paper.li: my take
paper.li is the most beautiful and practical application of Twitter data I’ve yet seen. And somewhat ironically, it harks back to a day when newspapers were all the rage.
The application essentially aggregates and presents back information in the form of a single web page based on a Twitter ID. Mine is here. Sounds simple, but I’m guessing the algorithms that drive it are quite complex. And that’s what makes the offering so compelling. They seem to find the articles that I find most interesting, those that I would have retweeted had I seen them on my Twitter feed.
In some respects, its charm is similar to that of Facebook. The algorithms that determine what constitutes your Facebook homepage seem similarly complex. How long does Facebook wait until it tells you the number of your friends that have recently connected to another person, for example? And with paper.li, what factors determine whether articles are presented to you and the order in which they appear?
It’s lovely. And useful. If you’re off Twitter for a while, it’s a good way to catch up without being overwhelmed.
Google Contacts annoyance
Google Contacts is allegedly getting an upgrade. It has apparently been rolled out to the basic (sorry) GMail customers and will soon be with us Google Apps customers. I’m never sure whether to be honoured that upgrades always seem to be road-tested by the lesser GMail brethren, or to be annoyed that they get them first. Either way, I can bear little influence.
The upgrade will make contacts more usable, allegedly. But as far as I’ve read, I don’t think it will solve my biggest gripe.
You see, I like order in my digital world. I like my photos to be tagged and geolocated. I like my invoices to be consistent. And I like my contacts to be pure. They are always saved as “Surname, Forename” (even my grandma, for Doherty, Pete’s sake).
Whenever I email someone new, either actively or as a response to an incoming email, they automatically appear in the All Contacts bucket, but don’t make it into the My Contacts bucket. That’s good, because I don’t want what might be stray contacts making their way into the sanctity that is the My Contacts bucket. But only by undertaking a comparison of the All Contacts bucket to the My Contacts bucket can I figure out what these wretched new contacts are, to make a decision as to whether to formalise them or bin them.
So on an ad hoc basis, I export My Contacts, export All Contacts, load both into Excel, do some vlookup jiggery-pokery and identify the delta. I then go through those contacts one by one deciding whether to delete them or formalise them by transferring them to My Contacts and adding the necessary metadata (Surname, Forename etc.).
Frustrating isn’t the word, but it’ll do.
RIP @paul_clarke—the account, not the person
Wednesday was a sad day. At 3.42pm BST, Paul Clarke decided that he’d had enough of Twitter. After 19,999 tweets, many of which enlightened me, touched me, amused me, and occasionally humbled me, he signed off.
20,000. I think that’s probably enough. Now, what’s next? Over and out.
I take this as a move directed against me. Only 22 hours prior, I’d texted him to tell him:
You are a genuine asset to Twitter and indeed the world.
“Ha,” I’m sure he thought, “that’ll show him!”
In seriousness, he was an enormous asset to Twitter, as I’m sure his other 2,390 followers would testify. His tweets were inspirational, almost always positive and a true pleasure to read. He directed us to articles that genuinely mattered, and to photos that were often sublime. And whenever I wrote an article of a certain ilk, it was his RT that I most actively wished for—a stamp of approval, if you will.
There are about five people whose tweets I eagerly awaited, and this number has now dropped to four. But I respect his decision. Twitter has its benefits—without it, I wouldn’t have stumbled upon Paul himself—but it can also suck life out of you if you let it. And I have been guilty of that, as my wife might vouch. At its worst, it can be trite, transient, shallow.
If Paul thinks it’s time to move on, it’s time for him to move on. I for one will be spending less time on Twitter as a result—a good thing, I feel.
For Twitter, status update number 21,495,421,699 marked a sad loss.
#YRS2010
I popped along to Young Rewired State 2010 late Friday afternoon. For those oblivious to its work, it’s basically an initiative designed to get youngsters engaged with government via geekery. Fifteen to 18-year-olds are invited to work on an initiative of their choosing, helped by a mentor, to create some sort of application that might be of use using government data.
It’s an admirable initiative. Apathy with government in general is low right now, and anything that can boost that, particularly among youngsters, has to be a good thing.
Friday was the culmination of a week’s work, with youngsters from regions across the UK—Norwich, Manchester, Bristol, Reading to name but a few—descended upon London’s Great Portland Street to present their ideas and applications.
Rarely has so much geekery been seen in one place. I tried to fit in to some limited degree, sporting my XKCD t-shirt, but was outdone on so many levels—the most predictable for such an event being the 127.0.0.1 t-shirt of Harry Rickards. Laptops abounded (both Apple-branded and otherwise), dongles, smartphones even the odd iPad. Young geeks were still polishing their applications (not a euphemism) while their peers were up on stage presenting theirs to the audience. Above all, an overwhelming sense of enthusiasm and passion filled the room.
It was refreshing. The news is filled with stories about “the youth of today”, and while admittedly these kids were in the main privileged (it’s not your average kid that gets to go to London to present from their own laptop), the passion was a joy to behold.
And some of the ideas were fabulous. From Steve Cox’s neat little postcode comparison tool to Issy Long’s wondrously designed site for displaying the energy efficiency of government departments. I hope she won’t mind me saying so, but Issy—the first girl to the stage—was nervous as hell, but it seemed that her passion for the subject matter surpassed the nerves, and the presentation was fabulous.
There were applications to find your local recycling plant based on the specific type of item you’re looking to recycle and those that suggested which GCSEs to take based on their “passability”.
I had to leave before the culmination, but the winning entry was a great idea that allowed people to find books of interest in libraries, linking in with social media to allow people to tag books and their location and for others to find those very same books. A mechanism, perhaps, to rejuvenate the local library.
But the applications were not the winners at #YRS2010. The kids who built them were. Their passion—for their device, their data, their OS of choice, their language of choice, their idea, their mentor, their application—was palpable. And to think that these kids will be the generation of tomorrow was both heartening and frightening. Heartening, for who better to drive forward the digital economy? Frightening, because these people will be competing with me in the jobs marketplace before too long.
Thanks must go to Emma for the orchestration, Hadley for the wondrous personal drinks service and Paul for diving around the floor looking like a tit in creating an awesome flickr set. Until #YRS2011.
The problem with centralising the strategy
In times such as these, the source of strategy must move closer to the centre.
During times of relative prosperity and wealth, strategies can afford to be local. One organisational unit can afford to have a different strategy to another, as long as the organisation is sufficiently large. Such diversity allows for business needs to be met in a timely fashion, and any inefficiencies that result are mere noise compared to the benefits perceived. (Note my avoidance of the word “realised”.)
In leaner times, the inefficiencies associated with localised strategy cannot be justified. What was believed to be “business need” is often discovered to be “business want”, and so the promotion and proliferation of localised strategies to meet those wants is seen as wasteful. Instead, strategy is drawn towards the centre, the local organisational units becoming more involved in implementing the strategy and managing tactical initiatives as opposed to defining and shaping the strategy.
In the private sector, the board and finance departments take control from the departments. In government, the Cabinet Office and HM Treasury take control from the Departments.
The difficulty lies not in the centralised model itself, but in the shift from one model to the other. By devolving the strategy in the first place, the local departments (capitalised or otherwise) diverge from one another. Oracle pops up here, SAP there. Where Microsoft abounds in one area, open source thrives elsewhere. Macs/PCs, Firefox/IE, Autonomy/Google, the list goes on.
So when strategy is overnight drawn towards the centre, change is necessary. And change costs money. And money is scarce, certainly in government—both within delivery departments and centrally.
What this means is that strategy will be slow to pervade. Very slow. Departments will not be able to make wholesale changes—there simply isn’t the money to do so. Only at points where investment would have occurred anyway will departments have the opportunity to embrace the strategy. And even then, if the shift to align to the strategy is more expensive than continuing down the previous trajectory, then the additional spend will have to be justified. Moreover, these investment cycles will become fewer and further between, hardware being asked to run for longer and software and operating systems continuing after the warranty and support have expired.
So the move towards a common strategy will be slow. Possibly so slow that by the time alignment is felt, strategy will again be devolved. Only time will tell.
Why for me, Twitter beats Facebook
Twitter is wonderful in a way that Facebook isn’t.
Facebook allows you to connect to people you know. It’s quite a personal thing housing pictures, thoughts and details that you likely wouldn’t want to give random people access to. So you’re quite discerning about those you invite to be your “friend” (for want of a better word) and those from whom you accept similar invites.
Twitter on the other hand is less personal. People’s profiles are generally quite vague and while many write about the minutiae of life, thoughts are generally not sufficiently detailed to tie to an individual. Its primary use, certainly among those people I follow, is to disseminate information that other people might find interesting.
This less personal feel that forms the basis of Twitter rather oddly promotes the creation of new friendships in a way that Facebook doesn’t. Facebook attempts to maintain existing friendships in a virtual world, and with its 500 millionth user recently signing up, it’s arguably rather successful in that mission. But the looseness of Twitter allows you to follow people you don’t know, strike up relationships with people you’ve never met and form alliances with those people based around common interests (and quirks).
With Facebook, what was real becomes virtual. With Twitter, what was virtual becomes real.
And this is what I love about Twitter. It extends your friend-base as opposed to enriching your existing friend-base. It’s almost like a social outlet in its own right. I can find people interested in Excel, in social media, in data mapping, in fatherhood, in iPhones, music, numbers and engage with them meaningfully on those very subjects.
The River Twitter
My good friend Alan wrote:
Twitter, for me, is a river. Every so often you step in and watch the flotsam drift by. Sometimes there is stuff that you pick up and look at, rarely you keep it to examine later. But what came before and came after is lost to the ocean of debris.
I love the analogy. Your Twitter feed is like a river. Whether or not you’re present to witness it, it keeps on flowing. And for anyone following more than a hundred or so people, keeping up with every snippet every day is a pointless goal.
Instead, just as with a river, you pop along every so often—to admire the view, to watch the boats pass, to see how the sun is glistening on the water. You might even take off your shoes and have a paddle. But however often you go back, the river will always be flowing, there’ll always be something new to take in, and you’ll always be welcome to get your feet wet, skim some stones or dive right in. That’s what I love about Twitter—and rivers.
Excel-based site map generator
A good six or seven years back, I developed an Excel spreadsheet that took a hierarchical data feed of pages (page name, level in the IA, page type) and generated a visual representation for you on the fly. A crop of the visual is shown below.
It used conditional formatting up the ying-yang, with particular complexities around developing the interconnects between the boxes. While there were some macros to re-hash the incoming data, the visuals were all based on conditional formats which were at the time limited to a maximum of three (plus the default format) per cell.
All in all, it was awesome. (If I may say so.) If anyone out there has a use for it, let me know.
Twitter determines my aroma
I undertook my first piece of crowd-sourcing today. It related to my armpits.
Over the course of my adult life, I’ve gradually settled on the regular contents of my bathroom cabinet. Dax is my hair gel of choice. I use Boots’ range of moisturisers and shave gel—the latter rather rarely. Euthymol has become my toothpaste of choice. And the Groom Mate Platinum Xl Nose has a lifetime guarantee—a fabulous product, if I may say so.
But I’ve rarely been happy with my underarm deodorant. In the States, I settled on something called Speed Stick, which was fabulous. But they converted it from a stick to a gel after we left, and after trying the latter I deemed it not worth importing.
So I used Gillette’s gel for a while, not being overly happy with it but neither being happy with any of its obvious competitors. So on the way to Boots this morning, I turned to Twitter. I asked for advice. And advice I received:
- Seany_G: mitchum roll on. It’s all rubbish, but this much less so.
- gregnbaker: Mitchum!
- simoneverest: slightly delayed but ‘Clinique rollerball’ my pref… (sadly too late to inform the decision)
- Anonymity respected: I use the women’s stuff. Mum liquid roll on in particular. Those women don’t fuck about in this department.
I’ve gone for what I believe is a unisex Mitchum. Three, actually. It will be aired for the first time tomorrow, and the Twitter community will be kept informed as to its progress and my satisfaction. Meanwhile, if any of my colleagues suffer any adverse effects, please update me accordingly.
SEOs: they don’t O SEs at all
I was called by an SEO the other day. That’s a Search Engine Optimizer [sic] to those fortunate enough to be unware of their existence. The call ended with me hanging up on him, such were his cock-like credentials.
I’ve never been happy with the concept of an SEO. It’s basically someone who understands enough about how the internet works—or more specifically how search engines work—to advise on how best to write, tag and structure your web pages to get them naturally to the top of search rankings.
The offline equivalent would be some form of location specialist, advising companies where best to position their shops to maximise footfall. But the online version has adopted somewhat legendary status, seeming to me to have invented an industry where one was not particularly needed. The very existence of SEOs means that SEOs have to exist, to compete with their counterparts.
Seth Godin today wrote tangentially to this very topic, signing off with:
That’s one reason I resist the temptation to optimize this blog for traffic and yield. I’d rather force myself to improve it by having the guts to write better posts instead.
I’ve always agreed. I need to make my service better and more attractive through its attributes and my reputation, as opposed to artificially improving my perceived quality by bumping my results up the rankings through clever tagging.
The very term search engine optimization makes my blood boil. It isn’t about optimizing search engines. It’s about frigging search engines such that they think you’re better than you are. To me, SEOs are the scourge of the internet.