Blog facebook

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?

Did you know that, should you feel the need, you can subscribe to a list of wanted criminals’ names? The West Midlands Police - Wanted RSS feed lists the names of men...or women...wanted in connection with specific enquiries.

You can also see the list on the force’s new Facebook page, where you can also download posters to ward off would-be trick-or-treaters.

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.

I’m a sucker for change. I like to shake things up, and I get bored very easily, so I’m always interested by new browsers, search engines, social networking sites, gadgets and other assorted whatnots. Now Flock is hardly new: I tried it back in 2005 and enjoyed the experience, but it was pretty much useless if you weren’t using del.icio.us... which I wasn’t. However, something spurred me to try it again and see how far it’d come. But first, to give you a bit of background:

Flock is a web browser based on Firefox, but with a much more attractive interface and a whole raft of social features. In fact it is this feature set that fuels its marketing as a “social web browser”.

Now let me get one thing straight. I’ve never liked Firefox, and I don’t like the assertion that it is God’s gift to web browsing. Certainly there’s a hell of a lot to be said for the Gecko engine on which it’s built, but the interface is dull and unfriendly and it’s less flexible than IE6. And why? Even IE6 supports liquid layouts without the use of tables, but which the Gecko engine never did. (I won’t go into the whys and wherefores of that, but it is true).

I wholeheartedly invite someone to supply a link to a site that successfully uses liquid layouts in CSS: I would genuinely like to be proven wrong because it’ll save me a whole bunch of time in the future!

Also the argument that people constantly trot out about it being open source is, for the 95% of people who use it (mostly web professionals because no-one else cares enough) frankly, bollocks. It matters not one jot whether you can download the source code if you’re not a programmer. Unless you’re a developer who wants to get his hands dirty, open source does not matter. There, I said it.

All of the above applies to Windows users only, by the way. For Linux and OSX it’s the best browser available, it’s just that for Windows, IE7 is better.

So, why Flock and not Firefox? Well for one the interface is much better. The dialog boxes are still too clinical and unfriendly for my liking, the scrolling isn’t as smooth and intelligent as in IE and editing in WordPress has some weird side effects. But all of these petty little issues were overridden by the rich feature set. For example:

The People Sidebar shows you an at-a-glance view of your social network identities. You can update your Twitter status, read through your Facebook minifeed, browse your Flickr library and go straight to YouTube...and more besides.

The Media Bar gives you a river of images and videos from sites to which you subscribe, using something they call media feeds, a bit of black magic I still haven’t managed to figure out (it’s not based on RSS, so I’m not entirely sure what is, in fact, the deuce.)

The Feeds Sidebar shows you a folder-based list of all your RSS feeds, marking out those which have unread items. You can read through them, marking off the ones that you’ve read (it’s supposed to happen automatically but rarely works) or easily sharing them via your blog.

If you’re a Google or Yahoo! Mail user you can check your inbox and compose a new message with a mere two clicks. You can share your favourite links via del.ici.ous, keep clippings of web pages and write new blog posts directly from your browser window. The search facility is great too (it defaults to Yahoo! but we all make mistakes).

And it is precisely because of all of these features that I’m getting rid of it. My small but ever-growing RSS list coupled with my subscription to a constantly changing Flickr photo stream means I’m forever seeing little red icons that demand my immediate attention.

This is not Flock’s fault. Of course this behaviour is by design and it’s great, not to mention being what I thought I wanted, but now I realise that these features simply distract me from work. I thought I wanted to be updated when someone published something new, but at the moment it feels like I’m being notified every time someone farts and it’s all too much!

There are a few other issues aswell, like not being able to sync all my accounts, settings and feeds with my laptop or even my Pocket PC, but the real reason is that all these fantastic connectivity tools are just far too tempting. You can’t have a Media Bar and not fill it: that would be a hideous waste of the developers’ precious time!

Plus you could say “why don’t you just ignore the red icons until you’re ready?” but you’re crediting me with self-control that I just don’t have. I want to know what’s going on right now, but my conscience tells me there’s work to be done.

So it’s been a fun few weeks playing with Flock and spending the time getting it just the way I like it - including installing the English rather than American dictionary for the excellent spell checker - and if you can control the urge to press the big red buttons that say “do not press” then check it out for yourself: it is of course free!

And if you feel like berating me for my earlier rant on open source web browsers please feel free to leave a comment: I’m all about debate!

Right then. Start, Control Panel, Uninstall a Program...

Social media websites need to make money to live. Facebook does it by showing you targeted ads based on keywords of interest, but Phorm, the new centre for unmitigated digital evil want to explode that model and use it across the Web so that targeted advertising follows you everywhere. The Guardian say they won’t use it, but beyond what some are referring to as an illegal invasion of privacy, could a system like this work on an opt-in basis?

Attendees of the Birmingham SXSWi brain dump discussed the merits of Amazon’s recommendations, of which I’m a big fan, and to which my bank balance has fallen prey on many occasions. So how about a single website where all the buying decisions you want to make public can be discovered by others?

What if, when you sign up for a new ecommerce website you tick a box to say “share my buying decisions with x” (where x is a cool name for such an app), and when you buy your product, the site talks to the x API which records the sale and adds it to the stuff you like? Once you’ve received and played with your new product you can return to x (or to the original site) and rate the product very simply with a thumbs up or thumbs down rating.

When you login to a social networking site (or any other kind of site where you provide your email address), that site talks to x which brings back a load of tags which the site matches against its list of ads. It displays the ads, you see something you like, you buy the product. That purchase goes back into x and the cycle continues.

There’s an idea, now go and build 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.

I’m sure I’m not the first - and I won’t be the last - to comment on the future of Facebook, but the simple fact is that it needs to be said: if we’re not careful, Facebook will die a unique death: not because of spam (like MySpace) or constant crashes (no, that fate is reserved for Twitter) but simply because of its very beautiful but much abused applications architecture.

The Facebook community is very savvy to this, hosting a number of groups that call for the developers to either

1. ban applications from demanding that the user invites their friends, or
2. scrap the entire architecture completely.

The second will never happen because systems like Photos, Videos and indeed Groups are built on this architecture. I think the first suggestion is a good one, but it doesn’t stop the problem because, although I receive very few application requests now, I still see the items in my News Feed and am constantly assailed with statements like “Steve has added the Are You a Fish or a Microwave application”. [Shudder]

I think first off there needs to be a clear distinction between

• a functional enhancement to the system (like Photos and Videos etc),
• a box to add to your profile (like Where I’ve Been or What I’m Listening to) and
• a waste of time (like Super Wall or Pirates vs Vampires or whatever).

Mark Zuckerberg and his team then need to work on allowing users to specify which application-types they might be interested in, and better still categorise the apps based on interests (Catbook for pet lovers, What I’m Reading for the bookish types etc). Then, much like the Profile Cleaner Greasemonkey script, we need the choice to ban applications from displaying on other people’s pages, so we can get straight to someone’s Wall to leave them a message.

If you’re not a massive Facebook user, here’s just a taster of some of the applications in my block list, in alphabetical order:

• Animated GIFTS (does Facebook not already have a Gifts application, and why do they need animating?)
• Aston Villa Fans and Aston Villans (why use two disparate apps when one group will do?)
• Could you pass the U.S. Citizenship test? (isn’t this what Posted Items are for?)
• Flirt With Hotties (is Facebook now doing 0898 numbers?)
• FunWall (the team improved the Wall so apps like this could be removed)
• Instant Messaging (cast your eyes to the top of the screen. See where it says Inbox? Now don’t let the door hit you on the way out)
• Nicest Friends (how bad would you feel if you weren’t on this list?)
• PENIS or VAGINA? (just a coffee thanks)
• Poke Pro (for when poking isn’t enough and you have to be that extra 10% more irritating)
• R U CUTE! (no, but I can spell and I don’t speak like a moron)
• Say Merry Christmas (it’s February)
• Scrabulous (why would I go to your Facebook profile to play Scrabble when I can do that on any number of sites?)
• Send Diamonds, Send Good Karma, Send Roses (see Gifts)
• Vampires, WereWolves (I’m none of the above; neither am I a pirate or a zombie)
• What Age Do You Act? (old enough to know how to use the Internet)
• What Drink Are You?, What Drug Are You?, What Underwear Are You? (the list goes on)
• what type of dancer are you? (this developer hasn’t even bothered to capitalise the name of his app)
• Who Has The Biggest Brain? (me: I have a tidy profile)

Facebook, it’s time to tighten up.

BBC Radio 1, not content with polluting the air with garage music and low-grade techno have now found a new, even clumsier way of “relating to” us kids. It’s called Facebook. Heard of it?

Well this is the new bee-in-the-bonnet for Chris Moyles and his team: Aled, their sometime day producer has made it his personal mission to setup and promote what he calls the show’s “fan page” on Facebook. It’s a reasonably-well put together page, and Aled makes good use of the site’s update system.

But what niggles me is not the page itself, it’s the idea that someone thinks they “should be on” Facebook. Essentially the people who inhabit social networking sites “because they should” are those who, ipso-facto, are the least suited to do so (to paraphrase Douglas Adams). If you’re not going to take the time to understand and then fully engage in a site like Facebook - or even, heaven forbid MySpace - then why bother signing up in the first place?

The Chris Moyles Show is a prime example of an organisation or group of individuals who are on Facebook yet - with the possible exception of Aled - don’t understand it. I’ve heard Moylesy going on about how many fans have signed up and how you can find the page (using phrases like “forward slash” and “all one word”) by going to Radio 1 Online and following the link there - because their Web department get grumpy when Chris gives out external links - but you can tell that he really has no interest in it. It’s all just “technical” to him, and he’s ostensibly the most important member of the team.

Bottom line: when it comes to social networking, if you can’t get into it, stay out of it.

I call myself a “new media junkie”. Now in order to live up to that name I need to do a fair bit of social networking: this may involve blogging, using Facebook (a lot) or answering questions on LinkedIn, and I love it.However, the increasing problem I’ve noticed is that, as more and more people use sites like MySpace to promote their music, YouTube to show off their videos or LinkedIn to shmoose, fewer and fewer people are getting their own websites developed.

Obviously as a web developer this presents something of a professional concern (if only a small one, as I’m only really talking about portfolio sites), but as a personal “fan” of the Web, I think it’s a real shame.

I certainly can’t blame people for doing it: it’s free, very easy and requires little promotion, as people will automatically find you and your content based on the network you inhabit, but it does serve to make the Internet just that little smaller and more uniform.

Is it possible the ubermarket invasion currently taking place on our high streets could be echoed online? Will smaller, independent sites be cut down by the mighty scythe of big business?

(Cue ominous music)