Social contracts

Spotted on Hugh McLeods’s blog - “how does a software company make money, if all software is free?” - an observation about the difference between closed-source aka Microsoft and open-source:

It took me a while to figure this out, but what applies to Open Source, also applies to Microsoft.

When you buy a Microsoft product, you’re not just getting ones and zeros. There’s also a form of “social contract” implicit in the commercial transaction. You gave them money, this entitles you to certain expectations.

A few weeks ago, I met a young developer who worked in an IT department of a large insurance company. I asked him what kind of software did he use. Answer: About 75% Microsoft, 25% Open Source. I asked him why did he not use more Open Source? I thought IT people loved Open Source?

“If something goes wrong with Microsoft, I can phone Microsoft up and have it fixed. With Open Source, I have to rely on the community.”

And the community, as much as we may love it, is unpredictable. It might care about your problem and want to fix it, then again, it may not. Anyone who has ever witnessed something online go “viral”, good or bad, will know what I’m talking about.

Which is only true for a given subsection of the Microsoft user base. If you don’t have access to that level of support - and most organisations below a certain size don’t - then you’re thrown back on the exactly same type of community resources regardless of whether you’re using open or closed source. The difference being that the open-source model provides the visibility of the source code, and the potential for fixed that this presents.

Apparently we *are* all doomed

This week’s New Scientist cover story is about the “Collapse of Civilisation“, and it’s well worth reading - as if the sub-prime banking crisis isn’t enough, civilisation is only two square meals away from collapse at any given moment.

I’ve been reading Jared Diamond’s Collapse, which explores the reasons why a number of formerly successful civilisations disappeared. He focusses primarily on ecological factors as he’s mainly concerned with ancient societies - the New Scientist article looks at modern Western civilisation, but their conclusions are equally gloomy - basically, modern civilisation is amazingly vulnerable.

It doesn’t take long to figure out why, and it took me right back to playing around with supply chain models during my MBA. Building reliable systems is about removing single points of failure, because failure probability is usually multiplicative. Put crudely, doubling the components halves the risk of failure. So coming from a background of designing networked systems, my instinctive reaction is double-up critical equipment and build in backup paths and redundancy. And where consumable items are a factor, the response is to hold buffer stocks.

But that’s a problem from a supply chain point of view, because duplication and buffering are adding in redundancy and inventory - both of which have a cost associated with them. I remember reading somewhere that the scheduling systems for components at Nissan’s Sunderland plant have to take into account the traffic conditions on the A1, because if there’s a jam it delays the trucks bringing components from the seat factory up the road. That’s apocryphal, but entirely believable.

So rather than a supply chain, we end up with a single-point-of-failure chain.

When you start to look at where the single points of failure lie, it starts to get scary - the average supermarket would be cleaned out within 3 days, so if there’s noone to drive the trucks with replenishments, the food supply is disrupted very quickly. The joke about the Little Chef restaurant being unable to serve an omlette because they haven’t been delivered suddenly isn’t quite as funny anymore.

Personally, I’ve always thought that the point at which to start worrying about the impact of a pandemic is when the schools are closed - because at that point, it takes parents out of the workforce, and most organisations would collapse as a result.

Treating supply chains as a network problem and reducing the single points of failure would seem like an obvious insurance policy, but that’s difficult to do when the financial systems are biased against this kind of thing. Simplistically, shareholder capitalism is about maximising short-term shareholder returns through minimising costs - and a just-in-time inventory system with little or no buffer stock is a very efficient way of cutting cost out of operations. So while operating “fatter” might be a hedge against disruption, it’s discouraged in the short-term, because disruption is only a future probability, while the need to cover this year’s dividend is a certainty.

Maybe capitalism will be our downfall after all?

Downing Street Twitters

I’m fairly late to the party on this one, but Downing Street is Twittering. As is HMGov, which came first - both being official UK Government presences in the Twittersphere.

My initial reaction was “meh” - about the very last thing anyone on the planet needs is yet another conduit for the tedious, unadventurous, corporate and just plain bland waffle that characterises the spoutings of central Government PR. After 11 years of New Labour media management, my default setting when hearing anything emanating from government is - to misquote Jeremy Paxman - “why are the lying bastards lying to me?”

And that pretty much sums up HMGov - it’s regurgitated press releases that noone read previously, shovel-wared via RSS into Twitter so noone will read them now that they’re only 140 characters long. Nice example of how to do it technically, but a waste of time from a “contributing to the good of humanity” point of view.

Downing Street started in much the same way - “PM marks 90 years of the RAF and 100 years of the Territorial Army in Downing Street statements”, “PM outlines measures to protect the UK from turbulence in the global economy at his press conference”, that sort of thing. But then as other Twitter users started to prod it to see if there was actually anyone behind the front door, Downing Street actually started to respond. Which is pretty much unique, as far as I can see.

Of course, the responding is being done by Downing Street staffers - I would guess they’d have to be civil servants, given the rules about how official Government channels can be used - and not the actual political inhabitants. Which is a shame, because it’s the politicians who need to be plugged into this - about the only people left in the country who think 42-day-detention is a good idea are Gordon Brown and Jacquie Smith, and *still* she spent Sunday morning lecturing Andrew Marr about how “the Government are listening”. Exposing them to something as immediate and conversational as Twitter could only be a positive thing.

I expect that this initial burst of conversational engagement will be fairly short-lived, as the more risk-averse holders of the levers of power hear about this - presumably by email - and clamp down. And it’ll be a cold day in hell before our Prime Minister Twitters personally. Trying as hard as I can to *not* be cynical about our government - and god knows how *hard* that is - it’s nice to think that this might be the *start* of something. And I’m impressed that I got followed back within 10 minutes of following Downing Street - so either there’s someone monitoring it, even at this late hour, or someone’s written an auto-follow bot. Both impressive in their own ways.

Hugh’s Law and Twitter

Richard Stacey of the Social Media revolution (in 15 minutes per week) points to a sudden jump in the number of his Twitter followers and wonders if that’s start of Hugh’s Law coming into play.

I’m not sure that’s the case. Hugh’s Law certainly applies to a lot of social networks - I more-or-less gave up on Facebook a while ago because the signal-to-noise ratio fell below acceptable levels amidst the welter of zombie biting and groups campaigning for Richard Hammond to plait his nasal hair (OK, that last one might be a slight exaggeration, but only a slight one).

But the key point about Twitter is that the follower/following mechanism gives a very clear and unambiguous signal about a potential follower’s intentions. If their ratio of following to followers is canted to following, it implies that they’re either a bot or they’re trophy hunters. And in either case, the solution is a simple ‘block’ action, which leaves you largely immune from their attempts at connection.

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Reciprocateable Ambient Intimacy

It sounds slightly heretical given what I do for a living, but I’ve never really fallen in love with social media like Facebook in the way that I’m apparently supposed to. The closest I’ve come to this is Twitter, which I do use, although I’d be hard-pressed to describe exactly why.

One of the terms used to describe Twitter was coined (as far as I know) by Leisa Reichelt, who calls it “ambient intimacy” (a long quote, but worth citing in full):

“Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible. Flickr lets me see what friends are eating for lunch, how they’ve redecorated their bedroom, their latest haircut. Twitter tells me when they’re hungry, what technology is currently frustrating them, who they’re having drinks with tonight.

Who cares? Who wants this level of detail? Isn’t this all just annoying noise? There are certainly many people who think this, but they tend to be not so noisy themselves. It seems to me that there are lots of people for who being social is very much a ‘real life’ activity and technology is about getting stuff done.

There are a lot of us, though, who find great value in this ongoing noise. It helps us get to know people who would otherwise be just acquaintances. It makes us feel closer to people we care for but in whose lives we’re not able to participate as closely as we’d like.

Knowing these details creates intimacy. (It also saves a lot of time when you finally do get to catchup with these people in real life!) It’s not so much about meaning, it’s just about being in touch.”

This is a useful description, but it doesn’t quite get it for me - Twitter is actually more than just ambient intimacy. It helps to contrast it with blogs: which are, fundamentally, a broadcast medium. Now I realise that this is a statement that’s probably going to get me blackballed from the Social Media Brotherhood, but bear with me - while I know that “blogs are conversations” is the conventional wisdom, experience suggests that actually blogs are POTENTIAL conversations.

Having the facility to comment does not a conversation make. And in some circumstances, having the facility to comment actually DECREASES the signal-to-noise ratio, as anyone who’s spent any time reading the Guardian’s Comment Is Free site will know. It’s not so much conversations, as a thousand opinionated drunks in a bar all shouting over each other.

So why is Twitter different?

Firstly, there’s the 140 character limit. Expressing yourself in a smaller space is far more difficult that doing so when space is unlimited (which is why this post is three screens long) . The limitation emphasises the NOW of the “what are you doing right now” that is Twitter.

Then, there’s the follower / following function. Unlike blogs, I can see exactly who is reading my tweets. And not only that, but I have the option to follow them back - which together with the ‘@’ function means that the Twittersphere (appalling term, I know) seems like a bar with a number of people of varying states of inebriation having more or less coherent conversations. Some take this to the extreme, twittering bowel movements, but in general the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty high.

And overlaying the follower / following, I have the option to block potential followers. The result of this is a near-total lack of trolls and spammers - it’s incredibly easy to make a quick judgement on someone’s worth as a follower by looking at their following / followers ratio. All of the Twitter spambots have without exception had a massive inbalance in the relative numbers.

The end result is reciprocateable ambient intimacy - I can follow someone, they can follow me, but we both have complete control over the relationship. Which is a far closer analogue to real-life relationships that anything that’s come before.

Digital dark ages?

Last weekend I was in the process of clearing out some of the junk that seems to accumulate around my life, and came across a box of CDs.   It represented about 50% of my physical music library and a good 10 years or so of building a music collection, going back to some of the first CDs I ever bought in the early 1990s.
After the ritual process of ratching through the box going “ooh” and “aah” over the memories that my increasingly-dodgy taste in music seems to remind me of, I was all set to pass them on to Oxfam for someone else to add to their collection.   There’s no real reason to keep hold of them, because they’ve all been (illegally) ripped to MP3 and now exist as spots of flux on the various hard disks that clutter my life.   But actually letting them go was a suprisingly difficult decision to make - and it was even more difficult to decide whether or not I should get rid of a box of vinyl records that turned up shortly after.

While the information density of a CD or DVD is infinitely greater than that of a vinyl record - and the sound quality is greatly improved, notwithstanding the blatherings of the oxygen-free-copper community - from the point of view of future accessibility, the CD doesn’t have a lot going for it.   For a start, their longevity is open to question - there were several in the box that were showing signs of decay or delamination.   And from the point of view of accessibility, they’re not much better.  Accessing the information stored on a CD takes a significant chunk of microelectronic engineering capability and precision mechanics.   Accessing the data on a vinyl record takes a turntable, a rolled-up cone of paper and a needle.   It might not have the sonic qualities that even the cheapest and nastiest CD player is capable of producing, but it’s a damned sight less hi-tech.

While I’ve got CD players to hand, it’s not much of a problem.   But there’s going to come a point in the not-too-distant future where there aren’t any CD players to hand - or at least they’ll be a damn sight more difficult to find than they currently are.  They’ll effectively be obsolete, they’ll wear and they’ll break down.  And while repairing the mechanical components might be reasonably straightforward, repairing - or worse, having to reverse-engineer - the electronics required to recreate sound from a series of microscopic pits etched on a fragile aluminium substrate is going to be much, much more difficult.

Which in some respects is a metaphor for the information legacy that we’re going to be leaving for our grandchildren, assuming that they’re interested in the legacy that isn’t rising floodwaters and a buggered planetary climate.   The concept of searching back through the archives is a much more difficult one when the archives consist not of yellowing paper, but rotten silver disks of proprietary encryption.  And that assumes that the information has been saved in the first place - when communication was via some form of written physical manifestation, there was at least a reasonable chance that a proportion of it would survive for future archivists to refer back to.   Once an email is deleted, that’s pretty much it - while there might be the odd backup hanging around, chances are that it will be in a closed, transient and fundementally inaccessible format.

Which starts to beg the question, are we destroying the future’s history without realising it?   Without these physical forms, where are the historians of tomorrow going to get their source material?   And what effect is that going to have on their understanding of us?   Are we in fact inadvertently creating a new Dark Ages through our abandonment of a technology that’s thousands of years old - writing - in favour of alternatives with half-lives measured in a few years?

I’ll go and hand myself in, then

The Metropolitan Police have launched a campaign to make sure we all stay frightened alert for the imminent threat of being gunned down by trigger-happy coppers blown to bits by suicide bombers.

There are several suspicious behaviour traits, apparently - taking pictures, owning more than one mobile phone, and - er - apparently, using doors.

Since at last count I had three mobile phones, at least twenty cameras of various description, and a front door, I suppose I’d better save someone else the trouble and go and hand myself in…

A picture’s worth a thousand words

As it’s Sunday, the British railway system is running at restricted capacity because of engineering works - something that always comes as something of a surprise to anyone who’s used to rail services in continental Europe, as they seem to manage to fit their engineering work around running trains.

Chiltern Railways serves the London to Birmingham via Aylesbury route, and as privatised rail franchises go, it’s run pretty well. It’s the route that I commute on daily, and the service is generally not bad - although longer trains in the morning wouldn’t go amiss at peak periods.

This Sunday, they’re digging up their track in a couple of places, which has resulted in suspension of service along part of the route. This is (verbatim for both content and formatting) the information that they’ve provided:

Sunday 24th February

Kidderminster-Birmingham-Stratford-Upon-Avon- Leamington Spa- Banbury- High Wycombe - London
No trains will operate between Warwick Parkway and Birmingham. No trains will operate between Leamington Spa and Stratford- Upon- Avon.
There will be 2 trains per hour between london Marylebone and Warwick Parkway.
Buses willl run between Leamington Spa and Stratford- Upon-Avon and Warwick parkway and Birmingham Snow Hill.
Passengers travelling between Birmingham and Leamington Spa and stations south thereof are advised to use Cross Country services to/from Birmingham New Street changing at Leamington Spa.
In addition to engineering work at the North end of the route a major event is taking place at Wembley Stadium therefore trains are likely to be busier than usual due to passengers travelling to/from Wembley. We have taken account of this by adding carriages to our trains and ensuring most trains call additionally at Wembley Stadium Station.
Aylesbury- Amersham- London
There will be NO trains on this route today buses will operate from Aylesbury to Beaconsfield calling at Stoke Mandeville, Wendover, Great Missenden and Amersham.
Change at Amersham for London Underground services to Harrow on the Hill.
Change at Beaconsfield for connecting trains to/from Marylebone.

Which makes me want to claw my own eyes out in frustration at the verbosity and lack of clarity.

Firstly, it mixes up four types of information about cancellations, reduced service frequency, peripheral information about events and alternative routes.

Then it uses inconsistent wording to describe the alternative services.

And finally, none of the information is presented graphically - the only way to work out what is going on is to read - and re-read until you understand - the text provided.

Imagine instead, if they’d taken a few minutes to provide a map (which took me five minutes in Omnigraffle):

But even now, I’m not quite sure if this is right - because I can’t figure out for sure whether the buses stop at intermediate stations between Warwick and Birmingham. The buses between Aylesbury and Beaconsfield do, because it’s explicitly stated - but that’s not the case elsewhere. So do they, or don’t they?

Is this picture worth a thousand words, or so?

Headshift are hiring

Headshift are hiring at the moment - in fact we’re almost at the point of having to beat off clients with a stick, so extra pairs of hands would come in really handy right about now.

If you’re a project manager, Rails developer, Confluence guru, CSS god or have mastered the dark arts of UI and IA design, then we’d really, really like to hear from you. We’re nice people that don’t bite, have virtually limitless supplies of organic bananas and chocolate Hobnobs in the office, and we also get to work on some of the coolest cutting-edge social software projects with interesting clients.

Twitter figleafs

A rather interesting comment cropped up in response to one of my automated delicious postings, and it got me thinking about what Twitter is, and why it’s so successful. Although the central premise of Twitter is simplicity and brevity - “what are you doing right now?”

Part of the appeal is watching how Twitter users bend and subvert those limitations for their own ends - status updates like those generated by Sandy, for example, or the way in which conversations can flow across the “twittersphere” (have I coined a new phrase there, or is that as annoying as blogosphere?)

But despite the deliberately limited nature of the Twitter feature set, the natural inclination on the part of us geeks is to want to extend and improve Twitter with extra features. “Now with tint control”, so to speak.

There were a couple of suggestions that cropped up in Michelle’s comment - one was the idea of a time-to-live for an individual tweet, so it would vanish in a puff of electrons after a given interval of time. Although that’s fundamentally attractive, I actually think it’s potentially undesirable on two counts - firstly that it extends away from the fundamental simplicity of twitter which to me is central to the appeal.

The second reason is that it builds in a false sense of security - that a defined TTL will result in that tweet disappearing. The problem is that anything you say on the web is instantly and irrevocably in the public domain, something that Claire Swire and Max Gogarty are going to be acutely aware of for the foreseeable future (the latter is worth looking at if only for the train wreck of a comments thread that emerges in response to the original post). The only way to be able to reclaim anonymity is to not say it at all, or at least try to self-censor.

Personally I think that our notions of privacy and the overhang of youthful indiscretions are going to have to change, if for no other reason that we’re going to run out of politicians in 20 years time unless the Facebook and Bebo generations realise that there’s no-one who’s not said something online that they later had cause to regret. (A world without politicians? An unexpected positive consequence?)

Personally, I’m not that concerned about exposing my tweets in the sidebar of this blog is that they’re out there anyway through the Twitter site itself. I’m not sure I really understand the rationale of having a private Twitter profile, as it’s only a illusory fig-leaf of security anyway.

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