TECH: Chromebooks And Why I Am A Convert

I’ve been using a Chromebook for just over a month now, and I’ve totally fallen in love with it. After years of mainly Windows, some Mac, some Linux and even older stuff (Acorn Archimedes anyone?) I’ve found an OS that just does works for me.

The last computer I actually bought was a cheap Linux netbook for £100 about 7 years ago - all others had been inherited or bought.  It just about did the job - I needed it to write basic documents like CVs, to check emails and to blog. 

Since that more or less bit the dust I’d been borrowing a spare laptop that had Windows XP on it which was a big step up but was slooooow.  Booting up into a usable state was about 8 minutes, and having to install more and more programmes to do what I wanted to do just slowed it even more, along with the virus checker chugging away in the background.

So I got an Acer 14 Chromebook with an HD screen because I wanted an efficient and affordable laptop I could call my own. The interface is very intuitive, but is in reality is only there to enhance the Chrome browser that 67% of readers of this blog use.  This is a really weird concept to get your head around at first if, like me, you have been using Windows for over 20 years.  You aren’t installing programmes, just plug ins to the Chrome browser.  You aren’t using a virus checker because there’s nothing a virus can really do to you.  The system updates itself in the background so if there are updates (and they do seem pretty regular) you won’t notice it at all.

Most importantly, everything is fast and feels ‘clean’.  It’s booted up in 10 seconds - it actually takes me about as long to enter my password.  There’s never been any lag for me.  It’s a no-frills approach to computing that’s a pleasure to actually use.

As technology goes more and more down the cloud route, the benefits of a browser-based OS become very real. One of the main criticisms of ChromeOS is that there’s little you can do on them unless you have an internet connection.  Which isn’t entirely untrue, but my response question would be: how often does an average user use their laptop without an internet connection?  

Writing documents and listening to downloaded music are the main things probably, which can be done with a Chromebook offline.  Games as well maybe, although the chances are if you’re a serious gamer you have a desktop or a console, not a laptop - and even then, our dependence on internet has encroached into this area with some of the most popular games being MMO. The majority of things people use their computers for today require wifi.

I know 2 people with MacBooks and many, many more with Windows laptops, but I think the minority would suffer from using a Chromebook instead.  All that time ago my netbook felt very limited.  Since we have become more and more fond of streaming media and using our smartphones for doing things, confining yourself to using a web browser is far less constricting.  It should be said that I have been invested in using Chrome, Google Drive, Android etc for years now - if you’re already part of the IOS ecosystem it would make sense to get an IOS laptop.  But I’ve been using a Chromebook for around 6 weeks there have been only 2 times when I have had to use a Windows PC to try and do something.  Once was to fill in a form which had been created using lots of boxes on MS Word, which neither Google Docs or MS Online could manage (and to be honest even using desktop Word it wasn’t easy to do because it had been badly formatted to begin with). The second time was trying to upload different versions of songs to Google Play Music without them being replaced by the service’s matching system (and it didn’t work doing it on Windows).  Neither were major things, although it goes to show that there’s a way to go for Google before it can expect people to use Chromebooks as their only device.  

That time may be closer than expected though.  Chromebooks are being used heavily in schools, meaning that a generation will be comfortable with using them, offices are increasingly becoming paperless and our media is now not only almost completely digital but largely cloud-based as well.  Coupled with that, Android apps are planned to come to most Chromebooks soon - although the roll out has been painfully slow - and these will plug a lot of the gaps for people that see a lack of functionality.  Although seen as a bit silly when they first came out, Chromebooks are definitely a very viable option for people these days, and it’s not impossible to foresee a time where they are doing extremely well out of beating Apple on price and Windows on ease of use.

It’s maybe premature to say that ‘they’re the future of computers’ - but I really hope they are.

TECH: Twitter Takes The 'Social' Out Of Social Media

Twitter seems to be repositioning itself as a rolling news operation.  That’s not a surprise exactly, but it’s a shame.

Its new ‘Moments’ feature, so far only available in the US, seems to be a digest of the most tweeted about stories of the day.  A bit like a Twitter version of Flipboard or Google’s Play Newsstand. (Being UK-based I’m sorry if that’s not a fair description of a feature I’ve not used.  But that’s definitely what it sounds like.)

 

Twitter's 'Moments' feature

As a new direction it seems like an admission of defeat from the company – they’re giving up on trying to persuade more people to interact with each other and want to be yet another online news source.

It’s not a surprise though.  Despite the large amount of accounts out there, there’s a significant proportion of people who have never really used it at all.  And daily use is on the wane with a lot of people who to check it every minute, let alone daily.  Meanwhile, Facebook continues to thrive.  As an experiment, post exactly the same thing on Twitter and Facebook – a random bit of silliness, a link to a news article, whatever you like.  I am willing to bet that in most cases the level of interaction and debate with other people will be much larger (and faster) on Facebook than on Twitter. 

For most casual users of Twitter, if just one person replies to your tweet these days, I’d say you’d be doing very well indeed.

That’s a shame.  It’s a company that used to thrive on millions of strangers interacting with each other, discussing common interests with people from all around the world.  It felt like a threat to Facebook at one point.  It was certainly cooler and trendier than Facebook, which was yesterday’s news.  (I’m aware that using words like cool and trendy makes me look like last week’s news.  I’m in my mid-30s with a baby on the way.  Sue me.) 

The Twitter experience has changed a lot since I joined.  It seems a lot less irreverent and amusing, for instance.  The balance between humour and silliness/current affairs and politics is a lot less balanced, on my timeline at any rate.  It’s news, famous people, journalists, more news, interspersed by the odd lonely and ignored tweet from a ‘normal’ user, sitting there forlornly unretweeted and unfavourited.  I suppose I could change my experience by unfollowing some people and finding some new followers.  But the novelty’s worn off now and that feels like it would be a chore I haven’t got the time for.

Twitter nowadays feels more corporate, more adult.  That’s because it is.  A lot of teenagers have moved on to things like Snapchat and other things that parents and politicians don’t use.  The journalist Grace Dent said that when your boss follows you on Twitter, Twitter is over for you.  Well if you’re a teenager and your parents sign up I expect this is even more accurate.

But leaving that to one side, the democratic feel of Twitter vanished when a Twitterstocracy emerged.  There was at some point a distinct drift to the dominance of power users (a mix of already famous journos, celebs, comedians and politicians with a handful of early adopters who gained prominence through heavy use and controversial/witty tweeting).  People stopped following new people as much and settled for the groups they already had.  (If you are a casual user, ie not using Twitter to promote your business, when was the last time you gained a load of followers who weren’t real life friends or spam?)

New users joining after this point would realise quickly they weren’t going to get followers very quickly without putting in a lot of effort. Their voices just weren’t going to be heard unless they turned into attention seeking controversy machines or were a company that could employ dedicated social media experts to create an online presence.

Even people who have been on Twitter for quite some time find that their tweets will be read by a relatively small amount of people if by anyone at all. More and more people have become passive users, reading but not interacting, not creating, sometimes only promoting.  And even at promotion, without a lot of followers it’s not actually that great.  For instance, I have always posted links to this blog on Twitter and I can tell from my stats that I don’t get any traffic from Twitter anymore.  I used to, but not anymore, nothing.  I get more from Google + for God’s sake!  Whether that’s because I don’t tweet enough on Twitter to have a presence on it I don’t know, but it’s not really encouraging me to continue to use it as a promotional tool.

It feels like the glory days of Twitter being a fun place to natter and chatter have gone, except perhaps when there’s a live television event.  As a company it is being steered  towards having a serious purpose, which isn’t as fun.

Loads of my freemium apps have started getting adverts telling me to use Twitter for all the latest news. This morning I had a Twitter alert about some “latest news” being retweeted.  I opened the link which went to a 2007 Guardian article about Martin Amis’ comments on Islam.  Hmm.  Might not be using Twitter for all the latest news just yet…