A short story to illustrate what's wrong in this world. My bank manager in Royal Bank of Scotland says he doesn't know anything about my businesses so I direct him to my web sites. That's no good to me, he says. I'm not allowed an Internet Connection in my office.

The Best Thing About Twitter. Is there's a many toss pots spreading their garbage I have no shortage of targets when I want to stick to somebody. So I can lay in to whoever I want as aggressively as I want - cause nobody is going to read it anyway. Guiltless gratification. At least that makes Twitter worth something.

Are you listening on the Business Internet? The new model for business will exploit Internet services - publishing what we know, listening to what people want, talking to narrow down the scope and confirm the proposal, and transacting the deal - delivery, billing and payment. We understand at least in principle how most of this works. But have we really figured out the listening part? Are you listening to what your prospective business partners are talking about and ready to add value?

So it turns out that Posterous autopost to Facebook doesn't work (for me at least) but Google Reader Send To does. There's usually more than one way of getting things done. It just takes up so much time. WTF

Posterous not posting to Facebook! It's always the same. The minute I think Ive sorted out these content aggragation services the software starts to play and not do the things Ive planned for it to do. Net result is I waste hours trying to figure out why. This is easy to do with Facebook because the software truly is garbage. Anyway this nice Simple Tweet app helps me do a couple of things. Not the least important is have a good bitch about bad software. The other though is test the autopost from Posterous to Facebook with a post orginating on Twitter. It'll also help me find out where my content distribution isn't working.

If the south of England is so rich? Why don't they tidy the place up? The last few days I've been staying in the town where I grew up. It's a complete mess. What was once a thriving and pretty market town built around a charming square complete with statue of King Alfred, elegant buildings and speciality shops is now looking like something that's been in a war.

I get really excited whenever a new software service catches my attention.

There are so many exciting things happening.  Everyday the Internet solves a problem for me.

The downside is this means at least every week, and sometimes more often, I find myself using a new piece of software.

Invariably it's free - that's the new model - but there is a hidden cost.   Learning the quirks of new software takes time, and this is this fundamental problem for anybody offering software for free.

If it isn't Free, isn't easy to understand, and doesn't provide immediate benefit with those functions which are obvious, we give up on it.

Personally I understand this all too well.  With Front Office Box we go to extraordinary lengths to figure what users might want to do at any place in the app and make it obvious, right there.

We don't do a perfect job - not sure anybody can :-(

But we do a better job than most of the stuff I try out.

There's always stuff I end up having to find my way through - and that's a pain in the arse.

Experience of struggling to find the best of somebody else's software has taught me a valuable lesson.  We need to work even harder, not adding features to match somebody else's marketing BS but making it easy to understand what happens where, and what it's worth.

Big plus point for the iPhone is the torrent of new aps coming down the track, especially the ones interfacing with the new services. The downside is all the time it takes to figure how to use them and then where and when to use them. Perfect examples Evernote and Instapaper. Then we have Simply Tweet posting to Posterous? Well I'd better stop having all this fun playing with new toys and get on with that paper I'm wanting to write. Watch out for Finding New Business Models for the Information Revolution.