Tag Archives: Twitter

Whither the Facebook Purge?

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The other day, a bout of online drama made me wonder if it wouldn’t be a good idea to make my online activities a little more private — hide my Twitter feed, for example, and maybe un-friend some people on Facebook to restrict it to just my “core” friends.

Facebook Friends List

Do I actually want to know what 281 people are doing?

But in doing so, I thought for probably the first time about the direction Facebook has taken with regards to friendships and viewing friends’ updates.

Firstly, unlike Twitter, when someone you know “friends” you on Facebook, the socially acceptable thing to do is to accept.  Rather than saying “it’s great that you’re interested in me, but I’m not as interested in you, so I won’t ‘follow’ you back,” Facebook mandates a two-way interest.  So if someone “friends” you, you either have to ignore them (and feel slightly guilty about it) or commit yourself to seeing their updates.

Secondly, Facebook is becoming less of a place to catch up with friends, and more of an identity service (which has been accelerated with the new Timeline profiles).  Your Facebook profile defines you; tells others who you are and who you know.  This adds to the impetus to “friend” people you don’t really care about that much — you’re not so much expressing an interest in another person as defining who you are.  And that, of course, also lumbers you with looking at their updates all the time.

It’s obvious that this is a common issue, and rather than backpedal or restrict the way Facebook wants to take its service, their response has been to add complex filtering options that let you block specific users and apps, view only updates from various groups, and recently, adding an automated filter that tries to guess which updates you’ll want to see.

Personally, I prefer using Facebook via the API (using SuccessWhale) which avoids the automated filter, but I must still block the updates of people I don’t care much about manually.  I’d quite like to cull my Facebook friends list down to just those whose updates I actually care about.  But is doing so a reasonable way of reducing my information overload — or willingly damaging an identity that I spent the last four years trying to curate?

Announcing: SuccessWhale version 2.0!

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Ladies and Gentlemen of the Internet, I am pleased to announce that SuccessWhale version 2.0 has just been released and is now live on SuccessWhale.com.

SuccessWhale is a web-based client for Twitter and Facebook, written in PHP, JavaScript and MySQL. It offers a multi-column view that allows users to merge together information from all their connected accounts and view it at a glance from any web browser.

The big changes between version 1.1.2 and 2.0 are:

  • Facebook support
  • Support for multiple Twitter (and Facebook) accounts
  • As many columns as you want
  • Columns that combine multiple feeds
  • Lightboxed images from Twitpic and yFrog
  • New themes
  • Numerous bug fixes!

You can see a screenshot of it in action below:

SuccessWhale Screenshot

I would particularly like to thank Alex Hutter, Hugo Day, Erica Renton and Rg Enzon, whose help in finding bugs and suggesting new features has been instrumental in bringing SuccessWhale up to version 2.0 today.

SuccessWhale is an open source project, and the source code is licenced under the GPL v3.

Could I Live Without…?

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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.

A Place for Google Plus?

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“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

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

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.

Google+ for Android - Main FeedGoogle+ for Android - Friends & Circles

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

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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:

Facebook post

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

Twitter post

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.

SuccessWhale: Considering the Reply UI

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What was once my simple Twitter client, SuccessWhale, is undergoing a lot of changes in the build-up to version 2. One of the biggest changes is the support for multiple services, of which Facebook is the first to be integrated. This, combined with the Twitter website’s new design, brings into question SuccessWhale’s “reply” UI.

There’s no question that there should be a big “type your status update here” box at the top. Both incarnations of Twitter do this, Facebook does this, every non-mobile client (and a few mobile ones too) does it. It’s what users expect, and I see no reason not to stick with it.

About a thousand years of internet time ago (2010), replying to a tweet from Twitter’s website re-used that top status box for the reply. The user clicked the “reply” button, and the status box got pre-filled with “@” plus the username of the person they were replying to. It looked like this:

Old Twitter Reply UI

SuccessWhale, then solely a Twitter client, copied this behavior. Its reply UI involved clicking a “reply” button and having its main “publish status update” box update with the replied-to user’s name, like this:

SuccessWhale version 1 Reply UI

Now SuccessWhale is attempting to be a Facebook client, too. On Twitter, replies to a status update are given virtually the same prominence as the original status. On Facebook however, posts are more thread-based, with comments on a status update clearly being daughter objects of the original update. Status updates themselves use “newest at the top” order, just like Twitter, but comments on an update are “newest at the bottom“. So on Facebook, it makes sense for the “reply” field to be inline, like this:

Facebook Reply UI

In playing around with the UI for SuccessWhale version 2, I introduced an inline reply box, which works something like this:

Successwhale version 2 Prototype Reply UI

A third reply UI was introduced with the new Twitter website – a floating “lightbox”-style reply area which appears when the “reply” button is clicked. Like this:

New Twitter Reply UI

So, between the two sites that SuccessWhale currently talks to, we have three UI paradigms for replying to a status update. I feel it is very important for SuccessWhale to have a consistent UI for replying, particularly when we introduce columns that mix updates from Twitter, Facebook and potentially other sources.

So, my question to SuccessWhale users is: which one do you like best? I have no particular attachment to any of them, so let’s get our democracy on. Your choice is between:

  1. Using the main status update box (like SuccessWhale version 1 and old Twitter)
  2. Using an inline box (like Facebook)
  3. Using a pop-up ‘lightbox’ (like new Twitter)

The comments are yours, vote away!

The Pulse

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Another afternoon of high-volume Pendulum and high-caffeine brain, blazing through work on one screen while flicking my attention over two others. Two news pages and four Twitter lists are open, poised. They all refresh automatically, but each time my eyes focus on them I reach for the manual refresh button purely on instinct.

It’s a constant stream of news that’s in real terms utterly useless to me. I’ve never been to Egypt and I don’t know anyone there. I don’t know a lot about Mubarak’s regime or any of the alternatives. In a world without the internet, maybe I’d buy a paper tomorrow and read about it with mild interest. But the internet itself, and the real-time access it brings, can elevate any topic to the point of obsession.

Something big is going down in a country thousands of miles away, in a country where everyone’s phones are offline, internet access has been cut, and news agencies’ cameras have been conviscated. But still the news comes. Phone calls translated into tweets, live blogs pushed byte by byte over satellite modems, handheld camcorders standing in for the lost news cameras.

The immediacy of it, the raw transport of information from reality to text and video, the process itself kicks off a little spark of adrenaline, inducing a stress response, refresh, refresh, refresh until the source stops broadcasting, then find a new one. Never stop. Disconnection is death.

The white-hot pulse of news flashes upwards from Tahrir Square out to low-earth orbit, back to the surface, across millions of spiderweb miles of cable and straight into my forebrain.

The real world feels so slow sometimes. It can be minutes between tweets.

It’s a continent away and it doesn’t affect my life at all. But I don’t want to be a day late reading the news — I don’t want to be 30 seconds late.

Each day I carry around a plethora of devices that let me avoid that horrible lateness; allow me to find the pulse from wherever in the world it starts and catch it before it’s had a minute to grow cold. One day, we will be able to catch that pulse and ride it with a mere thought — and for me, that day can’t come soon enough.

For the Discerning Lady or Gentleman, SuccessWhale version 1.1

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The sudden proliferation of peoples’ syndicated tweets from sources such as Foursquare and Fallen London annoys me far more than it should. Any more sensible old grouch would pick up his pipe, don slippers and write a strongly-worded letter to the local newspaper about how this ‘checking in’ business is corrupting society.

Instead, I made my Twitter client block them. Also, you can now do it too!

SuccessWhale users will now see a link at the top-right of the interface called ‘Manage Banned Phrases’. Clicking it will take you to a page where you can specify a semicolon-separated list of things you don’t want to see, such as “4sq.com;fallenlondon.com;bieber“. Once confirmed, any tweets in any timeline that are sucky enough to contain one of these phrases will be hidden from your view.

Twitter: now 12% less full of shite!

An extra feature has been rolled into this release, which is the ‘Reply All’ button. It looks like this: It only appears where two or more people are having a conversation (three or more if you’re included too). Clicking on it starts a reply to everyone mentioned, not just the tweet’s originator. So if @Alice is talking to @Bob, and you click ‘Reply All’ on one of her tweets, your entry box will then read “@Alice @Bob”.

So that’s version 1.1. Share and enjoy!

SuccessWhale is a free, open, multi-platform web-based Twitter client. It’s hosted at SuccessWhale.com, and you can find out more about SuccessWhale here. It’s GPL-licenced, so you can download yourself a copy too if you want one.

Adrift in Time

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As Mark pointed out to me, it’s probably rather strange to pick for your Best Man someone who you’ve seen only three times in as many years. But although some small part of my brain insists that some time has passed since I left university, it’s easily overruled by the rest.

I mean, graduation was about four weeks ago, right? And Joseph’s about three weeks old. Wait, what? Three years? Does not compute.

In that time I’ve made some friends, it’s true — and don’t get me wrong, they are good friends — but seeing someone once a week, or once a month, just doesn’t register in my brain as strongly as do those I lived with, even though the time I lived with them was long ago.

To my shame I’ve spoken to those University friends less and less as time has gone on. The majority I don’t even regularly IM anymore — we’ve become Twitter friends, Facebook friends, people who comment on each others’ blogs. I feel a strange kind of buzz talking to any of them, even just over IM, but yet I barely do it. I bash out a 140-character reply to some tweet of theirs, and my need for contact with my best friends is sated for another few hours. Normally I don’t feel too guilty about that, but sometimes it hits me that I’ve been doing that for four long years, and then, as now, I realise just how bad that is.

So yes, it’s really bloody strange that what I think of as my best friends, and my Best Man-to-be among them, are really those friends that I talk to the least of all. But having isolated the cause of that as my own reluctance to start instant messenger chats, at least I have something I can work on.

Breaking Out of Twitter

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Earlier this evening, @HolyHaddock linked to an entry on Brian Hurt‘s blog entitled “Why I Quit Twitter”. In it, he argues for his leaving Twitter on the grounds that it is not a good place for debate and extended discussion:

If you want to debate me, I’m open to it. But for the debate to not be pointless, that means it has to be held somewhere where ideas can be explored and complex arguments can be presented. In email, in blog posts, in comments, somewhere where there is room.

Twitter Conversation Thread

Figure 1. The Problem

Which is fair enough. I would argue that Twitter has every right to be bad at conversation — that’s not what it was created for. Once upon a time, it asked a simple question: “What are you doing?”. The user base has shaped Twitter over the years, most notably in the formalisation of @usernames and #tags which began simply as trends among users. But it has stuck resolutely to its 140-character limit, without which I think the service would change for the poorer.

I have no real argument with Brian Hurt here — his reason for leaving is a fine one, and he’s certainly not suggesting anyone else should necessarily leave for that reason. Personally, I didn’t come to Twitter for extended conversation, and I won’t be leaving for the lack of it.

But ironically @HolyHaddock and I did discuss this problem on Twitter, and it was probably not long before the conversation became annoying to those that follow us both. (To double up the irony, I was also using a pastebin to reply in more than 140 characters.)

I think the real issue here is that although Twitter does not well support conversations, people tweet things that are likely to start conversations, and there is no real way to break out of Twitter once the conversation has started. If we assume that Twitter has no intention of allowing long — even infinite-length — replies, then if there is to be any way to ‘break out’, it must be through another service.

Now the friendliness of the Twitter API makes it very easy for other sites to integrate with Twitter, allow users to sign in with their Twitter credentials, and pull tweets across for display. But as I see it, there are a few issues that would need to be resolved with a potential service:

  • Pulling Across. If a conversation starts across multiple tweets, these would need to be pulled across to a ‘break out’ conversation so that things already said don’t have to be re-said. It’s easy to identify the tweet that started it all, but no way in the API to find all replies to it. Starting from the most recent reply, one can find what it is in reply to and follow the thread all the way up, but if the conversation has branched, you wouldn’t capture it all.
  • Branching vs Single-Threading. Multiply-branching threads aren’t too much of a problem on Twitter, but displaying them properly may become an issue on the ‘break out’ service. Reducing everything to a single thread — blog comment style — is the alternative, but this could lead to some very confusing conversations, not least if some users’ tweets are protected and thus not visible to certain other users.
  • Reporting Back. Should anything be passed back to Twitter to let other users know where the conversation is continuing? How would we do that in a way that’s informative but not spammy? Should we instead rely on the user that ‘broke out’ to let the others know?
  • Permanence. Would there be a slight mistrust of the ‘break out’ service, meaning that users would prefer not to use it in case it disappears from the face of the ‘net tomorrow? How would we overcome this, and how would we allow users to create some permanent archive (e.g. download) of the ‘broken out’ thread in case they have discussed something meaningful and worth keeping?
  • Wave. Someone must have already done a Google Wave bot that will pull in tweets and let people do this, surely?
  • Popularity. How would we let people know that this service exists, and how popular would it be — how many people want this kind of service? (Many could be as much of a problem as few.)

Tagging onto the Google Wave point, is there a service like this that already exists, in Wave or otherwise? Any thoughts, oh great interweb hive-mind?