WillWybrow.com

Throwing my lot in with the Skype window photoshops. Next stop: bandwagon central.

The case for not calling Twitter a social network

When it comes to connections, Twitter doesn’t have ‘friendships’ as such. It is entirely based on one-way connections; you follow someone you find interesting but they don’t have to follow you back, nor should you expect them to. If someone finds your tweets interesting or your @ replies engaging then you can get to know someone on Twitter and become mutual followers.

With a social network you have to request someone as a friend and it has to be verified by the other person. It’s a service for people you already know in real life to index your online presence, rather like a phonebook or contact list, and of course to show the world how many people you know.

You’re not obligated to follow people you know in real life on Twitter. But with Facebook, you kind of are obligated to accept their friend request, because you can always take them off of your homepage and stop your status updates reaching them. But that’s what Facebook is for. While it’s often useful to follow people you know on Twitter (the #bskcrew, for example) because you can keep people updated with relevant local news and info and organise meet-ups. But just because that kid you never spoke to who used to sit across from you in English class in school is on Twitter, doesn’t mean you will end up necessarily following each other, even though that’s exactly the kind of person we populate our social network friends list with.

Also on social networking sites you have a profile page. Twitter’s ‘profile’ field is a 160 character bio that’s optional to fill in. Twitter doesn’t list any contact details and it doesn’t have a page full of your favourite music. It doesn’t have photo albums and it doesn’t have Flash games where you can swap cows with your aunt. Not that there’s anything wrong with this stuff, but they’re strictly social network things and that’s not what Twitter is.

You could argue, of course, that you can use Twitter to network with people socially, and so it deserves the description. But it’s kind of a new term and while yes Twitter might fit the literal wording, it doesn’t fit the idea that the phrase was coined to describe.

But people have made friends on the internet since it started and nobody’s bothered to call messaging boards or IRC ‘social networks’. Probably because they lack profile pages and photo albums and lists of favourite bands, and the only way to identify a user is by their username (and on a forum they might have a small, square avatar).

So?

Okay, up to this point, all I’ve done is say I think it’s wrong to classify Twitter as a social network. I haven’t got to the point where it makes you a cunt.

It’s because, you bunch of dickholes, now everyone wants in. If there’s one thing that average internet users can do really well, it’s ruin a web service with their presence. Once upon a time, Facebook was only open to university students. Remember that? It was a useful tool for organising events and keeping in contact with new university friends. Those were the days. But, of course, it’s for socially networking. So everyone needs to be on it so you have a complete set of people you know in a handy list. Your aunts and uncles are on it. Your ten-year-old sister is on it. People’s grandparents are on it. Emotional teenagers are on it. But that’s fine. We can deal with that because that’s what Facebook is for. But then someone said that Twitter is the new social network du jour and like the bandwagon-jumping pricks they are, a whole teeming mass of ill-educated, unfunny, culturally and educationally bankrupt people have swarmed in and are ruining it. They’ve heard it’s a social network and so they’re trying to use it like it’s “the new Facebook” or similar… they’re getting all their friends to sign up and diluting all the nice people with horrible people. And they don’t understand that it’s normal for people to follow each other because of shared interests, not because of some real-life meeting. They don’t know that’s what the nice part of the internet is about.

So you’ll get some tossers who, for no reason, delete you as one of their followers even though it doesn’t affect them in any way to have a particular follower. If a person is @ replying you with shit then there’s a handy block function but removing a follower because you don’t know them is not how Twitter is supposed to work you fucking cock muncher argh fuck all this

TL;DR butthurt over being deleted from following someone

Twitter has just introduced a ‘people you may know’ feature, lifted straight out of Facebook, it seems, right down to the position on the Twitter website is appears in.

Why? I’m not sure it really enhances the user experience much. With Facebook, you make friendship connections with people you’re meant to already know from real life. So if you and some third party have a lot of mutual friends then there is a chance that you will know that person as well, through one or more of said mutual connections.

But Twitter isn’t like that. You don’t follow people you know just because you know them. You follow them because you might be interested in their updates. I wouldn’t automatically follow someone just because I know them and I wouldn’t expect any of my friends to put up with any of the tweetstream spamming I do unless they actually get something out of it.

So all the ‘people you should follow’ feature can offer is suggesting Twitter accounts that the people you follow are following. That’s not really helpful. If everyone followed every suggestion we’d all end up following each other and that would make Twitter pointless.

A better option would to be some kind of semantic analysis or hashtag logging that suggested people who hashtag the same kinds of topics as you. But that is almost redundant because hashtags are clickable to find out who else is talking about that stuff. It would require some long-term data collection to build up a profile of hashtags that could then be compared like a last.fm profile to match your tweet-compatibility.

I think this could be another feature that the Twitter team is trying to monetise. We’ve all seen the ‘promoted’ button next to certain trending topics… how long before Coca-Cola appears in your ‘people you should follow’ box with a little ‘promoted’ sticker next to its name?

I thought I’d at least have already quit Facebook by the time Twitter got ruined.

Saw this last night. I have a few thoughts on it that aren’t really related to how much I enjoyed the film. Here goes:

Woody’s arm was better

At the end of Toy Story 2, Woody’s arm was all bulbous and poorly repaired. This was a pretty big plot element because his breakage is what sets off the whole story about the broken penguin Wheezy and is how Woody is found accidentally by Al. Thus the resolution of this at the end of the film ties off the whole adventure nicely. But in Toy Story 3, Woody’s back to normal.

Bo Peep is gone

Woody’s love interest is gone! If, like me, you didn’t think much of Bo, this is probably a good thing. She wasn’t good for him anyway. Who wants to date a woman who’s already got sheep? Woody should find someone younger and have some sheep of his own, right? I personally always shipped Jessie and Woody because I like him more than Buzz but we can’t have everything, right?

If there were a Toy Story 4…

…then it’d be worth it just to have Timothy Dalton and Kristen Schaal playing the new toys. And Whoopi Goldberg as that cool-looking octopus was good, and Richard Kind (that hypochondriac, Harvey, from Scrubs) as the bookworm was a nice touch but I don’t think the new characters really had enough to say. The film could have done with being thirty to sixty minutes longer possibly. I reckon it’s a shame they wasted Kelsey Grammer as the villain in Toy Story 2 because he’d have made a good Lotso. It’s good that they didn’t play out the older-and-revered-father-figure-turns-out-to-be-evil thing for very long before the “reveal” that Lotso was the villain because that was basically cut and pasted from Toy Story 2.

Spanish Buzz was hilarious

but very unrealistic. There’s no way an action figure would contain that much processing power. I’m guessing his developing personality would have to be stored in some kind of flash memory and that his ‘demo mode’ would live in some EEPROM on the circuit board inside along with his default settings for Spanish Mode. Maybe Buzz is running a quad-core i7 processor inside his back? Actually, yes, I’m sure that’s it. And if you unscrew his chest there are 2 USB ports and a DVI out and he’s got two SLi GeForce GTX 480s in his legs and can run Crysis at 60FPS on full settings.

“lol Ken is gay”

Also pretty funny I thought. Though it would have been better had he actually turned out to be gay. Not only would it have been a positive message for kids but it’d probably have the religious right up in arms and “controversy” that sparks off those nutcases is always a good thing.

That’s probably enough for now. I did really enjoy the film (though I think I enjoyed Inception more) so thanks, Pixar, for not fucking up for three whole films. I am sure the Toy Story trilogy will enjoy its place amongst the Great Trilogies. That is until some years down the line someone says “why don’t we resurrect Toy Story?” and then they make Toy Story 4.0 where an evil iPad has taken over the world’s digital infrastructure and Shia LaBeouf has to team up with an aged-looking Woody who’s past his prime in order to take down the culprit by using explosions.

I figure I spend a bunch of time Googling syntax or functions in code if I can’t remember them. And sometimes I’ll even lift out a whole section of example code from a search result and try and change as little of it as possible to maximise the time I spend not doing work. These little shortcuts make life bearable.

So I’ve decided to invent a new programming language. Each line is a search query you’d type in to bring up a reference page and an example of what you’re trying to do. Then, at compile time, the compiler does the searches, lifts out the example code from the top hit and then builds the binary from the collection of sample code.

It would probably be a fruitless and very tiresome (if not never-ending) effort to list ALL the things that could do with being shaken up around here. So for the moment I am going to settle for this very brief but presently high-profile list of some shit that needs changing.

1. Decriminalisation of Drugs

   I am sure I don’t need to link you to any of the number of articles online about the decriminalisation of drugs in Portugal. Google it if you want to. This, from the TIME.com article about it:

   “Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success,” says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research [into its success]. “It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does.”

   In light of the news about the mephedrone deaths that have just happened, the government will inevitably end up adding it to the list of banned substances, like they did with synthetic cannabinoids at the end of last year. That they still have to keep banning the new ways people find to get themselves high suggests that people are going to try it regardless. The only real way we can increase the safety of those who do choose to try it is by regulating the quality of the drugs sold (so that they’re not cut with rat poison) and to fully understand through scientific experimentation the effects so any short- and long-term effects can be made clear through education. Legalising the old-school drugs that everyone knows about will cause users to gravitate towards them. They’ve been more extensively studied than these new ‘legal highs’, so that bodes better for education and treatment of ill-effects and addiction.

2. Libel Law Reform

   In case you haven’t been keeping abreast of one of the most (if not the most) high profile libel lawsuits of late, Simon Singh was recently accused of libel by the British Chiropractic Association. He wrote that any chiropractic practitioner who claimed to be able to cure things like colic in babies was lying, with plenty of demonstrable evidence showing it to be ineffective. As well as in being counter-intuitive to assume that spinal manipulation can solve all your problems. While with any reasonable set of laws, the chiropractors would have no hope of achieving anything from suing someone with stacks of scientific evidence to back up their claims, actually suing someone for libel is no longer about who wins or loses. Because of the incredibly dramatic cost of being sued for libel, often the accused has no choice but to back down and not fight if the accuser is financially well-endowed. With a relatively small cost to a corporation, it can silence any individual or small organisation it wants to with the threat of expensive legal action, and thus hide any of its wrongdoings. The Libel Reform campaign seeks to raise awareness with the ultimate goal of getting this changed. And while it might not benefit the majority of people directly, it is a freedom of speech/censorship matter that needs to be addressed and corrected lest it remain an affront to liberty forever.

3. The Digital Economy Bill

   Sometimes I think Lord Mandelson doesn’t see things the way the rest of us do. His perspective on certain subjects is so skewed, I think maybe he might benefit from some psychiatric evaluation.

   Even if he passes the lunatic test, though, this doesn’t make his Digital Economy Bill any less insane. Mandelson wants to be given unlimited power to amend copyright legislation. He wants rights holders, via the courts, to be able to disconnect people suspected of filesharing without requiring any proof. He is willing to deny internet access to whole households to punish (and that’s punish, not rehabilitate or force repayment from) copyright infringers. There has also been a clause added that says ISPs would be obligated to block access to certain websites that facilitate copyright infringement (which could even include YouTube and possibly Google), but again this seems to only take place at Mandelson’s command.

   I’m also interested in the overlooked modifications to Nominet. It’s a kind of nationalisation of the service for registering domain names in the UK. Might not mean much to most people, but putting more of the internet in the hands of this government unnecessarily (Nominet is functioning fine as an independent body at the moment and can’t possibly benefit from being under government control) is an unmistakably bad thing. Some of us have registered domain names and don’t want ownership of them revoked at the whim of Lord Mandelson.

That’ll be all for now, I think. I will do some more when I get back to my chat logs and assemble all the ideas I came up with when Chris put me on the spot yesterday evening with all the policies I’d have if I formed a political party.

You may have heard of two technology-related stories in the news recently.

The first is that Gordon Brown is going to spend £300 million on his Home Access scheme to bring free laptops and one year’s worth of free broadband subscription to poorer families across the country.

The second is that Lord Mandelson is pushing for tough counter-piracy measures for internet filesharers, including disconnecting entire households from the internet.

What Labour seem to be doing is giving out internet access with one hand while taking it away with the other. Education Secretary Ed Balls has declared that there are educational, economic and social benefits to being on the internet that cannot be ignored. Indeed, the internet is so vital that part of the criteria you need to fill to qualify for the Home Access scheme is that you are a child on free school meals. That means these laptops and free internet access come with a similar priority level as providing food for underprivileged children. If that doesn’t sound like an opinion leaning towards classing internet access as a human right, I don’t know what does.

But Mandy obviously is unconvinced, since it is still his intention to cut off entire households from the internet because of the action of one of the house’s residents – or even the action of a neighbour – even when there’s every likelihood that a disconnection would result in more ‘innocent’ people (non-filesharers) than ‘guilty’ people (filesharers) being denied all those social and educational benefits.

A disconnection from the internet today is more crippling than ever. Apart from the real inconvenience it would cause to people no longer being able to look things up or check their online banking at their leisure, it would also stand in the way of anyone who occasionally works from home (seemingly more and more people nowadays), and it’s tantamount to capital punishment for anyone with lots of social networking contacts they can’t see very often in person.

And so far I haven’t even addressed the real problem. Buying DVDs and music is fine for those able to afford it and who are also ignorant enough to presume that £15 is a fair price for a DVD or CD (it isn’t). But those more technologically inclined will find ways around being tracked if they want to continue filesharing. Downloading will never, ever stop. But handing out free laptops and free broadband to poor children is going to give them the previously unseen option of downloading music or watching TV shows online. What will the Government do when its own broadband users commit copyright infringement? Disconnect them as fast as possible?

The internet is either a vital resource or it isn’t, Labour. Perhaps Brown should make sure everyone in his cabinet agrees which before they start making contradictory comments to the media.

Or just lynch Mandelson and let the crows have his eyes, whichever.

Some people use the Facebook “like” function to indicate approval of “shared” content. That is surely its purpose. But as I’ve already stated, there’s no option for disliking things. Some people have suggested adding such a feature.

Sometimes there’s not really anything to “like” about an update, for example, if I said “the BNP sucks,” I think it’d be reasonable for someone pressing “like” to mean “agree.” Reflecting on this, I thought to myself, “why don’t they add a “dislike” and an “agree” and “disagree” button?

In fact, they could add a list of possible emotional responses to an update and their opposites. Users could choose the appropriate word to match their feelings on the subject.

Or, of course, Facebook could implement a space after each update for users to input their own feelings. That way users would have access to the full expression of opinion that their language(s) allow. In fact, the space could be extended to allow a full comment on a subject to express views more complex than single words. That would be some kind of amazing, let me tell you.

Such are the fevered dreams of technologically-inclined.

I don’t know if I really have the dedication to keep this up… Lately I’ve not been passionate enough nor able to concentrate enough to get much down on the site; I just want to bask in my doom and quietly feel sorry for myself a lot.

I’ll probably do something big to the site soon, overhaul it and archive the blog to a subsection if I can’t keep it up. I’d hate to be one of those people who sits around with an unused blog. It’s not like I’m going to be able to carry on with it for longer than two more months anyway. We’ll see what happens.

I kinda miss the pseudo-anonymity that I used to have before the domain change. When I get out of this mess I am going to resume writing under an anonymous guise and leave this site as something more professional looking.

You’ll know where to find me. Just look for my colour.

Step one: find something that a lot of stupid people love (Lee Evans, Christianity, etc.).

Step two: say that it sucks.

This will guarantee that the idiots come flooding in.