While Apple can do no wrong in software and hardware (other than be TOO POPULAR), they often fail in one area and that’s social. Find my friends is the third social attempt by Apple. They’ve failed to set the industry on fire with Ping (their music sharing social network) and Game Center (their game matching service) and now we have real world location with Find my friends.

Find My Friends is “better” for some values of “better” than the other attempts but it still highlights a lack of vision, a lack of “what could this do, where could this go”.

For instance: I’ve added a couple of people on Find My Friends.

Setting Status
Finding friends is one part of the equation but being found is another. Where is the option to set a status update so that people can see this. Even something as simple as “Busy” or “Available” will let people know if they should message you. This is even more important than selecting the “temporary” setting to be found.

Geofencing
Where is the alert that tells me my friends have entered within a mile of my location? Having a travelling GeoFence is an obvious feature for Find My Friends enabled smartphone users. And yes, it could be great for the untrustworthy or unfaithful but giving people an iota of credit, if there’s a ‘situation’ where location becomes an issue, the stupid will get caught.

Finding Friends Again. And again.
I have connections established by Ping and Game Center but Find My Friends wants to rifle through my address book to find people I can connect to? Really? In 2011, this is a solution? Why not give me a list of my Ping and Game Center connections and just ask me if I want to add them to my FMF list?

Time Alerts
Why can’t I set my non-existent status alert by the time of day or by the entries in my calendar? This stuff is all interconnected. Why doesn’t it just work? For that matter, why does my phone still ring when I’m plainly in a meeting! I don’t think Siri will help with that!

Group Messaging
Where’s the option to message all of my friends? Where’s the option to ping them with a “Anyone free for lunch” or to set a status change “Free for lunch”. Where does this actually work for friends? In the video, they say it’s good for when the family (obviously all toting iPhones) are at Disneyworld but seriously do we have to message each one individually?

The daft thing is that group messaging is excellently supported in Messages (via iMessage) but not in Find My Friends. Dumb.

So, in my opinion, Find My Friends, just like Ping and Game Center, is a pretty half-assed solution. Apple can still tie this all together and make it just work and maybe they will – maybe this is all part of the plan. Maybe the NEXT MAJOR RELEASE will tie all of these loose ends together? But I doubt it.

Following a couple of nights of civil unrest, I exercise my white, middle-class, male privilege to think about what’s going wrong in Northern Ireland:

In the aftermath: how disenfranchised and disengaged with the status quo must you be if rioting is more attractive than any other activity?

Steven replied:

@cimota Lower east, seems to still be reeling from loss of shipyard/shorts, real lack of something to aspire to.

My reply:

@playfordrants Yeah, of course I think that building leisure yachts would be a good solution.

Stevens last reply:

@cimota whether its wind turbines or whatever something needs done we have ceased to be a society that actually seems to make anything?

While I may focus on the “digital media” microcosm and it gets a decent amount of attention because it is seen as an easy win for global reach and income generation, it’s sobering to remember that we remain the minority.

We used to have a thriving linen industry. During the 18th Century, a fifth of the worlds linen was shipped from Belfast. We used to make ships and planes. In 1912, Harland and Wolff was the largest shipyard in the world and Shorts was the first aircraft manufacturing company in the world.

Since the 1970s, more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost from Belfast – a situation made worse by the escalation of “The Troubles”.

And no, I wasn’t joking about building leisure yachts. We used to be good at this stuff (East Belfast Sailing Club is still renowned as somewhere to build ferrocement hulls).

So, how would we get back into the swing of things? How do we move upwards in the value chain?

My friend George runs a little manufacturing company in County Down. He’s a craftsman himself:

So far I have resisted the temptation to invest in ‘lean manufacturing’ techniques (which include extensive use of computer controlled machines) and have instead, built a team of real craftsmen who build Lowden guitars by hand using Japanese chisels, planes, knives and spokeshaves. It would have been much more economical to make our guitars with assembly workers and machines, but our choice is to build skills and understanding of wood, and in so doing the guitars feel and sound like individual ‘works of art’”.

So why can’t we do this in other areas? I’m not sure we can create 100,000 new craftsman jobs in the three years that we’d be allotted under an official work programme but we need to have that vision. It’s not about creating low end jobs or even really high value jobs – it’s about the middle ground. How do we raise the level of the lower end jobs – and to my reckoning, it’s about skills.

I had a debate with my co-worker about how to achieve some of this. He says I’m a top down thinker and he’s a bottom up thinker. Whereas I want to start programmes, he reckons I need to raise aspirations and allow them to think for themselves. My response is simple: if it were that easy, it wouldn’t be needed. We need to give people something to aspire to. Spread the story of master craftsmen like George and his team. Bring in existing master craftsmen across multiple industries and engage them in doing stuff. We have all of this empty space in Titanic Quarter and beside it on the old Sirocco works site – just beside where the unrest happened. I do not believe this to be coincidence.

And if it was me, I’d want to be involved in building boats.

Read the full article here at CultOfMac

Letting kids use or own iPads is controversial. Parents, teachers and others aren’t so sure about letting kids get sucked into yet another electronic diversion. Pilot programs at a few schools around the country to experiment with iPad-based learning tools are often met with criticism by parents and teachers alike.
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The right question is this: Is the iPad a healthy *replacement* for TV? And I believe the answer is a resounding yes.
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The iPad is scary because it’s new. But most parents have already accepted a gigantic role for something truly in the lives of their children: television. The content kids see on their TV sets is mostly mind-numbing, soul-deadening, formulaic consumerist crap, punctuated by sophisticated ad campaigns designed to transform children into mindless consumers.
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The bottom line is that TV is a massive, negative, toxic, unhealthy influence in the lives of American children. I think parents already know this.
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From a parent’s perspective, the iPad is superior to a TV in every significant way.
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My advice to parents: Unplug that TV and run, don’t walk, to Toys R Us and buy each of your kids an iPad 2 — before TV turns them into “average Americans.”

If you want to read about a real-world implementation of this, check out Fraser Speirs blog. Frasers story has been inspiring though I’m well aware that there would be no progressive programmes like this in Northern Ireland.

We have some cool edu-tech companies here in Northern Ireland. Some of them are focused on the iPod touch and iPad as delivery devices and I think this is a great development for the region – even if the technology is not adopted locally.

These are some of the links which I’ve emailed myself (my version of ReadItLater or Instapaper – though I’m leaning towards the latter). for the most part, they’re too good to miss.

…you’re part of a very privileged generation.

There are people who are too young to read this because they’ve not got social yet. There are some who are too old, too traditional.

Is it an age group thing or a changing world thing?

I’ve got some documentaries on DVD that I’d like to watch in company. In essence to stir up some conversation. In fact, it’s not necessary to agree with everything that is said, but it would be nice to have the opportunity to discuss it. Maybe get a group of folk together once a month?

I was thinking of calling it the “Saturday Night Really Tedious Film Club”. Think it’ll catch on?

Here’s the DVDs I own a copy of.

• Us Now (available on Youtube)
• An Inconvenient Truth
• Aardvark’d
• We Are The People

Add to this COSMOS, maybe Wonders of the Solar System, maybe some of the futurist documentaries out there. Happy to have other suggestions.

I launched a new blog today: City of Tomorrow designed to help capture ideas for the development of cities in the near future.

What is City of Tomorrow?

City of Tomorrow is a Civil Imagineering (as opposed to Civil Engineering) project to have individuals imagine the city of tomorrow and then explain this from the point of view of an observer in the future. We want to think of, and describe, features of our future cities and hopefully imagineer dates by which these things will be achieved.

What do we hope to achieve?

We’re at the Imagineering stage so we’re just looking for ideas. As we get closer to the dates mentioned, then we’re going to look for ways to implement these things.

When?

For the purposes of this web site, the date is now 2025 AD or later. We all live in magnificent cities which have witnessed more than a decade of revolution in architecture and design, in transportation planning, in social re-engineering and a complete re-write of the planning laws.

The writers here will provide a retrospective look at what happened in the past to get to where we are (in the metaphorical) today. We’ll provide important dates of when things happened, attempt to give links and credit to people who made the greatest changes and at some point in the future (in real time) review how much we got right, how much we got wrong.

Part of this comes from attending a CityCampLDN (CityCamp London) in February and meeting some of the “civil entrepreneurs” who attended.

CityCamp LDN brings together city leaders at all levels from government, business and community organisations to reimagine the way in which technology can help to reshape the future of London.

I know we have more folk who are interested in this – and this is definitely not a Belfast-centric piece of work – but we have to think about our cities first just due to the population. I hope that progressive town and borough councils will steal these ideas – I hope even more to get them engaged.

Later in 2011, I’d like to hold a City of Tomorrow event in Belfast and/or Derry-Londonderry to see if there are others interested but for now I’d appreciate any comments or tweets you have.

The first time I heard of “Ginger”, the device that was to become the Segway, was through some Apple-fan web site which proclaimed that Steve Jobs said that, “some day, people will build cities around this”.

From one point of view, he’s right. One day the streets, businesses and your home will have ramp access for you to use Ginger; but we should already be there in light of the disabled. Now, a transcript of Jobs meeting with Dean Kamen (with Jeff Bezos) paints a different picture. What’s kinda weird is that earlier this year, I met John Doerr.

But I digress.

The thing that I loved about the Segway was the thing I loved about the Sinclair C5, the Ford Ka and the New Bus for London.

These are transportation devices that were built for tomorrow. They polarise – you either love them or hate them (or ridicule them) but you can barely ignore them. (The New Bus for London was designed and is manufactured here in Northern Ireland by Wrightbus).

I think it’s important to consider what we build and always build for tomorrow. Create things that polarise opinions.

Consider that the Segway is illegal on both the footpaths and the public highway in the UK. It’s evident to me that we still build our cities around the width of Roman chariot wheels. How progressive.

You can listen to the audio for last nights RSA event with HRH Duke of Edinburgh and Sir David Attenborough now.

Forward to 32 minutes in for a classic.

One of the great difficulties of the WWF was, it had a very good story so it raised an enormous amount of money. And then suddenly we thought, what about some projects? Well, the money was coming in much faster than we could turn out the projects. So we built it up…why aren’t we spending the money, wait-a-minute we can’t produce the projects. And we started throwing money at projects and people said “What are you doing with the money”, so we had to discover some means of tracing what was going on and making sure that people didn’t walk off with it because aid programmes, as you probably know, the money very seldom gets to the people who need it. So, I remember, we made a rule that we were not going to give any money to any projects, if they needed jeeps or landrovers or radios or whatever, we’d pay for that, we’d pay for people, their wages, but we would not give them any money to spend, and that worked quite well.

I got hold of a brilliant chief accountant and I said “How can we follow the way this money is being spent” and he said, “well, do you want to do it a hundred percent because it would be very very expensive.” And I thought well, yes, probably true, we’ve got to admit that there’s going to be leakage somewhere. It was quite interesting – because you don’t want to spend two hundred pounds or two thousand pounds chasing five bob, you know, it’s going in the wrong direction, and that’s what happens in the civil service.

Now go back and listen to the whole thing or watch the video:

It has been nearly a year since I first came in close contact with the original iPad. It blew my mind, and since then, it has become a daily accompaniment. I create content on my MacBook Air, but I spend a lot of time consuming content and media on the device. In fact, if I had to guess, I use my iPad as much as I use my notebook computer.
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However, if iPad, the device, is more magical, the applications (apps) for the device are anything but. For nearly a year, I’ve been waiting (and waiting) for experiences befitting the device and its hardware capabilities. – OM Malik, GigaOm

I concur. I’m still waiting for the amazing experiences that we think we deserve when we tote around such amazing hardware. And if that goes for iPad, then it goes double (or maybe tenfold) for Android, WebOS and anything else out there.

We do have time, however. The mouse went from humble beginnings in academic and commercial research in the 60s to initial release with the Macintosh in 1984 and it’s still probably the major input metaphor for computers in existence. We have been poking at our computer screens with a single fingertip, the mouse cursor, for over two decades. While we all like the look of the future with multi-touch (and from the Kinect, zero-touch) interfaces, we still await the apps which will fulfil this promise to us. New touch-based methods to consume old style media ain’t a big deal.

We want mobile-optimised hyper-local-aware software, designed for touch and equipped with contextual understanding and social-network awareness so we can get the most personalised experience.

And this is the low bar.

If we can think of apps that can fill this criteria in minutes, imagine what we could do if we were in that business, if our job was to not only talk about the next big thing but be part of the team creating it.