Message in a Bottle

I’ve done the decorating! Hope you all like it!

Two vaguely-related blog-ettes from the drafts folder today, folks. And today, we’re talking technology. Not the specialist subject of this blog but I do try to keep my eyes on the tech world where I can.

Firstly, Blogger went down for about 20 hours a few days ago. A lot of posts and comments were scrubbed from existence, which was bad enough, along with the sheer length of the outage, which made it worse. But, Blogger is back up and I still maintain my blog on it, mainly due to the sheer effort it would be to take it all and import it into Wordpress. Maybe I should’ve gone with Wordpress ages ago, who knows. I’m pleased with the blog and I'm going to stick with Blogger – despite my indifference towards Google – for the time being.

Then I read about Google’s new-fangled “Chromebook” laptops, which are light computing devices where everything is stored online. Convenient if you want to move from Chromebook to Chromebook (or, as their videos like to keep assuming, you're extremely clumsy and live at the top of a skyscraper”, but consider the flipside: what if the service that holds all of the data and documents you hold dear itself crashes? I’m all for cloud computing – I adore Dropbox – but I really feel moving literally everything to the server in the sky is a bit too risky for now; Dropbox strikes a great balance herein that it backs up not only to a distant cloud storage, but also to multiple, if you configure it, physical computers.

It just struck me ironic and, actually, tragic for Google, that when they’re trying to persuade us all to move all of our personal and business computing to the cloud, one of their flagship services crashes spectacularly, taking content that, to my knowledge, there patchy, slow reassurance of restoration, with it.

Now, onto another irritation that I’ve realised: the new Facebook message product is friggin’ awful. Not only do I have a “Facebook email” address I didn’t want and won’t be using, my inbox has been “streamlined”. Though how having four years worth of message threads all squished down and combined with a primitive iteration of Chat history is streamlining God only knows. It wouldn’t quite be so bad if Chat histories were segregated into their own little area as opposed to being found alongside actual “messages” and it was possible to use subject lines for threads as was possible under the previous system. Obviously that’s just a little too complicated for most idiotic Facebook users – a worryingly large and increasing populace. And can someone tell me why some messages are in line with some from over two or even three years ago? This is a side-effect of the bunching of all the messages between myself, and, say, my friend Elliot all in one watered down thread, eliminating any useful and cherished delineation using subject lines and message threads in one fell swoop.

The epitome of this catastrophe of disorganised mayhem? The mingling of Chat histories and regular messages. These are not the same thing. The awfulness of Facebook chat is awe-inspiring even of itself. Why crowbar it into a private message service that, even though I used it infrequently, and now will endeavour to never use at all, was lovely and organised?

This whole Messages fiasco – I mean, if you thought my paragraph of complaints was a total shambles (and it’s nice to write such junk on the odd occasion) then just check out your Facebook inbox and try to make head ‘nor tail of it – pales into insignificance when it comes to the new Groups system, though more on that and some of the hideous groups that my membership of has been presumed upon in a later post. Oh, will that be fun…