the man on stage. He admits that he isn't sure himself what he thinks about the protection of copyright, and has no easy answers.

So, how will the music and TV industries react to this attack? They may point out that some of what he said was inaccurate - the "Don't Steal a Handbag" adverts have been dropped, and the wave of prosecutions against individuals has subsided, replaced by a confrontation with ISPs.

At the Roundhouse, Stephen Fry was preaching to the converted, the generation that has got used to seeking out music and movies on the internet, and isn't entirely sure why you would pay to download. "Good to know there's a pro-free-download approving voice on the inside," was one Twitter comment after the event, though that wasn't precisely what he was saying.

But what would be interesting now is to hear Stephen Fry take his very entertaining act to a new audience - how about a gathering of the Featured Artists Coalition, the musicians fighting to defend copyright? Now that would be a good night out.

Update 1518: Well, maybe Stephen Fry will be taking his thoughts to the Featured Artists Coalition after all.

I've now been told that Billy Bragg, a member of the coalition (and guest on 5Live), has read this post, and says that he and his organisation are in complete agreement with Mr Fry: they too have no wish to see young file-sharers criminalised.

So perhaps a better night out would be a performance at the annual dinner of the BPI or another industry trade body.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

At the BBC this afternoon, we've had an event to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the creation of the world wide web and to mark the launch of a major BBC2 documentary series on the web's history and future. The idea is that the series, which will be broadcast next year, will be a truly interactive process, with web users given access to the rushes, and invited to comment, criticise and generally interfere before, not after, the programmes are finished.

And who better a guest to have at this launch than Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the web's creator? He gave a short speech, then joined a panel discussion with top technology pundit Bill Thompson and Professor Susan Greenfield, the neuroscientist who has expressed some concerns about the impact of the web on children. And Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail and Free, joined us by satellite from San Francisco. The discussion was moderated by Aleks Krotoski - the presenter of the forthcoming television programmes. Here are a few scrambled, slightly chaotic notes from the event:

George Entwhistle, Controller BBC Knowledge, explained the process behind this open source programme.
"We'll share our rushes, blog as we go along and aim to build a web community around the programme. Who better to tell us about the web than the web itself?"

Sir Tim Berners Lee:

"I was coming through customs yesterday and when I said I'd invented the web, the customs officer said Why? My answer was that someone had to, and I was frustrated that it did not exist."
(You can hear some of what Sir Tim said here)
He explains the problem of sharing information at CERN, and how that drove him to come up with the web.

Twenty years on, he says, he's having to explain why we all need to put our data on the web. "Linked data is beginning to take off." He praises the BBC for sharing some of its data.

Government data - we must get it all out there so we can start making all sorts of connections.

Each time there is a paradigm shift, you have to look for the people who "get it" and cherish them.

Looking back over twenty years, it's the spirit of the web that matters.People doing it because they think it's a good idea. That spirit has made it very exciting, it's allowed everyone to get involved.People who didn't say no.

Looking ahead, the exciting things are semantic web and mobile. Only 20% of people have web access now. We have to make sure we target things in low bandwidth to people who may have poor connections.

Important to keep an open standards, royalty-free web.

Q+A.
What do you think of the fact that people post anonymously on the web?

Posting things anonymously is better than blowing up buildings. But as a user you have to learn to filter what you read online.

Q. What's the future of video on the web?

As a consumer, I feel that I should be able to get to - and pay for if necessary - anything that has ever been broadcast. I'm looking forward to a time when the BBC archive is online and I can get BBC content from the US. I'm prepared to pay. The common thread is random access.. The concept of a channel is going to be history very quickly.

Q. What is your view of policing the internet?

Things like fraud have moved online, and of course crime should be pursued on the internet just like everywhere else.
My feeling is that the web should be like a blank piece of paper. You can't buy paper on which you can only write the truth, or not draw a nude.
The medium should not be set up in order to constrain it.

Governements should not snoop on what people do on the internet. It will prevent people from using the net properly. "I don't want the governement to know my shirt-size."

Chris Anderson:

The internet lets you broadcast with an infinite number of channels. The web is "scale agnostic" - it works as well for reaching an individual as for reaching millions..

The 20th century was the century of physical production - an inflationary century.
The internet, and Moore's law, means everything gets cheaper. This allows you to be wasteful on the web - the economic cost is so low. It allows us to build businesses without knowing how they will make money. Companies with network television audiences, like Twitter, can be run with 50 people. We are economically and creatively liberated.

Susan Greenfield

My question is what will the web to do us? The brain will adapt to the different two dimensional environment that the web provides. We might be entering a world that is more sensory than cognitive.
When you read a book you are are led through linear steps. When you go on screen, it's a sensory process..
Wonders whether 3 year olds using Google is such a good idea - what have they learned to ask?
Are we changing round from an answer-poor, question rich environment to the opposite?

We need a debate about all of this. Could it be that if you're putting your brain in a situation where you're living for the moment, that could have consequences. Will it encourage greed and recklessness?

The banality of Twitter. "look at me, mummy, I've got my sock on...".If someone says they have 900 friends what does that say about friendship?

Why don't we have a few brain scans of young people to see what's changing? Can we find out what is so addictive about the web experience? Wouldn't it be great to sit down and think what we want to deliver to our kids? We mustn't blow this - the web can be a fantastic resource but we need to sit down and work out whether it's delivering a better society.

Bill Thompson

I saw the web first as a relative latecomer in 1993. The change that it has wrought - it's much bigger than television. What it's achieved in just twenty years is astounding. In fact it's more important even than print.

Think about the web in evolutionary terms - like developing a new eye. Delivering us access to more than a raw collection of facts but to knowledge. One of the most important things we have done as a species. So no wonder so many governments want to control it and see it as a threat.

It was built not to respect boundaries. So governments want to do everything they can to limit its potential. Tim told me in the mid-nineties he hoped the internet would help us to know more about our neighbours. "If we knew more, it would make us less likely to kill them." Sadly that hasn't happened - but the web does allow us to know about neighbours being killed.

But it's just starting - the evolution is at an early stage.

Tim Berners-Lee

People brought up on the web realise that when you give away information you don't lose - no longer a zero sum game. When I speak to government departments about giving away data, they worry that someone else will use that data and make money from it and that will be unfair. On the web the rules are different.

Bill Thompson and Susan Greenfield then have an interesting spat about privacy. Bill is keen to give it all away - and reads his mobile phone number out to the audience. Baroness Greenfield seems shocked.

Tim Berners-Lee explains how we can build structures of trust on the web. You take into account where data comes from, assess its reputation and the people behind it. "There are particular people I trust about movies, and particular people I trust about wine. Concepts of trust are quite subtle."

Baroness Greenfield says young people she meets are beginning to feel uncomfortable about being so transparent online.

Question - is access to the web a human right?

Sir Tim: Yes, like clean water. And of course clean water isn't available everywhere.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

Yesterday, as news emerged of Google's plans for a lightweight operating system for netbooks, I immediately began receiving messages from people telling me that this was not a story.

In particular, the Linux community - and I apologise for doubting in yesterday's post whether they are a community - seemed united in hostility to the idea that the Chrome OS was anything new.

Well, on the whole I'm glad that we ignored that, but it's worth reflecting on whether the whole story was as significant as it first seemed.

Google's new Linux-based operating system is only taking on Windows in one relatively small area, netbooks, and even there it's becoming clear that success is far from guaranteed.

I've been speaking to two firms planning to work with Google on the Chrome OS, one very cautious about its prospects, the other more enthusiastic.

The first, an executive from a netbook manufacturer who did not want to be named, said early hopes that customers for new small web-centred computers would embrace Linux had been dashed. "The market is now about 96% Windows," he told me. "Every manufacturer will admit that demand for Windows-based notebooks has far outstripped that for Linux."

He told me that customers wanted a familiar interface, and were worried about whether Linux would work with devices like mobile broadband USB dongles. "Linux just can't invest in that kind of compatibility," he told me. But he was encouraged by Google's ambitions: "If they can overcome those compatibility problems, bring in a user-friendly interface, then I think people will be interested."

Then I spoke to Ian Drew, vice-president for marketing at the British chip designer ARM whose processors are in many of the world's smartest mobile phones. He was much more excited about Chrome - which isn't surprising as ARM has been invited, along with Intel, to work on the operating system.

I asked him why customers would be any more inclined to desert Windows for Chrome than they had been to move to other flavours of Linux. He drew parallels with the smartphone world:

"If we'd had this conversation three years ago you'd have said nobody was going to beat Nokia Symbian - then Apple comes along with an innovative user interface and Google comes along with another. If things are designed that are easy to use and innovative and the right price, then there's room in the market."

He felt that familiarity with Google - and its reputation for usability - would give it a better chance than unknown Linux variants of winning customers. But he warned it wouldn't be easy, and that the new OS would have to be innovative:

"It can't just be seen as a replacement for Microsoft, it has to be seen to be x times different."

What struck me from both conversations is how rapidly the world is changing - the netbook market didn't exist a couple of years ago - yet how conservative consumers remain.

So Google's Chrome OS was big news in that it reflected the shift away from the desktop and into the cloud, but convincing people that they want to be part of that world is still going to be quite a challenge.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

It's a few hours since Google used its company blog to announce its entry into the operating systems market, and already opinion is strongly divided.

On the one side, there are commentators claiming that this is an earthquake in the software world - "Google Drops a Nuclear Bomb on Microsoft" read the headline on one technology blog.

On the other, the Linux community - if there is such a thing - was quick to dismiss the Chrome OS as a me-too product that might turn out to be vapourware.

When I asked for opinions on a well-known social network about the significance of Google's move, there was a sceptical response from some. One message read:

"I'd rather leave it to Linux. It's already there - and it's getting better all the time. This can only be a brain-drain".

Another said:

"So GOS is...a browser and a stripped down Linux Kernel? Like every other netbook? Lots of sound and fury, signifying nothing".

You won't be surprised to hear that my totally impartial BBC view of this announcement falls somewhere between the two extremes of nuclear explosion and vapourware.

First, it's clear that the Chrome OS is still at a very early stage of development, and Google is making this announcement partly to encourage the open-source community to get involved, and partly to land a punch on Microsoft as it prepares for the launch of Windows 7.

But it seems to me that this is another quite significant event in the gradual migration of millions of ordinary computer users - people who wouldn't know a Linux kernel from a hole in the head - out of the Windows world.

If, like me, your first experience of computing was through a desktop machine in the office - or a classroom computer - then you are very likely to be living in that world.

You will have learned to use products like Microsoft Office, you will probably have started sending e-mails using Outlook - or maybe Hotmail - and you will have taken your first faltering steps onto the world wide web using Internet Explorer.

Yes, a defiant and growing minority of users have preferred to live in Macworld, but Microsoft and Windows have been synonymous with computing for most people.

But just in the last couple of years the scenery has begun to change. Google is probably the brand most familiar to the new generation of computer users.

Now they're discovering that, as well as searching with Google, they can use its software to send e-mails, to write documents and spreadsheets using Google Apps, to take a journey down their neighbour's street with Street View, or to browse the web using Chrome.

Then there's the fact that a mobile phone is becoming the way millions of people now get much of their access to the internet and, in some cases, their first introduction to computing.

In the mobile world, Windows is just one of a number of operating systems - including Google's Android - jostling for users' attention.

And soon those people who are spending more of their time in the company of Google rather than Microsoft will have the opportunity to use the Chrome OS for all their computing needs. If, that is, they don't want to edit video or play online games or do any of the more complex tasks that this new operating system may struggle to handle.

And, yes, you can already live in a Linux world if you are really determined and quite sophisticated in your computer use - but that is always likely to be a minority pursuit.

So Microsoft won't exactly be running up the white flag at Redmond after reading the Google blog. But there may be some furrowed brows in the marketing team as they try to work out how many people will now choose to wait for Chrome rather than upgrade to the latest version of the Windows world.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

It's been announced today that O2 has won the exclusive contract to sell the new Palm Pre in Britain.

That means it will be the only UK network selling what many regard as the two smartest phones on the market right now, the Pre and Apple's iPhone.

So congratulations to O2 - but just a little question. Is your network really good enough to cope with the flood of data?

Because the whole point of both phones is that users will be doing far more than just talking and texting - they will be online all of the time making the most of their unlimited data packages built into the pricey contracts you will be selling them.

iPhone users have already shown a far greater appetite for data than owners of just about any other phone - surfing the web more, uploading far more pictures to Flickr, and of course using all those online apps they've installed on their phones.

And the advent of the iPhone 3Gs has only accelerated that trend, with Google reporting that uploads to YouTube from a mobile soared by 400% in the days after the launch of the first video-capable iPhone.

But if my experience is anything to go by, users of either of these phones may hit heavy traffic on the web as they try to surf, download and share information and pictures online.

O2 tells me that users on its 3G data network experience speeds "up to 3.6Mbps" and says it has begun rollout of "up to 7.2Mbps". The company says it has good coverage across most of the UK, with built-up areas obviously doing better.

I've been testing those claims using a handy little application called Speed Test - which does what it says on the tin. Over the past month I've done a series of tests on an iPhone, all of them in the London area, where you'd expect to get a pretty good signal.

I did once get a download speed of 1.7Mbps, but in most cases the speeds were below 1Mbps, and quite frequently, the 3G network just didn't appear to be there at all.

The picture on the right shows a test conducted by the window of my office in West London - as you can see, the phone is apparently downloading at just 27Kbps and uploading at....well, 0.

If I'd wanted to send some video to YouTube, I would have had a long and fruitless wait - and the phone's battery would have given out long before I'd uploaded.

Mobile reception in or near buildings can be problematic, but on my morning walk with the dog near my home, I've noticed that the 3G network evaporates altogether when I get to the park.

I called 02, and the company confirmed that there was a small hole in the network in the place I described. The firm said it really needed to upgrade a nearby phone mast - but was wary of the reaction from residents who'd protested before about 3G masts.

I do feel some sympathy for phone networks, besieged on the one hand by geeks like me demanding better service - and on the other by campaigners fearful that phone masts could in some way pose a danger to health. And O2 is no different from the other networks in making somewhat fanciful claims about the speeds that can be achieved by mobile broadband customers.

But if mobile networks are going to become one of the key routes to the internet for million of users, they're going to need to build more six-lane highways to replace those B-roads where the traffic keeps getting stuck.

Update, 10:43, 8 July: This morning Ofcom has published a report on the state of 3G coverage in the UK, and the growing importance of mobile broadband to consumers.

It includes maps of each network's 3G coverage [668KB PDF]. And it has to be said that O2's coverage looks pretty thin compared to other networks, with 3 in particular looking as though it reaches far more places across the UK.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

A few months ago, I wrote here about what I saw as an audio revolution on the web, with a new service called AudioBoo allowing internet users to share sounds and speech in the way the likes of YouTube help them to share video.

Now this revolution is gathering pace. As I've reported on this morning's Radio 4 Today programme, AudioBoo is attracting more and more content - celebrities like Stephen Fry are "booing", evangelists are using it for daily sermons, chefs and photographers are using it to broadcast daily tips, and citizen journalists have been sending audio reports from events like the G20 protests.

I particularly enjoyed this offering recorded by the Radio 4 newsreader Neil Sleat as he prepared for an afternoon bulletin. Having started as just an application for the iPhone, AudioBoo is now moving on to other phones, and has ambitious plans to expand further.

And there's now competition in the form of a rival service called ipadio. Unlike AudioBoo, you don't need wi-fi or even a 3G connection to use this way of sharing audio.

Ipadio's idea is to allow any phone user to broadcast live to the internet by simply making a call to the service. That means you only get phone quality audio - unlike the higher quality recordings you can make and upload using AudioBoo.

But Ipadio says it is "a live streaming phone reporting tool" whereas AudioBoo is a "record and publish" tool - and the company believes there is room for both.

Among those who've recorded "phlogs", as the company calls them are the Mayor of London Boris Johnson, the Paralympic champion Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson, and a doctor recording an audio diary of his walk across the Pyrenees to raise money for a kidney charity.

The BBC's World Service has started an interesting project using some of these new audio tools. It's called Save Our Sounds, and the aim is to gather sounds from around the world which might otherwise be lost.

We're asking listeners to the Today programme to take part in this exercise, by recording audio from around Britain and uploading it to the Save Our Sounds site. If you could use the tag #r4today, that would help us to identify recordings made by listeners to the programme.

So, forget video - the future is sounds, not pictures - and you can be part of it. Or at least that's what my radio colleagues tell me.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

Would a Conservative government dump the hugely expensive plan to digitise NHS patient records - and hand the job over to private firms like Google or Microsoft?

That's certainly the suggestion in a couple of newspapers this morning. But is that really Tory policy, does the private sector want the job, and would it work?

What's under discussion is the NHS National Programme for IT - or more specifically the Care Records Service - which is being introduced in England.

Last year the National Audit Office warned that the whole project was over-budget and years behind schedule, with the total cost to the taxpayer running at £12.7bn and rising.

So are the Conservatives really going to call in Google Health or Microsoft HealthVault - systems in use in the United States - and get them to do the job for a lot less money?

Not yet, a press officer told me, but they are looking at a review they've commissioned from a panel of experts which has been considering what to do about the NHS IT project.

And a further hint that there was something to the story came this morning at an event called Reboot Britain, convened to discuss radical ways of using technology to rewire politics and the delivery of public services.

The shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt was the opening speaker, and while discussing the way the internet was shifting the balance of power between people and politicians, he did throw in that NHS IT figure of £12.7bn and ask whether there might be a better cheaper way of giving the public control over their medical records.

But Google did not seem eager to rush in and grab this great big contract. Its Google Health is a service which allows Americans to build online health profiles, to download their own records from doctors and pharmacies, and to search for medical information and treatment.

But Google stresses that this service works in a healthcare system that could hardly be more different from the one in the UK.

Microsoft has a rather different line on its HealthVault system which it describes as a "personal health application platform designed to put consumers in control of their health information."

The company says it's already in talks with the NHS about launching the system in England, though as an add-on rather than a replacement for the Care Records Service.

But would getting in either of these firms save any money? Because it's worth noting that private sector businesses - including Microsoft - are already heavily involved in the NHS National Programme for IT, but that hasn't stopped the project from becoming a costly disaster.

What is clear, however, is that politicians from all parties are waking up to two things - firstly, that huge centralised IT projects nearly always end in tears, and secondly that a web-savvy populace is demanding more access to its own data.

So a plan to allow us all to store our medical records, along with our photos and e-mails, somewhere in a Google or Microsoft cloud will need a lot of work before it becomes a reality.

But don't rule it out. After all, who would have predicted 10 years ago that we would one day see the head of MI6 in his Speedos on Facebook?

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

Ringtones - sometimes they are funny, sometimes entertaining, sometimes rude and, yes, sometimes they are just plain annoying.

Ringtones are a multi-billion dollar industry and everyone from Madonna to Charlie Parker and from Wagner to Wang Chung is available for download.

Well now a court in New York is being asked to decide if ringtones can be classed as a public performance and if so the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, aka ASCAP, wants a piece of the action.

ASCAP has filed a suit in a Manhattan court against the country's two largest wireless carriers AT&T and Verizon. The organisation is a non-profit that collects fees for public performances of music. It then pays royalties to its 350,000 songwriting and publishing members.

Back in the 1990's ASCAP garnered unflattering headlines for suing the Girl Scouts over publicly performing camp songs like "Happy Birthday" and "Puff the Magic Dragon."

Now it is claiming that a ringtone that is played on a cellphone breaches copyright law.

In its brief ASCAP explains when a ringtone becomes a public performance:

"It need only be 'capable' of being performed to the public; whether the ringtone is set to play, and indeed whether anyone hears it, is of no moment."

The brief later states that:

"Whether the device is on or off, the volume is turned down, or the phone is placed on vibrate, AT&T has caused a public performance."

ASCAP has brought a similar action against Verizon but says it won't go after individuals in this fight.

Operators that sell ringtones already pay royalties to songwriters for use of their material.

So it's the music industry versus technology again over copyright.

Naturally enough there are a few groups who have asked the court to throw the whole thing out on its ear.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, says:

"[T]hese wrongheaded legal claims cast a shadow over innovators who are building gadgets that help consumers get the most from their copyright privileges."

Public Knowledge and the Centre for Democracy and Technology argue that copyright law exempts performances that are conducted without a commercial purpose.

ASCAP disagrees.

All three groups have said in their amicus brief to the court that they reject as "bogus copyright claims...that could raise costs for consumers, jeopardise consumer rights, and curtail new technological innovation."

EFF's senior intellectual property attorney Fred von Lohman says:

"Are the millions of people who have bought ringtones breaking the law if they forget to silence their phones in a restaurant? Under this reasoning from ASCAP, it would be a copyright violation for you to play your car radio with the window down!"

Fines for copyright infringement are steep. Up to $150,000 (£92,600) per violation.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

Is Twitter suddenly in a dangerous place, risking alienating users by becoming far too corporate, while failing to make any cash from those feeding off it? Three incidents in 24 hours have provoked that question.

First, I was invited by BBC colleagues to speak at an internal "summit"on the use of Twitter in our operations. Then I saw our story about the marketing agency promising to buy Twitter followers for clients. Finally there was a press release from a PR agency boasting that its client's product had dominated conversation on the micro-blogging service for an entire day.

Now mine is just one of many organisations suddenly scratching their heads over the potential - and the pitfalls - of using Twitter, but the fact that we and others are holding seminars about it is a sign that this network is becoming less social, more corporate.

And what about this Australian "social media marketing agency" - scary enough in itself - which thinks it can make money by selling me and other Twitterers to anyone who wants to buy us?

As a long-term user, I'm both appalled and fascinated by the idea. I'm a few hundred users short of 10,000 followers and so would love to acquire a few more in my increasingly desperate attempt to overhaul a couple of the UK's top technology writers.

But rest assured, I won't be paying uSocial to spam you with entreaties to come and hear about my personal and professional life - though if you need to find me I'm at twitter.com/ruskin147.

And what value do the brands who do sign up for this service think they're getting - surely they are likely to antagonise more people than they attract?

But it was the e-mail from the PR firm which really got my goat. It boasted that its client, a software firm which I shall not name, had managed to become the top trend on Twitter by promising big prizes in a competition to people who tweeted its name.

This achievement has been lauded not just by the PR agency but by bloggers too as an example of the right way to engage in "social" marketing. But the result is that it has made Twitter a much less useful and enjoyable place to be for a day, with corporate messages intruding into the conversation. So forget "#iranelection" - or even "#andymurray" - from now on the trending topics are likely to be "#winbigatpoker" or "#loseweightnowaskmehow."

Of course, we need to be realistic - Twitter is a business, not a charity, and does need to make some money at some stage. But the irony is that none of the marketing agencies, global brands or media giants clambering onto the back of this fast-growing network appears to be handing over a penny to Twitter.

Instead, @ev and @biz, Twitter's founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone, seem to be looking on while others launch a marketing blitz which could do serious damage to their relationship with their users

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

By any measure, he is among the most important figures in technology of the last decade, a major influence on the way we use and interact with computers and mobile phones, a British designer who ranks with the Conrans and the Dysons. But have you ever heard Jonathan Ive, the Apple designer behind the iMac, the iPod and the iPhone, talk about his work?

I hadn't - so when a friend invited me to hear him speak at the Royal College of Art's Innovation Night I leaped at the chance.

Now one of the reasons you don't hear much from the Apple designer is that he is, by his own admission, a hesitant and unpolished speaker. He told the audience at the Royal College that he's learned that preparing presentations takes him away from perfecting a product, so he'd rather let others do the talking.

But the format last night was a fireside chat between Ive and the Rector of the Royal College Sir Christopher Frayling in front of an audience of students and what seemed like the whole of the London design community.

Amongst his own people, the designer seemed more comfortable than faced with intrusive probing from some impertinent hack - though I did manage to get one question in about what he'd have liked to change about the first version of the iPhone(no clear answer, I'm afraid, though he said designers were never satisfied with their work).

And what emerged were some fascinating insights into the culture of Apple and the craft of industrial design. Ive was insistent that the key to Apple's success was that it was not driven by money - a claim that may raise eyebrows amongst shareholders and customers - but by a complete focus on delivering just a few desirable and useful products.

"For a large mulit-billion dollar company we don't actually make many different products," he explained. "We're so focused, we're very clear about our goals."

He said that Steve Jobs had always made it very clear that this focus on products was the only reason for Apple to exist - and contrasted the culture with that of other companies who talk about having similar aims: "If you have to spend time institutionalising that, talking about it, you end up chasing your tail."

So how did the company decide what customers wanted - surely by using focus groups? "We don't do focus groups," he said firmly, explaining that they resulted in bland products designed not to offend anyone.

Christopher Frayling reminded us at that point of Henry Ford's line about what his customers would have demanded if asked - "a faster horse" - and it's surely true that the point of innovative companies is to come up with products that customers don't yet know they need.

But it was the physicality of design work that Jonathan Ive was keen to stress - from the Apple design workshop full of machines, throwing off a lot of noise and dust, to visits to Japanese aluminium craftsmen to learn how that material could be crafted into a laptop casing. Yes, of course he and his team use all the latest computer-aided design tools - but he also likes to knock out a physical prototype and feel the weight of it in his hand.

He told a story about how, as a boy, he'd taken apart an old-fashioned alarm clock, and inside the spare outer casing found a mass of workings, "an entire watch factory".

Extraordinary complexity wrapped in a simple, functional, touchable, beautiful case - that seems to be the Apple design ethic.

So an inspiring 45 minutes in the company of a design genius - a few fragments of which I filmed using one of Mr Ive's own products. But at the end, Apple's PR team came up to stress that this was a private event and would I please keep the pictures to myself.

Another example of the somewhat paranoid culture of a company which always wants to be in complete control of its message. But maybe that's another reason for its success...

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

Remember when Facebook was the scrappy kid on the social networking block, with its teenage boss (ok, he's now old enough to order alcohol in most states), its devil-may-care attitude to money, and its apparently casual approach to grown-up issues like privacy and unsuitable content?

Just a year or so back, it was MySpace which seemed far more mature - it had a lucrative advertising deal with Google, a wise old parent in Rupert Murdoch, and employed dozens of consultants around the world to deal with the concerns of regulators and politicians.

But now MySpace is fading fast, shedding hundreds of jobs, closing offices around the world, and saying goodbye to its founders Chris De Wolfe, who has left, and Tom Anderson, who is reportedly being paid to stay at home, while still being the automatic "friend" of all new joiners.

By contrast, in London this week I came across evidence that Facebook is growing up very rapidly, meeting two new executives who appear to symobolise the company's new-found respectability and confidence.

I was in the company's compact Soho Square premises - they're moving round the corner to a bigger place in Carnaby Street next week - to interview the chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg.

What exactly is a COO? I'm never sure - but at Facebook it seems to mean the person who runs the business while Mark Zuckerberg concentrates on the cool stuff. Sheryl Sandberg has one of those very scary CVs - a Harvard MBA, then a spell working as chief of staff to Bill Clinton's treasury secretary Larry Summers, then a top job at Google before heading to Facebook.

And her message to me was not about some new way of sending friends virtual sheep or making your profile look really cool, but something far more surprising - Facebook is actually making money. Or at least is on course to be "cash-flow positive in 2010."

Now a decade ago when every dotcom measured its worth in "eyeballs" on its site, and claimed it was on course to break even pretty soon, I'd have been quite sceptical about Ms Sandberg's forecast. But back then the whole point was to race as fast as you could towards an IPO( a stock market float) or a takeover by a bigger business so that you could cash the huge cheque from gullible investors and go on making losses for years.

Facebook, by contrast, appears determined to stay independent, despite selling small stakes at astronomic valuations to both Microsoft and a Russian media firm, and rumours of an impending IPO sparked by the appointment this week of a new chief financial officer.

Yet it is obviously spending pretty freely - the cost of servicing 200 million users around the world who all want to upload photos and generally keep the servers humming is growing by the day.

I put it to Sheryl Sandberg that each new user, especially those in less lucrative advertising markets like India, must be costing the company money - but she insisted that wasn't the case:

"Not only are we covering our current costs but we are making major investments in our growth all over the world and our revenue from advertising is covering those costs."

I've been sceptical about the ability of any social network to make serious money from advertising - who wants soap powder messages in the middle of a conversation with friends - but Facebook says its revenue is up 70% year-on-year in the middle of the worst recession many in the advertising business can remember.

True, a 70% rise compared to a period when the company made small change from ads may not tell the full story - but Facebook appears confident that it's cracked a way for advertisers to be part of the conversation rather than an intrusive annoyance.

And the other person I met at Facebook's London office symbolised the firm's determination to deal with its other challenge - regulation.

Richard Allan, a former Liberal Democrat MP and then director of European government affairs at Cisco, has been hired to lobby European regulators for Facebook.

With the EU mulling over tighter privacy rules for firms that share their users' data, and with continuing concern from politicians about issues like cyber-bullying and hate-speak on social networks, there will be plenty on Mr Allan's plate.

So, yes, Facebook suddenly looks like a mature business, poised for steady progress towards profitability and ready to engage in grown-up conversations about its place in society. Then again, so did MySpace a year ago, until it suddenly went out of fashion.

So Facebook now has to work out how to be both grown-up and cool at the same time - never an easy trick to pull off, as my children sometimes remind me.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?