Interesting things I’ve been reading lately…

Yikes, I haven't posted for a while and I can only blame moving office, endless Bank Holidays, great weather and the like. Anyway, thought I'd make this a round up of interesting stuff I've see lately in case you missed it.

Jakob Nielsen is back and publishing the results of his usability testing on the iPad. There's a good review of it by Richard McManus at ReadWriteWeb which includes a link to the free report if you're interested in the nitty gritty.

On the excellent We Are Social blog we read that Twitter usage in the UK is going more mainstream. It's an interesting article although much is made of the recent injunction scandal putting Twitter onto the front page of the daily papers and thereby triggering a rush of people to check out this Twitter thing. How many of them will stay is another question, as is the perennial 'how many users does Twitter REALLY have?'

Meanwhile the acquisition of Tweetdeck by Twitter is causing controversy. One of my Twitter friends commented that it was 'bad for the ecosystem.' As this only officially broke yesterday stand by for the commentary.

Let's forget Twitter for the moment and think about the problem of web design versus print design - will they work together in the future, or is print dead? Mark Cossey argues for the former in this very nice article Print Loves Web...

From Inside Facebook comes the news that Facebook have added a 'Subscribe via RSS' option to Pages. I particularly like the observation that people in companies or organisations where Facebook is banned could keep up with Facebook feeds in this way. Not that I'm condoning time wasting, you understand (!) but it does baffle me to encounter organisations which are on the one hand desperate to market themselves on the social web, and on the other preventing their employees from accessing it. It is a limiting attitude and smacks of school rules. I can't really see who it helps, especially since many people can access Facebook on their mobile phones anyway, and presumably they don't have to hand them in when they clock into work?

And finally a nice riposte to the excoriating post about 'social media experts' that's been doing the rounds lately - Everyone Should Hire Social Media 'Experts' by Rand Fishkin on SEOMoz. I do love the internet!