Category: Web 2.0

For various reasons (none of which was the new “thou shalt be in the office three days a week” rule), I ended up going in to the office three days this week, for the first time since early 2020. To be fair, it’s nice to be in there now and then, but having avoided it for so long the hour or so spent cycling there and back, getting changed etc, plus the faff of having to lug everything I need in with me, feels more annoying. Also it rained a fair bit, although I managed to miss most of it.

A pretty unbalanced week on the running front, with not much in the way of easy miles. After racing on Sunday, I did the normal club session on Tuesday, plus the monthly track evening on Friday, and a hardish parkrun effort on Saturday. I’m ashamed to admit that all the other days were rest days (I was going to go out on Thursday evening, but we had a downpour that would have sent Noah scuttling off to fetch his hammer and saw).

My parkrun result wasn’t anything spectacular in itself, but numerically speaking I was pleased to end up with 22nd place, in a time of 22:22. Sadly it was my 232nd parkrun rather than 222nd.

Ninja has finally decided that she likes the new cat tower – or at least she likes sleeping all day on the top-but-one platform.

I had a ticket to see Jim Bob (out of Carter USM, for those old enough to remember) in Islington on Saturday night, which I’d bought before it transpired that it would coincide with a train strike. I ended up driving to Epping (where I was pleased to easily find a side road with free parking – and by easily I mean when I missed the turn for the £6 carpark and drove down the side road to turn round). The Central Line was in utter chaos thanks to someone apparently having decided to step off a train between stations on the other side of London (we were later told that they were both alive and in police custody), so it took forever to get to Stratford to catch the overground. Despite having left home at 4pm, I didn’t get to the Assembly Hall until after 7.30, but I was still just in time to catch the support band (BERRIES). The journey home was less eventful (my car even started first time!), but it was still 2am by the time I got home. The gig was good, but possibly not quite worth all that palaver.

Sunday was very lazy after that, starting by getting up at about 11, and not getting much more active from there. I made a pizza in the rain for dinner, having decided that eating lunch would be an extravagance after only finishing breakfast around noon. That makes two days in a row of only having two meals, after failing to allow time to eat on Saturday night. My scales claimed I was 5lb lighter on Sunday than Saturday, which must have mostly been dehydration from not drinking anything between about 7pm and midnight.

It feels like the Christmas commercialism’s starting to ramp up (now we’re mostly done with the ridiculous doesn’t-make-any-sense-in-the-UK Black Friday idiocy). Bah humbug.

An interesting insight from, of all places, a clip of CSI, where they’re looking at someone’s Twitter feed:

Greg: “Some people just don’t value privacy.”

Archie: “They don’t expect privacy. They value openness.”

I came across the clip purely by accident – it was in the ‘what’s related’ box on Youtube for a clip of psd asking Evan Williams a question at LeWeb.

And on a completely unrelated note, finding Evan’s site for the link above (via his Twitter profile, naturally), I see his comment on Twitter’s elusive business model:

I agree with Fred on this issue. It’s not that we don’t care about the business model or aren’t thinking about it, but, as Fred says: “But every ounce of time, energy, money, and brainpower you spend on thinking about how to monetize will take you away from the goal of getting to scale. Because if you don’t get to scale, you don’t have a business anyway.”

Which kind of ties in nicely with this tweet from JP.

Oh, and looking for that tweet, it appears Twitter now don’t SMS you @replies from people you follow to people you don’t. Maybe it’s worked like that for ages, but I hadn’t noticed before. Which relates slightly to my previous post, and also brings us neatly back to Paul’s question, which is where we came in.

[tags]twitter, privacy, openness, csi, psd, jp[/tags]

This post has been languishing in my drafts for a while, but JP’s musings on ‘asymmetric tweeting’ reminded me to get it finished.

Before the Internet came along, there was a fairly clear boundary between publishing and conversation. You could reply to a newspaper article via the letters page if you felt strongly enough, but the publisher decided whether to print your comments, and the relationship was still heavily one-sided. Conversations, in turn, could be largely divided into synchronous (face-to-face, telephone etc) and asynchronous (letters, fax and so on).

The more traditional internet communication tools follow a similar pattern: publish a web site; converse synchronously (instant messaging) or asynchronously (e-mail). A new addition was the many-to-many conversation – again either synchronous (IRC) or asynchronous (newsgroups; mailing lists).

With the advent of what I’ll call ‘Web 2.0’ for want of a better term, things start getting a whole lot stranger.

Let’s start with blogs. At first glance a blog is just published content, but what sets it apart is comments and links. Anyone can reply to a blog post, either by commenting on the post itself, or by writing a response on their own blog, and using trackbacks. If it’s a popular blog, you often end up with conversations between commenters which don’t even involve the original poster. With trackbacks, it’s not always obvious to people reading an article that it’s a response to another, so you can end up with several conversations on the same post: one in the comments, and the others in ‘the blogosphere’, held together loosely by hyperlinks. People will read later contributions without necessarily even realising that they’re part of a conversation of sorts. There’s no guarantee that the original poster will even read everything that links back to his post, and reading links to links is even less likely. Similarly many people comment on a blog and never get round to going back to look for replies to their comment (bloggers: please provide RSS feeds for comments on individual posts!)

Then we have the weird and wonderful world of ‘social networks’. Facebook, for example, provides several ways to converse with your friends. There’s personal messaging, which is basically a walled-garden, non-standard e-mail service and not especially interesting. You can write on people’s walls (not to mention superwalls, funwalls and who-knows-what-else-walls), and have ‘wall-to-wall’ conversations. Even ignoring the fact that they’re hidden from the Web at large, these are only semi-public, in that only people who are friends with both of you can see the whole conversation – non-mutual friends can only see one half. Or people can have more ephemeral conversations just using their statuses, which can look very odd to those who are only privy to part of the conversation, or who come in late when the statuses no longer make sense together.

Twitter, for such a simple service, also leads to a surprising variety of conversations. There’s the original simple broadcast “what are you doing?”, and direct private messages (again, not much different from e-mail or SMS), but things get interesting when people use the @username syntax to reply to other messages. As observed by Phil and discussed by JP, this can get confusing (and annoying) when you aren’t following the person being replied to (although watching who your friends reply to can be a good way of finding new people to follow). On the other side of the coin, if you reply to a tweet from someone who doesn’t follow you, they won’t even see your reply, unless they happen to look in the replies tab on the Twitter website (or subscribe to their replies using RSS).

And as if that weren’t complicated enough, what happens when all these tools meet up? Lots of people automatically post their tweets to their Facebook status, or create Facebook links to their blog posts, or aggregate just about everything to Jaiku, and inevitably some people will reply to the link or the second-hand message rather than going back to the source.

So can we cope with all these semi-visible, partly-asymmetrical, multi-homed conversations? We seem to be managing so far, and at least we have the choice. I was reading something recently that I wrote in my student days (when mobiles were for yuppies, and student houses didn’t generally have phones, let alone internet access). A bunch of us from various places were going camping in Wales for the weekend, and apparently there was confusion because someone had sent a letter saying they didn’t know where the campsite was, but it hadn’t arrived in time to send a reply. Life was simpler then, but sometimes the simplicity made things more complicated.

[tags]conversation, facebook, twitter, blogosphere[/tags]

FaceBook now provides an RSS feed for your friends’ statuses. Hopefully this is a sign of things to come, rather than an exception – I’d be happy to eat my words.

[tags]FaceBook, RSS[/tags]

It seems like I’m far from being the only one who doesn’t like the walled garden nature of FaceBook. There’s now an article on Wired bemoaning the same thing.

Interestingly, they come to the same conclusion that I’d been meaning to blog about for a while: that we need massive adoption of XFN to start pulling all the various social networks together.

I signed up to FaceBook a few weeks ago to see what all the fuss was about, and I’m still not sure I really understand.

OK, so it’s yet another social networking site, and it’s probably better than most of the rest. You can use it to store your photos (like Flickr) or videos (like YouTube), or to post regular status updates (like Twitter) And it’s got lots of ‘fun’ little applications, if you’re into that kind of thing. It’s got an API too, so it seems to have gained something of a reputation for being an open platform.

But how open is it?

I can show my Flickr photos on FaceBook, but as far as I can tell if I posted my photos directly onto FaceBook I couldn’t share them with the world at large. I can show my Twitter status on FaceBook, but I can’t just make it use that for my FaceBook status (or at least not without a lot of work). I could use the site like a blog, but then only a tiny invited audience would get to see my ramblings (big loss, I know). The whole site needs login, so it’s not externally searchable.

All the FaceBook applications seem to either exist solely within the site itself, or to just be a window onto somewhere else. There’s no real interaction going on. There are no APIs to allow other applications to access FaceBook data – it’s all one-way traffic. There aren’t even any RSS feeds.

It seems like FaceBook are making a play to become the Microsoft Windows of the social networking world – the common interface to everyone’s applications. Maybe it’s because I’m a long-time Mac user, but that makes me really nervous.

There are some great short videos on commoncraft.com explaining some Web 2.0 concepts for non-technical people. The lo-fi style is very clever, too.

So far they’ve done RSS, wikis and social networking (see below).