The dumbing down of Twitter starts here?

Posted on January 21, 2010 by Joe

I’ll admit it. Deep within me is a snob. As far as I’m concerned, the online world started heading down hill when you no longer had to know how to install a full TCP/IP stack to use the Internet. Most online discussion forums should, in my opinion, have an intelligence test before you’re allowed to post on them – basically the ability, for an English language website, to string together English sentences without text speech or foul language is a good starting point. OK…where was I….oh yes.

Seesmic, the company who produce the popular Twhirl Twitter application, are producing an application that they basically believe will bring Twitter to the masses of online users who are yet to Tweet. The software has been endorsed by Twitter and developed in collaboration with Microsoft, who may be planning on installing it as part of Windows. The program, called ‘Look’, is designed to be used by people who’re not currently tweeting and who may not feel that they have much to say – looking at it I’d say that it appears that twitter are starting to commoditise their platform – increase the numbers of users and volumes of traffic prior to some efforts towards monetisation of their network. In yestreday’s piece about BlippyI mentioned the ‘database of intentions’; perhaps Twitter are looking towards a massive increase in numbers of users to swell the flow of data that can be used to generate another part of this database. Twitter’s traffic / user levels have also been flat for a while – perhaps twitter see this move as a means of breaking through the current plateau and getting things moving again before the next new thing comes along.

Now, as you can gather from the title I have a few issues with what’s happening. To some people, the idea of ‘dumbing down’ Twitter may sound daft – after all, many folks think it’s pretty dumb already – so let me explain what I mean. Twitter is a platform that carries messages which users can filter and hence determine what they see. In principle, therefore, a large influx of new people shouldn’t necessarily change the culture too much; after all, people filter which Tweets they see. If Twitter does become a hotbed of text speech and obscenity (OK, even more than now! 🙂 ) then it shouldn’t affect most of us because we can filter out the noise. This is a different proposition to spam email or discussion Forums where the signal to noise ration – i.e. the amount of good stuff compared to the dross – does decline radically when larger numbers of users come on board.

However…all this new traffic will be using Twitter’s infrastructure, and unless the twitter infrastructure is improved I can see many more occurrences of the ‘Fail Whale’ in the months after the introduction of this new package.

As for the dumbing down; I am concerned; if Twitter are going in this direction to play the ‘numbers game’ then I can see good content becoming harder and harder to find. Twitter’s search facilities are pretty poor; using them to search through large amounts of juvenilia for the valuable nuggets of content is not going to be easy.

Blippy – how do you feel about sharing your purchases?

Posted on January 20, 2010 by Joe

I recently commented on whether Web 2.0 had ‘jumped the shark’ in terms of strange applications, and also remarked on whether the biggest threat to online privacy was ourselves. However, I don’t think I was prepared for Blippy – a web site that allows you to share details of products and services that you’ve bought via different routes– Amazon, iTunes, Mastercard, Visa, etc. Now this I find very weird and, dare I say it, slightly compelling viewing. The system was on an invite only basis until late last year, but now seems to be open to all comers.

It’s sort of like the online version of being in the check out at the local Morrisons Supermarket and peering in to the basket of the person next in the queue. I took a look on the site and randomly selected a user. From 5 minutes looking at their recent transactions I was able to work out that they either lived in San Francisco and had recently traveled to New York (or vice versa), that they had a baby / toddler, that they’d done some DiY recently and various other aspects of their lives based on the purchasing records that they were willing to share.

Now, there’s nothing here that falls in to the ‘blackmail’ category, and I’m quite sure that people using Blippy would keep their ‘special’ purchases off of the system, but to be honest I do find it a rather strange thing for someone to want to do. Maybe I’m just old. It wasn’t long ago that people were protesting about the use of RFID tags in goods to track our shopping behaviour in shopping malls; now we seem to be falling over ourselves to give the information away for free, along with the amounts spent!

The Blippy owners said last December that they weren’t yet sure how to monetise the project. Well, I think they were being rather disingenuous because it appears that Blippy have joined forces with the people who bought you the (now scrubbed) Facebook Beacon project. And then there’s the very direct link between the data that Blippy collects and what has been called the ‘database of intentions’ – data that allows the prediction of buying activity based on past behaviours. You have a large collection of data on buying habits; you have an individual with a recent history of purchases; it’s a relatively trivial software process to take the individual’s list and use the collection of data to predict what other items might be of interest. You can then contact businesses in those market sectors with what is at least a warm prospect for a sale.

Blippy is again an interesting example of how people are willing to put lots of information in to this ‘database of intentions’. Their lack of concern about their own privacy impacts upon us all by making it easier to predict our behaviour even if we only ‘leak’ small amounts of data.

Is ‘elf and safety’ destroying community responsibility?

Posted on January 19, 2010 by Joe

The other day I was browsing the online edition of the Sunday Times and came across a brief quote from Jeremy Clarkson :

“I mean, if you really want to serve the nation, you could stop whining about the council gritters and shovel some snow off a school playground yourself.”

This set me thinking back to when I was a child. Yes, we had bad winters back then and one of the things I remember clearly is being equipped with a shovel and sent out to clear our garden path of snow, then clear the stretch of the causeway from our gate to the next door neighbour’s fence post. I think that part of it was probably a maternal exercise in keeping me busy, but it seemed to be an activity that was done by a number of householders and shop keepers in the town where I lived.

As I got older, it seemed to happen less, and then somewhere along the way I heard that one of the reasons why people no longer did this was that by clearing the causeway you laid yourself open to being sued if someone slipped on your clear patch. Leaving the causeway to the tender ministrations of the local council didn’t leave you open to this risk. Whether this is true or not I have no idea, but it seems to be widely believed.

Moving on a few years, one day I was walking past the gates of the local maternity hospital when I noticed a chap, rather worse for wear, sitting bleeding in the church-yard next door. I poked my head in to the hospital lobby and mentioned it, expecting a nurse to perhaps pop out to take a look. Instead, I was told that I would have to call 999 and a nurse couldn’t be made available because ‘it wasn’t their job and they might have problems if someone sued’.

Have you noticed an emergent pattern here? Don’t do anything that might be helpful to people in your community – what you might call exercising community responsibility and your part of what was once called the ‘social contract’ – because you may get sued. There’s also the call to ‘Elf and Safety’ – that’s the thing that’s been used in the past to prevent the collection of extra bags of rubbish from the roadside – it’s against health and safety regulations for the bin men to lift the bags. People wishing to volunteer for charity work may have to have a Criminal records Bureau check because of the small risk that they may be a child molester. Again – something of a breakdown between local government and citizen and community.

Which brings me to my point – are Health and Safety and the generally risk averse culture we seem to have generated over the last 15 years or so – unsurprising mostly the ‘Big Nanny’ years of New labour – leading to a breakdown in community greater than anything managed by Thatcher in her years in charge? The general expectation in society has become ‘someone will deal with it’ – usually the Government, Local Council, ‘them’. This may work well when ‘they’ are actually delivering the goods, but today this is becoming less and less common. More often than not central and local government. along with big business, the banks, etc. are failing to deliver whilst at the same time legislating to prevent us from helping ourselves.

Folks – you centralists can’t have it all ways. If you wish to control all aspects of our society then deliver the goods. If you can’t deliver, then stop playing ‘dog in the manger’ and allow us to start helping ourselves.

Because we will help ourselves, soon. With or without your agreement.

Social Media Bubble….here we come!

Posted on January 18, 2010 by Joe

Are we heading for a ‘speculative bubble’ effect in the portions of the media and IT economy that are tied up with Social Media and Social networking? Regular readers will know that I’m something of a cynic about the importance of Social Media and Social Networking; whilst it’s clearly an important aspect of marketing for the future, I am rather concerned about the importance that the ‘industry’, if we can call it that, applies to itself.

Take the following article, from a Canadian newspaper, for example. Real world businesses are still doubting the importance and relevance of Social networking and Media to their ongoing business activity. Unsurprisingly, the practitioners are effectively saying ‘Ignore us and you’re doomed, doomed I tell you! Doomed!’ Now, some of us who were out of school in the late 1990s can probably remember the comments made by a number of folks with possible vested interests that anyone without a web presence would be out of business within 5 years. What actually happened was that within 5 years a lot of web companies were out of business, and many businesses with no web presence or strategy whatsoever were going along quite happily.

Just because you find something sexy and interesting doesn’t mean it’s important; passion is a wonderful thing to have but one also needs to be pragmatic along with it. In a recession, surely any business is likely to be most interested in keeping existing customers and is likely to be playing a ‘safe hand’ with it’s resources. It’s unlikely to want to adopt techniques that it’s customers may not actually be aware of or care about. There is absolutely no point in extensively using social media and social networking technologies if your customers are not aware of them! It’s rather like advertising in French when you have no one in France reading the ads!

The arrogance of Social Media zealots in assuming that real businesses are lagging behind is astonishing; surely Social Media / Networking is a support function for most companies, part of marketing and advertising. It’s not as disruptive a technology as the web itself is, and shouldn’t be treated like it is. Take a look at this definition of a bubble – the phrases that immediately struck me were “emerging social norms”, “positive feedback mechanisms”,”they create excess demand and production”. I think it’s fair to say that we’re seeing all these effects.

In addition, it’s difficult to value the Social networking / Media market place and individual services and companies within it. And then we have the other issues often associated with bubbles:

Moral Hazard– how much of the market place is supported by ‘other people’s money’ – if supported mainly by VC capital then companies may take risks that they wouldn’t take with their own money.

Herding– the more folks who say it’s good, the more the markets are likely to follow.

All in all….I think a ‘correction’ to the emergent Social Networking and Media sector is likely. And then we can get back to realistic use of this technology as part of an integrated marketing strategy for businesses.

Bust the brainy kids – you know it makes sense!

Posted on January 17, 2010 by Joe

Although this little gem of a story happened in the US, I have no doubt that given a few more months it’s likely to happen here. Well…I don’t know…at least the Yanks encourage science and technology enough to actually organise things like science fairs… However, back to the story. Smart kid builds a motion detector from some electronic bits and puts it in a bottle. Bottle is picked up, sensor triggers. Cool. Good future ahead of a bright kid like that – some technical education, quite possible a Gates or Jobs of the next generation…

That would be what I would be saying were I not living in Stupid World, where the kid’s teacher called in the FBI and the bomb squad, put the whole place on lockdown and suggested the kid and his parents needed counselling. Hello? WHO needs counselling? If this is the standard of management that is present in US schools then God help them. At a time when we need to encourage bright thinkers and hopefully generate a new generation of technologists, scientists and educators that can get us out of our current hole, this dimwit sets in motion a series of events that will probably encourage the kid to never show initiative again and stick to playing X-Box games and watching TV until he can graduate to drinking beer, playing X-Box games and watching TV.

Tragic.

I was like this as a kid – fortunately with one exception I had support from my teachers, and always had support (or at least quiet acceptance!) from parents, aunts and uncles and in latter years my wife! I built radios, movement sensors and any number of electronic gadgets. I accidentally jammed local TV sets whilst working on a radio control gadget, generated more smells than I could shake a stick at and learnt more about science and technology in my own time than I probably did at school.

Today, with what appears to be terror hysteria in the US and ‘Elf and Safety’ silliness in the UK it’s increasingly difficult for proper ‘hands on’ science education to be done. We really should be working hard to encourage this sort of practical approach to science and technology, both in in schools, colleges and via technical hobbies such as the practical approach fostered by amateur radio, robotics, astronomy, etc. Unfortunately the UK does not seem to be doing this through educational policy. This item from a few years ago points out exactly what is wrong with modern science education in the UK – it’s too wishy-washy and based around social awareness and ‘scientific literacy’ whilst moving away from teaching separate science subjects and encouraging education in the ‘basics’ of science – the scientific method, practical lab work, etc.

Whilst the literacy and social awareness issues are important, it’s critical that they are secondary to a scientific education that prepares our future scientists and technologists by educating them in basic, practical science and technology, so that they can approach the more advanced stuff from a position of having firm foundations. I hear all the voices saying that it’s important to engage students with science; but there is absolutely no point at all in engaging students in a watered down, multi-media based representation of some of the most practical and critically important subjects around.

Myleene Klass, ‘PC’ and PCs

Posted on January 16, 2010 by Joe

This is a long story in celebrity terms…but stay with me. It’s one of those tales where we can’t tell who’s version of what happened is actually the right one – so many versions of what happened it’s like a Celebrity Rashomon! It starts some weeks ago when Myleene Klass commented that immigrants to the UK should actually learn to speak English in order to help them assimilate better. This is such a common sense suggestion that it actually beggars belief that it’s worth reporting on. Klass’s own family background suggests that this is a good move; her mother is from the Philippines and Klass herself has clearly managed to fit in to the UK. She also dared to make a few comments about issues that are frequently referred to as being ‘politically correct’ – and that’s probably the point at which she started showing on the liberal / media establishment radar as someone to keep a weather-eye on…

Time moves on – a few weeks later, 2 local teenagers trespassed on Klass’s property, apparently attempting to break in to her garden shed. She was alone in the house with her young child, and did what most of us would have done – told the little scrotes to go away, unfortunately for her whilst holding or waving a kitchen knife. From within her house, through the window.

Here’s where it gets interesting; the police who arrived allegedly gave her the telling off for waving the knife, which was referred to as an offensive weapon. The police later denied this, but the media storm was unleashed with folks coming down mainly on her side of the argument. The police behaviour was reported by Klass’s spokesman. Life now gets complicated; it appears from a report in The Guardian that Klass’s agent and Klass herself both called the Police, and that the only comment made by the police (according to the Police) was that Klass should have contacted them sooner.

If you take a look at the comments following the Guardian story, it’s pointed out how it’s rare for The Guardian to take the Police side of a story at face value. There were also a few comments from the Grauniad readers that, to be honest, were snobbish. Comments on the ‘classiness’ of someone’s name shouldn’t reflect on how the story is reported, after all. Complete with ‘Sun’ style photo mock-up of Ms Klass wielding a knife. hello? I assume this is ‘ironic’. It just appears to me that the Guardian writer was using the trespass issue to take a swipe at someone for daring to criticise political correctness, and that a lot of ‘liberal’ readers of the Gruadian found a useful ‘two minute hate’ topic for the day. Can we expect the same standard of reporting from the Ruardinag when one of it’s favourite (and oh so politically correct) luvvies hits the news like this?

No? Why am I not surprised. There seems to be a sequence of events here that indicates one of three things to me;total coincidence, incompetence in the way that the story has been handled by media, police and Ms Klass’s PR people, or a non-too subtle attempt by the current establishment to slap a celebrity for saying the wrong thing. A warning that although you’re a celeb, say the wrong thing and we can still swat you like a fly.

In other words, coincidence, cock-up or conspiracy. You choose.

Google does the right thing (for Google, that is)

Posted on January 15, 2010 by Joe

For a long time I’ve taken the mickey out of Google’s famous slogan ‘Do No Evil’. I mean, most companies and individuals go through life with their ethical and moral compass intact and manage to perform this simple piece of behavioural calculus every day of their lives. To me, it takes a particularly arrogant bunch of people to make this slogan a selling point. And it leaves you open to a lot of pot shots form people like me when you get caught with, figuratively speaking, your hand in the cookie jar. And I know the irony of my position, being a Google user. Please, Microsoft, get Bing sorted!

And so it has been for a while with Google and the People’s Republic of China. Google’s presence in China – Google.cn – was only sanctioned by the Chinese Government if the search results were modified (after all, censored is such an evilword) so as to suit the political world view of the PRC. So a search on ‘Tiananmen Square’ might return lots of touristy stuff but certainly wouldn’t bring back stories about student protests, tanks crushing demonstrators, etc. Google’s stand on this always seemed to be rather against their loudly stated intention to ‘Do No Evil’, but in this case it was pretty clear to everyone except those who’d imbibed of the springs at Mountain View that Google were supping with the Devil with a long spoon.

Until this week. This week Google announced they were re-considering their positin in the PRC after the company had detected what it described as “a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure”in efforts to get in to the Gmail accounts of Chinese political activists. This is almost certainly Google speak for “We know the PRC Government is behind this but can’t provie it / don’t want to say it in public’. As a result, Google have stated:

“over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law”.

which at first glance seems pretty brave of Google – looks like they might be following through on the ‘Do No Evil’ stuff and are facing up, toe to toe, to the creators of the Great E-Wall of China. It would be nice to think that Google’s ethical sense has finally determined that by running the filtered service in China they’re actually compromising their own integrity and also supporting a totalitarian regime.

However, I think it’s most likely that Google will use this set of events as an excuse to get out of China altogether. Why? Google are second string in China; the locally developed search engine Baidu has largest market share, with Google apparently being most popular for technical stuff. Google are losing face by their inability to get to the top of the tree in China, even after compromising their integrity. In the West, Google are losing the lustre of ‘Do No Evil’ – in some quarters they’ve overtaken Microsoft as the Corporation you love to hate – certainly for me they’re a larger threat to my personal privacy than Microsoft have ever been in the whole history of that software house.

No, Google will pull out of China, or seriously reduce it’s exposure there, not for ethical reasons, but because it suits Google’s market strategy. They need to save face out there, and regain some of the moral high ground at home. This latest Chinese exploit will give them the excuse they need to exit and try and maintain that it’s all ethics, when it’s actually all market.

For Google’s deal with the Chinese Devil, the spoon they supped with just wasn’t long enough.

Enough toys for the boys (and girls)?

Posted on January 14, 2010 by Joe

I’ll be honest; I’m rarely rising the bleeding edge of technology. Despite being professionally involved in IT and electronics since 1982, it’s safe to say that I’m not one of the guys who gets calls to become an ‘early adopter’ of some thrilling piece of technology that I can’t live without. I use what I need to use to get my professional job done, and then in my personal life I tend to be a couple of years behind the edge. After all, that gives folks ample time to find the bugs and get them sorted. This saves me from tearing out what’s left of my hair. 🙂

It also means that occasionally whole generations of technology pass me by whilst I happily manage with what I have. This can occasionally be embarrassing – after many years dealing with the jokes about my ‘steam powered’ cell phone, 2009 was the year I caught up and got a Blackberry, and realised quickly that I’d been missing something that would have made my life easier.

However, the last few years have seen me wondering what the heck’s happening on more than one occasion. We’re encouraged to go DVD, then comes Blue-Ray. We’re encouraged to look towards digital TV, then High Definition, and now 3D TV. On radio we have DAB – this is probably the worst of the lot as in many cases DAB reception is significantly worse than conventional Band 2 FM radio. The Internet bandwidth required to use up to date web sites seems to be ever increasing, and the hardware required to run cutting edge games seems to get more complex each year. I’ve begun to think that perhaps it’s time to try and break out of this continuous consumption loop and maybe, just maybe, stop for a year or two. I was further reinforced in this view by this article in The Guardian newspaper.

The bottom line is that we know the ecosystem of the planet is increasingly fragile. We also know that some of the industries with significant impact in terms of raw materials, production of components and disposal of waste and ‘outdated’ equipment is consumer electronics. The companies producing the endless churn of new ‘must have’ products in order to keep their markets buoyant spout appropriately ‘green’ corporate messages but they are simply hypocritical efforts to gloss over the impact they have on the world.

Some may say that a world without new generations of phones and TVs every year is inconceivable, that progress is essential. But is it? Can we afford to carry on producing gadgets and equipment that is incredibly difficult to recycle, that swallows up disposable income, generates landfill, poisons the environment and uses up irreplaceable resources? Especially when there is older technology around that meets the same needs but maybe not in 3d, maybe not with high resolution.

In a world that is increasingly suffering major ecological and sociological shocks, is it acceptable for large corporations to continue to encourage us to amuse ourselves in order to ignore the big issues?

Or maybe that’s the whole idea that we amuse ourselves to death?

When Twitter gets like TV – lots of repeats!

Posted on January 13, 2010 by Joe

As some of you may know, I’m a newbie at Twitter. indeed, my first efforts were not impressive, I stopped, then re-joined with better results. My saga and comments are briefly recorded in these two blogposts, here and here. I’m now getting in to an almost regular Tweeting habit, though I’m still a consumer rather than producer of Tweets, and perhaps it’s my own way of using Twitter that gave rise to this post.

The other day I was browsing my Tweets (I use Twhirl most of the time, btw – not bad at all, though I’m also looking at Tweetdeck) and I saw a Tweet that made me do a double take, as I was convinced that I’d seen the same Tweet, even down to the wording used, sometime previously that day. It was a link to an article somewhere, and I remembered it because I’d read the linked article. I did what I always do in these circumstances, assume that either Twitter or Twhirl had had some sort of brainstorm. But no – the timestamp on the Tweet was a few minutes old, and other new tweets were coming in thick and fast.

And then it struck me – the same tweets were being sent a couple of hours apart by the same user – sort of like the rolling news on Sky or CNN. Sky promise all the news in 15 minutes, every 15 minutes, and some people are obviously doing something similar on Twitter.

Now don’t get me wrong – there is a time and a place (and a frequency) for repeat Tweets. I’ve seen it used most effectively when advertising events, seeking urgent help, etc. After all, the very ephemeral nature of Twitter means that on a moderately active Tweetstream a post will soon ‘fall off’ the bottom, so to say, and unless the user is monitoring reasonably actively the content will be missed. But what works for ‘time critical’ stuff like up and coming events, urgent requests for help, etc. doesn’t really work for uplifting quotes, re-tweets of news items, etc. It strikes me as being a bit like the approach taken by children when they want to get adult attention of repeating their request for sweets, biscuits, new toy, whatever every few minutes until the relevant adult either gives in or gives them a thick ear.

And so it is that I’m seriously thinking of giving a few folks I follow the Twitter equivalent of a ‘thick ear’ by stopping following them. I honestly don’t see the point of Twitter content such as aphorisms being repeated every couple of hours. To take the TV analogy further, as well as being like rolling news it’s also like the ‘+1’ channels that transmit the same content as another channel, just 1 hour behind.

In many ways, Twitter is like radio or TV broadcasting; unlike most digital content it is ephemeral and dynamic, and moves along a timeline – just like broadcast radio and television. Maybe we ‘content providers’ for this new media need to bear this in mind and lay off the un-necessary repeats.

The pleasure of the period-piece detective

Posted on January 12, 2010 by Joe

I think my interest in what might be called ‘period piece detectives’ started many years ago, when I watched the big screen version of ‘Death on the Nile’ featuring the wonderful Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot. I stunned my wife (and myself) by actually solving the murder pretty early on. Since then, I’ve been rather a sucker for TV series such as Sherlock Holmes, Poirot, Miss Marple, Inspector Alleyn – those wonderful amateur sleuths (OK…Alleyn was a policeman but very much one of this crowd!) who seemed to outfox what Holmes would call ‘the official constabulary’ whilst inhabiting their particular period of history.

And that’s where part of the attraction lies for me – the settings as much as the detection work. If we leave Holmes out for this article – after all, the fellow is such a phenomenon that he deserves his own blog item at the very least – these detectives all work in the late 20s through to the early 50s. In his excellent essay ‘Boy’s Weeklies’, in which he discussed the popular boy’s comics of his day, George Orwell wrote about the atmosphere used for some of the ‘School Stories’ in these magazines:

“…There is a cosy fire in the study, and outside the wind is whistling. The ivy clusters thickly round the old grey stones. The King is on his throne and the pound is worth a pound….Everything is safe, solid and unquestionable. Everything will be the same for ever and ever. That approximately is the atmosphere.”

And that’s how it often feels to me in the worlds of Marple, Poirot and Alleyn. Murder most foul may be committed, but there’s almost always the return to status quo pro-ante– the situation that we started with. Poirot, supported by Hastings, will use his little grey cells to apprehend the killer and deliver him in to the arms of Inspector Japp. Miss Marple will intuit her way around the crime; Alleyn and Fox rely on good old fashioned detective work. Murders have motives – no matter how strange they may appear to be. Even in Poirot’s ‘The ABC Murders’ or ‘Curtain’, where it appears that there is a random serial killer on the loose, the murders are not what they seem. Apart from the victims meeting their grisly end, violence is not common. There’s no soul-searching, alcoholic detectives with deep emotional crises that will impede the investigation, very few shoot-outs. The denouement delivers the criminal in to the arms of justice, and justice, not law, is seen to be served.

It’s hard to believe that there are wars and depressions happening, fascism is on the rise, then the onset of the cold war at the end of this period. But that’s fine – I’m after a detective story to keep me engaged for an hour or two. I have the real world with all these issues to come back to, after all!

In TV detective series that are set more recently, the closest is probably the popular ‘Midsommer Murders’, followed by ‘Inspector Morse’, although these both feature professional detectives rather than the gentleman (or lady) amateur. But the ‘feel’ is the same – and long may these series continue to take me away from the modern, day-to-day world.

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