It Could Be Worse

I’ve been a member of our local Freecycle mailing list for a few years, successfully using it to offload and acquire various items, from a double futon bed to an mp3 player.

In 2006, Giles Turnbull blogged about Freecycle’s shortcomings, from a usability and webapp point of view. It boils down to “Freecycle is a great idea unsuited to living inside a mailing list once the size of the list is >100 people”. Giles’ proposed solution was a web app, and his post contains some pretty detailed design descriptions. I’m sure that there’s an interaction designer in Giles trying to get out

(There’s probably something interesting there about group psychology and Dunbar’s Number, but I’m more interested in finding a practical solution.)

Other people have tried to build Freecycle-like philosophy in a webapp form, e.g. SnaffleUp, but they (so far at least, but it’s early days) lack the one thing Freecycle has in spades: a critical mass of users. Oh, and a snappy brand.

What if, instead of building a Freecycle-like webapp in competition with Freecycle, an app were built on top of the existing mailing lists, teasing out all that lovely data and metadata and making it queryable, sliceable, diceable and geo-plottable?

There are three pieces of information pertinent to an item on Freecycle:

• what it is
• where it is
• whether it’s still available

There’s no API to Yahoo Groups at the moment, but it’s possible to get Freecycle mails sent to a mail account on a *nix box, where they could be parsed and inserted into a database for querying by item name, description or location. If we group items by sender, it should be possible to determine that when a “taken” follows an “offered” with the same/similar subject line, then that item has changed from being available to unavailable.

All of that data is present in a Freecycle email, but the inconsistent way in which people format their subject lines makes parsing out the item and location a bit of a challenge.

An ideal Freecycle subject line looks like this:

[BathFreecycle] OFFER: Cat basket (Combe Down, Bath)

However, they are often more like this:

[BathFreecycle] offered cat basket bath

(As an aside, Bath’s Freecycle list is a great test case, as the name of the city is also the name of an item. Supposing someone wrote “Offer: baby bath”, one would assume that they weren’t trying to offload their offspring but had merely omitted their location. Formalising this in the parser would be hard, if not impossible, such that it may have to be flagged for review by a human.)

A way around this would be to prime the parser with a list of possible locations. Once you remove the list name, the offer/wanted/taken/received prefix and the location, you’re left with the item.

The variability of people’s use of grammar, spelling and format (despite the fact that your messages are moderated until you’ve demonstrated that you can write a subject line properly) makes the subject parser the biggest challenge in implementing this solution.

All of this does raise the issue of increased ease of, and cross-group, querying. Already there are scammers on Freecycle lists, making bogus offers then directing people toward pyramid schemes and the like. Also, it’s seen as bad form to post the same item to more than one group simultaneously; having said that, it’s ok to subscribe to several lists (if you can keep up with the volume of email).

This geocoded database would make it much easier for people to snap up “big ticket” items, possibly to sell on (it happens at the moment). If Freecycle’s aim is purely to keep usable or servicable items out of landfill, does this really matter? Also, I can imagine the central Freecycle organisation not being happy if this “hack” were built on Freecycle outwith their blessing and control.

I know other people find Freecycle frustrating. Does this (very rough) outline of a solution sound like it makes sense?

(This is turning into a marathon: parts one, two, three and four precede this one. I can’t guarantee your sanity should you choose to read that lot.)

Joshua Porter: Leveraging Cognitive Bias in Social Design

“Rationality be damned…”

We (humans) work on limited information to make a decision – the Bandwagon Effect.

Heuristics

Heuristics are a shortcut to making a decision. They’re useful (else we would likely never make a decision, make a decision very, very slowly and/or go insane in the process) but they are subject to cognitive bias.

Design-related biases

• Including Not Invented Here (which I loathe; hey – I have a bias against it!)

Representation bias

• leveraged by Freshbooks to go after the type of audience they want
• Yelp.com’s reviewer of the day
  • these are power users that are showcased as being representative of the wider community, even though they’re not

Loss aversion

More people would take a bet on a 50% chance of a win than a 50% chance of loss, even though the result is the same!

Losses loom larger than gains [as illustrated by the LHC switch-on this week, and the focus on the infinitesimally small chance of earth-swallowing black holes]. For instance, here is OpenID described in terms of gains and losses:

“Log in anywhere with your domain!” – gains

“Don’t forget another password!” – losses

Any feature described in terms of future savings is probably better described in terms of an immediate loss.

Ownership bias

People value things more when they have a sense of ownership, and this is reflected in the names of many online services: Youtube, MySpace, myhotel. Also, Flickr is littered with “you” descriptions.

This ownership bias is a factor in the 9x effect (mentioned during Joshua’s workshop), where sign-up is actually nine times harder than we think.

On Slide.com, sign-up is deferred until later; the user gets to make something first, creating a sense of ownership (and the need to avoid losing that which they’ve created – more loss aversion).

More to come. Yes, really.

(Parts one, two and three precede this…)

After the workshop ended, a few of us decamped to Komedia Bar for an ale; at 7pm it was time for the emerging tradition that is the Pre-Pre-Party Burgers, next door at Gourmet Burger Kitchen. GBK had reserved half the restaurant for dConstruct attendees, so it wasn’t too difficult to get a seat. I stuck my coat on an empty chair on a table otherwise occupied by Ross, Mark and Adnan, all of whom were fine burger-eating company, despite having never met me before in their lives

Burgers eaten, we headed for the Pre-dConstruct Party, at Po Na Na’s in The Lanes, the area that was originally the fishing village that eventually became Brighton. The party was sponsored by Chi.mp, a still-in-beta-as-I-write-this service for claiming your identity online and doing aggregated life-streaming. I’ve signed up for a beta invite, but no word yet. Still, I got a free t-shirt and baseball cap, neither of which I’m likely to wear, unfortunately. The t-shirt says “Never mind the bollocks, here comes Chi.mp” and is extra-large so looks like a tent on me: two good reasons not to wear it to work. The baseball cap is one of those trucker’s caps that ironically fashionable people were wearing a few years ago, but since I may be ironic or fashionable but not at the same time, I decided that it’s not for me.

This was to be the start of a large well of freebie-related disappointment at this year’s dConstruct. I had planned to stock my wardrobe for the coming year but, alas, it seems that the economic woes of the wider world have reached Noomeejaland and no-one wants to spend on quality giveaways! What we need is more VC cash to flood into the industry… no, wait: we don’t.

Anyway: there were free drinks, at least, so it’s not all doom and gloom. It was good to see some familiar faces from Bristol and Bath (Alex and Laura Francis, Dan Dixon, Mel Kirk, Ryan Carson, Keir Whitaker) plus Mike and Dominic from Carsonified, who I’d not met before. I also got chatting to some new faces: Andy and Geoff and a couple of guys who work at Cardiff Uni and who’ve just been through the same Groupwise -> Lotus Notes transition that we went through a few years ago (”but at least Groupwise IMAP actually worked!”).

I’m far too old to be partying all night, and I have two young children, so I’m tired by 10pm these days. I didn’t stay very long at the Pre-Party, where the music was so loud that it wasn’t really possible to hold a conversation. I do sound old, don’t I? Off to bed, said Zebedee.

Next morning, breakfast with friends! Chris Hall and Alex and Laura Francis were also staying at The Kemp Townhouse, so it was a more sociable affair than the day before. The Smoothie of the Day was the same as yesterday’s, suggesting that it’s actually the Smoothie of More Than One Day; it was, nonetheless, delicious. I started with muesli as before, but followed it up with pancakes with smoked salmon. This was a mistake: the pancakes were far too filling compared to the muffin that you get with Eggs Benedict or Florentine, and I couldn’t eat it all. I hate wasting food.

The Actual Conference

As the conference agenda was printed in full on the attendee badge, I could relax a bit; opening remarks weren’t due until 10am. I checked out of the hotel and wandered over to the Brighton Dome, venue for the conference. I realised part-way there that I’d forgotten my invoice, without which I’d fail to claim back expenses. One phone call to the hotel later and the manager promised to leave it with Chris, who was staying the Friday night as well.

With no more checking in to do (as I had my pass from the workshop day) I grabbed a coffee, bumped into Adrian again and we found a seat for the talks.

After an intro from Richard Rutter and Glenn Jones (of Madgex, one of the sponsors) it was time to hear from…

Steven Jones: “The Urban Web”

(Steven is author The Ghost Map, an account of Cholera, Information Design and Social Networks in 19th Century London)

Steven gave a fascinating account of how a doctor (amateur InfoDesigner), a vicar (social networker with hyper-local knowledge) and the availability of open data in a standardised format led to the tracing of Soho’s 1854 Cholera outbreak (the penultimate one in the city) back to a contaminated water pump outside 48 Broad St.

These principles, discovered during the book’s writing, led to the development of Outside.in a (US-only, atm) web site that aggregates hyper-local knowledge, even from non-geocoded sources. This seems fraught with the risk of inaccuracy or outright wrongness; in fact Leisa Reichelt (one of last year’s speakers and a user experience designer) Tweeted: Not convinced by the premise or the implementation of outside.in. I guess it takes some people less time than others to see through a web site’s glossy presentation (and Outside.in is glossy) to see the reality underneath. (Not that glossy presentation is bad, it’s just that it needs to be glossy presentation of something that’s functionally sound.)

Anyway, if you can look past that, Steven dubbed this stuff “The Geo-Web” and gave an example of Outside.in being like virtual CCTV: a van exploded in Brooklyn, where he lives, someone Tweeted about it and it (somehow) ended up in a geo-specific alert/feed.

But, as Chris Hall pointed out, there are massive trust issues with all of this (like many Web projects, the creators of which seem to assume everyone’s as nice and cuddly as they are) and the opportunity for cheap, non-destructive “social” terrorism, or at least mischief.

Aleks Krotoski: “Playing the Web”

(Aleks writes for The Guardian, is a gamer and an academic. She’s also a very lucid, funny speaker – not what I’d expected (which was someone rather arch) from reading her stuff in the paper.)

Her talk’s tagline is “how gaming makes the internet (and the world) a better place”. There’s a Games world out there, and a Web world; it’s not often the two collide in any meaningful way.

Web people love games. Why? Stickiness! (which leads to advertising and profit, usually). Games people, however, aren’t really bothered about the Web.

• It’s not about the graphics – it’s about play.
• It’s not even about the story – it’s about play.

Games are part of the Experience Economy, which “is a way to make something fun sound really dull”

How do they do it?

1. Controlled systems
   • but gamers feel the need for openness
   • do anything, go anywhere, meet anyone
   • there can be to much openness, though; it’s a fine line
2. Enabling systems
   • The Internet and the Web have always had community
   • Games only started getting community later on
   • There are people selling games for Second Life for Real Cash Money on eBay; this is virtual stuff with real value
3. Psychological systems
   • Games don’t have to be active – see PMOG, which is based on your “real Web” activity

There’s a feedback loop between gamers and game designers

• They often overlap (i.e. many game designers are gamers)
• there’s little awareness of formal HCI best practice…
• but they get it right by gut feel [as do web devs... sometimes?]

Gamers are a pretty homogenous bunch: most likely (though not exclusively) male kidults; web users, on the other hand, are much more diverse: they are anybody and everybody.

The challenge, then, is to talk to and work with people from the world of games and meet them half-way.

“gamers make the best designers” a lesson there, decision makers where I work often don’t use the internet much — Chris Hall

Should people who are immersed in Web culture have a greater decision-making clout at IOP Publishing? That’s a tough one, as it may be that “ordinary” (i.e. non-Web-immersed) users may be left cold by services designed “by gut feel” only. User-centred (and activity-centred) design is of paramount importance if we are to be truly “customer focused”.

To be continued…

(See part one for some fascinating travel and eating anecdotes, and part two for the first half of Joshua Porter’s workshop)

Designing for sign-up

Contrary to what I (and presumably others) thought, this isn’t about the sign-up form! It’s more to do with the need to articulate the core value of what’s being offered to the user. In pseudo-physics terms, it’s about converting potential energy into kinetic energy.

Research has been done that suggests that sign-up is nine times harder than we think it is:

• users overvalue their current solution by three times, and
• providers overvalue their offering by three times

Getting from interested to sign-up – there are three types of visitors:

1. I know I want to sign up
2. I need to know more
3. I’m sceptical

To meet those three visitor types where they are, there are three strategies for sign-up:

• immediate engagement – you can use the site and still see what’s in it for me (WIIFM) without signing up
• articulate benefits and features
• use levels of description, e.g.
  • Netflix.com sign-up screen
  • Tripit.com

The carrot vs. the stick: Netvibes lets you do stuff first, without signing up. If you want to save your stuff, though, you have to register. This is a stick, rather than carrot, approach but it can work well.

Luke Wroblewski calls this “progressive engagement”, though Joshua prefers the term “instant engagement”. Some examples are Slide.com and Freshbooks

Reputation

“Social problems don’t have technical solutions”

The Yahoo Developer Network have some design patterns for reputation in their pattern library.

Reputation rewards need to be tied to quality as well as quantity; you need to reward (and highlight) desired behaviour. The example given was that of Heidi Klausner, a reviewer on Amazon whose number of reviews equates to >5.5 per day since 2001. There is some speculation out there about her authenticity (i.e. whether she’s actually a team of reviewers) but her reviews seem to contain nothing that can’t be gleaned from the back cover of the books in question.

What’s interesting is that, while no-one will get anywhere near Ms. Klausner in raw number of reviews, other reviewers perform better using other, more intelligent metrics. Some have a much better ratio of helpful reviews to total reviews; others have more reviews marked as helpful.

Reputation isn’t just about people’s behaviour and actions; personal profiles contribute as well. “The profile must fit the domain”, however, so don’t ask users for the name of their dog on a business-focused site, for instance. Yelp.com is a good example of a site that combines lots of different reputation patterns.

“Optimise for value-added behaviour”

Reciprocity

On LinkedIn, when someone recommends a colleague they’ve worked with, it’s very rare indeed that the recommended person doesn’t return in kind with a recommendation (so much so, that a failure to return the compliment is seen as an insult). This feeling of indebtedness can also apply to websites that users place value on, e.g. Amazon (again!).

Amazon now order their reviews by most helpful, not by date, and they display the rating spread (i.e. how many of each star rating), not just the average rating. 1-star reviews are important because people want to know the worst experience people have had, as well as the best, so they don’t buy a bad product.

eBay’s feedback profile contains lots of data. The join date is a very important piece of information; a longer membership period increases trust. eBay removed reciprocity from seller/buyer feedback as it created a toxic relationship between the two parties: sellers wouldn’t leave feedback until a buyer left positive feedback; if a buyer left negative feedback, the seller would respond in kind. Ultimately, who needs to know how good a buyer is? Apparently, eBay had wanted to remove the seller->buyer feedback for a few years but eventually bit the bullet and did it.

What can’t you do?

• Amazon.com: you can’t rate a review as helpful (or not) from a reviewer’s list of reviews. If possible, this would allow bulk, targeted fanning or hating of specific reviewers, taking the focus away from the review and onto the reviewer. An ad hominem form of rating, if you like.
• You can’t Digg someone’s Diggs on your Digg friends’ activity or profile page – again, this would make it about the person, not what they had Dugg.
• Facebook’s newsfeed had users up-in-arms when it launched, as they saw it as an invasion of privacy. None of it was data that was new or previously unavailable; it was just aggregated in one place for the first time. Facebook’s response was to introduce fine-grained privacy controls, which apparently no-one really uses but their mere existence pacifies people, making them feel in control.

Metrics (for pirates – AARRR!)

The usage lifecycle goes like this:

Unaware -> Interested -> First-time use -> Regular use -> Passionate use

Compare to this metrics scheme: AARRR, which stands for:

• *A*cquisition
• *A*ctivation
• *R*etention
• *R*eferral, leading to…
• *R*evenue (profit!)

Your sign-up process is a funnel; it’s very likely that, of 100 people who hit a landing page, only 60 will make it to the sign-up form, and only 20 will complete sign-up and hit the confirmation page. All funnels are leaky. [It's possible to track funnels in Google Analytics, though better solutions exist, apparently]

However, number of users is not a valuable metric (take note, sales and marketing!). What is important is engagement, but how do we measure that?

Engagement analysis

Retention is a good measure of engagement. If people keep coming back, you’re doing something right.

• Do a Cohort Analysis on registered users who visit or do some other activity on the site.

The Viral Loop

How well are users bringing new users into the system?

• Word of mouth
• Embed a widget
• Mimic an action (e.g. Facebook apps)
• Forced sign-up
• Direct invite

The problem with Metrics

“You get what you optimise for”

“At Blogger, we determined that our most critical metric was number of posts. An increase in posts meant that people were not just creating blogs, but updating them, and more posts would drive more readership, which would drive more users, which would drive more posts.” — Evan Williams, founder of Blogger.com (and Twitter)

Fin

That’s the end of the workshop notes – check back for the conference write-up!

To be continued…

(If you’re short on things to do, part one contains fascinating details of my journey and dinner)

Thursday morning brought a slight respite from the high winds and torrential rain of the previous night. Breakfast in the hotel was really, really good: muesli/dried cranberries and yoghurt followed by my choice of Eggs Benedict. Oh, and the Smoothie of the Day.

Looking at the map, I reckoned that Clearleft’s offices (the location of the workshops) were about half a mile away – I estimated a 10 minute walk. The slightly less-than-crow-flying route meant that I breezed in the door on the dot of 9.30, the stated start time. But lo! That’s just the coffee and pastries; no need to panic.

After signing in and obtaining my badge-cum-programme, I was waved at by none other than Adrian Long, who I’d not seen since leaving Uni in 1999. C’est un monde petit.

The actual workshop: Social Web Design – From Strategy to Interface.

The workshop was led by Joshua Porter, who’s ex-UIE but now runs his own business, specialising in the design of social web apps. He famously (well, in web design terms) wrote The Del.icio.us Lesson blog post, defining how “personal value precedes network value” or, basically, a site needs to be useful to one person over just being useful to many people; it will become useful to many people if people use it because it’s useful to them.

A few aphorisms to start with:

• “What worked in the Industrial Age doesn’t work in the Information Age” i.e. where once each user of a mass-produced product had essentially the same experience, now each user’s experience is highly individual.
• “Your audience is the only thing that matters”
  • in-house designers have a massive advantage over consultants: domain knowledge
  • there should be no barrier between the design team and the audience
• The recent focus on usability is great, but “if ease of use were the only requirement, we would all be riding tricycles” (Douglas Englebart, creator of the computer mouse)

We need usable plus useful. How are we providing daily value to our users?

Strategy: finding focus

There have been countless Web sites whose strategy is mashing up two other Web sites; this is a strategy of mashing up two other strategies and, as a result, is not really a strategy.

Over time, it is likely that your audience tends towards being made up of 15-year-old girls who, because of their lack of inhibition, will sign up for anything. Boston.com’s registration page was cited as an example of a site that, like our own Community Websites, expect sign-up before giving very much value to the user. The big problem is that, if you make people sign up before doing anything, you’ll end up with the wrong audience (the aforementioned 15-year-old girls).

This is a Fuzzy Strategy or, putting it bluntly, “Old-school business thinking”: where making money is the primary goal; the goal influences strategy and therefore influences design.

If the user activity is “create a widget”, the old-school, fuzzy approach can be shown like this:

Landing page -> Sign-up ($) -> User creates widget

In the rearranged, activity-centred approach, it goes like this:

Landing page -> User creates widget -> Sign-up ($)

In the second model, money-making is less of a focus than meeting user needs. [These principles are very much in line with the philosophy of Obliquity, though the word was never mentioned. Obliquity is the idea that "overcoming geographic obstacles, winning decisive battles or meeting global business targets are the type of goals often best achieved when pursued indirectly".]

Design Strategy

Moving to a model of “user-value first, money second” requires long-term thinking, as value is created over time. If we do this, User Experience (UX) must be primary, and drives all other strategies.

To do this, we must optimise for use. If we create something that people love to use, the business will be fine. [N.B. IOPP has a stated aim to be customer-focused]

Why are we still struggling with this stuff?

• competing interests
• political infighting
• short-term thinking
• buzzword bingo
• no ongoing evaluation
• fake strategies

“Software doesn’t usually fail because of a lack of programming talent… it usually fails because the talent is not pointed in the right direction” — Joshua Porter

Joshua then asked us “what’s your favourite software”. The answers were all applications that are very focused on a very specific activity, and do that one thing well. This is consistent with both Unix and the Web: small pieces, loosely joined.

Advocates of User-centred Design often suggest asking “Who are your users?” In social software design, though, it’s better to ask “what are your users doing?” [N.B. On our sites, once upon a time, the answer to that question would have been "reading", but the list of activities is now much, much longer]. This is Activity-centred Design, or…

• What do people have to do to make you successful?
• What are you making people better at?
• What are your users passionate about?

An interesting comparison was made between “traditional” bulletin boards (giving discussion & support in an unstructured way) with social networking sites (with specific, aggregated data) e.g. Patients Like Me – users input very specific details of their illness and symptoms, and over time the system determines who their “neighbours” are).

Lessons from Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath

• The Commander’s Intent: “if we do nothing else, we must…”
• Feature Creep can kill strategy

Social Objects

Social Objects are the things that users work/play with on any given site, e.g.:

• Flickr -> photos
• Upcoming -> events
• Last.fm -> music
• YouTube -> videos

On YouTube, greater than 50% of the page real-estate is taken up by these social objects.

To find out what your objects are and the activities users carry out on them, it’s often necessary to conduct structured research. When you’ve discovered your objects (nouns), you need to find your verbs (actions). Social features are verbs that involve more than one person.

To be continued…

Last week I made the annual pilgrimage to Brighton for dConstruct – one of the UK’s leading grass-roots Web conferences. Now in its fourth year, the theme of the conference this time was “Designing the social Web”, a topic increasingly of relevance to what we do at IOP Publishing.

“Social Software” is merely software that gets better the more people use it; it’s not necessarily about creating the next Facebook or MySpace, and many (though not all) sites could benefit from social features. While we, as a company, have dabbled in several of the Social Web’s themes (blogs, commenting, registration, social bookmark links etc.) and have oft-stated aims of engaging with communities of interest in the world of Physics, it’s probably fair to say that our efforts have been piecemeal and not informed by any overall Social Web strategy. I could start going off on one about the need for multi-disciplinary Web teams, but I’ll save that for BathCamp at the weekend…

In previous years, I’ve come away from the dConstruct conference wanting more depth; 45-minute sessions are necessarily biased towards an overview or taster of any given topic. This year, I booked onto Joshua Porter’s workshop “Social Web Design: from Strategy to Interface” in order to get a bit more substance.

I left Bristol on Wednesday afternoon, taking a slightly odd train journey via Bristol Parkway and Reading. Four hours later, I was in Brighton. A taxi ride took me to the hotel (Kemp Townhouse), which was small but perfectly formed; after checking in, I wandered out for food. Knowing that geeks and healthy food were unlikely to be in close proximity over the following days, I chose Sawadee, a Thai restaurant in St. James’ Street where I had a new experience: asking for a table for one. No matter, though; the next two days were bound to give plenty of social interaction so some peace and quiet was welcome, and the food was tasty but relatively healthy: Thai fishcakes followed by pan-fried cod in a sweet-and-sour sauce with rice.

After that, I returned to the hotel to get some rest before the learning-and-networking onslaught to follow.

To be continued…

Today I got embroiled in a debate with Pete and Brian on Twitter about the term Web 2.0 and its increasing meaninglessness. This was only a few days after jumping on an old school friend’s use of the term, citing ReadWriteWeb’s …There is only the Web.

I recall Phil saying I was “all about the 2.0″. And I still am, in that I think the New Web needs to be about real community if you’re going to profess that your site is a Community Website. With the increasingly common use of the term “Web 3.0″ (usually taken to mean The Semantic Web) in The Valley and similar bleeding-edge places, and “Web 4.0″ (both serious and satirical) the danger is that we’ll find, like Microsoft did with its software, that the version numbers soon get a little silly.

Their answer was to use years instead (Office 2003 etc.), but the answer for the Web is not to use artificial version numbers at all. It’s not as if there is anything fundamentally different, technologically, between the so-called “Web 1.0″ and “Web 2.0″. It was always meant to be a state of mind or a way of seeing the Web experience, not a particular technology. Web 2.0 (or the concept meant by it) is any, all or none of the following:

• Ajax / rich interfaces / RIAs
• Blogs
• Wikis
• Social networking sites, like MySpace, Facebook etc.
• User-generated content (YouTube etc.)
• Forums (though these are as old as the hills)
• New things that almost defy description (Twitter)
• “Communities” (however you define them)
• Mashups, APIs and easily-linked resources

The trouble is that you can ask ten different people “what is Web 2.0?” and you’ll likely get ten different answers, possibly including some of the above list.

I do believe that Tim O’Reilly couldn’t have predicted what the monster he created has become, and the term was actually useful in 2003 to get a handle on the ways in which newer Web sites differed from old ones. But that time has passed, and the term “Web 2.0″ (and all succeeding x.0 versions) needs to be retired. Now.

As I write this, I’m trying (and failing) to load twitter.com/home. Oh – it just timed out. According to Is Twitter Down? it’s not down, but I can’t get to it. There have been no updates on my timeline for two hours now, which is quite rare for a working day.

I just wonder whether Twitter has reached a natural end. You know “it was fun while it lasted” sort of thing. And it was fun, until relatively recently. Then the number of “spam” followers increased, thanks to the ease of scripting against the API, no doubt; on the other hand, the API also allowed fantastic tools like the Twitter Twerp Scanner to me made, so I don’t think Twitter shouldn’t have an API.

With or without an API, the problem with Twitter (as has been said numerous times) is that it doesn’t scale. It’s a centralised (if clustered) service unlike email, blogs or Plain ol’ Websites, which can exist anywhere and conform (roughly) to a standard. To Tweet, you must Be On Twitter. This is its fatal flaw while being central to the way it works. Mike Arrington wrote on Techcrunch a while ago on how Twitter might be decentralised.

Twitter: a highly-addictive social experiment that just goes to show, by counter-example, the merits of decentralisation.

BT, Virgin and Talktalk broker deal with Phorm.com, who intercept internet traffic, set anonymous cookies and deliver targeted ads…

There are lots of comments on this Guardian article, including this one from martinusher:

I had a quick look at this system today on a technical website and it appears that the system effectively routes all your web traffic through a proxy server which records your browsing habits (and, while its about it, obscures your browsing habits from anyone else downstream from it). This is why they require the cooperation of your ISP – they have to intercept your network traffic before it passes onto the Internet proper. (Typically the link to an ISP is a point to point link just like a dial-up even if you’re using broadband.) This has implications far beyond just figuring out what you’re doing so they can feed you ‘relevant’ advertisements; its nothing less than packet by packet control of everything you do.

This may sound infeasible because of the volume of traffic but a quick look at the equipment suppliers will show that its not — the industry is quite capable of examining and categorizing everything you do CIA style but won’t at the moment because its not cost-effective. The ads will give it the motivation to install the kit, the other uses will follow.

Its also got the potential to cut off the air supply to sites like Google.

– You might call it "resistance": 95% say they’ll opt out of ISP’s data-sharing deal

See also:

• Bad phorm
• On Techdirt: Phorm.com are an (ex?) spyware firm
• More Phorm horrors

Update: seems I was a little late to the party (I only noticed it when it made it to The Guardian). The Register’s been rather prolific in chronicling the various angles on this, including the the possibility that BT lied as to its involvement and that the traffic snooping actually violates several laws:

• ISP data deal with former ’spyware’ boss triggers privacy fears
• Data pimping: surveillance expert raises illegal wiretap worries
• BT pimped customer web data to advertisers last summer
• How Phorm plans to tap your internet connection
• The Phorm files

I’m rather enamoured of OpenID, the really neat, decentralised way to log in to any OpenID-supporting web site with one username/password. Simultaneously, I’ve had a Vox account since I was invited to try the beta pre-launch. It was moderately interesting as a community-based approach to blogging, but as I already have this blog I never used it for that purpose.

At some point (I forget when), Vox became an OpenID provider. “Great,” I thought, “I’ll use it as my OpenID.” All was well until a few days ago, when I tried to sign in to Vox using Opera Mini on my Sony Ericsson K800i. Here’s a screenshot of the sign-in form:

The orange “Sign in” button is a button — right? Wrong. It’s made up of the following markup:

<a class="command-submit orange-button button"><b>Sign In</b><s></s></a>
<input type="submit" class="invisible-button" />

So, they’ve got a “real” submit button there, which probably attends to an imagined screen reader scenario–CSS and JavaScript off; but because Opera Mini usually behaves — for all intents and purposes — like a desktop browser, it attempts to render the fancy orange button but doesn’t quite have the nous to interpret whatever JavaScript event binding code Six Apart are using to make the orange button submit the form.

I emailed Vox support:

The sign-in button isn’t a ‘real’ html button and therefore I can’t sign in using Opera Mini.

They replied:

We’re sorry you’re having problems signing in to Vox. We would like to suggest that you try using Internet Explorer or Firefox when signing in to Vox. We fully support these browsers and you’ll find that you can use all of Vox’s functions when using them.

For more information about what Vox needs in order to work, check out our Requirements for using Vox article. (emphasis mine)

I replied to them, for what it’s worth:

OK – that’s fine. I would say something about “just use normal HTML and it works anywhere!” but I guess I’ll just find another OpenID provider.

So that’s what I did. I signed up with MyOpenId, who seemingly know how to use normal HTML elements for their intended purpose, rendering the service usable on Opera Mini.

If ever there was a lesson in keeping things simple and using Progressive Enhancement, there it is. For no extra effort, more people can use your service in more places and using more devices and platforms. What’s not to like?