Twitter makeover in the offing?

Could Twitter be about to unveil a new look? At the time of writing (9am BST) Twitter is down for maintenance. The famous fail whale promises it will be back “in about an hour”, although it has been promising exactly that for at least half an hour now and I don’t know when the maintenance started.

Why am I conjecturing about a new design? Well, at around 10pm BST yesterday evening the design suddenly changed. I thought the Internet might have mangled the CSS file, or lost bits of it, but the result was certainly not a mess so I wasn’t sure. I twittered about the new layout and responding tweets confirmed others had seen it. It persisted only for a few minutes then reverted to the familiar somewhat dated look. I wish I had thought to make a screengrab - I’m sure someone must have. Yep, Techcrunch have got hold of it.

The news has certainly spread. Leo Laporte twittered about it a few hours ago.

Clearly it was a test. I guess it was a kind of impromptu Market Test. Twitter knew the new design would work from the technology perspective. What they didn’t know was how Twitterers at large would react to it. I liked it and guess the majority response will be favourable, and it wouldn’t have taken long for the Twitter management to collect a significant sample of user reactions.

There is speculation here that the design changes are in preparation for integration of Summize, the Twitter search service recently purchased by Twitter.  Maybe, but it’s not obvious how the modified design would accommodate the full functionality of Summize.

Twitter is still down. But what will it look like when it comes back up? I’m now wishing I’d made a screengrab of the original look for old time’s sake.

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iPhone iNadequacy - plenty of apps but any more RAM?

The original iPhone was already hampered by its limited 128Mb RAM; restrictive enough to make it crash on browsing websites with a large number of images or when using Cover Flow with a large album collection.

Well, the problem has just got worse. The new 3G iPhone invites you to download lots of fascinating apps from the iTunes app store. This will place yet further demands on the iPhone’s RAM so you would have thought Apple would have taken the opportunity of the upgrade to boost it by the odd few hundred megabytes.

Well Apple are being rather coy about the specifications so it is hard to be sure, but it does look like the RAM has not been beefed up.

The release of the 3G iPhone has coincided with a big increase in hits to this website (particularly this post) from iPhone users (or maybe potential buyers) trying to find out about the amount of RAM on the iPhone or because they are encountering Safari crashes or other similar problems. It is probably too early to say but I suspect Apple have just exacerbated a problem they should have been acting to fix.

ISPs playing ISPy

How would you feel if your ISP allowed a third party to install equipment at their datacentre which intercepted all your Internet traffic, (secretly so you wouldn’t notice) so that your browsing could be tracked, webpage by webpage, entirely without your knowledge?

In this scenario, the ISP is paid by the above-mentioned third-party (an advertising company) for allowing the spy equipment to be installed. This advertising company uses your browsing record to profile you so you can be presented with targeted ads when you visit any website that uses their advertising system.

This is happening right now in the UK. A company called Phorm (who do have “phorm” in the spyware business) have signed up three of the UK’s largest ISPs: BT, Virgin Media and Carphone Warehouse. This looks like the start of a very worrying trend. Its legality in the UK looked like being challenged but the challenge has died away so how long before every ISP in the UK signs up with Phorm or any of a number of other companies entering this market? They get money, presumably lots of it, just for letting someone wire up a few boxes. It must be very tempting.

How soon before this is the norm in the US, then the whole world? Phorm the norm …

If you want to learn more about this, The Register has been following developments and there are a number of relevant articles here.

For the propeller-heads, tech guru Steve Gibson gave us an insight on Security Now! into the fiendishly clever use of technology that underpins how browsing is tracked.

Steve makes the excellent point that there is a fair way and an unfair way to do this sort of thing. The ISP’s customers should be told openly about the tracking/profiling and be given an option to opt in or opt out. Some customers may not care about having their browsing monitored or being fed targeted ads, and may be quite happy to accept a discount off their broadband fees for participating in the scheme, in effect getting a cut of the ISP’s earnings from it.

Other customers, who are uncomfortable with such an invasion of privacy, could opt out and forego the discount. So, does the fact that this choice is not being offered suggest that Phorm and the ISPs expect most broadband users would opt out if given the choice? Perhaps the ISPs are too mean to share the earnings.

Or maybe the ISPs are scared their customers would be so outraged by the very thought of the scheme that they would lose confidence and switch ISP. If it was my ISP then I would most definitely switch. I just hope I would be left with a non-spyware riddled ISP to choose from.

It may be harder for US broadband users when this insidious practice crosses the pond because there are so many local ISP monopolies.

Phorm used to be called 121Media and became notorious for an earlier tracking technology which worked by inserting Javascript into web pages displayed on the customer’s browser. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the insertion often caused an error so that the browser froze up.

This is the “phorm” I referred to above.

From the lips of Dicky De…

It is a surreal feeling when you are out walking the dog, as you do every day, listening to your favourite podcasts, and out of the blue your own name gets mentioned on a popular show.

This is not the first time I’ve heard my name mentioned on a high-profile podcast. I have had a question answered on the award-winning Security Now! podcast with Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson, and previously a letter read out out on The Daily Giz Wiz with Leo and Dick DeBartolo, but on both those occasions I had a strong inkling I would get a mention.

It is quite different when you’re not expecting it. There I am, walking the dog in the morning as I do nearly every day, earphones in, listening to a playlist of podcasts including most of the shows on Leo Laporte’s TWiT network, and in particular Daily Giz Wiz 606. Dick and Leo conclude their chat about the featured gadget (Display Link), the letters jingle plays, there follows a bit of spillover discussion about the gadget and suddenly Dick starts talking about a “letter” he received from me.

I was caught out because I had not thought of my email as a “reader’s letter” as such. I follow Dick on Twitter and he follows me. There had a been a period of about a week when Twitter replies weren’t working and Dick had twittered about not being able to read replies to his tweets, so I had emailed him about the Summize.com solution.

I suppose I had suggested Dick get Leo to give the solution some publicity since so many high profile Twitterers were complaining they couldn’t get at their replies and didn’t appear to know about Summize.

Rumour has it Twitter are about to buy Summize, presumably to integrate them as a search engine. If the combined service performs as poorly as Twitter does now I’d rather Summize remained independent.

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No Surprise Wise use Summize for Twitter Replies

For some days now the “Replies” tab on Twitter has been inactive. Try to use it and you get the message that “Twitter is stressing out a bit right now, so this feature is temporarily disabled”.

This means that if anyone has replied to one of your tweets (in my case using @denniswright in the text) I will only see it in my Twitter timeline if I happen to follow them. Now most of the tweets aimed at me are from people I do follow so it’s not a massive issue for me. It’s more of a problem for Twitter heavy hitters who are followed by a shedload of people, while themselves following relatively few, but wanting to check on interesting tidbits from their hinterland of followers.

The latest tweet from John Dvorak, 23 hours ago, read: will REPLIES EVER work again? Looks sketchy. Makes it hard to interact.

A simple solution is to use Summize.com as a stand-in for Twitter Replies. There are any number of Twitter-related websites that fill in the numerous gaps in Twitter’s functionality, taking advantage of the fact that at least Twitter exposes a decent API. Summize contributes the much needed search function, so if I search in Summize for @denniswright I will get all tweets directed at me, including replies from followers who I don’t follow back.

I hope John Dvorak and other Twitter heavyweights (not being personal here John) know about this or figure it out soon.

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Fussy Flickr

It’s not just Flickr. It’s all images on the web. Silly me, I didn’t know there was no support at all for colour management of images displayed on web browsers. So I uploaded a JPEG created using the Adobe RGB (1998) colour space, to Flickr. The Adobe colour space extends to more colours than the more common sRGB so you’d think it might appear more colourful or vibrant, but the image looked awful. My poor daughter looked less than healthy.

I tried again with the sRGB equivalent. That worked rather better. sRGB images look about right on the web but nothing else does. It’s all explained here.

It really is about time someone did something about this, particularly given the proliferation of photographic images on the web since the advent of digital photography.

See if you can tell which image is sRGB and which is the Adobe RGB. No prizes.

A Spanish neologism - the verb “tuitear”

I love this! Spanish Twitter lovers have borrowed the English verb “to tweet” and have started using it with a Spanish spelling. Hence we have a new Spanish word … tuitear. An example here - a blog post about Dash-Express, the satnav system that tweets your GPS location at regular intervals as you drive around.

There already is a Spanish word to tweet, “piar”, referring to the act of avian vocalisation, but the Spanish web fraternity appear to be eschewing it in favour of tuitear. Presumably because it chimes with Twitter and piar doesn’t.

How tweet … er … sweet.

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Angels and Churches

The Diocese of Rome is being remarkably petty. Sadly, it is no great surprise.

They have refused permission for various churches in Rome to be used in the filming of Angels and Demons, based on the book of the same name by Dan Brown. Key action sequences in Brown’s bestseller were set in the Chigi Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo and other prominent Rome churches, but will now have to be filmed somewhere else.

This ban is infantile and unbecoming on at least two counts.

Firstly, whereas the church may have a gripe with Brown it is over his most successful work, The Da Vinci Code, which has already been filmed, because its premise revolves around an unorthodox rendering of the life of Jesus. There is nothing in Angels and Demons that attacks the foundations of the Roman Catholic faith. Alright, a number of clerics meet untimely deaths in churchy surroundings but that is not the issue. The church don’t like Brown because he has made a lot of money out of “telling porkies about Jesus”, so they won’t let him come round to play any more.

But what I find the most petty is that this ban will not stop anyone, believer or otherwise, from seeing the film nor change what is portrayed in it. If Director Ron Howard can’t shoot in the Chigi Chapel then his scouts will find some other church somewhere to play stunt double and hardly anyone will know the difference or care. They won’t be able to use the original Bernini statue of Habbakuk and the Angel so they’ll make a passable facsimile out of papier mache. So it will waste the film studio’s time and money but otherwise achieve nothing. If that isn’t petty and childish then I don’t know what is.

I wonder if the film’s star Tom Hanks will reprise the eyebrow-raising hairstyle he sported in The Da Vinci Code? Now that’s a sound reason to ban him from a church, or anywhere else for that matter.

Dutch Dilemma

Holland have already won their group in Euro 2008. Better than that, they have a golden opportunity to dump both Italy and France out of the tournament. All they have to do is let Romania win in their final group game in Berne on 17 June.

If Romania beat Holland in that game they are guaranteed to finish second, and both Italy and France will fail to qualify for the knock-out stages, whatever the result of the contest between them in Zurich on the same day.

It must be oh, so tempting for Dutch coach Marco van Basten. France and Italy may both have struggled in the tournament so far but they both have the potential to prove a far greater threat to Holland in the closing rounds than do Romania. So easy to get rid of them both at a stroke, to turn the battle between them into a meaningless, futile struggle.

But how could Marco get away with such a thing? To be seen to be deliberately letting Romania win would result in cries of foul play from Italy and France. Holland might get into serious hot water over it.

It is not like Portugal playing a weakened team and losing 2-0 to Switzerland tonight. Even if Switzerland had won 200-0, Portugal would still have topped their group and the Swiss would still have finished last. The game was academic, of no consequence.

For Holland to contrive a defeat against Romania would deprive France and Italy of an opportunity to progress in the tournament. So Marco would have to think of a very clever and subtle way to do it. To make it look like his team were trying really hard to win but somehow manage to lose. Giving away a penalty would be too obvious. Same thing with the goalie diving spectacularly over the ball, or strikers missing open goals. Sure to attract accusations of match fixing.

Marco can’t really trust to his players’ acting skills. He’d do better to leave out 2 or 3 of his best players (justifiable given the group is won - he is entitled to rest them and protect them from risk of injury in those circumstances), motivate the team on the day to play to the best of their best abilities, but pick a formation or choose tactics which he knows will not work well against Romania. It can’t be too outlandish, but he should be able to set up some advantages for Romania that will prove decisive over the course of the match. He’s a clever guy. He’ll think of something, and make it look like Romania just played a blinder.

Jarret M Coon and the mysterious case of the lost tribe

When I last wrote about him 10 days ago, Jarret Coon was following more than 126,000 people on Twitter and had something like 4,400 followers. Today his contingent of followers is up to over 5,800 and still rising strongly, but he now follows only 45.

Clearly something significant has happened. There is a clue in this blog post by Erik MacKinnon.

“At about 3am on Wednesday June 4, myself, 14 year-old Jarret Coon and Richard Sayer were suspended from Twitter - for having the most number of Twitter users followed. Jarret, myself and Richard (#1, 2 and 3 respectively) have continuously followed Twitter users to the point that we are each following well over 100,000 people.”

So it looks like the day after I blogged about Jarret Coon, he and two other Twitterers who were following large numbers of people came to the attention of Twitter HQ and promptly had their wings clipped. As for why Twitter staff might feel motivated to suspend the Twittering Three and strip them of their followees, there is another clue in Erik MacKinnon’s post, where he refers to a complaint by another censored Twitter user, the tastily named foulbastard, which was resolved on the Get Satisfaction website.

Jason Goldman from Twitter explained:

“Because of the opt-in nature of following another person on Twitter, we don’t have a spam problem but we do get some folks who try to abuse the system for some reason or another. When enough people block an account on Twitter that usually indicates some sort of attempted abuse—this is how the Twitter community lets us know when something is not quite right.”

Now it is quite likely that Jarret, Erik and Richard Sayer were starting to get blocked by some of the people they were following. With such large numbers of people followed there were bound to be some who resented the attention of someone they didn’t know, notwithstanding that this is the norm on Twitter. I do remember Jarret tweeting around 3 June about “having a hater”. There was a female Twitter user who regarded Jarret as some kind of stalker, just for following her unsolicited, mouthed off about him on Twitter and also blocked him. I’m guessing this is the sort of thing that led to the suspensions reported by Erik.

The wing-clipping was short-lived. Jarret Coon is back on Twitter, as are Erik MacKinnon and Richard Sayer. The latter is not far behind Jarret in terms of followers.

As a final observation about how Jarret has been so successful in building up a big following, I described his technique in my previous post as including “twittering outrageous garbage more or less non-stop“. Well clearly there is a reason his outpourings of tweets have found some traction. There are followers who view them in an entirely different light. There is an example of that here.