Tag: Signal-to-Noise

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Forget Ashton Kutcher and Oprah, forget #unfollowfriday, forget 25 Random Evil Things about Twitter — the key problems with the social media / microblogging / broadcast IM / whatever you want to call it service boil down to two problems:

  1. It asks the wrong question
  2. It was designed around limitations of cell phone text messaging

The Wrong Question

Twitter’s prompt is not something general like “What’s on your mind?” It’s “What are you doing?” That encourages people to post things like “I’m eating lunch” or “Just got into work,” or “Posting on Twitter.” Presumably what they mean is “What are you doing that you think people would find interesting?” but of course that’s too long a prompt from a usability standpoint.

The thing is, there’s no reason to broadcast the mundane to the world. Don’t tell me “I’m eating soup.” Tell me, “Just learned that gazpacho soup is best served cold. I wonder if they eat it in space?”

Unfortunately, that means the signal-to-noise ratio can get pretty bad at times.

Outgrowing its Limitations

Twitter posts are limited to 140 characters of plain text so that the your name and comments can fit in a standard SMS message. Now, this is great if you use Twitter via text messages on your mobile phone. It’s not so great if you use Twitter on the web, or through a smartphone app like Twitterific on iPhone or Twidroid on Android, or through any of the zillions of desktop apps.

I don’t have a problem with the 140-character limit itself (it can actually be liberating in a way), though it would be nice to have some formatting options beyond all-caps and *asterisk bolding*.

The real problem is that links have to share that limit. URL-shortening services have exploded lately as people try to squeeze links into the tiniest space possible to save room for their precious text. Even if you use something as short as is.gd, just including one link means you’re down to 122 characters.

Plus URL shorteners come with a host of problems, in particular the fact that they hide the destination. That’s no big deal if the target matches the description, or if it’s a harmless prank like a Rick Roll, but it’s all too easy to disguise something malicious.

Seriously, if you got an email that said something like this:

Look at this! http://example.com/asdjh

Would you click on that link? Even if it appeared to be from someone you know? That’s just asking to get your computer infected by a virus, trojan horse or other piece of malware. Or to see something you wish you could unsee.

Better Link Sharing: Facebook

I hesitate to bring up Facebook as a good example of anything, and I know the current layout is largely reviled by its users, but they really got posting links right.

When you want to post a link to your Facebook profile, you paste in the full URL. Facebook reads the page and extracts the title, a short summary, and possible thumbnail images. Then you have the normal amount of space to write your comment. Continue reading →

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Some people think it’s a great idea to block spam by having their email system automatically reply to any unfamiliar address, forcing the sender to jump through hoops that spammers presumably won’t bother with.

About half an hour ago, the IEEE Communications Society sent out a call for papers on its mailing list.

So far I have gotten three challenge-response requests, two out-of-office notices, and a response to one of the CRs.

I expect to see more when I get back from lunch.

Update 2:30pm: Four more challenges, another vacation autoreply, and four more responses. No sign yet of any discussion, complaints, or even (as I half-expected) a rash of misdirected “unsubscribe me” messages.

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More “You sent a virus!” garbage going around. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t even look at most delivery failure notices, which means I could easily miss errors about mail I really did send.

I got ticked off enough this time that I wrote back to the return address on the warning, matching the tone and structure of their message as closely as possible:

An invalid virus notice was found in an Email message you sent. Your Email scanner recognized a virus as W32/MyDoom-O but did not take into account the fact that this virus always uses a fake sender address.

Please update your virus scanner or contact your IT support personnel as soon as possible as you are sending bogus virus warnings to third parties whose systems are not infected with the virus. This runs the risk of causing unnecessary concern among the less tech-savvy (and extra calls to tech support about the nonexistant virus they fear they have). I would recommend reading up on the phrase “crying wolf” as well.

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I regularly get bogus bounces from clueless virus scanners that don’t realize the sending address is fake 99% of the time, but this takes the cake:

Sometime last night I received three copies of the same notice from some system in Brazil. They had written their virus warning in Microsoft Word, saved it as HTML without cleaning up all the extra junk, and made it the only part of the message… in Base64 encoding!

If you’re going to send any kind of diagnostic notice by email, you want it to be as simple and widely readable as possible. That means plain text (not HTML or Base64, and certainly not both!) It also means if you do want to use HTML, at least clean it up and include a plain-text alternative. For all you know it’s going to be read by some admin logging into a GUIless server through SSH over a modem connection on a hotel phone line!

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On an ideal Web, pages would stay put and links would never change. Of course, anyone who has been on the Internet long enough knows just how far away this ideal is. Commercial sites go out of business, personal sites move from school to school to ISP to ISP, news articles get moved into archives or deleted, and so on.

There are two sides to fighting link rot. The first is to design your own site with URLs that make sense, that you won’t find yourself changing a few months or years down the road. If you have to move something, use a redirect code so that people and spiders will automatically reach the new location.

The other side to the fight is periodically checking all the links on your site to make sure they still go where you expect.

So how do you handle online journals? Obviously they’re websites, so from that standpoint you should at least try to keep the links current. But on the blogging side, there are problems with this, in particular the school of thought that you should never revise a blog entry (also discussed in Weblog Ethics). Continue reading →