As usual, Merlin Mann offers his unique view on the update, and how its helped him read more, rather that flinging something red at something green

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While there is a lot to be said about that, around the morality of a newspaper and how far they can and should go to pursue a story, I’m more concerned with how massively people have erupted with opinons on the matter. Moreover, how a lot of companies are now under scrutiny even though they are unrelated to the story in question.

@richardmurphyUK

Sign of things to come? #NoTW story buried in US Murdoch papers WSJ & NYPost yet world knows about it End of newspapers?

@Britt_W

Any bad news being buried today I wonder…? #notw

@paul_scoones

NZ news site Stuff.co.nz has already buried the NOTW story, even on its World page. Does Murdoch control Fairfax Media…? #notw

@appleaddicto

Gas price hike by British Gas buried underneath the #NOTW…

There seems to be a mass assumption being made that any news story that a person deems as important, is purposefully being buried by the company by announcing it while a bigger news story is going on. But would you really expect a big company to rush through all its ‘bad’ news at such a time just in the hope that it gets buried by the lead?

In the example of British Gas’ price hike, such a change would have been planned weeks ago, and likely the press release and announcements were already prepared. What is more likely is that it was just bad timing, or rather a coincident that caused the announcements to overlap. If British Gas had a press release planned, why would they think about delaying it just to make sure it got proper news coverage? Equally, would they have had the lead time to get all the press information ready between the lead story hitting and before it died off?

To me, thats unlikely.

But the other side of this, is the rumours circulating that The Sun will start producing a Sunday newspaper. Such rumours were greater fueled bu the fact that SunonSunday.co.uk and TheSunonSunday.co.uk were registered two days before news came out that NotW was closing, at a time when Rupert Murdock was still backing his staff at NotW. Is it not just as likely that some bright spark with £10 to spare went to 123-reg.co.uk and bought the domains, as a prank, or thinking that it could happen, and hope to sell the domains to News International for a premium? This is a age old money-game called Domain Parking, and many companies have spent hundreds of thousands of pounds to obtain a domain for their company. Certainly the WHOIS details for the domain don’t offer any suggestion that its been bought by News Int. The registrar is private, to a UK Individual, named Mediaspring, a company name that doesn’t seem to exist in Companies House. I would also wonder if the Web Department at News International, or News Corp, would really use 123-reg.co.uk?

Similar domains, such as TheSundaySunPaper.co.uk has been registered on 8th July 2011, and points to a landing page, stating that the domain is for sale. Beyond wild speculation, I see no evidence that the registration of a few domain names by an unknown party equates to a new edition of The Sun.

The main point here is that it doesn’t take much for wild speculation on Twitter, or other social media websites, to spread quickly, and can often tar a company with a bad reputation. One unhappy customer, or mischievous individual can cause damage to a commercial business. Moreso, as TV news programs tie into Twitter more, they further open themselves to wild speculation, as the information coming from them is no more than a 3rd or 4th hand source.

Of course, all this being said, Twitter has proven itself a useful news source, in fact when a plan crash-landed in the Hudson River in NYC, it was a user of Twitter who caught the first photo, providing second-hand evidence of the event, and getting his photo seen on countless news shows and in newspapers and magazines.

So maybe its not all bad, but maybe, we just need to be a bit more careful about the rumours we spread, and what we RT.

The license agreement allows you to log in with your iTunes account, which continues to grow in usefulness and becoming the one place to spend money online. Once logged in, you go to the Purchases page and hit the Install button.

Where this could start to fall down is when relying on developers to stay active. Imagine this. You’ve spent £39.99 on some app from the MAS and you have just gone and bought a brand new iMac or MacBook Air. Unfortunately, the developer of the wonder app you love has shut shop and closed his developer account. Now you can’t reinstall your app because it doesn’t exist now. We’ve already seen this with the iPhone, where a number of apps have been removed later. This leaves the only trace of that application on your old computer.

For normal users, they may not even think about backing that up. They’ve been conditioned to believe that the MAS is there to go and reinstall all their apps.

In the old days, you would still have a CD with a printed license key there to reinstall even years later without issue. It’s not friendly but it’s always there (unless you lose either part).

This isn’t a problem exclusive to the MAS but it’s more prominent given how Apple promote the store.

So what is the expectation? If Sony closed, you wouldn’t expect them to support your TV that is still in warranty. If the company is gone, you lose your support. It’s a risk we take without thinking about it, but with bigger companies, we’ve come to expect they will be here for years. When it comes down to a single iOS developer working weekends to build that cool app you can’t work without, where is that expectation? How far can you reasonably expect the developer to support that app?
Honestly, the truth is not at all. You don’t buy software with a support warranty. You buy as is. It could be gone the next day and you’re stuck. No update, bug fixes or support and no refund.
What could you expect a developer to do? Well they could continue to support an app for a set time period, or suggest alternatives to their “killer app”. Or they could put the app in a DMG and stick it on a web host somewhere. That allows users to carry on using it, and download it regardless of it’s presence in the MAS.

In some ways the solution comes down to backup again. But it’s also having someone who knows to backup those apps, a friendly tech savvy person who knows this stuff. As that tech savvy person, we are already doing this. We have our SuperDuper nightly clones and Time Machine backups and know what to do to get it back.
But we’re not the normal users are we?

This adds to Twitters acquisitions, now including Tweetie for Mac and iPhone, both developed by Loren Brichter. What this calls into question however is the place of Tweetdeck as an application.

Twitter already has a great Mac application, Twitter for Mac, available in the Mac App Store. Given that Tweetdeck is an Adobe Air application, it leaves the question of where it stands as a desktop client. If it remains as an active program, then where does it stand with Mac users? How do you tell new users there are two applications, and how do they choose? If its aimed as a Windows only application, it makes for an inconsistent user experience, if they switch between the two OS’s.

So will it even stay? Perhaps Twitter bought Tweetdeck to get all its users, and intends to push them to a native Windows client, and ditch the current Tweetdeck application. Or maybe Tweetdeck gets scrapped entirely, and this is purely a purchase of talent and to remove the competition.

Tweetdeck only accounts for about 13% of usage amongst non-official applications (5.46% overall), but is still second place to Ubersocial, and far behind the web interface. So it seems hard to believe that its a $50m purchase for 5.46% of the market. That would give Twitter an estimated value of $915m, which is ridiculous. Or is it?

I got engaged!

I proposed to Katie on her birthday after a lovely tapas dinner at Bar Estilo with her parents. I got down on one knee, and just asked her straight. She was shocked, surprised, felt faint and needed to lie down.

We celebrated the following day with a champagne lunch at Selfridges in Birmingham, then relaxed for a long weekend off, as we told our friends and family.

Needless to say, we’re both very happy and have begun the long process to plan our wedding.  We think it will be next year in late August or early September but need to find a venue before we can set a definite date.

I wanna say thanks to all those who wished us well on Twitter and sent us engagement cards.  I will try and do some progress blog posts as things go on, maybe share some wisdom with those reading this.

And this is the final piece

So how about some stats for the project?

Started on 2 January 2009
Finished on 10 February 2010
365 photos (obviously)
61 in black and white
26 outside
5 in New York, New York
Took over 1600 photos
7 with Katie
4 with mirrors

I had a lot of fun. Hope others did too.

I’m hoping that after that, or perhaps even during, I might get the opportunity to study for the Apple exams, aiming to become a Certified Professional at some point.

Hopefully I can be less slack about studying this time around, since it took me over a year to do my A+ and about a year to do my Network+. Suggestions welcome!

At some point during the course of development, there was an upgrade to this freeware application, which I dutifully installed looking forward to some random bug fixes I would never encounter.

What I did encounter was that the developer had suddenly decided that he wanted to charge for this application, and so pushed out an update to all versions to make it shareware. So the next time I fired it up, I was prompted for a serial number and asked to purchase a copy of the software.

I’ve got nothing against buying software. I’ve bought a Tiger, Leopard and will buy Snow Leopard, I bought VMWare Fusion cos I had a need for it, and I bought SuperDuper cos it was a great bit of software. But I knew going into that that I’d eventually have to pay for the software. It wasn’t sprung on me.
I do have something against being forced to pay for something which I was previously getting for free, just cos the dev had a change of heart. Especially to do it in such a sneaky way as a software update. If you want to charge for your product, then release a new paid only version, stop development and updating the old version, and do a clean cut over. Offer new features and support for the product, but don’t sneak in through the backdoor and demand money.