I Don’t Believe It, They’re Back Again…

Yep, here we go again...

It’s actually nearly a year to the day since I wrote a lengthy and tiresome rant about the problem of taxi drivers in Dublin – not their problem that is, I mean the actual general problem of us being lumbered with them. And surprise, surprise, with the annual regularity of Santa Claus, they’ve somehow found their way back out of their cars and onto the streets again. Or rather, they’ve somehow found their way to parking their cars across the main streets again. I can’t remember which it is. Last time, my major complaint was that they don’t deserve business because they’re too expensive anyway (and with the exception of 8-20-20 cabs, which seems to plug itself on the radio morning, noon, night and day, they all still are) and they don’t provide any sort of a decent service, but this time I’ve more of an issue with their ridiculous campaign/’protest’ just by itself. Needless to say though, the same points I made last time still stand – given the choice between a nitelink home for about €5 versus an unpredictable, but generally around €30 taxi ride, there is actually no choice. Secondly, when you get on the Nitelink, or an Aircoach, or any other form of transport in fact, the last thing they do is tell you the current goings-on in their industry. When I get into a taxi however, I’ve actually found myself looking around to see if they have a CD with a pre-recorded spiel on the regulator, deregulation and the other longstanding issues of discussion that I nearly always seem to get told about, when in fact I usually want to go to sleep. Quite frankly, they don’t seem to have noticed, but I care not a jot about what’s happening in the taxi industry and I don’t see why anyone else should either.

The YouLoveThatsh solution to reduce the taxi numbers overnight...

Secondly, I’ve rapidly come to the conclusion that taxi drivers in Dublin don’t really fancy trying to improve any aspect of their service. We know for a fact that they don’t like competing on price – that’s why they all gleefully display that stupid yellow card in as many places as is conceivable throughout the vehicle and it’s also why they race to hold a ‘protest’ anytime there’s talk of not regulating taxi fares or anything approaching such a potentially ruinous state of affairs. But aside from that, the cars they all drive tend to be absolutely disgusting too. They may be clean, but that’s usually as far as it goes – and quite often, even that proves to be a little too much, as the door nearly comes off in your hand as you open it, owing to the amount of rust accumulated over years of neglect. And from there on, things just get worse and worse – a bag in the boot? That’ll somehow end up being at least an extra euro. What about a couple of you coming along for the ride? Well it’ll take the same amount of petrol, but inexplicably, will increase the charge by at least another few euro. For what? To sit in a rusty tin can and be lectured to about the state of the industry and how, according to one taxi driver I had the unquestionable privilege of listening to one night, the regulator not doing anything because ‘she’s a woman’. A woman? I don’t believe it, who let her into the position of taxi regulator? Crap, she might even try and…you know…regulate. Somebody really ought to show her the way back to the kitchen as quickly as possible before she tries to introduce some sort of competition or some other radical idea.

Taxi drivers try to understand why the big 2-floor yellow taxi isn't charging everyone the standard fare...

Blaming everyone else just won’t help and the taxi drivers for years seem to have thrived on it. But, to re-iterate a point I made before and still strongly stand by, taxi drivers’ do not belong to one big company that’s hiring too many employees; in actual fact, for all intent purposes, they’re self-employed people. And if there’s too many people doing the same thing, well then you either need to differentiate yourself, or add value somewhere, or else get out of the industry and find something else to do. A lot of the long-time taxi drivers I’ve ever had the pleasure to have to be stuck sitting beside love nothing more than to go on about how deregulation (essentially, introducing competition) ‘ruined the industry’. Did it? Or did it maybe make it a bit easier for their customers to actually get a taxi and put a stop to the cosy cartel that had been on the go for donkeys’ years beforehand? And besides, it’s not like the whole deregulation thing just popped up overnight in the first place. Put it this way, think about Superquinn and Dunnes Stores. Imagine if they’d made such a ridiculous song and dance over Tesco coming in. Or Lidl. Or Aldi. They didn’t, because they’d have been absolutely laughed out of the place altogether for being such greedy warts. Instead what they did was try to continue doing what they did best for years before – either continue being an upmarket supermarket that bakes fresh bread and prepares fresh produce, etc (Superquinn) or else be the leading Irish supermarket and department store focusing on price (Dunnes). But with taxi’s, you have everyone moaning, but what are they doing to help themselves? If I go up to a taxi rank and there’s two of the same car there, what’s the difference going to be?

No taxi's out in Loughlinstown however; 'Where's that? No...that's outta me way' as I was once told...

I mean, you know fine well in advance they’ll both be pretty much the same price and that you’re going to more than likely get a lecture on deregulation and the regulator one way or the other, so what’s different about them? Absolutely nothing, taxi drivers are doing zilch to try and attract their consumers to their particular service over another. The only taxi company showing any signs of creativity is actually the 8-20-20 cab company, with the amount of discounts they’re offering and their continuous radio advertising, so continuous in fact that I find myself occasionally singing the phone number part of their ad. And another thing, holding the city to ransom doesn’t wash with me either, in fact it just makes me hate them even more. The simple truth is, if an industry is important enough and really that useful, well then they just need to stop working and you notice pretty quickly the difference it makes – like health services withdrawing staff, or air traffic controllers. But with the exception of tourists out in Dublin Airport and a minor selection of the population, who really would’ve noticed taxi drivers were on strike yesterday if they literally just stopped working? Nobody. So instead, they pulled what I’d consider to be one of the most thug-like campaigns that I’d imagine was extremely counterproductive to their campaign in so far as, more than anything, they just made their customers angry, by holding the capital city to ransom. Well done guys…

Sorry, I Read About Your Demise – Online…

My extensive book collection...not a single one from Hughes & Hughes either I think!

I have fond memories, when I worked out in the airport of walking into Hughes & Hughes bookshop (of which there was plenty to choose from) at about 6am of a crisp morning and catching the headlines. No, not buying the newspaper, just literally picking it up, catching the headlines and walking off again, back to work usually. The reason behind this was quite simple – I like to know what the news is, but not necessarily the full details of it, especially if I’m pressed for time. And the one time of the day when I’m not pressed for time, is sitting in front of the computer when I can chill out, listen to some music and do what I want. And of course, read the Irish Times for free online, without having to pay a cent for it. And I know for certainty that I’m even worse with music – a couple of years ago I was actually one of the diehards clinging to CD’s and music shops with every pound of my being. I used to even buy mp3 players based on (along with a number of other attributes) the ease of transferring wma (Windows Media Audio) files onto them, from what Windows Media Player saved them as. Eventually, and quite suddenly, that went completely out the window and I now listen to music for free on Youtube, have iTunes installed and pedal all my music onto my iPod that way. I pay for the majority (ok, let’s just say ALL so that Eircom don’t knock me off the internet by tomorrow morning) of my music I listen to, so in essence I’m doing what I’ve always done – bought tracks, listened to them on some device, been happy. The only difference between now and a few years back is a total cut out of the middleman, in this case, music stores. And some quite frankly sucked anyway.

Trance Heaven, just one staircase away - or a click onto iTunes...

Golden Discs was a prime example. I know what kind of music Tower Records keeps, and I know that HMV’s dance selection in the basement of Grafton St. is decent but can often miss exactly what I’m looking for, but I never really knew what Golden Discs were doing exactly. They sort of sold playstation games, pop music and blank video tapes, but then some other times you’d go in and they’d have iPods up for sale, along with extensive genre selections and all sorts of other treats. But it was so unpredictable and so lacking any sense of imagination and predictability that simply going to Golden Discs for something wasn’t worth the effort, you might as well have just carried on to HMV or wherever. And while I worked in Chartbusters, I saw the very same thing slowly creeping in there too. In the US, Blockbuster I believe it is, copped on fairly promptly to the fact that online movie rental was the only option left on the cards for movie rental franchise’s that were quickly being ousted by the increasing popularity of PVR’s (Personal Video Recorder’s…some sort of lay term for American Sky Plus boxes’) and the large cable companies providing stop-go movie capabilities. They got cracking with the online thing, set it up and to differentiate, made it so that you could return your online-ordered movies to your local Blockbuster store, instead of having to post them. Problem solved. In Ireland, Xtra Vision too seem to have had a similar revelation and even though I still wouldn’t say their on course for having an excellent retail strategy, they can at least say that their ‘multimedia shop’ approach, where they hawk anything from mobile phones to Playstation 3’s, was a brave effort to at least do something productive.

Looks like the book - and the company, has folded for H&H...

Chartbusters, at least while I worked there, were so busy popping in all sorts of unwanted junk into the shops, that to me at least they may have shown a bit of innovativeness, but they completely lost sight of what they were actually supposed to be involved in – movies. And slowly, the shops got quieter and quieter, seemingly around the same time as Sky/NTL subscriptions went up and more and more newspapers/media talked about online movie rental. It seems, in many ways, to be a repeat of the music example given at the beginning where the whole retail dimension has shifted away from physical stores, bar one or two strong companies that remain, with everything else now online in one centralised place, iTunes for example, where people get everything they want. Chartbusters sat back and did nothing. So, when the news broke about Hughes & Hughes hitting the wall this week, many people, at least if the Irish Times is to be believed, were a bit taken aback and a bit disgusted that we could let a bookshop of all things go broke. But surely isn’t this just another part in the evolution of book retailing, like what’s already happened in many ways to movies and music? And I know this’ll come as a surprise to most people, but for once I’m not going to blame bad customer service for this one. I’m blaming it on something much more simple – innovation. Hughes & Hughes sat there, making stashes out in the airport without any real signs of showing some creativity. Sure, they’re never going to be able to compete with the likes of Amazon and the online booksellers in terms of price, but why would they need to? If they focused predominantly on their profitable airport business, why would they need to compete? Do people regularly order books and get them delivered while they’re waiting in the airport? No, I shouldn’t think so.

Well, wanna hear about the upcoming events and signings? The event is them going into receivership and the signing is the signing over of all the assets...

When HDS Retail, who operate the Virgin bookstore in Frankfurt Airport, Terminal 2 realised that they could only afford to keep so many newspapers and were most likely missing out on a large portion of foreign travellers who either were not interested or didn’t understand the papers on offer, do you think they just gave up the ghost and kept pedalling the same old stuff? You better believe they didn’t – in fact, they introduced a special print-on-demand (POD) service for daily newspapers so travellers in the airport can now choose the day’s copy of up to 1,000 worldwide newspapers, printed off for them in minutes. The price? 1c per page. Why didn’t Hughes & Hughes try something like this, a number of POD kiosks and allow people print off their own newspapers – better yet, for every POD newspaper printed, give them a free downloadable PDF copy of the same paper from a Bluetooth/Wireless source, since the POD kiosks operate by downloading a PDF version of the paper in the first place. Maybe even allow them to download the PDF files to a USB key, the options are literally endless. And aside from that, there’s many other ways I can think of that they could have gone ahead with and shown a bit of creativity. What about rushing out a version of their website as quick as possible with the option to download e-books, or maybe purchase an actual book and get its e-book counterpart download for free, and at least try and get a foot in the door before e-books make their own options? There’s no doubt that while we may not all be doing this, lots of people in a few short years will have taken the iPod’s literary equivalent and will be reading off a screen, cutting out the middleman once again – bookshops like Hughes & Hughes, sad as it is, need to start giving us a good reason why we should keep on being loyal and what they’re doing to keep up…

How to be Low-Cost & Still Make Friends…

Gusen poses for a portrait beside the Germanwings-mobile...

With the weather looking cracking outside (and I’m stuck inside under the pretence of doing college work), it’s got me thinking again about what to do for summer and how best to escape out of Ireland for a long holiday at great speed. It also got me thinking about how I travelled last summer and the airlines I took – and also how I’m still waiting, many months later, for Air Canada to get to the bottom of the refund I asked for since they never let me get on a flight I’d paid for by changing the dates and not telling me which date the flight was to be on. Last summer, I began my trip on Germanwings, a great low-cost airline, completely owned by Lufthansa that has to be one of the leanest and yet most pleasant low-cost airlines knocking around Europe’s skies. They do it like this; the fares are low but not so low that they have to hit you with ridiculous charges for just about everything else from there on. Some people, I’m told have hit upon incredible fares on Germanwings, I’ve never gotten anything better than about €30 each-way. What’s more, you can still check-in at the counter without being financially raped for the privilege, and you even get a seat. The whole seat issue for me has become more and more important in the last year as I’ve slowly tired of people dropping any sense of human standard as soon as they get inside an aircraft cabin, and begin near-killings just to be near a window, or aisle, as preference dictates. Incidentally, as I’ve said before, I always seem to wind up without much effort at the best seat in the house anyway – the emergency exit.

And out comes the cheap beer...

Aside from that, the planes are new and even though the colour scheme seems to call for burgundy and yellow’s, they manage to keep it not plastered inside like another one I can think of. But probably by far the biggest advantage for any regular low-cost travellers out there is the infamous ‘Bordbistro’. Without a word of a lie, it has to be nearly the cheapest in-flight catering service of any airline in Europe. They actually have meal deals combining sandwiches, kit kats and a drink for literally a few euro. And what undoubtedly appeals to me the most is that if you don’t fancy having a coke with your meal deal, many of the options allow you to just have a beer instead. Last time I flew to Cologne, we were hardly after taking off before I had a beer sitting in front of me – full size too, I might add – for a very agreeable rate. The only downside to the whole thing was the crazy turbulence coming into Cologne that sent Anna into a bit of a panic and meant I had to wrap up my beer quite quickly – so it wouldn’t spill. The previous time however, they managed to pull an even more unbelievable stunt out of the bag, and one that continues to put me and the other lads present on the trip into shock and confusion. The plane somehow was seemingly running around 2 hours late so we waited and waited and finally we got to board. And after the obligatory cheap beer purchases being made all-round, we landed pretty shortly thereafter.

And now for the bumpy landing, drinks away...

Only 20 minutes late. I’ve still, to this day, no idea how exactly we made up so much time on such a relatively short flight. Either way, it was welcomed because as we quickly discovered, Paris’ Charles de Gaulle is actually a complete and utter kip as sunset descends. I read the other day that they’ve announced increased profits for last year (and I’m glad they have) and reckon that Ryanair’s model is slowly starting to wear thin, which kind of concurs with my line of thinking as well anyway. It seems that airlines who maintained some level of humanity may be poised to come out of the global downturn and are slightly less prone to passenger number drops after a fare increase than the likes of Ryanair may be, who are planning to make their first fare increase in four years pretty shortly. More than likely it won’t be noticed but there’s no doubt that bringing costs up without any comparable increase in service (actually a decrease if they get their way with the toilet reduction/seat increase programme or toilet charging) is maybe not the best way to go about things. The other thing is, since Germanwings never pursued such ridiculous cost-reduction programmes throughout their aircraft, all their planes, if they

Another on-time flight, as they say...

needed could easily be sold off or put on full-service duty if the need arose. Ryanair, by contrast, have purpose-built the planes to be cheap, and reducing down the number of toilets in order to fit in more seats may be just another nail in the coffin should they ever decide to sell them on. I wasn’t too surprised to hear a while back that Aer Lingus are now talking about sort of putting a halt to their low-low-cost strategy and bringing things back in line with EasyJet (and Germanwings), as I’d actually sort of speculated on some months ago right here. In the meantime though, I need to find an excuse – any reason at all – to take a flight to Cologne sometime this summer so I can get my cheap beer in, comfortable seating and decent punctuality. Any ideas?

DIT & The Relentless Pursuit of a Working Computer…

Ah...DIT's fully working e-mail system, good to see...

I’ve been in DIT now for what’s pushing on 5 years and in this, the most significant of all of the years, the one thing that’s come to my attention and is slowly making me angrier and angrier is the state of DIT’s Information Services. It all began when we had Squirrelmail for our e-mail a number of years ago and I was known to regularly spend up to 20 minutes or more just trying to log in, with that stupid graphic of the squirrel regularly reappearing and telling me there were too many connections, or some other excuse. That, also coupled with the absolutely vast array of different ‘portals’ we seemed to be occasionally using, namely webCT (which later became Web Courses, although nobody really knows for sure if there is a difference), WebExOne, Scratch drive (I have no idea whatsoever what that even refers to) and lecturers folders’ by themselves. Added to that, was (and still is) the requirement to remember the passwords for the library site, modularisation/student results site, web timetables site and of course the e-mails site, MyDIT. Would you believe that, at one point I did ask the students union what exactly the purpose of having so many thousands of different sites to have to log in to was and what the need for having to remember up to 20 passwords was and the response, quite flatly, was that lecturers apparently have the right to decide what ‘platform’ they want to shove their work on to the most, meanwhile we watch the capitation fee rocketing up as each individual lecturer decides he or she does or doesn’t like this WebExOne, or this WebCT, or whatever and the college has to go and pay for the software/licence/whatever for each one of them.

And what's this, a working printer? Not a chance...

So, when MyDIT (www.mydit.ie) finally came out, it seemed like a good idea. Most people probably have no recollection of why exactly we got burdened with such an unbelievable worsening, so I’ll relay the main points both as I remember them and how the IS people still have it on their own website. Apparently, MyDIT ‘will provide a consistent look and feel’ to how you would use multiple applications and reduce the number of usernames and passwords needed to be remembered. In an ideal world, they might even have reduced the number of usernames and passwords down to just one. But as you know, it never happened and if anything, the number of usernames and passwords seem to have just gone up, leaving us in the meantime with an e-mail system that I think is a pile of crap, since I don’t appreciate anything that tries to load pop-ups in all seriousness as its main window. As for the whole consistent look and feel, the only thing consistent in the look and feel of most of DIT’s many (and I do mean many) different websites that you might use on an all-too-regular basis is quite simply that you can be assured that they won’t work or that if they do, it’ll be badly. MyDIT I find, for something that was supposed to replace the ageing squirrel is actually even more unreliable and seems to be ‘offline’ more often than the examinations office is closed.

And here we have the page you get sent to from mydit.ie, also working fine...

Anyway, we could debate the merits and demerits of how awful the whole thing is for hours on end, but just one example should sum things up (and provide a sound reason why this exhaustive rant ever commenced). This morning, as planned, my group met up at 9 to finish off our presentation that was due at 11 and then e-mail it to the lecturer and rehearse. From 9 to 10 however, what we actually did was rapidly move rooms to the point that we gave up putting down our bags, after discovering that a majority of the computers were unable to find that elusive ‘tree’ when trying to log in. Then, when we did get logged in, MyDIT was down, for a change of pace. Following on from that, the next problem was that because of all the cheap Dell computers they must have bought in some wholesale deal about 6 years ago (at least), hardly any of them take a USB key unless it’s perfectly flat with no added decoration or width. Needless to say, mine wouldn’t fit in because it’s shaped like a doctor (see picture below) and I couldn’t fold his arms in to make it work. Then, when that problem had finally been sorted, the next problem presented itself in the form of Powerpoint loading at a rate of years. It literally took 3 minutes for the first slide to finally reveal itself and as soon as it did, such was the tiresome process of just loading it, that the whole thing went ‘Not Responding’ for another 3 minutes, before loading another slide for me.

The doctor will see you now...

Since MyDIT wasn’t working, there was a little note left on the site with redirections on to another site, that surprise surprise, also didn’t work. Then, just as it had done earlier, the computer decided to play another wee prank on us towards the end and crash the whole presentation just as we were getting it sent off. Nightmare. And MyDIT still isn’t working. I don’t know what DIT think they’re doing but the whole thing comes across as a complete and utter joke – MyDIT actually calls to mind for me the whole PPARS payroll computer for the nurses a few years back that cost an absolute bomb and then had to be scrapped because it was no use. It seems to be just the same as that whole thing over in DIT; when it comes to students money, there’s no limit to the junk that it can be used to get, preferably in the form of computers so slow you could get out and walk to the lecturer and hand-deliver whatever it is you’re trying to e-mail, an e-mail system that doesn’t work and maintaining the need for as many passwords as possible, preferably with complicated add-on features such as invitations that need to be doled out to students from lecturers before use. What annoys me isn’t that the whole thing is such utter crap, more the fact that they seem to permanently get away with it as if nobody could be bothered saying ‘here, stop buying junk we don’t want to use’. I noticed in the recent DITSU elections, there was strong mention towards using Google for e-mail (nobody wants to touch the whole issue of having so many multiple learning websites since the lecturers are obviously continuing to assert their ‘right’ to use hundreds of different platforms and in the process force us to pay thousands for multiple different copies of what’s essentially the same thing) but, knowing the way things go, I wouldn’t hold my breath…

Empty Hotels? Must Be The Old Tax Break…

Soon to be 'Knightsbridge' of Dublin...oh wait...no, it's cancelled sorry...

Everyone seems to be racing, at the moment, to try and pin our Irish problem with having hundreds of thousands of empty hotel bedrooms on investors who sought to get the infamous ‘hotel’ tax break. I’ve heard various people say it while out and about; ‘And sure all the rooms are empty, all those greedy builders just trying to get their tax breaks’; I’ve read it in the newspapers (in what was by the way, one of the most childish and stupidly-written bits of journalism I’ve ever seen and certainly not what I’d expect from The Irish Times), ‘our vast hotels have to serve their time as the living dead before investors get their tax break’ (8^th February, by the way, the article’s called ‘Zombie Hotels’ or some such rubbish) and now at this stage even my own family have started saying it, and they should know why a lot of those hotel rooms are empty, since my grandparents, living in Mayo as they do, regularly stay up in hotels in Dublin and because of them, we’re all fairly well versed on the various different hotels around Dublin. I’d like, if I may, to put across another potential reason why Irish hotels just don’t seem to be cutting the mustard anymore, ignoring the fact that there’s a global recession on and the Government have also decided at this junction in time to stick with their ridiculous €10 travel tax, just to make sure that nobody comes over. I’d like to put across the view that perhaps, just perhaps, the reason a lot of Irish hotels are empty – is because they’re actually absolute crap and just don’t appeal to anyone.

Alright, let's play a game, how many hotels in Dublin can you think of that are pretty much the same inside, I'll start you off...

Some of the hotels we often seem to see in the papers and fail to understand the reasons for their failings is because they were thrown up any old fashion and simply aren’t in a good location to appeal to who they’re supposed to…or anyone, in many cases. Take the Beacon Hotel out in Sandyford. My beloved grandparents stayed out there once while one of them was undergoing medical treatment in the neighbouring Beacon Hospital. I always presumed that since the two buildings are attached and they offer a special rate for hospital attendees, that it must be designed more or less purposely for businesspeople for the surrounding industrial estate and hospital patients, visitors and family. In fact, the whole place, I’m told was distinctly uncomforting with a large mirror just randomly propped up for all to see and the only cuisine on offer was Thai – which quite simply, I like a lot, but I’d doubt if worried family members and hurried business people have either the time or want to sit down and enjoy a full Green Thai Chilli…especially on their own. Then (and this example’s definitely not a tax-break hotel), down in Mayo itself, we stayed for extensive periods of time in a place called ‘Teach Iorrais’ a number of years ago. By about the 4^th night we’d quite correctly guessed that ‘soup of the day’ would always be vegetable and that roughly every 3^rd stay, it was helpful to ensure that if you were on the bottom floor, you battened down the hatches at night since there was likely to be a fight outside that may threaten to come through your window, usually with little to no intervention for some time.

Lots of glass! Perfect, I love feeling like a fish in a bowl while having dinner...

All this luxury in the various hotels for a hearty room price of around €100 upwards. Even without the Government ‘introducing’ a travel tax or any of the other stupid measures implemented to put tourists off coming to visit, the tourism numbers to Ireland would absolutely have to have taken a fall – it would actually have made no sense if they hadn’t. There was numerous tourist traps knocking all over the country – we already know that Ireland during the boom (and even still, I firmly believe) wasn’t offering any sort of value for money and to compound all that, the hotels were both expensive and not really up to the standard, considering the price being asked. Then, in another amazing example, there was a few hotels that spring to mind that actually tried to follow the others and upgrade themselves, removing, in the process, the main reason that their ‘client base’ went in the first place. The oldies used to love going to the Royal Marine out in Dun Laoghaire, particularly for what I suppose they’d term its ‘old-world charm’ (I’d personally term it the smell of dust, the old man about to croak it playing the piano in the corner and the lift that went as slowly as most of the residents), but they went and closed it, did it up so that it now looks like just about every other hotel in Dublin and re-opened it. It kind of seems sometimes like most of the hotels just couldn’t be bothered trying to go after anyone in particular and just saw other modern hotels raking it by charging a fortune (which I suspect had more to do with people just having to put up and shut up than really liking a particular hotel and actually wanting to spend the obscene amount required for the stay) and sticking bright spotlights in the reception area, lots of modern art hung all over the place and that irritating type of cuisine that comprises of a blob of meat in the middle of a huge plate, decorated with some sort of sauce that you don’t like.

The infamous 'dead pigeon on balcony' hotel...

By contrast, I went over to the UK a number of years ago quite regularly on ‘business’ so to speak and invariably, with the exception of the hotel we stayed in that had a dead pigeon on our balcony no matter how many times we mentioned it to reception, most of the places over there were dripping with charm, be it ‘modern’, ‘old English’, ‘country’, whatever. They all had a place and they knew who they were targeting. By comparison the place I think of in Mayo was all about the modern art, as was the last 3 or 4 Dublin hotels that spring to mind. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with keeping a hotel modern – but modern doesn’t have to mean chrome bar rails, sterile white paint absolutely everywhere and random blobs of paint hung up in frames all over the hotel acting as ‘art’. In fact, for me, just a bit of feeling that I actually am in somewhere different to home will do me fine, while still holding onto the ‘essentials’ like internet, phone, etc. I wonder what people thought when they came over here and stayed in some of our hotels – ‘wait, am I still at home?’. And, much as I like to blame the developers for lots of things too ranging from the price of breakfast rolls to falling share prices, I don’t know if we really can pin our failing hotels on them as much as we’d like to…
Any thoughts?

Dublin Nightclubs & The Perpetually Empty Wallet…

That's it buddy, hang in there...

When I was a first year in college (many years ago at this stage), there seemed to be way more nightclubs on the go than there is today – most of them, it would later turn out, complete rubbish. Nightclubs, in Dublin anyway, seem to only last about 5 – 6 years before either being revamped or else scrapped. And they all seem to follow roughly the same cycle from what I can see. To begin with, nightclub opens to much fanfare and visits from ‘celebrities’, generally ones I’ve never heard of and end up having to Google and everyone goes out of their way to dress up and look nice and be good and sober when they intend to visit, expecting hearty crowds to be there. And, because they’re expecting hearty crowds to be there, and many people do, it’s a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy in so far as because everyone goes along expecting so many others, there is then loads of others. I remember when 21 Club opened – I’ve said this before, but I’m sure if I was to go there again today they’d actually think I was picking someone up rather than actually planning to party – I actually thought that, judging by the name, you had to be 21 to get in. It came as a great surprise to me eventually that I wasn’t getting in just because of my stunning good looks and wit at the door, but rather that there was no ‘21’ age restriction. From there on, all clubs seem to slowly let more and more people in, anyone in fact, and the whole thing slowly loses its edge. For me, a number of incidents spring to mind that confirm this. Seeing a girl I knew to be 17 in 21 Club. Being told by a taxi driver one night that his 14-year old (WHAT?) daughter regularly went to Barcode out in Clontarf. And, after that, probably the night (can’t remember what club) I was standing up against the bar, looked across and there was some guy standing there in a full tracksuit. That kind of thing – just letting anyone in.

Oh no! No more punches in the face...

I’m supposing it’s just greediness on the part of club owners nationwide but whatever it is, it never seems to work because from there on in, the club generally tends to decline rapidly – just look at Bondi Beach out in Stillorgan (now Burn Beach Club, soon to be Tribe). Or Redz, pictured. I was in there once – didn’t actually pay, I just wandered in with a group of people who were outside smoking – and within nanoseconds had to dodge out of the way of an oncoming collection of 10 – 12 gents piling up on top of each other, landing the punches anywhere they could. Shortly thereafter, Redz ended up resorting to just offering crazy drinks promotions as often as they could and from what I saw of it, the place slowly degraded further and further into oblivion, becoming packed at night full of people getting progressively rowdier and rendering the simple act of purchasing one of these cheap drinks more and more impossible. Then there was the time I was in Doyle’s on the top floor, and for whatever reason (I can’t really remember) decided to try an emergency exit. It was locked. From being greedy and trying to pack the people in at any rate, nightclubs over here then seem to go down the slippery slope and, as I say, either end up closing or having some sort of major revamp. In the case of Bondi, even that doesn’t seem to have worked.

...And who's for a spiked drink tonight?

So, since we’ve safely established that most nightclubs in Dublin are absolute rubbish, I’d like to give you a comprehensive listing of why I think they’re such rubbish. To begin with, there’s the queue. Listen, I’ve gathered that building a queue is obviously some way of building, I don’t know…anticipation and suspense, but after an hour of slowly contracting pneumonia outside, the only anticipation I have is the anticipation of getting inside and trying to rid my hands of the rapidly-onsetting frostbite. Then, when you finally reach the top of the queue, you get to meet the second upsetting element of the night out – the guys standing around outside with big grumpy faces, standing as tall as they can and trying to look intimidating, all the while coming across like a bunch of people who’ve just escaped from prison…and they’re actually assuming the role of ‘security’. If I had a euro for every time I was asked where I was coming from on a particular evening by bouncers, I’d have been able to forget about college and future careers a long time ago. They must be the only crowd of public-facing people who still regularly get away with gratuitous discrimination, and if not that, insults. There’s a few exceptions to this of course, but I do mean ‘few’. Then when you get inside – by this stage thinking that it’d have been easier to take a Ryanair flight than just have a night out – there was the compulsory €10 entrance fee, just for waiting outside for the guts of an hour. Then, finally, you get the chance to do what you’d intended to do the whole night – have a drink. Or so you’d think. One time as I was just about to reach the bar of a certain nightclub, the bouncer nearly jumped on me. The reason, it turned out, was that I’d failed to provide the club with more money for doing nothing and hadn’t ‘checked’ my coat. Another €2 please.

Haha! Are we thinking of the same place?

Finally when you get to the bar, you’re greeted by the worst sight imaginable – a group of girls spreading themselves out in a layer in front of the bar. This almost certainly means a 15- or 20-minute delay to proceedings. In one case, my friend Gusen actually waited close to 40 minutes just to get a drink. Then, when you finally have had a few drinks (at a less-than-cheap rate) and are feeling ready to get onto the dance floor, things once again get interesting. There are three main options for how you can come back off the floor; firstly, some horrible boy/girl who can hardly stand and has the remnants of their last puking session down the front of their top starts staring at you, so you run for the hills. Secondly, you’re standing there and some guy (or group of guys) decide to spontaneously commence a fight in the middle of the floor and before you know it, you’re flat out wondering what just happened. Or thirdly, one of my other favourites, you’re standing there doing nothing at all really, when an eagle-eyed bouncer spots someone unlawfully bringing a glass onto the floor. Rather than just ask them to bring it back off, the general result here is to steamroll across the floor and try and remove them with force if at all possible, generally catching you somewhere in the middle. So when I see nightclubs looking for business and handing out stupid deals for drinks outside college (which invariably are only available on 2 types of drinks and only between about 9.15 and…9.20), and I see others going bust or having to redo things, do I’ve any sympathy?

Getting to Galway for €1…

The long and winding road...with emphasis on long...never-ending actually...

A couple of months ago, myself and Anna took an extremely cheap €5 one-way ‘saver fare’ with Citylink up to Galway just for the day, to have a look around and see what kind of things Galway has to offer. As it turns out, if you’re there for just one day, there’s actually not a whole lot and the day ended up with us being more than grateful for the lift back home to Dublin, again at the nominal rate of €5. The plus sides were that the bus was clean, comfortable and roughly to schedule. The down sides was that, in common with a whole host of other Irish transport operators, they didn’t seem to have grasped the actual theory behind web sales, which is that it can lower your costs, reduce your paperwork and increase boarding times (for transport operators). Instead, Citylink seem to just give the drivers a paper list beforehand which they then go and check your name against (rendering the whole reference number thing completely useless), print you out a normal ticket (even though you’ve supposedly already printed your ticket) and away you go. The coach was semi-decent, the only downside being that it came with one of the most useless forms of in-journey entertainment ever devised; the ‘road’ camera. In aircraft, they’ve started putting cameras into certain parts of the aircraft that would allow those inside who are able to view the camera’s output, to get some sort of pretty cool view. So, for example, there might be a camera staring straight down so you can see the runway under you as you land, or a camera in the tail staring straight so when you’re parked at the airport you can see how much taller the tail is compared to the roof of the airport. I believe it was Bus Eireann who, a number of years ago, began putting cameras in the front of their dashboards staring out at the road ahead.

Or you can take Irish Rail, now with 'on-board telephone'...

I’m not sure of the intended effect but I know of at least a number of people for whom the fisheye video camera’s video causes general feelings of nausea. Citylink too seem to have decided that this is a good idea and gone ahead with it. The only thing making up for any difference between the services is that they’ve installed free wifi on all their coaches, which puts them way up ahead of Bus Eireann for me anyway, any time. Oh, and they’re actually cheap, too. One of the greatest moans I’d have in fact about public long-distance transport in Ireland over other countries is the complete lack of connectivity you experience during the journey. It wasn’t that long ago in fact, since Irish Rail were still noting that their Enterprise service to Belfast boasted an ‘on-board telephone’, like that was something to be in anyway proud of, given that about 80 – 90% of people on the train probably had mobile phones anyway. They’ve also said that they don’t see the point of installing wifi on their trains as there’s ‘emerging technologies’ available for customers themselves. True, but the problem is, they’ve had disastrous luck in the last year with continuing shutdowns for maintenance, upgrading and not to mention the occasional collapsing bridge. I think, to be honest, given how they’ve shown themselves not exactly adept at the usual barometers of transport service, namely reliability, frequency and price, they should really consider ways they can distract their few remaining passengers so that they don’t notice they’re travelling slower on newer trains, than the Belfast service did back in the 1940’s.

Citylink - Linking Dublin and Galway with less of that legality...

I, as I’ve regularly declared, rarely see the point of taking the train for all but the longest of journeys. I know that they’re now running €10 fares in the direction I’d most likely wish to take quite often but at this stage, they’ve lost me. Citylink meanwhile, to be fair, have shown themselves to be a far more useful transport operator than BE, even if one of their routes may be slightly less-than-legal, something which I never really appreciate too much. It appears that GoBus are also running the Dublin to Galway route non-stop (with a DOT licence) and have been for some time, and what’s more, the word on the street is that their buses are much nicer anyway – a sort of Business Class over the Citylink’s average economy. Both have wifi, but GoBus has a toilet (trust me, you wouldn’t think it, but if you travel regularly enough, travel by coach without a toilet gets very annoying and potentially painful) which puts it ahead of both Citylink and BE, who continue to manage to show sheer stupidity and drag further and further behind the private operators. I know myself if I’m travelling on my own, the more entertainment and comfort – or at least speed – that can be laid on to shorten the whole experience, the better. BE bought a load of new buses there a few years ago, and then seemed to decide that that was good enough – buses would theoretically always be the poor mans alternative to trains and there was no need to even compete. I remember even thinking a couple of years ago how, if I found myself bathed in cash, I’d go and start up a coach company in Ireland and set about putting some luxury back into coach travel, while undercutting Irish Rail’s (then) extortionate fares.

Bus Eireann? That'll be €12.60 please...

It annoys me greatly that a huge national bus company which receives Government subvention to operate would go and buy a load of new buses, slowly let them fall into a state of disrepair (on the inside anyway) and not even bother whatsoever to try and compete in any meaningful way with the train. The only competition they’ve been able to show whatsoever has been the occasional Twitter ‘€2’ fare. Rubbish – it’s almost as if we have to rely on private companies for everything sometimes in this country! While BE were offering their €2 fares, they were at the most undesirable of times – which was grand, because while that was annoying, I suspected it would be offset by taking a train back from wherever I went; only to find out that they too are at the same game and despite being a Government-owned company, are doing the Ryanair by charging you to use a credit card. In the end, on the last few trips out of the capital city, it’s been the private operators that have taken the business. Due to this so-called price ‘war’ on the Dublin to Galway route, Citylink are now offering ‘super-saver’ €1 fares to Galway, including a semi-decent bus and free wifi. GoBus meanwhile, seem to generally stick around the €10 each way mark (I can’t be sure since their website isn’t loading, which I find rather stupid), with an even nicer bus, free wifi, toilet, etc. Bus Eireann though, today is quoting me an absolutely nonsensical €12.60 (student fare) for a seat, no toilet, no wifi and a million stops along the way.

Government subvention? Forget it, I’d rather ‘subvention’ them into the sea and give the private operators everything, if nothing else, we’ll get free wifi and regular price wars – hey, at this rate, it’s cheaper for me to take the bus to Galway for college than to Dublin in the first place…

Q: What do Eircom’s Customer Service & Their Broadband Have in Common?

And so the journey begins...

A: For at least the last month, it’s been extremely difficult to get a hold of either. During the so-called Big Freeze, when my hometown of Shankill suffered anything between 1 to 2cm’s of snow, our internet’s been patchy at best. Immediately during this crippling snowstorm, our internet ceased activities altogether so I went and called Eircom’s customer service, the agents at which, it turns out, don’t really have a clue what’s going on in the ‘area’ contrary to what they might assert via the phone. Initially I was told it was our Eircom Phonewatch alarm system that was probably causing the issue, despite 5 years of uninterrupted internet access prior. Since that excuse wasn’t washing, the agent then confirmed that it was in fact something to do with the weather in my area, even though it seemed to be nowhere as extreme as elsewhere in the country, or even elsewhere in Dublin for that matter. Apparently though, and this is actually what initially got me off the phone, other people in the area were reporting similar problems. Like most people, I don’t appreciate being told lies, and I now know for absolute certainty that this was a lie. Because no sooner had they hung up, than I rang some neighbours who also have their accounts with Eircom and quelle surprise(?), they were experiencing absolutely perfect internet. No problems at all. It was only me. So I rang back and in doing so, embarked on a month-long journey of trials and tribulations, joys and sadness, but mostly lies and disappointment.

The non-working (but now working although wanted) modem...

I can assure you that during the course of my month-long journey to get internet restored to my house in any sort of meaningful way, I discovered that firstly, Eircom call agents do NOT generally wish to help eradicate your problems in the long-term, rather they wish to get you back off the phone and wondering why your internet’s not working even though it was a second ago in the fastest time possible. Secondly, unless you keep the pressure on, on a ridiculous basis, nobody is actually willing to help you. This applies to the call-centre agents who simply refuse to do anything beyond what they perceive to be the limits of their duty. This generally means no engineer visits, and I notice from Twitter this applies to many other people, not just myself. It also applies to the engineers themselves, one of whom eventually turned up to our house (without us knowing he was supposed to do so), had a wander around, and quite quickly diagnosed our modem as the problem. Even though he had another one on him (which presumably is how he diagnosed the problem in the first place), he was unable to help beyond telling us it was our modem, they’d send us a new one for free (for which apparently, we should’ve exercised intense gratitude since they hadn’t always replaced their own bandy modems in the past for free) but he wouldn’t know much about when that would happen and that that was as much as he could do. And just like the Kaiser Söze, he was gone, never to be seen or heard from again. Even on Twitter, it took repeated ‘tweets’ and direct messages to get any sort of conversation going and even at that, they just never responded in the end and stopped following me on the social networking site.

Oh Eircom, where did it all go wrong...

In the end, they sent us out a new modem, which also didn’t work for a number of days. Finally, after trying many things, with no apparent reason, our new modem began working just in time for them to have sent out a new modem. And because they’ve sent out a new modem, even though our other ‘new’ modem is working, they want the working one back. It’s all very confusing. Either way, we’ve decided that since we now have internet, we’re going to execute our right to remain silent until they physically turn up at our door and ask for the working modem back. The whole thing is just another sorry chapter in the annals of customer service of Irish companies. Listen, I don’t know what Eircom think they’re doing or how they can get away with this – to be honest, long before this whole sorry saga erupted I was already strongly considering getting one of those portable USB internet sticks and carting it around so I could at least keep on top of things away from home as well. I think they need to realise that contrary to popular belief, they’re not the only internet provider out there – sure, they’re the obvious choice for most people and even when customers go to other providers, many times they’re still using Eircom equipment – but they’re not the only provider around and their days of being the ‘monopoly’ are long gone, so they could do with a full cleanout of the old customer service. And by the way, why doesn’t the engineer just give you the working modem he has when he knows the problem?

FORE!

I don’t entirely blame them for not being able to provide broadband internet for as long as they didn’t – to be fair, the Government foolishly sold them out to a bunch of venture capitalists donkeys years ago and that pretty much put the kiss of death on them ever wanting to develop high-speed internet services (the kind that make our supposed ‘knowledge-economy’ tick), since profit obviously came first, but now that a large portion of the Irish population are finally starting to get accustomed to broadband services (even if they remain some of the worst in Europe), it’d be nice if companies like Eircom started realising that profit starts and ends sometimes with customer service. In our house at least, we’ve more or less come to the conclusion that we’ll be abandoning the Eircom ship as soon as we possibly can and from what I can see on Twitter, there seems to be a few more just like us. At the moment, even though we have internet restored once again, I’m only half a step away from taking a golf club to the old Netopia modem at the top of the stairs and see if I can get a hole in one, just like Eircom did in terms of losing our custom as soon as we figure out the best alternatives…

Every Little Helps – Especially €500,000…

Yes, pay less...or more, if you're a supplier - every little helps...

The main, decent newspapers were brimming over yesterday with news of Tesco allegedly charging its Irish suppliers up to €500,000 for so-called ‘pay-to-play’ fees, which they actually got wrong, they’re actually called ‘pay-to-stay’ or simply ‘listing’ fees. In essence, they appear to have been caught demanding upfront cash fees for providing the shelf space for Irish suppliers to keep their products on offer to Tesco customers. Supposedly, in theory, these fees then go on to cover the cost of things like storage and administration – that sort of thing – behind keeping the products. Essentially, yes I know, it’s more or less the Ryanair credit card charge of retailing – suppliers have more than likely offered product discounts, marketing contributions and God know what else, and then they have to fork out just to get the product physically placed on a shelf, when in fact, that seems like it should be just part of the whole deal anyway. So, in that regard, I can see the sheer stupidity of the fee in the first place, either they want the product or they don’t, but this seems to be just another Ryanair-esque ‘discretionary fee’ as they’d no doubt term it. I can even see how it could be disastrous to Irish producers whose financial viability may not permit paying up to €500,000 just to have their stuff plopped down on Tesco’s shelves. And I must admit, I do quite like the notion of Irish produced food and I can see the potential importance of agri-business and food production to the economy. There are just a few small issues I have with the whole thing however.

Superquinn, meanwhile, is too busy fleecing everyone to notice what's going on...

Firstly, I’d love to know how seriously this is actually going to hit the profitability of these Irish food suppliers in the first place. I mean, the way I see it is, if they have the money to pay the fee being demanded of them, then surely that creates a hugely profitable opportunity in itself, which could possibly be recouped if they’ve the right products to sell in the first place. Secondly, surely if it’s an issue that these suppliers simply cannot afford to actually pay this listing fee, they should all just say ‘no listen, that’s ridiculous and we’re not paying it’, end of story. As it happens, my take would be that while I too wouldn’t want to pay it if I was in their shoes, 116 stores is a lot of places to potentially sell your goods and if you do the maths on that, it works out at just over €4,300 per shop to stock your products. If anything in fact, it’s just bad for consumers more than anything else, because undoubtedly it’ll be the Irish consumers who shop in Tesco who’ll end up picking up the tab. I’ve no idea how large these suppliers are, but to my mind at least, the likes of Glanbia, etc should have serious strength here to run a bit of a campaign if they’re so dead-set against the fee. What springs to my mind would be to either charge a marginal amount extra on each product sold at Tesco only or else to charge slightly more on the product in general and then, either way, make it extremely public through a media campaign that the price had gone up slightly because of Tesco’s ridiculous fee and how it was pushing the viability of the business into doubt.

Tesco - they can't always have been massive...

The other thing that I wonder about is the true surprising nature of this revelation from Tesco, given that it’s not really anything new from them. In fact, I’ve an article here from The (UK) Guardian’s Julia Flinch talking about the exact same thing happening to UK suppliers some time ago. It even goes on to quote market research group Gfk who have said that more than a quarter of suppliers regularly pay such fees. So unless these Irish suppliers were living on Planet Z, there’s no way they couldn’t have not known about them. But the simple point is, whether they’ve heard of them or not, it all boils down quite simply to whether they can pay it or not, if they can then they can stay in Tesco, if they can’t, well then they can’t. To be honest, I know I’m probably not being as sympathetic as perhaps I should be but there’s two good reasons for that. The first is that Tesco have been around for absolute years and you can be sure there was a (long) time when it was the suppliers who told them how things were going to be, and they had to play along. As a result, they had to find other ways of reducing their costs to make themselves into the cost-leaders they are today. It’s like saying that now that Ryanair for example is able to play airports off against each other for business that they’ve always been able to do that – rubbish! In the early days there too, they had to just take whatever airport charges were foisted upon him by the respective airports. And I’m sure that at one point or another it was the exact same for Tesco. In fact, I’m even sure that when they came to Ireland first they didn’t just immediately start calling the shots. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I do have plenty of other issues with Tesco as a company, but no company simply has the power to call the shots so early on in their life.

Love Irish Food...especially, if it was a bit cheaper...

The second thing that springs to my mind when I think of the whole debate is the issue of Irish suppliers and real value anyway. It’s not, I suspect, a proposition they’re too familiar with. In fact, if someone asked me to name the Irish products I feel represent the best value they’d have to be…eh…Brennan’s bread and Cadbury’s, if they’re even supplied from Ireland and not the UK. To be honest, it doesn’t matter where I buy the stuff, be it Tesco, Superquinn or Dunnes, I don’t ever really feel that Irish suppliers offer particularly exceptional value. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not being ‘unpatriotic’ as Fianna Fáil would no doubt claim, I’m simply saying that as a student with not much money on a day-to-day basis, Irish food doesn’t tend to jump out at me as representing any sort of value. So, to be honest, for me at least, them just paying the listing fee and at least being in the stores when I decide to splash out would be much more important than keeping all their collective products a few cents less and being stocked in hardly any other supermarkets. That said, if all the suppliers collectively refused to pay the listing fee, I can’t really see Tesco just cutting them out of the loop altogether since it seems like after the whole cutting out of Irish food fiasco last year, they’ve been slowly and quietly trying to re-introduce Irish food back onto the shelves. Aside from that, the Irish suppliers better hope they don’t get any more pork dioxin, avian flu, foot and mouth, BSE or any of the other ‘food scares’ if they’re really trying to play the poor mouth, otherwise we’ll all be hoping they didn’t pay the fee…

Floating Whale’s and The Mystery of Google Wave…

Alright, I've no clue what's going on here...

Back in late 2009, I received a no-doubt life changing invite to join Google Wave, which I promptly took up the offer of and signed up (youlovethatsh@googlewave.com). However, from when I initially signed up, right up until about last night, I actually didn’t really cop on so much as to even how to ‘add’ someone like you would on one of the more ‘mainstream’ methods of communication. Even with that done, I then realised I didn’t know what exactly you were supposed to do – a review of the press release and notes that came with Google Wave described it as something bordering on the next evolutionary stage of e-mail. Instead of either having to send along everyone’s replies with your most recent ‘re-wave’ if such a thing exists, or else each person storing the messages on their own computer, Google Wave apparently possesses the magical qualities of storing all the ‘waves’ on a server elsewhere, and you can look at the previous waves, edit them, send them out to others…basically forward, edit or reply to an e-mail except with added Wave. And I’m sorry to say it, but for a company so hell-bent (and usually so bang-on) on world-leading stuff, Google Wave has me at a loss. I’ve no idea really what it does that I can’t already do (albeit maybe in a few more steps or by taking up some more of my own disk space) by e-mail. The only thing it really did for me, to be honest, was get me thinking about how much of this ‘new media’ social networking stuff we can possibly all be given before everyone gets fed up.

Tickling the ivories on one of many social networking sites...

This epiphany of sorts also came at precisely the same time as I pressed refresh on my computer only to be greeted with a regular page I encounter while using Twitter; the floating whale, being lifted clean out of the water by all the Twits. Too many of them, in fact. While Twitter’s proving unbelievably successful (I even got an account myself some weeks back, and gave in), I still have absolutely no idea whatsoever how they’re making any money or what the plan to make some money is; and they obviously need it, because I’m being greeted by the floating whale with increasing regularity. What seems to be the case, it would appear anyway, is that in everyone of my age group migrating from the original incumbent, Bebo, which was also pretty awful, Facebook and to a lesser extent, Twitter have taken a whole batch of newcomers. Bebo, and it’s quite funny to even think about it, seems to have been a definite passing trend for anyone between the ages of 16 – 21. The problem was, it feels like anyway, while we were all at it and loving it, they allowed a bunch of the tiny tot brigade to join, who promptly whored themselves out on other people’s pages, created useless groups, allowed to you customise your profile, which in turn made everyone’s profile significantly more difficult to understand and the whole thing started leaning more and more towards the world’s most messy social network, MySpace.

Almost forgotten what it looked like...

I joined MySpace too but realised after I’d had 4 friend requests from porn stars seemingly, that it may not be for me. That and the fact that my friends had profile skins so unusual that it wasn’t possible to see where their ‘wall’ existed, or what was supposed to be a link, and so on. Facebook, to be fair, was the only one that actually showed any signs of stability over the last years by remaining roughly the same throughout – everyone knows what it looks like; dark blue, you used to have to be part of a network and comes complete with a pretty useless chat feature that on my computer at least, often tends to do whatever it wishes. Funnily enough, on my little Linux laptop, Facebook Chat worked only for a cursory period before Linux obviously deemed it worthless and refused to even so much as show me the ‘chat’ box any longer. So you can imagine my horror when I saw a (fairly well populated) group on Facebook lately calling for the introduction of customised profiles and the ability to put different designs a la Bebo or MySpace – nightmare situation. The only criticism that can be levelled at Facebook is their redesigns (which I don’t understand the necessity of, given the frequency with which they seem to feel the need to roll them out), which always seem to draw widespread criticism. That and their annoying ads for things I’ve no interest in, which seem to also always come complete with a suggestion that I really should like whatever it is Company X is selling since one or two of my friends also like the product.

Oh no! The whale takes flight, once again...

Finally, we come to Twitter. Actually, by now, you probably realise where I’m going with this – these social networks seem to become less popular or never become popular in the first place (Hi, Google Wave) the more features they land in front of you and the more complicated things get, when all you want to do is just stalk people, look at their pictures and maybe leave them a note, if you know them…sometimes, even if you don’t know them. So in this regard, Twitter is actually quite satisfying, in that I don’t have to wade through someone’s hundred thousand quiz results or their invites to play Party Pirates or whatever to just leave a comment. The only problem though is due to their lack of revenue, I’m finding that whale, as I say, floating more than ever, which is annoying to say the least. The other thing is, even though I appreciate what they’re trying to do, I’m finding it increasingly to be a bit of a back-step to only be able to pen 140 characters or whatever it is. When I bought my first phone, 10 years ago, I was only able to text 140 characters and my current phone doesn’t even so much as impose a limit, it just flashes ‘SMS 2’ and so on as I plough on into the next message. So, in the end, I really don’t know what to make of it all – anyone have any thoughts? It seems that simplicity is best and if possible, stopping people from creating hundreds of thousands of stupid groups – and making things easy to understand quickly (which again, is code for, I will not be reading any documents on how to actually USE Google Wave, if it’s not self-explanatory, then forget it). So, what’s next for social networking?