Blog Social networking

Once again Facebook is mentioned in connection with a violent story, further engendering distrust in online social networks.

A BBC report today led with the headline “Man killed wife in Facebook row”. I’m sure it helps attract readers - he said sardonically - but as you have to read half-way down the article before you get to the bit about the assailant being drunk and high on cocaine, I can’t help thinking that yet again someone is looking at this the wrong way.

Obviously the Beeb are hardly saying that Facebook is to blame, but I certainly can’t help but wonder whether the incident would have happened over something else equally trivial that was not Internet-related.

So is it necessary to point out the site? Considering that the BBC doesn’t have to sell papers, can we not get passed the finger-pointing?

We Share Stuff, formerly the North Birmingham Social Enterprise is now up at wesharestuff.org. Run by good Internet eggs Stuart Parker, Jon Bounds, Jon Hickman and Kevin Rapley, the enterprise hopes to make the Internet a useful and valuable place for all, by removing some of the barriers to entry.

In their own words:

“The Web has much to offer and sometimes we all need a bit of help in finding what we need. This culture of sharing that has found a home on the Internet, is what we're about.”

from We Share Stuff’s About page

The “informal learning” project started in early 2008 in a pub in Digbeth and has been steadily growing speed, and with the help of Birmingham Power 50 member Jon Bounds, it will doubtless go from strength to strength.

In short, it’s a way of making the Internet understandable to your mum. Only less patronising.

I don’t listen to Radio 1 very much now (not live at least, although I download a few of their podcasts) but I’m not so sure they’ve got the hang of this Facebook thing yet...

If I’m honest I’m not entirely sure why the Webbists at Radio 1 feel it’s necessary to pick an arbitrary gig to promote on Facebook: surely that’s the Kings of Leon’s responsibility? But the biggest irritant is their apparent need to notify me for every Radio 1 page I become a “fan” of.

What’s more irritating (which is Facebook’s problem) is that I can’t mark a specific update as spam. I don’t mind receiving updates Chris Moyles’ or Scott Mills’ shows as I quite like them, but I don’t want to receive the same thing three (or more) times.

It gets worse though, as both shows have had events in the past two weeks that should have, but weren’t broadcast as updates.

It’s not a big thing I know, but what is the point of having a presence on a social network you don’t understand if you’re not going to engage with it.

Twitter had the chance to change the way people used the social Internet, by making its services usable completely over SMS. Yesterday they forfeited that chance by shutting out those who don’t live in the right countries.

In a low-key blog post, the powers that were announced that, unless you lived in Canada, the US and for some reason India, Twitter’s SMS support would be shut down.

This comes after they suspended support for the “track” keyword via SMS (which allowed users to receive messages that were relevant to their username or a selection of keywords) and neglected to tell anyone.

I’ve been a big supporter of Twitter, having written my own Twitter app and numerous blog posts in sympathy with their reliability issues, but removing the mobile element renders the update system no better than Facebook’s (which only has support for BT Cellnet, or O2 as they like to be called).

Biz Stone, the author of the blog post gave a sensible reason as to why SMS was pulled. I think we were pretty naive if we thought that we could continue to receive updates from our friends for free and forever, but what I object to is this idea that it’s OK to shut out countries like the UK, who have got behind this site in bigger ways than I think many others have.

The fact that Twitter didn’t even attempt to strike up some sort of deal with a carrier is what has annoyed me. Biz’s explanation that you have to pay for texts isn’t just restricted to Europe: even in the Land of the Free you still have to pay for SMS, unless American Altruism is a new mobile carrier?

A Facebook group has inevitably sprung up to try and encourage mobile carriers to “cut Twitter a decent deal” but the simple fact is if the Twitter guys cared enough about what happened outside of the Americas, they’d have realised that you can charge people to receive texts. By adding the same limiting capability as was previously available the system would allow its users to budget, so they weren’t bankrupted by a slew of spammy texts they could not control.

Unless and until they plug this hole, I don’t know if I’ll be using Twitter. Not because I want to be an arse - although I am very good at it - but because there are just too many features being removed. Because tracking no longer works - even though the system will tell you it does - I have to read tweets via mobile Internet. I can send them via SMS, but I will now receive direct messages through email only.

I thought the point that tweets were 140 characters long was because this followed a similar convention to SMS messages, allowing the system to append their own 40-character comments to the end of each tweet, but now since this is no longer the case, Twitter is just a site that doesn’t have as many features as Facebook.

Not only have Twitter bought Summize, but the beleaguered social Internet near-giants have rebranded the site as Twitter Search, and moved it to search.twitter.com.

For the unaware - where have you been all this time? - Summize was a service that let you search Twitter in various ways, and build a feed or Pipe to track a particular topic of conversation. But now I wonder whether, with its clean and uncluttered look Twitter are branding their newly acquired system as a social search engine, thus becoming the Google of social search?

The idea of social search is simple: rather than relying on a computer algorithm to determine the relevance of content to your criteria, you use the conversations people are currently having, index them, query them and pull out the resources that suit you. Rather than getting a simple list of links, you get multiple conversations which you can engage in straight away.

You could easily argue that simply engaging in Twitter itself and ignoring the search capabilities (ie: simply asking a question and waiting for a response from a peer) is social search in action and the results you get back are more reliable because of it, but why not use Twitter Search as a springboard? Why not filter the results you’ve been given by the search engine by getting in touch with the people who put those tweets there in the first place?

I’ve been listening to BBC Radio 1 today, specifically Jo Whiley’s show (for my sins).

She has a regular slot on her daily show in which she answers questions texted or emailed in by listeners. Questions such as “what was the music on that advert that was on last week?” or “where does the expression ’fishwife’ come from?”

The BBC engage reasonably heavily in Twitter (although as pointed out in a tweet by Paul Henderson this engagement is fairly one-sided) and have accounts for each of their major services, one of them being Radio 1.

Interestingly enough however that account is lying dormant, the last post being 10 months old. Now to me this looks to be something of a missed trick.

I know from past experience that BBC policy prohibits its own online actions, rendering its broadcasters unable (certainly without receiving flack) to read out URLs for other social networks in which they are involved. Chris Moyles has previously complained that he can’t direct listeners to his show’s Facebook page without those responsible for the station’s official Website complaining that he is driving traffic away from the site.

With this in mind I can see why saying twitter.com/bbcradio1 on air would obviously cause civil war to break out within Broadcasting House, but think how much more interesting their shows could be if people could communicate with the station hassle and cost free.

Plus think how many more casual listeners they could gain if they tweeted that Bloc Party or some other “worthy” band were to play an impromptu set at Maida Vale and it was due to start in 15 minutes, or that a guest on Chris’ show has just said something outrageous that must be heard with a link to the iPlayer.

I don’t listen to Radio 1 that often but I think I would if the message I received from Twitter was more interesting than “Radio 1 has received 1905 texts in the last hour”.

In fairness, inhabitants of the Twittersphere are probably more likely to be 6 Music listeners, so what’s stopping that station from engaging in this growing platform? 6 Music doesn’t (don’t?) even have a Twitter account, let alone an out of date onr (or in the case of Radio 4, an account that has yet to be updated).

If you love Twitter, you’ll likely hate it in equal proportion for its constant propensity for crashing. Users of live blogging or chat platform - even Twitter itself - can easily find themselves discussing the question “is Twitter down?”

This has brought about the inception of a website that solves this, and only this question. istwitterdown.com consists solely of a white page with one word, in black at the centre of the page, saying either “yes” or “no”. No adverts, no titles, no explanation, nothing except that single word, which is linked in the case that Twitter is up to the Kool and the Gang single Celebration. (Because Twitter was up when I checked the site - shock horror - I’m not aware of what the link URL would be if the site fails.)

Reminds me of the original “Last page of the Internet”, of which there are now several, ad-plastered versions.

Just to clarify for non-UK readers, by “pound shop” I mean a shop where every item costs £1.

I went for an interview with a firm based in Broad Street last week. Professional decency prevents me from revealing the company’s name or website, but they’re a technology business who own, amongst other things an Indian TV station and a price comparison site.

The website I was to be working on should I have accepted the post was a social networking site, but to compare this site with the likes of MySpace or Facebook would be like comparing a £1 lightbulb to the lighting rig for a prog rock show.

This kind of “knock-off” website is the result of a passionectamy. At some stage someone has sucked the passion for the web out of the decission makers in the company, and left them with no soul but one hand permenantly aloft and a little voice saying “me too”. In short, these guys give jumping on the bandwagon a bad name!

The company that built the site does not care about social media - in fact the MD asked me what social media was [he wasn’t testing my response: he literally thought it was a jargon term] - and so cannot hope to produce an effective “object in social space” (to coin a Peteism), so needless to say I didn’t accept the position.

I used the phrase “pound shop website” because, what you find in shops where everything costs £1 is not an innovation in value but rather a lesson in how you can take a good idea, remove every hallmark of quality and sell it for a tenth of the price of the original idea. Products that sell in pound shops are never ahead of the curve but just within reaching distance of it, so as to take advantage of it without ever taking the risk that originality brings.

Pound shops exist because there is a market for them. I buy stuff from them because if you want something cheap and disposable you can get hold of it fairly easily, so is there a market for it?

A SXSW brain dump via Bambuser threw up an interesting concept for me when Stef Lewandowski asked the question “is your mum on Twitter?”

That simple rhetorical question for me encapsulates the state of the Social Internet as it is. We have a whole raft of great apps available to us for free, but we as early adopters seem, in my opinion to have difficulty bridging the gap between what is a “cool application” and what an average web user can gain from it in his/her day-to-day life.

I was in the pub with a mate who’s a student at Leeds University. After listening to some of his tales of drunken misdeeds I quickly found myself evangelising tools like Twitter. Here I thought was a prime example of how an app such as this can be used to great effect, for one thing by the University itself. What is a lecture was cancelled? What if students needed a quick reminder that an important project was due? What if the local Rock Soc had organised a pissup somewhere? This is all fairly obvious stuff but there are myriad uses for it in and outside the education service.

What’s interesting is that, even for students who spend three years of their lives learning and developing so are not afraid of hearing about new developments in worlds that interest them, it’s very difficult to make the leap from “yeah, that’s cool; right, I’m off to the bar” and “yeah, that’s cool, what’s the address again?”

I wholeheartedly believe that everyone can benefit from such a unique app, but that’s not true of the entire Social Internet. The beauty of Twitter is that you don’t need to be connected to the Web after you’ve signed up: you can do everything via SMS, and even my mum’s got a mobile.

So do the monitor and keyboard form the barrier between great services and the digitally bewildered? My mum sends emails and maintains a blog (would you believe) but using my dad as a proxy, so she never really uses the Internet; but she’ll happily send a text on her mobile. So does it just come back to the fear of breaking the Internet, or is it just too much effort? If you could plug your camera into your TV and upload your photos via your digibox, would more people start using Flickr for example?

These questions can’t be answered for all sites, especially when you get onto social media behemoths like Spacebook or MyFace, but these often contain elements of other sites (Facebook status vs Twitter tweets, MySpace Music vs Last.fm etc).

Google are starting to understand that the beauty of the Internet is such that you don’t need to be sat infront of a 17" screen to experience it, and in the case of some of Google’s telephony services you can take a screen of any size out of the equation entirely.

So do the early adopters need to bridge the gap or should it be on the heads of the app developers to make their services available without the big scary screen?

Many are of the opinion that the word “nice” should be banned from all polite conversation, and that’s a viewpoint I can understand. It’s a lazy word that conveys very little and in some cases for “nice” you can simply read “uninteresting”.

But in the world of technology - especially in these days of Web 2.0 - the word “nice” can convey a good deal of information that is generally understood within techie circles: a ”nice” laptop will have all the connections and wireless capabilities that one could reasonably want whilst being light and portable; a “nice” camera will be easy to operate yet packed with features, and a “nice” operating system will be robust, secure and user-friendly.

So what is a “nice” website and why is it important? Let me give you an example. Two “life stream” sites exist (there are many more, but these are possibly the two most popular): FriendFeed and Profilactic. They both have much the same functionality: you pile all your various social media usernames or profile URLs into one place and you get a page a little like a Twitter timeline with your every move documented, aswell as an RSS feed. I’m signed up for both, but I much prefer Profilactic because it is “nicer”. It has very few actual features that set it apart from FriendFeed (it has a much larger list of profiles you can add, but most of them are irrelevant, at least to me) and it’s actually a little buggier, but I prefer it to FriendFeed. So why? Let’s look at the clues...

1. It uses AJAX. Although an accessibility nightmare and very much “the in thing” it does make for an attractive site: you get a lovely ”please wait” message while your timeline (or your “mashup” as it’s called in Profilactic) is built.
2. The layout is much more attractive. I’ve stumbled around FriendFeed looking for the link I’d clicked the last time I was there, because things weren’t laid out all that well. FriendFeed is not by any means an ugly site, but it gets a little cluttered when you have lots of different feed items whereas they’re separated far better in Profilactic.
3. You can play your YouTube videos direct from the timeline (you can’t in FriendFeed, you’ve got to click the link).

I think the problem here is that, what separates a good site from a “nice” site is a collection of things which, if this were a project being built for a paying client would never have been added because they don’t provide extra functionality, they just make the site a more pleasant place to be in and clients aren’t always prepared to stump up the cash for that. I’m not suggesting that FriendFeed was built by anyone other than its original brainchild - I have no idea - but it possibly suffers from the “Phase 2” mentality whereby the “bells and whistles” are added later. Unfortunately sometimes it’s the bells and whistles that separate you from the competition, and that’s certainly the case with these two websites.

So in conclusion, “nice” is important, but it comes at a price.