Philosophy
The Great Spotify Scandal
Apr 14th
The blogosphere is all a-buzz today after Spotify’s announcement that it’s free and open services are to come to an end relatively soon. As of May 1st anyone who isn’t a paying subscriber to the music service will find what they have access to severely limited – 5 plays of each track, and a further limit of a total of 10 hours a month after 6 months.
Spotify was unveiled in October 2008 in Sweden, and spread across the European launch countries very quickly indeed. Soon after the service boasted 15,000,000 users with as many as 1,000,000 paying a monthly fee of £10. On the back of such subscriber numbers Spotify AB has raised approximately $150m in 3 rounds; the most recent being $100m (presumably for a big push into the USA). Company valuations hover around the $1b-$2b mark.
The usual cries foul having been bandied about with the news of the changes to the way it works. Users who don’t, or won’t, or can’t pay the subscription fee are understandably distraught that they’ll have to give up access to Spotify’s extensive bank of music, and that they’ll have to either stop listening to music or find an alternative vendor. Existing subscribers who are happy with what they’re paying for are calling for everyone to subscribe because they feel it’s well worth the money.
It’s the same, sadly all too common story. A company raises a small amount of money to offer a service for free in order to attract a large userbase. They then use that userbase to ‘prove’ the popularity of the service to late-stage investors, and raise more capital. At that point those people who helped push the company to where it is, who put up with the outages, the mistakes, who provided feedback to the developers to make the product better, and who invited their friends to the service so it could grow, are all tossed out into the cold. It’s not the best way to thank your early adopters.
Now, of course, the reality of the situation is almost certainly that the record companies who license content to Spotify don’t want to give users in the USA completely free access. It’s a big market and there’s lots of money to be made from it. As a result Spotify have to close the doors somewhat. It’s (probably) not their fault or entirely their own decision to make.
I won’t be switching to a Premium Spotify account. I’ll use the service to check out new artists, as I do now, but I’ll listen to other services for the majority of my day-to-day music. Heck, I might even turn on a radio again. I suppose I ought to learn that free and freemium web services rarely remain free forever, but I suspect I won’t. I’ll keep signing up to alpha and beta test things and keep being disappointed when they kick me back out the door when I don’t pony up any cash later.
The Next Social Step: Emotional Context Part 2
Jan 25th
Continuing from the blog post I wrote a couple of weeks ago the rampant march of “emotional data” continues.
Path, the ‘limited’ social network that only allows you to keep 50 contacts in your network at any given time, have updated their app to version 1.3. The latest edition lets users tag posts with one of five smiley faces to denote how they feel about the image (or video since Path 1.2). Users get to choose from happiness, laughter, surprise, sadness or love. To get an overall picture of how much a photo is liked it’s a great update, but the lack of choice might render the system a little redundant. Time will tell. It’s certainly interesting to see emotional context being used in a mainstream and well-funded social application.
Another new start-up using emotional context data for social software is the rather odd and left-field “She Chooses“. This one is aimed squarely at the female gender as it markets itself as;
She Chooses™ is the social network application that taps the power of feelings to assist women in making choices.
The site is similar in many ways to Twitter. You post updates that are tagged as questions, updates or tools, and other users reply or empathize (which appears to be the equivalent of Facebook’s “Like”). The app’s selling point appears to be something that the creators have deigned to call “The Tool”. It’s an emotionally sensitive “expert system” where you choose the way you feel and what you’re after and it returns a list of people’s updates who might assist you. I’m not sure how useful it’ll be.
My only reservation about “She Chooses” is the “I am a woman” checkbox on the registration page. I ticked it, but I suspect you’ll be kicked out if you don’t. That’d be a step backwards in terms of equality if you are. Who knows? It’s a long way from launching; perhaps that’s just an alpha software quirk.
The Next Social Step: Emotional Context
Jan 13th
Watching Amber Case’s recent TED talk, “We are all cyborgs now”, I learnt about the fascinating concept of “ambient intimacy”. As the self styled ‘digital philosopher’ explains;
“It’s not that we’re always connected to everybody, but at any time we can connect to anyone we want.”
How intimate the relationship we have with our social networks is governs the way we operate when we’re living our lives – those of us who use social networks for solely for business aren’t likely to be permanently glued to their mobile phone even when they’re out with friends. Similarly, those people with a very close and intimate relationship with their social network friends might sit in the pub with their “real world” friends and ignore them, preferring to talk on Twitter, Facebook or an instant messaging client. Neither is wrong per se, so long as you’re striking a healthy balance.
Some start-ups are beginning to pick up on the fact that the emotional connection that users have on social networks is strong but often difficult to broadcast to your friends. I recently blogged about a new social client called “Vibefeelr” that enables you to post messages to your friends with an attached “vibe” that approximates to how you’re feeling at the time. This sort of thing is likely to become more common. There are a huge number of Facebook apps that do the same thing, and once Twitter’s ‘annotations’ enable users to attach metadata to tweets I imagine it won’t be long before there’s ‘emotions for Twitter’ too.
In the mean time there’s another new social tool for Twitter called smood.it. Smood.it lets you post an emotion to Twitter with a few attached hashtags to tell people why you’re feeling the way you are. Further to that those, smood.it will watch your tweets and catalogue how you’re feeling based on which emoticons (smilies) you use. It’s quite a clever approach because it means you build up a history of feelings without having to leave whatever Twitter client you use. Unfortunately, in my case anyway, it’s woefully inaccurate because I use happy face smilies far too much. With some tweaking, maybe a hashtag like the “Selective Twitter” Facebook app uses, it could be a powerful tool for people who want to track their feelings.
I imagine the next few years will see an increased use of ‘augmented’ social networking, with additional data coming from options we choose when we post. Who knows, perhaps our current state of mind might be captured from a camera, or even from an analysis of the post itself. It’ll be interesting to see what people come up with.
Crowdsourcing Volatile Location Information
Jan 10th
Geolocation check-in apps, such as Foursquare, Latitude, Facebook Places etc, have become relatively mature in a very short period of time in internet terms. Foursquare, the market leader, has been in use for less than 2 years (although it is based on Dodgeball that was around for a few years prior to that).
As the apps grow their userbase they’re adding additional features such as photosharing (Foursquare), real time updates (Latitude), and better business tie-in (Gowalla).
While it’s nice to check in and add somewhere to a list of places you’ve visited, and perhaps add a picture or a note, those additional pieces of data are static, and frankly a bit boring in the main. Once they’ve been added by half a dozen users there’s no reason to add more. That limits the reason to check in to either telling your friends where you are or to try to win a ‘badge’. Those aren’t often reason enough to keep users checking in whenever they go out. I’ve stopped checking in to places entirely. I don’t care enough about being the major of somewhere to bother. What appears to be missing is the ability for users to share volatile information about the location they’re currently in.
Imagine if you could add things to your check-in that would be of interest to people who aren’t in your network though. For example, when you check in to a bar you could add how busy it is on a sliding scale from “Dead” to “Jammed”. People looking for a bar around your location could search for “Bars that aren’t empty”, hey presto your check-in becomes useful data. After an hour your information would be discarded because it’s no longer relevant.
If everyone go into the habit of checking in and supplying information about how busy a venue is then rather than a simple catalogue of where you’ve been a geolocation check-in service would become a must-have real-time data source for travelers.
If anyone at Foursquare is reading this you can have this idea for free. I’d find it very useful.
The Right Way To Get Things Wrong.
Oct 6th
“The website is down.”
That’s an all too familiar message. Errors on websites are still shockingly common. And what the user sees when your website is suffering an outage of some description, be it a server error, a missing page, or simply the user getting something wrong should be a big concern in your life if you care about retaining their custom.
Back in the olden days of the internet, so about 18 months ago, most websites had customised “404″ pages, the page that the user sees when they go to an address that isn’t found. Giving the user something more friendly than “Not found, try again” was seen as best practice in web development. Some sites came up with amusing ways to tell their users that the page was missing. Of course, some sites still just dump the not found message on you. But that practice hadn’t spread to other server error pages. Users were still faced with an unfriendly, complicated message if the server broke.
That changed with the growing popularity of Twitter. As the site grew the developers realised that server problems were a real, and frequent, problem. Obviously they fought to keep them to a minimum but they also put in an error message that would placate and pacify the user – the “fail whale”.
It was nothing short of a stroke of genius. People largely stopped complaining about outages and problems and referred to the errors are “fail whales”. While it was just a semantic change it alter people’s perceptions and attitudes towards the site. I strongly suspect that Twitter’s enduring success is down, at least in part, to that whale. Without it people would have abandoned the site and not returned. With it they weathered the problems. It’s worth noting that the engineers at Twitter have seemingly always been more keen to keep the API server block running more so than the website. The API servers are what deliver tweets to 3rd party applications – ones without the whale. Users seeing the pretty, friendly error will wait for a fix longer than those who don’t.
This notion of making things friendly extends beyond Twitter. On an Apple Mac, particularly on an iPhone or an iPod, seeing a error message is incredibly rare even with unstable software. The application just dumps you back to your desktop or home screen, or occasionally the device locks up and needs a reset. Again, I believe that is a conscious, deliberate decision on the part of Apple. By not showing an error message (particularly a complicated one with error codes and text that’s only meaningful to the developer) the user doesn’t get confused by something they don’t understand. Everyone gets being dumped back to their desktop. They know what happened. They understand the application crashed. It doesn’t matter whose fault it was, the user knows that they need to start over. And they do. Compare that to an error on a Windows PC where it’s not so simple, where the user might see the famous “Blue Screen of Death” with it’s memory address notifications, segfaults and IRQ conflicts. It’s not friendly. It stops the user in their tracks.
How then can we learn from Twitter, Apple, and all the others who have embraced this simplicity? I believe Twitter especially have managed to get this right so I’d recommend a straight copy of their solution. Not necessarily with a whale, but with a single, humble error screen that conveys to the user what is going on – that there’s an error. It shouldn’t say anything else. Users don’t need to know that there’s a connection error with your database server or that there’s an unexpected T_STRING on Line 93 of your controller script. All the user should see is a friendly page asking them to try again later. Use your server logs for debugging things. That’s what they’re there for.
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?
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.
The Democratic Process
Apr 8th
The UK is a democracy. This is good. We’re fortunate enough not to be living in a totalitarian or dictatorial regime, we get to elect a parliament fairly and without coersion, and, generally speaking, we don’t have too much to complain about.
However, in the past few days with the Digital Economy Bill, and I imagine more so in the build up to the 2010 general election, there has been much talk of how the government works. Bills being rushed through in the wash up with an unusually short amount of time given to debate on the floor of the Commons have been decried and derided by many users of the social communciation tool Twitter. At one point the #debill tag was trending in 3rd place on the network’s global tally.
All that is fairly standard stuff. It’s a contravsersial bill. There are several contentious issues in it. But there has been one criticism that has stood out for me. That is that the bill is being pushed through government undemocratically.
That is utter rubbish.
The UK’s system of government is a representative democracy. We do not have delegates, we do not have a majoritative system, and we do not have a direct democracy. We never have had. Allow me to explain a few of those terms;
A representative democracy is a system of government in which people elect an MP to represent them in parliament. The key term here is represent. Rather than delegating someone to go to parliament to act as a proxy for your view, at an election we vote for someone to represent us in the way that they feel is right. Your MP uses his or her brain (hopefully) to decide how to vote in a way that is best for their constituency members. They do not have to vote in the way that they think their constituency members would. That is absolutely critical. They do not, and should not if it’s what they honestly believe, vote in the way that the voters back at home would.
A majoratitive system, which we do not have, means that the government should act in the way the majority of the people would want. Some might argue that it’s a more democratic system as it better represents the views of the people, but personally I live in abject terror of the idea. The landscape of the UK would be a very different place if we had such a system. For example, the majority of the people are in favour of capital punishment (approx. 50% are in favour, 30% against, and 20% undecided).
Lastly, we do not have a system of direct democracy. Direct democracy is where the government actually asks the people to decide the really big issues themselves (by referendum). We do have statutes that allow that to happen, but it’s incredibly rare. Our democracy is much more indirect – issues are resolved in parliament.
Where does this leave the democratic process with regard to the Digital Economy Bill? Some prominent bloggers and commentators have pointed out that MPs have ignored the 20,000 letters sent in by the electorate. Ignoring the fact that 20,000 voters is only 0.04% of the people eligable to vote, not to mention some people will have sent more than one letter, and some of the letter writers might not be eligable to vote on May 6th, this criticism assumes that the MPs did actually ignore the letters in the first place. There’s no way to know that is actually the case. An MP might have read 100 letters all telling them how awful the bill is and disagreed with each and every one. Under our system of representative democracy they’re entitled to do that. That’s how our democracy works.
Then there is the criticism that there were only a fraction of MPs who turned up to the debate, and only a handful more to the vote itself. This is a more valid point, but still fails to recognise how parliament works. There are monitors all over the house itself, not to mention internet, radio and television feeds of the live debate. An MP might have decided that if they had no questions to ask or points to raise their time would be better spent listening to the debate from their office while they worked on other things. The website http://www.didmympshowupornot.com/ ignores the fact that a lot of parliamentary work goes on outside of the floor of the commons chamber itself. Not turning up to vote though, that is more of an issue. The bill is an important one that affects a number of aspects of life for all of us, and those MPs who decided to abstain should be questioning that decision today.
My own opinion on the bill is that it was horribly rushed, ill-thought through in many places, and tainted by David Geffen’s seemingly influencential relationship with Lord Mandelson. If I were an MP I would have voted no. However, I have a great deal of respect for this country’s long history of democracy, and I understand that it’s wholly democractic for MPs to be in favour of something I don’t agree with. The next stage of the political process (assuming it goes through the Lords as easily as it appears to be doing) is to recognise that it is going to be law and lobby our new MPs come May 6th to review and correct the law.
