Some of you already know what I got up to earlier this week; I went to Paris to live-blog Google Press Day 2007. If you’re interested, you can read all about the day’s announcements on Google Blogoscoped, but here’s a more personal (and quite lengthy) account of what happened over those couple of days...

I was flying out from Manchester Airport on Monday lunchtime, so I stayed at my parents’ over the weekend and started my journey at Bolton train station. While I was waiting on the platform, I was kept amused by a random drunk nutter telling some guy how he’d played on stage with loads of famous bands, like “Franks Ferdinand”.

When I got on the train, the guy the nutter was ranting to was on his mobile loudly telling someone all about it. I had no choice but to listen in. “I’ve just been chatting to that busker [the nutter] who was in the video. He’s given me his address and wants a copy of the DVD. Can we send him one? Who should I give his address to?” After getting someone’s name, he continued. “Yeah, the gig was brilliant. Everyone said it sounded really good. Shall we just tell Jay he’s on the monitors at Glastonbury?” So, I’d managed to establish that he was linked to a band, presumably playing at Glastonbury. “Sorry, this is a bad line. I’ll call you later.” And then he hung up, leaving me wondering who he was.

I arrived at Manchester Airport a few minutes later, checked in for my flight and bought a copy of Q. Imagine my surprise when I turned to page 20 and saw the guy from the train! Turns out that he’s Bolton-born singer-songwriter Simon Aldred, more commonly known as Cherry Ghost. I’ve no idea what his stuff is like, but he’s been on Later... With Jools Holland and one of his tunes – People Help The People – is one of Q’s 50 essential tracks to download this month, so I’ll have to check it out.

My flight was delayed by just over an hour but I finally arrived at Paris Charles de Gaulle International Airport and waited for my train. On the platform were two French chavs, one of which was playing crap French music through her crap, tinny-sounding mobile phone speakers. It’s both disturbing and reassuring to see that this isn’t just a British phenomenon. When the train arrived, it was crammed, dirty and far too hot. I reckon it was actually worse that the one we got to Headlingly!

Anyway, I finally got to my hotel with around 90 minutes to spare before I had to get on a coach at the Marriott that would take us to dinner. Plenty time for a shower and a leisurely stroll. Or so I thought. As it turns out, the map Google provided wasn’t entirely accurate, so I had to phone Suzy at work and get her to give me better directions. After making my way towards the wrong Marriott (there are apparently several in Paris) I had to resort to running(!) to make sure I made the coach pickup. Red-faced, sweaty and out of breath, I finally arrived at the right Marriott with blisters on my feet only to be told that there was no rush because the second coach wasn’t leaving for another 10 minutes. Thankfully, the coach had air-conditioning so I managed to cool off a bit before we arrived.

The venue for dinner was a small restaurant and marquee on the river, with a view of the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower. Danny Sullivan (of SearchEngineLand.com) was behind me in the queue for name badges. Danny overheard me stating my name and publication, joked that Google Blogoscoped wasn’t really a publication and introduced himself. Danny and I then shared a table with a member of Google’s PR team in India and a few newspaper reporters from Paris, Israel, Turkey and India. The food selection was pretty impressive; canapés on arrival (including a rather disgusting combination of chocolate, foie gras and what I think was some kind of cherry jelly or liqueur), a choice of terrines for starter, duck breast in a creamy mushroom sauce served with vegetables and some kind of bulgur-wheat-like substance for main course, and then a wonderful variety of desserts. After plenty of talking, listening, eating and drinking, we headed back to get some rest before our early start the following day.

Having picked up an agenda for Press Day, I thought I’d go back to the hotel, connect to the Wi-Fi and make a post about the evening. That’s when I found out that (a) the Wi-Fi wasn’t free and (b) the Wi-Fi didn’t work. So, I reluctantly paid €8 for a card which gave me 60 minutes of Internet time in the hotel lobby and battled with the French keyboard to post the agenda. Other than the annoying French keyboard, the Internet kiosk was a normal Windows 98 PC that had been locked down with software so that you had to enter the code from the card to use the Internet from its restricted browser. Except, as I learned while I was making my post, you could simply press Ctrl+N to circumvent the software completely and open a new, clean Internet Explorer window – even when your paid-for Internet time is up!

After a terrible night’s sleep (too noisy with the window open; too hot with the window closed) I was taken by coach to Google Press Day 2007 to start my live-blogging. When I arrived, I looked for a seat near the front with a power socket nearby because my laptop only has a battery life of around two hours and the day was going to last about four hours. Luckily, I managed to find a socket to give my laptop a recharge during the morning break and lunch hour. Throughout the day, the Wi-Fi was a bit flaky, as was most of the electrical equipment after a member of the catering staff managed to make a table collapse that was supporting loads of glasses and a few large vases, smashing them all and causing water to drip through the ceiling of the room below, directly above the stage, the lighting rig, projectors, microphones, laptop and front two rows of seating!

After four hours of live-blogging, taking photos and asking questions, Press Day was finally over and a coach took us to the airport, where I managed to catch a well-deserved power nap. My flight home was then delayed by an hour or so (again) due to thunderstorms and lightning in Paris, which meant I had to get a later train from Manchester Airport to Sheffield and eventually arrived home at around 01:30.

What a busy couple of days, eh? I saw Cherry Ghost, experienced a bit of Paris, met Danny Sullivan, got a photo with Marissa Mayer, asked Eric Schmidt some questions, saw a real iPhone (when Eric whipped his out of his pocket for a few seconds just to show off) and had a brilliant time at Google’s first Press Day in Europe and my first attempt at live-blogging from an event!

Many, many thanks for sending me Philipp!

Update: 23 June 2007 (10:54)
I've now uploaded all my photos to Flickr and added some links to them in the post.

Labels: google, music, personal, travel

Things have been a bit quiet on this blog recently. That’s partly because five weeks ago I finally signed up to Facebook, which is currently the best way to spend all your spare time doing nothing on the Internet. (More accurately, I received an invite to join Facebook from a friend, but since I wanted to use a different email address than the one where I’d received the invite, I had to register an account and then search for the friend who’d sent the invite in the first place... but more on that later.)

Facebook always seems to get mixed reactions; people either love it and can’t get enough of it, hate it because they don’t see the point, or like the idea but find it useless because they don’t have any friends (either on Facebook or in reality). When Chris joined, he described it as being “Friends Reunited done well. Or Friends reunited with Twitter and Flickr added on. And with blogger.” Coco signed up and hated it at first, but soon changed his mind once he’d got a few more friends and found out it had an API. Now he loves it so much that he’s written a Recipe Binder application for Facebook. Generally speaking though, the people who ‘get’ it and use it properly quickly become addicted to it. And I know this because I’ve seen loads of people update their status to things like, “Chris is addicted to Facebook.”

So what’s so good about Facebook then?

Here are five things:

1. You can tag people in photos, enabling you to view all photos of your friends regardless of who took them. This makes it much more useful than Flickr when it comes to parties and group photos.

2. Not only can you leave comments for your friends on their walls, but you can use the Wall-to-Wall feature to view your conversation with them in chronological order. The lack of a feature like that on MySpace confused the hell out of me.

3. When you login, you see your News Feed which shows you what’s happening with all your friends, like who’s been writing on walls, which groups they’ve been joining, what their current status is, whether they’ve uploaded new photos. Again, MySpace had nothing like this. Checking all your friends’ profile pages for new stuff on MySpace is a right ball-ache.

4. They have a pretty decent mobile version of the site at m.facebook.com which lets you do most things, such as update your status, view profiles, write on walls and accept friend requests.

5. They recently released a development platform so that anyone can write applications for Facebook. That’s good for Facebook (because they don’t have to bother doing much new development), good for users (because they get loads of useful or otherwise interesting applications) and good for developers (because they get to show off their skills and stuff).

And what’s bad about it?

Here are another five things:

1. They’re sneaky bastards and ask you for your Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail account password so that they can send invites to all your contacts. By making this part of the registration process, they’ve been hugely successful in spreading their Facebook love.

2. If someone sends an invite to an email address other than the one you’ve got registered with Facebook – or the one you want to register with Facebook if you’re a new user – you can’t accept the invitation. When you click the link, you don’t get the option to login. This means you either have to login and search your friend or start messing about with parameters in query strings. While Facebook does allow you to add multiple email addresses to your account, I still got an invite the other day asking me to register even though I’d added that email address, so I don’t know what’s going on there.

3. There’s no easy way to find out which people you’ve already sent friend requests. The closest you can get is the list of people who can view your profile on the Poke, Message and Friend Request Settings privacy page.

4. There’s no option to remain signed in on the main site. However, the mobile version does leave you signed in. I guess this is because it was originally aimed at schools and universities where most people would probably be using shared computers. They should at least make this an option now.

5. They recently released a Developer Platform so that anyone can write applications for Facebook. That’s bad for users because Facebook profiles will probably start to become overly cluttered and messy like most MySpace profiles, especially when some applications have a ‘viral invite system’ which essentially sends invites to all the friends of anyone who adds the application.

Of course, if I’m wrong about any of those points, let me know.

Facebook me!

Today’s blog post was brought to you by the number 5...

Labels: facebook, personal, rant