Part of my job involves creating copy and press release for our company—as well as reading other companies’s PR and communications. It has me thinking about things that make for good communication from a company, and things that don’t. In the interest of positivity, I’ll phrase these as “Dos” rather than “Don’ts,” because nobody likes to be told what not to do.

1. Keep it short and simple

This is essential. Reading a long, drawn out, rambly, and complex story about anything is a recipe for losing a reader. In any communication to a wide audience, keep it short, snappy, and simple. While I’m prone to lexicographical whimsy and complicated prosody on my personal site, that’s my voice. The ten-dollar words, and complex sentences go out the window when I’m writing something for work.

Use short sentences, short paragraphs, and simple terminology (where appropriate). I’m not saying to go all Dick and Jane on your reader, but sometimes an exercise in simple language like XKCD’s “Up Goer Five” can help clarify your message. Instead of “We’ve refactored our technological processes to increase user engagement,” try “We updated our website to make it easier to use.”

2. Use the active tense

Is there anything worse than reading something from a company that’s in the passive voice?

“WidgetCo would like to express its regret over the industrial accident that spilled one-hundred gallons of marshmallow fluff last week. WidgetCo has been made aware of the causes of the accident, and has sought to address them.”

Yes, I’m sure WidgetCo would like to express its regret, but it’s not. It’s only expressing its wish to express it. They “have been” made aware, though they may not still be.

Let’s recast this with the active tense:

“WidgetCo apologizes for last week’s industrial accident that spilled one-hundred gallons of marshmallow fluff. We know the causes of the accident and are addressing them.”

It’s not great, but this shows WidgetCo is being direct and active in apologizing and addressing what caused all that marshmallow fluff to spill.

On the web, when asking a user to do something, a short, imperative statement is critical. For example, our product rolled out a feature to help users complete their profiles, in the form of a progress bar and suggested actions. The section on the page was originally titled “Your profile completeness”. Aside from being complex, it didn’t exactly call anyone to action. It was simply: “how complete is your profile.” By changing it to “Complete Your Profile,” the action was clear, as was the intent behind the progress bar.

3. Be personable

This ties in a lot with two, but there’s a difference between boring corporate-speak that ignores the reader, and interesting copy that interests the reader. For example:

“WidgetCo’s SystemX allows users to communicate effectively across multiple platforms and networks.”

Snore. Nobody talks like that, and while it’s moderately direct and clear, it’s talking about a user instead of to a user.

“WidgetCo’s SystemX lets you reach out to your friends no matter what software they use.”

Boom. It’s longer, but the words are shorter and it speaks directly to the reader. “This lets you do that.” is a good formula to use, assuming “This” is clear, and “that” is simple.

4. Have a personality

Don’t be afraid to lighten things up. Many great new technology companies have elements of their communication and presentation that are playful and fun, which is a huge improvement on the personality-free, faceless communications we associate with big, personality-free, faceless corporations. Sadly, when those big personality-free, faceless corporations decide to try having a personality, it’s when they’re trying to sell you something.

You don’t need to sell something to have a little fun and make your customers smile. A little bit of informality, a little bit of humor, and a little bit of cleverness all go a long way to defining how you communicate and how people respond to it. This is a balancing act, of course. When telling someone bad news, surrounding it with jugglers and clowns is only going to hurt you. Context is key with everything.

These are just a few thoughts from my experience writing for a business. All of these take time and practice. All of these, too, can be wrung out by any sort of bureaucratic structure that isn’t all on the same page about how you communicate. [1] This goes beyond writing well from a technical standpoint. These are matters of voice and presentation that often get lost in attempts to be either all things to all people, or cover-your-ass desperation. If you trust your own ability to communicate, and do so honestly, and clearly, the ideas in this post extend naturally.

So far, I’m betting on an A5X-powered Retina iPad Mini by this fall. While I’m making semi-crazy predictions about future iOS products so I can look back on this in a year and probably feel like an idiot for being so wrong, here’s one more.

The recently rumored, larger-screened “iPhone Math”, or more likely “iPhone Plus”, is plausible as an additional model (not a replacement) alongside the 4” iPhone. And there’s a good chance that it would have a 4.94”, 16:9 screen.

The theory is easy to understand: perform John Gruber’s Mini-predicting math backwards. The iPad Mini uses iPhone 3GS-density screens at iPad resolution. What if an iPhone Plus used Retina iPad screens with iPhone 5 resolution, keeping the rest of the design sized like an iPhone 5?

Marco Arment on the “iPhone Math” or “iPhone Plus”.

I’m still not convinced, because there’s so much practical advantage to the one-handed nature of the current iPhone screen size(s). The iPhone 5’s taller form factor made more sense to me. Still, Marco does make a good case, much in the same way John Gruber did for the iPad mini. I still just don’t see the point of making something bigger for its own sake. If someone can present the business case for a 5″ iPhone beyond “everybody else is doing it,” that would really give me some incentive to buy into it.

As a kid, I loved reading computer magazines. I was the only 11-year old in the world, I think, with a subscription to PC/Computing. When the magazine stopped talking about hardware and software, and then became a crappy business magazine, I was miserable. Reading these magazines was terrible for a budding geek. It gave me ideas, especially about portable computing.

Somehow, Christmas 1999, I’d convinced my parents to get me a Palm IIIe. I think I sold it as a way to help me do better in school, remember my homework, and so forth. In actuality, it became a pocket Minesweeper device. Still, I was the only kid in my high school with a pocket computer. The best anyone else could do was a TI–83 Graphing Calculator, which I also had. I rarely used the Palm for note-taking, or to-do list making. Eventually, when I went off to college and got a laptop, the Palm stayed at home. I think I sold it off for $20 on eBay.

I went without a pocket computer until 2003, when I got my first iPod, a 40GB 3rd Generation model. The original iPod did serve as a rather basic PDA, albeit one that could only be updated when connected to a computer. It could display contacts, and a calendar, or play Solitaire. Really, though, it was my MP3 player, and I used it heavily for three years, even replacing the battery. [1]

However, the darn thing took one too many falls from my pants to the ground. The hard drive crashed, and the iPod would not boot, just make whining and clicking sounds while getting very, very, warm. I unplugged the battery, shipped it out for parts, and bought a black, 60GB 5th Generation iPod. That one lasted a year, before the headphone jack broke, and I replaced it with the 6th Generation model, with the anodized aluminum face—also in black. Within a month, I’d dropped it on the road, and stepped on it, while running to the bus, cracking the screen and scratching the aluminium. Still worked like a champ.

In 2008, tired of my damaged iPod classic, I took some bonus money from work, and bought my first iOS device, a second generation iPod touch. I’d lusted after the iPhone, like all good Apple fanboys, back in 2007, but was stuck on Verizon for the forseeable future. The iPod touch was my first taste of the future, and I was hooked immediately. Then, in 2009, when my Verizon contracted ended, I got an iPhone 3G. Omnipresent internet! I finally had the one device to rule them all, even if it was on AT&T. The iPhone served me well, despite being damaged in an attempted mugging on Christmas Eve, 2010. [2] While I considered keeping the touch around as a secondary device, even jailbreaking it as an experiment, I decided it was superfluous. Come October of 2011, I replaced the 3G with the 4S, which I have today, and serves me well. Its big brother, a refurbished, 3rd Generation iPad, came into my possession in November, and quickly found a niche.

In 2005, I was at a technological crossroads. My old desktop machine, Pandora Mk. II, was failing. With money saved up, I decided I needed a new computer. One option was, now that I was a commuting college student, an inexpensive laptop. [1] The other was a Mac mini, the cheapest Macintosh on the market. At the time, I’d been reading a lot of stuff from 43 Folders, and about the Quicksilver app. Though I’d been staunchly anti-Macintosh for years, Merlin’s exhortation of the platform was starting to win me over.

My distaste for the Mac was not formed in isolation. I’d used Mac computers in classroom settings, and found them to be slow, difficult, illogical, and borderline user-obsequious. The Mac Performas in middle school were barely able to surf the web. During my early high school summers, I was an aide in the computer lab at the Bridesburg Boys & Girls Club, and found doing light administrative chores on the small group of Macs there to be a pain. When my high school got in one of the first Bondi Blue iMacs, I used it to redesign the school’s website during lunch periods. Running Photoshop, Netscape, and SimpleText at the same time often lead to problems, including the mysterious “Error −37”. [2]

While off at Polytechnic University, however, I noticed the first wave of geek switchers. Another Comp Sci student, and member of Poly’s ACM chapter, brought in an iBook G3 one day. I mocked him for it, but was quickly schooled. The real shift came when some of my more hardcore geek friends on the internet, including a friend who worked for Dreamhost, said they’d gone Macintosh.

Meanwhile, I’d grown exceedingly frustrated with Linux. Somewhere along the line, using Fedora Core, permissions to my USB devices got munged, meaning that if I wanted to get pictures off my camera, I had to go into a terminal, switch to root, run a series of commands to pull the pictures off the camera, and then change ownership and permissions to my normal user account. Elsewhere, if I dared to plug in my thumbdrive and my iPod in the wrong order, I had to manually edit /etc/fstab just to make things work.

Still, I didn’t want to go back to Windows. Windows Vista was on the horizon, and people had already smelled a turd. XP was still broken and insecure unless you patched it offline, and ran a suite of security applications. The only option left was the Macintosh. I bought the mini. The day it arrived, once I’d set the machine up, I plugged in my digital camera. Immediately, iPhoto launched, and displayed a dialog box asking if I wanted to import the photos. It was then I realized all the time I had wasted. I named the computer Booji Boy.

I’d bought the Mac mini not long after Apple announced the Intel transition, thinking that they’d get to the mini last, a sentiment echoed by Apple pundits at the time. Five months later, the first Intel mini came out. Undeterred, I used the mini as a primary machine for about three years, upgrading it to a full gigabyte of RAM, [3] and adding on a 250GB external hard drive, designed to sit under the mini. I later augmented it with Kayo II, a refurbished iBook G4, which ran like a tank. The fan on the laptop died, and I never even noticed. This became my primary machine in my last year of college, and the mini went on loan to my roommate when his ancient Compaq finally died.

When I graduated in 2008, I asked my parents for one thing as a graduation present: a MacBook. I received a near-top-of-the-line white MacBook, maxed out on everything except RAM, which I upgraded myself. That white MacBook, Madame Psychosis, well, I told that story already. Its successor, a refurbished, June 2012 model MacBook Pro, works like a champ. I think I’ll be sticking with it for a good, long while.

So, Twitter’s new social video app, Vine is being used to post porn. Considering Apple’s stance on porn and the App Store, [1] and their tight relationship with Twitter, this is cause for consternation. Should they pull this high-profile app by their partner from the store, like they’ve done with similar apps by developers with less ties? What can be done?

In all honesty, not much.

First off, a service like Vine is going to get people using it to do dirty things. It’s the nature of the beast. Porn and the Internet are close bedfellows. Porn was traded by BBS, and on Usenet, well before the web was a twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye. When you hand a user a camera, give them an audience, and say “go nuts,” you’re very likely to see someone’s nuts. It’s an unfortunate fact of life. You can’t tell me that someone at Twitter or Vine didn’t ask “Hey, what if someone posts six seconds of their genitals on here?” If you are of the opinion that there is no such thing as bad publicity, then this whole flap is clearly a way for Twitter to get more adoption on Vine. This is step one. Step three is, of course, profit. They may have seen this coming.

Having tried the app, I’m not entirely sure that’s the case. Vine drops you in the middle of a public timeline of videos, with audio, that automatically starts playing. This, alone, makes me think they didn’t think this through. I know it’s a social video app, but you don’t start playing stuff, with audio, without a user asking you to. Also, by dumping you into a public stream, you don’t know what to expect. If someone at Twitter/Vine thought for a moment, they’d seed the service with a few good users from a beta, suggest people to follow, and make damn sure nobody sees something on the main stream that they didn’t ask to see. You can leave the porn tucked away in a search. (The search sucks too, by the way.) The whole porn on Vine foofaraw is just bad social design being exploited by the sort of people who would exploit any bad social design to show their naughty bits. You’d think Twitter would have figured that part out by now.

But then, you don’t get the buzz of “Hey! There’s naked people on this app!”

As for Apple, where does this leave them? Vine’s no different than Instagram when it comes to access to body parts, it’s just that they move on Vine. A simple “are you eighteen or older” verification dialogue, as gets slapped on any app that accesses the open web, would easily solve this from Apple’s end. As for those who make a fuss over Apple’s unwillingness to have porn in the App Store, their complaints carry very little weight when users have a preinstalled app that can view all the porn they’ve ever dreamed of. It’s called Safari. I doubt Apple’s going to take that off any time soon.