BBC News reported yesterday that Facebook had banned Kate Middleton, for being a fake princess-to-be, rather than, say, realising that soon-to-be-royal Kate Middleton isn’t the only person with that name. (The story was also covered in The Sun, which, naturally, started off with the most important fact to its readers—that banned Middleton is blonde.)

After the super soaraway paper got involved, Facebook apparently relented, but Facebook’s quote on ITProPortal.com is interesting:

We review thousands of pieces of content every day and takes action to ensure Facebook remains a safe and trusted environment for everyone. Of course, we make an occasional mistake.

Two questions here leap to mind. First, did Facebook ban on a hair-trigger (as suggested by the original articles) rather than doing some actual research? (In other words, how much research is done before action is taken?) If so, that’s poor form for a site that’s pretty essential to millions of people. Secondly, did ‘imposter’ Middleton do a great deal to fix this or just run straight to the press for her 15 seconds of fame?

(This story has been updated.)

The BBC’s transformation into a shell, driven utterly by Murdoch-loving government and opposition alike continues unabated with the news that it is to close about 200 websites. In order to make cost-cutting savings of 20% as demanded by a Licence Fee settlement that shores up Middle England’s view that £145.50 per year for the Beeb is SHOCKING AND EVIL (© Daily Telegraph Mail Express), most of the community sites, including 606 and h2g2 are being axed.

It’s a huge pity that a corporation such as the BBC, which aims to create community programming and related services—and that is the only major broadcaster in the UK to bother creating a great deal of British-made output—has essentially been bullied into dumping the majority of its community websites. The argument against the BBC’s output is typical:

The changes are intended to make the BBC website more distinctive and reduce competition with commercial websites.

I’m sure that will come as great consolation to the myriad people cast adrift from the various online communities as the axe falls.

For me, h2g2’s upcoming closure is a particularly sad event. It was the first online community I truly engaged with, becoming one of the original set of editors when then-big-cheese Mark Moxon decided he needed some help. I always felt the direction of the site was wrong (in creating distinct edited articles and hard-linking, rather than following a pattern along the lines of what became Wikipedia), but then the edited guide almost became incidental anyway.

This is because h2g2 became all about community. It’s a massive, important support network for many thousands of people, who depend on it to get through the day. The anti-BBC crowd will yell: “So what? There are millions of forums online—just join some of those!” But that misses the point. As sure as communities in the real world are irreparably torn apart when a local community centre is demolished to make way for something that actually ‘makes money’, so too are online communities wrecked forever by the kind of short-termism lauded by the government, opposition and Middle England, who care only about whether something makes a profit, and not about whether it’s important to people other than themselves.

Update: Nick Reynolds, BBC Online’s social media executive, says in the comments:

Just to correct something here. H2G2 is not actually closing (as has been misreported in some places). We are trying to find a future for the site outside the BBC.

Success here, of course, is not guaranteed. It took the BBC to ‘save’ h2g2 when DNA The Digital Village went belly-up, and people now have an expectation of ‘free’ (both regarding general online social media services and with h2g2 itself); additionally, Wikipedia and Facebook’s rise during that time perhaps makes h2g2 a tougher sell. Still, I very much hope the BBC does manage to find someone to take the site on.

My larger point stands, though, in that demolishing such popular community sites is a poor idea. There’s definitely fat at BBC Online that could be trimmed, but 606 and h2g2 seem more like slicing into the good stuff and chucking it in the bin.

Update 2: Perhaps pre-empting the BBC’s attempts to ‘dispose’ of h2g2, the community has created an area on the site to discuss a potential takeover.

Update 3: Regarding the ‘belly-up’ statement, that refers to h2g2’s original owner, which I mistakenly wrote as ‘DNA’ rather than ‘TDV’. A correction has now been made.

DOS emulator iDOS arrived on the App Store last year and was swiftly removed once it became clear the author had ill-advisedly bundled commercial games with it that he didn’t have the rights to. Apple was also apparently pissed that iTunes file sharing enabled you to upload your own games to the app. This, apparently, is bad and totally different from, say:

• File-sharing books to iBooks, GoodReader, Stanza and the like;
• File-sharing comics to Comic Zeal;
• File-sharing documents you’ve written to Pages;
• File-sharing practically anything to Air Sharing.

So in iDOS 2, the author removed file-sharing, resubmitted and the app found its way back to the store. The author reports it’s been pulled again, “because the ability to run custom executable is violating the appstore [sic] policy”.

These ‘custom executables’ (i.e. third-party games) can only be installed by using a third-party utility to access app bundles. Applications like iPhone Explorer and PhoneView enable users of non-jailbroken devices to mount an application bundle and access its /Documents and /Library folders. In iDOS, you could shove old DOS games in there, then fire up the command line on the app itself and load the games. Apple considers this evil, even if you, say, own the rights to the games, or they are freeware and you therefore legally have the right to run them.

My worry is that Apple will now close the backdoor to app bundles, somehow blocking access to the aforementioned folders. Few people know they exist and that you can access them, but they are massively handy, because backing up these folders is the ONLY way you can back-up content from apps and games before deleting them, and the ONLY way you can reinstate your data after a reinstall. I’ve done this myself many dozens of times—it’s the only way I can have a usable device but also not ‘lose’ the many hours I put into the likes of GTA.

Apple clearly doesn’t care about this. When you wipe an app, the data’s gone for good. This is absurdly stupid, putting iOS games on a par with cheap, nasty DS carts that don’t have battery back-ups. If Apple automatically backed up game and app states to iTunes and provided the option for reinstating this data on a reinstall, blocking backdoors would be fine, but it doesn’t. Here’s hoping I’m wrong, but knowing Apple, it favours locking down wherever possible, even if there’s really little or no reason to.

In January, I remarked on IceFish’s amazing line of side-scrolling Metal Slug rip-offs, which weren’t at all basically the same game trying to spam the App Store.

There was Commando:

And the amazing, innovative Commando Soldier:

And then the truly ground-breaking Action Commando:

But it appears I wasn’t thorough enough in my exploration of the App Store, because I missed iCmdo, for which I can only apologise. That creative and novel game looks like this:

But what if, even after iCmdo, you’ve not had your fill of exciting, unique, cutting-edge iOS games? Why, you’re in luck, because IceFish has created two more pioneering titles that are unlike anything you’ve ever seen on the App Store before.

First up, there’s the distinctive CommandoCityRescue:

But Craig, I hear you say, I don’t like games with ‘City’ in the title, so what can I do? WHAT IS THERE FOR ME HERE? Don’t be disheartened, because IceFish has created a game just for you, and it’s called CommandoRescue:

I’m sure you’ll join me in congratulating IceFish for creating what must be the most diverse and imaginative selection of games on the App Store. EA, your time is done—there’s a new champ in town!

Phil Libin’s guest post on TechCrunch is an eye-opener. The day the Mac App Store launched, the Mac leapt from bringing in about three per cent of new Evernote users to 52 per cent, and although this figure slid over the following days, it’s still high.

Libin thinks this proves desktop software remains viable, but that user experience is key, as is discoverability. One thing Apple got very right with iOS was in placing the App Store front and centre and encouraging users to buy software. The same’s now true on the Mac. One can only hope someone at Microsoft is paying attention, because a Windows equivalent would be fantastic (and potentially cut down on malware/virus issues if the store was properly curated).

Libin also reckons the experience has cemented his thoughts regarding users gravitating towards the best user experiences, justifying the company’s native-apps approach:

If Evernote’s desktop clients were written in Adobe AIR, I’d be worried right now. The immediate popularity of the Mac App Store, and the iPhone App Store before it, reinforces my belief that in a world of infinite software choice, people gravitate towards the products with the best overall user experience. It’s very hard for something developed in a cross-platform, lowest-common-denominator technology to provide as nice an experience as a similar native app.

As the CEO of a software company, I wish this weren’t true. I’d love to build one version of our App that could work everywhere. Instead, we develop separate native versions for Windows, Mac, Desktop Web, iOS, Android, BlackBerry, HP WebOS and (coming soon) Windows Phone 7. We do it because the results are better and, frankly, that’s all-important. We could probably save 70% of our development budget by switching to a single, cross-platform client, but we would probably lose 80% of our users. And we’d be shut out of most app stores and go back to worrying about distribution.