Thanksgiving, Technology, and Just Picking a Fight

My logs tell me that nobody took this 2011 plea seriously. I blame the typeface.

Last year on Thanksgiving I made the case for ignoring social media for the day. I felt strongly enough that for the new year I even wrote about some social media behavior goals for the coming year that we could all try to follow.

The year before I cautioned you that you might get wrapped up in helping your parents (or elders in general) with tech support issues (like upgrading browsers, surfing tips to save a turkey that has caught fire, and so on).

Those are both a far cry from the prior two years where I wrote about how nifty social media could be for the holidays. Oh the heady days of 2009, with so much opportunity to come from so much interconnectedness.

In the span of four short years I had mostly decided that social media can make for an awkward and unpleasant holiday if not used properly (or, in some cases, if used at all).

Let's Try Something Different

Maybe we should try to have ourselves a completely disconnected, proper face-to-face meal. I know this is difficult, but this time around I'm supplying talking points!

Politics!

The President of the United States of America has decided we should talk about Obamacare. He says that, chances are, folks at the dinner table probably look to you, mostly as a voice of reason, on the subject. And so his team has put together a brand new site just for the holidays: It's time to have the talk.

I should note, this site was most likely not done by the same folks who built HealthCare.gov. I do, however, think they were vying for a front-page spot over at TC;DR (Tab Closed; Didn't Read):

And let's not even get started on the print styles.

It's impossible to make jokes about political subjects without people assuming it's a political statement. On balance, I also offer a link for the other side of the table: Healthcare.gov and the Gulf Between Planning and Reality. The advantage here is that each side will actually be talking about different things. How is that not hilarious?

Science!

Maybe you can pose a question to the table without letting on that you know the answer? Haven't you ever wondered how many batteries it might take to cook a turkey? I haven't. But Wired thinks it's a worthy topic: How Many Batteries Would It Take to Cook a Turkey?

I'll spare you the effort of clicking the link. Just do this quick math for a 10-pound bird starting at room temperature:

Solve for black bar.

Language!

If you have any pedants in your family, perhaps you'd like to quiz them on the history of the word turkey. Dictionary.com has a digestible (and according to the comments, mostly accurate) post that covers it: The Mistake that Gave Turkey (the Bird) the Same Name as Turkey (the Nation)

Or Just Suck It Up and Be Tech Support

If all goes wrong or you just can't get people to bite on any debate, then you can always fall back to the safety net of tech support. Heck, you might even end up like this guy: In Which I Fix My Girlfriend’s Grandparents’ WiFi and Am Hailed as a Conquering Hero.

Now go relax. Read The Oatmeal's comic on Thanksgiving as a Kid vs. as an Adult. Prepare for where you'll sit using College Humor's Thanksgiving Seating Chart (which ties in nicely with The 8 Relatives You'll Talk to at Thanksgiving). Take this Map of Thanksgiving Dinner to plan your assault on Crudités Dam. Maybe you can debate the merits of the turkey that, like an &lquo;elected” prom king or queen, will be the National Thanksgiving Turkey as designated by the White House:

Confused. Is the White House asking us to choose which turkey, by exclusion, dies? http://t.co/aWNmLnLdF2 #TeamCaramel #TeamPopcorn

— Adrian Roselli (@aardrian) November 26, 2013

While they are both pardoned, they'll still die an early death.

In short, disregard your family and stare at your computer/phone all day, just like the moody teen we all truly are.

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Backing Up Your Social Media

Social media outlets are practically a dime a dozen. Excluding ones that are pretty stable right now (Twitter, Facebook, etc.), most of them will either fail or get bought. The problem is that your data, your content, typically dies when they do.

As an individual you might not care too much if one of the niche services fails. As a business who relies on social media, however, you should care.

Every post to Twitter or Facebook or Blogger or (insert whatever services you use here) represents effort spent to promote your brand. That effort is probably from paid staff (because nobody lets interns have the keys to their global brand, right?) and represents some cost as a result. Cultivated Facebook campaigns, Twitter conversations, Pinterest boards, all represent a combination of your effort and community participation.

When a service goes away, so does the money and effort you spent to cultivate it. So does the community feedback that demonstrates to others that yours is a good brand. So does any SEO benefit it may be giving you. So does the content you created.

I regularly ask social media practitioners how they back up all the data they post to these services and it almost always results in blank stares.

Most organizations make some effort to back up their marketing or sales materials, in addition to their intellectual property, but for some reason social media is left out in the cold.

I'll cover some examples of what I have done and do, along with some tips on how you can plan for your own back-up.

Twitter

Twitter allows you to produce an archive of all your tweets whenever you request it. What you will get is a link to download a ZIP archive which contains a completely stand-alone web site that allows you to see all your tweets. You can use this site right from your computer with no internet connection.

I suggest taking it one step further and creating a folder on your public web site so you and all your team (and even the general public if you want to share the address) can access all of your tweets at any time from any where. This method will also allow you to search all your tweets instead of being limited by Twitter's own date restrictions on searches. For example, I have my Twitter archive at AdrianRoselli.com/Tweets.

Tweets in the archive contain the full content of the original tweet, but do not contain any of the replies to, favorites of, or re-tweets of your tweets. They do, however, link you directly to the tweet at Twitter.com so you can get all that information.

As part of your job as a social media manager I recommend you set up a calendar reminder for the first of each month (or whenever works for you) to download and store your Twitter archive.

Facebook

Facebook also allows you to create an archive of everything you have posted, including photos, videos, wall posts, messages and chat conversations along with the names of your Facebook friends. It does not include comments you've left on the posts of others. An expanded archive option also provides historic information such as your IP addresses for when you have logged into Facebook.

As such, I recommend against posting your entire Facebook archive to your web site as it will probably contain information that you have opted to not share with the general public (especially since it can also contain other people's private information).

I should note that I am talking about a personal profile here, not a business profile. So far I have been unable to find information on how to archive a business/organization profile. Suggestions are welcome.

[Your Blog Here]

Quite a lot of social media involves maintaining a blog. This blog may exist on any one of many platforms, including one you've built yourself. For this example, I am talking about a blog that you host elsewhere, probably for free, such as an option from Wordpress or Blogger, among others.

In an ideal scenario you will have secured a blog sub-domain, such as blog.adrianroselli.com. This is the first step to having some portability and control should your blogging platform go away. It won't be so easy to get adrianroselli.blogger.com if Blogger goes away, mostly because I don't own (and likely would be unable to purchase) the domain blogger.com.

If your blog platform does go away and you have some advance notice, you have some options to get your content before it is lost. Some platforms will offer you a way to get all your content out and other platforms may offer you a way to import that content. If your failing platform doesn't offer an archive, you can always spider the content using a tool like HTTrack.

Ideally you'll want to recreate your content on your new blogging platform, so make sure you also recreate the same page addresses (most of the blogging tools allow you to create a custom page address, though it will be a manual process). In this scenario, any inbound links won't be broken. For those cases where you cannot replicate the page addresses, explore options to create custom redirections with your new blog provider or, if it's on your own server, through server-level mappings.

Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, and Other Services

I have used many services over the years, in particular services targeted at image sharing. I have used Brightkite, Plyce, Picplz, Posterous and am now on to Tumblr. With the exception of Tumblr (so far), they have all gone away. I haven't lost my images, however. In the case of Brightkite they made everything available for download for quite some time and in a structured format. Picplz offered the same, but not until many users raised a stink and followed its founder to his next gig to push their point. Posterous made its site available as a static HTML archive.

Had these sites not made the content available, however, I still had a plan to get everything out. I simply spidered my profile page for each site using a tool (HTTrack again) that converts it all to static HTML. In short, I captured every page and every image to a format that I could simply post on my own site or view on my local computer (as I did with Picplz and Posterous). While I cannot replicate the old addresses (similar to the case with a blog domain), I can at least make my content available should I want to reference it again.

When Pinterest or Instagram or Tumblr or insert-service-here announces it is going away, I will simply fire up the same tool and begin my archive process. Each service may very well offer a tool to do this, but I'd rather make sure I have it just in case they don't. In addition, sometimes it's more work to process a stack of JSON files than it is to simply spider the site and post it somewhere on your own site.

Related Bits

• Startups should bend over backwards to let users take their data after they shut down [Updated], June 3, 2012 at The Next Web.


• Proposed Standards for the Care and Feeding of User Generated Content, June 25, 2012 at Zeldman.com


• You Get What You Pay For, December 17, 2010 by me.

Too lazy to read Terms of Service. Just going to upload videos to Vine & Instagram at the same time and let them fight about who owns them.

— Adrian Roselli (@aardrian) June 20, 2013

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Facebook Graph Search and Lessons from Timeline

Facebook has announced its new Graph Search feature which allows logged in users to search for information across their friend profiles. Facebook even made it a point to set up a page about privacy in the graph search to try to head off concerns from users.

In this case, Facebook may over-estimate its users. Do you remember when Facebook rolled out its timeline to everyone? Do you remember all the cries of privacy violations in the form of exposed private messages and old relationship details? I do. I recall that it all boiled down to user's misunderstanding the feature and forgetting that they had publicly written and posted some things that might not look so good to them now.

I remember these headlines:

• Facebook resurrects old posts on Timeline, panic ensues, September 24, 2012 at CNet.


• Facebook May Be Publishing Your Old Private Messages On Your Timeline Or You May Just Have Been Lamer Than You Remember, September 24, 2012 at Gawker.


• Despite statements from Facebook to the contrary, users are still claiming to see private messages in their Timelines, September 24, 2012 at The Next Web.


• Update: Facebook Confirms No Private Messages Appearing On Timeline. They’re Old Wall Posts, September 24th, 2012 at TechCrunch.


• Facebook Users Say Private Messages Appear Publicly [UPDATED], September 24th, 2012 at Mashable.


• Are private Facebook messages becoming public? September 24th, 2012 at CNN.


• Facebook Users Convinced Years-Old Private Messages Are Being Published On Timelines. (But They're Wrong.) September 24th, 2012 at Forbes.


• Facebook on Privacy Scare: Nothing to See Here, September 24th, 2012 at The Wall Street Journal.


• Facebook privacy fears: Timeline trash or French farce? September 25, 2012 at Computerworld.

Let's see if the Facebook user base on the whole can remember a lesson not even four months old — lock down the stuff you don't want people to see in a search.

Complained about your co-worker? Remove it. Pictures of your former significant other? Hide them. Bragging about that thing you didn't win? Purge it. Denying the holocaust? Go to hell.

If you aren't sure how to do that, Google can probably point you to a pile of tutorials.

Update, Jnuary 23, 2013

• Actual Facebook Graph Searches Don't worry, we'll all be used to this in a few weeks' time.


• How To Use 'Graph Search' To Facebook-Stalk Mark Zuckerberg And His Employees

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Social Media Goals for the New Year

Every year I think people will start to get the hang of social media. After all, it's really not much different from what we've done as a society forever, just more rapid-fire. Every year I am proven wrong.

Perhaps we need to consider better behavior on social media as a New Year Resolution for it to take effect. So here's my attempt at guidance.

Background

When I got to college, few people had heard of email and even fewer used it. Usenet was a foreign concept to nearly everyone I knew in meat-space, but with so much traffic I knew it wasn't hurting for users. Before there was a web, I understood the notion of choosing my words carefully. Archives of all my posts would surely stick around for many years, I thought, and so they have. I can still find stuff I posted back in 1992.

As the web happened and it became easier for anyone to share anything, and as email flourished (back when we had time to read it instead of filtering it), I adopted a variation on an old idea of how to behave in email — never write something in an email you wouldn't want to be posted on the front page of The New York Times. Nowadays maybe it's a tweet on the front page of the Fail Blog.

I think we should all accept that with the ubiquity of cell phone cameras, let alone all the surveillance cameras, web cams, and soon airborne drones made by 12-year-olds, everything you do runs the risk of being scrutinized and posted online for the world to judge. By posting your own contributions to social media sites, you (and I) continue to drive it.

When Facebook's co-founder's sister (who is also Facebook's former marketing director) posted a photo to Facebook and was surprised to see it tweeted by someone she didn't know, claiming it as an invasion of privacy, the collective web laughed at her. She became the holiday poster child for how confusing Facebook's privacy settings are to understand and implement — and she's the sister of the face of the company.

It also makes her follow-up tweet all the more laughable, partly because I doubt she asked the permission of her family members before posting their photos online:

Digital etiquette: always ask permission before posting a friend's photo publicly. It's not about privacy settings, it's about human decency

— Randi Zuckerberg (@randizuckerberg) December 26, 2012

What You Can Do as a Social Media User

Most importantly, don't think that just because you have locked down your social media accounts, no one that you haven't authorized can see it. An errant retweet or a misunderstood setting are all it takes to make that notion come crashing down. Just look at Zuckerberg's sister — she clearly doesn't understand either of the platforms she uses despite what she thinks.

I have my own set of rules I follow and I try to lead by example. That doesn't mean all mine are right, but I had to start somewhere.

• For the most part, I do not post photos of people without their permission. Exceptions include crowd shots.


• I don't post photos of children, though when there are exceptions I do not post names with the photos.


• When I do take general place or crowd photos, I avoid posting ones with the faces of children visible.


• I avoid posting photos with faces visible when I am making fun of a particular fashion choice.


• I don't create venues for homes.


• I don't post photos with street addresses visible.


• I don't embed GPS information when tweeting from someone's home.


• I don't retweet tweets from a protected account (unless I have permission or it's a particularly good insult to me).


• I don't tag people in photos without permission or prior experience that it will be fine.


• I don't tag friends in places when I am out, which is also why I don't auto-tweet my Foursquare check-ins (on top of the fact that it's annoying).


• I don't include information about friend or family schedules in posts, especially when they are travelling.


• I do not sync my phone with any cloud service or allow any auto-posting. I'd rather pick and choose than run the risk of the wrong image making it to the wrong place.

It's worth noting that I have violated all of these at least once, sometimes by accident and sometimes by stupidity. In a handful of cases I have been rightly chastised.

When it comes to kids (anyone's kids), I work to make sure I don't put enough information out there that a motivated offender couldn't just drive up to a kid on the street and spout enough information to make the kid think it's safe to get into his car. I wish more parents on Facebook made that effort.

What You Should Do as a Person in the World

Accept that everyone has a camera and can post photos and videos of you at any time. Accept that you may appear unintentionally in crowd photos that appear on everything from locked-down Facebook pages to the local news to band fliers and so on.

When you have a friend who keeps posting photos of you that you don't want posted, you should confront him or her. At some point you'll have to decide between how cautious or uptight you want to be versus how much that friendship means to you.

If you are a Facebook user, you can control whether or not you get tagged in photos (as a link to your Facebook page only) and you can even un-tag yourself.

Either behave or own your pile of crazy.

Related

• Facebook security hole allows anyone to view private New Year's Midnight Delivery messages and photos, December 30, 2012.


• How much data did Facebook have on one man? 1,200 pages of data in 57 categories, December 28, 2012


• Zuckerberg's Etiquette Sham, December 28, 2012.


• Mark Zuckerberg's Sister Complains Of Facebook Privacy Breach, December 26, 2012.


• Yes, Randi Zuckerberg, Please Lecture Us About 'Human Decency', December 26, 2012

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Ignoring Social Media This Thanksgiving

Past Thanksgivings

Three years ago I wrote a post describing how I used social media during my 2008 Thanksgiving dinner (mostly to keep my guests pacified in my tiny house while I considered cooking a turkey with a pencil torch). To my family it was novel to watch people across the country post their meals, perhaps in stark contrast to what I was feeding them.

I posted again about Thanksgiving and social media in 2010, this time discussing how people were getting help with their holiday plans online and how social media was far noisier than it was two years prior.

Last year when I posted about Thanksgiving, I included the #Turkey911 hashtag and talked about what a terrible idea it would be to answer the call from the web to upgrade your parents' browser. I also noticed even more noise on all the social media outlets, including from my own friends who had derided me for my food photos from prior years.

This Thanksgiving

This year as Thanksgiving approaches I realize there are far more people using social media than there were back in 2008 when I first started posting my holiday photos.

In 2008, Twitter had about 6.0 million users. As of March 2012, Twitter is up to 140 million users. In 2008, Facebook was at 100 million users and as of last month has now hit 1 billion users worldwide. Other social media outlets have come and gone, but these two demonstrate the overall penetration social media has into everybody's life.

That also helps explain why there is so much more noise online. Whereas in 2008 many users were sharing with smaller audiences, not as vocal, and spam and advertising wasn't a big deal, in 2012 it feels like everyone wants to share everything while I am also constantly being assaulted with social spam.

Two pieces I read in the last few days stood out to me as I was thinking about the coming holiday and social media.

The Quiet Ones

Over at The New York Times is an opinion piece titled, "The Quiet Ones." The author tells a story of riding in Amtrak's Quiet Car, where passengers are expected to be as close to silent as possible. In it the author makes the following observation:

In a 2006 interview David Foster Wallace said, it seems significant that we don't want things to be quiet, ever, anymore. Stores and restaurants have their ubiquitous Muzak or satellite radio; bars have anywhere between 1 and 17 TVs blaring Fox and soccer; ads and 30-second news cycles play on screens in cabs, elevators and restrooms. […]

People are louder, too. They complain at length and in detail about their divorces or gallbladders a foot away from you in restaurants. […] People practice rap lyrics on the bus or the subway, barking doggerel along with their iPods as though they were alone in the shower.

Mobile Vs. Social

Yesterday I read a blog post, "Mobile Vs. Social." In it the author discusses how people essentially need this constant input and interaction, that we are giving up or stifling real human interaction for the false human interaction of social media (or even SMS or email). He suggests just looking around in public to see it in action:

Just look at parties, lunches or any other grown-up interaction scene you can think of. People talk for a while, and then they just can't help themselves looking at their phones. Just for a second. Just needing that latest "fix."

My Point

I have a suggestion for all of us for Thanksgiving this year, one I will try to follow myself (which won't be easy) — turn off your phone.

I have no illusions about how trying Thanksgiving can be for many and how compelling it will be to escape to the cultivated social constructs in your phone. This tweet may sum it up nicely:

Always use "Thanksgiving" on first reference. "National Day of Family Hate" is fine for subsequent.

— Fake AP Stylebook (@FakeAPStylebook) November 21, 2012

So let's give it a shot. Consider it good practice for the coming bandwidth / electricity / zombie apocalypse.

If you need a little convincing, see if this TED video from Sherry Turkle ("Connected, but Alone?") does it:

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Social Media Profile versus a Web Site

This image gleefully stolen from The Page That No One Will Ever See. Now it may be a seen page.

Yesterday an eye-catching headline popped up in my Twitter feed: 6 Reasons Facebook and Twitter Are More Important Than a Website (which is a different message than the author's "infographic" that suggests users find Facebook more useful than a brand's site). I have been down this road more than once, but I thought I would follow the link and see what those six well-thought, sound business reasons must be.

1. Websites Require Constant Maintenance

Given the immediate nature of social media, a traditional marketing web site needs far less maintenance than trying to engage followers. I argue that many users expect content on a web site to be relatively constant, updated as appropriate and, in the case of some web applications, automated to a degree.

A Twitter account that pushes out content every few days, however, might be considered slow. One that pushes content every few minutes can be an assault to a follower's timeline. One that doesn't respond to tweets from users might be considered disrespectful.

Contrast this with a Facebook page that has some traction and has many fans. When those fans post to the brand's wall or comment on posts from the brand, there is an expectation of a quick response from users, which requires constant vigilance to keep users from feeling like they are being ignored.

The author also claims web sites can cost between $50 and $5,000 dollars to build, but makes no effort to identify how much a social media resource costs to maintain profiles and fresh content across multiple social media outlets. This assumes a business isn't so clueless that interns are considered good resources for representing the entire brand on social media.

Sticking with the cost argument, I think the author hasn't been paying attention to recent Facebook changes in the form of promoted content.

2. Social Media Is Scalable

The author seemingly assumes most web sites are hosted on servers under desks. Granted, the real point is that a web site may not be able to handle traffic from a random viral traffic spike.

This may very well be true for some sites, but given how many sites are hosted on, and get resources from, content delivery networks and national hosts, the need to scale can often be handled with a phone call to a hosting provider to kick the site into the next hosting bracket. One cannot call Twitter or Facebook when it has been overloaded and demand it scales up for your traffic.

Interestingly, pages on my own site have suffered far more downtime as a result of embedded content from Twitter and Facebook. When they suffer the inevitable and random "fail whale," their poorly-written scripts can take down my entire page. At least when social media platforms are on the fritz, I can still direct users to the rest of my web site for information.

3. Websites Require Specialized Knowledge

I am actually a little sad this point isn't true. With the preponderance of WYSIWYG editors, export-to-web features, free platforms like Blogger or Wordpress with pre-built themes, it's far too easy for someone without specialized knowledge to get his or her message out there. And this is a good thing.

The author does make a point that to have a truly unique site with modern standards such as HTML5 and CSS will require someone with skill to do it for you. Oddly, the alternative he proposes is to use exactly the same Facebook or Twitter layout as everyone else. And I can personally guarantee it won't be built to modern standards such as HTML5 and CSS.

To be fair to social media, almost no web site claiming to be built to modern standards actually is either.

4. Your Customers Are Already on Social Media

Really? He knows that? He has run a series of surveys, done market analysis, engaged my users directly and determined they are on social media? And he found more than 15% of US adult web users are on Twitter?

For my target audience, he is right. Although that's by accident. I can also rattle off plenty of businesses (including my own clients) who don't know that for sure, haven't done the research, aren't in a position to, and can even guess that it's still not true.

The assumption in the article is that users are already inundated with web addresses. He argues that somehow a link to a Facebook page can percolate above all that, that even a Twitter hashtag will make sense to more users. The logic is that users are already on social media, so they'll just go right to your message.

Nevermind that your target users may be in a demographic that doesn't use social media. Or your business may not be a fit for social media. Or that there are still more web users than Facebook users (even if you include the thousands and thousands of fake accounts). Or that there is already enough noise in my Twitter and Facebook feed I don't see stuff from my real-life friends.

5. You’ll Be Easier to Find

Using SEO as a dirty word (well, it is), the author suggests that it's hard to find things on the web. He says social media platforms have their own search already, so if you just focus there you will be found much more readily.

To make an anecdotal argument here, which is abnormal for me but curiously appropriate in this case, I can tell you that if I want to find a brand or person on Twitter or Facebook, I go to Google first. Google provides a far better search for me than I can get in Facebook's or Twitter's results, partly because both Twitter and Facebook are too busy trying to pitch me or assume I know their lingo. If I'm not logged into either one, it's an overall useless experiment. If I am trying to research a product or service, then Facebook and Twitter are the last places I'll go.

Given how readily Twitter suggests people or brands I should follow that are either promoted, of no interest, or that I have already unfollowed, I would not rely on the discovery method of gaining new followers. Given how Facebook has changed its model to require you to pay to get your message in front of fans and their friends (promoted posts), I wouldn't rely on discovery there, either.

If you dismiss the value of a search engine to help users find you and rely solely on the search and discovery features of social media, then you are painting yourself into a corner. Twitter use won't generate enough content over time for all your targeted phrases (unless you constantly assault followers) and neither will Facebook, because they both push older content down, out of the view of search engines.

6. Facebook and Twitter Facilitate Content Creation

Yes, they do.

When I am particularly angry at a brand, I go right to their Facebook wall and post my issue. I also approach them on Twitter. In some cases, I hijack their hashtags. I create all sorts of content about how much that brand has disappointed me. The brand may respond and make it right, but my words are out there, getting indexed by Google, being associated with the brand.

But that's not what the author means, he means (his words) content can often be generated through the simple click of an upload button. Regardless of the fact that you need someone to take that photo, craft that caption, be available to respond if people engage with it, and even hope that anyone cares, he's telling us that content is free and writes itself.

Which it doesn't. Otherwise I wouldn't have had such a good turnout (and feedback) at my content strategy session at the local WordCamp.

Wrap-up

Only in the closing paragraph does the author suggest that maybe you might still need a web site and maybe you might benefit from Twitter and Facebook. So I have to ask myself, why didn't he lead with this? Why are the hollow arguments told strictly from the perspective of spending you effort on Facebook and Twitter to the detriment of your site? Because he's a social media services peddler.

If the author truly believed that Twitter and Facebook are more important to have than a web site, then I look forward to when he demonstrates that belief by shutting down his site and moving it all to Facebook and Twitter. Until then, it's a poorly-argued sales pitch.

Related

These are posts I've written that go into more detail on some of the points I raise above. Traditional web sites easily have as many issues and more, but that's not what this discussion is about.

• You Get What You Pay For


• Picplz Shutting Down, as Free Services Often Do


• Use Twitter's New Embedded Timeline without Slowing Your Page


• Reviewing Twitter's New Profile Header


• Facebook, HTML5, and Mis-Reporting


• Followers, Likes and +1s as Meaningless as Hits


• Facebook Likes…Your Data


• Twitter As Passive-Aggressive Enabler


• Twitter's t.co Continues UX Failure of Link Shorteners


• Lots of Twitter Followers Guarantees... Nothing

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Reviewing Twitter's New Profile Header

Today Twitter announced that it has added header images to profiles, similar to what Facebook and Google+ have done. In addition, Twitter has updated its apps for iOS and Android devices to use those header images. Twitter explains why it has added this feature:

Starting today you can make your presence on Twitter more meaningful with new Twitter profiles. […] You can upload your header photo, which appears above your Tweets, to express yourself instantly, anywhere.

By adding a header image, I am both making Twitter more meaningful and expressing myself. Even though I have used Twitter for 15,000+ of my own tweets so far to express myself, and follow a group of folks that bring meaning to my Twitter stream. In case it's not obvious, I am suspect of the reasoning. It feels to me more like Twitter trying to make itself more like Facebook (and Google+ and App.net), especially with the promotion of any photos from my timeline into their own prominent photo bar on mobile displays.

Twitter offers only two parameters for providing the header image — it should not be over 5MB and it should be 1,252 × 626 pixels. I can only assume this over-sized behemoth is Twitter's way of accounting for high resolution displays. And so I dutifully made and uploaded my header image.

Desktop Browser

Screen capture of new Twitter header on desktop browser.

I am wholly unimpressed with the desktop browser experience. Not only has the image been scaled down (which I expected), it was scaled down to 542 pixels in width, or by a factor of 2.31. That's not a nice even number and it relies on browser image scaling (which isn't even bicubic in older browsers) to present the image.

In addition, my name and description are lost in the image, which means I'd have to build a space into my file just to account for the text. On top of all this, the link to my web site doesn't stand out in any way as a hyperlink. It is not obvious that it is clickable, and that's ultimately the thing I want people to click if they visit my profile page.

Forgetting how the image disrupts copy laid on top of it, the size of the image header leaves (at the window size I was using) only 3 tweets visible in my timeline. While at this same window size I only had 5 tweets visible with the old header, I'd rather have those two tweets back given the issues I have with the new header.

Compare this with my profile page before the header:

Screen capture of old Twitter header on desktop browser.

Mobile Browser

Screen capture of new Twitter header on mobile browser (Chrome on Nexus 7).

The mobile browser experience isn't much better. The text is nearly illegible, but at least the hyperlink to my site appears to be bold, if smaller. Only three tweets are visible and then there is a bar with images I have posted. The worst part is that only one of those is mine (the other five are retweets), they are from July, and the thumbnail, when tapped, loads the wrong image. I don't like my tweets being truncated for this low-value content.

Without the header image, however, the experience is almost no better. I still lose the same amount of space to a header image I have not defined. The only plus is that the text is now legible. See the before photo:

Screen capture of old Twitter header on mobile browser (Chrome on Nexus 7).

Mobile App

Screen capture of updated Twitter app with new header (Nexus 7).

Everything I said about the mobile browser experience with and without the new Twitter header applies.

Except this is even worse.

You can't see my description, location or web site address in my profile without swiping to a second panel. Perhaps in some misguided attempt to make the text more legible by laying down a black overlay on the background header image, Twitter has now made my biographical information and link to my site totally invisible without some user interaction.

Not providing a header image does not save me from this mistake. As you can see below, custom image or not, my information is still a screen away.

Screen capture of updated Twitter app without new header (Nexus 7).

Conclusion

I removed the header image. I see no reason to push all those kilobytes to users to lessen their experience should they stumble across my profile page. On top of that, I don't want to hide any more tweets than necessary nor obfuscate the link to my site (though I have no control over that in the mobile app). Perhaps in the future I'll take time to craft an image to better fit the layout, but I have more important things to do than try to shoehorn something into Twitter's mistake. Not to mention they can just change the rules again at any time.

Frankly, I'd rather Twitter enable Twitter cards for all sites. There is far more value to me as a content creator and as a user in that feature. And that feature leans on the existing Twitter experience, not some vapid attempt to copy other social media platforms.

Update: 2:19PM

I just discovered .net Magazine did a brief piece on the Twitter header image this morning, and the sources they cite say pretty much the same thing as I do.

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Facebook, HTML5, and Mis-Reporting

My Twitter stream and the headlines of sites across the web yesterday lit up with Facebook's CEO blaming its stock price (failure to meet hyped expectation) on HTML5 (and its failure to make the Facebook mobile experience suck less).

Even ZDNet jumped on that bandwagon with a post titled Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg knocks HTML5 in favor of native apps, using the summary, Mark Zuckerberg didn't hold back in acknowledging Facebook's mistakes, citing a focus on HTML5 as the biggest one. Bolstering its point, ZDNet included this quote from Zuckerberg:

The biggest mistake we made as a company was betting too much on HTML5 rather than native.

That's it. No additional context, no more justification. An article clearly buying into the notion that Facebook is doing poorly because it built its mobile experience using HTML5.

Blaming a technology is easy. It takes the burden off the organization using it. No longer do you need to justify that your business model is broken, or the user experience is impenetrable, or that you didn't factor all the use cases. You can just blame the "savior" technology for letting you down.

That would be as silly as blaming responsive web design for Facebook's poor IPO performance.

The W3C, one of the organizations developing HTML5, today tweeted a link to a message from one of its mailing lists that includes the full Zuckerberg quote:

When I'm introspective about the last few years I think the biggest
mistake that we made, as a company, is betting too much on HTML5 as
opposed to native... because it just wasn't there. And it's not that HTML5
is bad. I'm actually, on long-term, really excited about it. One of the
things that's interesting is we actually have more people on a daily basis
using mobile Web Facebook than we have using our iOS or Android apps
combined. So mobile Web is a big thing for us.

That statement better summarizes the situation. HTML5 is not done yet. It's not fully formed. Browsers haven't implemented everything and the rules are changing as (parts of the group of specifications that make up the marketing term) HTML5 gets into the wild. It also demonstrates that Facebook made a poor strategic decision by expecting too much.

In Facebook's case, relying on HTML5 to mimic an app just won't cut it for some of its features. While it has worked in other cases, that doesn't mean it will work in all cases. Facebook has consistently had a poor user experience on mobile. That's not the technology, that's strategy and implementation.

You can watch the full interview in the embedded video below. Make your own judgments about Zuckerberg's comments and compare it to how it's being reported across the web.

Head to ~11 minutes for the conversation about mobile.

Related

• Facebook: bet on HTML5 a 'big mistake' from .net Magazine.


• Mark Zuckerberg: Our Biggest Mistake Was Betting Too Much On HTML5 from TechCrunch.


• Zuckerberg’s Biggest Mistake? ‘Betting on HTML5′ from Mashable.


• HTML5 is dead. Long live HTML5! from CNET.


• Failure of Responsive Design is Why Facebook's IPO Tanked, on this blog, May 23, 2012.


• Don't Choose Between Mobile Web and Mobile Apps, on this blog, February 26, 2011.


• Apps Are Not Killing the Web, on this blog, February 5, 2011.

Update, September 18, 2012

Yesterday .net Magazine had a piece about Facebook's W3C representative posting to a W3C mailing list his troubles with the HTML5 approach. I read it not as a complaint but as someone raising issues and asking for help. I also saw some interaction on Twitter this past weekend, spawned by a tweet of mine pointing to the W3C email, between Tobie Langel (Facebook), John Dowdell and Brian Leroux (Adobe), and Steve Souders (Google). Following the link embedded in the tweet below demonstrates that there is discussion among the industry players and perhaps this entire media storm could help move standards further along.

@souders would love your feedback on etherpad.mozilla.org/appcache /cc @brianleroux @jdowdell @aardrian

— Tobie Langel (@tobie) September 17, 2012

More Update, September 18, 2012

Quora answers questions about rebuilding its app, a la Facebook, providing context from a different perspective.

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Use Twitter's New Embedded Timeline without Slowing Your Page

Update: September 7, 2012

I misunderstood how browser load external JavaScript files when that load itself comes from embedded script. Ben Ward explained it to me and referenced this handy article, Thinking Async.

The gist of the article is that using JavaScript to write in a call to a JavaScript file causes the browser to load the external script asynchronously.

While it may be like wearing suspenders with a belt, I'm still going to leave my async edits in my Twitter embedded timeline calls.

Original Entry

Yesterday Twitter announced its new embedded timeline feature for web sites. The gist is that you drop a block of code on your site and users will see the timeline for the selected account as if they were viewing it on Twitter.com — embedded media, expanded links, etc.

This is a new feature and is likely to change, even if the how-to Twitter post isn't too clear on that. I say that it will change because of language in the developer documentation like No other customization options are available at this time, as well as the slew of requests for more type styling options (among other customization requests) on the Twitter Embedded Timelines Questions page(s).

There are also known bugs. If your domain has a hyphen in it, then this won't work. If you are using Opera Mobile, Android 2 or 3 default browser, or an iPad, then the swipe-to-scroll gesture doesn't work (I already reported that one).

Another issue that Twitter may not consider a bug is how the script to embed the timeline is loaded. Currently if you have an embedded tweet or the old embedded timeline on your page and Twitter is down (fail-whale down), then your web page will take quite a while to render. This is a function of how browsers load JavaScript. The browser won't finish rendering the page until it has loaded all the JavaScript or given up (a timeout, which can take minutes).

While there are JavaScript functions that can mitigate this, those don't come into play until the script has downloaded. Instead, HTML5 has a couple attributes for the script element that apply here — async and defer. Essentially these tell the browser it can render the page before the script is downloaded. Since Twitter content is often just add-on content for your existing page, this is the right approach.

Instead of spending a thousand words explaining how this attribute works, I refer you to the WHATWG specification using an embedded tweet where I manually insert the async attribute:

If you use JavaScript and don't know about async/defer HTML5 attributes, you should read up and use: whatwg.org/specs/web-apps…

— Adrian Roselli (@aardrian) September 6, 2012

The new embedded timeline feature doesn't make it quite that easy. Twitter gives you code to drop on your page that has no script element into which you can casually paste async. The script element is generated by JavaScript, which looks like this:

<a class="twitter-timeline" href="https://twitter.com/aardrian" data-widget-id="243755160277487616">Tweets by @aardrian</a>

<script>!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs");</script>


Many of the people who may drop Twitter timelines into their web site are not JavaScript coders. So I whipped up a quick modification you can make to that pre-generated script that will drop the async attribute where it needs to go:

<a class="twitter-timeline" href="https://twitter.com/aardrian" data-widget-id="243755160277487616">Tweets by @aardrian</a>

<script>!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.async=true;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs");</script>


The js.async=true; tells the Twitter function to drop an async into its script reference when it gets created. The generated chunk of code will look like this:


<script src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" async="" id="twitter-wjs">


Now if Twitter goes down again (which it will) your page won't hang as a result.
I have also asked Twitter to consider including async in its standard copy-and-paste code.

I have eight (8!) examples of this in play on my Buffalo food truck page, where I have embedded the timelines of the current crop of food trucks in the area so I can check them all at once while aimlessly wandering the streets in a hunger stupor.

If you have a better solution, I am all ears. Please drop it in the comments with any other feedback.

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Age, Treachery Bests Youth, Skill

Social Media seems to be wildly misunderstood by some folks, including those within the social media profession who have the ability to use its own tools to spread that misunderstanding like a telephone game.

Though my example is old news (by SM standards), I have seen it popping up for the past couple weeks pretty regularly. On July 20, Nextgen Journal published a piece called Why Every Social Media Manager Should Be Under 25.

I should qualify that when I heard the title I laughed and assumed it was parody. It wasn't. By the time I read her piece (two days after it was posted) a series of blog responses had popped up. I tweeted the absurdity from a conference (I was studying web intents, really):

Hah! "Why Every Social Media Manager Should Be Under 25" nextgenjournal.com/2012/07/why-ev… Response: experiencetheblog.com/2012/07/a-resp… via @blairboone cc @smcbuffalo

— Adrian Roselli (@aardrian) July 23, 2012

I could easily pull the article apart, but it's been done. The link in my tweet does a good job already. To the young author's credit (which may demonstrate that she does understand social media), she has avoided the Streisand effect by allowing the article to stand and the comments to roll in.

Instead of reading all the rebuttals, I like the meta conversations that have popped up about the concerns over ageism in the industry (which appear to be so far unfounded by the successful brands), or how we should all remember that once it's on the internet, it tends to stay (something older users may have been protected from in college, though I wasn't one of them). Some have even suggested the responses from the elder generation could have been more helpful and less brutal (even if I think some of the brutality was helpful).

Some folks saw an opportunity and just ran with it, like the guy who registered CathrynSloane.com, the name of the author of the original article:

I discovered Cathryn had decided not to secure her personal domain name for the past 10 years […] I spent a total of $11.00 USD and about an hour setting up free email & web hosting for this domain. Now all 2,267,233,742 (as of 12/31/11) Internet users can find and read the information presented here. No need to mess with Facebook, Twitter, etc., and I have full informational control over content/context and privacy.

I am over 25. Not by a little. I am also a member of the local chapter of Social Media Club, whose local membership spans a range of ages but does tend toward the younger (than me) side.

I have clients who have asked about finding someone to help them act as their face on assorted social media platforms. I tell them that factors to consider when evaluating a social media manager include experience, skill, understanding the brand message, and just having the emotional intelligence and savvy to present a brand on any social media outlet.

An intern at the copier may be a great use of an inexpensive resource, but an intern who acts as the voice of your organization in a particular form of media probably isn't. Knowing how to use a copier is a rote skill which does not make an intern qualified to produce the annual report or press releases. I feel you can swap Facebook, Twitter, etc. in place of the copier and the analogy stands.

I'd also like to point out that much of this is a rehash of conversations back at the dawn of the web, when the job title "webmaster" was coined and the younger someone was the more qualified he/she was. That also didn't pan out as true.

No matter how old you are, there is something to be learned from this entire story. Probably many somethings, but one that stuck out during a conversation today (which led to this post) was that knowing how to use a tool doesn't mean you won't cut yourself with it. I suspect Ms. Sloane has learned that now.

Related (Because I Said So)

1. Another Piece Claiming Social Media Makes You Dumber, August 9, 2011.


2. Twitter As Passive-Aggressive Enabler, January 4, 2011.


3. Humorous Social Media Infographics, October 6, 2010.


4. Don't Let Social Media Get You Robbed (or Stalked), March 2, 2010.


5. Lots of Twitter Followers Guarantees... Nothing, January 6, 2010.


6. Facebook Doesn't Make You Smarter, Rigorous Research Does, September 8, 2009.

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Social Media Day 2012 in Buffalo #smdayBUF

This past Saturday marked the third Mashable-sponsored Social Media Day here in Buffalo. While the last two years have been unofficial (much like the day itself), this year the City of Buffalo declared June 30, 2012 as Social Media Day (the year on the proclamation makes me think this is a one-off). At my last count, 17 other cities and three other states also declared June 30 as Social Media Day (as reported by Mashable).

The event in Buffalo this year was heavily sponsored and included free giveaways, contests, real-time video streaming, and plenty of food and drink specials. The description from the event announcement:

• Take the Social Challenge and win the grand prize!!!


• Get your photo taken on the AT&T Red Carpet


• Network and find out who is really behind those Twitter handles


• Find out what companies are hiring and who really GETS social media in Buffalo


• Learn about the basics or wax poetic with the experts--everyone is welcome


• Have a great time with drink specials provided by Lobby Bar at Statler City: $2.50 domestic beers and well drinks as well as appetizers on hand


• See who's tweeting about you on the Twitter wall--#smdaybuf


• Feel good by knowing your ticket donation is going to Computers For Children

This year's event was organized by the Buffalo chapter of Social Media Club. The Buffalo chapter is less than two years old and has many of the members that helped organize the event the last two years, plus many newcomers.

While the venue was full all day long, the nice weather on a pre-4^th of July Saturday afternoon probably hampered attendance a bit, as noted by the Social Media Club Buffalo Chapter president:

most buffalonians who work in and present on social media were not at #smdaybuf. just a thought. Now im done.

— Nicole Shoe (@Buffalogal) July 1, 2012

If you were not there then you can catch up with some of the activity by viewing the Twitter stream, tagged with #smdayBUF. There were many photos throughout the evening, and as some of the albums start to show up I will link them here. If you have one you want linked, please pass it along. This includes any video or news coverage.

Photos, Videos, Press

• A Facebook photo gallery: Social Media Day Buffalo 2012 AT&T Red Carpet.


• Social media frenzy at Statler City at Buffalo.com.


• Social Media Day shares Buffalo's buzz at The Buffalo News.


• A Social Media Mixer at Buffalo Rising.


• Techies take "byte" out of social media from YNN.


• Videos of folks talking about what social media means to them: Rachel Gottlieb, Jeremy Juhasz, Jennifer Macey, Kevin Evanski, Liz Chatterton, Erin Reedy, and Christina Singh.


• Tiffany Tcheng recounts Social Media Day Buffalo 2012 at the Cypress North blog.


• There is also a Social Media Day 2012: Recap at the KC You There blog.
  

Previous Events

• Social Media Day 2011 in Buffalo #smdayBUF, July 1, 2011.


• Social Media Club Buffalo: #TacoVino, December 10, 2010.


• Buffalo Launches Social Media Club Chapter, September 23, 2010.


• Event Profile: #smdayBUF & #smdayBUF 2.0, August 12, 2010 (posted at City Love Cloting).


• Social Media Day in Buffalo #smdayBUF, July 1, 2010.

Choice Tweets

Holy shit I just won the grand prize at #smdaybuf!! Overnight stay at the Mansion on Delaware!

— Tiffany Tcheng (@tiffanytcheng) June 30, 2012

@djlopro clearly you didn't see me shaking it to ALL of the prince songs! #SMDayBUF

— Rachel (@BuffaloRach) June 30, 2012

It's Social Media Day! We'll be sharing real life beers at #SMDayBuf later, but in the meantime - remember... twitter.com/KegWorks/statu…

— KegWorks (@KegWorks) June 30, 2012

If it's #SMDay and there's no proof on @Instagram, did it really happen? #SMDayBuf #InstagramOutageProblems

— Angela Stefano (@amstefano988) June 30, 2012

The amount of pickles I've eaten today will surely wreak some sort of havoc on #SMDayBuf later...

— Trey Wydysh (@Songs4Tomorrow) June 30, 2012

Going to a party where I only know people (minus @bflojester) by Twitter handles. Looking forward to putting faces to handles! #smdaybuf

— Krystal Sondel (@LovinOnBuffalo) June 30, 2012

None of you look like your avatars!! #smdaybuf

— Buffalucci (@Buffalucci) June 30, 2012

BIG THANKS to @BevCoasters @LolaPearlBakes @ATT @BlissDesigns @BN360 @adclubofbuffalo @BuffaloNiagara @StatlerCity @EBL_WNY #smdaybuf

— SocialMediaClub (@SMCBuffalo) June 30, 2012

Thanks to @SchulzeWines @West Herr @bfloharborkayak @BFLFashionWeek @DarienLake @BuffaloScience @CypressNorth #smdaybuf

— SocialMediaClub (@SMCBuffalo) June 30, 2012

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Picplz Shutting Down, as Free Services Often Do

Picplz is a photo/image editing and sharing app/service that has been compared to Instagram and long referred to as the Android alternative (Instagram didn't support Android until recently).

At 10:17pm EST on a Friday night (last night), June 1, Picplz sent out the following cryptic tweet:

tmblr.co/ZUq_PyMaUlXD

— picplz (@picplz) June 2, 2012

Even though I hate shortened-URL-only tweets, Picplz doesn't tweet often so I followed it to read this in the brief blog post:

On July 3, 2012, picplz will shut down permanently, and all photos and user data will be deleted. Until then, users may download their own photos by clicking on the download link next to each photo in their photo feed.

And that's it. Just about a month before it's gone. Just over 30 days to manually download each one of my photos.

My take? Oh well. It's a free service that just saw the darling of the photo manipulation and sharing space (Instagram) get bought up for an absurd amount of money. I suspect Picplz just gave up. I knew going into it that at some point I'd have to pull my stuff out (hence my regular requests on the support forum for an RSS feed of my full history).

In December 2010 I wrote about our reliance on and sense of entitlement to free services in You Get What You Pay For. This is the same thing. It's a perfect example of how you need to be prepared from the start that your favorite free service will change or go away. When it does, don't expect great (or even good or maybe any) notice or customer service.

Years ago I started using Brightkite to post images (and track my travels, share them with Twitter and Facebook, live as an online gallery, feed to mapping services, etc.). When Brightkite went away I dabbled in Gowalla and sensed its demise, so tried out Plyce, which also changed direction. I found Picplz and still dabbled in others just in case Picplz went away. Now I just need to choose my next photo posting platform and hope I can get a couple years out of that one, too.

In the meantime, I will be writing a script to wade through my 1,400+ Picplz photos and pull down all my images, descriptions and geo-data. Considering I paid nothing to use the service for over a year and a half, I think this is a fair cost to me.

Related

• You Get What You Pay For


• Brightkite Yields to Foursquare, Gowalla, Etc.


• Brightkite Changes Direction


• Why We Check In: The Reasons People Use Location-Based Social Networks (my Brightkite use is referenced in the article)


• Brightkite Tries Another Angle

Update: Sunday, June 3, 2012

This post got a lot of traffic overnight and didn't realize why at first. It seems I scooped the regular tech news outlets and so for a while this post was the only one out there. Cool. These other posts have popped up since then:

• PicPlz shutting down permanently on July 3rd, all photos to be deleted pre-fireworks at Engadget.


• Photo-sharing service Picplz to shut down on 3 July at TheNextWeb.


• The Instagram Effect? Mobile Photo Sharing App PicPlz To Shut Down Permanently On July 3 at TechCrunch.


• Photo Sharing App Picplz to Shut Down on July 3 at Mashable.


• Photo-sharing app PicPlz calling it quits on July 3 at GigaOM.


• Instagram Competitor picplz Shutting Down July 3rd at Geekosystem.

Interestingly, less than two months ago Lifehacker ran the article Don't Bother with Instagram; Here are Five Better Alternatives for Android. Of those five, Picplz is going away and Lightbox Photos got gobbled up by Facebook.

Update: Sunday, June 3, 2012, 11:20pm

Earlier tonight Picplz tweeted out some hope for those of us with lots of photos who don't really have the time to download each photo individually:

Also, soon we will provide an export solution as a thanks to you, our loyal and devoted users. We already miss you.

— picplz (@picplz) June 3, 2012

Update: June 15, 2012

Picplz notified users (via another cryptic tweet that led to a blog post) on Wednesday that it would make each user's photo archive available as a download. Users would be notified via email when their archives were ready. I received my email late last night and am in the process of downloading my 1.5GB archive now (so I have no idea the formats of anything).

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