So it looks like Milo hasn’t checked his facts again

A few months ago I was so enraged about a poorly researched barely disguised homophobic article written Milo Yiannopoulos from the Telegraph I felt the need to write quite a lengthy rant.

Today it would appear he still is in the habit of not fully checking facts. In his article about the law keeping up with technology (and don’t even start me on the spurious nature of the article, seriously 2 tweets and we need new laws apparently), Milo describes the extremely genourous offer from Stephen Fry to pay any fine received by Paul Chambers as “perhaps somewhat opportunistic”.

Milo your article is perhaps somewhat opportunistic – some may say timely of course, but I’ll stick with opportunistic, Stephen Fry made his offer well before the trial or the associated media attention so no this isn’t opportunistic it’s exceedingly generous.

Why Grindr has become boring…

Grindr became successful in London and the UK mainly because of some fantastic word of mouth advertising from Stephen Fry. Also because people ‘advertised’ their app on other networks and websites.

Now however Grindr is successful and they forbid ‘advertising’ any other apps or services within your profile. Their now frankly ludicrously long list of things they prohibit at http://grindr.com/guidelines/ is getting out of control. It might simply be easier to publish a list of things you are allowed to do. I think it will be a much shorter list.

“No advertising of services, goods, events, websites or apps.” which means that you can no longer say ping me in your Grindr profile for fear of being wiped for ‘advertising’ an instant messaging app on iPhone called… Ping!

“A link to your Facebook profile is allowed in the Facebook field. MySpace, Twitter and YouTube links are allowed in the About field; these links cannot contain advertising or pornography or they will be removed. No other web link of any kind will be allowed in any of the profile fields.”

Grindr you are successful because people want to use your service – they tend to use other services too – don’t be naive and think that preventing people mentioning other URLs or services means they won’t use them – it just means you are likely to get excluded from the list that people advertise on other site. I used to link to my blog as the about field is quite limited but clearly you frown upon that. The web is all about links and sharing please don’t stifle that. Plus it would be nice to know if you plan to ‘support’ other social networks soon or not. What’s wrong with Orkut or last.fm?

So Grindr thanks – it’s was fun while it lasted, let me know when you are planning to be a little more open…

Funniest comment award goes to…

Just because Stephen Fry loves Apple does not mean you need to be bent to enjoy good design.

Jon Ive, the Apple design GOD, is married with kids. SUre, they might be photoshopped in but I don’t think so.

I love good design and I’m as straight as a fence post. I also enjoy Stephen Fry too, but not That Way.

More: @ the register