To add or not to add ….

What do you do with that former bully’s friend request?

Facebook friends aren’t always friends, are they?

So what do you do with a would-be one who most definitely wasn’t a friend at all?  A person who used to bully you between the ages of 6 and 16 – not physical bullying, more just being a real sod – has sent you a friend request on Facebook. Do you ignore them? Explain why you’re not accepting their request? Or accept them, and let bygones be bygones?

Could this be the chance to actually let them see all the great things that came to you – Spy on all the on goings in their life!

Its a tricky one but im sure we’ve all been in the situation where you just leave it hanging – weeks or months … Accept or ignore ?

Oh the dramas of the social media!

Spotify is going offline …. but in a good way

Spotify is going offline. Not in a bad way, but in a potentially profitable way.

From today, “premium” subscribers to the music streaming service will be able to select their playlists and set them to be ‘Available offline’. According to Spotify, “Those playlists will then be synced to the computer so you can listen to your favorite tunes even if your internet connection goes down or if you’re at summer house with no connection at all.”

The interesting question that we haven’t been able to determine but which will doubtless be investigated in great detail by Spotify premium-owning geeks around Europe is: do the songs have any digital rights management (DRM) attached?

Spotify streams in the patent-free Ogg Vorbis format, but it actually caches what you’ve listened to (on a Mac, for example, you’ll find the songs you’ve listened to or might be about to listened to in an strange format in your home folder at /Library/Caches/com.spotify.client/Storage/.

As much as anything, it’s a neat way to avoid having to pay streaming bills (though not of course music publishing charges) if you keep listening to the same songs.

Unclear – but it’s not clear if those files actually have DRM too. Clearly, the app does something else to the files so that it can read them but others can’t. In that sense, the obfuscation amounts to a sort of rights management: Spotify can read them, but others can’t. But it’s not the way you usually think of them.

The question now is whether this will mean more people will sign up for Premium ??

The last time there was a public declaration it was that something like 2% of users have gone for it – though the introduction more recently of the iPhone version may mean that’s moved up. But – Spotify on your desktop machine? What’s the point? Don’t you always have your songs with you if you want them, on a digital music player? It seems like an oddly retrograde step, to encourage people to use computers to store songs again.

Nevertheless, if it grabs you, you can also now pay for your premium subscription.

Spotify has specified that you can store up to 3,333 songs on up to three devices including your phone. You have to have the latest version of Spotify, and may need to log out and in again to see it. Premium only, of course.

So – will that make you more likely to pay for the privilege ?

Film to premiere on mobile phone …

RAGE is the first feature film to premiere exclusively on mobile phones and even better …. It wont cost you a penny!

This unique mobile premiere links directly to Sally Potter’s vision for the film, as RAGE tells the behind-the scenes story of a crisis at a New York fashion house through a series of intimate interviews, as if shot by a schoolboy on his mobile phone over a seven-day period.

The filmmakers have partnered with Babelgum for this revolutionary release strategy, which sees RAGE simultaneously available on mobile, online, digital screens and DVD.

Check out more information on it here http://ragethemovie.com/