Someone I know just posted on Facebook that their son has been killed in a car crash. Their expression of grief in this context took me aback. I sat here stunned.

This is someone I haven’t had contact with for years and for me to respond with a Facebook comment in such circumstances seemed wrong.

But then I realised that here was a fellow human being in frankly unimaginable pain reaching out. Who was I not to reach back …..

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If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.

John Updike

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Zero integration with iTunes – I want to share or favourite tracks as I am listening to them.

The pre-selected favourite tracks don’t represent my tastes.

Hard to see what the favourites are as they use album art rather than track titles.

When I choose to add favourites manually I can’t browse my library and have to abort the profile update to look at my lists!

The recommended artists bear even less relationship to my tastes.

No way to import contacts.

Talk about connecting to Facebook but no way to do it.

No way to create or share lists

No integration with Twitter

Photo upload still not working!

[I originally called this post Ten things I don't like about iTunes 10 but realised it was Ping I was ranting about. That then made me question the version number change for iTunes as bugger all else has changed except Ping!]

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At risk of invoking memories of playground rejection by wading in to the sensitive topic of whose a friend of who, I thought this was an interesting story worth telling.

I saw from Facebook that two people I know, Robert Scoble and Jeff Jarvis, had friended Leo Laporte and went to try to add him as a friend as well. I got the following error message:

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I am more and more convinced that far from damaging business efficiency, as is often claimed by naysayers, becoming more social at work heals so much of what goes wrong.

How often are people de-motivated by a manager treating them as a number or a statistic on their spreadsheets rather than relating to them as a person? How many costly misunderstandings occur because those burdened by responsibility are more comfortable with broadcast than respectful listening? How many projects fail because of the dominance of a powerful individual at the expense of the social bonds of a group?

We have disparaged the “soft” social skills of relationship building as being un-businesslike in favour of a dispassionate coldness. Maybe we should think again.

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Utopia is on the horizon; I walk two steps, it takes two steps back. I walk ten steps, and it is ten steps further away. What is utopia for? It is for this, for walking.

Eduardo Galeano

Quoted in Steve Chandler’s excellent Fearless

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In the process of pulling together previous blog posts for a project I came across my first post about Twitter in November 2006:

Twitter

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So many of my conversations with clients end up being about either maintaining the corporation’s managerial integrity in the face of marauding hordes of Facebook enabled staff, or protecting their brand integrity in the face of viral damage spinning out of control online when a customer decides to get their own back for a bad experience. Neither the fantasy of brand nor managerial integrity are sustainable.

Banking epitomises this. When I eventually give up with online systems – that treat me as an undifferentiated unit of a mass market, barely segmented into simplistic demographics – and trek down to my local branch where I have to sit and watch a bank teller – who is treated as an undifferentiated unit of a staff who isn”t trusted to make any decisions and are subject to the same online systems as me albeit with a different set of assumptions this time about grade and accountability.

We both face the same impersonal closed box and we have both had enough. We are starting to talk to each other.

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Tonight I attended a music competition at my daughter’s school. We were truly blown away by the standard of all of the acts which had been organised, choreographed and written by the pupils themselves. Genuinely talented, nice kids lifting the spirit with their energy and commitment.

Then came the adjudication. One of the most inappropriate responses I have seen in years. Every comment on every item had to have the obligatory “could try harder” element which of course ended up being delivered with more relish than the rest of the feedback.

Goodness knows what motivated the woman but her behaviour struck me as a classic case of being given authority and assuming that that means keeping things in check and being in a position of knowing better – even if you don’t. You can stack it up alongside the price of pomposity as one of those so, so damaging, and unnecessary, aspects of authority that we could well do without.

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In Toronto recently, and now Sydney and Melbourne, I am having plenty of opportunity to contemplate the energy and determination it took for the original settlers to survive and thrive in what must have been hugely challenging circumstances. I find myself comparing their circumstances with those of the people I am here helping, people trying to bring the social web into the world of business. The same attributes of vision, courage and determination are needed. As are immense amounts of sheer bloody hard work. Building infrastructure, establishing laws, growing culture – the parallels are many.

However I then began to think about the downsides of modern cities. They all dominate the natural environment and, with a few local nuances, the architecture, populations, and culture are pretty much the same. They have also dominated, and to a large extent exclude, the indigenous populations.

I then found myself re-considering the parallels with the web. Maybe the geeks and early adopters are like the indigenous populations who worked with the land and lived in harmony with it. Maybe the settlers are the people who now follow on and “civilise” things turning online conversations into “social media” and BBS’s into Facebook. The hunting and gathering of the hyperlink will be turned into the factory farming of “social search”.

Maybe the geeks and idealists will end up being contained in reserves while the onward creep of northern European, middle class, industriousness continues to dominate the planet and the people on it ……

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