In other words, technology had never been more advanced.

And that’s just it: by any measurement, we’re constantly living within the most advanced technological era of all time. Yet by the long list of aspirational technologies you’re about to read, you’d never know it.

To an outsider, it must seem like 21st-century humans believe they’re always living a decade or three in the past, and that the future and its inevitable entourage of flying cars, teleportation, and other really cool stuff we haven’t even thought about is as much a part of the human narrative as the fireplace, the automobile, and the internet. Because we believe that the future must bring more powerful technologies (and so far, we’ve been right), the future plays as much a role in how we understand ourselves as the past.

Some of these technologies you may have heard of. Others might seem incredibly far-fetched. But the important thing to realize here is that regardless of whether they ever come to fruition, the mere fact that many people around the world believe these things to be inevitable illustrates just how discontent technology makes us with the present — and also how much we long for constant interaction.

2012

Flying cars – Yes, as in cars…that can fly. Okay, while you might not be the one piloting (or even passengering) the flying car, the engineers at Terrafugia have long been busy perfecting their Lightweight Sport Aircraft (LSA) concept and are currently accepting buyers to the tune of $270,000.

“The whole idea is to address the gap in travel between 100 and 400 miles,” said Cliff Allen, Terrafugia’s vice president of sales. “You could leave your home or office, drive to the nearest GA [General Aviation] airport, convert over to the aviation mode, fly to the airport nearest your destination and drive the last 10 or 15 miles.”

No word currently on whether you’ll actually be able to drive/fly (I prefer “flive”) your Terrafugia Transition by year’s end, but you can certainly obtain ownership — and odds are good that you’ll be airborne within the next few years.

2013

Speech-to-speech translation – Imagine you’re in India (or, if you are in India, continue being in India). This is a place where foreign languages and dialects are constantly coming together and increasingly demand a translation service. Now imagine that when someone speaks to you in a foreign language, an audio receiver automatically picks up their speech, translates it into your language, and plays it back for you. This is already a reality.

What this means is that within a year or two, you’ll be interacting with foreign languages in an unprecedented way — as puzzles to solve rather than pictures, whole stories to understand. I’m not going to be the one to decide if seamless translation is a good thing…but I do know that no matter how good the technology may be, there will always be that person who has trouble using it.

Superspeed rail more convenient than planes – Planes travel fast. Hundreds of miles per hour. But getting there, checking in, boarding, waiting…I’m not even going to run through it all. Point is: since rail is more efficient, if you could ride an incredibly fast, comfortable train and your door-to-door time was about the same, wouldn’t you prefer it?

That’s about to be what happens when Deustche Bahn completes and begins its service from London to Germany. Currently, you either need to book a flight from England or take a zig-zagging rail route to get to Berlin. Given the amount of business traffic between London and Germany, it’s likely that other large hubs will begin to see rail as the preferred method of mass transportation — just look at what’s coming in year 2020.

2014

Solar flight – Less than 100 years ago, Charles Lindbergh captured the entire world’s imagination like never before when he completed the first non-stop transatlantic flight from New York to Paris. In two years, we’ll see the completion of the world’s first circumglobal flight powered by nothing more than energy harnessed from the sun. Will anyone notice?

I doubt it. But what happens if the technology becomes cheaper? What if at some point, you can buy your own solar-powered personal flying machine that will get you a few hundred miles for the cost of a Buick?

2015

Self-charging holographic mobile phones – That’s a mouthful. Let’s simplify: first of all, we have had, for a long time, wristwatches that power themselves by the regular motion of the wearer. Today, cell phone companies are already unveiling kinetic motion-powered cell phones…meaning the scourge of battery life may plague you no more.

As for holographic phone calls, this is something just about every major cell phone player is putting R&D money into — I guess people just love that Star Wars scene with Obi-Wan coming out of R2-D2 too much not to make it happen.

So, to recap: charger-free cellphones that project a holographic video of you and the person you’re calling. So what does that mean for travel? Well, let’s say you’re on vacation in Dubai, and your office calls and needs you in a meeting — you won’t go, but your holographic self will. The more we can connect the physical world — even if it’s just a lifelike representation — the less influence geographic boundaries have over us all.

Serious space tourism – The concept of “space tourism” is about as cutting edge as “social networking” these days — we’ve been there, talked about it. But still, we haven’t really seen it aside from Richard Branson’s crazy-billionaire aspirations of taking slightly less wealthy people into space with him.

That’s all definitely going to change, though, because Boeing — an aerospace player who doesn’t mess around — announced that it will bring passenger service into the final frontier beginning 2015.

2016

Augmented reality everything – By the end of this year, Google will begin selling augmented reality glasses that stream information in real time onto a user’s eyeball. Which means that finally, you’ll never have to remove your eyes from your Twitter/reddit/Facebook news feed.

Assuming our appetite for more information, more often, as fast as possible doesn’t start to diminish, we can only expect that our visible realities will inevitably become subject to the changes we choose to make upon them. Probably the biggest proponent of this idea is Ray Kurzweil, who discusses how in the future our entire realities will be created through nanobots that “re-engineer” our perceptions of the world around us by communicating directly with the brain.

2017

The locationless classroom – Some of the younger readers might not fully agree with me here, but it’s true: school is awesome. However, the current model of getting dropped off at a turning circle to “learn” between the hours of 8am and 2pm is probably not the end-all-be-all of scholastic efficiency — especially when you consider that nearly 10% of all highschoolers drop out.

Given our steady progression to locationless communication, it only makes sense that we’ll eventually take our schools into the cloud and digital classrooms will be come, at least in some part, the norm. This already happens in towns like Branson, CO, where the official population is only 100 but 850 children actually attend the local school via the internet.

When you combine this idea with the aforementioned holographic cell phone technology, one can envision a future where going to school involves projecting yourself into a virtual classroom environment to study with your other holographic classmates. I’ll say that’s at least a few years down the road, though…

2018

Biometric and electronically enhanced passports – Perhaps the biggest factor keeping people where they come from is not geography, not nostalgia, nor family, but passports. Human will can overcome nearly any physical obstacle — but no amount of wanting can overcome a denied passport at a political border.

So, what will the passport of the future look like? We’ve already begun incorporating RFID chips and other technology into passports — is biometric data the next logical carrier of our identification? And as human screening becomes replaced by technology, we can expectwaiting times at passport controls to become incredibly diminished.

At the same time, though, this may be a slippery slope: no data is invulnerable to hacking and manipulation, and as history has unfortunately shown us, an individual’s biological and physical makeup is often the first to become discriminated against.

2019

Self-driving cars – Every time I mention this to someone, they don’t believe me. And then I show them the video of Google’s self-driving car. And mention the fact that the UK has already begun building private roads and corridors for self-driving cars.

Obviously, the main motivation here is safety. It’s the primary difference between cars of today and those of even 10-15 years ago: our cars are immensely more self-aware, and anything that can be done to reduce the more than 30,000+ deaths caused by automobiles (annually in the U.S.) will be a welcome addition to our traveling lifestyle.

2020….and beyond

London to Beijing by rail – About two years ago, China announced plans to develop a rail system to link Beijing with London — thousands and thousands of miles covered in just two days.

The elevator into space – The Japanese engineering and construction firm Obayashiannounced this year that they have the ability and intention to set in motion a 36,000km elevator into space, to be completed within forty years.

Today, this sounds impossible. We have never, ever seen a 36,000km structure — manmade or otherwise. But the same was once true for so much of our world that now seems commonplace: skyscrapers, highways, hydroelectric dams. Truly, the past century and a half of unprecedented technological innovation has done more for our imagination than it has for our productivity. For the more we build and achieve, the more we feel inadequate and strive for what was impossible yesterday, but today seems all but inevitable.

Facebook — the once-underdog social network founded by a kid in a hoodie in a dorm room — may have officially cemented its status as a titan of the tech establishment it once challenged.

What changed? Facebook — no longer a feisty startup but a 3,000-person, soon-to-be-public corporation with $3.9 billion in cash and an $85 billion to $100 billion valuation — spent $1 billion to gobble up a much-smaller competitor, the photo-sharing app Instagram.

When it did so, it stirred up a caldron of ill will that the “People of the Internet” have been harboring toward Mark Zuckerberg’s once-hip company. Some Instagram users said they were downloading all of their photos and then deleting them from the app just so Facebook couldn’t get its hands on them.

Pundits weren’t kind to Facebook, either. David Horsey of the Los Angeles Times, writing about the Instagram purchase, noted that the company is looking more and more like “Big Friend,” a gentler variation on George Orwell’s all-seeing Big Brother. Data indicate others share that view, too. A new poll, conducted before the Instagram news, found that 28% of Americans have an unfavorable view of Facebook — twice as many as disapprove of Apple and nearly three times as many as Google.

This backlash highlights a new reality: As a technological juggernaut, Facebook is more Microsoft than Tumblr. To use a musical analogy employed on Twitter, it’s the Nickelback to Instagram’s Bon Iver.

Facebook and Instagram’s images couldn’t be more different, so it’s tempting to say that this Goliath-buys-David event is a turning point for Facebook. But people have been writing about Facebook losing its mojo for years now. In 2009, AdWeek ran this headline: “Is Facebook getting uncool for 18-24s?” A year later, mainstream news websites noted the phenomenon of parents and grandparents joining Facebook, scaring off younger people.

“It’s official, Facebook is becoming uncool,” CBS declared.

It’s hard to pinpoint the moment when Facebook’s image problem started. Maybe it was when users realized how much data Facebook was collecting about them. Maybe it was when CEO Zuckerberg started to seem less like that geeky, counterculture college kid and more like a run-of-the-mill billionaire.

But it is possible to take a look at the conversation and tease out a few factors that seem to have led to Facebook’s current status as an inescapable, perhaps Orwellian, Internet giant.

First: Money. Nothing leads to public skepticism quite like a few billion dollars in pocket change. Compare that kind of situation at Facebook to Instagram, which as CNNMoney notes, hadn’t monetized its product. It didn’t support advertisements and apparently didn’t sell its users’ data.

Facebook, on the other hand, is accused of profiting wildly on the backs of the 850 million people who share personal details about their lives on the social network. For more on that, see The Wall Street Journal’s recent feature “Selling You on Facebook,” which analyzes the info that Facebook apps collect.

View some of the photos, comments from readers

Second: Size. As companies get bigger, people tend to question their motives. Google is a good example of this view. The Silicon Valley company once was the darling of the Internet — the search engine that didn’t have ads on its homepage and declared its company ethos was “Don’t Be Evil.” As the tech blog Gizmodo writes, Google “built a very lucrative company on the reputation of user respect.”

That was easy enough when Google was small. As it grew, however, some people started to lose faith in the company — and to question its motives.

Gizmodo: “In a privacy policy shift, Google announced today that it will begin tracking users universally across all its services — Gmail, Search, YouTube and more — and sharing data on user activity across all of them. So much for the Google we signed up for.”

People never talked that way about Instagram, which only had 13 employees and 33 million users. It’s the kind of company journalists love to use the word “scrappy” to describe.

Third: Trust. As the company has grown, some people have come to trust Facebook so little that they’re pulling photos from Instagram in advance of the takeover.

According to Megan Garber at The Atlantic, 25,000 people visited Instaport’s site in six hours on Monday after the news broke, compared with 400 people on a normal day. Instaport is a service that helps people pull photos off Instagram for home storage.

“You could read that spike, on the one hand, as a mass freak-out on the part of users who don’t trust Facebook — despite Mark Zuckerberg’s promises — with their networks and memories,” Garber writes. “You could also read it as an insurance play, a just-to-be-safe move on the part of people who want to feel sure that their photos are secure.”

Mistrust of Facebook stems in part from concern about its privacy policies, which have been described as overly confusing. Facebook itself acknowledges that privacy concerns could trip up the company in the future.

In its initial public offering filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the company wrote: “We have in the past experienced, and we expect that in the future we will continue to experience, media, legislative, or regulatory scrutiny of our decisions regarding user privacy or other issues, which may adversely affect our reputation and brand.”

Finally: The cool factor. Maybe it’s less that people see Facebook as evil and more that the site just isn’t as cool as it used to be — partly because it’s so popular and also because it’s not the new kid on the block anymore. Zuckerberg launched Facebook in 2004, which is eons ago in Internet time. MySpace and Friendster — all of Facebook’s predecessors — didn’t survive (or didn’t continue to grow) for this long.

Instagram, meanwhile, was founded in late 2010 and was only in recent months becoming part of the zeitgist. iPhone-toting hipster types liked the app for its mobility — you cold post photos easily from your phone — and filters that gave their pics a retro, vintage vibe.

“Instagram is, in a word, cool. Facebook is losing its ‘cool’, rapidly,”wrote Allan Swann at the Computer Business Review.

Instagram managed to create a cache in part from its status as an underground hit. Even with tens of millions of users, the app was praised by reviewers as intimate – a place, true or not, where it was safe to post personal photos and share stories with a relatively small network of friends. (Just to throw in some data: I have 815 Facebook friends but only 67 people whom I follow on Instagram, and I actually know almost all of them.)

It’s not clear that any of that will change for Instagram. Zuckerberg says the app will continue to operate as a product that’s independent from Facebook and that people won’t have to post Instagram photos to Facebook just because the company owns the app. But the backlash helped crystallize the idea that Facebook no longer is seen as the always-cool company that everybody implicitly trusts.

“Some Instagram fans are acting as if this is a tragedy,” Horsey of the Los Angeles Times writes of the acquisition. “They liked the idea that there was a little corner of the online world where they could gather and be outside the reach of the Zuckerberg empire. …”

There was a time when people clamored to be part of Zuckerberg’s network, which launched at first only for Harvard students. But now, as the Instagram backlash shows, Facebook has long stopped being an exclusive club. It’s seen as the big, bland company that the app’s users worry will ruin the cool thing they had going.

AUSTRALIA, prepare to resize your pockets.

The first in a new generation of big smartphones has officially landed in the country and it’s compelling enough to make you forget the additional burden that comes with stuffing a huge screen into your pants.

Samsung has finally launched its Galaxy Note Down Under, through Optus and Vodafone with Telstra to come, and its 5.3-inch screen is bound to raise eyebrows and win over some mobile internet fans.

Samsung Electronics telecommunications vice-president Tyler McGee says the unusually large HD Super AMOLED screen gives the phone “the freedom of a paper notebook” with added connectivity.

In this vein, the company delivers the Note complete with a retro accessory: a stylus.

Called an S-Pen, this stylus hides inside the phone’s shell and can be used in unexpected ways.

Touch it to the screen while pressing a button on its side and it will capture a screenshot – a simple but welcome addition to an Android phone.

Samsung has also created a new category of apps designed for its use, labelling them under an “S Choice” banner.

These include freehand sketching apps Zen Brush and OmniSketch, and the unusual iAnnotate that lets users draw on PDF files – a task that could prove handy in the business world.

Samsung also delivers a multimedia app of its own in S Memo that lets users add drawings, scribbles, voice recordings, photos or just picture fragments into memos that can be kept or shared. It’s an unusual use of a phone, but one that could find a market.

Despite the focus on its screen, the Note hides plenty of impressive specifications behind it.

It runs in a speedy manner using a 1.4GHz dual-core chip, uses Google Android Gingerbread software (an Ice Cream Sandwich update is promised) and it delivers cameras front and back, including an 8-megapixel shooter with LED flash on its rear panel.

Its battery has also been upsized to power its oversized screen and, at 2500mAH, keeps the display lit for a reasonable time.

The Note won’t suit everyone, however. Its bright screen is easy to see, but this large inclusion also makes the phone clumsier to grip and harder to pocket.

Samsung has also missed an opportunity with this phone. Though the US Note connects to 4G networks, the Aussie version will not. Its top speed of 21Mbps on HSPA+ should impress, but adding 4G connectivity would have earned it a larger fanbase.

Regardless, the Note leads its class and is a pleasure to use. Fans of the new generation of phablets (that’s phone/tablets) should welcome its arrival.

The pricing of the PlayStation Vita has raised some eyebrows. Most expected the Wi-Fi enabled version to retail at $349.95, but $449.95 for the 3G Vita? That’s a bit too much to take for some. As a result you may find yourself tempted to import a 3G unit from overseas, but before you do, you might want to double check a few things.

First Impressions

When I fired up the PS Vita for the first time this past weekend, I couldn’t help but think back to Dec. 2004. So much has changed. I had a one-year-old son, who is now eight. I hadn’t started writing for the blog you are reading right now. Sony entered the handheld fray, with the battlefield littered with fallen portables, with the goal of not only holding its own against mighty Nintendo, but succeeding. Sony wanted to build a better handheld.

In its day, the PSP was the prettiest handheld there was — something Vita, with its stunning OLED screen, clearly retains in its DNA. There are key differences. The PlayStation portable used chunky discs called UMDs and was made in Japan. The Vita uses tiny cards and is made in China. The Vita is loaded with a completely different user interface. It may carry the “PS” branding, but is a radical departure from the PSP, sporting dual thumbsticks, front and back cameras as well as front and back touch. This isn’t just a PSP on steroids, this is a successor in the truest sense of the world.

In the West, the PSP is, perhaps, viewed as a failure of some sorts. More and more developers ceased supporting it, and the PSP fell by the wayside. In Japan, the handheld has been a rousing smash, thanks to a series of hit franchises, especially Monster Hunter. In Japan, owning a PSP is a rite of passage: little kids might gravitate towards the DS, but it’s junior high and high school students who desire the PlayStation Portable. It’s cool.

With that PSP momentum, no wonder Sony decided to launch the PS Vita in Japan. The Vita is an easier sell to Japanese gamers, because so many of them own the PlayStation Portable. It should be an easy sale to Western gamers, looking for a different portable experience than what’s available: namely one with a large, beautiful touch screen, buttons, and dual thumbsticks.

Design

For years, gamers have been saying the PSP needed dual thumbsticks, that the PSP’s biggest shortcoming was that there was only a circle pad, and that one reason why Western developers didn’t make games for it was the controls. Sony listened. Sony made a portable device, which, out of the box, has two thumbsticks. You don’t need to buy an add-on. You don’t need to wait for an inevitable hardware iteration. Bam, here you go, dual thumbsticks. Finally, a company that listens to people.

The thumbsticks work well. Yes, I wish I could press them down like I can with the DualShock 3′s thumbsticks. But, perhaps, that will come in a feature iteration — maybe not. If not, that’s OK, because these thumbsticks do the job.

The face buttons and the direction pad are nice and clicky. Personally, I hate pressing gummy buttons. Some don’t like clicky buttons, and these are slightly more clicky than the 3DS’s buttons.

Like so many electronics these days (and like the original PSP), the Vita’s front is shinny. In direct sunlight, there is glare, but for regular use, indoors and outdoors, I didn’t experience anything that was not manageable. Since this is a shinny device, you bet it’s a fingerprint magnet. I found myself constantly polishing and wiping down the Vita. And I don’t think I leave more prints than your Average Joe. However, the portable’s front-and-back touch seemed to handled fingerprints as well as any Apple device.

One of my favourite things about the Vita is just how easy it is to hold. The back of the PS Vita has two groves to comfortably hold the portable. Smartly, Sony gave up on trying to get the Vita to fit in your back pocket, and the Vita screams I AM A GAME MACHINE. It’s not a phone that need tweezers to game with or a large tablet that requires a stick-on joystick. It’s a game machine. It’s large, and, thus, I found it easy to hold. Granted, the thumb sticks are right below the face buttons and the directional pad. I had no problems accessing them. Maybe others are. Maybe you will. I dunno.

Besides the face buttons, the directional pad, and the dual thumbsticks, there are a PS button, a select button, a start button, and one of the two cameras as well as two speakers. It’t not cluttered, and the button positioning is instinctive. The speakers are directly to the side of each thumbstick. The positioning is interesting, and no doubt to save space. I did not notice interference with game music or sound while playing.

The right and left shoulder shoulder button are made from a nice tinted plastic. The plastics used throughout the machine are tactile and high quality. With the Japanese yen so strong, Sony cannot make the Vita in Japan and expect to turn much of a profit on it. While the company is, no doubt, skimping on manufacturing costs, the device feels solid and well made. That being said, I would not chuck this handheld in my bag like I would with Nintendo’s seemingly indestructible handhelds. If you are going to get a PS Vita, do get a case. The Vita’s screen looks like it could get scratched, and the portable is a dust magnet.

Unlike the PSP, the Vita does not use UMD, but rather, a proprietary game card format. The game cards are small — the memory cards are even smaller. If you are not careful, game cards are going to get lost, memory cards are going to get lost, and there will be tears. Likewise, either carry around your game boxes or get some sort of holder. And, with the PS Vita,you cannot bite your nails. Now is a good time to stop! Getting game and memory cards in and out of the Vita is incredibly fiddly. Part of me wishes Sony made them slightly larger on purpose. Though, if they were larger, I’d probably be bitching right here, right now about how Sony should’ve made them smaller.

Portable game hardware requires a different kind of commitment than home consoles do. Portable game hardware has a “be seen” element to it that doesn’t quite exist with home hardware. The Vita did pass the doofus test in that I did not feel like a doofus, while playing it out and about. The unit I’ve been using is 3G, which is a godsend in Japan if you actually leave your house, because WiFi if often more scarce than it should be. The WiFi model should suit most people just fine, though.

The one area that feels like a letdown is the Vita’s camera. It’s a bit crap. Compared to the Sony who crammed everything under the sun into the original launch PS3, things like this just shows how sensible Sony has become. The Vita doesn’t really need a better camera — this will do just fine. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t slightly disappointed to go from the images on the stunning OLED screen (it really is stunning) to look at the seemingly grainy Vita photos I’d taken. I was.

Interface

The screen is something else. At home, I have a Panasonic television from 2005. It’s starting to show its age, and it’s not full HD, but it works OK. Whenever I play video games in controlled environments, such as at studios or trade shows, I get to experience them under optimal visual conditions. At home, because of the set-up I unfortunately have, there’s a slight dip. But on the Vita, there isn’t that dip. You get that optimal experience all the time, no matter how old your television is.

And since chez Ashcraft only has one television, the PS Vita’s Remote Play was one of the features I was most excited about. It could free up the TV to allow my kids to watch their kiddy TV and my wife to watch whatever Japanese drama she’s into. Unfortunately, the feature is not yet fully ready at launch, and, as far as I know, you cannot play any PS3 games via Remote Play. When using Remote Play, I did notice a slight drop in picture quality when accessing my PS3 via the Vita, an understandable drop, given the network and hardware limitations. Because the Vita’s OLED screen is so pretty, the slight drop might be even more noticeable.

Even more beautiful than the OLED screen, is the user interface Sony has running on it. For years, I’ve used Japanese electronics, and I’ve found the interface on so many of them to be maddening. For a country and a culture that values simplicity, the user interfaces are often anything but. They’re clunky, clumsy, and often don’t make a lot of sense. Sony’s XMB interface for the PSP and the PS3 is quite good. The Vita’s interface is much better. Previously, I posted a walk-through on Kotaku, which you can check out here. This interface, along with the rear-touch, were the two things that really sold me on this system. Both are simple and both are clever. Yet, neither are gimmicky.

And gimmicks have become such a part of gaming hardware. I remember sitting in the audience at Sony’s infamous 2006 E3 press conference and hearing Sony exec Kaz Hirai talk about how the PSP could be used as a rearview mirror; it could run images showing what’s behind you, and you could put it next to your text while playingGran Turismo. I remember sitting there thinking, “This is the stupidest thing ever.”

There are stupid things about the Vita, such as restrictions on how many PSN accounts you can use. But, so far, the blunders seem so small, and the Vita appears well-thought out and well executed. There are a bunch of games already out for the machine, and if this is going to be a success, there should hopefully be a bunch more. With the Vita, Sony didn’t only build a better handheld, it built one of the best.

PlayStation Vita Features:

• 5-inch OLED Multi-Touch Touchscreen

• Dual Thumbsticks

• Rear-and-Front Cameras

• Rear Touchpad

• Sixaxis Motion Tech

• Three-Axis Electronic Compass

• WiFi (3G for the 3G Model)

• Bluetooth

• 4 core SGX543MP4+

• 512 MB RAM, 128 MB VRAM

• Dual Speakers

Unfortunately, this latest in the long line of Apple iTV rumors doesn’t bring many specifics on what exactly Apple’s next-gen TV will look like.

According to “people familiar with the matter,” Apple is in talks with media executives at several large companies and is developing a TV with wireless streaming capabilities.

One thing that will play an important part in Apple’s upcoming TV product is voice recognition software, similar to Siri. The software “might allow users to use their voices to search for a show or change channels,” the WSJsays.

Another important aspect of Apple’s strategy is the synergy between all the other devices in Apple’s ecosystem. For example, a user might start watching a video on a TV set, then continue viewing it on a tablet.

None of this has been officially confirmed by Apple. WSJ‘s report says it is “unclear” when the company plans to start selling such a device, and even if a date were set, Apple may change its plans at any time.

That’s because on the mobile web, utility trumps style. Fancy visuals and a great motif may look terrific on your desktop, but on mobile, all they’re likely to do is slow things down. And on that small screen, you’re not going to see much anyway.

Nevertheless, as more and more of the population experiences the web via mobile, creating a mobile website is essential. Doing so, however, requires a different frame of mind, or maybe, as Dennis Mink suggests, a trip in a time machine. “It’s really like the early days of the Internet, like 1996, 1997,” says Mink, VP of marketing atDudamobile, a company that creates mobile sites. “We all had our 14.4 baud modems, and things were as stripped down as possible.”

Indeed, even with the spread of 3G and 4G, Mink doesn’t expect that to change. So, if you’re considering creating a mobile site, here are a few guidelines that Mink and other experts offer to make it as compelling as possible:

1. Keep It Simple

As noted, most users aren’t visiting your mobile site for the aesthetic experience. Instead, they’re trying to get something quickly, whether it’s information or a pizza. A good place to start is to ask yourself, “What are most customers going to visit our site for?” If it’s to reach a live person, then make the phone number prominent (and use Click-to-Call.) If it’s to find your address, put that up high as well. Put two or three of the most important things in one place.

“Keep navigation to a minimum while delivering the maximum amount of engaging content within a smaller screen that you get on a laptop or desktop,” says Craig Besnoy, U.S. managing director for NetBiscuits, another mobile web consultant. “In addition, a properly designed mobile site keep as much of the call to action above the mobile fold, while keeping text input to a minimum.”

2. Don’t Use a Lot of Images

Nothing slows a page down like a few large images. Mink recommends getting rid of most the images on your homepage except for ones that are considered essential and even then, you should use smaller versions. Anything else is self-sabotage since a slow user experience leads to a high bounce rate.

3. Design It for Multiple Handsets

A mobile site that’s designed for an iPhone won’t look good on a Nokia phone and might not even show up at all. That’s a mistake, says Rekha Baliga, director of customer engineering at mobile web consultant Atmio, since a big chunk of the world’s users are on a Nokia phone. Atmio keeps a database of more than 500 mobile phones and ensures that any site it creates will look good on any of them.

“Never design a site for a specific device,” says Besnoy. “Despite popular belief, everyone does not use an iPhone or Android, nor is their device running the latest version of the operating system.”

4. Learn From Other Great Mobile Sites

Most companies and brands haven’t set up a mobile site yet, but a good number have. That’s good news for you, since you can learn from the best ones (and the worst). Below are two sites that Besnoy recommends. Both use NetBiscuits’s platform, but beyond that, each — eBay’s and CBS’s — offer simple navigation, large type and few images.

5. Use an “M-Dot” URL

People Google you on their mobile phones just like they Google you on a desktop, so you should create a site that’s optimized for SEO. One important consideration is an “m-dot” URl (ex: m.abc.com.), which will help Google recognize and index your mobile site separately from your standard one.

6. Test and Listen to Feedback

Some mobile web consultants, like Atmio, offer A/B testing for mobile sites to let you compare how different designs perform. Another option is Google’s GoMo site, which lets you plug in your URL to see how it looks on a mobile phone.

Ultimately, though, your customers will provide the most valuable feedback since they are your target audience. So listen to any complaints or compliments that come your way. What you’re looking to hear is that the site worked quickly and as it should, not that it looked pretty. As Mink says: “There’s not much mystery to it. At this stage, it’s as simple as it looks. Zero in on that primary action you want [customers] to take and make that your primary focus.”

According to recent research from NM Incite, for 82% of Facebook users, knowing someone offline is reason to add them on the social network. The next most common reason for adding a friend is having many mutual friends, a practice reported by 60% of users.

The remaining reasons for adding friends include superficial aspects of your Facebook profile such as physical attractiveness and friend count — which is not surprising considering many users make their posts and comments visible to only their Friends. You can see the complete results of the study in the graphic below.

When it comes to why we unfriend, there are more possible explanations. Fifty-five percent of Facebook users call offensive comments cause for removing someone from their networks. The next most common reason is not knowing a friend well (41%) and sales soliciting (39%). The remaining explanations are a variety of social media etiquette SNAFUs.

Men are more likely to use Facebook for professional networking and dating. For women, Facebook is the place to connect with real life friends, snag deals and express creativity. Women are more likely to remove friends for offensive comments or a weak offline relationship.

The “State of Social Media Survey” polled 1,895 social media using adults (age 18 and older), recruited online between Mar. 31 and Apr. 14 through online forums, blogs and other social networking platforms.

Why do you friend and unfriend people on Facebook? Let us know your practices in the comments.

This didn’t begin as an impulsive decision with unexpected consequences, and I’m not a Facebook hater by any stretch. I love and use social media, and am fascinated by what its explosion has enabled in a variety of arenas. Facebook has obviously been a huge — and probably the single most comprehensive — part of that.

My experiment has continued longer than I expected. I haven’t quit, purposefully not deleting my account entirely. But through extended deactivation, I have learned some things: that I miss out on a lot of conversations now; that, somewhat ironically, I’m more focused now than before on my own life and needs; and that I’m not the only person who wonders, to-FB-or-not-to-FB?

A recent New York Times article titled “The Facebook Resisters” profiled young-adult Facebook abstainers who point to concerns about privacy, alienation and information overload. But I’m interested in a broader question: In a world where it now seems more generally accepted to be on Facebook than not be on, what’s it like to opt out?

Since July, I haven’t felt like I need Facebook socially, but there is plenty I’m missing out on. During the many times when funny Facebook photos from parties or nights out come up when hanging out with friends, I feel like the only kid on the schoolyard without a TV, lost at sea while other kids recite lines from The Simpsons. I also frequently find myself playing catch-up when someone brings up an article someone else shared on Facebook. And there’s a whole world of flirting and getting-to-know-you that no longer exists for me.

I miss the definite ease of communication with friends and acquaintances. I’ve used Facebook before to find sources for articles too, but no longer can. So, now my avenues of communication are more segmented: Twitter to keep in touch with some friends, mostly those I’ve met through work, and find cool articles people recommend; LinkedIn to organize my professional contacts; and old-fashioned phone and email to keep up and make plans with close friends.

But it’s what I’ve actually enjoyed about being off of Facebook that has surprised me most. I spend less time on my computer without Facebook’s source of infinite content. During real life experiences, what is or isn’t worth sharing on Facebook no longer lingers in the back of my mind, so I spend more time simply enjoying the present. And the false comparisons between others’ curated digital self-presentations and my own naturally widespread sources of pride, fulfillment, dissatisfaction and insecurity no longer exist.

In the final analysis, what my little experiment has shown me is that Facebook has become so ingrained in human life that it’s kind of like religion in a way. You can partake or not partake as much as you like, but the thing itself isn’t going anywhere. Your choice won’t change anything in the bigger picture, but I’ve found it fascinating to explore the differences in my own life.

After five months, I’m going to keep the experiment going. It’s been fun to be deactivated, but I’m not going to delete. I’ll be back one day. But, for now, I’m enjoying my life offline.

What do you think? Have you ever deactivated or deleted your Facebook account? Why, and what was it like? Just how ingrained is Facebook in your life? Let me know in the comments.

But, there’s a catch — and a rather annoying one at that. Once your tablet is updated you can’t just sync your PS3 controller and instantly turn it into a portable PSone. You’ll first need to get your hands on a $29 USB adaptor cable that’s also used for transferring files to your tablet. Once the controller is synced you’ll be wireless for life, but the cable is still kind of an annoying inconvenience that should really have been included with the tablet in the first place.

That’s how a similar system, employed by NAB, has been described in a recent article in The Age. According to the piece, it (or more accurately, The Sunday Age) was the first to gain access to one of the facilities where the magic happens and, as you might expect, it’s not much to look at. Not that a row of servers would have been particularly exciting, either.

But that’s where the work gets done. The neural network doesn’t just watch out for the obvious and outrageous, such as mysterious charges from a far-off country or $1000 spent on novelty toothpicks. It learns from your particular spending habits and makes judgements based on your previous activities.

A 99-point scoring system is used for each purchase, so humans can immediately see what should take top priority. According to Visa’s risk management head Ian McKindley, these agents have the ability to view real-time transactions and, if necessary, shut then down.

The piece ends somewhat ominously — it’s not just credit cards being targeted by scammers now. With phones and online technologies coming to the fore, providing us with new ways to part with our cash, we’ll eventually have to develop new systems to watch for unusual behaviour and, if required, act.

The question is how much power will be given to these systems? Are you happy to wait for a human to double-check suspicious transactions, or would you prefer automatic safeguards to kick in at a moment’s notice, even if it results in the odd inconvenience?