Twifficiency, OAuth and You
Aug 18th
Yesterday there was a little Twitter drama centred around a site created by a young web developer who goes by the name of @jamescun. He built a website that rates your efficiency on the social network Twitter. It’s one of those “Who’s the best at Twitter?” things that people want to be top of without really understanding, or caring, what that might actually mean. Twifficiency.com is a measure of ‘mechanical efficieny’, a ratio of how much you point in compared to how much you take out. This has the advantage that it’s not a simple measure of how much you tweet or how many followers you have, so, in theory at least, anyone can “win”. That’s great. It’s a good way to get people interested.
Following it’s wildfire-like spread across the UK side of Twitter many people came out in praise of it. As I understand it James has received web development job offers on the back of it. That’s pretty awesome. James clearly has some coding ability. What he did was admirable in many respects. Getting your website trending is the ambition of many Twitter API users.
However, that’s not to say what he did was right. The problem with the site, and the reason it spread so quickly, was that it tweeted from your account when you authorised it using Twitter’s OAuth API without telling you it was going to. That’s essentially spamming the user’s timeline. What’s more, it’s against the API terms and conditions (Part 2, “Principles”; Section 1 “Don’t surprise the user”; Point b “get the user’s permission before sending Tweets”). Had Twitter wanted to they could have revoked James’ API key on that point. James went on to correct that later in the day.
This highlights, for me, a basic problem with OAuth, and in particular the user’s understanding of what it means. Once you authorise a service using Twitter’s OAuth provider, the owner of that service has pretty much free reign over your Twitter account. The service can post tweets. The service can send Direct Messages. The service can add and remove followers. All this can be done relatively easily, and at any time after you authorise the service. Twitter’s OAuth tokens never expire. Did you sign up to a service a year ago, and forget about it? There is nothing stopping that service spamming your followers today except the owner’s morals.
To that end I tweeted that people who have used Twifficiency.com should pop into their Twitter.com account settings and revoke it’s access (my tweet). I think it hit a nerve. It was retweeted more than 600 times. It drew some attention from James’ admirers too. I’ve had lots of replies telling me that what James made wasn’t any danger, it wasn’t spamming, and that it’s perfectly safe. I know all that. I wasn’t accusing James of any nefarious intent. I was simply advocating good Twitter security – don’t give anyone access to your account without good reason, and if you do in order to give something a try, remember to revoke that access afterwards. Otherwise you might inadvertently hand your account over to someone who’s less upstanding than James.
As for my Twifficiency rating, it stands at 33%. To be honest, I would have thought it’d have been much, much lower.
The Twitter Effect
Aug 2nd
Earlier today I ran out of milk. It happens all too frequently. It’s not very exciting. But that doesn’t stop me tweeting about it. Anyone who follows me on Twitter will be acutely aware of the fact I tweet some incredibly inane rubbish.
Today though, someone was actually reading me tweets. Cravendale Milk, or more likely someone from their internet/PR/social media provider, has clearly set up some sort of listener to watch for people who mention milk, and then they reply with a little advert for Cravendale and a link to an online discount voucher. It’s quite an obvious thing to do but it’s fun and entertaining at the same time. I don’t imagine it requires much capital investment either.
As I was amused by the fact they replied I posted again, this time to tell my followers what they’d done. And that’s when Twitter’s networking effect started to become quite noticeable. There were retweets. And retweets of retweets. And retweets of retweets of retwe.. well, you get the idea. I thought it might be fun to do a little investigation to see just how far Cravendale’s offer of a 50p discount voucher might have spread.
The original message was reposted by 6 people, and then subsequently retweeted by a further 4 people. Adding together the number of follower than I have, plus the 6 people who retweeted me, and the 4 who retweeted from them, gets a total reach of 23,712 Twitter users. This ignores the number of people not following those 10 accounts directly but who would still have seen the tweet on Twitter lists that follow any of the accounts involved.
Of course, that doesn’t mean nearly 24,000 people saw Cravendale’s brand. A percentage of Twitter accounts are dead, some others aren’t viewed regularly, some people will have ignored the tweet, and so on. Conservatively though, it’s not unreasonable to think that Cravendale’s PR team managed to get their message out to several thousand people this morning for the cost of watching Twitter and replying to someone positively (and a 50p voucher).
I still need to go out and buy milk though. Someone should invent a way of delivering it by the internet.
5 (and a bit) Interesting Ideas
Aug 1st
There are millions of completely crazy ideas around the internet. Sites that you see and think “Really? REALLY?”. I’m not going to name names but I see them almost every day. Frequently they fade away without a trace, occasionally they grow to be incredibly successful, and I’m usually left scratching my head thinking “What did I miss?”.
What’s out there at the moment that’s piquing my interest?
Much as I hate blog posts that consist of lists, I’m going to sacrifice that notion to bring some of the ideas I’ve seen recently that I believe are doing great things (or will be doing great things in the future);
GetGlue – http://getglue.com/ – It’s check ins for media. Rather than checking in where you are, you check in what you’re consuming (tv, dvd, books, etc). It’s a great idea. The statistical profile data of who is doing what and how that relates to what other people are doing will be fascinating. There are rivals (Philo for example), but GetGlue seems to be the best one at the moment.
Zong – http://www.zong.com/ – It’s kind of like Paypal for mobile phones. To buy something you just use your phone number. I’ve been talking about the idea of a “walled garden” for mobile sites for a little while now, and I think this sort of service is exactly the kind of thing that needs to be in place before that can happen seriously. There’s another option in the form of Vento, but Zong appears to be a more mature product at this stage.
PlacePop – http://www.placepop.com/ – Another Foursquare “rival”, PlacePop have taken the idea of GPS enabled check in services and applied it more directly to businesses using a “virtual loyalty card” idea. If they can get traction from retailers I imagine they’ll be huge. Another FourSquare alternative that’s looking interesting is SCVNGR ( http://www.scvngr.com/ ). They’re taking the check in model and applying it to gaming allowing users to build games on top of their service rather like geocaching. It’s hard to see SCVNGR failing considering they’re backed by Google. I fully expect to see SCVNGR games appearing in Google Maps and Earth soon.
Hunch – http://hunch.com/ – Hunch takes a list of the things that you like and builds a “taste profile” of you enabling it to recommend other things that you might like too. It’s quite an obvious idea but the graph technology behind the site makes things quite exciting. “Taste engineering” seems to be something that’s cropping up a lot recently. Local start-up and Difference Engine veterans wishli.st ( http://wishli.st ) have something similar running as a beta.
Jumo – http://www.jumo.com/ – Jumo is a site that will, once it launches, aim to bring together volunteers with volunteer organisations. I don’t yet know much about how they’re planning to do it, but it’s definitely worth watching as it’s been founded by Chris Hughes. Hughes was a roommate of Mark Zuckerberg and a co-founder of Facebook and the brains behind MyBarackObama.com, Barack Obama’s online presence during the 2008 presidential election campaign.
Canv.as – http://canv.as/ – This one is a complete mystery. There are no clues to what it is, or will become on the site whatsoever. Like Jumo though, it’s of interest because of the person behind it – Canv.as is the brainchild of Chris “Moot” Poole who founded 4Chan (the site that gave the internet “rickrolling” amongst other things). Poole is clearly good at community building, so I’m keen to see what comes from his next venture.
What the user sees first.
Jul 29th
Imagine the scenario. Someone out there is using Google. They’re looking for a company. They want to buy what you sell. Have you optimised your website for the key words they’re looking for? For the sake of argument, let’s assume you have. So your business is in the first few results. That’s brilliant. Except for some reason you’re not getting their clicks.
All this happens before the user has even visited your site. Before they’ve seen your fabulous design, read your professionally written content, browsed through your product pages with the wonderful photographs and seen your temptingly competitive prices. All this has happened on Google’s search results page. You aren’t helping your business get sales if your business listing in Google doesn’t look as good as it possibly could.
This is best illustrated with a couple of examples.
What the user sees first when they’re searching for a company to buy from is something like this:
Nothing in Abacus Media’s listing tells you very much about the business. While Abacus have a great looking website that clearly sets out what they do, a search engine user would have to click on their rather obscure and wordy listing to read that content. Few people will – they’ll move down to the next listing to see if that better matches what they’re looking for. Compare Abacus Media’s listing to another Newcastle company:
This listing is for Union Room, a web development company. The difference is immediately apparent. Union Room’s listing clearly defines what they do, where they are, and even how to contact them. It’s a better description of the company by far.
Union Room have achieved this by making use of the META “description” tag in their page content. In contrast, Abacus Media have chosen to omit the tag so Google’s spider has had to lift the text for it’s listing page from the page content of the website. In situ the sentence might be fine but in Google it doesn’t work.
The description tag is the only META tag that Google pay any attention to these days as the others were abused by spammers in the early days of the internet. Keywords, authors, and so became worthless as measures of a page’s content so one by one Google started to ignore what they contained. Recently though there have been moves inside Google to start using page content in search listings again, just not META tags.
“Rich snippets” are well defined blocks of HTML content that Google look for in your website content. They’re a variation of a technology called “microformats”. What a microformat does is enable a machine such as Google’s search spider to understand what the content of a page really means. You, or more likely your web developer, designs the code for the page in such a way that when Google’s spider encounters it it’ll be understood better, and consequently displayed in Google’s listings in a much better form. Currently Google understands 4 different types of snippet; “reviews”, “people”, “products”, and “businesses”. You can find out how to use each one here: http://knol.google.com/k/google-rich-snippets-tips-and-tricks. If you decide to implement any of them in your website you can test that Google understand your code using the new Rich Snippet tool in Google’s webmaster suite: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets.
For search engine traffic the face of your business is what they see in Google’s listing page. Make sure it’s not ugly.
Can SEO analytics backfire?
Jul 27th
For those readers of this blog who don’t happen to read the Boston Globe I’d like to share a fascinating link: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/?page=full
The article is about how readers of political articles, when faced with the corrected facts about the article they’ve read, actually become more adamant and entrenched in their misinformed views rather than less as one might expect. Far from admitting defeat, they insist they’re right. Human nature makes us incredibly unwilling to admit we’re wrong.
The problem is known as “backfire”. No one yet knows why backfire happens. It’s pretty strange. And, as with most of the articles and stories I read, I got to wondering how this might apply to web development.
Anyone who’s been in a client-facing role in web design or development, or any other creative industry I imagine, will have met at least one client who is insistent that they know best because they’ve been misinformed by an article, a friend or a previous developer. It’s especially prevalent in the field of Search Engine Optimisation. There are many, many myths about what effects change in your website’s ranking, and persuading a client that what they think is good for their site is actually quite harmful can be a considerable challenge.
Presenting a clear and concise set of web and search analytics results that show how a change has made a positive improvement to the website, either in terms of search traffic, conversion ratio, or customer feedback doesn’t always lead to the client agreeing that the change should stay. The “knowledge” that the client is working from trumps the numbers in front of them in apparently indisputable black and white.
The answers to the issue of client knowledge backfire are given in the article – the direct, blunt approach of flatly refusing to accept that the client is right (because they’re not) while repeating the evidence to them might get through. Alternatively, complimenting the site and highlighting the positive aspects before presenting the aspect that’s backfiring might work instead. It depends on the client. What’s clear though, from my experience and from the literature about the problem of backfire in other aspects of life, is that simply giving a client the facts and expecting them to come to the ‘obvious’ conclusion isn’t always going to work.
Waking NEDD
Jul 20th
Over the 10 years or so I’ve had a keen interest in the development of software around the North East region. I was paid by companies in Sunderland and Newcastle to write a little of it. Much to my annoyance I found a huge amount of digital development work leaves the North East, outsourced from the region to agencies large and small elsewhere in the country and abroad. Sometimes that was due to cost, but more often it was down to ignorance of what services are available. As anecdotal evidence, I’ve been in the room on more than one occasion when a potential client has stated outright that there are no companies in the North East who could create the website/web app/mobile app/whatever that they’re looking for. That always struck me as plain silly but advice to the contrary fell on deaf ears.
Obviously the tendering process will always attract bids from far and wide if the job is marketed well enough. That’s inevitable. And if the best bid comes from a company that you’ve asked to put together a proposal who happen to be a long way away you’d be mad not to commission them due to geographical reasons, especially as the teleworking technology has made it easy for companies and their suppliers to work together without being spatially close to one another. Likewise, the internet has made it simple for a company looking for work to contact potential clients without regard for where they happen to be. The digital industry is truly a global marketplace.
However, while that’s true, it doesn’t make sense to ignore the local companies either. Just because an agency is based a few doors down there’s not a reason not to ask them to tender. The pool of talent here in the North East is vast – anything that a big agency in London can do could be provided equally well in Newcastle, Gateshead, Durham or Middlesbrough. The assumption that to get the best you have to use a company in the capital is far too common, and wholly wrong. This London-centric attitude seems especially dominant in public sector and publicly funded bodies. Money allocated to the North East would benefit the North East more if it was spent here. If you’re organising something that is paid for directly by central government, or by one of the many regional development funds, wouldn’t it make more sense to approach the local providers first?
To this end I’ve decided to gather up the details of all the North East’s talented digital service providers and compile them into a directory accessible by anyone interested in commissioning some sort of software, be it web, mobile or desktop based. Further to that though, I envision this directory as the number one go-to-guy for other related services such as search engine optimisation, social media marketing, email marketing, video production, etc.
This is the beginning of NEDD – the North East Digital Directory. What’s online now is, obviously, a very, very early version. I have a few ideas about how to make it work. What’s there now is little more than a way of viewing the data.
If you run a business that provides some sort of digital industry service, or you work for one, or you’re a freelancer involved in the industry, pop me an email ( nedd@usrlab.com ) and I’ll add you to the directory.
Webdurance
Jul 17th
Webdurance, a 24 hour event to hack together a website for a set of local charities, and the idea of brothers Paul and David King from 1DayLater.com, damn near killed me. I haven’t been quite that tired in a very long time. I’m not consumed that amount of coffee, or sugar in so long either. Strangely, I also ate more fruit than I normally do too.
I haven’t attended anything similar in the past, so I can’t really say whether or not it was well organised relative to other charity hacks, but I can say with some certainty that everything went incredibly well on the day. There were no disasters, all the scheduled food breaks happened, the location was ideal, the freebies were worth having, and everyone had a great time. From speaking to a few of the charity representatives after 24 hours of coding I’m sure that they were pleased with the result of everyone’s hard work too. Everyone involved should be rightly proud of themselves, especially Paul, Dave and Ester who organised everything.
The success of the day, marked by the quality of the websites that the charities now have, is testament to the web design and development talent in the region.
I hope Webdurance turns in to an annual event. I’ll definitely be there for the next one. Congratulations again to everyone who was there.
Statistics Fun With DNA Databases
Jul 14th
The UK National DNA Database currently has about 3 million people’s biometric information stored in it.
If DNA recovered at crime scene has a 1 in 50,000 chance of matching someone, what is the probability that a match will be found even if the actual perpetrator’s information isn’t in the database?
1 – (1 / 50,000) ^ 3,000,000 = 99.9999%
Basically, it’s a certainty. Someone’s profile will be returned falsely.
That’s 1 in 50,000 chance though. That’s a weak test of the sort you get from old, broken-down DNA. What if it was a fresh sample, and the chance of a random match was 1 in 100,000,000 (a hundred million)?
1 – (1 / 100,000,000) ^ 3,000,000 = 2.9554%
That’s approximately double the chance of winning £10 on the National Lottery (1.7544%).
How come they never mention this on C.S.I?
The Death Of Internet Advertising
Jul 13th
Here’s an interesting number: 1.7 billion. That, according to the ITU, is the number of people who’ll be accessing the internet using a mobile device by 2013.
Here’s a second interesting number: 70%. That, this time according to mobile ad and content provider Buzzcity, is the percentage of times that a mobile device is to access the internet from the user’s home. People only go mobile with their mobile about 1/3 of the time. I imagine the other 70% are people who’re too lazy to get out of bed or off the sofa when they want to look something up.
What does it all mean?
It means that using mobile internet in the home is going to be pretty big. People won’t be turning their computer on to check Facebook or to look up the name of that actor who was in that thing or to tweet what they’re having for tea. It’s also going to spell the “death” of internet advertising. Of course, it won’t actually be the death of internet advertising at all, I just put inflammatory statements in so I get links (like every other blogger), but it will spell a paradigm shift in the way advertising works.
When a user checks something on their mobile phone using the internet they’re very focused. Far more so than a user on a desktop PC or a laptop. You fire up your mobile browser, look up the thing, and switch off. You’re very unlikely to be distracted. This presents a problem for traditional (in internet terms) in-page advertising. Pay per click adverts only raise revenue if the user is willing to leave the website to look at whatever is being advertised to them. If they aren’t, and mobile users generally aren’t willing to leave, then PPC can’t work – users won’t click adverts, no money comes in, no funds for the business. Per impression advertising is a possible solution, but advertisers aren’t keen for obvious reasons. Even with the advantage of geospacial or device specific targeting PPI is unlikely to be the answer.
What is?
I believe there are two options. The first, and rather more positive idea, is a cross-site micropayment subscription model. I foresee the development of something akin to a massive walled garden that any website can join in with. The user would pay for credit to access any site within the paywall at a minimal fee (in the region of £1 per 1000 pages) perhaps as part of their mobile phone payment scheme, and the website providers would get paid when users view pages. This idea is not new – it’s been trialed on many hundreds of website and website collectives in the past and never really worked. I think the situation will be different for mobile though. People are much more receptive to paying for mobile content; be it texts, call time, apps, or ringtones.
The second idea is one I hope doesn’t happen. Website providers might simply close the door to mobile users. I use websites like Thinkexist.com quite frequently for looking up facts. If they realise that they’re making an overall loss from mobile users they’ll be left with either charging for subscriptions, accepting the loss, or blocking the users. Some websites will accept the loss in the name of being fluffy and nice to their users, perhaps in the hope that they’ll come back to the website from a PC and click on adverts. I fear more won’t be so generous though. They’ll block mobile browsers, either permanently or with a click-through advertising splash page (see IMDB.com on an iPhone for an idea of how that works).
Either way, the burgeoning mobile internet market is going to bring about some sort of change. Exciting times.
Are you starting something?
Jul 12th
I consider myself to be a chronic procrastinator. Left to my own devices I make “to do” lists, lists of “to do” lists, project plans, plans for project plans, lists of plans for plans of project plans; essentially, I’ll do anything but actually start working. I willfully make my life more difficult than it need be.
If I’d been a waiter in a 1920’s restaurant in Vienna I’m pretty sure I’d have been fired for going on about how there’ll be all sorts of amazing things in the future, but I might also have been observed by a student by the name of Bluma Zeigarnik.
Zeigarnik noticed that the waiters could remember perfectly the orders of their customers until they’d paid their bill, at which point the waiters instantly forgot all about the order. This effect, now known as the “Zeigarnik Effect”, states that we retain information about unfinished tasks far better than we do about completed ones. Further to that though, the paper in which Zeigarnik first wrote about the effect goes on to explain that our brain actively dislikes having unfinished tasks. The response to working on something that drives us to complete the task is all wrapped up in this effect – we try to clear our minds by finishing things so that we can forget about them.
But how does the Zeigarnik Effect apply to my inability to work properly? It’s quite straightforward. According to Professor Richard Wiseman in his book “59 Seconds”, the best way to overcome procrastination is to start a task. That sounds obvious. He goes further though – you don’t need to think that you’re going to sit down and complete the task. You don’t need to think you’ve got to work all day. So long as you can spend a few minutes on it that’ll be enough. Once the ball is rolling the Zeigarnik Effect will be enough to keep your mind on whatever you’re working on and pull you through to the other side.
I discovered the solution to the problem of procrastination in my last year of university. I started working on my final year project at the beginning of the first semester only because I had a free weekend when all my housemates were away. When I’d sat down to start I had no intention of working on the project for several months. The weekend would have been enough. But having that unfinished task drove me on to finish. All the while most of my fellow students were putting off starting theirs. Consequently, by the end of the year, I’d finished with plenty of time to spare while the rest of the group were pulling all-nighters to get their projects done. I realised that starting was the important bit. The rest comes naturally.
It was only very recently I discovered the reasoning behind the phenomenon (hence this blog post). I can heartily recommend it though if you’re like me – don’t sit down to work for hours. You won’t do anything productive. Sit down to work for a few minutes. That’s the way to get things finished.
