RE: Is Facebook unethical, clueless or unlucky?

1. Is Facebook clueless, unethical or just unlucky? Why?

I don’t believe that Facebook could possibly be clueless; they’re one of the few companies that gets to take their pick of what talent is available to the industry.

This is a slip into the unethical, at the very least it’s a slip into the grey area – every web company that survives on advertising revenue (ie, nearly every social media company) is under constant pressure from their own advertising, marketing and public relations teams (or whatever fulfills the tasks of such traditional elements in their business) for better, deeper information and bigger numbers for that information. At the end of the day, it boils down to targeted advertising, and must do for a company like Facebook, judging by their popular D.I.Y. advertising model.

I don’t for a moment believe that their motives are *evil*, but I do think they are misguided. I think they have probably “dogfooded” themselves into believing that it’s a harmless way to increase the value of their product (and their product is the users of Facebook, their customers are the people who buy the ad space).

2. Will Facebook’s latest behavior result in more lawsuits and/or industry regulation?

There are stirrings of regulation on this side of the pond (though still only rumbles) and one has to suspect that eventually the problem of regulating Internet companies activities online is going to get attention – but I’m not sure this particular event will be the final straw. I think it’s likely that companies will keep pushing the boundaries until one finally does something that creates a scandal and brings the whole privacy house of cards tumbling down.

3. Do you trust Facebook with your information?

I was initially wary of them for their “enterprising” (and now widely adopted) strategy of scraping address books and email inboxes for contact details to “helpfully” invite others to the service. I think the value they bring to the table is limited, and that their success is based, in large part, on the ferociousness and tenacity of their contact harvesting spampaign and gimmicky features that result in email notifications.

So no, I don’t trust Facebook to not exploit what information I give them; I’m waiting to see just how far that exploitation goes.

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Mindset of the mob – a response to John Waters

An opinion piece about the effect of “new forms” of communication appeared in the Irish Times on Friday last, written by John Waters.

While the piece makes some succinct and witty observations, I believe that it fails to comprehend the breadth of application of what is collectively referred to as “new media” (with scope as varied as the authors describing it).

There are many levels of discourse on the Internet, much as there are many levels of discourse in print and speech. I think it is a mistake to allow anonymous, unmoderated comments to be added to newspaper articles, even blogs – depending on the context.

I believe John is correct in assessing that the particular method currently employed by the newspaper adds no value to the article whatsoever. However, it is unfair to generalize all forms of new communication as subject to the same problems or that even those “abusive” and “posturing” comments are objectively useless.

In fact, “the mob” needs a place to harmlessly churn and rage and eventually either blow out or become coherent and constructive. At the bottom of a news article is not the place for that. It’s easy to mock, but as long as someone is communicating at all they can be engaged and even educated. It isn’t necessarily the place of the newspaper itself to do so, however it is the place of every person to educate and help their fellow countrymen in whatever small way they can. That’s what the Internet can facilitate like no other medium before; places like Boards.ie present a method for people to discuss and educate themselves and others with little material cost, but perhaps a large personal gain.

However, as much as it allows for that, the greater the reach something has, the higher the value becomes for some people to become those that John pithily describes thusly:

“Most contributors appear mostly to want to draw attention to themselves, seeking to convey strength, cleverness, cynicism or aggression, while pre-empting the possibility of hostility or ridicule by pushing these responses in front like swords.”

This is not a problem confined to the new media. This is something that has been with humanity since man realized he had an audience for whatever he was doing. It’s less mob mentality than it is stage mentality; the same as the wino who starts a mocking dance in front of a street musician playing to the crowd, or the manic street preacher perched upon his box, eulogizing at anyone in range.

It’s easy to lay the blame for problems upon the technology itself, despite the inherent blamelessness of technology. Technology needs to be applied correctly. Though, to be fair to John, he does postulate towards the end of the piece that the problem may be representative of a change in society.

Blogs and Twitter and Facebook and forums and comments are not interchangeable terms and they are not the same thing packaged up differently. It would be akin to sweeping broadsheets, tabloids, celebrity magazines, paper pamphlets and sticky notes all up into one big amorphous glob, calling it “old media,” and then going on to say that broadsheets and sticky notes are inherently worthless because celeb magazines are mindless trash.

Allowing anonymous, unmoderated comments on newspaper articles is comparable to leaving your front door wide open while throwing a party. You will inevitably have gate crashers, whether malevolent or simply “friend of friends”, and these people are ultimately unaffected by the condition your house may be in after the party.

John is right when he describes these people as attention seeking, but they are not stupid, nor are they even unusual. In newspaper comments they are simply being given, on a platter, a platform they have not proved themselves capable of contributing to, while being respectful of other readers and contributors.

What we now consider “newspapers” are what some blogs will undoubtedly eventually become and in fact have already become (the likes of The Huffington Post, for example.) Even now, the lines are blurring; Rupert Murdoch is planning on introducing a “pay wall”, but that horse has already bolted. Journalists should, need to, embrace the new technology that is being made available to them. Absolutely, there is a need to understand this technology rather than simply shoehorn it into current processes, or apply it lazily, but there is also a need to be careful not to scorn or attempt to decry these new channels that will almost certainly become the news outlets of tomorrow.

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Kevin Smith, Dublin, October 14th

Kevin Smith announced a one day presale of tickets to his show in Vicar Street, Dublin, An Evening With Kevin Smith, on his Twitter account last night.

Tickets are on sale starting today from 9am.

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Base-56 Integer Encoding in PHP

I found myself needing to write a URL-shortening system recently, nothing particularly fancy, just something that would result in URLs similar to those of tinyURL and bit.ly. PHP’s own base64 function is purely for encoding string data to make it “URL safe” and actually results in a longer string. PHP also has a base_convert function, but this only goes up to base-36, and it seemed like a waste to only go as far as base-36 when more can be fit in.

I found a couple of functions written in Python on StackOverflow for base-62 conversion that solved the problem perfectly. The author of the solution, Baishampayan Ghose, also suggested a shorter alphabet (removing similar characters for ease of readability) which would whittle it down to base-56. I’ve ported the functions to PHP and employed a base-56 alphabet in the example below, but it would be trivial to swap it out for a longer one if required.

$alphabet_raw = "23456789abcdefghijkmnpqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZ";
$alphabet = str_split($alphabet_raw);
 
function base56_encode($num, $alphabet){
    /*
	Encode a number in Base X
 
    `num`: The number to encode
    `alphabet`: The alphabet to use for encoding
    */
    if ($num == 0){
        return 0;
	}
 
	$n = str_split($num);
    $arr = array();
    $base = sizeof($alphabet);
 
    while($num){
        $rem = $num % $base;
        $num = (int)($num / $base);
        $arr[]=$alphabet[$rem];
	}
 
    $arr = array_reverse($arr);
    return implode($arr);
}
 
function base56_decode($string, $alphabet){
    /*
	Decode a Base X encoded string into the number
 
    Arguments:
    - `string`: The encoded string
    - `alphabet`: The alphabet to use for encoding
    */
 
    $base = sizeof($alphabet);
    $strlen = strlen($string);
    $num = 0;
    $idx = 0;
 
	$s = str_split($string);
	$tebahpla = array_flip($alphabet);
 
    foreach($s as $char){
        $power = ($strlen - ($idx + 1));
        $num += $tebahpla[$char] * (pow($base,$power));
        $idx += 1;
	}
    return $num;
}

Usual code-usage caveats apply.

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Bolshevik Bingo!

Noticed that the proles are getting restless? Spotted someone looking for revolution? It’s time to play Bolshevik Bingo!



Test your exposure to newly fashionable socialism!

Test your exposure to newly fashionable socialism!

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Irish URL shortening services

Ok, so, at the end of the day it’s not really all that important that a URL shortening service has a .ie at end of it. Or is it?

I find myself using bit.ly (not Irish) more and more due to how much better integrated it seems to be with services from Twitter to Wordpress. It appears to be inching ahead of myriad other potential services, though I think there’s opportunity for the .ie brand to be made use of, as well as potentially curtailing the service to Irish Internet user idiosyncrasies somehow.

The three shorteners that I’m aware of are:

Short.ie – Collaborative effort by Webstrong and echolibre, this would be the strongest contender to bit.ly in my book, I have it set as the default shortener for several of the @boards_ie twitter streams.

URL.ie – Around as long as I’ve been using URL shortening services, used to be quite flakey with complex URL strings (or anything with a ? in it) but those problems seem to be sorted these days. Shorter URL than short.ie too, which is a bonus if you wish to eke out an extra couple of chars.

Min.ie – Doesn’t appear to be online at the time I’m writing this post, so possibly not a top recommendation, although another with a nice, short URL that makes sense.

Are there other (.ie) shortening services that I’m leaving out?

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Things You Didn’t Know About Boards.ie – Twitter streams

In case you’re interested, here’s a current list of the various Boards.ie presences on Twitter, not including the obvious plethora of regular users and moderators who have accounts! I’ll be mirroring this post over on the new Boards.ie Blog, just in case you see this article appear twice in your reader.

Founders:

@devore – Much underused (ie, never used) account of Tom Murphy, aka “DeVore”.

@johnbreslin – Account of Dr. John “Cloud” Breslin, researcher and lecturer at NUIG.

@ecksor – Jerry “ecksor” Connolly.

@regi – Dan King, aka “regi”, Digiweb Hosting.

Staff:

@boards_ie – Originally used for downtime notifications, now the “official” Boards.ie twitter account, this account is maintained by the Boards.ie staff and occasionally the founders to notify followers of interesting Boards.ie related bits of information, including blog posts, mentions in the media… and downtime notifications :)

@duggan – Me, Ross Duggan. First non-director employee of Boards.ie, lead developer.

@IRLConor – Conor McDermottroe, second addition to the Boards.ie technical team after myself. Senior developer – he has the smarts.

@darraghdoyle – Darragh Doyle, community manager for Boards.ie as well as somewhat prolific blogger.

@Shiminay – Dav Waldron, also community manager for Boards.ie. F*ckin’ metal.

Automated Feeds:

@bargainalerts – Feed of new threads from the Bargain Alerts forum.

@boards_top – automatic amalgam of various threads/posts from Boards.ie deemed to be of significance in one way or another, through some basic queries.

@adverts_ie – Feed of the FS Computer Harware section of adverts.ie.

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Developer Links – 27-07-2009

Some of these are a couple of months old, but not out of date if you haven’t seen them :)

Easy Retweet Button – John Resig, authour of the jQuery library, has written a little script to do a nice, simple and effective “retweet” button.

A Programmer’s Bookshelf – My esteemed colleague, Conor McDermottroe, has written a short list of books he recommends for the working programmer.

There are no small changes and Every pixel counts – Des Traynor with two insightful articles on user interface design.

The myth of the genius programmer – Google tech talk (via Justin Mason)

Advice: It is not a debate – Great post from Robin Blandford on the subject of taking criticism. Not strictly a “developer” link, but I think a very important lesson to learn for anyone who makes decisions that will directly impact people. Developers are often part-time project managers, it should be noted.

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Make DestroyTwitter client look like the Irish Times

Ho ho ho, hilarious, I know.

http://destroytwitter.com/themes/lg

Destroy Twitter theme screenshot

Destroy Twitter theme screenshot

PS: Tweetie for mac and iPhone is the only Twitter client worth using.

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The New Media Rags (bit of a rant)

“Social Media” news sites are swiftly becoming the tabloids of the 21st century, exemplified by dumb posts like this, as well as the latest example of linkbaiting from Techcrunch. For example, I feel that there’s a big, gaping hole in the world of tech news and information. I find myself turning more and more to Google Tech Talks (and now FLOSS Weekly thanks to Conor) for straight up nerd material, rather than this frenetic depthlessness encapsulated by the plethora of ADD-fuelled “new media” information streams like Mashable, TechCrunch, Tweetmeme, etc. Several of these are ostensibly technology news sites, but have a barrage of worthless VC cruft or net-celeb drivel. Where have the tech journals gone? I had a casual Twitter conversation on the subject with Michele Neylon, a well known technophile in Irish tech circles, who agreed there was little on offer in the way of particularly good tech news and information sites.

Posts like those above are read by tens of thousands, horrifyingly maybe even millions of people, all of whom are getting this same blasé, unresearched, sweepingly generalised rubbish. A rare incident of journalism from Techcrunch UK reflects a conversation going on amongst media types that perhaps this “crowdsource news” stuff is a really bad idea (what a revelation). On his show, This Week in Tech, Leo Laporte has frequently speculated that the increasing demand for bleeding-edge news is a dangerous trend towards increased viral misinformation. News, sufficiently interesting, will get passed along, unchecked, within a social trust sphere. Also, Internet information, sufficiently believable, will be quoted as fact by mainstream media.

It must be dismaying to reliable media outlets to see their hard work cheapened in favour of superficial, tabloidian “articles”, the facts of which are usually cherry-picked from traditional media anyway, or worse, simply made up.

What’s really changing is the speed that rumours disseminate at. In that regard, this is simply a mirror of what happens “around the water cooler”, at parties or anywhere else that people talk. What’s new is the audience around that water cooler; instead of five people it’s five million. A made-up story doesn’t change just the hearts and minds of a few, it can change stock market values. As a news and information site with a critical mass you have a duty of care to ensure your system is not misused. Boards.ie, despite not claiming to be a news site of any sort, walks that line between allowing expression and curtailing malice every day. This is only possible because of the overwhelming good will of most of the userbase, and the tireless efforts of the (volunteer) moderators.

The increasing inter connectivity of Internet citizens is bringing plenty of new challenges, not least of which is the pursuit of truth. Information disseminates so quickly now that it doesn’t even matter if it’s true or not, as long as it’s fast and interesting (read: controversial). In the frenzy to be first, harmful lies can spread like wildfire through the modern media jungle, wreaking havoc before anyone even really knows what happened. It sounds terribly dramatic, but we may be on the cusp of a global mob mentality, a superculture activated and defined by extremes. People are starting to wonder aloud why we need news companies when we tend to get the information from each other before they do.

It’s getting to the point where journalism as an institution is being questioned. While it may be that the concept of the huge corporate newsroom is (perhaps) seeing the end of it’s days, journalism as an institution is still utterly vital, perhaps more now than ever. Social media sites that rely on a thin line of advertising revenue and clickthrough are going to be concerned with quantity and speed, eschewing quality. In-depth, well researched news would become a thing of the past if genuine, honest-to-god journalism died out; or at least become the realm of the philantropist-backed or hobbyist outlet.

Realistically, I don’t think that day will ever come. How can it? Anonymous or citizen journalism is unreliable by the very nature of anonymity. Additionally, a normal “citizen” aka Joe Soap has nothing to lose from being the source of inaccurate news. Virtually anonymous review sites offer little in the way of credible information. There needs to be “worth” of some sort attached to a source for it to be reliable and trustable. I think that modern news and information companies need to be careful not to hop on the bandwagon too eagerly and in the process devalue their brand. Yes, there is a place for anonymity, the rumourmill, the backchannel, but this needs to be seen for what it is, an evolution of these – literally ancient – channels of communication. News/information channels and data channels should not become any more intermingled than they already are. There is an important distinction between data and information, one which was impressed upon me by one of my former lecturers, Dr. Markus Helfert, and one which I believe can be applied to this scenario.

I doubt there’s any disclosure required here, but I will point out a bias beforehand since I do happen to work for Boards.ie :) . I feel that the move spearheaded by the community managers Darragh Doyle and Dav Waldron to facilitate companies who wish to interact directly with the Boards.ie populace is a powerful step in the right direction for online interaction. In Ireland, a Boards.ie account becomes a bit of an Internet passport under the right circumstances (ie, with enough personal investment of time, content and relationships). For a company, it’s nearly a trial by fire to be one of the select few who have the open-minded progressiveness to last as an “official” voice there. There is a transparency of operation and agendaless, perhaps slightly revolutionary vibe from the founders of the site. There is a fierce mistrust of salespeople and “shills” which is endemic to the user culture. As far as I’m concerned, any company who understands this enough to attempt to build a bridge there is very well clued in.

I think we’ve been moving towards this for a long time now with the likes of Google, Flickr, Amazon, and other powerful new Internet brands, but trust and worth are going to become more and more of an issue as the number of people on the Internet increases, far beyond the scope of financial transactions. As the value of widespread misinformation increases, so too will the value of reliable information.

Update: Excellent related article written by Clay Shirky that I just came across via @eamonnfallon.

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