Well, the visitor counts of my iapps.co.uk website soar again, thanks to Apple listing the iPhone O2 MMS application on their Web Apps section … I must admit I was slightly surprised.

I read this today on the Guardian website;

BBC Worldwide chief executive, John Smith, who is leading an ambitious drive to boost profits from the corporation’s commercial arm, said it was a “historic moment” and that a key aim was to avoid the fate of the music industry in losing control of its assets. “In the UK we felt worried about what happened to the music industry,” he said. “[Apple's] iTunes is a disaster for rights holders.”

I would disagree, iTunes has provided a realistically priced alternative to overpriced CDs and a whole new way of buying music (by the track) …

Not to mention the thought of the BBC charging for access to content seems absolutely outrageous - we all pay a TV license, which is what pays for these programs to be made - we shouldn’t have to pay again to watch them (or if we do, the BBC Tax license fee should be abolished)

Last but not least, if it’s anything like BBC iPlayer and C4’s existing offerings it will be Windows only and not be compatible with the iPod - big mistake. What are 90% of the portable media players these days? iPods/iPhone etc… That’s exactly why iTunes Music Store is the huge success it is… it’s all seamlessly integrated.

Unless I can click to instantly download an episode - on my mac, and then copy that to my iPhone, iPod, Apple TV etc without worrying about DRM getting in the way - then I wont use it (in fact unless it works on my Mac, I can’t use it!)

I got this today from 123-reg, the outage was finally cleared on Monday 19th November.

That outage is far too long for 123-reg to retain my custom, I’m afraid.

The fact that they felt the need to send me this though, suggests they might be struggling to hold onto people.

Dear Ross,

I am writing in response to your blog entry created on 17th November 2007.

I would firstly like to take this opportunity to apologise for any service interruptions you experienced over the weekend. 123-reg encountered intermittent performance issues on its DNS servers between late afternoon on Friday 16th November and Sunday 18th November. This issue was caused by a combination of excessive loading on the DNS services and a rare hardware failure. During this time, 123-reg engineers have replaced the hardware and full service has been resumed.

I apologise once again for the inconvenience this outage has caused. 123-reg engineers are currently completing further investigations in order to identify the cause of the failure and any necessary actions required will be implemented as quickly as possible.

If you require any further information or assistance regarding this issue, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Kind regards,

Catherine

Catherine Elliott
Customer Solutions Team

Update (Monday 19th): Almost 70 hours on 123-reg have put the same status message back after removing it (Last Update: Monday at 10:41) showing that the problem is still ongoing!!!

I’m moving back to running my own DNS servers in the near future, avoiding the muppets that are 123-reg “technical” staff.

Largely due to my recent developments for the iPhone visits to this site, and iapps.co.uk, have increased phenomenally in recent days - better still some of those visits have become work, therefore money… everything was looking great until Friday.

As of Friday most of my 123-reg domains stopped working, after contacting them it seems that they were aware of a “wide spread outage” however what seems to have happened is that their systems no longer recognise ns.hosteurope.com as being their own DNS servers! - The web-based control panel wouldnt let me manage my domains because they weren’t pointed at ns.123-reg.co.uk / ns2.123-reg.co.uk … having worked fine for years.

All of my domains have failed and come back sooo many times on Friday I’ve lost count - I don’t know what they’re playing it - worse still they put up their own holding page (and advertisments) on my domain names!! - that’s tantamount to domain squatting and is likely to damage my search engine placement!

Worse still this is affecting my clients, which makes me look bad even though there’s nothing I can do about it. Guess it’s time to go back to managing my own DNS servers, either way I will be migrating all of my domains off 123-reg.co.uk - and complaining to ICANN and Nominet about their actions regarding pointing active domains to their own advertisments - I for one do not appreciate having my name used to promote a company that I have no affiliation with.

In summary, 123-reg is cheap if you just want a domain name - but use something like everydns.net or zoneedit.com for your DNS. Apologies to anyone who was affected by this, particularly people trying to use my iPhone apps!

Everyone knows the iPhone doesn’t support MMS, probably because although we use it heavily in Europe - it’s relatively underused in the US, which the iPhone was originally designed for.O2 are kind enough to send a text message to iPhones which get an MMS message (the same as any older mobile that doesnt support MMS) inviting you to visit a website to view the MMS. Sadly the O2 website wasnt designed with EDGE mobile connections or Safari in mind, so it’s rather impractical to use.So I set about building my own, web-based MMS inbox that lets you see all your O2 MMS messages in an iPhone friendly format that would fit right in with applications like Mail on the iPhone.

For more information see:   http://www.iapps.co.uk/