Category: Blog

Something wrong with these pictures

Walking through a small market town in Southern England I spotted this sticker in a shop window. Feeling like a Good Social Samaritan I popped in and advised the lady behind the counter that she might attract more followers and fans by adding a Facebook Name or Twitter Handle to the signage.

My comment was met with a blank stare. I wish I was making this up.

The next picture is of another shop in the same town. In the days of my youth this was the local independent bookshop, the new owners sell Lovely Things (whatever they might be).

In the arcade next-door there used to be a secondhand bookstall, that’s been replaced by a Chocolatier.

Sometimes change is not progress.

Images: James Barnes

Does anyone at Google+ own an iPad?

At this stage there’s not a lot to say about Google+ that hasn’t already been said. Is it a micro-blog? A blog? A Social Network? A photo-sharing site? Who knows, these aren’t questions anyone can answer yet.

To sum up the general feeling from the plethora of first posts on the product we’ve been offered: impressive user growth and so-so engagement; a great tool for SEO that’s poor for anonymity; and a less spammy than Facebook that’s not as immediate as Twitter.

In the short time that I’ve been using Google+ my  principle bugbear has been the lack of tailored device recognition.

For example, if I load up the landing page on the iPad using Safari or Terra I’m automatically redirected to the mobile version of the website. I then have to log-in and scroll to the bottom of the page to change my settings to the desktop browser view. I have to do this for every new visit in browser session.

Quite why Google insists on serving the mobile view to the world’s best selling tablet I do not know, given the advantage of greater screen estate and pinch zoom it makes no sense at all. The device recognition required for a better experience would be relatively trivial for the team to implement.

Perhaps it’s all a bit different from an Android tablet? If it is I can’t help feeling that’s the Product Marketing equivalent of cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Image: James Barnes

Eat The Phonebook

The one feature that unifies each and every Social Network is, rather obviously, making connections. Likewise, regardless of platform or Operating System, the feature that unifies the means by which you communicate from a connected device is an address book. It’s the feature you use without thinking about it. How often have you heard people say that they don’t remember phone numbers anymore? They’re in the mobile, right?

Well, the same is probably true of email addresses, IM IDs, Twitter handles, Skype names and a whole lot of other nom de net. That reeling, scrolling list of friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues, followed and followers is your interface to the world. It grows every day and your influence is probably being measured by its size. That digital phonebook of contacts is a battleground in the war over ownership of your social graph and you know what? There isn’t a single company fighting on your side.

First, the fundamental problem: Doesn’t matter how you group, circle, list and/or connect with all those folk, at the moment your buddies are hosed all over your digital footprint. Maybe they’re written in a little black book too. You’ve got numbers on your phone, addresses in your email inbox, a business network on LinkedIn, people you half-care about on Facebook and a bunch of geeks clamouring for your attention on Twitter and Google+. A bunch of disparate contacts spread all over the place.

Wouldn’t it be great if one tool could synchronise all of our contacts and all of their details between mobile, tablet, laptop and desktop?

For everyone’s benefit I spent too much time having a look at the startups that are working to help us solve this almighty headache. There are quite a few. Soocial, Xobni, Gist, Hiya, Connected and Plaxo are perhaps the best known. I’m not going to review them individually, suffice to say they all perform passingly well at gathering contacts from many and various devices, apps and SNS, then providing reasonably good management tools and in most cases, export to csv or vcard.

Unsuprisingly, in their battle for relevance, these companies have a common denominator: they are designed as dashboard destinations, places created for viewing the aggregate activity of your contacts, like some kind of Salesforce Prospects List for social stalkers.

Perhaps I’m reading that wrong but hopefully we don’t all fret about initiating our interactions without advance intel and don’t need to bone up on what someone has been posting online in the moments before we call, message or email.

In short, these services would be ideal for enterprise if, like onsip, they added unified communication. For personal use? Too much work, not inclusive enough and too creepy. All we want to do is keep a list of our contacts in one place, synchronised and safely backed-up (NB: Hats off to Soocial for their sterling work in providing a massive list of supported mobile phones for their SyncML product).

One might have expected a Mobile Operator to take advantage of the opportunity to use IMS/RCS and offer a richly integrated social phonebook experience on the smartphone. Unless the now defunct Vodafone 360 is counted, I’m afraid none of them have. Wandering through the stalls at 3GSM in any of the last three or four years it would have been difficult not to encounter vendors providing perfect RCS contact management solutions. I’m not sure that any one of them made a sale. It would seem as though the Operators have exchanged their on-net subscriber-owning vision for Facebook and Twitter widgets on the Home Screen.

And what of the technological innovation that does away with numbering and addressing? Well, that’s happening, but very slowly, with tiny incremental steps. Sure enough Telnic have been promoting their excellent name-dialing, Voxbone has a great inum initiative, T-Mobile has introduced a natty caller id product and there’s even a scrappy little startup called spelldial that’s worth checking out for a simple over the top solution.

The enum concept is taxiing to the runway but like video-calling, it might be a while before it gets clearance for take-off – and then, to belabour the metaphor, the flightpath might be wholly different from that planned.

Having spent some time looking at this particular problem, it’s plain to me that the answer lies in the Operating System itself, not in some startup, and not in the hands of Facebook. You may never win the battle to own your Social Graph, but here’s my simple advice to help you control it:

If you use a Mac, use Address Book and buy an iPhone or iPad. The successor to MobileMe is going to deal with your contacts quite effortlessly. It will probably do a neat job of integrating Twitter too.

If you buy into Google+, GMail, GoogleDocs, GTalk and Google Voice, then get an Android phone and make sure you set Google Contacts to sync.

If you use Windows and Outlook to manage your contacts, consider buying a Windows smartphone and keep that faith.

Hey, you could always use an excel spreadsheet.

Image: Grist 

Due diligence and diligent customer service

This one is a little off-topic but the News International ‘phone hacking’ scandal has dominated the headlines over the past week highlighting the twin walking disasters that are British Politics and British News Media. Buried away in the coverage there are a couple of things that are bugging me:

1. In 2007 the Bancroft Dynasty sold their stake in the Wall Street Journal to News International. This week scion Christopher Bancroft has said:

“If I had known what I know now, I would have pushed harder against (the Murdoch bid).” 

There’s a long held legal principle that ignorance is no excuse and it applies equally well here. Had the Bancroft’s done their due diligence they might have found the UK Information Commissioner’s Dec 2006 report “What Price Privacy Now?” Within that document the ICO states:

“Having considered the matter (illegal trade in personal information) further the Information Commissioner has decided that a further disclosure is in the public interest and in the context of a special report to Parliament is consistent with the discharge of his functions under the Data Protection Act 1998. The following table shows the publications identified from documentation seized during the Operation Motorman investigation, how many transactions each publication was positively identified as being involved in and how many of their journalists (or clients acting on their behalf) were using these services.”

Here’s the top of that table:

 Of course, there might be 5.6 billion different reasons why the Bancroft’s due diligence failed to spot this blemish on News International’s sterling record of reportage.

2. ‘Phone hacking’ is a bit of a misnomer, ringing through to some poor sap’s voice mailbox and spoofing their default PIN bears little resemblance to the phreaking of Joe Engressia or even Woz, Jobs and the Blue Box. That notwithstanding the mobile network operators themselves have, arguably, failed in their duty of care to customers.

Granted new mailbox set-up is now a little more secure but to the very best of my knowledge no operator has contacted their customer base, via email or SMS, to advise a PIN change – how many people are still unwittingly using a default PIN? Why was it ever considered a good idea to use default PINs?

Two relatively trivial points of order in this vast calamity but I needed to get that off my chest. On a related note, nice to see the Great British Public fired up about something other than the X-Factor.

Tumblrweed

A few weeks ago I opened a Tumblr account and created a property for affenstunde within that network. You might think I’m a little late to the Tumblr game, well, I’d played with Posterous and Tumblr before with some degree of anonymity, this time the intention was to try a real usecase. As a ‘Product Guy’ (god but I hate that casually tossed-off term) it behoves me to try every interesting service and app and see whether or not it works; what’s bad and what’s better; and just generally: why?

I thought that Tumblr might be an appropriate place to post things that are too short for a blog post and too long for a tweet – a place for the ephemeral fun stuff, sharing and comment, daft pictures and wild invective. There are some moments when micro-blogging falls short: I’ll tweet a link to something that I find interesting (yet trivial) and wish that I could write a few more accompanying words of explanation; or people get confused and assume that the act of sharing an item/opinon denotes approval rather than suprise, outrage or abject horror.

For a little while there Tumblr did the job. I wasn’t overly comfortable with sticking my content in someone else’s silo but enjoyed the simplicity and ease of use. Then, today, I read these words:

“If you care about your online presence, you must own it.”

Words of wisdom cast down by Marco Arment, former CTO of Tumblr. Message received and understood.

I guess, like many folk, I had some grand idea that my domain should only be used for high falutin’ thought leadership, nothing less than 1,500 word masterpieces of incisive wit and insight should grace these pages. Guess I was wrong. Truth to tell ‘publish and be damned’ are far better watch words.

Image: found on a content farm via Google Images – true source unknown

Firmware updates for legacy devices should be mandatory not mocked

 

So Stephen Elop has stated that Symbian mobiles will receive OTA firmware upgrades through to 2016, four years after the final smartphones using this OS are scheduled for release. Good for him.

It beggars belief that some idiots have chosen to knock Nokia, the most mockable of manufacturers, for choosing to provide ongoing support for legacy devices. Clearly these self-styled mobile gurus know nothing of which they speak.

If you truly believe that there is such a thing as a mobile ecosystem it is surely nonsensical to shun the bottom of the pyramid through overly short life-cycle obsolescence.

As I have written previously this issue has become something of a headache for Google and shows no signs of going away as that OS fragments into the legions of low-cost OEM/ODMs crapping out those 400,000 Android devices a day.

This week an all too believable rumour that the forthcoming iOS 5 release will not support the iPhone 3GS has been doing the rounds. The intent is all too clear: you will buy a new iOS device every two years. I’m as much an Apple fanboy as the next guy but forgive me if I don’t see such a policy as being good for consumers.

If Nokia does one thing extremely well it’s firing firmware upgrades that support hundreds of language packs into multiple dealer channels. If you have any sense you should be lauding the decision to prop up Symbian through to 2016.

Image Symbian World

None busier than Twitter

 

May 1st 2011 will go down as one of the biggest news days of the year. According to the San Francisco Chronicle this was Twitter’s CNN moment.

Just as the television news network live-casted the first Gulf War to every cabled-up living-room so, at the very second Keith Urbahn hit Tweet and let slip news of OBL’s death, the world’s favourite micro-blogging service became the de facto place to break stories.

Twitter is a powerful medium for broadcasting, curating and consuming news; a vanity mirror for all kinds of celebrity; a sounding-board for desperately earnest marketers and consultants; a search and discovery tool for stalkers; an obvious measure of influence; and arguably, a catalyst for social change (although not always the good kind). In brief: it’s important.

Some say Twitter has become a Utility. I say no it hasn’t, micro-blogging has become a Utility, Twitter is a popular and successful service example. Sina Weibo is another.

As May 1st wrapped around to May 2nd @twitterglobalpr was keen to tell us that usage had peaked at an all time high of 5,000+ tweets per second during Obama’s televised announcement of Bin Laden’s death. If that sounds like busy to you, think again. How busy does a mobile network Short Message Service Centre get on any New Year’s Eve? Or Diwali? Or Eid? I can guarantee you that the magnitudes of messaging are much greater and the service more robust.

I’ll gladly join Scoble and offer my congratulations to Twitter for keeping up, but I come from a telco world where services must be available to the five nines (99.999%) twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. Staying up doesn’t impress me much – that’s a baseline.  You can say what you like about the Scobleizer but surely he’s a tool better used to trumpet your cool new whatever than he is a notifier of basic competence.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a big fan of micro-blogging and I use Twitter a lot, but it’s a free service and you know, it really does feel like one. An internet age ago Eqentia suggested that Twitter go Freemium to alleviate its growing pains. I agree, as is so often the case ‘free’ is being used as a get out of jail card for a shockingly poor standard of care.

In the absence of anything to sell Twitter has not bought my loyalty with its grace and favour, just my frustration. So like a User I’ll use it while it suits me, if I were a Customer we’d be in a far more valuable relationship.

Until that happy marriage comes to be my prospective partner is just another big fat replaceable pipe.

Image: Flandrum Hill

Edit: Thanks for the handful of emails, yes, the old title of this post (‘None more busy than Twitter’) was indeed grammatically incorrect. This was one of those obscure in-jokes that failed to pay off (a bit like this blog really). Amended accordingly.

Putting innovation in the too hard basket

Mobile Industry Review’s Ewan MacLeod posted a good early-morning thought today. Following a 4:00AM pick-up call from a taxi driver he wondered why it was not possible for his mobile network to provide him with contextual information about an incoming call rather than a caller’s number, or worse, the Withheld announcement:

“..surely there’s a way of easily plugging this stuff all together? The fact that I approved the call? The fact that the taxi firm HAVE my mobile details — couldn’t they be ‘approved’ to be able to display status and context to my phone, rather than the default number?

Is a call even necessary? Couldn’t the phone just turn green? Or flash red? Especially if the device knows I’m awake and operational, I certainly don’t need an interruption beyond ‘your taxi is here’. Like a growl update.

And if you do need to interrupt, do it with some kind of contextual information rather than a phone number.

Alas, I don’t think we’ll ever see anything like this from the mobile operator — despite the operator playing the role as the ultimate trusted party in the value chain.”

This is a great thought though not a new one. Ewan is not the first person to highlight the lack of mobile operator support for useful calling features, one wonders why such value-adds have not been delivered in IMS-RCS deployments, context aware caller info seems to be a perfect use case for the Rich Communication Suite.

I suspect this has a lot to do with being ‘too hard’ from a legal perspective. First comment on Ewan’s post (from someone in the banking industry) immediately flags up compliance issues and I can imagine that this mindset has a very loud and influential voice in the offices of many mobile operators. Shame.

Of course it’s also hard to build such a feature into off-net calls where a third party is used for terminations – not an insurmountable problem, but certainly a crunchy one.

However, an all IP comms network with some sensible opt-in rules might find that adding contextual information to calls becomes a useful and popular feature, maybe this is something that Skype should have implemented an age ago.

If this feature is not part of your Unified Communications strategy, think again.

Image: GreenSmith Consulting

Death of the Phone Call is a First World problem

 

In first world telecoms Voice is being commoditised to feature status. If further proof were needed this week the folks behind Bluebox released their latest offering, the 2600hz Project, a cloud-based telephony service that promises easy access to: “Anything you can do with VoIP, for now – with SMS and video coming shortly.”

Describing the practical applications of the 2600hz platform, GigaOm explained:

The software is designed to handle up to a billion calls per month on about six virtualized (or not) servers and can connect seamlessly to run on or with Rackspace clouds, Amazon’s clouds or on a private cluster of machines. Instead of paying a penny or so per minute to a VoIP company, businesses that want to add voice calling over the web to their social network, their app or their role-playing game just deploy this software and take care of it themselves.

Though a number of companies offer similar ‘cloud telephony’ 2600hz is unique in providing voice support entirely free of charge, their revenue model will be to add chargeable services as they grow. I think this is an excellent piece and I’m sure that 2600hz will do well; yet another way in which the nature of voice communication at distance is rapidly evolving in proportion to the availability and affordability of increasingly powerful technology.

For a comprehensive account of the changing nature of the humble phone call I urge you to go and read the great essay Dean Bubley has written on The Future of Voice for Vision Mobile, it really cannot be bettered. Here’s a taste:

We already have in-game voice chat between players, remote baby monitors, always-on voice telepresence, audio surveillance and all sorts of other voice applications which really are not calls, as such. Numerous other voice communication modes are evolving, especially those linked to social and messaging applications.

In a nutshell, we no longer need to shoehorn all of our “distant voice” communications needs into the unnatural format of a “phone call”. We are able to visualise, contextualise, obfuscate, interrupt, lie, drop in and out, waffle, multi-task, spy, listen, store, mumble, overhear, translate, declaim, announce and recall speech over a network in many, many different ways.

All rather spot on by my own reckoning, little to add to that except to reinforce the point that this is a first world phenomenon. For as long as they can get away with it governments and operators in developing countries will be ring-fencing that minute-metered phone call as it represents a significant source of revenue, especially foreign exchange.

This is not just the North South divide coming into play on roaming arbitrage but all international terminations, it’s quite possible that within a year or two we’ll be able to measure some kind of Human Development Index for voice and messaging.

Wonder whether any start-up can deal with that problem?

Image: Josh Dilworth

Erratum: In this post I gave the impression that the founders of 2600.hz were one and the same as the folks behind Bluebox and FreePBX. This is not the case. Apologies to all concerned for the error.