So a couple of weeks ago I lost my phone, and while I enjoyed the momentary respite afforded by having nobody ring me, this is 2008 and a girl needs a phone. Over the course of a few retail trips, I had pretty much convinced myself to drop €400 on an iPhone, mostly just because I thought I should have one. But the iPhone, for all its wonders, has one major failing: it does not come in pink.

Which more or less explains why I instead walked out of The Carphone Warehouse with a Sony Ericson W580i Walkman™ Phone that cost, after trading in an old phone and signing up for the Meteor calling plan I wanted anyway, a grand total of €29. (Please note: I also have a new number – 085 702 8212.)

It is very, very pink. The front is pink. The back is pink. Slide it open, and the rear slide panel is practically fuchsia and glitters like a Barbie disco ball. The earbuds, too, are pink, as is the mic jack.

But my absolute favourite part is when you open it up, it has little pink rhinestones in between the numbers:

This phone is, in short, every 9 year old girl’s telecommunications dream. Given that I actually was 9 years old when I got my very first Walkman back in 1981, I’m enjoying the retro flashback. Back then, they were approximately the size of a paperback, weighed as much as a small child, and used this old fashioned music recording device called a tape. If you shook or dropped it, it would skip. Nowadays, if I want to randomise my MP3 playlist on this thing, I can just shake my phone and it mixes everything up without missing a beat.

I absolutely loved it even before I found out that dude, MY PHONE HAS THE SIMS ON IT. Okay, so it’s a lightweight and kind of lame version, but whatever: Sims! I has them! On my phone!

So anyway, despite new computers, new laptops and even new houses, as far as I’m concerned this is the best 30 quid I’ve spent in a long, long time. Sadly, our love affair so far as been torrid but all too brief: the phone refuses to charge. So tomorrow we’re going back to hopefully get that sorted, which is obviously critical.

Not because I’m desperate to take anyone’s calls, but because my Sims are waiting for me.

I was greatly cheered today by the news that Dublin based Irish start-up MOLI has received $30M in funding. I was also to no small degree baffled, as neither I nor several other Irelandias on Twitter had ever heard of them when the news came through via Walter.

I hopped over to check it out, and lo my joy was unbridled. Because this – this, my friends – this is the social networking model I have been talking about for months. This is social networking for grownups.

Moli pins its colours to the mast with the post-Facebook slogan “Control your privacy.” As previously mentioned, I’m all for that. But more than that, Moli convincingly delivers what nobody else does: controlled personal networks. Moli lets you build several network channels (for example, work, friends and family) so you can present several faces to the outside world. And then Moli lets you approve new contacts to one or many of your self-defined channels.

This is marvellous. While I may be happy for my friends to see photos of me from my Saturday night at a hen party, I may be less keen for my mum to see them, and I certainly do not want my business partners and clients to see them. Moli lets me push my self-published content – photos, music, audio and blog entries – to whichever channels I select on a per item basis.

As a concept, this is every bit as fantastic as my string of instant fangirl tweets implied. In practice, it doesn’t quite live up to its potential. For a start, I was a little disappointed that Moli couldn’t check my Gmail to tell me who I know that is already a member. Looking around and trying to find anyone I might know, I also realised that there is a heavy emphasis on art, music and creative types ala VIRB. There is an outstanding range of tools for music and visuals for this crowd, but that’s less than useful to me if my business face is not the arts.

Potentially very useful for businesses, however, is the fact that Moli enables online sales and transactions for the low monthly cost of $3.99. For microbusinesses, this could be a fantastic tool ala Etsy, allowing them to get online, setup shop, and conduct sales at a nominal cost in a visually controlled environment with Paypal or Google Checkout.

And then, while I was sitting there trying to decide if sinking time into MOLI was worth it, given that I’m not an artist or a small business crafter and I have no idea how to find the people I know there, MOLI broke my heart.

For all the positioning and talk of “protecting your privacy” MOLI fails at the most basic hurdle. Because it doesn’t cloak new joins; in fact, it has to be displaying them somewhere, because within 15 minutes of joining, the spam started.

MOLI’s most “active” member, DrTom, would like me to check out his environmental webTV station and products. Lynn would like to hook me into her self-proclained “EZmoney” scheme. (I can only guess how many multitudinous levels it has.) I’m waiting for the bank transfer solicitation from Nigeria, which will surely arrive any moment now.

I am, to put it mildly, devastated. I’m about to set up a channel called Spammers and admit these new “friends” of mine while we await the next flight from the African subcontinent, but really, I’m pissed. This is a great idea, a spanking design, a pretty good UI with a few small issues, and a bastion of everything that is wrong with the internet.

Moli, you wooed me, you hooked me, and then you broke my heart.

By email.

Bitch.

Update 1 | Commenter Hawk5721 comes from a Moli IP
Update 2 | Hawk5721 is Moli.com’s Director of Customer Service

Santa didn’t quite fulfill my Christmas request for a little more toolbar space, but he did deliver something equally wonderous to my web browser for Christmas.

I’ve been a long time user of Remember the Milk, which is a great website for reminding me to do things, except for the fact I can never remember what it’s called. Aside from that, it’s utter bliss in list making – I can make separate lists for work, projects and home, and get reminders if I want them. If my husband could be bothered to join, I could nag him remind him to take out the rubbish without ever opening my mouth because you can schedule tasks to repeat, and share them with other RTM users, too. Even if it isn’t as nicely styled as something like Basecamp, the user interface is more clean and very straightforward, too, which I always appreciate.

However, I have not used it religiously because I set my web browser’s home page to the far more critical Gmail, so RTM required me to remember to open a new tab in my browser to access it. Until today:

Yee-yippee-haw. Remember the Milk now integrates with Gmail. I can create new tasks, assign them to lists, edit their due dates, and mark them as done right in my regular Gmail window. This is similar to what finally got me on the Twitter boat: it also works in Gmail and I don’t need another application – or in this case, another tab. Hurrah.

I am extremely organised but pathologically forgetful, so I’m really hoping this convergence will set me up for a more productive 2008. If Gmail could somehow remind me what day of the week it is, I’d be all set.

Also new to my Gmail is Better Gmail 2, which does nice things to your Gmail interface like showing different icons for different types of attachments, showing you your unread mail count in the tab title, and using https for more secure mail, etc. This extension is only available for Firefox, which just proves what I’ve said all along: God loves a nice API.

So with a long holiday stretch approaching, the husband out of town and nothing to do except clean the house and deal with 6,000 emails, I did what any sensible woman would do and joined Twitter.

It’s interesting, particularly in the ways its foundations are contrary to a lot of the other wildly popular social networking applications. I really like the terseness (you can only enter 140 characters per message) and the IM interface; I love things that integrate with what I have running already instead of making me use YAFA (Yet Another Feckin Application.) I can see how it would be handy as a social notepad, and lends itself to building, for example, a sidebar blog within another kind of content. (Incidentally, has anyone coined the term sideblarg yet? Because if not, I so call it.)

I also like the openness of it; anyone can click a button to follow your Tweets, and you can likewise follow anyone you’re interested in. It’s very expansive; you can even browse people’s Following lists to pick up other folks you want to follow, too.

This is exactly what I was doing, in fact, when I browsed through to Anil Dash’s Twitter page and hit my wall of Twitter understanding.

1,780 followers? On Twitter? Seriously?

With all due deference to Anil Dash, a lively thinker who throws pearls before swine on a regular basis, it is simply unfathomable to me that 1,780 people care what he had for dinner last night. (It was oxtail soup, in case you were wondering. You read it here first 1,781st.)

Now, the man is a pretty high profile web celebrity with a lot of blogshphere credibility via his work at Six Apart, Movable Type and TypePad, so I can see why people are interested in what he’s saying, what he’s thinking about and what is catching his attention. But having to wade through the inanities of family dinners, canine conversations, concert replays and descriptions of random passing tourists to find out that Anil is thinking about maybe organising a NYC tech conference is a pretty high noise to signal ratio. And I’m somehow doubting that if one day, he magically unlocks the secret of life, the universe and everything and wants to share it with the rest of us, he’ll choose to do so using Twitter.

I mean, it’s not like the guy doesn’t have a quite popular blog.

I am not, by the way, in any way knocking what Anil Dash chooses to Tweet. He’s using Twitter in exactly the right way; the constrained input of Twitter practically begs for the minutia of anyone’s life. And of those 1,780 people following, there are presumably a number who are close enough to him to care about that level of detail in Anil’s life.

It’s the other 1,680 people I’m wondering about.

For anyone ever tasked with user interface and step-through design, this is an absolute gold mine. (For anyone else, I have no doubt it’s incredibly dull. Sorry about that.) It’s a categorised collection of UI screen captures, from logins and alert messages to 404s and permissions forms – all the stuff we routinely design all over again, with varying results.

It’s the Flickrwank* of Brian Christiansen, who explains this repository by way of an oft-repeated conversation in his office:

Hey, did you see the new Staples.com homepage?

Yeah, I did. I noticed that they created a top-level tab labeled ‘Ink & Toner’.

Interesting, huh?

Yeah.

And for anyone who has ever lead a client through the UI process, that’s all he needs to say. For anyone who hasn’t, it means that people buy a ton of ink and toner online; that Staples shifts a lot of it; and that search metrics and user testing showed visitors were struggling through tiers of categories and complex searches to find this core product before the re-design.

But you don’t care. All you care about is that you can find ink and toner really, really easily at Staples.

*Not pejorative.

I noticed an interesting screenshot in Bernie Goldbach’s Flickr stream from November 29th – Trend Micro’s new browser plugin, TrendSecure, flagging Boards.ie as Undesirable.

Intrigued, I went through the whole rigmarole of digging IE out, dusting it off, installing TrendSecure, and then turning off what little security IE offers in order to enable Trend’s security browser plugin.

Apparently, sometime in the last two weeks Boards.ie has been upgraded to Threat Level Elmo: Dangerous. According to Trend, we should all

avoid this page or use considerable caution when viewing it.

Priceless. If they consider Boards to be dangerous, fuck knows how they classify PROC…

There’s been a bit of a buzz lately across Irish blogs about the cleverly named Pix.ie. Apparently it’s like Flickr, but not. Since I’m officially declaring myself to be all Flickr’d out, thank you, I am a prime candidate for this service: I’m in Ireland, I take photos, and I need somewhere to store them.

But what I really want to know before I sign up is this: will Pixie connect me to other Pix.ie users? Because I want to upload photos, not be “networked” to new friends.

I know I’m ridiculously old and probably a Luddite, but the more everything converges, the more I appreciate things with discreet purpose. I do not want to use my mobile to take pictures, I do not want to use my computer as a telephone, and I do not want to use my alarm clock to play MP3s. I have a camera to take photos, a telephone to make phone calls, and an MP3 player to play music.

The iPhone is my idea of convergence hell. It’s a camera! It’s a movie theatre! It’s an MP3 player! It’s a web browser! It’s a GPS! It’s a €400 alarm clock!

It’s a phone. Says so right on the tin. But, alas, no.

Similarly, the internet is just awash these days with sites busy converging their users into social networks. Despite my crankiness, I actually enjoy (and am fascinated by) any number of sites who’s primary function is, in fact, social networking. The problem is that everything is a social network these days. I keep expecting Tesco to offer to connect me to people who buy the same brand of bogroll as we do the next time I log in to order the shopping.

The temptation for developers to dive into this hot internet arena is, of course, enormous. I understand how databases work; I understand that when User A and User B and User C all tag different photos with the same phrase, it takes a huge amount of willpower to not leverage your data, to not connect the dots, and to not link these users together into some flavour of social network.

But man, do I wish they would resist. I am on Orkut, LinkedIn, and Facebook (though it will be a cold day in hell before I register for Bebo or MySpace.) I have IM accounts with ICQ, MSN, Trillian and Yahoo. I belong to 25 websites where I can pick up messages sent me from other users. I have 22 email addresses, seven phone numbers, and three blogs with open commenting. I cannot maintain this level of connection. I don’t understand how anyone can, in fact.

Flickr started out as a photo storage site with a necessary layer of user connections on top to manage privacy. I would argue that it’s now the web’s most successful social networking site, with some photo storage thrown in as a bonus. Photographs are now just the social currency of Flickr. Possibly I just find that irritating because I’m a crap photographer, but really, I went for the images and not for the people behind them.

So if it’s not to much to ask, Pixie, I’d just like some photo storage, please.