Why your photos are worth $1bn to Facebook

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It’s a simple fact that photos drive visits to Facebook. Facebook is an advertising company, and you’re only valuable to its clients when you’re on Facebook looking at their adverts. Making Facebook the central place to share your photos with friends is a great way to make sure you come back and see more adverts.

Photos aren’t just about repeat visits, though. The photos you upload, combined with those added by your friends, make you vastly more valuable to Facebook. Valuable enough, in fact, for Facebook to buy rival photo-sharing network Instagram for $1bn. Here are my thoughts on why your photos are worth so much.

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Address Book security

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Last April, I wrote about the UK Conservative Party’s election app. This app uses your iPhone’s address book to send personal details (and likely voting intentions) of your friends and contacts to the Conservative Party.

The subject of address book security has been in the news again recently. Two particular stories have caught my eye, both of which raises questions about how we value address book privacy in mobile apps and on the Internet.

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Wolfram Education Portal

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iBooks Author wasn’t the only digital textbook announced this week. Just one day earlier, Wolfram Research announced a beta of its upcoming Wolfram Education Portal.

You might have missed the announcement; I certainly had, until Amy Worrall pointed it out. Wolfram’s Education Portal is like a more technical amalgam of iBooks textbooks and iTunes U, through which educators can create interactive digital textbooks and manage course plans and feedback. Or at least, that’s what it looks like from the beta.

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Apple’s iBooks Author licensing terms

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I’m surprised by the fuss about Apple’s iBooks Author licensing terms. The terms prevent you from selling your iBooks Author-created works outside of the iBooks Store (although they can be distributed for free). You can still export and repurpose the content therein, but you can’t sell the complete, packaged layout file created by iBooks Author in another store.

This seems perfectly reasonable to me, for three reasons.

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Ignored keypresses when typing on iPad

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The iPad has a reputation for being difficult to type on. It’s generally accepted that the iPad is okay for short emails and notes, but is not suited to longer documents. The anecdotal consensus seems to be that an on-screen keyboard, with no tactile feedback, leads to more errors than a physical keyboard with real keys. Based on my research today, this simply isn’t the case. Instead, it’s the iPad’s software that’s causing the majority of typing errors.

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Our Choice: “The Next Generation of Digital Books”

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Publishing has had many saviours in recent years. Apple, Amazon and Google have all been touted as potential messiahs by an industry desperate to work out its role in an uncharted digital world.

Big technology companies haven’t been the only saviours. Small independent producers such as Touch Press and Inkling have experimented with the boundaries between books and apps, with interesting results.

Today sees another entry into the Future of Publishing, launched with considerable fanfare by Al Gore and Push Pop Press. Our Choice, the sequel to 2006’s An Inconvenient Truth, claims it will “change the way we read books, and quite possibly change the world.”

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Section 3.3.1 and accessibility

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I run an iPhone development company.  We’re currently making our UK train times app fully compatible with VoiceOver. We’re being helped by users of the ViPhone Google Group, which is a forum for discussing the iPhone 3GS and its support for visually-impaired users.

I saw a comment from a member of the group the other day, shortly after Section 3.3.1 went mainstream:

Could this mean more accessible apps for VO users?

Note the meaning behind the comment.  Not “how dare they”, or “shame on you”, but “hurrah – this will mean that apps are more likely to be accessible via VoiceOver.”

Making better quality iPhone apps isn’t just about how they look – it’s about how they sound.  And that’s another reason to develop your apps in Xcode.

VoiceOver accessibility programming for iPhone

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We’re just putting the finishing touches to VoiceOver accessibility support for our National Rail Enquiries iPhone app. When adapting the app for VoiceOver, we found that Apple’s developer documentation for accessibility was pretty good, but there were still several questions we couldn’t answer. After some help from Apple, and some experimentation and research, we’ve managed to answer most of our queries. I thought it might be useful to share what we discovered, in case other developers have run into the same problems. Here are our questions and findings.

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