Recently on Bedroomation

Commenting schizophrenia, and what to do about it

This post is spurred by a post a month or so back by Jason Santa Maria that I was slow in getting to - it’s about the cultivation of online conversations, specifically comment threads against blog posts that have reached such a length and a nature that they could be called a conversation.  It’s a refreshing piece, recognising as it does not only the problematic nature of making web comments useful, but also that there’s much a blog author is able to do, and that any method for managing comments and keeping them useful has to be lightweight and not require too much active involvement - people lapse, and systems that require too much ongoing maintenance are doomed to fail.

There’s also an excellent suggestion for a piece of blog functionality that can help orient the reader of a comment thread that may have become unruly by dint of sheer length - with the deliciously idiomatic name of a “mile-marker”, this would be a kind of meta-comment that would sum up the comments so far with the intention of making it far easier for the would-be commenter to jump in.  The mile-marker would either be written by the author themselves, in which case it could include some implicit commentary (i.e. picking out an individual comment in the mile-marker would intimate appreciation), or crowdsourced out (though it was unclear whether this would work!).

This would all probably work pretty well on Mr Santa Maria’s blog (and I would encourage him to try it out - seems to me it sits well with his other idiosycratic touches such as artistic direction for individual posts) - he’s a well-known web designer who gets many well-thought-out comments per post.  Online commentary, though, exists in many places, in many fora, and it’s unruly almost everywhere.  Before we can really come to any answers that may be expected to work to corral them (and I think devices like mile-markers will have their part), it’s important to cast our eyes over why this might be.

Consider a newspaper article - say, on the Guardian’s Comment Is Free section - where the body of the article is written by a staff journalist, yet the focus of the article would be deemed to be the comments (in this case using a platform provided by Pluck).  The journalist may or may not join in with the comments themselves - indeed, the piece may be a syndicated spiel by Noam Chomsky, say, a fellow who couldn’t be counted on to deign to give feedback to comments wherever his original piece may wind up.  Even if the journalists comment, it’s rare that they are speaking as authors, and the presentation of their comments doesn’t privilege them as such - much of the time they are sucked into chumming with the commenting contingent, backpedalling from the original article content (which they have no freedom to edit anyway).

There’s a tension here, which is that the commenting system on a site like Comment Is Free exists as a rootless, amorphous mess of pseudonymous commenters ready to latch onto any article that is published and bend it to its will, not because the commenters necessarily have anything to say, or are interested in anything so much as a conversation, but because the subtext of a site like Comment Is Free is that any article that falls in the forest without a comment makes no sound.  It’s there on the Guardian’s front page - an article’s importance is not to be determined by the content of the article itself, but by the Geiger counter read-out of the comment radiation that surrounds it.

There is the question: what is the motivation of a commenter on such a public webspace, where commentary is almost entirely pseudonymous, and where Pluck’s system (probably by omission) discourages any actual conversation?

There is the central tension: when someone writes a comment against any piece of web content with clear authorship, is the commenter speaking to the author directly, or merely performing a kind of existential venting?  Or is it the case that comments will all fall somewhere on that scale?

There is another tension: when someone writes a comment, are they writing that comment with sole reference to the original piece of content, or are they sensitive to the context of there being intervening comments?  Or is there another scale, and where on the scale is the correct/conscientious place for the commenter to be?  (Here’s why the mile-marker idea shines: it is both unreasonable to expect a commenter to read a preceding set of 384 comments, and reasonable for a blog author who is interesting in fostering something that be called a conversation to expect a commenter to at least be up to speed on where the conversation is at the point in time they come to comment as the understanding of the topic in hand will hopefully have moved on from that implicit in the original article - so the mile-marker allows the commenter to quickly go some way to reconciling these two states so as not to embarrass themself when they write the comment.)

Another tension: between whom is the conversation?  Is it between the blog author and the combined body of the readership, so more or less a Q&A?  Is it between a group of people who already self-identify as a group, with their own established shared discourse, their own means of naming themselves, etc?  If so, where does the author fit in - hapless supervisor?  Babysitter?  Careless troll-feeder?  What does this mean for the nature of the conversation?

Another possible source of tension: is the author of the piece of web content the controller of the entire forum for commentary, and are they clearly able to exercise this control?  Or is the editorial control for the commentary the responsibility of someone else (as in the case of a newspaper article)?

Why is commentary allowed?  Is it a pretence at democracy, or is the author actually interested in things commenters might say, as opposed to the weight of commenters who may say it?  (Democracy ain’t qualitative.)  Is the author really interested in furthering a discussion that is greater than themselves?

How do commenters identify themselves?  To what degree are they projecting their own egos in a given situation?  (This could, possibly, be measured by determining whether a commenter is saying anything factually new or ideologically different to anything else that had theretofore been expressed in a particular comment thread.)

How do comments end - some kind of realisation by someone that makes all other comments moot?  Or do they just fizzle out?  (Don’t they pretty much always just fizzle out?)

What about an article that’s a year old but still relevant - what does it mean when a commenter writes a comment then?  Does the consideration that the author probably won’t see any comment against such an old article mean anything?  What about the future, when it’ll be common to come upon blog posts that are fifty years old yet still with commentary open?  When does the notion of interactivity die?

It’s clear that in order to rein comments in, this stuff cannot be left open to chance.

Re: the mile-marker idea, I had thought of the concept of a comment chorus, whereby comments didn’t comprise consequential posts after the article, but instead comprised a wiki that subsequent commenters could edit (with, naturally, an undo admin function!), the sum-total of which would be a kind of meta-article that would show “what we’ve learnt”.  Commenters’ names would be listed, but would be separated from their individual contributions to the chorus.  Consensus, if one could be reached, would be left like a residue for all to see, and see quickly.

I think the matter of identity in online commentary is actually the elephant in the room of this discussion, and I’ll write about that in a subsequent post.

So, comments? (Or comments about comments?)

Are underscores OK in HTML class attributes?

I’d been using underscores in class names for a while, and a couple of weeks ago someone I work on things with mentioned that they supposedly weren’t allowed. Now, I prefer underscores over hyphens generally (and certainly prefer them over using camel case), and Google have just pronounced them OK for URLs, too. Is there any good reason, in 2008, not to use underscores?

Molly Holzschlag let it be known a couple of weeks ago, on Twitter, that best practice involves not using underscores because of “irregular implementations”, and also mentions in neighbouring tweets that underscores were originally illegal in CSS2 (and had to be escaped in CSS1), but that they were made legal in the errata.

The only authoritative article I can find on the subject, and the one I think is being referenced here, was written by Eric Meyer in March 2001. It mentions that Netscape Navigator 4.x simply didn’t read underscores in class names, and neither did Opera 3.x-5.x. IE4.x upwards, more by luck than judgement, have recognised them fine.

So, unless somebody can stop me, I’m going to use them. Case, if not closed, then ajar.

The devaluation in instant availability

Bill Drummond being interviewed about recorded music:

There was one occasion where I went to HMV to buy a CD. Standing outside the doors, I could see aisle upon aisle, rack upon rack - every CD known to mankind is there for me to buy. Over the decades my taste in music has broadened; I like all sorts of things. There was just this knowledge that whatever I buy, I’ll get it home, I’ll put it on and I’ll be disappointed. Later that night, I got home, got the children to bed, started doing my emails. I’d read about Napster, but I hadn’t actually used it. I started imagining that every piece of recorded music is out there - I could click on my computer and have it in my hand. I knew that whatever I got on to the hard drive, when I listened to it, it wouldn’t be what I wanted. From that point, I started seeing recorded music as a kind of genre in itself. Somehow, all recorded music, no matter where it is in the world, even if it’s from the pre-recorded music era, once it had been sucked into being recorded music and you’re listening to a two-dimensional thing, that can be listened to anywhere any time while you’re doing almost anything. In my head it’s all become this one thing that’s fast draining of meaning. Once an artform loses its meaning, it no longer has any real value.

Noticing a theme emerging?

I’m game, I hate bizarre password rules too

I’m currently signing up to try out RescueTime, and wasn’t entirely sure about the prospect - but a good bit of opinionatedness has swayed me:

OK, the “watch for mistrakes!” is a tiny bit too unartfully kooky, but that’s forgiveable.  What really impresses me is the help text given for the password field:

We hate bizarre password rules. Keep it over 3 characters, but otherwise feel free to make it as secure or insecure as you want.

This is great!  So many misconceptions fly about around the nature of a “strong” password.  Web application developers take it upon themselves to “educate” the unwashed masses of the benefits of picking a hard-to-guess password, and increasingly force you to pick “at least one number” or “at least one non-alphanumeric character”.  So people think that pa$$w0rd is a significantly stronger password than password, just because Facebook tells them so.  What’s missed is that once passwords get to a certain level of complexity, they become impossible to remember.  So the user is forced to reset their password every time they use the service, or note it down somewhere, or have it emailed to them.  It opens up further points of insecurity.  So jam isn’t going to keep even a basic brute-force attack especially busy, but jammertime might! Plus, you can remember it. Plus, it’s up to you, and you as a user are not forced to abrogate your own responsibility to keep your account access secure by adhering to someone else’s nannying over-simplifying AJAX widget.

So I was pleased RescueTime wears its opinions on its sleeves, and doesn’t take me for an idiot. Because, well, we share enemies, and I suppose that could be the start of a beautiful relationship!

Demote questions without answers!

Something that shouldn’t be beyond the wit of Google: parsing a page in a forum that only has one post, posting a question, to which no-one has ever replied - so it can be dropped further down the search results! Or separated into a different set. If I’m searching for a string of words that are constituent parts of a particular question, I’m looking for an answer to that question, primarily. Only secondarily am I looking for another incidence of the same question, with no-one offering to help me.

Oh, and while they’re at it, another type of thread that is due a markdown:

Newbie:

I’ve got this problem. I can’t figure it out! I’ve tried this and this and that, and no worky!

“RTFM” nerd:

Listen carefully. Type ‘ifgumbo -err –include-suppositories’ into the command line and post what you get. You know what a command line is, right?

Newbie:

*screeds and screeds of stdout garbage you have to page down ten times to get through*

…

*tumbleweed* *it’s at this point you realise the thread is from 2003*

Seeking obscurity

Miranda Sawyer in the Guardian, having a good old-fashioned moan about the new times:

I have an idea about alternative culture: if there’s something interesting going on, leave it alone. Don’t whack it on YouTube, don’t blog about it, don’t hire a PR and get a piece in the Guardian Guide. And never invite a marketing executive to enjoy the ‘experience’. Just go there, have fun, go home, shut up. Mass communication is all very well, but stumbling across culture is important too. Special is good.

I suspect more and more people are going to have this impulse, and a growing band of people are going to struggle against being automatically mediated at every turn.

Live Search: Firefox 3 - what Firefox 3?

I was a little staggered to find just now, while searching for ‘Firefox’ in Live Search, a whole page of results pointing to Firefox 2. I suppose it’s possible their indexing is just really, really slow (Firefox 3 has been out a week now), but none of the links on the first page were even for the official Firefox site. This is one of the most popular items of software in the world! Are Microsoft actively skewing their search results?

Web things that must die #3: Reflected text

I wasn’t that great of a fan of the “Web 2.0″ style trend for the reflection effect (as pioneered by Apple). Too often it’s executed poorly, and just smacks of trying to look cool without putting too much thought into the actual design. (Yes, I realise I’m quite one to talk.) I think, though, that these effects are gradually dying out, which is well and good.

So the specific gripe is when a designer actually goes to the effort of capturing text rendered on the page and creates a reflection from that, ignoring the fact different OSs and browsers have a different array of fonts, and that text is, well, text, and shouldn’t be treated as a graphic.

Life then gets far worse when you change the text but neglect to re-generate the graphic. I suppose that would be a hassle, right? I missed the boat on getting a screenshot of this, but in the earlier part of this year, the Microsoft home page was making exactly this mistake in its footer: the text itself said “2008 Microsoft”, but the reflected text put the year as 2006. They seem, now, to have noticed (after a period of at least 12 months!), and have obfuscated the reflected text so you can barely make out the lettering. Good, trailblazing move, Microsoft!

So it’s a disappointment, considering that jQuery is my most favourite of JavaScript libraries, to find this same error on the jQuery UI download page:

Especially as there’s a neat fade-to-orange effect there, which needs this image:

It’s a shame such a neat effect is spoilt by a lack of attention to detail.

Re-generating an image every time you want to change your text is a hassle you can save yourself from quite easily - just don’t reflect the text in the first place!

Now, I look forward to the day when these types of reflections can be rendered by CSS. How cool would it be if you could select the text and see the selected text in the reflection? Ersatz approximations of this, however, look ugly, are unmaintainable, and should be nixed.

How web design needs to change utility companies

There are any number of blogs and, more specifically, people around discussing the finer points of web design at all levels, from low-level technical matters to high-level interface interactions. The Web is excellent, largely, at self-analysis, reconceptualisation and experimentation - it could, of course, be better, but it’s true to say that the dominant idioms on the web today have undergone a trial-by-fire that would be hard to match in the offline world. The web is a world of knowledgeable amateurs, not restrained by technology, or financial costs (much), but by ideas, and strong ideas rise to the top fast. The Web is also immature in many ways, and this will continue to happen as long as the value of web applications is measured purely in the crude terms of usage numbers or VC funding rounds - what goes up can go down (or worse, stagnate) just as quickly. I wish that people would more often follow Alasdair Gray’s maxim, “Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation”, an exhortation written for Scotland (it’s inscribed in one of the walls of the new Scottish Parliament) that can be applied in a comparable fashion to the new world of the Web.

The first thing that the Web needs to backwards-bequeath onto 20th century modes of thinking is the primacy of idiosyncratic interfaces over monolithic ones. I used to work on the phones doing outsourced customer service work for O2 (the UK mobile network), and very often someone would fax in a formal letter, following all the conventions of the venerated form, and we had no means to respond in kind - most of the time, in fact, these faxes, rendered barely legible by inkjet cartridges the company was slow to replace, were completely ignored. If you run a classical filing system, and have in-trays and out-trays, and actually have the power to respond in kind, it’s clear how to deal with a fax. But in a world where arbitrary pieces of work can be packaged up and sent down the wires to some other company the other side of the world employing people whose first language is not yours and who are only granted an extremely limited scope of responsibility and ability to communicate, a formal letter isn’t going to get far any more unless it’s aimed at the CEO.

Communication with companies never used to be so hard. We’re clearly going through an interregnum where the old mode of communication with, say, a utility company, has been shattered, yet there’s not a replacement idiom that’s worthy of the name. If you have a serious billing issue with a company such as British Gas, my experience is that it will take you at least a few months before you get anywhere at sorting it out with them. I know few people who would describe such companies as anything better than criminal. If British Gas was a person, someone would have been granted power of attorney over it by now on the basis that it was showing signs of severe synaptic breakdown. Yet we still have to deal with them to heat our flats and houses!

Take my current issue with my broadband provider, Tiscali. Reading my bank account a couple of months ago, I saw that they had re-opened the ADSL account I had at my old address and were charging me for two accounts concurrently. So I sent them a note on their ‘Contact Us’ form on their website informing them of the problem. There was a drop-down on the form where you could specify the topic, and the closest one seemed to be “Broadband” (they do phone and TV packages as well). First email I get back: this email has come through to Broadband helpdesk, whereas Billing & Admin are best placed to deal with it, so we’ve passed the email on. Why did I want to know that? I just wrote on their contact form - it’s not my fault if I picked what they think is the wrong “topic”. Second email I get back: we don’t have your postcode, account details, etc - please provide them. I was logged in to the Tiscali site when I submitted the form - they already had a context there to grab my personal info. I provide the relevant account numbers to be told that their helpdesk can’t sort the issue out and I need to telephone in. Telephone in? Why provide customer service by email if it can’t do anything?

So I reply and ask why this is, and the email is sent on to the “Finance & Admin” team who will apparently respond within 48 hours. Four days later there’s no email, so I send a quick email asking whether there’s any response, which is construed as a complaint, all types of which I’m assured Tiscali takes very seriously. Then Finance & Admin respond that they have already looked into my case and found I only had one account. I respond, copying in the part of the previous email where I gave them the two account numbers, and a miracle happens - a lady phones me up on my house number (not the mobile number I gave in my emails, but never mind) and admits that there have been two concurrent accounts, in error. So what is she going to do about it? I would have to call up the Cancellations department to get the account cancelled, and then call up Billing to get the amounts credited off and my bank account refunded. You call them, I said. You already have all the information you need to sort the matter out, and you admit that I’m owed money. So you know what to do. By getting me to call these numbers you’re getting me to do your job for you. I pointed out - it’s always necessary, and working in an outsourced call centre speaking to people from a country different from your own is tough - to her that she’d been about the most helpful person yet, and that this was the fault of the company and not her. She then did a strange thing, which was to credit £10 to my account as a “goodwill gesture”. It’ll cover what they owe me in interest, at any rate! But as a response to me refusing to phone them again (twice) and threatening to get all my money back immediately with a direct debit indemnity claim (which I promptly did), the response is to throw money at me as an apology, as if that makes it all better! It should be amazing that a company will authorise their outsourced agents to pay their customers off sooner than authorise those agents to contact other people within the company who are equipped to get particular things done.

That said, such a thing is normal, right? It shouldn’t be.

Taking Amazon as the archetypal Web company that provides, at its centre, non-Web services, can you imagine them telling you to phone them twice after you’d emailed them with a support query? It’s unthinkable. The reason is that they understand the primacy of the interface between them and their customers. It’s stayed more or less the same all the way through its history. In many ways, it is defined by its Web interface. You can imagine the logistical challenges that were involved in growing Amazon up, but you don’t ever see them. You’ll never be told you contacted the wrong person. Not to hold Amazon alone up here, but I’m making the point that the Web should change our expectations. You should be able to think of any company that operates on the Web as one big efficient and organised person.

When I worked for O2, I’d have to give people the numbers of other departments many times a day. “Can’t you just put me through?” “‘Fraid not, sorry.” “I was told this was the right department.” “I don’t know why you were told that, and I’m sorry.” The thing one would do most, working that job, was apologise. My macro’d emails from Tiscali mostly comprise apologies of various hues, and little by way of substantive help. Stop apologising, and stop handing out “goodwill gestures” that will only stop me shouting quite so much. Trust your workers, allow them to communicate freely. Hire them according to higher standards (Zappos‘ policy of paying employees $1,000 to quit after their initial training makes a ton of sense). Genuinely value them. Here’s an important one: listen to them. They’re speaking with your customers all day every day, so they know them a lot better than you do. So listen to them. Don’t do as O2 did and pay some ridiculous marketing company in London vast sums to process a completely unmethodical survey that will only point up what you want it to. Do you really think your workers are significantly dumber than you? Clue: they’re not. Don’t force them to sit and apologise for you all day just because you don’t get it.

It’s still amazing to me that automated telephone systems still don’t give you useful feedback when you call them. “Your call is important to us.” It’s a cultural cliché that would have been lanced in a handful of months in the Web world. “We are experiencing especially high volumes of calls right now.” The increased use of the sentencelet ‘Sorry for the wait there’ when getting through to an agent, even if there wasn’t in fact a wait at all. (I’ve even had that one at a supermarket checkout - I know how queues work, OK?) When I’m waiting to get through to you, provide me with some feedback that’s actually useful to me! Say where I am in the queue! I’ve only been in one such telephone queue, and that was over six years ago. Such a feature should slay, but it hasn’t! Such a small thing, so much less annoyance! Why is no-one talking about this? I may have heard discussion of the subject on the Rissington Podcast, or maybe I was imagining things? Still, the state of these telephone systems in 2008 is still one big anti-pattern.

The Web doesn’t just include the Web - it provides new synapses between that which is real, and we should look to it and re-model interactions that happen off the Web in ways developed on the Web. We’re in the early days of a nation of everyware, and the Web is gaining primacy. It’ll soon be unthinkable for a company to ask their customer to call two different numbers to sort out an issue that is the company’s mistake. It’s now only unacceptable. Utility companies should realise that, and change now.

XFN: rel-contact - I’m against it

I’d like to follow through on my anti-XFN rant with a series of, thankfully, smaller posts on the subject. I’d like to be able to offer some useful discussion as to what indeed can be done for relationship portability on the Web.

For now, though:

XFN defines rel-contact as being applicable to someone whom you “know how to get in touch with”. Since when was knowing how to get in touch with someone on the Web so rare as to need explicit declaration? Does it actually mean “will return my calls”, or “will respond, if half-heartedly and acronymically, when I IM him”? Why might we need it?

Web things that must die #2: XFN

I wanted to write about this subject last October, prior to my recent confidence boost that has enabled me to start putting my words out there properly. At the time, a hunt around the webs didn’t seem to reveal much resistance to XFN - the microformat for relationships that’s been around since 2003 or so and has hardly set the Web on fire in the interim five years (damning when you consider the growth of the social web in that time). So I wanted to write a first-principles refutation of the utility of XFN so it can finally be banished from serious discussion of the social Web and put in its proper historical context, which is the distinctive honour of being the first (though very alpha) microformat.

Then I found that since that time there’s been a considerable amount of chatter on the subject. Last month I had the fortune to attend South by Southwest Interactive way over yonder in Austin, Texas, and a highlight was the panel Building Portable Social Networks. I haven’t attended any kind of Web conference before, and found myself both surprised and delighted that, respectively, XFN was still spoken of in terms of it remaining part of the inventory of what “we” have, and that ideas were being floated that rose above predications on flawed technological specifications and seemed to be coagulating in a plane (to extend that rather tenuous metaphor slightly) where they started making real sense.

The stand-out comment on the panel was from Leslie Chicoine, who argued that in her work for (the very wonderful) Get Satisfaction she had forbidden the use of the word “friend” to describe relationships between users and instead described those relationships in terms of the actions those people shared. Chris Messina seemed to nod along, and no-one else on the panel offered a word of dissent. “Ha!”, I thought. “I’m not crazy! Now, how come I’ve never heard this spoken of anywhere else?”

During the Q&A I felt a desire to stand up to the microphone and ask the assembled what, exactly, was the case against taking XFN out the back and shooting it. I had no idea how that would go down, and though I felt a sense that the audience might be responsive to such an idea, I was worried that asserting that XFN must die to such an illustrious panel might come over as glib. Of course, I shouldn’t have had any such concern, but I’m polite to a fault.

Plus, maybe my argument wouldn’t have been quite as nuanced as a carefully considered blog post on the subject. Three weeks later. On a cold yet currently clement island in another continent.

So idly hopping and bopping around various blogs today I come across a link to Chris Messina, in the context of his work for Flock. Remembering that he seemed like a thoughtful fellow, I subscribed to his blog feed, and hark! He had written a post the day after the panel speaking of the case against XFN! I’m doubly uncrazy!

It’s an odd post, though. It initially caught my eye because he starts off with his conclusion (his emphases):

Quite simply, contact list portability can be achieved with only rel-contact and rel-me. All the rest is gravy.

The only part of XFN I would have defended in my question to the panel would have been rel-me. Joseph Smarr had already explained how it has a practical use in Plaxo. I’ve never heard anyone describe any of the other rels as if they were useful before. I’ll explain why in a bit.

Oddly, Messina then posts an image from the “XFN Creator” Wordpress admin panel, citing it (more or less) as the reason he chose Wordpress for the DiSo Project:

Doesn’t this all scream “unnecessary” to you? Why would anyone who didn’t care about microformats (and I certainly do) bother to do this? Look at all these unnecessary checkboxes and radio buttons that would be disregarded in any other context as cruft. It’s telling that the only relationship that makes any sense (rel-me) is put into words: none of the other terms could be expanded into a sentence fragment of stable and unproblematic meaning.

So I’ll put Messina’s post aside for the moment and dive into XFN itself by picking through the XFN website.

The introduction page gives much away - this is a spec that was drawn up five years ago, and hasn’t been updated since. Under a section entitled Delusions of Grandeur it is posited that XFN could usurp Friendster and become a decentralised way to express relationships on the Web. In that temporal context, it seems like a valuable mission! I remember the rise of Friendster well - how suddenly you could wander the pathways of the six degrees of separation between you and that strange guy in town who always shows up at the same things as you. This was a great new thing, yet it was owned by one company! If only *we* could have control of where our friendships are online, and how they are expressed.

So we get the XFN 1.1 relationships meta data profile. The definitions are immediately fuzzy, and give the feeling that, far from giving your relationships back into your control, they are defining them for you so they are forever out of your grasp. They don’t even do a very good job of it. On the page giving background information we get offered the cop-out friend is in many ways the most difficult value to describe. No kidding! So back on the technical specification we get, as a definition for friend:

Someone you are a friend to. A compatriot, buddy, home(boy|girl) that you know. Often symmetric.

A friend is defined as someone you are a friend to. Is there an ‘or’ relationship with the second sentence there? It’s hard to tell. Compatriot? Are we to take that literally? So, if a friend is someone who considers you a friend (if that’s the right way to construe it), this relationship is necessarily symmetric, right? Oh, it’s often symmetric. So how do I enforce that? Why is that of use in a technical specification?

For extra pedantic points, it could be pointed out that if Bob links to you with rel-friend, this definition means you are required to consider Bob your friend and mark your link up accordingly, otherwise you will be remiss and hence banished from the interwebs.

Reciprocity is one of the two major elephants in this room (there may be other cubs lurking, as yet unnamed). Back in the intro page we have the example of Adam and Brad, one of whom having described the other as a friend only to have been labelled as an acquaintance in return. Dang! That, and our referential integrity is not assured! But it doesn’t matter, because while values such as friend are defined to be symmetric, this does not require that links between blogs be of the same types. So why do we have a technical specification?

What about values that are defined as always symmetric? rel-met is the case in point here:

Someone who you have actually met in person. Symmetric.

The background page suggests that the definition of met is very straight-forward; either you have met someone in person (or IRL as we sometimes say) or you haven’t. You’d think, wouldn’t you? Here comes that second elephant: XFN is set of positive declarations a person makes about their relationships, not an objective view of them. Why is that a problem? People’s memories can differ. Some may consider a handshake a meeting. Have you met Barack Obama [or insert more local political candidate here] because he shook your hand at some hustings somewhere? Some people may view life as a giant game of Pokémon. Some prefer to let meetings slip by them, undocumented, forgotten. If Bob marks that he has “met” Alice, and Alice hasn’t reciprocated at any given time, XFN makes Alice’s elision suddenly pregnant with meaning. Furthermore, XFN doesn’t make any attempt to determine what exactly could be inferred from this, yet the founders foresaw services that would trawl the internet picking up these relationships, recontextualising them and almost actively encouraging an inference one way or another. Because if you’ve met someone, it’s symmetric, right?

Are we running out of time here? Let’s go on to a few of the lesser rels. rel-neighbor - here’s a good one. Different people may have different definitions of what ‘neighbor’ might mean to them, and they are all valid. How great is that? So can I be neighbours with the whole world? Lend me some sugar!

rel-parent, my emphasis here: Parent is the inverse of child, and refers to a person who parented you, whether biological or adoptive. Ooh, that could get sticky.

The romantic ones are a real minefield. There’s rel-muse and rel-sweetheart. That’s all very nice, but not many of us are actually Pablo Picasso, and most of us haven’t even ever lived in the 1920s.

And rel-date. What’s that? I’m British, I don’t “date”. I don’t understand American dating rituals, the unspoken expectations. Oh, here’s one of those little elephant cubs running around. The people who drew this up were all American, and although they have tried to keep terms simple and generic, you can’t ultimately escape your culture. If anything is to work as a technical specification, it needs to be applicable in all locales. What happens to the XFN definitions when you translate them into a different language? I know that if anyone from my country (and we speak English - hell, I *am* English) was invited to mark up a link as belonging to a “co-resident”, they would respond, “No! Where’s ‘flatmate’ on this thing? And one more thing - don’t they know it’s football, not soccer?!”

So why am I reading so much into this? Wasn’t XFN just an honest attempt, in the first place, to allow people to mark up their relationships in their blogroll if they wanted to? Well, yes and no. If XFN was just about people adding their relationships to links, it would have been much freer in implementation. You would have been able to add terms if you wished. That’s how human language works; we don’t tend to make up words unless we need to. If XFN was about freedom, and semantics as they’re commonly understood, you’d have been able to pick your own mot juste, and the only way the spec would constrain you is by telling you where and how you can do it. XFN wasn’t though; it stands for XHTML Friends Network. XFN was intended as a decentralised friends’ network where the founders got to choose how you can link up with other people. XFN was intended to be extensible, true, but this would be further mini-standards extending what is already a standard. The problem is that it was a standard at all. The only point of standardising the term “friend” was so that an inferred equivalence could be established between Alice declaring Bob as a friend and Bob declaring Charles as one. How dare we cheapen our friendships like that! At least, in the context of a centralised network like Friendster or Myspace, the term “friend” carries inference about what Alice’s declaration of friendship with Bob then allows her to do with him. Out in the great blue autonomous skies of XFN, there’s not even that benefit.

Then, there is the treatment of the temporal dimension. XFN declarations are present tense “by design”. Huh? Doesn’t that make it an unmanageable task to keep them up-to-date? Well, you don’t even need to bother, according to the FAQ:

You don’t need to worry about updating your old blog posts’ XFN info at all. In fact, just like the example of where you used to live, [...] your old blog posts simply reflect your relationships at the time that you wrote those posts.

Surprisingly, they ignored that most blogging engines tie a blogroll to the entire blog, not an individual post, so this is no practical way to date relationships. Even if they were, XFN gives you (and the machines that are supposed to read this stuff) no format to identify the date on the page that the declared relationship statuses were current to. Again, XFN is either not sufficiently thought through, or there is an ostensibly necessary part left out on purpose for the sake of “simplicity”, for no reason other than that the self-contradictions inherent in XFN would become all the clearer.

(I realise that this quote only mentions XFN in blog posts rather than blogrolls, but XFN has mainly been used in blogrolls because that’s where adding semantics makes sense. People may realise that when a blogger marks a link up with added semantics they applied at the time of writing, but this is not a sign of XFN’s intrinsic elegance, more that it’s a rare point where XFN happens to align with how humans naturally use language.)

The last comment I’ll make about the site itself is over the following strange paragraph:

And we do realize that by creating XFN and the mechanisms it uses (XMDP), we have opened a Pandora’s box, and have made it easier for those that would create and propagate negative relationships. We can only hope that our positive creation wins out over any such negative creations.

Why do the founders imagine all this? Why is this necessarily a positive creation?

There is an essential consideration I need to introduce at this point. I’m going to call it the Canonical Online Me. XFN was introduced specifically for bloggers, and not because blogging necessarily has such a privileged position: it’s because it was considered to be a truism at the time by the founders and the folk who surrounded them that one’s blog was one’s Canonical Online Me. It was only because of this assumption that XFN makes any vague sense at all. We can probably assume that there wasn’t an attribute value on the blogs of the founders that wasn’t intended. Those intentions become weaker as the Web radiates from them. Pretty soon (and at the time of writing I’m no exception) people are using crudely hacked versions of others’ templates to write their blogs, and the meanings that can be inferred from mark-up, if they are context-dependent (and relationship declarations, unlike geographical locations or contact information, are always context-dependent), become proportionately weaker representations of the relationships they are supposed to represent. By the time we get to consideration of the tens of millions of Myspace pages, where users do not even have any choice over the structure of their page, and make relationship declarations wholly based on the context they are made in, we can see that XFN has become a completely inappropriate means of expressing relationships with any fidelity.

Yet XFN has often been spoken of, in the content of the data portability debate, as the one ring to rule them all. This is impossible, because XFN isn’t even apt for expressing relationships in one location that isn’t your Canonical Online Me. With the advent of Twitter, there’d likely be truth in the suggestion that many Web folks would consider the aggregation of their tweets as a better quotidian representation of their Canonical Online Me then even their blogs. In other words, the locus of our online selves is becoming more and more distributed. Furthermore, the useful common thread is what we do, not the declarations that we make in different contexts. As web apps store more of the information about what we do, and makes that information available through APIs (with permissioned access), having a second layer of declarations, over and above that which can be inferred from what we are observed to do in different contexts, becomes less and less viable or necessary.

Messina’s follow-up post to the one where he makes his case against XFN is a more useful discussion, starting as it does with a concern for real human needs that users have on sites that exist now. However, he also expresses an affinity for a very acidic post by Adam Greenfield in December 2007. Why doesn’t he then conclude that any mention of XFN should be ditched? Greenfield’s diatribe is mostly on point, and all of the quotes that Messina bullet-points in his post align with what I have been arguing here. While Greenfield’s argument about the uselessness of defining terms when you don’t allow the use of the opposite - often reduced to the argument that we should be able to express enemy relations as well as friend relations - is a bit of a faux ami, as the problem isn’t the linguistic impotence of the terms used but, more basically, the artificial limitations on choice of words, he makes a very resonant point about the most important facts of our relationships not being made explicit for the sake of social comfort and coherence. XFN is an unnecessary layer. Why is the fact of linking someone within a particular designated context, qualified by other observable facts from elsewhere on the Web, not meaningful in of itself? In real life, we invite people to parties, and then other people may infer that we are friends with those people we have invited. If we had to qualify those invitations with explicit word on whether, in individual cases, they constituted an act of friendship, we’d just be creating discord for ourselves. That’s why we don’t do it.

XFN should be ditched. We shouldn’t mention it aside from the context of the emergence of microformats. I don’t want to have to go to any serious Web conference and find people still speaking about it seriously. rel-me has uses, and is unproblematic because the relationship I have with myself doesn’t change according to context (well, I’ll leave that metaphysical discussion for another time), and besides it has nothing to do with a creation of a centralised network by the back door. rel-contact: eh, maybe. Use it if you like to. It’s just a rel attribute value! But we must slay the sacred cow of XFN. Eric Meyer, one of the three founders, wrote into the comments of Messina’s first post that XFN was just meant for paving the cowpaths of people expressing their human relationships via hyperlinks. That’s not a problematic intention, but the spec was flawed then and, with what we’ve learnt from the social web in the meantime, is ridiculous now. It shouldn’t be allowed to stifle sensible discussion on these serious issues any further.

Stuff White People Like #94: Shameless Buy-Outs

Ugh.

One regular post a week intertwined with blog posts hawking Target products?

Watch this one sink like a stone.

Update: oh wait, I just noticed the date today! How silly of me.

Web things that must die #1: Password Strength Meters

So you’re signing up to BrandNuThingOnTheBlockr, and since it hasn’t yet implemented OpenID it asks you to create a password. You choose horatio, because why should you deviate from the password you’ve used for every other site? OK, maybe you should deviate slightly. You type it in and, huh, look at that, it tells you Password Strength: Weak. You go back and, um, stick a zero in there. h0ratio. No difference. h0ratio1? Oh, well that’s changed it to Password Strength: Medium. Great, now at least the thing isn’t calling me a dunce, and I think I might remember this one. Great, I’ve found my password.

Password Strength meters are a little AJAX widget that people started hooking up because they could. They don’t provide any information. They’re about as useful as the colour-coded alerts issues by the Department of Homeland Security. Sites should give examples of bad passwords, and secure ones, if they really care to. All a Password Strength meter does is tests how far one of your users can be bothered to travel down the colours of the traffic light without getting bored.

Coming to a gauge of a password’s strength through a crude measurement of the ratio of alphabetic, numeric and other characters is too crude to be useful. They’ll only stave the more brute-force type attacks. Sign up to Facebook, and when it asks you to make up a really super-duper secure password type in pa$$w0rd. A cute little asynchronous request will go off and then come back… oh, Password Strength: Strong! Go right ahead with your military-strength password, little chickadee.

From the “oh noes” department

From the Guardian today:

The report shows that teenagers are digitally promiscuous, switching allegiance from sites as fashions change. One 16-year-old girl told the IPPR: “First it was like everyone was on MSN, then everyone sort of has Bebo, now everyone who had MSN moved on to Facebook, so it’s just what everyone’s doing at that time.”

Kids these days! Hell in a handcart! Etc!

The little things

The first difference you notice between the buses in Austin, Texas and Glasgow, Scotland (I recently returned from the former and live in the latter) is that the drivers in Austin don’t drive along cocooned in reinforced plexiglass. They politely correct you when you put your day pass through the slot the wrong way, and smile at you with such earnestness that you’d believe they’d be perfectly happy shaking your hand were their own hands not primed on the steering wheel ready to help smoothly accelerate you away to your destination.

Or possibly I’m imagining things, and I wasn’t in Austin long enough for my rose tints to tarnish at all. It definitely made a change from the grunts one receives from the average Glasgow driver, the nonchalance when they halt the bus you’re travelling on at a stop where they’re to change with another driver and just walk off without saying a word to anyone. I was told that in Austin all the crazies sit at the front of the bus; in Glasgow, they sit on the back seat, cycle through their ringtone MP3s (the songs all seemingly voiced by very sugared-up chipmunks), and talk in unhushed tones about stabbing people. I’m not joking, or hyperbolicising either. You can see why the plexiglass is required.

None of those differences, though, are the fault of the bus companies in question. Ironically, I believe that FirstBus Glasgow and Capital Metro of Austin are both ultimately controlled by First Group of Aberdeen (bizarrely, large swathes of the globes public transport infrastructure is now owned and run by two Scottish families with curious politics). I could, indeed, wax lyrical about the stupidity of FirstBus Glasgow’s introduction of a two-trip £2 fare which required the buyer, once the ticket had been printed off by the machine, to then pass the ticket through a slot in the plexiglass to the driver who, after fiddling for a blue highlighter pen from his shirt pocket, puts the ticket against the uneven nodules of the steering wheel, then draws the best line he can harriedly muster down the middle before handing it back. I could then extend that rant by telling how that fare (a nice round £2 for your daily commute) became so popular that a few months later FirstBus put it up to £2.50, 10p more than the cost of two singles. But this would be fun I’ll save for another day.

Nope, the one detail that I noticed, beyond the basic matter of cost (at the current US-UK exchange rate it is five times cheaper to take the bus in Austin than Glasgow), was that a day ticket is just that, a day ticket. Buy one at 10pm one evening and it doesn’t expire at midnight, or 1am, or whatever the witching hour happens to be arbitrarily set at in your town - you’re good until 10pm the next evening. Little ideas like that will increase the numbers of people using the bus to a greater degree than, say, a 20% drop in fares. Little ideas like that make you feel respected as a user and a citizen, rather than ripped off to some greater or lesser degree.

Greetings from the laundromat

I write this from a laundromat in Austin, Texas - still here after attending all the SXSW activities. Cultural disconnect is starting to kick in - I feel like a fly on the wall of a 70s B-movie (one where the characters enjoy omnipresent free wi-fi with portable computers that aren’t made of wrought iron). This place, though, closes at 2am. The sign on the door, “Last Wash: 1am”, is almost apologetic. This I can get behind!

More reflection on the Austin craziness to follow.