Thanks.

Thanks for Google Search.
Thanks for Google Maps.
Thanks for Gmail.
Thanks for YouTube.
Thanks for Google Calendar.
Thanks for Google Chrome.

I use these services every day and they are awesome.

I am almost 30 and remember when web-based email was a joke. I remember when we didn’t need thumbnails for our online videos because the online videos were thumbnails. I remember when the idea of using an online map seemed ridiculous. I remember when searching was, literally, an exercise in futility.

I am under no illusion that these services are free. I realise there’s a transaction going on.

Some people seem to think that if your business model revolves around advertising then you’ll never have my best interests first and foremost. I tend to think every business cares about itself first and foremost. What I’d like is honesty. I think this becomes more difficult as the relationship involves more people. But it is not impossible.

I’ll certainly admit I’m disappointed in you from time to time. More so recently than before. Most of the time it’s because I think you’re worrying about the wrong things. Please don’t worry about Facebook. Or Apple. Or Amazon. Or whoever is really successful next week.

Worry about solving problems. You’re pretty good at that.

Humanity isn’t static—you can’t just be okay with all development up until the invention of the sarong, and then declare all post-sarong technology to be “unnatural.” Sure, cavemen didn’t have shoes. Until they invented fucking shoes! (You know what else they didn’t have? Discarded hypodermic needles. Broken glass. Used condoms.) They also didn’t have antibiotics, refrigeration, written languages, wheels, patchouli, the internet, and NOT LIVING IN A ROCK WITH A HOLE IN IT. But I don’t see anyone giving any of that up in the name of “health.” Hey, why not install a live gibbon in your fridge so you have to fight it to get to your bison jerky? Just like nature!

One usually reserved the phrase ’sickening angle’ for limbs. Perhaps that makes this not entirely inappropriate. Even without removing the earphones from my pocket, I can tell that something has gone horribly wrong. My mind flashes back to when, 10 minutes earlier in the car, I had removed the phone from my back pocket. Something about the position of the earphones had felt wrong. I realise now what it was.

I remove the earphones from the pocket and my fear is confirmed. The jack does not jut straight out from its white surrounds, instead it is bent in a way that doesn’t look natural. Immediately I work at forcing it back into shape. I hope this hasn’t damaged the insides.

It has. Later, in a coffee shop, I plug the earphones back into the phone. They fit all right but when I put the buds into my ears no sound comes out. I strain to listen over the background noise. I can barely make out something coming from the left hand side.

The intelligent thing to do would be to buy a cheap set. You can get pairs for ¥1,000 in any convenience store. But I want the proper ones, the ones that match. The ones with the clicker and the microphone. Their sound quality is not supposed to be good. I can’t tell the difference. Or I don’t care enough to learn. If I didn’t care about what they looked like, I probably wouldn’t have bought the phone.

I am surprised at how uneasy I feel. I can’t listen to my music. It has been one hour and I have been sitting here unable to listen to my music. I have heard these songs all before. It is not so much the music as the knowledge that I could listen to the music that I want. That I don’t have. I need to go and get another pair. It is worth ¥2,800. I need that knowledge.

I imagine that I use my iPhone home screen differently to most people. Here’s a screenshot:

As is quickly evident, I keep the home screen basically filled with Apple’s default apps. The third party apps I use the most are actually on screen two:

Why this setup? There are two reasons.

The first is that I have a thing for things being in ‘factory condition’. I don’t take it to the extreme of leaving my living room furniture in plastic wrap, but I get close. When I was a child, I would not play very much with my toys in the traditional manner, preferring instead to construct diaromas where the toys were put into their ’natural state’ and left to be admired.

The second, and more practical, reason is that having my second screen be my ’real home screen’ means I have 27 ’icon slots’ of iPhone real estate within a single swipe (31 if you count the four slots in the iPhone’s dock). This is because if I go left to the first home screen, I have nine slots and if I go right to the third home screen, I have nine slots. These together with the nine on the second screen equal 27. This compare with just 18 if you do things the traditional way.

I imagine for many people this might seem silly. Why not just use folders if you’re so worried about the number of icons you can fit on a single screen? Well, the problem is that I much prefer the look of an icon rather than a collection of folders. I am often aghast when I pick up someone’s iPhone only to find row after row of folders.¹

I’ve yet to meet anyone that uses their home screens like this but figure there probably are some other second screen weirdos out there.² But what about you? How do you use your smart phone home screen?

Google may have to get us to use Google+ if it wants to remain relevant. But it should be able to go about that in a fundamentally honest fashion.

If it can’t keep its promises, if it can’t avoid resorting to trickery, if it can’t keep itself from subverting the power of its search engine for commercial ends, and on top of all that if it can’t even deliver the highest quality search results at a default setting—the most basic thing people have come to expect from Google, the very thing its name has become synonymous with—why should you trust it with your personal data?

Everyone I follow has been linking this up but there’s a reason for that: it’s really good.