if connected

We’re all becoming more dependent on free websites: for storing photos, webmail, social networking, blogging, calendars, contacts, notes, sync, everything. But as the downturn shifts towards a recession more of these free sites will be at risk of sudden closure if last time is any indication.

Today, logging in to wordpress I was struck by the shrewd opportunistic net thrown towards livejournal users as wordpress promoted ease of import with a tagline on the wordpress dashboard. Livejournal has apparently just laid off a large part of its staff and is moving more of its operations to Russia…

I’m pondering how to have early warning of the risk to avoid last minute panics to back up content, or, sites folding during a two week holiday so I miss the chance to retrieve my stuff. Yes, I could spend time researching the viability of every firm that runs a service that I’m using, but it takes time and the reason to use most of these sites is time-saving and convenience. Anyone feel like starting a ‘failing firm watch’ website? I’m thinking a community effort could cover the ground much more effectively.

Perhaps it’s time to focus more on self-hosting and remote access to my home network, rather than leaving stuff in the cloud on someone else’s kit.

Mobile broadband and mobile Internet isn’t ‘always-on’ whatever the industry may tell you.

Mobile network signals vary. Inside buildings the 3g signal often drops out. Underground on London’s tube, there’s no signal at all. Worse, when a phone has a weak signal applications go treacle-like and waste users’ time rather than offering a clear error message. Phone GPS satnav receivers virtually never work indoors and often struggle on city streets with tall buildings.

3G mobile phones and USB modems drain battery power to such an extent it effects use patterns. The more mobiles are used to go online the more the battery is hit. Heavy users temper and reduce their use of push email, downloading large files, and so forth to reduce the power impact. The result is that they’re never fully online.

It’s not mobile ‘always-on’ but mobile ‘almost-on’ most of the time. Even when battery and network signals do hold up, the design of mobile devices alters the net experience so people behave differently when mobile. Small screens and poor text input results in email triage. Longer efforts wait until when people are back at their PC. Noisy locations and sunlight make music and video a poor experience compared with home.

People are not, and will never be always-on, even if the technology manages to catch up. If people go into a meeting, they are effectively out of touch (reading email still isn’t acceptable behaviour however much people do it). Similarly, people are offline during the morning shower, when asleep in bed, or when out for a run or out for dinner in a restaurant even if the tech folks swear the mobile phone is online.

The wobbly hard drive on my previous laptop forced me to think about where my digital stuff lives and how often it’s backed up. Much of my important, frequently changing documents no longer lives just on my hard drive and so back up isn’t necessary to ensure they survive a broken hard drive or a lost laptop. All of my recent emails — work (Exchange) and home (IMAP) — all of my contacts (Exchange), appointments (Exchange), notes (Evernote), todos (Evernote), and bookmarks (Foxmarks) sync with central “cloud” computers and are usable on multiple devices.

The cloud should make my stuff resilient to problems at my end. Instead the buck passes to others. I may still lose access to my data but it won’t be my fault. Essentially, I’m trading off one potential problem for new ones. Cloud services are a double edged sword.

Connectivity is the main weakness I worry about. The broadband connection between me and the service is a choke point that breaks everything if it fails, or if I’m in one of the many “out of coverage” situations (mobile “always on” Internet is a myth). Even on home broadband connections the upload speed makes sync to remote services slow which is why virtually all of the services I use sync small amounts of data. We need fibre broadband.

Sync is essential for mitigating some of the pain if remote services fail. Sync means I have a local copy of my stuff all of the time. Without it, if the third party has an outage then I lose everything. Bloglines and Friendfeed are some of the few remote services I use that are entirely web-based. I’d much prefer that they mimicked the Evernote approach. If they break, they break, and there’s nothing I can do.

Mobile Internet and Mobile Broadband is not an always-on experience and this isn’t going to change soon. Near term, there will always be places or situations where the cellular data network doesn’t reach or where only a poor slow 2G signal is present (+). Product managers must design around it. The best current mobile applications and devices understand this, and download what content/messages they can as soon as they can. SMS works this way: messages are delivered direct to the handset. Blackberry push email’s main benefit is that when a user opens their email, there is no wait while messages download. This to my mind is the greatest advantage of building a mobile application, rather than a mobile website. Good applications work anywhere, anytime, whatever the network situation, and can use local storage and sync to deliver faster responsiveness than a website. But Apple has made a strategic decision with the iPhone to target always-on behaviours. The iPhone’s entire design assumes that there is always a fast network connection present, for both the built-in Apple applications, and the bulk of those from the new app store. Some examples:

• Google Maps (built-in) does not store any map data locally, even if the user has browsed that map before. Effect: the user has to wait for the map to download each time they open Maps, the speed depends on the vagaries of the mobile network. Despite the new GPS chip which works anywhere, the maps application is only usable if there’s a data network. So, its usefulness in very rural areas is limited. Alternative approach: Nokia Maps automatically caches map data locally, speeding its responsiveness, saving the operator from unnecessary data transit, and avoiding data costs for the user if roaming abroad.
• Apple’s iPhone email only automatically downloads the in box, not other folders, so there’s a delay each time a user opens any other folder, and it doesn’t work when there’s no signal. How long the delay is depends on how many messages and the speed of the data network. With a 2G data connection and 20-30 messages I find it takes at least a minute or two. Similarly, there’s no user setting to control how much of a message is downloaded, so routinely users experience partially downloaded messages, even if the iPhone has many Gb free space.
• Apple’s new Exchange email support does not allow messages to be moved or deleted if there’s no connection. Weirdly, Apple’s IMAP support allows it. The experience when I tried to use Exchange email on the tube, above ground where there is patchy coverage, reminded me of the user access control alerts from Vista: the iPhone kept popping up warning messages.
• Sending SMS messages only works when there’s a network present, and the iPhone does not auto-retry sending in the background until there’s coverage. Effect: I write a message on London’s tube where there’s no signal and I have to remember to click send when I surface. I’ve seen the same poor behaviour on Windows Mobile 6. Alternative approach – my Nokia 7110 from 1999, write an SMS, try and send it, fails, but the text stays in the outbox and the phone auto-retries in the background. The SMS gets sent as soon as it’s possible.
• Apple Weather app downloads weather each time the app is opened and has no local cache. Effect, doesn’t work on London’s tube. Slow to launch. No different in experience for the user compared with accessing a bookmark of a mobile website that has been saved to the iPhone home screen.
• Evernote (a great third party application) stores all notes on its servers with no local cache or sync, unlike the PC and Mac versions of Evernote that sync notes between Evernote’s cloud and the local computer. Alternative approach – Windows Mobile syncs notes from Outlook to the handheld with a full copy of each note in both places.
• The newspaper applications for iPhone are little more than skinned websites, but which take longer to load than the iPhone’s Safari web browser, and still only work with a live mobile data connection. Mobile News, Bloomberg, SFNetNews applications all require a connection to read stories, just like accessing a mobile website in Safari, yet take longer to launch and have a less standard UI as they are all distributed as separate applications. Alternative approach – antique Palm application Avanto Go, enables users to download content to their PDA for offline viewing. More recent Windows Mobile and Symbian versions offer over the air download. Local storage improves the speed to jumping between pages, so people read more, and see more adverts. The New York Times app for iPhone also appears to do this, but it needs a better UI to display when it has finished downloading stories.

If there’s no data connection the current iPhone UI repeatedly nags the user to remind them to switch off flight mode (if the user has set it to on), or that there is no data connection if the mobile is “on” but has poor reception. This reminds me of the worst of Vista’s user access control pop-ups (which can at least be switched off). Bottom line – Apple needs to improve the iPhone’s ability to operate where there is a slow connection, or when there is no mobile data network present. They need to add automatic local caches to their standard applications, and offer the user a few more settings to manage data roaming, beyond the current blunt on/off. Apple also need to make it easier for third party apps to store and cache data locally as well. + Examples of coverage issues: In-building, 3G signals often don’t reach or are weak. In rural areas, mobile networks routinely only offer gprs and sometimes there is no reception at all. Airplanes don’t allow cellular radio use. Public transport often lacks good coverage: cellular masts tend to have been positioned along main roads, not along train lines, plus cuttings and tunnels break up the signal. London’s tube has no underground mobile coverage whatsoever. If a 3g cell becomes very busy, speeds slow, and the geographical area that 3g covers actually shrinks. Etc. etc. If a user is moving in a train or a car, there is no guarantee that a good mobile data signal, or any signal, will continue to exist as the user roams between cells and locations. They may start an activity in good coverage and then lose it.

Surely the clue is in the name: this is a personal service for sync’ing personal stuff, not social networking.

Or, did I miss something important in the speech while I watched the football, and which is not listed on Apple’s MobileMe site?

(oh yes the photo gallery, surely that’s just a straight evolution from .Mac – Ovi this is not)

While Watergate was all over the news wires overnight, the Avant Go feed on my phone revealed a different story.
I sync’ed at 7.34am UK time today (2.34am East Coast) but neither the Washington Post nor the New York Times had the story (even though the NY pages have a section headed “Latest news”), presumably they are both based on the previous day’s paper. However, both Reuters US and the BBC feeds had it.
Bring on mobile phone coverage for the tube! With that I’ll be able to read the real news, in real time.
For companies looking to offer ‘download and sync’ audio or video news, learn the lesson: news content has to be as up to date as possible to have value.