loose wire blog

When Technology Lets Us Down

(from tcbuzz's flickr collection)

Two recent events from the UK underlined how dangerous our dependence on technology can be.

The soccer UEFA Cup final in Manchester was overshadowed by riots when one of the massive screens installed in the city for fans who didn't have tickets broke down.

And more recently, the inquest into the death of a former BBC editor found that she committed suicide after failing to find support among her colleagues. Her line manager, the inquest heard, tried to find her counselling:

However, her manager sent an email to the wrong address and his request was never acted on.

Technology is passive, and doesn't take into account the implications of failure. In the first case the technology either didn't work, or those setting it up didn't know how to work (or fix) it. In the second case, the error was more obviously human: the sender of an email did not enter the correct address, or did not enter the address correctly.

This is more about our failure to anticipate failure in technology, and our blind dependence on it working.

Obviously, it would have been smart of the organizers in Manchester to have had a back-up plan in place for an eventuality like a screen breaking down. And the line manager's apparent failure to see whether the email arrived at its destination or even to have picked up a phone and tried to reach the counsellor directly.

But perhaps there are ways for technology to further help us by providing a layer of redundancy? In the case of the screen, could there be some sort of diagnostics test which would alert the technicians that something was amiss, or about to be amiss?

And, in the case of email, the answer is perhaps simpler. There are tools out there to determine whether an email has arrived safely and been opened. The one I use is MessageTag, which will inform me whether an email I have tagged with the service has been opened. (The advanced service will give me a list of emails I have tagged and show me which ones have been opened, and which havent--a very useful checklist to show me which emails I need to follow up on.)

(There are privacy implications with services like MessageTag/MSGTAG, which I've gone into before. But sparing use of the service, I believe, is acceptable, so long as you give recipients the option of opting out of future tagging. Other people use the receipt acknowledgement option in Microsoft Outlook and some other email programs.)

We perhaps need to be reminded that technology, as it stands, won't save us from ourselves.

Technorati Tags: failure,bbc,uefa,manchester,technology,suicide,email

The Size of the Future

(This is a guest post from a friend and long-time colleague, Robin Lubbock of WBUR, who will be contributing to Loose Wire Blog. You can read his blog, the Future of New(s), here.)

Why don't you buy hard-back books? Either they are too expensive, or too big. They are too big to comfortably hold in one hand. So if you're sitting in bed trying to read you've got to find a way to prop the thing up. Not a hurdle you can't overcome. But an inconvenience.

Now think about the reader of the future. It's the same issues. Size, readability, and cost. Any lessons you've learned from book reading, apply them to the electronic book and you'll be imagining the electronic reader of the future.

So why hasn't anyone made a good electronic book yet?

I was in Staples the other day and an assistant asked me what I wanted. I said "I want something about three or four times the size of an iPhone which I can use for browsing the Web when I'm in bed." He said they had nothing like that, but he wanted one too.

So when I saw photos of a group of proposed readers in an article by John Markoff in the New York Times this weekend I thought my dream had come true.

But Markoff has a different view. He says he also used to think he was looking for a mid-sized reader for the Web. He went over some of the issues. But he reached the conclusion that although chip power means that you can't get book performance out of a phone sized reader yet, people could be comfortable reading newspapers on a three-and-a-half-inch screen.

I took his implication to be that if people are happy with a small screen for reading newspapers and blogs, there will be no call for a mid-sized reader.

But I still want one. And I still believe the company that successfully develops a tool that has the same benefits as a novel, in usability, portability and ruggedness, will make a fortune.

Facebook's Trapdoor

I'm puzzled.

I can't understand this quirk in Facebook that means I can't politely brush off someone requesting my friendship without giving them access to all my friends and a lot of my info. 

Receive a friend request and you get this message:

I have a rule that I don't make buddies with people I've not actually met, or know online. Instead I divert them to LinkedIn, a sort of frat house for networking. Facebook is for friends. So I usually try to brush them off with a message.

Only you can't do that anymore.

Click on the Send message button, and you get this text at the bottom of the message window:

It says:

If you send xxxx a message, you will give them permission to view your list of friends, as well as your Basic, Work and Education info for one month.

In other words, you can confirm someone, you can ignore someone, but you can't send them a message that says "do I know you?" or "not sure we've met, how about you email me on LinkedIn?" Well you can, but you've got to give them some of the biggest keys to your little Facebook kingdom first.

Why? What is the point of that? What possible benefit is it to me to allow that to happen? Why would I let someone I haven't met, and who I have no friends in common with, have access to that kind of information? And, more importantly, shouldn't I be a little bit worried that my Facebook friends are allowing this to happen? How many of us actually read those little notes?

I am trying to think of a logical reason for this. Why would Facebook make it impossible for someone to reply to a request with a message that does not commit them to giving access to their information?

The only reason I can assume, perhaps because of my conspiracy-addled mind and limited brain power, is this: If the person requesting the connection has access to that information, so do most of the applications he is using. Facebook doesn't care how long the connections last between users; all it cares is that it has access to the data. Who cares if it's only for one month? That information only needs to be grabbed once. In other words, my theory goes, that data is valuable enough for Facebook to create a sort of trapdoor through which unsuspecting folk might allow their data to be compromised.

Or am I missing something? I must be.

Technorati Tags: facebook,privacy

Google Killer? A Clip Around the Ears, Maybe

There's a new search engine out there, according to the Guardian, and it sort of tries to figure out what you're looking for. Which is good. Google searches are great so long as they're simple. But is Powerset up to snuff?

Here are some searches I did (betraying my interests):

Pretty good stuff. And how about me?

Even less obvious matches seem to work:

Also right on the money. Nixon got second place when I asked who was the first u.s. president to resign? which is good enough:

Other searches tho -- how many copies of Office 2007 has Microsoft sold? and how far is it from London to Sydney -- weren't any good at all.

Of course, Powerset is so far only parsing Wikipedia articles (only -- there are 2.3 million of those in the English language). And ask Google the same questions and you're also likely to get the answers high up (1st in the case of Nixon, Taser inventer, Suharto resignation, though nowhere on my own alleged career (fittingly). Sydney/London throws up a WikiAnswers page, and I've given up hope trying to find out how many copies of Office 2007 have been sold.)

Still, it's early days for something like this. There's no question that a better search engine will one day come along, perhaps belonging to Google, perhaps not. Will it need to parse every sentence for meaning? Who knows?

Technorati Tags: google,search,powerset

Generating Meaning or Fluff?

I love this: a mashup that generates great-looking ads from Flickr pictures and a computer. The conclusion: We realise how easily affected we are by words and pictures together, but how the mix often doesn't mean very much, especially when they're ads.

By remixing corporate slogans, I intend to show how the language of advertising is both deeply meaningful, in that it represents real cultural values and desires, and yet utterly meaningless in that these ideas have no relationship to the products being sold. In using the Flickr images, the piece explores the relationship between language and image, and how meaning is constructed by the juxtaposition of the two.

Of course, it also raises the question: At what point would it be cheaper and more effective to generate ad copy by computer?

THE AD GENERATOR

Technorati Tags: ad generator,ads,automatiion,ai,buzzwords,copy,advertising,PR

Burma's Firewall Fighters

Another good report on Burma's failed efforts to stop information getting out, from the Commitee to Protect Journalists:

Those fears are driving Burma’s undercover reporters to become more innovative. DVB’s Moe Aye said his in-country reporters now check in with editors by pay phone at predetermined times to mitigate the risk of communicating on lines that may be tapped by authorities.

In-country journalists have their own clandestine procedures. One undercover DVB reporter secretly reported on the trial of a popular political prisoner by using his mobile telephone to record the detainee entering the courthouse. Later that day, he used the Internet to transmit the footage in time to meet DVB’s production deadline.

“They say, ‘Don’t ask me how, just wait and it will be there.’” Moe Aye said. “I don’t ask, so I can’t tell you how they do it. They have their own ways.”  

Although I still believe it's important not to overstate the influence of the Internet in opening up a country and placing a brake on the brutality of regimes (Burma has shown no lack of appetite for repression, and can pull the plug on the Internet at will, firstly, and secondly information and images still found their way out even in the pre-Web uprising of 1988), it's great to read of how young Burmese are finding ways to report on what's going on there.

Burma's Firewall Fighters

Technorati Tags: burma,myanmar,censorship,repression,journalism,media

Sleazy Practices Cont.

Fired up by Google's move into the crapware domain by foisting an "updater" on customers who want to install (otherwise great) programs like Google Earth, I took another look at what was happening in the updater sphere.

Apple drew some heat for its own bit of underhandedness recently, when its own Apple Software Updater automatically included downloading the company's Safari browser. After a backlash, it dropped the Safari from the "Updates" section to a "New Software" section, but still prechecked it:

In other words, run the updater and not concentrate, and you'll find yourself downloading 22 MB of browser you didn't ask for, and didn't have before.

So no, I don't think Apple did the right thing here. Apple fans can protest as much as they like, but there's a clear move here to get new software to users to install software they didn't ask for and, if they don't actively intervene, will have it installed by default. Browsers, like media players, are particularly significant because they will try to make themselves the default browser, and users once again need to act against the default process to avoid this.

Needless to say, Apple's bid has been modestly successful, apparently at least doubling its modest market share for Safari. Still miniscule, but a start.

Of course, software is one thing, but it has to be used. For that it has to be visible to the user. No point in hiding the program launch icons somewhere they can't be found. On Windows, there are three places you want to be: the desktop, the system tray, or the start menu. Apple is particularly smart about this, ensuring that all its products sit, not in some side-alley subfolder, but in the 'root' menu:

and

as well as on the desktop:

(though not, interestingly, the Updater.)

Of course, Apple isn't alone. Microsoft has long been doing this, as has Adobe.

Folk argue this is all besides the point, that users retain control over their computer and can remove all this stuff if they want. But to me it's worrying that Apple, Microsoft, Google, Sun, Adobe et al think that this is OK, and, like their defenders, fail to understand that for the vast majority of users, installing software is not an everyday experience, and that these sleights of hand merely cause extra stress, confusion and uncertainty. That can't be good.

Technorati Tags: crapware,updaters,google earth,apple,microsoft,google,java,sun,desktop,start menu

Google's Sleazy (and Broken) Updater

Sorry to see that Google is going the sleazy route that Microsoft and Apple have ploughed before, namely trying to hoodwink and browbeat users into installing and automatically updating software they don't want via an installer.

Try to download Google Earth now, for example, and you'll be directed to the Google Updater, which will try to persuade you to install software you didn't ask for. (A great write-up of all this is at the Google Operating System blog.)

On top of the inconvenience and sleaze of all this, I was irritated to find that the Updater doesn't actually work: Not only that, but the help pages don't help, and there's no direct link to the original files so you can download them separately. (Fortunately the blog above does.)

All in all, a sure sign that Google is entering the software business, since it's adopting the same bait-and-switch, install-by-stealth tactics of its Apple and Microsoft competitors. Shame on you, Google.

Technorati Tags: google earth,google,sleaze,microsoft,apple,updaters

The History of an Article

The Guardian is adding some great features to its website. I'm not crazy about the betting stuff, coming from puritanical stock, and I'm not quite sure how the paper is making money from all this, but I do like the "article history" feature. It's below the byline and before the text. Click on the link and a window appears explaining where the article originally appeared offline and when it was last updated: 

There's a similar link at the bottom of each story although for now the link doesn't seem to work:

This stuff is good for several reasons:

• It helps to create a relationship between the offline and the online, especially where the paper has two distinct offline products (Observer and Guardian).
• Giving a 'last updated' time/date gives the reader a sense of how recently journalists/editors added to the story. I'm not quite sure whether this means the Guardian is going to update the story in the journalistic sense of adding a lead if the situation requires it. But it's helpful to the reader to know when the piece was last touched.
• This would also work well for corrections. Correcting a story and explaining what it was corrected from is an important part of journalistic transparency (this Wired story, for example, corrected Clueless Manifesto to Cluetrain Manifesto after BuzzMachine pointed out the error, but didn't indicate what the original error was; ironic, given the subject matter.)

Of course, this could go further. Perhaps the Guardian could share with readers when work started on the story, who edited it and for how long, as well as a history of comments on the piece (I never quite understand why comments are allowed on blog-type articles on the Guardian website, but not on stories.)

And a minor quibble: I'd like to see the time tagged as GMT, or British Summer Time, or whatever, given the Guardian's huge foreign readership. We're a big global family now, but we're not all in the same timezone.

Anyway, kudos to the Guardian/Observer for an impressive site.

Technorati Tags: newspapers, guardian, editing

The Way Chat Should Be

Great to see that Google Talk is adding improvements. I just noticed this one, for example: Drag a photo into a chat window and it appears in the chat itself. Click on the picture and a little progress bar lights up on the right as the recipient accepts the picture.

Resize the window and the picture resizes:

This is good stuff, especially when you compare it with Skype, which for some reason no longer allows dragging of files or links into a chat.

Chat, in short, needs to fit the conversation. And conversation involves sharing things, looking at things together, and generally connecting to each other.

Switch to Google Talk. Skype, get your act together.

Technorati Tags: chat, google talk, skype, instant messaging, IM