Like any other year, 2011 brought a lot of highs and lows in my tech life. Unlike any other year though, 2011 was filled with situations and trends that just wouldn’t change to my liking.
2011 was just too much sharing for my taste
There were lots of great things happening in tech this year, too many to talk about here. But I have put together a list of things that managed to annoy me to no end.
- Social. I’m sick and tired of “social.” Unfortunately, every new app and website appears to be based on sharing your information with people you probably don’t even know. I’m not sure what everyone’s obsession is with sharing everything, but 2011 was your year if you like to do that.
- Social media spam is at an all-time high. The only upside is that most spammers are easy to spot because for whatever reason they’re convinced that using a young and pretty Japanese girl as an avatar. At least they’re easy to spot and block that way.
- Image Memes. People who fell in love with sharing those stupid images with text overlaid on them on Facebook, G+ & Twitter because they couldn’t think of anything better to post.
- Commercial lead-ins. Every stinking video on every stinking commercial website has a 15 to 30-second commercial at the start of it. It’s particularly annoying on sites like DiscoveryChannel.com where this doesn’t happen just on the first video you watch on the site, but EVERY video, every time.
- iPhone 5/iPad 3 rumors. Four solid months of rumors citing “anonymous sources” – none of which actually panned out.
- Tech journalism in general. Many popular tech sites were bought out and subsequently destroyed by their new owners (TechCrunch.com comes to mind). Other sites, suffering from lack of income due to readers blocking ads and using other means of reading articles that don’t display ads, offered little more than press-releases with no commentary at all.
- Design websites that have turned into nothing more than business card design photo collections and sponsored giveaways of business card printing and WordPress themes.
Why must I click 12 times to read a three paragraph article?
- Articles as slideshows. There’s nothing more annoying than having to click through 12 pages of ads to read a 200 word article. This is literarily my #1 complaint about the web in 2011.
- Page-jump shuffle. 12 page articles w/3 paragraphs on each page (to pump page views and amount of ads per page). This kind of goes along with the previous bullet point. I don’t mind when a 5,000 word article is broken up, but there’s simply no reason to make me click so many times for a 500 word announcement.
- Freemium apps. Apps in the iOS store moving to the freemium model. Baiting customers with what looks like a great app, only to force users to purchase upgrades in-app that make the app useful.
- No demo available. The increased volume and lower cost of apps in the Mac App Store is fantastic for the shareware market. Unfortunately, not having the ability to try an app before you buy it never materialized, thus keeping many users from exploring more apps. Apple really needs to come up with a system to allow demo downloads instead of leaving developers to maintain two sets of code of a single app.
- Flash still exists. Apple managed to kill Flash in the mobile market. Unfortunately, killing it completely on the web has proven to be a much more difficult task. I hate Flash, and the use of it on a website all but guarantees I won’t visit a site unless it proves to be too valuable not to.
- Apple’s iOS fetish. Apple paid a lot of attention to iOS devices in 2011. Unfortunately, that meant no updates for the MacPro or iMac (other than a speed bump to the iMac in May). I’m simply not ready to give up my big, powerful desktop Mac in exchange for my MacBook Air and iPhone.
- Adobe pricing updates. Adobe announced an extremely unpopular piece of news regarding the pricing for the next version of their Creative Suite, thus setting off a shit-storm of complaints from users. In the end, I think people will warm-up to the subscription plans. But Adobe is in a difficult position because for the first time in their history, there are viable alternatives to their flagship apps. I suspect that 2012 will bring a kinder, gentler Adobe.
Hopefully, 2012 will bring some relief in my tech life and all the previously mentioned items will be resolved to my liking – because you know, the tech world revolves around what I like! 😉