Following on from T-Mobile Germany's announcement of the Cupcake update rollout, T-Mobile have now confirmed worldwide Cupcake release in May via over-the-air update.
This ends a long saga of uncertainty, misinformation and seriously jumbled messages from both Google and T-Mobile which has made a sizeable portion of the G1 user base very angry and confused.
The first rule of customer relations is that the more information you give your customers, the happier they will be. But happy customers doesn't necessarily mean good marketing, and the months of vague and conflicting messages, speculation and false hope have created a vast amount of traffic and publicity for the newborn Android system.
Could it be that all this delay and vagueness were a cunning move to spread the Android buzz, in the same way product shortages create frenzies around consoles and toys? Share your views in the comments.
I got an email back from my contact at T-Mobile's press office regarding the rollout of Latitude on UK G1s. Familiar message: Google say it's in the hands of T-Mobile, T-Mobile say Google are sorting it. I think I can speak for the UK Android customer base when I say I'm officially tired of this circus.
OSNews has a post about Android version 1.5 (commonly known as Cupcake from the development branch which has driven it), believed to be coming in a couple of weeks, with a list of features and tweaks. This is certainly one of the most complete release descriptions I've seen so far.
Of course, it's by no means guaranteed that we'll actually see all these features at release, even in the US and particularly in Europe. We've already seen the previous Over-The-Air update stripped of a lot of predicted features in Europe, rendering it largely a bugfix. Until the thing actually arrives on someone's phone, we just have to wait and see.
(via TalkAndroid) T-Mobile Germany have announced on their homepage that they will be rolling out the Cupcake update for Android in May. Previous updates have surfaced in the US a couple of weeks before Europe, and in the UK about a week before the rest of Europe, so we should be seeing an update in the US very shortly with the UK following.
This idea struck me as I was working on the upcoming new design for www.silverknife.co.uk, and made the decision to completely cut out the "classic blog view" pages in favour of lean post lists and "highlighted post" boxes.
The blog as we recognise it, a continuously scrolling list of entries in reverse chronological order, became a feature of the web in the late nineties. Content management systems had been around for some time, allowing users to update the content on their websites with user-friendly tools, but they generally required some technical expertise to set up in the first place.
The blog (through popular tool/sites like Blogger and Wordpress), allowed thousands (and eventually millions) of non-techies to create their own websites and share news, opinions, links and photos with the net. The standard design was deliberately simple - new posts at the top, pushing down older content until it fell off the page and into a dated archive.
Simple it is, but there are big design flaws in the classic blog structure. Even with short posts, many blogs ended up with giant, slow-loading main pages going over multiple screens, at a time when the growing web design aesthetic was to keep everything one one screen if at all possible.
Like a lot of people, I read most of my blogs in chronological order - either just to get a sense of the progress of the news, or because they are narratives in which each posts depends on the last. That means a lot of scrolling on a classic blog, sometimes requiring clicking through multiple archive pages and then scrolling right down each one to find the first new post. That's not a good accessible design.
And the big players are showing a steady progression away from the classic design - just look at the top ten blogs on Technorati.
Huffington Post and Gizmodo effectively have newspaper-style front pages, with multiple columns clustering posts together, and generally just a picture and headline or tagline for each item - although both have a reverse-chronological progression down the front page.
Lifehacker, Mashable, Engadget and Ars Technica show only very short clips from each post on their front page, with a link to the rest of the item - generally a graphic predominates each one.
Techcrunch, Smashing Magazine and Blogging Stocks have slightly longer clips for each item, but only Boing Boing retains the endlessly-scrolling, full-text-of-every-post format - of course, being primarily a linkblog, Boing Boing has relatively short posts anyway.
The classic blog is rapidly becoming a relic - so is it time for the big blogging platforms to move toward a new design template? Something a little more twenty-first century? Share your opinions in the comments.
An interesting situation has developed regarding Google Latitude, the location-based social networking tool which failed to show up in the last over-the-air update to the T-Mobile G1. According to a Google employee answering this question on Google Mobile support, Latitude has now rolled out in the UK but due to a "code of conduct between operators" in the UK, it's not available for the G1.
To really rub it in, you can visit the Latitude web page on your G1, and you're even presented with a big blue "Launch Now" button, but pressing it just takes you to your regular Google Maps display. Aggravating.
My contact at the Google press office says that this is fully on T-Mobile's side of the fence, and they are now looking into this for me - I'll post here as soon as I have some news.
When Brand (creator of the Whole Earth Catalogue and CoEvolution Quarterly, two vital touchstones of early computer culture), used that phrase at the first hacker's conference back in 1984, it was immediately seized as a motto by a generation of crackers and phone phreaks.
These were the countercultural explorers who tested the communications networks and computer systems to their limits, broke security measures and invaded closed systems. Occasionally they had malicious intentions, very occasionally they were looking for profit. But most of the time (and this is what their opponents could never understand) it was for the pure joy of making the unknown known, of uncovering secrets and releasing information that had been locked away.
At the time, information systems were a string of digital islands in a stormy and uncharted sea, each one occupied by a distinct and unique tribe with its own customs and treasures, many of them wary of outsiders and watchful for invading threats approaching their shores.
In the eighties, keeping your island defended and your treasures hidden was at least feasible. It took a wild and wily explorer to chart that ocean, climb those jagged cliffs, and learn enough of the language of the natives to infiltrate their society.
Now, the ocean is a sea of constantly flowing traffic, and almost every one of the islands is accessible - in fact, it's no longer possible to be a closed and self-contained digital island any more and function. The smartest islands have bloggers, Twitterers and Facebook gurus spreading the word of their golden idols and sandy beaches.
But still throughout the network, and often in the positions of most significant responsibility, are people who cling to the island mentality. "Hold the beaches, guard the cliffs, let no-one hear about our treasures!"
Enough with the island metaphor already.
The trend that Stewart Brand identified twenty-four years ago is now being tested to its limit in a truly open information environment, and it comes up as true as it's ever been. Information wants to be free - not just wants but is driven to be free by forces as powerful and inevitable as gravity.
The fact is that once information is out, it's damn near impossible to put it back. Once the span of human memory and the survival of a piece of papyrus or vellum were the tenuous connection between a piece of information and the future. Now, carried by materials (magnetic charges and constantly-changing electrical circuits) which are ironically far more volatile, information survives and spreads to an extraordinary extent.
A post on the most ignored blog on the Web has a good chance of being Google-cached, Wayback-Machined and crossposted in a dozen different places by human or automated agencies. And Google may be ahead of the game on storage and indexing, but a thousand competitors are racing to join the quest to save, spread and organise every piece of knowledge available.
Ironically, the organisations with the strongest island mentality - government, law enforcement and monolithic corporations - are also the most eager to have available every piece of information about someone else. Their hypocrisy is bad enough, but the belief that they can somehow guide or dam the flow of information to suit their ends borders on the hilarious.
"Yes, I know Sony blocked their movies from the Xbox, but...You can use MediaMall's PlayOn to restore this functionality to your box, along with the other cool channels it has available. I don't know why people ever, ever try to stop nerds from doing things. It's really the most incredible waste of time." - Tycho Brahe, Penny Arcade
Now we have not just a small group of technical prodigies who work to spread covert information but an entire population of information-creators and -spreaders, armed with cheap, user-friendly tools.
A contemporary example is the case of the recent G20 summit riots, where CCTV cameras were turned off in many of the potential hotspots of police-protestor violence (a fact, incidentally, not reported in any of the mainstream media I've been able to search), but amateur video footage revealed more than one human rights violation by police officers.
Of course, "Information wants to be free" cuts both ways. It may remain possible in the future, through the exertion of enormous effort and expense, to keep secret such personal information as medical and criminal records, personal relationships and indiscretions. But the evidence so far has indicated that any large collection of data leakslike a sieve, and the gathering of data into large repositories is not going to stop any more than the creation and dispersal of that information.
We may all have to resign ourselves to a future in which there is no way to retain any degree of privacy, a kind of neo-theological universe in which all our sins will come back to haunt us, and the only hope for freedom is never to take an action worthy of criticism.
Of course, the optimistic view is that this kind of all-consuming openness will create a society with much greater tolerance and less need to judge. What do you think? Share your views in the comments.
Image by netzkobold via Flickr
