Hardly anyone knows this, but I am in fact a much bigger Blackberry fanboy than I am an Android fanboy.

“Sure i love reading books on a bright LED screen that hurts my eyes, because i fucking hate myself”

Although there seems to be a huge hatred arising from the more traditional readers about eBooks, one cannot deny that they are going to take over the entire publishing and reading industry pretty darn soon. About ten or fifteen years ago when the internet first started out, people thought that it would only be possible to use this technology on a computer hooked upto the cloud via a telephone line. Then came wifi, and then came probably the most important technological accomplishment of the 21st century, mobile internet. Gone are the days when only a Blackberry would be able to send email via a GSM network, now we can browse pages in full view over 3G, HSDPA, and even 4G networks (for you lucky bastards in the States). If you were to look at all of the things that previously had not caught on immediately, but have been steadily improved over time, then you’ll also notice that it is very easy to apply this theory to eBooks. eBooks have had a slow start, but then along came Amazon’s Kindle eReaders, which actually made reading on a portable electronic device a pretty pleasant experience. Now to consider the iPhone for a minute. Somebody at Amazon decided to create an application for the iPhone called, you’ve guessed it, Kindle for iPhone. With this, the user could easily synchonise all of the books they had purchased from the Kindle store to their device, and also sync things such as reading settings and bookmarks from the Kindle desktop application for Mac and PC. Kindle arrived for Android the other week, which, very conveniently, coincided with my desire to read The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty. I purchased the book from the Kindle store and am now reading it on both my PC and Android phone:

Another factor to consider is the enormous growth of smartphones over the past two years; there is a huge number of people who use their smartphone not just for business, but also for pleasure (yes that can include porn, lol). If you look at both the growth of different smartphone platforms, or lack thereof, as well as the ever-increasing amount of applications centred toward things such as reading, it is easy to see how this is going to end up in perhaps only a few years time. We are starting to use our smartphones more and more, and for different reasons, and I think that within the next few years we will really be able to see a potentially massive growth in things such as Kindle, or iBooks for iDevices. 

If you’ve actually listened to one of my podcasts the entire way through without stabbing yourself, then I applaud you good sir/madam. I am currently in a state of utter bemusement as to what I am going to speak upon in my next podcast, so I am happily taking suggestions and requests. Think of it as requesting a song to be played on your favourite radio station, but it’ll be me ranting on about something. Topics can be anything in the world really, you can get me to talk about why Barack Obama is nowhere near as good as people would be lead to believe, or even why I love people who drive four-wheel-drives in a city (which I honestly do, by the way). 

So, what are your requests?

Okay at this point I should mention that if you don’t know what Twitter is, the a) You shouldn’t be on my website, and/or b) You should really stick your head down the toilet. Now that that announcement is over, we can move on. Those of you who like to write prose on the Internet in the form of one hundred and forty character blurbs will notice that Twitter has been down a heck of a lot recently, as the lovely people over in San Francisco wanted to upgrade a feature of the timeline cache system, in order to improve the overall experience. Thing is, they chose a pretty darn bad time to do this, right at the start of the World Cup where they knew that everybody is going to be tweeting their arses off about the football. Then, rolling into the equation comes Twitter’s API, which basically allows third-party apps such as Tweetdeck to access Twitter, thus allowing users to utilise these apps in order to use the Twitter service. Once the number of tweets being ‘requested’ in a certain time frame gets to a certain point, then the API literally dies. This means that third-party apps stop working. Once the API is overloaded, people start switching to Twitter’s standard twitter.com web interface, and then what usually happens in these situations is that users are greeted with the following page:

(those of you who are on Twitter will be more than familiar with this!)

Now once you’ve got to this point, you’ll probably be very annoyed, unless you have the patience of a saint. What you’ll do in your frustration is leave the fail whale tab open and refresh it every two minutes in order to see whether Twitter has sorted itself out yet. However annoyed you may be, this is actually going to make the whole situation worse. So basically, if everyone were to tweet one hundred times a week, then Twitter’ll be fine, however if everyone tweeted 100 times an hour, then it’s highly likely that you’ll fuck up the Twitter API. 

So the moral of the past few days has been the following:

1. Calm down

If Twitter goes down, then just remember that it’s likely that it won’t be down for more than an hour or so, or even less than that. There’s plenty of other things to do with your time! Personally, I tend to use this time as an opportunity to take a break, sit outside with a beer for half an hour or something, listen to some music, make a cake. If you insist on being on the Internet then go on YouTube or something. Or if you’re in the mood, go watch some porn. 

2. Twitter, get better servers

Seriously, Twitter needs to stop adding new features before having upgraded their servers from Linux to Mac or something. It’s like adding thousands of hugely complex animations to a phone OS without bumping up the processor speed in order for it to actually cope with all the enhancements. 

Rant over. Good afternoon. 

So in case you don’t already know as well as this site I also run another blog along with a friend of mine, you can visit it here. We are just a small technology website at the moment, but very soon we are going to take off and (hopefully) become big. What makes our site special, you might say? Well for starters we as authors have been using technology since the day we were born (virtually). We’ve both witnessed the rise of the internet and are both experienced web users, we also both have a good range of opinions about the technology industry as well as the potential success or failure of certain online businesses or social networks. 

Once the site has started up properly and we have some ads running we hope to generate some money, and who knows where it will go from there? When we started it was merely for fun, but now that we seem to have taken it more seriously we can see that the project actually has some potential, I see success at the end of the tunnel so we are going for it.