Memex 1.1

Interesting post by Naoimi Gleit in the Facebook Blog.

Ever see a story about a friend who tagged “themself” in a photo? “Themself” isn’t even a real word. We’ve used that in place of “himself or herself”. We made that grammatical choice in order to respect people who haven’t, until now, selected their sex on their profile.

However, we’ve gotten feedback from translators and users in other countries that translations wind up being too confusing when people have not specified a sex on their profiles. People who haven’t selected what sex they are frequently get defaulted to the wrong sex entirely in Mini-Feed stories.

For this reason, we’ve decided to request that all Facebook users fill out this information on their profile. If you haven’t yet selected a sex, you will probably see a prompt to choose whether you want to be referred to as “him” or “her” in the coming weeks. When you make a selection, that will appear in Mini-Feed and News Feed stories about you, but it won’t be searchable or displayed in your Basic Information.

She goes on to say that they’ve “received pushback in the past from groups that find the male/female distinction too limiting.”

Eh???

Go to twitabit and post your tweets there. Their server will stack them in a queue and make sure they get delivered.

Just thought you’d like to know.

Thanks to Dave Winer (who has a small stake in Twitabit).

Very interesting study from the Pew ‘Internet and American Life’ project which, among many other things, suggests that,

A significant number of voters are also using the internet to gain access to campaign events and primary documents. Some 39% of online Americans have used the internet to access “unfiltered” campaign materials, which includes video of candidate debates, speeches and announcements, as well as position papers and speech transcripts…

(Hint: Steve Jobs’s Keynote on the iPhone 3G?)

Thoughtful Guardian piece by Charles Arthur.

What Twitter needs is to expand its capacity while making money from those who are using it. True, it has just received $15m (£7.5m) of venture capital funding, valuing it at $80m. But it needs to deter some people from using it - while benefiting from those who continue to.

There are two obvious ways forward. Charge the users, or charge those who want to get at the users. The first option is fine - if it wants to lose 90% of its user base (the rough tradeoff any service sees if it begins charging, however little). The second option might look puzzling, but it has worked before, in the MP3 market.

Once, there were zillions of MP3-playing software programs. Then Fraunhofer, which owns the patents, decided to charge for their use. At a stroke, the number of MP3 encoder/decoders shrank - leaving only those companies able to pay for them.

Twitter could do the same: charge for access to its API, or throttle requests over a certain limit from non-paying sources. True, its architecture challenges would remain - but with money coming in, it would have the incentive to get it right. And in the end, what do you want: a Twitter that’s free, or a Twitter that works?

My answer: one that works.

Dave Winer has had an interesting idea. He wrote a script to work out how much work the Twitterers he follows makes for Twitter’s servers. Results here.

First a big disclaimer — this means nothing. In so many ways. To be on the list I had to have followed you some time in the last few months. If I haven’t followed you, you can’t be on the list. So don’t think of being on the list as some kind of honor.

So what are the numbers? Okay from left to right, the number of people folllowing the person, then the number of updates, and finally the first multiplied by the second, giving a very very rough indication of the amount of noise (or spew) this person is generating on Twitter. Of course Scoble is at the top of the list. I’ll let you figure out what that means. I chuckled when I saw Guy Kawasaki coming in at #4 — I guess his semi-spam pays off (if this means anything, which it doesn’t — see the disclaimer).

Scoble’s spewage quotient is 308,359,436.

Interesting blog post by Darren waters.

It seems to me that there are fewer and fewer water cooler moments, in part because television has become less of a cohesively social experience.

PVRS, video on demand, BitTorrent, digital download stores, DVD box sets have all helped to fracture the common viewing experience.

We tend to watch our TV content out of sync with one another these days.

But last night I experienced a water cooler moment as a programme was being broadcast. It was social TV at the point of broadcast, and it was thanks to Twitter…

Needless to say, I found the post from Darren’s Twitter stream!

At dinner in college last night I sat opposite a charming young woman who seemed surprised to learn that I had a FaceBook account. “Oooh”, she said, “Can I be your friend?”. “Certainly”, I replied, with what I imagined to be old-world courtesy, “I’d be honoured”. At which point one of her (slightly inebriated) friends further down the table shouted “Are you stalking her, then?”

Harrumph. But Lo! — here’s a weird report from The Register:

A social networking site has deleted most of its users over the age of 36 because it claims older users pose a danger of sex offending. It claims to be forced into the action by the Government, but the part of a law it cites is not yet in force.

Faceparty has deleted what it describes as “a huge number of accounts” from its social networking site in recent weeks. It lists ‘over 36 years old’ as one of its reasons for deletion.

“We understand that only a minority of older users are sex offenders, but you must understand that we cannot tell which,” it says in its explanation of the deletion of accounts.

“New government legislation means we need to check older users on the sex offenders list,” says its notice. “This legislation is based upon checking email addresses against a government provided list. Faceparty has never insisted on validated email addresses and can therefore not participate in this new scheme.”

I’d never heard of Faceparty, and the Register thinks that the company has misinterpreted the legislation, but it makes you think, doesn’t it?

And the real irony is that I’ve probably been on FaceBook much longer than anyone else at the table last night!

For those who can’t abide the whole social networking thing.

Interesting story

Twitter user Orli Yakuel, with 650 followers, had a nasty surprise this morning - her direct messages (private messages between two Twitter users) showed up in her normal Twitter stream (and were subsequently published to her FriendFeed account). Friends messaged her to tell her about the embarrassing issue.

In a subsequent update, the culprit was identified:

It looks like this is a problem caused by GroupTweet, a newish third party Twitter application that allows users to direct message a lot of people at once. Orli says that she tested the application earlier today, and a number of commenters are pointing out that it may be the problem. GroupTweet requires you to create a new Twitter account to use with the service, and tell it the credentials for the account. But if you accidentally enter your primary account credentials instead, it will expose your direct messages to the public. This is not a Twitter API issue as far as I can tell, it’s a problem with the fact that GroupTweet is confusing and if you make a mistake, your direct messages are made public. This is particularly an issue for non-native English users when using it. I could have very easily made this mistake when testing the application.

TechCrunch claims that the guy who wrote GroupTweet has disabled sign-ups for the time being, but I can find no mention of that on the site.