Joe's Jottings

And I’m sure that Twitter will not be doing anything else – at least not yet – with their code when they’re making the Twittersphere safe for us all to Tweet in by screening links.  The logic of the Twitter people is sound; by vetting links they can reduce or totally remove the number of phishing and malware links that are made available to Twitter users.  They’re effectively developing a Twitter ‘Killbot’. One thing that has become clearer over recent years with the explosion of Social Network sites like Twitter and Facebook is that no matter what you say to people, and how often you say it, folks will still click links from total strangers and get themselves in to trouble.  Despite warnings, they’ll hand over user names and passwords because they’re asked for them.  And even savvy Net users are occasionally caught out by well crafted ‘targetted’ phishing scams.

 So checking and validating links – including those in DMs – is at first glance a good idea.  It only takes a few people replying to spam or filling in details on phishing sites to keep the problem going, and as education seems to be woefully inadequate at changing people’s behaviour on these issues; let’s face it, after nearly 20 years of widespread Internet use by the general public, the message about not replying to spam and not buying from spammers  has still not penetrated a good many thick skulls.

However – and it’s a big however – the technology that stops dodgy links can also be used to stop any Tweets, simply by tweaking the code.  There is a line that is crossed when you start using automated filtration techniques on any online platform.  It’s obvious that on fast growing, fast moving systems like Twitter it’s going to be impossible to have human beings realistically monitoring traffic for malware of any sort, and it’s inevitable that some form of automated techniques will be in use.  But once that line’s crossed, it’s important that we don’t forget that the technology that stops these links can also be used to stop anything else that ‘the Creators’ don’t wish to be on the system.

A wee while ago I wrote this item, in which I suggested that so much of the responsibility for ongoing phishing attacks on Twitter falls on folks who’re clicking those links; whilst spammers and phishers get bites, they carry on trying.  So, if you ARE still falling for these phishing scams – get wise and learn how to spot them!

One final observation – the code that can spot a malware link can also spot keywords.  And when you can spot keywords you can start targeting adverts.  And combined with Twitters newly activated Geolocation service, we might soon see how Twitter expects to make money from location and content targeted advertising.

A short while ago I wrote a couple of posts about the issues around Real time Search (How important is Real Time Search and Google and the Dead Past) – that is, Internet based searches that include Internet content that has been generated in the few minutes (or even less!) prior to the search.  Those of us who’ve been around the Internet for long enough will remember the days when you could wait days or weeks for stuff to show up in a Google search; nowadays Tweets can turn up in search results almost immediately.

There are many reasons – most expressed in the two posts above – that I have for feeling rather uneasy about the whole idea of real time search, particularly around personal privacy.  I think the main mistake I made when I wrote those two posts last year was to underestimate the speed with which things would move.  Recent developments in geolocation based systems – that record the location from which a post is made – such as FourSquare and the geocoding side of Twitter have made it easy for Tweets and similar online posts to locate people in the real world.  A particularly fine example of this phenomena is the suitably named ‘Please Rob Me’ - this site uses some clever coding to detect when people Tweet that they’re away from home. 

The publication of ‘exploits’ for web browsers and other software could also become a hot topic.  At the moment, a hacker may determine how to ‘poison’ a website with a specially manufactured piece of code that can infect an unprotected PC with a virus or Trojan Horse program.  The hacker can then publicise the fact via various means, hoping that others will get the chance to use it before the manufacturer of the browser relaeses a ‘patch’ for the bug that the code exploits.  Real time search could very much help hackers – by releasing details of an exploit, then linking to it from a few sites, then tweeting it, it’s quite possible that details of such exploits could be showing up in search results within minutes or hours of the exploit being identified.  Unless the search results are sanitised in some way to prevent this happening – highly unlikely – then this will surely lead to decreasing online safety.

A related problem might be in the creation of online Pop-up Shops’ for ‘warez’ or other illegal content.  For those who’ve never come across a ‘Pop-up Shop’ these are shops that take out a very short lease on a retail property – typically a month or so around Christmas or some other busy event that will guarantee good local footfall.  They then sell cheap goods, Christmas cards, etc. and then shut up shop and disappear – whilst these shops are totally legit business, the Internet equivalents are frequently not.  Given real time search, a suitably optimised ‘instant site’ with an arbitrary URL could be put on a server, show up in search engine indexes / Tweet indexes within the hour , make material available and be gone before the authorities even know it was there.

Real time search is here – faster and probably more effective than I feared.  And it’s not going to be pretty.

Regular readers of my ‘jottings’ might recall a recent post of mine in which I debated the value of Tweeted Wisdom.  Always one to consider returning to the scene of past musings, I was today motivated back in to Twitter criticism territory after I read a Tweet that suggested that:

 ”100 is the new 140 for massive retweetlove”.

Now, I have enough problems with 140 characters, but then again I’m using Twitter to communicate ideas and concepts as well as gossip, funnies and bon-mot to the good folks following me.  Whether I get re-tweeted or not is not the first thing in my mind when I put a Tweet together – what matters to me is whether I can marshall the idea effectively in to the 140 character limit.

Starting to apply lower character limits to Tweets based purely on the possibility of re-tweeting does seem rather ‘arse about face’ to me – it IS putting the process of communication ahead of the content – i.e. putting the medium before the message.

Some years ago, the Ford Motor Company were in pretty dire straits – losing money and market.  There was a serious concern amongst the higher echelons at Deerborn that Ford might actually go under.  Various policies were implemented throughout the organisation, including cuts to the design and manufacturing base of the company.  The story goes that at one Board Meeting, some of the directors were commenting that they had managed to get the books looking better by reducing costs, and that most of the cost reductions had come from savings made by closing down manufacturing facilities.  A grizzled old veteran who DID know the difference between a carburetor and a Carbonara pithily pointed out that, based on that thesis, the best way to save the company was to close ALL the company’s manufacturing facilities and stop making cars altogether….

And this is how this sort of emphasis on the mechanism of Twitter strikes me; people get way too wound up with the phenomena and culture and technology of Twitter rather than the function – and the function of Twitter is to allow rapid, succinct communication and conversation between people.  Or even between people and other computer programs!  But the emphasis is on communication and conversation – and when we start emphasising the possibility of a re-tweet over the quality of content, we are in danger of making Twitter more ‘gimmicky’ – something that is not good.

So, for what it’s worth – use that character allowance for the purpose it was originally given to us – to communicate.  Giving 30% of available space up for posisble re-tweets seems pointless.  What matters is what you say; not necessarily how many times it gets re-tweeted.  The ultimate re-tweetable message accoridng to some folks would be a single word – don’t let the usefulness of Twitter be compromised by ego.

Like many of us on Twitter, I follow a number of Twitter users who post aphorisms, quotes, sayings, etc.  A sort of electronic review of the ‘Wisdom Literature’ of the last 2000 years.  This can be pretty cool; I do wish that some folks would post their tweets across the day rather than in large floods, but, hey, it’s tolerable.

However, I recently started wondering about aphorisms in general – just how much wisdom can you cram in to 140 characters?   There is a lot of really smart stuff that gets posted, but just how much of it ’sticks’ with us – indeed, how much of it is actually thought about by the people who actually post the wit and wisdom? 

Don’t get me wrong – there is quite a bit of good stuff that comes up.  My main issue is just how much we think about what we see – indeed, how much time do we have to think about what’s presented to us in the Twitter-stream.  After all, Twitter is fast and ephemeral – that hardly seems a suitable medium for something designed to stimulate thought and insight.  There is a serious risk when we start delivering and consuming ‘bite sized’ wisdom literature, and that is that the interpretation  and assimilation of what we read gets forgotten about.  

the whole idea of ‘widom literature’ is that it delivers to us something to chew on; it’s not a finishing point, it’s actually a starting point from which each of us may trace our own journey starting from the same starting point.  There is a Christian practice called Lectio Divina - literally ‘Divine reading’  which is based around reading a piece of spiritual writing – maybe scripture, maybe something generally spiritual – and then study it, ponder on it, interpret and then use as a basis for prayer or other worship.  And this is a process that takes time, and isn’t rushed.  While a piece used in Lectio Divina might easily be short enough to encompass in a Tweet, the time taken to interpret it certainly isn’t ‘Twitter-Time’.

Twitter is a great medium for certain types of message, but I am starting to wonder whether it’s a valid medium for wisdom literature ; I toyed with the idea of launching a ‘blog’ type site last year based around publishing a suitable quotation each day and writing a short piece based around my own thoughts on that topic – but then ditched the idea after a week or two because I realised I was subjecting others to my own interpretation. 

At least Twitter removes the ego from the posting of such literature quotes; there’s no space to post an interpretation, after all!!  But Twitter reduces everything submitted to it to something that exists in the reader’s ‘window of opportunity’ for just a few minutes before it’s forgotten.  Is that really how to treat this type of post?

The second point of interest is why the sudden flurry of attempts to compromise Twitter accounts. It’s been suggested that one reason is that the compromised accounts will be used to promote sites in to search engines, based on the recent development of search relationships between Yahoo and Microsoft’s ‘Bing’.  Getting hold of the Twitter accounts would have been the first stage of the operation; the idea would be to automate those accounts to ’spam’ other users with  other links over the next few weeks to attempt to increase the search engine standing of those links.

But the thing that’s surprised me most is how often people have actually gone along with the phishing request – to enter your Twitter user name and password into an anonymous web page, with no indication as to what the page is!  To be honest, it stuns me.  And it isn’t just Internet neophytes – according to this BBC story an invitation to improve one’s sex life was followed through on by banks, cabinet ministers and media types.  Quite funny, in a way, but also quite disturbing – after all, these are people who’re likely to have fairly hefty lists of contacts on their PCs, and whilst an attack like the one detailed in this article is quite amusing, a stealthier attack launched by a foreign intelligence service against a cabinet minister’s account would be of much greater potential concern.

There are no doubt technical solutions that twitter can apply to their system to reduce the risk of the propagation of these Phsihing attacks.  For example, looking at the content of DMs sent from an account and flagging up a warning if a large number of DMs are sent containing the same text.  Twitter have also been forcing password changes on compromised accounts – again, this has to be a good move.  It might also be worth their while pruning accounts that have been unused for a length of time – or at least forcing a password change on them. 

A further part of the problem is with the use of Link Shortening services like Bit.ly to reduce the length of URLs in Tweets.  This means that you can’t even take a guess at the safety or otherwise of a shortened link;  a link that is goobledegook could lead to the BBC Website to read the story I mentioned above, or to a site that loads a worm on to a Windows PC – or prompts you for your Twitter credentials.  perhaps a further move for Twitter would be to remove the characters in URLs from the 140 character limit.  That way, full URLs could be entered without shortening.

But ultimately a lot of the responsibility for Twitter phishing attacks lies with us users.  We need to bear the following in mind:

1. If you get a DM or Reply from ANYONE that says ‘Is this you’ or ‘Read this’ form a friend, then to be honest, check with the person concerned to see whether they have sent them.  If you get such a message from anyone who’s not well known to you, then just ignore the message.
2. DO NOT enter your Twitter username and password in to any website that a link takes you to.  If you do do this, change your password as soon as possible, and don’t use the Twitter password on ANY other system.
3. Keep an eye on your Followers – if there is someone you don’t like the look of, just block them.  It may seem extreme but it stops possible miscreants ‘hiding in plain sight’.
4. Ensure your anti-virus and anti-malware software is up to date – this is your last line of defence designed to stop malware that YOU have allowed on to your machine by falling for phishing scams.

So…play your part in reducing the impact of Twitter Phishing attacks by not clicking those links!

In a recent article, it’s been suggested that Twitter is becoming a major route for spammers to peddle their wares.  This seems to be a feature emerging of all social networks right now, but in today’s piece I want to focus on Twitter.  The view expressed in this article is pretty strong – probably an even more extreme position than I take with regard to spam on Twitter, but it’s worth looking at twitter from the perspective of whether we are participating in a network that is becoming more spam than good quality ham?

As is suggested in the article above, the relationship we have with the people we follow is rather different to the relationship we have with people who email us spam – on the whole the folks who send us wonderful offers of Viagra and millions of dollars on the Beserabian national lottery are unknown to us (and probably to any other human being on the planet).  With Twitter, we’ve actually accepted the folks we follow as followers, and when one of those followers does transgress our own definition of ’spam’ and send us a message we regard as inappropriate, as well as it being annoying there’s also a sense of betrayal of trust to a greater or lesser degree.

When we interact with people on twitter, there are two relationships involved; people follow us, and we may follow then.  We only see their content if we choose to follow them.  This is why I’m extremely careful in who i do follow.  But even then, if someone who normally posts sensible stuff posts a couple of sales messages over a few days I’m not going to break my heart about it – I get more upset by people who ‘flood’ twitter with lots of posts one after each other or who repeat posts at frequent intervals.  Such content is much more intrusive, in my opinion.  They tend to be the ones who’re more likely to get put off my list of followed people than someone who sends me the odd sales message.

The other interaction is who follows us; until we also follow them, we don’t see any content that these people put up, but I’m equally protective of who I allow to follow me, based on the real world aphorism of being judged by the company that you keep.  This is why I regularly screen people following me and block folks who’re obviously doing little else than selling, obvious ‘iffy’ accounts, etc.  It’s important to do this as far as I’m concerned because I don’t want any of my other followers following someone based purely on the idea of ‘If they’re following Joe they must be OK!’  Just a quick look at the profile and Tweets of some some folks immediately indicates to me that they’re

The ’silent spam’ we tolerate by allowing folks to follow us who’re ‘bad’ but whose posts we don’t notice is just as bad as the noisy spam that we’re aware of on a day to day basis.  In my view I regard this sort of spam as the true voluntary spam, and as members of the Twitter community we should all be blocking and where appropriate reporting these folks, even if we are not following them ourselves.

A few days ago I came across this news story, in which a group of French journalists are to be holed up in a farmhouse somewhere with no access to normal news media but with access to Social Media – Twitter, Facebook, etc.  The idea is to see whether news can be effectively and accurately reported via Social media.

It’s an interesting idea, but, just like Celebrity Big Brother, one has to ask Is there a point?’  To start with, as has been pointed out by some commentators, by announcing it in this way it’s quite possible that people will try and game the system and attempt to get some totally ludicrous story in to the news programme that these reporters will be creating in their isolated time.  And there’s the lack of ability to follow up alternate sources who aren’t on Twitter, no way of getting a gut feel from the rest of the media, etc.  In the last week there was a particularly persistent rumour on Twitter that Johnny Depp had died, which indicated the ‘life of it’s own’ aspect that many rumours have, only this time it was spread incredibly quickly and virally across Twitter, hence reaching, in the words of the beer adverts, parts other rumours in the past could not reach.  I have a gut feel that the items that interest the vast majority of people on Social Networks are unlikely to be the content of conventional ’serious news’ outlets.  More National Enquirer than National Interest, more Geek than GATT.  I can see some areas of overlap – the major big stories like Haiti, for example.

On the other hand, if by chance the news reported by these reporters reflects to a greater or lesser degree the output of the conventional media, then it has an awful lot to say about the efficacy of the ‘citizen journalist’ in pumping out on to social media outlets news that is editorially similar to that which is reported by the mainstream. 

A further possibility is that ‘hard’ news stories that don’t get conventionally reported but that do appear on social networks and web sites such as Indymedia might be picked up and run with.  To me, this is the most interesting outcome of all, and if the reporters and their parent stations play the game with a straight bat it could give us all an intriguing insight in to the editorial policies of conventional media and how this form of newsgathering of crowdsourced stories might start showing more sides of conventional news stories than typically gets reported.

One thing that does concern me about this sort of approach, apart from validation and verification, is analysis.  Everything is a scoop; the fast nature of Social Media means that the time taken to interpret and analyse what’s happening is time in which any number of other stories will zoom by.  This is a pattern we’ve already seen in 24 hour rolling news; everything is reported quickly; the facts (or rumours) are reported with no sense of context.  It’s like trying to get a picture of the strategic and political importance of a military engagement from  a soldier who spent the whole battle in a foxhole pinned down by enemy fire.  It’s a valid viewpoint in one way, but is not a method of reporting that produces truly informed citizens.

As anyone who’s ever heard me rant about the ‘numbers game’ side of networking – especially on sites such as Ecademy, Linked in or Facebook – will testify, I’m a great believer in quality rather than quantity, and until the software on such sites can do more for me than it currently does in terms of augmenting my memory and the cognitive abilities I apply when trying to remember ‘Is Fred interested in Mousterian Variability or is that Jill?’ then I use these sites to more conveniently keep in touch with roughly the same number of people I would via non computer based means.

So I was pleased today to read this item, suggesting that the brain has a top limit on how many people we can keep track of.   It’s called Dunbar’s Number and is suggested by anthropologist Robin Dunbar to be about 150.  It shouldn’t be surprising; it’s been realised for years that there are optimum sizes for small teams of between 6 and 10 people, which fits with the old military idea of the ‘Brotherhood of the table’ – the ideal size of a small, self contained, fighting unit being a section of about a dozen men.  In such small teams personal loyalties develop and the team bonds quickly.  Larger groupings are employed in companies, but few large companies now look to any ‘business unit’ as having more than a couple of hundred people in them, as management becomes impersonal and the whole unit becomes less effective.

I’ve held for many years, even before the advent of Internet social networking sites, that the quantity over quality brand of personal networking is more to do with train spotting, stamp-collecting or the MI5 Registry than it is to do with maintaining close and friendly business or social relationships.  The numbers approach reduces everything to the level of transactions -’What can ‘x’ do for me today?’, or ‘I need to know ‘z’, who can help me?’  Whilst this is indeed part of social relationships, the more is beautiful version of social networking makes it all there is to having a network, which is painfully sad.

The natural extension to this approach is what we’re seeing now; many ‘numbers based’ networking sites end up as platforms for the exchange of low-value ‘opportunities’ between people, which are rarely of value to the recipient.  Spam may be too harsh a word, but what else can you call it?  If you have a network of 2,000 people, then you’re much more likely to feel OK about ‘cold calling’ them all than you would if you had a more tightly defined network of respected confidantes, friends and valuable professional associates.  Same on Twitter – it’s easy to spam 20,000 people with marketing messages in 140 characters because you simply cannot know them all.  You’re working as a publisher.  there’s nothing wrong with that but don’t fool yourself in to believing that your relationships with those 2,000 or 20,000 people are anything other than, in most cases, opportunities for you to push your message to them.

Of course, true relationships do develop from these large numbers of what I call ‘transactional friends’, but they enter in to the 150.  The vast majority of these thousands of friends and followers seem, therefore, to be just stamps in a collector’s album.

I for one don’t want to be a collector!

I’ll admit it.  Deep within me is a snob.  As far as I’m concerned, the online world started heading down hill when you no longer had to know how to install a full TCP/IP stack to use the Internet.  Most online discussion forums should, in my opinion, have an intelligence test before you’re allowed to post on them – basically the ability, for an English language website, to string together English sentences without text speech or foul language is a good starting point.  OK…where was I….oh yes. 

Seesmic, the company who produce  the popular Twhirl Twitter application, are producing an application that they basically believe will bring Twitter to the masses of online users who are yet to Tweet.  The software has been endorsed by Twitter and developed in collaboration with Microsoft, who may be planning on installing it as part of Windows.  The program, called ‘Look’, is designed to be used by people who’re not currently tweeting and who may not feel that they have much to say – looking at it I’d say that it appears that twitter are starting to commoditise their platform – increase the numbers of users and volumes of traffic prior to some efforts towards monetisation of their network.  In yestreday’s piece about BlippyI mentioned the ‘database of intentions’; perhaps Twitter are looking towards a massive increase in numbers of users to swell the flow of data that can be used to generate another part of this database.   Twitter’s traffic / user levels have also been flat for a while – perhaps twitter see this move as a means of breaking through the current plateau and getting things moving again before the next new thing comes along.

Now, as you can gather from the title I have a few issues with what’s happening.  To some people, the idea of ‘dumbing down’ Twitter may sound daft – after all, many folks think it’s pretty dumb already – so let me explain what I mean.  Twitter is a platform that carries messages which users can filter and hence determine what they see.  In principle, therefore, a large influx of new people shouldn’t necessarily change the culture too much; after all, people filter which Tweets they see.  If Twitter does become a hotbed of text speech and obscenity (OK, even more than now! ) then it shouldn’t affect most of us because we can filter out the noise.  This is a different proposition to spam email or discussion Forums where the signal to noise ration – i.e. the amount of good stuff compared to the dross – does decline radically when larger numbers of users come on board.

However…all this new traffic will be using Twitter’s infrastructure, and unless the twitter infrastructure is improved I can see many more occurrences of the ‘Fail Whale’ in the months after the introduction of this new package.

As for the dumbing down; I am concerned; if Twitter are going in this direction to play the ‘numbers game’ then I can see good content becoming harder and harder to find.  Twitter’s search facilities are pretty poor; using them to search through large amounts of juvenilia for the valuable nuggets of content is not going to be easy.

Are we heading for a ’speculative bubble’ effect in the portions of the media and IT economy that are tied up with Social Media and Social networking?  Regular readers will know that I’m something of  a cynic about the importance of Social Media and Social Networking; whilst it’s clearly an important aspect of marketing for the future, I am rather concerned about the importance that the ‘industry’, if we can call it that, applies to itself.

Take the following article, from a Canadian newspaper, for example.  Real world businesses are still doubting the importance and relevance of Social networking and Media to their ongoing business activity.  Unsurprisingly, the practitioners are effectively saying ‘Ignore us and you’re doomed, doomed I tell you! Doomed!’  Now, some of us who were out of school in the late 1990s can probably remember the comments made by a number of folks with possible vested interests that anyone without a web presence would be out of business within 5 years.  What actually happened was that within 5 years a lot of web companies were out of business, and many businesses with no web presence or strategy whatsoever were going along quite happily.

Just because you find something sexy and interesting doesn’t mean it’s important; passion is a wonderful thing to have but one also needs to be pragmatic along with it.  In a recession, surely any business is likely to be most interested in keeping existing customers and is likely to be playing a ’safe hand’ with it’s resources.  It’s unlikely to want to adopt techniques that it’s customers may not actually be aware of or care about.  There is absolutely no point in extensively using social media and social networking technologies if your customers are not aware of them!  It’s rather like advertising in French when you have no one in France reading the ads!

The arrogance of Social Media zealots in assuming that real businesses are lagging behind is astonishing; surely Social Media / Networking is a support function for most companies, part of marketing and advertising.  It’s not as disruptive a technology as the web itself is, and shouldn’t be treated like it is.  Take a look at this definition of a bubble - the phrases that immediately struck me were “emerging social norms”, “positive feedback mechanisms”,”they create excess demand and production”.  I think it’s fair to say that we’re seeing all these effects.

In addition, it’s difficult to value the Social networking / Media market place and individual services and companies within it.  And then we have the other issues often associated with bubbles:

Moral Hazard- how much of the market place is supported by ‘other people’s money’ – if supported mainly by VC capital then companies may take risks that they wouldn’t take with their own money.

Herding- the more folks who say it’s good, the more the markets are likely to follow.

All in all….I think a ‘correction’ to the emergent Social Networking and Media sector is likely.  And then we can get back to realistic use of this technology as part of an integrated marketing strategy for businesses.