Memex 1.1

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.

Calling all parents of teenage kids. See this from Good Morning Silicon Valley…

When Beth, a single mom from Richmond, Va., told her 13-year-old boy to stop playing on his Xbox and do his chores, and the youngster’s ill-advised response was to break the vacuum cleaner, she decided to hit him where it hurts (and her resolve only hardened after she found porn site cookies on his computer). According to Gizmodo, Beth first put the boy’s Xbox up for sale on eBay. Then she password-protected his computer so he couldn’t get online. And finally, in the unkindest cut of all, she posted a Snoopy cartoon on his MySpace page, making him look decidedly uncool. “Apparently I’m the meanest mom in the world, were his words,” she told Gizmodo. “I’m a single mom. I can’t let them walk over me or I might never get up.” Cruel? A bit. Unusual? For now. Effective in reducing recidivism? Time will tell.

Well, his sidekicks are — on his behalf. See his Twitter channel. As of this moment, he’s got 1,332 followers.

Thanks to Michael (who has some other interesting Twitter-channel links too) for spotting it.

Don’t know who created this, but s/he is a genius.

Thanks to Gill for passing it on.

Update: It’s by Stephen Wildish.

Songwriter Bill Bragg was struck by the news that Bebo co-founder Michael Birch has walked away with $600 million after the site was bought by AOL. Bragg has some ideas about what Birch should do with the money:

I heard the news with a particular piquancy, as Mr. Birch has cited me as an influence in Bebo’s attitude toward artists. He got in touch two years ago after I took MySpace to task over its proprietary rights clause. I was concerned that the site was harvesting residual rights from original songs posted there by unsigned musicians. As a result of my complaints, MySpace changed its terms and conditions to state clearly that all rights to material appearing on the site remain with the originator.

A few weeks later, Mr. Birch came to see me at my home. He was hoping to expand his business by hosting music and wanted my advice on how to construct an artist-centered environment where musicians could post original songs without fear of losing control over their work. Following our talks, Mr. Birch told the press that he wanted Bebo to be a site that worked for artists and held their interests first and foremost.

In our discussions, we largely ignored the elephant in the room: the issue of whether he ought to consider paying some kind of royalties to the artists. After all, wasn’t he using their music to draw members — and advertising — to his business? Social-networking sites like Bebo argue that they have no money to distribute — their value is their membership. Well, last week Michael Birch realized the value of his membership. I’m sure he’ll be rewarding those technicians and accountants who helped him achieve this success. Perhaps he should also consider the contribution of his artists.

The musicians who posted their work on Bebo.com are no different from investors in a start-up enterprise. Their investment is the content provided for free while the site has no liquid assets. Now that the business has reaped huge benefits, surely they deserve a dividend…