A Business Guide to Twitter

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Heard about Twitter but not sure what all the fuss is about? Think you would like to explore it but have never got round to it? If so, then this short guide is for you. It will show you how to get started, some simple techniques and ways it can help you and your business.


* What is Twitter?
* What it's not
* What are Tweets?
* Key facts about Twitter
* How does that help my business?
* Real-life examples of businesses using Twitter
* The growth of Twitter
* How do I get involved?
* Get started
* Completing your profile
* Having a plan
* To follow and be followed
* What to tweet?
* How much, how often?
* Some techniques
* Some tools
* How can I promote my feed?
* Embed your feed on your website

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Who thinks Social Media is there for the taking?

Or who thinks they own the social web?

Until a couple of months ago I would have answered without hesitation - "marketers".

Since the beginning of the social media revolution wannabe marketers and wannabe marketer gurus have been desperately talking up and promoting the supposed potential of social media as an effective marketing tool. Well they would, wouldn't they? They were willing the future to be a nice income stream for them - social media as gravy train.

They pushed the concept to such an extent that by 2010 it had become an accepted dogma; a 'given'; carved in stone. Among marketers. Apparently it didn't matter what your business was, all social media platforms were there for the taking. It was just how to actually tap in was the problem. But never mind: there's money to be made selling the 'secret' too! Hurray!

Instead of "How might a marketer use social media?" it had become "Only I can give marketers the knowledge to use social media effectively."

But now there is a slight change out there in cyberguruspace. An ever-so-slightly more cautious tone is creeping into blog posts and analysis. In time this will be a bubble that bursts.

There is worry inside and outside Twitter about the microblog and newsfeed's huge percentage of inactive accounts: is Twitter over-valued as a result? For example, Bob Warfield summed it up very nicely at Enterprise Irregulars on April 14 2011.

He looked at how most tweets are really ads, and free ones at that. So how will Twitter convince business to pay for adverts? And will Twitter users accept their streams filling up with paid ads? Or will they simply not follow these kind of accounts? Isn't a paid ad automatically spam in the minds of most users? Afterall, they don't have to receive the free kind if they don't want them. And of course this applies to the true spam tweet - those emanating from dodgy marketers. Just don't follow the source. And block them from following you if you don't want to be associated with them in any way.

Twitter users have the power. That's the only way Twitter can really work, and why it has been such a success. Deep down Twitter must know this.

It is useful to look at the history of spam in a social web context. Spam started with email. In those far off innocent days when email was conceived nobody really thought about the way the unscrupulous would use it. There then began a long struggle to claim back the inbox and rid it of the pestilence. The war is effectively won. Ten years ago or so it was a total preoccupation for most users. That is all history. In these days of webmail, sophisticated filters and firewalls, unsolicited emails should be a relic from the past. Simply put, if you suffer from more than a couple of spam emails per month in your inbox you are doing something wrong: either you are using a very old-fashioned and poor service or you just can't be bothered to do anything about it. And though the spam email is still out there, everybody is familiar with those miniscule ROI stats associated with spam.

Furthermore, personal power has extended to all kinds of straight advertising on the web. If you find it gets in the way you can block selectively or with a blanket, using multi-browser add-ons such as Adblock.

So, when the social web came along with the ongoing explosion in platforms providing multitudinous ways for people to connect around different networking concepts, the spammers (they like to think of themselves as marketers these days to give themselves some cred) were very quick to see an opportunity.

But there is one huge stumbling block. The social networking sites were built on the back of years of experience with unsolicited email. The developers built sites at which users controlled who they were connected with and what they saw in their news streams. Of course this hasn't always worked perfectly and users have often been confused by some of the complexities of set-ups and options. Add to this the difficulties encountered by sites (eg Facebook) in letting in business without compromising the basic principles.

However the principle remains and is actually stronger than ever. Social sites are exactly that: they are for people. Businesses are mostly only let in under sufferance if they behave. (An exception would be Foursquare where businesses are central to the concept and users willingly buy into the game). Generally users must be proactive in connecting with business. If a business either doesn't behave, or is simply boring, or offers no incentive to connect, it will be ignored.

Where does that leave the 'marketers' - the modern spammers? Up a gum tree, that's where. How to invade Twitter (for example); appear attractive and interesting so real people follow you; and convince them to click-through and buy what you are ultimately selling? Because that is what it is really about.

The good news for the social media using public is that it is just beginning to dawn on all those thousands of wannabe Twitter 'marketers' (for example) that it is very difficult indeed - nay, impossible. That doesn't mean there aren't thousands more wannabes joining up every day and trying to find the yellow brick road. But they are joining up to an illusion; an incestuous roundabout with eventually no winners.

Quite a long time ago in social web history there was a site called Entrecard. (It still exists, but in a rather different form.) The concept was to get bloggers together in one place to promote eachother. Participants earned credits for 'activity' following other bloggers which could be used to place ads/links on other participants blogs. The more clicking-through a blogger did, the more credits you earned and apparently the more 'popular' your blog became.

Of course there was a fundamental flaw: serious bloggers haven't really got much time to read many other people's blogs and what they are really looking for is the great mass of non-bloggers to be interested in their posts, not attract a collection of other bloggers desperately feigning interest in an attempt to attract more people to their blogs - an incestuous roundabout.

This is what is developing slowly and more subtly at Twitter for the hordes of new marketers.

For the last few months I have been conducting an 'experiment' at Twitter. I have had the tweets at my personal account 'protected', meaning that potential followers must ask to follow me through an automatically generated email and I can accept or decline. The first thing I noticed was a significant increase in potential followers. My personal account is a fairly low-key affair - I tweet but once or twice a week and mostly use the account as a news harvesting service across several areas of interest, so this new found attention was something of a surprise. (Does a protected-tweet account give me some kind of kudos? Do people assume that I must be special?)

But who was trying to follow me was interesting: almost exclusively the new breed of wannabe marketers. Below are two recent examples. They are typical, and it will be seen that they are crass and uniform - tweeting without imagination to a formula set out by some wannabe make-quick-bucks guru. Everything about them feels wrong: from the 'attractive' but anonymous stock photo style of image, through the absence of any kind of biography to the post mix of irrelevant and oft-heard bon mots or platitudes juxtaposed with links to whatever-it-is that is being flogged.





But what really interests me is the list of followers these accounts attract - and believe me all these accounts are interested in is increasing their followers ad infinitum. I was struck by the similarity to the original Entrecard site. Most of the followers appeared to be abandoned or inactive accounts following automatically, or (and this turned out to be the case with these two examples) yet more wannabe marketers following back because, well, that's one of the ways to get more followers yourself isn't it? You've got to laugh.



Note that in the fragrant valenciamay's record of lists following 'her', IanDavidB has got it exactly right with his "spamandotherdouchebags" list! (Don't be surprised if by the time you read this both accounts shown above will have disappeared).

Comical really. So just like the old-style Entrecard, the modern Twitter spammers are setting up rings of incestuous wannabes all spouting trite quotes at each other and pushing the same stuff. One day they will catch on that it is all an illusion.

So what will happen? Under cover of the usual caveats about the foolishness of predicting the future, spamming as a social media activity will slowly fizzle out as we, the users, become increasingly savvy about who we let into our social networking lives. (Spamming should not be confused with aggressive account-hacking - that will almost certainly increase as the dodgy marketers realise that if they can't get your attention by 'fair' methods they must try foul.)

This will be bad news for the those that seek to over-value the likes of Twitter. The pop and collapse of over-valued social media sites is set to be the next Internet bursting bubble. This does not mean Twitter will disappear - far from it. It will be chastened, yes. More sensibly valued, yes. And the real users will go on using the service in all the many ways they use it now, once the hysteria has largely evaporated.

The conundrum for SM was, is, and will be, how, having attracted users in the first place by giving them the power, to make an honest buck without driving those same users away in their hordes. The users on the other hand will come out stronger than ever.

Footnote: a tweet suggestion (of a type they favour) for wannabe marketers to ruminate over: "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink."

Is history repeating itself?

This is a capture of a recent jokey conversation at Facebook which I was involved in. I have the uneasy feeling that history is making a stab at repeating itself. Right now it appears we have a dotcom bubble getting within sight of bursting point. It may not be such an idiotic and hysteria-driven bubble as the one a decade or more ago, but it may yet prove to be an even more tragic crash because of the stupendous amounts of money being thrown around. Ten years is about half of recorded history in Internet terms, so I guess a large number of today's players were too young to notice the first time. Their elders should know better. A bit of quiet reflection might be in order.

(If the images are too small to read, click on each to enlarge)

How to Auto-tweet Calendar Events

Generally speaking auto-tweeting is not a good idea. Your followers on Twitter will be thoroughly turned-off when they discover your tweets are impersonal and robotic. In a word, they will be seen as spam, nothing more. Auto-tweeting naturally falls into a similar numb category to auto-following based on a keyword.

However, that is not the whole story. There are a number of circumstances when auto-tweeting is the perfectly acceptable and time-saving solution. One of these circumstances is calendar events. What better way to provide your followers with useful information about your activities than have your public calendar tweet event reminders automatically? This must be useful for a huge range of individuals and business types: a musician tweeting tour dates and a cinema tweeting programme changes; companies announcing which exhibitions or trade shows they are attending, and university departments, societies and clubs of all kinds posting event dates and fixtures.

Automatic calendar event tweets can be the sole output of a particular Twitter account if it is made perfectly clear in the bio that that is the modus operandi, and you feel that that is the best way to serve your purpose. However, I suspect that in most cases these kind of tweets best form just a part of the output.

Back in the middle of 2009 I wrote a piece call "Do a bit of plumbing with Yahoo! Pipes." It described two methods of producing an On This Day In History type feed for a learned history society, the Crimean War Research Society. The first method was by iframe and javascript, the second used RSS and Yahoo! Pipes. Since then I have set the whole thing up on a Google Calendar and processed it so that every event is posted at Twitter. It works very well as an illustration of the method described below.


This method for auto-calendar event tweeting is not unique to me or Glanton and there are other ways of doing it. However, this is the method I find most satisfactory. One side-effect of the process is the creation of a blog of all the automated events (to which the auto-tweets link) which can in turn be automatically processed further - for example with geo-location.

The method involves using a Google Calendar with email reminders, Googlemail and Google Blogger, plus Twitterfeed. For simplicity and to keep control of the process I recommend setting up a unique Google account to handle the calendar, mail and blog. You can always import other calendars into the main one, and having another Google account gives you an extra lump of potentially very useful cloud storage space.

When setting up the Google account I suggest choosing an esoteric or even coded name - remember this account is not intended to handle emails other than those generated by the calendar and you don't need punters trying to use it as way of contacting you. Similarly shut down the profile of the Google account to the barest minimum. Whatever you do, you will get some spam in the inbox of course, so you will need to visit the email account every so often to perform housekeeping tasks.

Now, using your new Google account, set up the blog at Blogger. Like the calendar, this part of the system is public: it is where people will come when they click on the shortened URL in the tweets. Each tweeted event will have its own blog post, or rather each reminder from the calendar will be posted at the blog, which in turn will be tweeted by Twitterfeed.

Next, start populating the calendar with one or two events. Set up the reminder(s) for each event, and also the location if relevant. Make sure you put concise details of the event in the title field as this is the bit that will get tweeted along with a link to the blog post. Remember that it is only 140 characters long and will always be preceded by Reminder: , which is 10 characters including the space, and will have details and shortened url for the link to the blog stuck on the end. So it is best to keep the title to around 50-60 characters, or at least get the important information in that space, because anything over that will be chopped off.


Each reminder will be tweeted, so think about what is going to be the most effective sequence for each event. If geo-location is relevant, add the event location and check to see if it gives you the right map. If not, edit it until you get the right response. (Clearly if the event is to take place in Conference Room 101 at Head Office, then you just need the location of Head Office.)

So you can see the whole system working, I suggest setting up a dummy or test event only a matter of a couple of hours or less into the future so you can check it all works.

Now go to 'Settings' in your intergrated account blog. Click the 'Email & Mobile' tab and then look at 'Posting Options' (see below). What I have changed to 'account-name' will show as the first part of your Google account name. In the field that I have changed to pink you will be invited to enter the 'secret words' part of your special posting email address. When filled in, make a note of it and 'Save Settings'.


Next, return to the email account armed with this special blog-posting email address. Set up forwarding by creating a filter: click 'Settings', 'Filters' and the 'Create a new filter'. Fill in the Subject field just like this below and click 'Next step'. (Every email from the calendar will have 'Reminder' in the subject field, so it is a good choice of keyword. However, if you can guarantee to always use an even more esoteric word in the event title field - perhaps the initials of your company - then you could use that instead.)


Fill in 'Forward to' with your special blog-posting email address and click 'Save filter. You CAN set up forwarding using the 'Forwarding and POP/IMAP' facility, but that will forward every incoming email straight to the blog and you don't want to risk those few spam mails that get in your inbox being blogged and then tweeted! That would be very confusing for your followers, and excessively generous of you towards the spammers.



Now you need a Twitterfeed account. Set up a new feed to catch every new post from the blog's RSS feed and send it to your Twitter account. Use the 'Advanced Settings' to tweet 'title only' and make sure 'Post Link' is ticked.


Don't forget that you can have Twitterfeed do the same for other blogs too: tweet a reminder that there is a new post at any of your blogs. And you can have Twitterfeed post to Facebook too, if that is your game. (In fact this is one of the best ways to keep an FB page appearing fresh). Other end services offered are StatusNet and Hellotxt, either or both of which could be the right place to send your calendar event reminders, depending on your particular circumstances. The possibilities are endless - but work out what is best for you and your audience, rather than over-egg the job by trying everything! Consider also that in the next year or two there is almost certainly going to be a big shake-down and streamlining of Social Media apps: the same services - in fact more - will be available, but they will be provided by fewer companies and sites.

If you would like to see a simple calendar event tweet set-up in action, go here to the blog and here to the Twitter account. This is the one I set up for the history society mentioned at the top of this piece. It tweets one or more events per day from the Crimean War, covering the period of the war, 1853-1856. There is at least one event for every day of the year, and every event has a map location. The calendar is set up to repeat every event every year ad infinitum and send out the reminder just before the event. The Twitter account also receives irregular and infrequent automatic posts when the society's website is updated, plus occasional manual tweets about new books and Crimean War related websites. I hope it acts as inspiration!

Information paywalls: betrayal of the World Wide Web’s first principles, or realistic necessity?

This post is a follow-up to John Royle’s and my posts about News International’s decision in the summer of 2010 to charge for online access to The Times and Sunday Times.

What are the issues surrounding information paywalls? To be absolutely clear - I am not talking about ordinary ecommerce: buying a new book from Amazon; having a bouquet of flowers sent to your mother through Interflora (FTD); paying for a software download, or web hosting services. Everybody understands that goods and services bought online are just the same as goods and services bought in a bricks & mortar shop or by snailmail order. You might quibble about the relative charges, but they are straightforward commercial transactions.

No, this is about information - a far slipperier beast than any DVD, bunch of carnations or tin of baked beans. Potentially ephemeral and transient, or timeless - eternal even. Valueless to some; priceless to others.

Right now, in November 2010, this blog post is worth nothing at all. Nix. Niente. Tipota. Zilch. Just possibly in a few hundred years, in the unlikely event it still exists in some retrievable digital form, a researcher of the 21st Century World Wide Web may consider paying for access to it as part of a bigger package of relevant archived material. Or perhaps I am flattering myself. But I like to think not. If it doesn’t sound too pompous, in my experience all old manifestations of the written word have some value to somebody, somewhere, sometime.

So what characteristics bestow monetary value on digital information? Is it simply age? And how old is old?

Certainly age is a very important factor. No one (except perhaps Rupert Murdoch) can pretend that up-to-the-minute general news stories, comment and advertisements – in other words most of the content of hardcopy newspapers – can possibly be hidden behind a paywall when presented online. Advertising is free by definition, otherwise it wouldn’t be advertising. And advertising is already used online to generate some income from otherwise ‘free’ information. Everybody knows “Comment is free” – this blog is effectively ‘comment’ and we certainly wouldn’t have the bare-arsed cheek to try and charge for it. And as for real general news stories they are available ‘free’ (plus ads, see above) from so many online sources it must be extremely hard to justify charging for your particular version of the story, because your version should be almost identical to everybody else’s if you have all got the facts right - er, shouldn't it? And everybody else’s is free. And remember that most stories, apart from genuine exclusives, originate with a limited number of sources anyway.


But when news is old news it becomes archived. Literally ‘yesterday’s news’. That expression normally means something is ‘old hat’, passé, worthless. In fact the very opposite is true. Such is the demand for history, both old and recent, that the keepers of newspaper archives who have digitalised their collections at considerable expense have been pleasantly surprised by the number of people prepared to cross paywalls for access. And whether it is newspaper archives, or all kinds of old records for which major expense has been incurred in the digitalisation process, then a paywall is fair and justified. (Not everybody can afford to be as magnanimous as Google Books and provide online versions of hundreds of thousands of old books ‘free’. And bless them for it.)

The Lancet - clearly a specialist information paywall:

But up-to-date specialist news is quite a different matter from general news and comment. Business and financial news is a good example. Ordinary newspapers do contain business pages of course. However, if you are prepared to pay for business and financial news online, are you going to subscribe to a general newspaper or are you going to subscribe to a specialist like the Financial Times? Obvious really, but yes, the Financial Times online - specialist - is doing rather well; News International’s London Times online - general - is doing rather poorly by all accounts.


But what has happened to the “free access for all” concept of the World Wide Web? Well, it is still there, don’t worry! It has only acquired a certain amount of realism. There are still millions of amateurs (and I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense) out there spending their evenings and weekends posting information to websites – available free to anyone with an internet connection and a relatively enlightened government. But anyone of those amateurs will tell you that it is quite hard work and time-consuming. They know that as an individual, or part of a small group, they don’t have the clout to tackle big digitalisation projects. Realistically therefore, big projects involving one very large collection of information can only be undertaken by, or on behalf of the keepers of the collection, and that means business. And money.


There are exceptions of course. Wikipedia I hear you shout. Quite right, but it works because it is only an aggregation of all of those millions of amateurs, all doing their small piece of the whole. It is actually just like the old multi-volume hardcopy encyclopaedias: numerous contributors each covering their own specialist subjects. But even so, Wikipedia is such an enormous beast it does need money to keep it alive: the amateur maintaining his small, but valuable family history site, say, can stand the cost of 50 megabytes of server space. Wikipedia is different! If they are to avoid selling advertising space or selling access through subscriptions, then they must continue to seek donations.


I haven’t said anything about copyright. Copyright exists in a different dimension to value. Sometimes they overlap, but neither guarantees the other in the mind of the potential buyer. Copyright is useless without value.

To take you back to the beginning of this piece: it belongs to me – technically I hold the copyright, and, just like the journalist at The Times newspaper, I am paid to write it. In my case it is as part of a package I sell to Glanton. But you are never going to pay for this post in the lifetime of that copyright. And anyway, the whole blog in itself acts as a kind of oblique advertisement for Glanton. If Glanton didn’t exist, this blog post would never have been written. And if my imaginary researcher (in the year 2525) has actually paid for access, then it is only because the provider has gone to the trouble and expense of aggregating and storing blog posts from more than 500 years ago, and the researcher (Just in case: “Hello there! And sorry about the links and images: I guess they are all broken by now.”) believes there is value in buying access. I hope it was worth it.



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'SOCIAL CHECK-IN': Harmless gimmick, or something sinister? Or both?

Social check-in, for those who might think it is a new method of flight check-in - using your Facebook password perhaps - is actually personal geolocation using your portable device to sign in to participating businesses and establishments. The idea being that your friends, playing the same game, can see where you are, and you can see where they are. And then you and all your friends can play an old fashioned game of sardines around the high calorie special lattes or Caipirinhas. I guess.

Excuse my cynicism, but the vocal supporters of these social networking geolocation apps like Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook Places try and shame me into feeling like a grumpy old fuddy-duddy simply because I ask, "What is the point?" But these things are games, pure and simple, and shouldn't be credited with more significance than that. They are games which attract players by gently massaging vanities and social insecurities - play the game and prove you exist.



Don't get me wrong: geolocation is very useful - for specific purposes. It's great that people can find your 'bricks & mortar' business with ease online and have it pinpointed on a map, and then through their smart phone can be directed straight to your door so they can (let's say) buy the only secondhand Tintin books available in your city. It's great that you can run a blog for your business promoting all the trade shows you will be attending and with 'RSS 2 Geo' those trade shows will be pinpointed on a map. You get the idea. It is extremely useful.



But personal geolocation? Give me a break.

More than ten years ago - in the age of the simple cell phone - I was visiting a high-tech relative in Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Friday lunchtime and we were in a bar with four or five of his friends-stroke-colleagues. It was decided that most of us would meet up again after work at another bar, and maybe some of us would go on together to eat somewhere. But nothing was actually decided and I pointed this out as the lunchtime party broke up to go back to work. I was mildly shocked and amused to be told, "Don't worry - we all have cell phones - we'll sort it out in the afternoon!" Shocked and amused because the group seemed oblivious to the absurdity of ignoring the simple face-to-face opportunity to firm up the evening's social events in favour of spending yet more time ringing round - probably several times - to work out where we were going to meet.

And the result? Well, the afternoon's phoning proved totally unnecessary. We met at the bar the group always met at on Fridays after work. Of course. And those of us who went on to eat went to one of the group's most favoured restaurants. And this is the crux of the matter. We are creatures of habit. Even trendy high tech urban young adults with disposable income are creatures of habit. Today the successors to the group described above must be among the perceived top targets for the whole 'social check-in' concept - along with the wannabes of course, who are actually the biggest target group. (Look at the Foursquare and Gowalla websites and it is clear they are aimed at the teenie market.) However, they too are creatures of habit. Few people have time to be anything else, however 'cutting-edge' and trendy they consider themselves. Even the 'Friends', from the eponymous darling TV sitcom, always met at the same coffee shop. OK, that was to satisfy production demands, but you get the point because it was totally natural. No viewer was surprised by that routine.



So what are the young trendy high tech urban adults with disposable income making of social check-in? Well of course some of them will play with it for a while, until they realise that it's a gimmick. And when they start dropping out, social check-in will be left with the wannabes and the office saddo. People will be sitting there trying not to spill their lattes on their smart phones while they work out where all their friends are. Two of them are on the sofa opposite - oh, right! (Embarrassed smile - I forgot you were here - "Hi Guys!"). And if you are not all in the same place anyway, who is going to move? Surely there is massive comic potential here.

And what about the office saddo? Remember, he's the guy you reluctantly befriended on Facebook, but then quickly hid from your news stream, and if he sends you a direct message you pretend you didn't see it - well the notification is a bit small and easy to miss isn't it? This is the poor lonely socially challenged inadequate or pain-in-the-arse who you have spent months keeping in the dark as to where you all go on Friday nights. He has a smart phone too you know - of course you and everybody else knows because he never ceases to bang on about it (normally he only gets to spend his money on gadgets), and sure he will sign up to Foursquare - and everything else.

Will people get totally paranoid about their every move? Will there be special apps developed to work out which restaurant you can go to tonight, successfully avoiding everyone on your private black list? You may end up just going home because your device won't let you go anywhere anymore.

And what happens if you are a perfectly trendy modern type, who just happens not to live in a large urban area? There are plenty of us about. Not a dozen Starbucks within spitting distance. In fact only one Starbucks for miles and miles. The whole idea of social check-in is going to look pretty puzzling to an awful lot of people who live in small communities, smart phone or no smart phone. At least Foursquare appears to understand this: their strapline reads, "Check-in, Find your friends, Unlock your city." My stress.



The evangelists for personal geolocation, however, are already trotting out the same two mantras.

First mantra:

It [social check-in] is today's equivalent of calling someone, "Hey! I'm at the café on the corner, c'mon over if you want!"

I think I have already dealt with this! But I could add, has anyone ever actually done that? Gone to a café and then start ringing round to see if you can entice friends to join you? Oh wait a minute - perhaps you are the office saddo, desperately trying to find someone to be social with...?

The second mantra is about security and the whole big brother/'1984' issue:

With Facebook you control the information you share. With Places, you choose when to share your location by checking in or allowing friends to check you in. Your location is never given to anyone automatically. This works just like Gowalla or Foursquare. People, you control it.

Absolutely true. You can turn it all off if you want to, and you don't have to sign up in the first place if you don't want to. [Turn off FB Places] But how many users actually have much idea about Facebook's privacy settings? Not many I wager. Unfortunately the social web illuminati can't understand that huge numbers of social web users - indeed, computer users - just want to turn the blessed thing on and use it. I guarantee that there are thousands of FB users out there who haven't even realised 'FB Places' exists; understand it, or know whether they want to use it or not.

And what about the business of letting everybody know where you are all the time? Or your friends letting everybody know where you are without your knowledge? It will happen. Big Brother and all that. You may argue that through mobile phone and plastic money usage The State can get a fix on you pretty quickly anyway, unless you are extremely careful. And, hey, you're honest, aren't you? They are not going to have any reason to look for you, are they? You live in a free country don't you? There are privacy laws in place to protect you aren't there? Of course there are...

But the more sinister side of social check-in and personal geolocation is almost exactly the opposite. By showing where you are in real time, or where you are going to be in a few hours, it shows where you are not. Right now I am not at home. Or where I should be. If you are cool with that, then so be it. But be warned: nobody quite knows where this is going, or what cunning ways will be thought of to dishonestly exploit these services.

So, personal geolocation and social check-in is a gimmick. An urban craze which will burn itself out when people get bored with it and realise that it is just some elaborate game and it is actually far easier to organise a social life using more traditional methods. And for all those cafés and other 'ideal' businesses? Well, they are probably damned if they do, and damned if they don't. Who wants to be seen as a place where no one ever checks in? But who wants to be known as somewhere you can't check in? It's your call.

So is there actually anything useful about social check-in, other than its potential as a silly vanity game with potentially hazardous consequences? Well, yes, maybe. Here is a comment I saw in the last few days:

A former co-worker of mine used his [FB Places] to track his travels all over Germany recently, it was interesting to follow!

OK, that's fair enough. However, that rather makes my point: geolocation is great for special and specific events, and for businesses to geolocate themselves in a modern Yellow Pages kind of way. As a day-to-day benefit to social networking it sucks.

Now, bring on the mystery and crime movies...

and be careful out there, people!



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In Praise of the Skype Telephone

A bit of light relief with a serious message: save money!


In "Praise of Skype" - what do you mean? Surely everyone knows about all the benefits of the web telephone system? Aren't you several years behind the times with this piece?

No - no - not Skype itself! I really do mean the Skype telephone. The hardware. An actual handset you can buy and have in your house or office.

What? You are joking aren't you? [scoffing noises] I mean that's sort of retro isn't it? Or rather, a technological sidestep into a cul de sac. Not something for the comms-savvy 21st century modern techie-type, surely?

No, I am perfectly serious. I have been converted. A year ago I would have agreed with you and probably laughed at the very idea. But it is all in the flexibility it offers, especially for the home environment. Having what looks like an 'old-fashioned' cordless telephone when you have Skype installed on your computer might seem silly and unnecessary, but really it is only like having the Skype App for your smart phone.

Flexibility? Now you are having a larf! Everybody's got a PC in their home - and several in their office, plus a laptop - and most people have a smart phone with the Skype App don't they? What else could they need for making Skype calls?

Well, I think you are wrong. Not everybody does have a smart phone with the Skype App. Yes, most people have a PC in their house - but that's rather my point.

What is?

Well, when you make a Skype call from your PC there's lots of clever things you can do like video calls and screen sharing and so on, and that is fine for the office and quite often at home. (For example, video calls with the grandchildren in Australia.) But there are other circumstances - especially in the home - when you don't need all that.

Go on.

In fact 'all that' becomes a burden. You don't need it and don't want it. People often just want to blather on a cordless phone for hours on end while they get on with other things around the house, just like they have done for years with their cordless landline. In fact, before there were cordless phones people had great long extension leads so they could carry their receiver around the house. (Remember the 1970s? Flares, shag-pile carpets and huge long telephone extensions. Coolio coolio.)

Well, they can do that on their desktop or laptop can't they? You don't have to make a video call and most microphones are good enough to let you walk around the room at least. And if you have a laptop, or better still a small notebook, you can carry that around with you from room to room.

Yes, you are right up to a point. And in fact that is what my wife does. But it doesn't suit everybody. Let me tell you a true story.

Go on then -

Well, as you know, from early spring until late autumn my wife and I spend most of our time in Greece. The younger of our daughters lives in our flat in Germany the whole year. We have broadband connections in both places, feeding a desktop in Germany and my laptop in Greece, with WLAN to my wife's notebook. My wife and our daughter like to talk on the phone most evenings, usually for a considerable time. It used to be that our daughter always rang from Germany using the landline and one of the cheap pre-dial codes so that the charge went on the German bill - slightly cheaper than doing the same procedure from Greece. The bill for these calls came to somewhere between 5 and 10 Euros a week. Not a lot? Well, think about that for the best part of 30 weeks a year. A complete waste of money when they could talk free for as long as they liked using a web phone system like Skype. Once set up in both locations, it worked well. For a while. But I started to notice more and more that there seemed to be some excuse for not using Skype, and more and more of their conversations had reverted to the old landline and cheap code routine.

It took me a while to find out why. The German end was the problem. Our daughter found it a real drag having to boot up the PC and then sit in the office cubby-hole where it lives. For their length of conversations she needs to go the toilet at least twice; smoke at least two cigarettes (on the balcony); probably make herself something to eat and quite likely watch a TV programme, and deal with SMS and calls from her girlfriends on her mobile phone, all while talking to her mother. She says it is multi-tasking. Now, our daughter is probably an extreme example, but there must be plenty of people in a home environment who are not welded to their computers like us and would much rather talk using a traditional cordless phone or a mobile.

Solution? A Skype telephone! Hooray! I reckon the one I bought is just about the best option, and certainly for this particular circumstance. It is the DUALphone 3088, which plugs its own modem into your router and the handset sits in its own wireless base station, so you can keep it pretty much wherever you want in a normal-sized house.

- but does it work? Does your daughter use it?

Oh yes. Have a look at the photos - our daughter multi-tasking! In fact our two households are connected for hours on end every evening...with no running meter. And in our case, the handset has paid for itself within a year.

So, if you thought web telephoning wasn't for you because of perceived restrictions, think again. Have a look at the different equipments available. Surely between Skype on desktop, laptop, notebook, smart phone and skype phones themselves, landlines should be kicked into touch in almost every conceivable circumstance in office or home - the only exceptions being where local landline calls are free or part of a comms package you are already paying for.




[ Disclaimer: Neither Glanton nor Tom Muir have any connection, financial or otherwise with Skype or Dualphone. This is not an advertisement! ]


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Welcome to the paid-for web: a contrary view

I disagree with my colleague John Royle about his post Welcome to the paid-for web. Or rather, I have a slightly different take on the significance and certainty of the events he describes.

I believe that tacit in his description of Rupert Murdoch's News International's decision to start charging for access to The Times and The Sunday Times websites is the assumption that the said news organisation and newspapers are actually important in a web news context.

There is no denying that News International is big and powerful as a print news organisation. And there is no denying that the London Times was once thought of as The Thunderer - THE Upmarket British newspaper; how Britain saw itself and the rest of the world, and essential reading for 'top' people everywhere and perceived as a source of sound information and steady, sensible opinion. However, that reputation has been steadily eroded in the decades since Murdoch bought the paper. Eroded to such an extent that for a number of years now it has been only half-jokingly referred to as "The Broadsheet Currant Bun" - a mildly scurrilous Cockney Rhyming Slang comparison to its stablemate at News International, the infamous and unapologetically downmarket redtop tabloid, The Sun.

Of course there is a lot of oohing and aahing at the moment about The Times and The Sunday Times charging for content because, well, it is a change. But I don't believe it is a very significant change; nor do I believe those newspapers' online presence is either important in a global web context, or would be greatly missed if it was to disappear completely. Generally speaking, I don't think there is any particular loyalty amongst online news consumers: one source disappears, another starts to charge - "oh well, never mind, forget them, let's move on. There is plenty more out there."

I believe online news is so big, so diverse, so instantaneous, and online news grazing so endemic and habit-forming that the majority of online consumers will soon forget about Murdoch's newspapers - if indeed they ever knew they existed. Yes, he may well get his 10% of current visitors to sign up (though my guess is it will be slightly less) and that small percentage almost entirely consist of libraries and universities along with journalists and commentators from other news organisations who need to have their fingers on every pulse - however weak. The few readers of The Times who still care deeply about their favourite newspaper are I believe almost exclusively confined to those who buy the print at the railway station kiosk or have it drop through the letterbox every morning. If you have paid for hardcopy you are not very likely to worry too much about any online version, one way or the other.

Based on the above, I don't believe everybody is going to cling to Murdoch's shirt tails and move to pay-for content. Firstly, I think very few will see 'Murdoch's 10%' (if he ever gets even that) as a good result. Nor will the advertisers.



Secondly, there is already a well-established model for charging for online news content: back issue archives. The Times itself, from 1795-1985 inclusive has been totally digitalised and available online in its entirety for nearly ten years now. At a price. And fair enough I say (although currently they only cater for institutional subscriptions, which is bad luck on private individuals without access through a subscribing organisation). Similarly, but more universally available, is the British Library's Colindale Online Newspaper Collection which currently provides total searchable access to 49 local and national titles from 1800-1900.



Surely this already established method is the way for news organisations to deal with their online presence? The everyday, constantly updated, headline and limited article output is to stay free (with any advertising that can be sold attached of course), and the back catalogue of full, uncut issues is available online in an archive at a price. I believe this is the way most newspapers will go. The Scotsman already does this. The Times was doing it too until last week, but they seem not to have realised.



If however, John is right, and print newspapers as a herd all turn to pay-for online content, then they will marginalise themselves in web terms. The massive online news consumer group will simply drift away to specialist online news services or organisations which remain free to view. There will be enough to satisfy every taste everywhere, I am certain.

And as for a general stampede away from free content of value on the web to charging, I suspect the former has been something of a rose-tinted illusion for a considerable time. As I have said, The Times Digital Archive has been online for the best part of ten years, and has only ever been available by subscription. Almost every serious specialist magazine which has an online edition charges for access, and always has done, in my experience.

However, daily news - real news, collected, processed and broadcast on the web on a constantly updating basis, is a different beast altogether. It's diversity, quality and volume may fluctuate, but I believe it will always be free.

So what do I think will befall The Times and The Sunday Times online output and any other national newspapers who do choose to go the same way? Surely they are asking to be treated like specialist magazines, when they are actually quite the opposite. What can they do? Perhaps they should be broken up into specialist departments and subscriptions sold for these new seperate sites on that basis, so that The Times newspaper as a total concept, an entity, no longer exists online.

Will John or I be buying the drinks in 2011? No doubt it will be me whatever happens! ;-)


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Welcome to the paid-for web

Last week saw an event which I believe will go down as one of the most fundamental shifts of the internet age and will mark the end of the honeymoon period we have enjoyed thus far. I'm referring to Rupert Murdoch's News International's decision to start charging for access to The Times and The Sunday Times websites.



From this week you'll pay £1 for a day's access and £2 for a week. Furthermore he is blocking Google and other search engines from spidering the content - in other words News International content will not legally appear in any news feed or news digest.

The jury's out on whether this will work (Murdoch says he's prepared to lose 90% of visitors so long as the remaining 10% pay) but if it does, and my money says it will, then every single news and newspaper website will follow suit faster than you can believe. If you think about it, it has to happen. Every newspaper in the world is losing money and the web advertising revenue is just too widely spread to fund them.

I know it feels like a shame and we are being hard done by, and at odds with the fundamental perceived principles of the internet, but 'reality bites' and in the current climate every word that someone is paid to write is an asset and who can blame the owners of those assets for profiting from them on the web just as they do in print? There is no reason at all why one medium should cost and the other be effectively free, despite the presence of advertising.

My point is, that once the new News International business model is established then every digital product that has any value and can be distributed over the web will come with a price. My guess is that by mid 2011 it will be the norm. Incidently, did you see that I linked value with cost? Remember that old one?!

Projecting further ahead, I think we'll see a whole new raft of businesses floated who aggregate, summarise, and recommend all these paid-for digital products so that you can make an informed choice before subscribing and keying in your credit card number. These advisory services will, of course, cost you.

Look out too for new technologies to help you protect your new valuable digital assets - RSS blockers, cut and paste stoppers, screen grab disablers.  And if that fails then happy days for the poor cash-strapped lawyers of this world who will be employed to sue anyone re-publishing paid-for content.

Welcome to the new internet world where content costs; gateways rule; and people of our generation look back on the golden age of free access and free material on demand.


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Share; sharing; shared?

Some thoughts about semantics (especially for Mark Zuckerberg and others):

What do we mean by "share"? In the real world where people sit together at kitchen tables and drink hot drinks and chat about the next-door neighbour, there are two kinds of sharing. There is one chocolate biscuit left so you agree to break it in half and share it. That is the most basic kind. It is free. Equal by definition. Generous of spirit. There are no strings.

The other kind of sharing can be a little more complicated. In the discussion about the next-door neighbour, one of the coffee drinkers at the kitchen table might say:

"I have a good story about the neighbour - I am going to share it with you."*

Superficially this information is going to be free. But there is often a lot of tacit code attached:
"I am party to information to which you are not."
"I am generously going to make you party to it too."
"I am giving up something with my act of sharing with you."
"By telling you that I am going to share something with you, I am reminding you that that is what I am doing."
And, depending on the context, there may be many other strings attached.

(*especially if they are American - it may be just me, but I suspect that on the European side of the pond we find this use of 'share' a tiny bit creepy - pompous even - and are much more likely simply to say, "I am going to tell you something.")

But what about the meaning of "share" online and in a social web and networking environment? It has become clear that it depends which side of the user-provider fence you are standing on. The friend on Facebook - if they think about it at all - mostly believes, or used to believe, that clicking "share" meant they are simply posting something for their friends to see. But the FB executive trying to create income streams for their social network sees every click you make as a potential money-spinner. "Share" has surreptitiously come to mean "Share with the world; share with every application and site which is prepared to pay for it." (In some ways this is no bad thing: Targeted ads are surely better than un-targetted ones.) All social web apps like to use the term "share". It has become an industry standard. But wouldn't "post" or even "broadcast" be more appropriate?



And it is disingenuous of Facebook to try and have us believe that the current incredibly tedious and long-winded privacy settings you can use to combat their version of sharing are simply a silly mistake on their part. Who are they kidding? (Somebody really designed all those forms by mistake?) They will do something about it because of enormous public pressure. But only because of that pressure. In reality they would like every user to let them use/sell everything they do on Facebook.

And therein lies the great struggle between social network provider and user. We want 'free' social networks. The 'free' social networks need to make money by some means or other.

But I am convinced it will not be through business, large or small, except by the placement of traditional ads. I believe Facebook simply isn't for business, whatever people have been persuaded, or like to imagine. Another recent FB débâcle proves this in my opinion. Facebook have decided to make Page owners with under 10,000 fans pay for the full facilities associated with Pages in one way or another. Please see: www.allfacebook.com/2010/05/facebook-limits-landing-tabs-to-authenticated-pages/ As one would expect small Page owners are furious. I have picked out just two, among numerous excellent and pertinent comments attached to the Allfacebook piece:

" I’ve been fuming about Facebook for a while, and how they deliberately make it difficult for small businesses to organically grow a following. This move further proves that Facebook is no friend of small biz. Unless you have an established brand and know how to find your customers on Facebook, it’s fast-becoming a next-to-useless marketing “tool” for small business. Boycott I say!
Lucy Beer - May 19th, 2010 at 7:22 pm "

" Makes you wonder what else they will “take away” with no notice. This is another good reason why you need your own website or blog where YOU call the shots not Facebook…
Michelle Hummel - May 19th, 2010 at 8:20 pm "

"...you need your own website or blog..." Oh yes. Exactly. Your website is yours. People will find it, whether they are FB users or not. Forget Facebook!

So how is Facebook to make money? I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Targeted, discreet ads in the right column à la Google. (I'm prepared to give up certain aspects of my online privacy to have targeted ads rather than untargeted ones - for me that is a no-brainer.) And that's it. If this reduces the perceived value of Facebook, then so be it. Sorry guys and gals. But with 500 million users surely it is worth it for business to advertise?

Just a thought: Does all this winding up by Facebook of their 500 million and business to boot, bring my Second Wish a little bit closer?

PS: If you want to check that you have the strongest privacy settings at Facebook, and maybe completely lock-down the service, follow these 33(!) steps. Not all are sensible - why prevent your friends posting on your wall, for one thing? But as a basic guide to navigating FB's current byzantine privacy settings it is helpful.
(Note: some of the features are called different things in different parts of the world.)




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And of course you can share this blog...!!

Grooming for cloud-computing, or simply misunderstanding Facebook?

I have been particularly interested by two recent announcements. Interested, but not necessarily desperately excited.

The first partially explains, but does not excuse, Google Books' bugger's muddle of an interface for their users' libraries which I raged against in a post last month. The second is the revelation that Microsoft's Office Web Apps, which copycats Google Docs, will apparently be made available, free, to all users of Facebook.

The first announcement concerned the coming of a Google ebooks store this summer. Yes, they are going to take on Apple and Amazon in this lucrative download market. Clearly the ebooks store will be intergrated with the main Google Books site. Nothing wrong with that. However, it does in some part explain Google Books' cack-handed redesign of their library interface to include compulsory social networking elements which I blogged about last month. Obviously Google wants to use the viral marketing potential of users (they hope ebook buyers) writing reviews and 'spreading the word' among other users/buyers. Again, nothing wrong with that - in principle. However, it does not excuse the awful botch-job they have made of the user library in anticipation of this momentous event. It still beggars belief that they can think making their five default 'shelves' undeletable and in-yer-face is any way constructive, user-friendly or displays the slightest trace of intelligence or adeptitude. I can only dream that when the ebooks store eventually goes live somebody at Google will realise that the current user libraries design needs binning. We live in hope.


The second announcement is of course Microsoft's direct attack on Google Docs with online apps of their own: Office 2010 will include "Office Web Apps". OK, fine. I am not particularly interested in who fights who for what share of the online apps market - so long as there IS a lively and developing online apps market. What does interest me is this quote from the BBC's piece on the subject:

"Crucially, Microsoft will also offer its online office suite to all users of one of the world's most popular social networking sites, Facebook."

Crucial? More like gimmicky - at least that's what first sprang to my mind. I have written many times about what Facebook is for - what users really want it for. It's really not for business, except as a benign adjunct to a much wider web presence. Social networking sites are really exactly that - exactly what the term 'social networking' implies. So do FB users really want to access, create and store Worddocs, spreadsheets and all that 'work' related stuff directly from their FB account? Somehow I expect that instead they will be slightly bemused - as they are by many of Facebook's tweaks and attempted innovations.



But hang on a minute.

Google Docs is the trail-blazing serious cloud-computing place for both business and individuals. However, it has been around a while now in internet terms, but as the BBC report states:

"Google Docs currently has a small (4%) but growing share of the [business] market."

Everybody recognises that cloud-computing is the way forward - for everbody. However, few businesses and individuals have made the switch so far. They don't really need to at the moment. Even cloud-computing evangelists like us at Glanton still have our hard drives cluttered up with MS Office, OpenOffice and all the bits and pieces of 'traditional' and fantastically wasteful home and office computing.

So what are Microsoft and Facebook playing at? It can only be grooming.

Grooming users to first realise there IS an online apps / cloud-computing universe out there; then accept it; then use it; then wonder how they ever lived without it. Office Web Apps at Facebook is not an end in itself. It is simply a (possibly) very clever way to worm their way into the consciousness of a very large user group. It may take some time to have any effect, but I believe the Facebook connection will fade in time as its job is done.

The success of this move may well start to show in the next few hardware buying cycles. If the FB user - now accepting the concept of cloud-computing - can buy a new laptop relatively cheap because it actually has fairly limited hard disk space and no bundled software packages like the traditional MS Office, but does have free access to Microsoft's new Office Web Apps - then they are going to be tempted aren't they? Or they will have learnt enough to know that they don't even need the access to MS Office Web Apps because they have already become a free Google Docs user.

When I find myself buying my next computer I am sure that is what I'll be looking for.



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