(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.

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.

It’s something of a running joke in the tech press how often highly paid and influential analysts update their predictions for iPad sales. TechCrunch’s article by Erick Schonfeld from a couple of days back neatly sums things up:

The iPad sold three times as much as the average tech blogger predictions, and five times as much as the average Wall Street analyst prediction. Think about that the next time you see a prediction for anything in tech. The newer it is, the less anybody knows.

To be fair, Brian Marshall did OK guessing at seven million, but just 1.1 million, Doug Reid of Thomas Weisel and Yair Reiner of Oppenheimer? Really? Even if the iPad hadn’t become a breakout hit and shaken up the industry, it would have sold more than that number to Apple fans alone.

A year ago: Acer dismisses a tablet (PCWorld), arguing that its netbooks and notebooks won’t be affected by the iPad.

Today: Acer is to start selling tablets by summer (Computerworld), and Taiwan sales manager Lu Bing-hsian says:

They are aimed at phasing out netbooks. That’s the direction of the market.

As reported on the internet, iOS 4.3 returns you to the home screen with a four finger pinch. But plenty of games and apps exist where you use more than three fingers to interact. There are light toys (like uzu), virtual musical instruments, and plenty of games (such as Eliss) where you could feasibly make that gesture and thereby quit the app. Maybe this won’t be the case, or perhaps Apple just doesn’t care. If the new gesture does impact on such apps, though, that’s a major blow to a touchscreen OS, especially on the iPad where multiplayer games are commonplace.

I asked for dev replies on Twitter and will publish them here, unless said devs see their words reprinted, hunt me down and force me under threat of being slapped silly to remove them.

Neil Inglis:

It’s worth noting that nothing’s set in stone. Apple’s developer release notes for the iOS 4.3 beta specifically state that they’re looking for feedback on how this affects people’s applications. If enough people say it’s a problem, they’ll remove it or scale it back.

Personally I love the concept but I think it breaks enough applications that they’ll be forced to remove it. It’s not just that some apps intentionally use these gestures, I think users are far too likely to accidentally make them.

The conclusion there is the thing I’m most concerned about. I can see people making such a gesture by mistake. Good that Apple’s looking for feedback though.

Matt Gemmell:

A pinch is a specific gesture, remember; it’s not just any old four-finger input. Apple hasn’t grabbed them all.

And in response to my query about the specifics of that gesture:

A specific, mathematically-defined gesture which takes into account both position & velocity. It’s not just 4 fingers moving.

Stephen Darlington:

Apple are specifically asking for feedback on the gestures so I don’t think you can file it under ‘don’t care’. My guess is that they’ll add an option for developers to switch the gestures off, much as you can turn off the task switching.

Patrick Scheips:

The apps don’t quit, they just ‘freeze’ if you use these four or five fingers gestures. But yes, these gestures even work in those apps. I’ve tested that in uzu.