Blog twitter

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.

As my Twitter followers are aware, I spent an hour hanging around Birmingham International Railway Station for a train back to New Street today, which was late due to “severe delays”.

We all know and accept that things go wrong, but I think many of us are now immune to the standard-issue apologies we receive when this happens. What’s infinitely more valuable than a blank apology is a helpful suggestion: “board this train and change at New Street and continue your journey from there”.

While I was waiting, and not knowing how long I would be sitting at the station café, I started thinking about how most Websites deal with unforeseen problems.

In his book The Big Red Fez, permission marketing guru Seth Godin looks at ways we as Website owners and developers can make our users’ lives easier in the unlikely event of a loss of cabin pressure.

Rather than a 404 (page not found) error or a search that yields no results, why not say sorry and then suggest some of the most popular pages on your site? If a page stops working, why not get a quick form together than emails your Webmaster, provide a direct email link or list a telephone number?

Railway stations are good because they try not to leave you feeling helpless, but Websites do that to users all the time. You could be on the verge of converting a visit into a sale when the link between your site and the payment system fails, and their order details, along with their confidence in you, is lost.

The microblogging site Twitter is as famous now for its all-too-frequent error messages as it is for its revolutionary offering, but interestingly enough someone has done the contingency work for them. Twiddict lets you cache your tweet on their server until Twitter is ready to receive it. Brilliant!

So with Twitter having bought Summize, surely the next best move would be to acquire Twiddict, re-brand it, keep it on another server and send all over-capacity or “something is technically wrong” messages its way.

That’s a quick example for a fairly frivolous site, but the same pattern can be adopted anywhere. Your error page doesn’t have to follow the same design pattern as your main site: after all, your visitors are probably only going to click the back button again, so if you have a few sites, why not upload some contingency forms to a cheap Linux host and redirect your errors to the relevant form?

Just extending a helping hand to your visitors when things aren’t going their way - no-one cares if things aren’t going your way, sorry! - can really make a difference and once in a while it’ll bring you a conversion you otherwise might have lost.

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?

On Thursday I thought of a problem. I like the microblogging site Twitter, and sometimes I like to mention what my friends are talking about.

However, there is a problem. In order to preserve the status update (or “tweet”) as it’s known, you have to either copy and paste it - and get rid of all the nasty code that goes with it - or worse, take a screenshot of the tweet, save it, upload it and paste it onto your post.

Solution: After spending a couple of seconds on Google - that’sreally all you need - I discovered that there wasn’t anything out there that would do the job, so I thought I’d have a pop, and thus TwitterPaste was born.

It’s a ridiculously simple app: all you do is copy and paste the link to the tweet you want to embed (which you can get fairly easily), hit the big button and copy the code you get itno your blog.

Another problem: it doesn’t work on WordPress. Although this site is built on my new Byron CMS, any collaborative blogging projects I am involved in tend to be run on WordPress because it’s something bloggers are very familiar with...and it’s really good. The problem is however that, unless you’re editing in code view (which shows you all the “raw” HTML as apposed to the formatted text) all the code that TweetPaste generates gets stripped out.

Solution: The TweetPaste WordPress plugin. This simple one-file plugin generates the code needed to embed a tweet onto a page. And because it uses IFrames it deprocates so RSS readers should be able to display a link to the tweet, if they can’t display the IFrame.

And in other news, this is my first ever WordPress plugin! WOOT!

So now I can embed tweets into my blogs, and allow others to do the same. And all in less than 12 hours.

Oh, and to prove that it works, here’s me tweeting the fact:

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.

In a recent post, Lee Robertson of Epiblogger gave us seven reasons for why Firefox is better for blogging than Internet Explorer. Actually it’s got nothing to do with Firefox at all, but more to do with the add-ons that are available for it.

Why Firefox should have such a glut of add-ons in comparison to IE I’m not sure - and please don’t mention it’s because it’s open source: Firefox is cool because it’s written by nice people who make their code available for everyone to break, and IE is horrible because it’s written by Microsoft who are all fascists. I digress. I do that sometimes.

I really like Lee and Rhett’s work: Rhett has critiqued my friend Kev’s blog and is a regular listener to, and critic of my podcast. They’re both good writers with good ideas, and this latest post by Lee is no exception: i just don’t agree with the argument.

To demonstrate that, I thought I’d look into each of Lee’s points and try to rebut them, if only for the sake of balance. It’s got nothing to do with fairness, I just think IE7 is a better browser than Firefox. So to point 1:

1. “Firefox might not have been the first browser to offer tabbed browsing, but it is one of the greatest features for bloggers to have.” Agreed, and it’s implemented into the core of IE7.
2. “Firefox add-ons extend Firefox to make it much more than a web browser...” I used to be a desktop software developer and find the continuing blurring of the lines between desktop and web apps unsettling. I don’t like the idea that soon everything from watching IPTV to listening to Internet radio will be done through a web browser. I think web browsers should stick to being web browsers. Lee then goes on to look at the add-ins that make Firefox a great blogging platform.
   1. CoLT is a plugin that allows you to copy and paste the text and URL of a link so you can easily paste it into your post editor. Can I not do that already? I highlight the link text then hit CTRL+C to copy, or right-click the link and select Copy Shortcut. Or am I missing something?
   2. ScribeFire is an alternative post editor, so if you don’t like your WordPress/Blogger/etc interface you can use this. Windows Live Writer does this already, is browser-independent and is surprisingly good. I’ve used it before and was impressed at how well it worked with a standard blogging platform or - I imagine - anything that implements XML-RPC.
   3. FireFTP is an FTP client for Firefox. IE has supported FTP since version 5 (and in stable form since 6), or you can just use Windows Explorer. When Dreamweaver fails to connect I go straight to Windows Explorer for my FTP, and have never needed any third-party software.
   4. Zemanta suggests pictures and links related to your blog post. This sounds really cool, and according to the FAQ they’re testing an IE version. Either way, one point to Firefox.
   5. Web Developer gives you a massive set of tools to help test your web pages’ functionality and appearance. A brilliant add-on and another point to Firefox. If you develop for the Web and use Firefox but don’t have this add-on, get it. Chalk up another one to the mighty ’fox.
   6. Twitterfox is a Twitter client for Firefox. There are a whole glut of these and they’re very useful but I found that - as I documented in Adventures in Browserland - being too closely connected with such a vibrant community was distracting. Nevertheless, it’s something IE doesn’t have.
   7. Dictionaries and language packs What Lee’s referring to here is, not a dictionary but a spell checker. Some blogging platforms include their own but are often horrible (WordPress is no exception), but as I mentioned in How to Make Sense of your Blog, ieSpell is a great add-on for IE that gives you multi-lingual spell checking support that works really well.
3. “Multiple Home Pages - This goes along with tabbed browsing. You can open several pages as your home page.” Very true, but another feature that was implemented at the same time as tabbed browsing into IE7.

Obviously some of the features I’ve documented here are very much in the “me too” vein, where Microsoft have been trying to play catch-up with the rest of the online community, but whether a development camp thought of an idea first or whether they’re implementing something that has gone missed for ages is by the by.

In all of this I’m completely discounting IE6 and all those who have gone before. IE6 is a dreadful browser with more bugs than a dung heap in Mexico - see, I do jokes too - but its successor far surpasses even Firefox in my opinion. I still think there’s no reason to use anything other than IE7 on a Windows machine unless you need to use some of the tools I’ve mentioned that IE doesn’t have (mainly the Web Developer toolbar).

So that’s my rebuttal. If you think there’s something I’ve missed or you just want to call me Microsoft’s bitch or a capitalist pig-dog please be my guest! I am a capitalist pig-dog but no, I have never suckled at the mighty Gates teat, and never will.

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...

Corporal Lachlan MacNeil of the 16 Air Brigade is taking part in a unique project run by the Guardian. He’ll be blogging his way through the next six months via text and video, mainly to give us “back home” the chance to see what life is like for a British squaddy in in Afghanistan, but also to give a voice to some of his troops so they can communicate - albeit one way - with their loved ones.

I’m more than a little intrigued to see how it pans out over the coming weeks and months. Other than a headcam I’m not entirely sure what the Guardian have kitted him out with, nor how the pressures of life under fire will affect the regularity of his posts, but if nothing else it should prove an interesting experiment.

I doubt we’ll see other social media tools put to great use in the Army: the idea of troops twittering their current location is probably unlikely.

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?