Locality Switch

Governments have a tendency to make things much harder than they have to be. Take, for example. social media. It’s a simple thing, isn’t it? Even a kid with elementary computer skills can understand how to post something to YouTube, a Blog, or Facebook. Why do our politicians get it so wrong?

Bureaucracy.

Let’s look at the short lived blog of Senator Conroy’s: The short lived Digital Economy blog. It looked and smelt like a government website, and got so many things wrong.

How about the Twitter account of my local Mayor, Councillor Larry Bolitho. The tweets are written in third person, each one starting with “Larry Bolitho”, and proceeding to tell us where he is. There aren’t any personal thoughts in there. Oh, and have you seen the instruction manual and disclaimer which comes with it?

Responses will be at the discretion of the Mayor… Who@HillsShireMayor chooses to follow on Twitter is at the discretion of the Mayor.

It would be great if our politicians could get with it on this whole social media thing. Some of their present attempts are just embarrassing.

However, there is someone who is up to date on this whole social media arena. Barack Obama. Have you seen the Whitehouse website? It’s beautiful, functional, accessable, and also integrates with social media platforms.

Anil Dash wrote a blog post about Government internet startups. He notes that they are now actually doing things right:

Now, .gov websites have historically been backwaters at best, a bunch of awkwardly-designed, poorly defined sites that only met the bare requirements of a web presence. But of course the current administration is comprised in great part of digital natives, and it’s remarkable how quickly they’ve remade the .gov world into not just a number of compelling websites, but into a broad set of platforms that are going to inspire as much technological innovation as Twitter, Facebook or the iPhone did when they unveiled their technology platforms.

It’s great to see what the Government of the United States of America is turning out, in terms of websites and useful web tools. They are being innovative, and are truly leading the way in government web presences. Countries around the world should use this as the benchmark, and strive to meet it.

Let’s hope the rest of the world can see the benefits of social media and the web, and start doing things properly. It can work to their advantage.

Twitter’s Trending Topics is where you can see the most popular topics on Twitter at the moment, and check out the stream of tweets related it it. It all works in real time, which opens it up to a whole heap of spam.

Twitter makes is really easy to get your message in front of a large audience through these trending topics, which spammers are utterly exploiting. To get your message in there, just include the trending key words in your tweet, and you magically appear in the stream for the topic.

It’s not only the spammy messages which are annoying – it’s also those foreign language messages which appear in the streams. I don’t need to see the tweets from those speaking another language – it doesn’t help me one bit.

How can this spam be stopped? Well, it would be fairly easy to remove the foreign language tweets from the stream – just have a set of common words for each language, and if the tweet matches another language’s key words, then Twitter can hide it from my stream.

The issue of real spam would be a bit trickier to fix, but I believe it is a very doable. The first thing to do would be for Twitter to scan each tweet and see if it has a whole heap of trending topic keywords in it. These are the most obvious type of trending topic spam.

Second thing to do would be placing a little link on each Tweet in the stream of Trending Topics which says “spam”. If people click that, it flags it for moderation. Oh, and to avoid abuse of the spam button, it should be only be available to users who have been on the site for a few months.

Finally, I believe that it should take a certain amount of time of someone being a user before they can actually appear in the trending topics stream. It won’t hurt if the new members don’t get in the stream, will it?

These are a few simple ideas which I humbly present to Twitter to help remove the low quality contributions by people who feel it is necessary to spam up my tweet-box.

I love it when companies go and fix data inconcistencies within their system. Today, Twitter fixed a rather odd problem which effected the count of how many people followed you. If you don’t know about it, here’s the news direct from the horse’s mouth:

For some time, the follower and following counts we display have been incorrect for some folks. We’re soon to push a change that will address this issue. This means that the count you see in your sidebar should match what you see on your follower and following pages.

However, a consequence of this change is that follower counts will drop for some people. In particular, those with large followings may see significant changes as we correct for spam accounts and data inconsistencies. No legitimate followings should be affected—we’re just cleaning up artifacts in the system.

[ From Correcting follower and following counts ]

I say this is an odd problem, because the whole concept of counting how many people follow you should be really simple simple, right? In the Twitter database, I expect there to be a column in the users database which contains the number of followers; each time you get a new follower, the count increments.

On my own Twitter account, I had about ten more followers in the count, then I could see in the list. How can the numbers get this different? I don’t know, but I bring it down to growing pains. While Twitter now seems to be getting more reliable, it isn’t past all of it’s problems – the links in the chain still break occasionally. It will still face ongoing challenges when developing and expanding this unique social networking platform. They are innovators, and with that title comes certain expected problems; let’s hope they can work through them.