Dawkins, meet 4chan

Posted on March 20, 2012 by Ian

When Richard Dawkins first coined the word “meme”, he described it as “an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.” The mental equivalent of a gene, it is something we pass from parent to child, though the mental rather than physical nature of the meme allows it to be passed from any person to any other person regardless of their parentage.

Of course, the internet has taken that word and twisted it somewhat, using “meme” to refer to viral pictures and video, things we might once have called “image macros”. A meme in the colloquial sense doesn’t seem to have much in common with a gene anymore.

But whenever my four-year-old son describes something as “epic”, or wants to see “the one with the cat that’s a Pop Tart in space”, or runs up to me and breathlessly informs me that “Daddy, daddy, there was a cat… and it was playing the keyboard!“, I begin to suspect that there isn’t that much of a difference after all. I have passed on to my son my eyes, my nose, the curl of my toes, and a thousand obscure pop-culture references that he has picked up on and gleefully spreads to others despite having no context for them whatsoever.

We, the Web Kids

Posted on February 23, 2012 by Ian

Occasionally, I read a piece of writing that sums up my thoughts so well, so exactly, that I sit and try to blog something comparable and just fail. Try as I might, I can’t outdo the original. I’m not sure what Pastebin.com’s retention policy is, so just in case, here it is in full:

We, the Web Kids

by Piotr Czerski (translated by Marta Szrede)
There is probably no other word that would be as overused in the media discourse as ‘generation’. I once tried to count the ‘generations’ that have been proclaimed in the past ten years, since the well-known article about the so-called ‘Generation Nothing’; I believe there were as many as twelve. They all had one thing in common: they only existed on paper. Reality never provided us with a single tangible, meaningful, unforgettable impulse, the common experience of which would forever distinguish us from the previous generations. We had been looking for it, but instead the groundbreaking change came unnoticed, along with cable TV, mobile phones, and, most of all, Internet access. It is only today that we can fully comprehend how much has changed during the past fifteen years.
We, the Web kids; we, who have grown up with the Internet and on the Internet, are a generation who meet the criteria for the term in a somewhat subversive way. We did not experience an impulse from reality, but rather a metamorphosis of the reality itself. What unites us is not a common, limited cultural context, but the belief that the context is self-defined and an effect of free choice.
Writing this, I am aware that I am abusing the pronoun ‘we’, as our ‘we’ is fluctuating, discontinuous, blurred, according to old categories: temporary. When I say ‘we’, it means ‘many of us’ or ‘some of us’. When I say ‘we are’, it means ‘we often are’. I say ‘we’ only so as to be able to talk about us at all.
1.
We grew up with the Internet and on the Internet. This is what makes us different; this is what makes the crucial, although surprising from your point of view, difference: we do not ‘surf’ and the internet to us is not a ‘place’ or ‘virtual space’. The Internet to us is not something external to reality but a part of it: an invisible yet constantly present layer intertwined with the physical environment. We do not use the Internet, we live on the Internet and along it. If we were to tell our bildnungsroman to you, the analog, we could say there was a natural Internet aspect to every single experience that has shaped us. We made friends and enemies online, we prepared cribs for tests online, we planned parties and studying sessions online, we fell in love and broke up online. The Web to us is not a technology which we had to learn and which we managed to get a grip of. The Web is a process, happening continuously and continuously transforming before our eyes; with us and through us. Technologies appear and then dissolve in the peripheries, websites are built, they bloom and then pass away, but the Web continues, because we are the Web; we, communicating with one another in a way that comes naturally to us, more intense and more efficient than ever before in the history of mankind.
Brought up on the Web we think differently. The ability to find information is to us something as basic, as the ability to find a railway station or a post office in an unknown city is to you. When we want to know something – the first symptoms of chickenpox, the reasons behind the sinking of ‘Estonia’, or whether the water bill is not suspiciously high – we take measures with the certainty of a driver in a SatNav-equipped car. We know that we are going to find the information we need in a lot of places, we know how to get to those places, we know how to assess their credibility. We have learned to accept that instead of one answer we find many different ones, and out of these we can abstract the most likely version, disregarding the ones which do not seem credible. We select, we filter, we remember, and we are ready to swap the learned information for a new, better one, when it comes along.
To us, the Web is a sort of shared external memory. We do not have to remember unnecessary details: dates, sums, formulas, clauses, street names, detailed definitions. It is enough for us to have an abstract, the essence that is needed to process the information and relate it to others. Should we need the details, we can look them up within seconds. Similarly, we do not have to be experts in everything, because we know where to find people who specialise in what we ourselves do not know, and whom we can trust. People who will share their expertise with us not for profit, but because of our shared belief that information exists in motion, that it wants to be free, that we all benefit from the exchange of information. Every day: studying, working, solving everyday issues, pursuing interests. We know how to compete and we like to do it, but our competition, our desire to be different, is built on knowledge, on the ability to interpret and process information, and not on monopolising it.
2.
Participating in cultural life is not something out of ordinary to us: global culture is the fundamental building block of our identity, more important for defining ourselves than traditions, historical narratives, social status, ancestry, or even the language that we use. From the ocean of cultural events we pick the ones that suit us the most; we interact with them, we review them, we save our reviews on websites created for that purpose, which also give us suggestions of other albums, films or games that we might like. Some films, series or videos we watch together with colleagues or with friends from around the world; our appreciation of some is only shared by a small group of people that perhaps we will never meet face to face. This is why we feel that culture is becoming simultaneously global and individual. This is why we need free access to it.
This does not mean that we demand that all products of culture be available to us without charge, although when we create something, we usually just give it back for circulation. We understand that, despite the increasing accessibility of technologies which make the quality of movie or sound files so far reserved for professionals available to everyone, creativity requires effort and investment. We are prepared to pay, but the giant commission that distributors ask for seems to us to be obviously overestimated. Why should we pay for the distribution of information that can be easily and perfectly copied without any loss of the original quality? If we are only getting the information alone, we want the price to be proportional to it. We are willing to pay more, but then we expect to receive some added value: an interesting packaging, a gadget, a higher quality, the option of watching here and now, without waiting for the file to download. We are capable of showing appreciation and we do want to reward the artist (since money stopped being paper notes and became a string of numbers on the screen, paying has become a somewhat symbolic act of exchange that is supposed to benefit both parties), but the sales goals of corporations are of no interest to us whatsoever. It is not our fault that their business has ceased to make sense in its traditional form, and that instead of accepting the challenge and trying to reach us with something more than we can get for free they have decided to defend their obsolete ways.
One more thing: we do not want to pay for our memories. The films that remind us of our childhood, the music that accompanied us ten years ago: in the external memory network these are simply memories. Remembering them, exchanging them, and developing them is to us something as natural as the memory of ‘Casablanca’ is to you. We find online the films that we watched as children and we show them to our children, just as you told us the story about the Little Red Riding Hood or Goldilocks. Can you imagine that someone could accuse you of breaking the law in this way? We cannot, either.
3.
We are used to our bills being paid automatically, as long as our account balance allows for it; we know that starting a bank account or changing the mobile network is just the question of filling in a single form online and signing an agreement delivered by a courier; that even a trip to the other side of Europe with a short sightseeing of another city on the way can be organised in two hours. Consequently, being the users of the state, we are increasingly annoyed by its archaic interface. We do not understand why tax act takes several forms to complete, the main of which has more than a hundred questions. We do not understand why we are required to formally confirm moving out of one permanent address to move in to another, as if councils could not communicate with each other without our intervention (not to mention that the necessity to have a permanent address is itself absurd enough.)
There is not a trace in us of that humble acceptance displayed by our parents, who were convinced that administrative issues were of utmost importance and who considered interaction with the state as something to be celebrated. We do not feel that respect, rooted in the distance between the lonely citizen and the majestic heights where the ruling class reside, barely visible through the clouds. Our view of the social structure is different from yours: society is a network, not a hierarchy. We are used to being able to start a dialogue with anyone, be it a professor or a pop star, and we do not need any special qualifications related to social status. The success of the interaction depends solely on whether the content of our message will be regarded as important and worthy of reply. And if, thanks to cooperation, continuous dispute, defending our arguments against critique, we have a feeling that our opinions on many matters are simply better, why would we not expect a serious dialogue with the government?
We do not feel a religious respect for ‘institutions of democracy’ in their current form, we do not believe in their axiomatic role, as do those who see ‘institutions of democracy’ as a monument for and by themselves. We do not need monuments. We need a system that will live up to our expectations, a system that is transparent and proficient. And we have learned that change is possible: that every uncomfortable system can be replaced and is replaced by a new one, one that is more efficient, better suited to our needs, giving more opportunities.
What we value the most is freedom: freedom of speech, freedom of access to information and to culture. We feel that it is thanks to freedom that the Web is what it is, and that it is our duty to protect that freedom. We owe that to next generations, just as much as we owe to protect the environment.
Perhaps we have not yet given it a name, perhaps we are not yet fully aware of it, but I guess what we want is real, genuine democracy. Democracy that, perhaps, is more than is dreamt of in your journalism.
“My, dzieci sieci” (“We, the web kids”) by Piotr Czerski (translated by Marta Szrede) is licensed under a Creative Commons Uznanie autorstwa-Na tych samych warunkach 3.0 Unported License
Originally posted at: http://pastebin.com/0xXV8k7k
Contact the author: piotr[at]czerski.art.pl

Not So Fleeting Anymore

Posted on November 11, 2011 by Ian

I took my first faltering steps “online” in the mid-90s, courtesy of Trumpet Winsock under Windows 3.1, followed by AOL’s UK Games Chat, doubtless a gateway drug to the life of Usenet and IRC that followed; hoping and pleading that my parents wouldn’t pick up the phone and hear the telltale 14.4 kilobit buzzing that gave away my illicit internet usage.

Isn’t “going online” such a strange notion now, when “offline” is only achieved by bloggers camping in the woods as a publicity stunt; a week without the internet in exchange for their fifteen seconds of internet fame?

Everything I did online in those days, everything I was, is long gone now. IRC logs lost to formatted hard drives; Usenet posts beyond any server’s retention time; my background-MIDI hell of a website that probably died with Geocities. But since the turn of the millennium, something has been happening — the internet is less fleeting; more permanent. The blog was on the rise.

It was a little over ten years ago that I penned this waste of the English language, which has survived a trip from a website of my own concoction, through LiveJournal and Drupal to where it now rests as the oldest entry that has made it to my current blog. (Sadly, I cannot say the same for the HTML formatting or the image to which it once linked.) The follies of my youth (at least, from age 16 onwards) are now preserved for the world to see.

The eighteen-year-old spouting bad philosophy. The nineteen-year-old who wanted to be a child forever. The twenty-year-old that saw himself though the eyes of characters he played. The twenty-one-year-old that thought he’d be with his friends forever, and the twenty-two-year-old that started to realise he wouldn’t. The twenty-four-year-old who geeked out, the twenty-five-year-old that got political, and the twenty-six-year-old who overanalyses his son’s questions.

Nothing is deleted anymore, nothing lost to history. Those thoughts that I don’t commit to bloggery, Twitter and Facebook keep for posterity or for marketing potential.

My son is four now; it won’t be too many years before he’s able to browse the ‘net by himself and to stumble upon his father’s teenage wittering. What will he make of the way I cryptically tried to figure out how to reject his mother when she first asked me out, or the drama-tastic marker I placed in apology for a post I removed — a post made when I was not exactly espousing the virtues expected of a father.

It’s probably the kind of detail he won’t want to know about my life, in much the same way as I’m happy with my lack of knowledge of my own father’s young adulthood. And, briefly, I considered deleting most of it — the personal stuff, at least.

But as I considered it, walking home in the dark, I passed the nursing home that advertises “a special neighbourhood for the memory impaired”. Should I ever get to that point, and should my family not follow my explicit instructions to pack me off to Dignitas the minute I become a burden on them, I can’t think of a better way to hold onto my memories than to have them accessible and searchable from wherever I may be.

Every scrap of drama, every bawling whinge, every pointless meme and every political diatribe made me who I am today, and someday I may be grateful to read it all again.

(Though seriously, I have posted a ton of crap over the years. Man, I should never have been allowed on LiveJournal.)

SuccessWhale is Terrifying: VPS Edition

Posted on October 10, 2011 by Ian

Just under two years ago, my SuccessWhale Twitter client was gaining new users at a steady rate and, as I noticed with alarm, was about to blow through my then-limited bandwidth allowance.

I’ve since relocated all my web stuff to Dreamhost, taking advantage of their unlimited bandwidth offering to plow through 10 GB and more a month. But now I’m coming up against the last remaining limit of my shared hosting – memory usage.

Both Westminster Hubble, which constantly crawls MPs’ social networks and RSS feeds, and an increasingly complex SuccessWhale, churn through a ton of memory. I don’t have a nice scary graph for this one, but at peak times, I’d estimate that my web server kills over half my PHP processes due to excess memory use. That means Only Dreaming basically goes down, while SuccessWhale throws errors around if it even loads at all.

It looks like I’m left taking the expensive plunge of moving my hosting to a VPS rather than a shared solution, which is a jump I’m nervous to make, especially since none of my web properties make me any money. Most worrying of all is that VPS prices tend to vary by available memory, and I don’t actually know how much memory all my stuff would take up if it were allowed free rein. And nor do I have any way of finding out, bar jumping ship to a VPS and taking advantage of free trial weeks.

So, dear lazyweb, do you have any experience with this sort of thing? And can anyone reccommend a good (cheap!) VPS host that fulfils the following criteria:

LAMP stack with “P” being both PHP and Python (or *BSD instead of Linux)
Full shell access
Unlimited (or at least 100 GB) bandwidth
Unlimited (or at least 10 GB) disk space
At least 20 MySQL databases
IMAP mailboxes & mail forwarding

I’ve been recommended linode by a friend which seems great for tinkering, though the price scales up rapidly with RAM use and I’m not sure I want to deal with the hassle of setting up Apache, MySQL etc. by myself. And there’s Dreamhost’s own offering, which would be virtually zero-hassle to switch to, but probably isn’t the cheapest around.

So, citizens of the interweb, I seek your advice!

Could I Live Without…?

Posted on July 26, 2011 by Ian

A couple of months ago, I was particularly scathing about the crop of Facebook games that I was playing, particularly ones that had no end. The result? I no longer play any games on Facebook whatsoever. As I bemoaned at length, not one of them was adding to my life in any appreciable way.

I wonder if it is now a good time to apply the same logic to various online services — to be extremely critical of them, to discover whether or not they actually add any value to my life. In short, could I live without…

1. A Google Account

As a search engine, Google is almost essential to life on the internet today. Like a lot of you, I have signed up to many Google services over the years, each one simply on the merit that it was better than the competition (if there even was competition). I go through phases of being alarmed at the amount of data Google collates about us all — their “do no evil” policy is wearing thin in the eyes of their customers. But could I manage without mail, calendars and contacts synchronised between my phone and the web? Without the near-endless entertainment of Google Reader? Without the Android Market?

Although I resent Google’s dominion over my online existence, its offerings are just better than others’. And having an Android phone seals the deal.

Verdict: No.

2. GMail

If I can’t live without a Google account, maybe I should just dump the GMail part of it? I’ve actually done this once before; moved my e-mail wholesale to my own server. But I went back — it’s a nice feeling to be in charge, to have your own mail server, but everything was so much harder. ”Archiving” and “tagging” become a multi-click ‘move’ operation, IMAP has a host of strange issues, and no webmail client is a patch on Google’s.

Ditching GMail appeals, but two months down the line I’d probably spend another evening moving everything back again.

Verdict: Probably not.

3. Twitter

I suspect I’m in the minority, in that I follow no celebrities and don’t use Twitter for anything to do with “brand awareness” or “customer interaction”. I use it for talking to my friends. There are simply too many of us, online too irregularly, to use instant messaging — or god forbid, phone calls — any more. (Whether that says something about the quality of our interaction, I’m not sure.) But without Twitter I’d be largely unaware of what’s going on in the lives of the dozen or so people I care about the most. Though my posts may be trivial and of interest to few, losing Twitter would be close to losing friends.

Verdict: No.

4. Facebook

The social network we love to hate, there are a whole host of reasons people would want to quit — disregard for privacy, endless Farmville spam, lack of transparency / import & export functions — but yet, so few do. I don’t play games on Facebook, I rarely post photos, I don’t “like” pages or take quizzes. I have around 300 “friends”, many of whom I haven’t seen since school and wouldn’t recognise in the street.

But there’s a few close friends and family that don’t use Twitter, and closing my Facebook account would mean cutting them off. And besides, there’s always that nagging thought: “you’re 26 years old, every 26-year-old is on Facebook!”

Verdict: It’s tempting to try.

5. Google+

Like many geeks, I am an “early adopter” of Google+, a social network that’s still in beta. Now and again I load the page or run the mobile app, to see what people have posted — and they’ve posted exactly the same as they posted on Twitter. Plus, without an API, I never bother to manually copy my own Twitter and Facebook posts to G+ too.

It’s nice to be in there in case it picks up and becomes the next Social Network to Rule them All. But right now, it’s taking up brain power and space on my bookmarks toolbar, and I’m gaining nothing from it.

Verdict: Yes.

6. LiveJournal

All my LiveJournal posts are already syndicated from my blog, and I go through phases of disabling comments on my LJ posts to drag people to comment on the blog itself. It rarely works, but I have so little interaction with people through LiveJournal these days that it barely matters. LiveJournal is dying, at least from my perspective, and I have already declared it time to quit. Perhaps now is the time.

Verdict: Yes.

7. DeviantArt

Once upon a time, I posted stories here with regularity. Now, it’s a place I visit daily on the off-chance that one of the couple of artists whose pictures I enjoy has posted something. Usually, they havent. This is what RSS was made for.

Verdict: Yes.

8. Flickr

Though firmly an amateur, I’m proud of my photos and Flickr is where I choose to show them off. It’s also where family members abroad go to see what we’re up to, and it’s my insurance against a hard disk crash erasing the bits and bytes of our memories. Just as with GMail, there’s a strong temptation to move my pictures to my own server, and run my own image gallery — but Flickr just does it better.

Verdict: No.

9. Last.fm

I’ve been a keen scrobbler since the days when people knew what “scrobble” meant, and it’s so easy to set up that I’ve always set it up on any new computer, operating system or media player. But why? I know what my taste in music is, and I have little interest in my own listening history. My friends surely have even less. The only reason I can see for continuing is that I’m proud of the amount of data I’ve generated already — and that’s no reason at all for carrying on.

Verdict: Yes.

10. Foursquare

In using Foursquare, I may be just as much a victim of the sunk cost fallacy as I was in all those Facebook games. I’ve now been “playing” for so long that I’ve stopped caring about beating my friends; stopped caring how far away the next wall-chart sticker might be. Checking in is just something I do when I arrive at a place. I’m now essentially getting nothing out of Foursquare, even though I’m still reliably giving the company and its affiliates a complete history of where I go and where I shop.

Verdict: Hell yes, ditch this yesterday.

What are your thoughts on my reasoning? Which services are you tied to, and which are you considering leaving for good? I’d be interested to know.

IE6, WordPress, and Dick Moves

Posted on July 4, 2011 by Ian

For years, anti-IE6 sentiment on the internet has been rising — and justly so. It’s ten years old, and cares so little for standards that web developers often have to code for it specifically. Quite reasonably, they — we — are a bit fed up with that. Successive versions of Internet Explorer have become much better at standards support, and it would be great if every IE user would just upgrade to IE9 tomorrow.

But life isn’t like that, especially not in the world of corporate IT.

Particularly infuriating for those with no choice over their browser are the pop-ups that tell us to “upgrade our browser for the best experience”, or worse still, landing pages that flat-out deny access to anyone not using a modern browser. The IE6 users of the world agree with you! We don’t like the browser much either. But to rub our faces in it is kind of a dick move.

With version 3.2, WordPress is incorporating one of these “upgrade your browser” popups alongside an acknowledgement that their admin dashboard may no longer work. I’m sure the many corporate bloggers who have no choice but to use WordPress from IE6 won’t be too happy about that move, but even for the rest of us just trying to get to our site dashboard from work, it’s annoying. Much as we hate those popups, our own sites (at least, their admin areas) will now be displaying them.

WordPress’ announcement contains a handy sample e-mail to send to your boss or sysadmin:

Hi there. The computer I use at [where you use the computer] is equipped with an out-of-date web browser. Internet Explorer 6 was created 10 years ago, before modern web standards, and does not support modern web applications. More and more sites and applications are dropping support for IE6, including the new version of WordPress. Even Microsoft, the makers of IE6, are counting down until IE6 goes the way of the dinosaur (see http://www.ie6countdown.com/ for more information). Can you please install an updated version of IE or any modern browser (see http://browsehappy.com for more information) on the available computers? Thank you very much.

I get the feeling that the WordPress team haven’t spent a lot of time behind the corporate firewall.

Luckily, my company has within the last year upgraded to IE8. But many others are not so lucky. From me a year ago, that sample e-mail would have had to look more like this:

Hi there. The computer I use at [where you use the computer] is equipped with an out-of-date web browser. [...] Could the Ministry of Defence please spend tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money checking and vetting a new browser, so that I can access a couple of web apps that are by no stretch of the imagination business-critical? Could this browser then be added to the list of those allowed on our networks? To my own company, please could you spend a similar sum of money testing this software, deploying it to our PCs, checking our corporate software for compatibility, modifying it where necessary, purchasing newer versions of our core business tools, and dealing with users’ technical support calls over the following months? I’m sure this can all be happily afforded within our bounteous overheads. Thank you very much.

The corporate upgrade process is long and slow, and little can be done about that. We already hate IE6 — popup banners telling us that have to upgrade it to use your site don’t make us hate IE6 more, they make us hate your site more. Please, please, stop it.

Geo-IP Security: Option Three

Posted on July 4, 2011 by Ian

Facebook, and many other online services, have an almost-clever security measure that tries to protect users against account theft. It uses your IP address to do a “Geo-IP” lookup — that is, to figure out roughly where in the world you normally access the site from. If an access attempt happens from elsewhere, the user will have to supply extra information to log in — often an “identify this person from their tagged photos” quiz.

Even if you pass this test of your identity, however, strange things sometimes happen — after a recent trip to France I found myself having to re-authenticate all my apps, and after a few days in Germany, my friend Pete could only restore normal service by changing his password.

I can see how this feature could be useful for some people — perhaps even the majority — but for some it has the potential to be a major irritation. Not only is there no way to disable it in Facebook’s case, there’s also no way of venting your frustration when it goes horribly wrong.

For this reason, I suggest that Facebook’s settings page needs the following options:

A Place for Google Plus?

Posted on June 30, 2011 by Ian

“Google+”, Google’s new stab at social networking, is doing the rounds of tech news sites today. So what’s it like — if you scored an invite, should you be using it, and if you haven’t yet, are you missing out?

If you’ve used Facebook — and let’s face it, you have — Google+’s interface will be immediately intuitive. A long feed of statuses and shared links, the ability to comment, re-share and “+1″ (i.e. like). It does photos and videos, integrating with Picasa. It does check-ins, integrating with Latitude. It does text and video chat, integrating with Google Talk. You’re probably not surprised by any of this.

It’s most un-Facebook-like feature is its “Circles” — groups of people that you can share with easily. This is possible with Facebook groups, but there it’s the exception rather than the rule. Google clearly intends for your Circles to define the way you share, chat, and use Google+.

Google+ Circles Manager

If this is sounding a lot like Diaspora to you, well… it is. Aside from the distributed nature of Diaspora, it’s virtually identical — including the slow invite procedure that causes it to be a virtual ghost town at the moment. Only time will tell if it suffers from the same problem, the root cause of which being that it is not the world’s first social network.

It has some great ideas, and if nobody were members of Twitter or Facebook already, it would be easy to say “yeah, this is great, let’s all use this”. But Google+ requires effort — time taken to invite friends, curate your groups, set up sharing preferences. It’s a reasonable amount of effort to invest for people that aren’t sure if their friends are going to use it too.

But the biggest, most important issue is that it doesn’t, at present, integrate. With anything. Now it is still under heavy development; I’m sure integrating with other services will come soon. But right now, it doesn’t talk to Twitter. It doesn’t talk to Facebook. It doesn’t have a public API to talk to third-party apps. I, and many other users, are so heavily invested in Twitter and Facebook that the transition to Google+ has to be seamless — it has to work alongside the other networks, without any extra effort, otherwise it’s just not worth the bother.

To make the point, this is how the networks and apps that I currently use interact: (yes, I was that bored)

Graph of my interaction with Social Networks

There’s not space on there for something that accepts status updates, unless it’s supported by SuccessWhale or TweetDeck. There’s no space for something that accepts check-ins, unless it syncs with Foursquare. No space for anything to use my pictures unless it can get them itself from Flickr. No space for another chat system unless I can use it from Pidgin or Skype.

I don’t mean to be negative to Google+ — it’s a good service which I’m sure, given time, will become great. One day it may be the new Facebook, a social networking behemoth that all others aim for and compare themselves to. And it actually cares somewhat about privacy (for now), which would in my opinion make it a preferable king of the social networks. Its UI is great; combining Google’s characteristic minimalism with some actual great design rather than just utilitarian blocks of colour.

But for $deity’s sake, Google, give this thing a public API. As Twitter realised five years ago, the API is as important as — if not more important than — the service itself. Let us mix it up in weird and wonderful ways with the services we’re already using, and Google+ will instantly lose most of its barrier to entry.

Twitter, Facebook and the Expectation of Privacy

Posted on June 30, 2011 by Ian

I’ve been asked a couple of times why it is that my status posts on Facebook are locked down, visible only to friends or sometimes friends-of-friends:

…but yet with the same button-click that I post to Facebook, I post exactly the same thing, publicly, on Twitter:

Surely that’s undoing all the good of my Facebook privacy settings?

The reason is because I’m not doing it for reasons of my privacy — I’m doing it for yours, and what your expectations of privacy might be.

On Twitter, a reply to me is a first-class citizen — a tweet in its own right. It has a ‘reply ID’ field to help thread conversations, and it mentions my handle using the ‘@’ convention, but otherwise it is a tweet like any other. You, the replier, have one simple privacy setting — is your account public or private? Can the world see your tweets (including that reply) or just the people you allow?

By contrast, on Facebook, a comment is a second-class citizen — a child of the original post. Implicit in this is that it inherits the original post’s privacy settings. As the commenter, you do not have control over who sees what you write. Assuming — as most have — that the original poster has accepted the default privacy options, the commenter has only one choice: either allow their reply to be public and searchable for the entire internet, or don’t reply.

On Facebook there’s no way I can let you set who can see your comments, so I do the best thing I can: make your comments visible only to the 300 or so people who I am reasonably sure are not evil. If you like, you can check the list and see if you object to anybody on it.

It’s not ideal, but it’s the best I can do to respect commenters’ privacy on a service that itself respects privacy only grudgingly.

Data and the Generation Gap

Posted on April 4, 2011 by Ian

I returned to my parents’ house after my final year at university approximately an eternity ago* to discover that they had at last entered the Cretaceous and acquired a broadband internet connection. I was less than impressed with the limits imposed on this connection, though – it came with a measly 1GB monthly data limit, which of course for them was perfectly adequate. I don’t know how much they get through these days (and I’m willing to bet they don’t either), but I suspect their 1GB limit is still firmly in place.

Well, what do you know, I have a 1GB limit too, that this month I’m getting worryingly close to. Only mine is on my mobile phone. My WiFi is always on when I’m at home, leaving at most 70 hours a week at which I might be actually getting through that mobile data. 40 of which I spend at work, sitting in front of a computer. …With internet access. Extrapolating over the month, that implies that I use around 10MB an hour, just passively, not deliberately “surfing” the net.

It’s not by any means a fair comparison, but if those bytes were all printed out as single characters, my passive data consumption is roughly a War and Peace every two minutes.

And that, not to put too fine a point on it, is fucking insane.

I’m guessing that my parents’ passive data consumption is near zero — they both have smartphones but don’t use social networks or really download any apps, and their laptop stays in its bag upstairs until they bring it out to use it. Naturally, when they’re not using it, they turn their router off to save electricity. A laudable idea, to be sure, but therein lay my second problem with my parents’ internet connection.

“Why have it on when you’re not using the internet?” they asked.

“But what if my computer wants to use the internet?”

It’s not just the rate of technological progress that is extreme, it’s the inevitable way in which it transforms our lives. Back in the late seventies, the computers my parents used at university were giant things, all mainframes and time-sharing and punch cards. Consumer hard drives of 10MB were a thing of the eighties. And here was I, not thirty years later, coming back from university with the idea that I should be able to download that amount of data every hour, without asking for it, and mostly without even looking at it. With the idea that not only should I not fight for time on a single computer, but that my computer should be left to talk to others over the internet without me being involved.

I’m not saying my folks are stuck with a 70s idea of computing; far from it. But the extent to which our lives are data-saturated now compared to thirty years ago is monumental. And I wonder what, in thirty years’ time, my son will make of our archaic blogs, social networks and video streaming.

* 2006.