The internet needs fewer customers, fewer products and more hippies.

There are two groups of people leaving Twitter at the moment: interesting celebrities who’ve taken enough shit, and angry nerds who don’t like the direction Twitter is going at the moment. Neither party is leaving in droves, but it’s a steady trickle that might easily be a drove’s scout party.

The nerds’ complaints are generally that Twitter has started to act more like a business and less like it gives a damn, which it is and doesn’t. It’s pushing for users to point their eyeballs at the profitable bits of Twitter rather than just the interesting ones, and seems willing to shut down anything that tries to work around that aim. That’s a completely reasonable position for Twitter to take — remember that if you haven’t paid for a service, you’re not a customer but a product — but it’s a bit of a kick in the teeth to the early-adopting developers and users who invented Twitter phone apps, replies, mentions, hashtags, URL shorteners, image hosting services, retweets, search, and basically everything else that makes Twitter different from Google Reader. Things the community felt it owned, Twitter took for its own. And it’s not the first plantation owner in the digital sharecropping economy to do so.

But that’s the problem: Twitter is a business, and probably so is your calendar, email, newspaper, address book, photo album, to-do list, notebook, social network, blog, RSS reader, backup, and map. There’s always the risk that any one will suddenly vanish, or become something you don’t like, or something nobody likes but that’s incrementally more profitable. That’s why so many websites look like this:

That’s not for the users. Nor are “frictionless sharing”, competitions you enter by spamming your friends, articles you can’t read without sharing them, ‘toolbars’ full of adverts, overlaid and interstitial adverts, automatically-playing audio adverts, articles split across five pages, or big-name websites running adverts that are obviously scams. But that’s the reality of a free internet. The alternative is the ‘premium’ services: ad-free, deliberately nice to use, but the pricing is arbitrary and ridiculous (£10 will get you five weeks of the Times’ iPhone app or two years of the Guardian’s) and most of them are liable to dick you about for a bit then get bought out and shut down by Google or Twitter anyway, because they don’t care about you either. They just have a slightly better motivation to keep you on-side. For now.

There have been two notable attempts to build a ‘people’s’ Twitter, free of these problems. The first was to launch an ‘open’ protocol, OStatus, which is decentralised: the system can run on several servers, and users on one can follow users on another. It’s more of a faff than using regular Twitter but it’s more robust to meddling commercial interests. The second is App.net, which launched with a $50 one-year membership fee and a promise never to shut developers out of their API. The users are paying, the developers are paying, and advertisers are not. You’re a customer, not a product, with all the rights that brings.

I think these are both useful steps in a good direction, but neither solves the problem: open protocols aren’t immune from death-by-committee, basically all OStatus users rely on a free but commercial server such as identi.ca to host their feed, and App.net is still run by a small, unaccountable group. In both cases, we’re not so far from the position as we were in with Twitter, but with an iota more power against a more-apparently benevolent dictator. That doesn’t feel like a long-term solution to me. I remember when everyone thought Google was warm and fuzzy.

Moreover, they feel like very techie solutions, when meatspace has had the tools to solve the problem for years: co-ops. In a co-op, you’re neither customer nor product: you’re a member. An owner, on equal terms with the people who set it up. A customer co-op can’t easily screw its users, because it is its users. I don’t think it’s entirely a coincidence that the Co-operative Bank didn’t seem to miss a stride when the financial sector melted down that time (you remember).

If enough users were willing to buy into a service with centralised resources but distributed control and ownership, they’d have no need to submit to any other interest. These .coop services wouldn’t suffer from centralisation because the service couldn’t do anything without its users’ permission, and nor could it refuse to do anything its users wanted from it. The users want 300-character messages? OK. They want to give free accounts to the unwaged? Done. They want to vote off an unpopular user? Depends on the rules they’d voted in for themselves previously. It’s open to abuse, but if anyone knew of a better system I would hope we’d be using it to run countries.

This might even go some way to protecting beleaguered celebrities. If a loud minority of trolls are making the network unpleasant for well-liked and popular users, then the service has an interest in altering its rules or functionality to remedy that, if only so everybody else can enjoy their chatter. Twitter, on the other hand, is happy to lose the engaging semi-famous as long as Justin Bieber and Kim Kardashian are on hand to drip-feed their absurd fanbase their little snippets of nothing.

It would be harder to set up something like this than something like App.net: as well as all the technical difficulties, you’d have all the organisational difficulties of setting up what is quite a complex decision-making process (and eventually a majority of users are likely to ask for something superficially reasonable but technically impractical). There are organisations already out there to help co-ops get started, though, and people make them work all the time. There are a lot of details that need to be worked out before anything could get off the ground, but I think this is the model best able to replace the obnoxious-but-free/pretty-but-expensive dichotomy for those types of people no longer satisfied with it.

Who are, I think, the sorts of people most likely to join co-ops.

Chirp

“First tweeting – now chirping,” say the BBC on Google+, having noticed that two otherwise unrelated iPhone apps are, for unrelated reasons, named after birdsong.

Chirp is a new iPhone app that aims to solve the perennial problem faced by owners of smartphones whose manufacturers inexplicably crippled the Bluetooth support by design. This one uses sound: in the same way that dial-up modems and, before them, ZX Spectrums used to convert data to sound and send it down a phone line or store it on a tape, Chirp plays encoded data out of your phone speaker, and picks up incoming data with the mic. Brilliantly, they’ve taken the phone part out of a modem, and then put what’s left on a phone. It’s both elegant and faintly absurd, so obviously I love it, but I find myself wondering what the hell it’s for.

The fastest dial-up modem was rated 56kbps, and ran at 53.3kbps — and so took nearly three minutes to transmit a 1MB photo (not that anyone was taking 1MB photos back then). Chirp, clearly optimised for reliability rather than speed, runs at 25bps, and would take nearly four days to transmit the same photo. Instead, Chirp sends a 50-bit code that your phone sends to Chirp’s server, which returns the photo over 3G or whatever. So the process is entirely done with the phone’s data connection, except that the last part of the URL is ‘chirped’ through the air. Probably it could be sent via Chirp’s servers instead and nobody would notice for months — I expect some people still believe Bump actually works by bumping the phones together.

It seems to me that this makes Chirp slightly pointless for sharing files, links, and (they really do this) “140-character text messages” between friends. Partly that’s because I already have more ways to send short text messages to my friends’ iPhones than I could possibly ever need, but mostly it’s because I disagree with their chief executive’s claim that “it’s fairly novel to be able to transmit information to anyone who is in earshot”. In fact, humans have a built-in feature for exchanging short communiques with other humans within earshot. Building that into telephones, a device specifically invented to circumvent that limitation, therefore seems like the most monumentally pointless endeavour since the world’s most easily accessible encyclopædia was translated into Latin.

The idea of putting chirps out over tannoy systems or radio broadcasts is a more interesting. Then it’s essentially a QR code made of sound, and there are bound to be uses for that. QR codes, like Blippar and, well, more or less every attempt to make inanimate objects interactive, suffer because for every legitimate use for them there are a thousand stupid ones shoehorned in by PR nitwits. I’ve even seen an information stand with a QR code but no URL — it has machine-readable data but no human-readable data. It’s hard to shake the feeling that it was designed as a tool for the benefit of rebel robots.

The problem with chirps, QR codes, and the like is that there’s almost always a far more efficient way of doing the same thing. The obvious approach to broadcast links as sound would be to read out the URL. If that’s impractical then the correct solution is to come up with a better URL system — long strings of gibberish are rarely ideal. Even if you use sound, there doesn’t seem to be any need for the radio station to change their broadcast so much as to team up with Shazam so the app can directly recognise their station and connect users to whatever content is under discussion. Of course, most users will listen to one or two radio stations at most anyway, so 99% of the time they won’t even use that; they’ll just choose from their favourites list. And then you’re just tweeting links, which incidentally works fine.

But okay, let’s say you’re ‘chirping’ URLs. I can’t decode them: I almost never listen to audio on any device other than my iPhone, which will presumably mute said audio the moment Chirp starts listening for it. The one thing I’d like it to do — pull links out of Pod Delusion reports — is the one thing it can’t do. On the other hand, Downcast‘s ‘share via Twitter’ feature lets me send a direct message to @rtm with a link to the show-notes, which accomplishes the same thing without building a whole nother app or running yet another server full of short-coded URLs.

I’m sure there’s a use for Chirp, but I reckon you’d have to have it installed for a couple of years before it came in handy. The BBC rather worryingly suggest that the developers “see a future where you pay for a can of drink with a chirp” which seems like it would make credit-card-cloning scams so easy that there’d be an app for it on Cydia within the week.

As an alternative method of sending URLs over the phone or radio, I wondered a while back about creating a URL shortener that made links memorable rather than short. There’s a memory trick that encodes any six-digit number into a memorable image, by building them out of three pegs from a set of 100. If we could have more choices from smaller pools, we could build a site with long but easy to say, hear and remember URLs — a Bit.ly for the mind. You’d probably need a pictorial keyboard on the homepage to make it usable. I never bothered to make it principally because I don’t think it’d be very useful.

And neither, I fear, is this.

Apple Have Updated The iTunes Terms And Conditions

Every so often, my iPhone tells me that Apple have changed their terms and conditions again, and I have to agree to the new ones if I want to install an app ever again. I worry that this is becoming a time sink.

According to a website I found, the current version of the T&Cs is 17,581 words long. It’s been in force since October 12. Archive.org have a copy from July, which had been in force for a little over a year. That is 16,836 words long. The one before that ran from April 1 to at least May 19, and is a staggering 25,115 words. Another 19,273 words served from September 2009 to February 2010, and there was a version in June that was 18,248 words. Lastly, the version that was online between November 2008 and April 2009 was 17,870 words. There are gaps in this, because Archive.org doesn’t scan every website every day, so it’s possible that there are several more iterations that I’ve been unable to count. But let’s go with this for now: I have found 114,923 words of terms and conditions on the iTunes website.

Let’s put that number in context.

iTunes has 200 million users, and the average reading speed for comprehension is 200-400 words per minute. I’m going to take the lower estimate, since this shit is really boring. Using that figure, if, as Apple presumably intend, all of those people read all of those words carefully enough to understand them, it would consume 218.7 man-millennia. Wolfram|Alpha chooses to express that figure in terms of the total age of the universe, and doesn’t bother with scientific notation.

But what’s that figure like for one user? I made you this graph, using figures from this website:

Anyway, I just clicked ‘I agree’ and got on with my day.

Ten ways I would improve Facebook

I am normally the first to defend Facebook’s various redesigns, although only because most of the vitriol directed at them is from people who know where everything used to be but not how to look for them. But this one… this one is a bit of a disaster, isn’t it?

It’s just… everything. Everywhere. All at once. I mean, obviously I put the blur on myself, but still… Google’s been systematically taking out UI elements and spacing things out, and as a result all their websites look gorgeous. The new-look Gmail has been out for about a day and already people can’t believe how cramped the “compact” option is — even though that was the only size available on Tuesday morning. I have genuinely stopped visiting Facebook unless it emails me.

So here’s what I’d do. I’ve tried to keep all this within Facebook’s general ethos: profitable, brand-friendly, oriented towards real-life connections, wants to be your home page, and big on news feeds. I really like the idea of Facebook and I wouldn’t want to turn it into Twitter or Google+. I just don’t like the direction it’s going or the handcart it is riding there.

1. Scrap the stupid fucking chat/news sidebar thing

Nobody likes it, four columns is too many, and it does nothing the main site can’t do. The one potentially useful part of it — the old-style chat panel — is by default scrolled off the screen with an invisible scrollbar, while the scrollbar next to the sidebar scrolls the page on the other side of it. Use the space freed up by eliminating the sidebar to increase the font size to something halfway readable.

2. Get rid of all the irrelevant crap

The right navigation bar should only have information relevant to the page you’re looking at. No status updates from a year ago, bad suggestions for people it thinks I might know, random photos, or anything like that. If you’re on the main landing page then it should have notifications, event invitations and so forth. And if you click “10 invitations”, it should take you to the events page rather than creating a pop-out with another link in it. If you really must put an advert in there then go ahead, but stop accepting adverts from obvious scams, because it’s unethical and makes you look dodgy. If the adverts could not take the form of polls, that’d be nice too.

Get rid of all the bullshit in the news feed, too. I don’t care if my friends change their pictures. I don’t care if Sarah is now friends with some guy I’ve never heard of. I don’t care if someone’s got a high score in a game. I don’t care if a friend “likes” a status posted by someone I don’t know. Basically, if my friends didn’t explicitly tell me about something, please assume I won’t care about it and don’t show it to me. Oh, and ditch “questions”. The overlap between “people who post questions” and “people whose friends like to see questions” must be essentially nil.

Basically, show me things I want to see, not things you want me to see. I won’t click on the latter anyway, and it will only deter me from visiting the site at all.

3. Never guess what might be important to me

Suggested friends should have at least 10 connections to me rather than having a passing acquaintance with one of the 200 people I’ve vaguely met since I joined the site. Similarly, “top stories” are a bit of a disaster area. The other day, some guy I barely know commented on a photo I’d never seen, in Russian, and Facebook considered this a “top story”. I moaned about that on Facebook and the first comment was (essentially) “Dammit, Facebook considers this status a top story”. Hopefully, “top stories” won’t be needed once the newsfeed is free of all the crap I just mentioned. I wouldn’t mind this too much if Facebook hadn’t insisted I tell it who my “close friends” are — so now their updates come through as notifications and the news feed has its own, independent and much less accurate stab at what it reckons I might care about.

Similarly with the left navigation bar: it has basically random shit in it. It should have the main navigation links — newsfeed, events, messages and so on — and then a list of your favourite pages — like the “quick links” lab experiment in GMail, this would let you bookmark any page within Facebook, be it a fan-page, profile, group, event, status, photo, album, message thread, whatever — and then a list of non-favourited online people so you could chat to them. The little icons for each section/group would remain, except that profiles’ icons would be a green or blue circle depending on whether the person was online. The gist here is that I decide what I want to see, rather than Facebook’s servers guessing. Even a casual glance at the chat sidebar shows they’re shit at that.

On the subject of the left navigation bar, the ‘friends on chat’ thing needs to have names, and online indicator spots big enough that I can discern their colour. I really thought this stuff was obvious.

4. Scrap “smart lists” and implement “circles” in a sane way that makes sense for Facebook

“Smart Lists” are rubbish. Nobody’s interested. Google+ beat you hands down and you slavishly copied it, except hopelessly missing the point. Thanks to circles, people use the same Google+ account for professional and personal networking — and with Facebook’s market dominance, getting circles right could help it be LinkedIn and FetLife at the same time, to the same people. (Another thing Facebook does hopelessly at the moment is adult content. It’s insistence everything should default to public means it has to have a blanket ban on nudity, and that really restricts how it can be used.)

I think a better way to integrate circle-like functionality into Facebook would be to add what I call “contexts”. Each of your friends, groups, pages and subscriptions exists in one or more contexts — Manchester, skepticism, television, university, whatever — so let us build them. The ‘context’ page would then show all the posts from those groups, people, pages and so on. The “friends” context, and perhaps the “family” one, would be special — these would have to be mutual and would act as the friend list does now — these are the people you can invite to events and message freely and so on.

I get that nobody wants to sort through 200 ‘friends’ and put them in lists, but still, “Smart Lists” isn’t the answer. There’s no point trawling my friend list looking for anyone who’s listed “Manchester University” under “education” because that’s almost certainly not how I know them and it’ll miss loads of people who haven’t bothered filling that out. On the other hand, pretty well everyone at Skeptics has joined the Facebook group for it, so I could click “make context from this group”, it would create a new context named after the group and add the members and the group itself, and I’d be 90% of the way there. Add a couple of feeds and a page or two, and I’m sorted. I could probably import a couple of other skeptic groups and have a really useful resource.

Then I can add interests and other profile information to contexts, so my skeptic friends can see I’m on the acupuncture discussion boards without my family thinking I endorse it, and a Mistress could be open with all her subs about what fetishes she’s into without her boss being able to see it too. Friends and colleagues would see different email addresses. I would imagine maybe that members of a context could see that you were connected with other members of the same context, as distinct from Google+’ system where you can simply see a list of people in my circles without knowing which ones they’re in — so your professional and personal circles wouldn’t see each other.

5. Allow me to pull in information from outside Facebook

Facebook is keen to be my homepage, and it’s equally keen to know what I like, so it’s absurd that they force content creators to support them before I can read it there. Google Reader doesn’t work that way and nor should this. It will only encourage people to create fan pages if they discover they already have an army of Facebook subscribers.

Twitter has a good API, too. Let me add Twitter users to my contexts too. And perhaps tweet comments as replies if I’ve linked my Twitter account. Heck, maybe even invent a Twitter account for me if I haven’t. Turn Facebook into a viable Twitter client. Don’t compete with Twitter — eat it.

While we’re here, though, scrap the dumb “fan pages” generated automatically from Wikipedia, because they’re just hopeless.

6. Let me put non-Facebook content on my profile

Once the above is done, I should be able to add RSS and Twitter feeds to my profile so people can choose whether to subscribe in Facebook or not — and if I notice lots of people read my RSS or Twitter through Facebook, I should be able to link them so I can interact with them directly. Right now, I have to choose to show all my tweets to everyone or none to anyone, and I’ve no idea what my friends would prefer. Facebook are sort of fixing it, since I can now just about hide certain kinds of updates from certain people only, but really, who’s going to use that in any but the most annoying cases? And why should I have to have to import my blogposts as “notes”? (Answer to rhetorical question: so my friends don’t suspect the content is available elsewhere.)

I should be able to use Facebook as a landing page in the mould of Minicard. They want to be my permanent email address, why not my permanent homepage too? If it’s easy to set up then people will go for it, much like all bands have a mySpace just because it’s easy to set up and you can put songs on there. And then your users are pretty well locked in.

7. Fix the email alerts

I’ve mentioned this before, and they’d nearly got this right — implementing nearly all my ideas — and then they decided everyone was getting too many emails so they unilaterally changed all my settings and now I only get an email if I get a message and don’t visit the site for a bit. By the time it deigns to email me about it, there might be several replies. Not good enough, especially when they’re trying to set themselves up as a viable primary email address. A secondary messaging service that doesn’t proactively alert me when I have new mail is worse than useless — it’s like prayer or homœopathy: it gives people the illusion of having contacted me so they won’t bother actually doing so.

Secondly, the “other messages” folder is a liability. Events send me important updates and I never see them because they’re ferreted away without even a badge update on the home screen, much less an email. I have to explicitly check for these ‘bacn’ messages. It’s absurd — why would I not want updates about events I’m attending?

8. Duplex API

Right now, it’s very easy for developers to piss information all up someone’s Facebook wall but almost impossible to take information from Facebook to use elsewhere. This is why Twitter apps are varied and fascinating while Facebook apps are X-to-Facebook syndicators, quizzes and vampyric ‘games’ designed to make you spam adverts to your mates. Facebook is built on newsfeeds, and every single one of them should be available as RSS. If my tweets go to Facebook but my Facebook updates don’t go to Twitter, then Twitter, not Facebook, will become my social hub.

9. Add a calendar

Facebook is a great events handler, and not bad for messaging if you use it as your primary provider, so why not add a calendar? Isn’t that just common sense? Isn’t that a great way to get me to visit every day? Isn’t it a great way to convince office networks to unblock you? I use Google Calendar for work and I’m sure people would use Facebook for it if it supported that and didn’t mean sharing all your drunken photos with everyone on your friends list. As an added bonus, it could show you your schedule around the time of events you’ve been invited to so you’d know if you were available.

It’d be nice to have the calendar available when you were planning an event too, and for preference some system to create a dateless event and let people tell you when they were and weren’t available.

If the calendar and messages could be available via Microsoft Exchange or similar so I could use the native apps on my phone, that would be even better, although I imagine Facebook would rather I use their app.

10. It should always be obvious what is going on

If adding someone to a list will email them, tell me before I do it. If you add “following” as well as “friending”, make it clear that that is what is happening. We don’t trust you, so be more open with us until we do, and then keep doing it — for a start you can make the Friend Finder use Gmail’s API rather than requiring my password like a scam website would. And if you’re advertising a dating app, don’t add “Brian Jones uses this!” underneath, because that will only discourage me from going anywhere near it — people generally aren’t keen to broadcast their resorting to internet dating to all their friends. Quite apart from anything else, stuff I don’t want my friends to know is usually stuff that will bore them and I feel sure we covered this in point 2.

In short, I think Facebook has the potential to be far more useful than it already is. It could easily be more widely applicable while at the same time appearing far more focussed than it is. It’s decreasingly obvious what Facebook is for, and that needs addressing, especially if they’re going to go for a TweetDeck-style intimidating-wall-of-text-based interface.

And maybe I’ve totally missed a key point, and all this wouldn’t work and Facebook’s way really is the best for all sorts of reasons I don’t understand — but if so then Facebook need to discuss it on their blog rather than filling it full of propaganda about people finding long-lost relatives or whatever on their website. But right now it seems like they’re adding features haphazardly and quietly deleting them again a year later if they’ve hopelessly failed. If they have a vision, they’ve not communicated it to me effectively.

Lesbians exposed!

Some SEO for you, there.

In case any of you are unfamiliar with the insane background to this story, last week Avaaz, fresh from their silly campaign to “protect” herbal medicines that don’t work, wrote to me again asking me to help them free “Amina”, the author of a blog called “Gay Girl in Damascus”, who had been kidnapped by the Syrian government. Amina promptly turned out to be a man living in Scotland with his wife and beard. This story was apparently broken by Paula Brooks on her blog, LezGetReal, before she too turned out to be a married man.

Anyway. That is the situation, whether you want to believe such madness or not, and my beef with it is only to do with the response piece in the Guardian, by Julie Bindel — who claims to be a lesbian herself but one can never apparently be too careful these days. Her main thesis is that “heterosexual men are deeply fascinated and wildly confused by gay women,” and “need a man’s guide to being a lesbian”. This seems somewhat at odds with the evidence since apparently two of us had infiltrated their ranks quite successfully, so she illustrates the culture gap from the other side by utterly failing to understand men.

For example, she says

I have lost count of the number of times men have asked me what I “do in bed”. They can’t imagine sex without a penis being around somewhere, which is presumably why so many lesbian-fanciers offer to help out in the bedroom. … Male fascination with things Sapphic is usually born out of total indignation that we do not desire the male form.

No, it isn’t. I’ll grant you the “can’t imagine sex without a penis” bit — I couldn’t imagine how that worked when I first discovered that lesbianism was a thing. It’s like trying to connect an iPod to your stereo: you need to buy a male-to-male adapter or it just doesn’t work. But that’s just reasonable curiosity; it doesn’t mean we’re indignant about being excluded. If anything, I’m more indignant if someone I fancy is with another man. If I look at a lesbian and ask “what’s she got that I haven’t” then I think of several rather lovely things almost immediately and I’m forced to conclude fair play. Frankly, I expect most men think lesbians are onto something: we don’t fancy men and neither do we understand why anyone else would. Even the jokey, sit-com explanation of “male fascination with things Sapphic” is that we want to see naked women having sex without our gaze inadventently landing on a throbbing, erect penis. In fact, sexuality is just a bit more complicated than Bindel seems to appreciate, and for some reason, homosexual sex is hot.

It’s absurd to ask why men like lesbians. Why do we like women? There’s no practical reason in our heads. We don’t look at a gorgeous young lady and think “now there’s an efficient vehicle for my genetic code”. It’s not rational; it’s just built in. Accept it and move on.

After explaining how and why she reckons us men don’t understand lesbians, Bindel attempts to educate us, with her own list of Lesbian-Approved Stereotypes, which include

Pour scorn over The Killing of Sister George, Notes on a Scandal and The Kids Are All Right (because Julianne Moore – who you must fancy, by the way – slept with a man)

Buy a turkey baster. Do not use for basting turkey.

and

Do not bring flowers on your first date: bring your toothbrush and your cat.

and is illustrated with the following image, captioned “what lesbians like”:

I get that she’s joking, although I don’t know if the joke is ‘aren’t lesbians funny with their turkey basters’ or ‘look what those idiot men think about lesbians’, because nowhere in the article has she demonstrated the slightest insight into either of womankind’s major target markets. But either way, it’s still a list of sexual stereotypes, which is a shit joke in anyone’s book. But more than that, I think that if this exact column had been written under the pseudonym “Bill Graber”, it would have been immediately ripped to shreds by a mob of offended feminists, who quite frankly would have had a point. To be honest, I think it probably will anyway, but it’s straight out of the “it’s OK for me to say it because I am one” school of comedy. Well, I don’t think it is OK for you to say it, but more to the point, if men “don’t understand”, but lesbians can post lists of insulting stereotypes and expect it to be taken in good humour, then of course male bloggers of lesbian issues will do so under female pseudonyms! It’s apparently the only way to be taken seriously.

Of course, maybe I’ve got this all wrong. Maybe I, a mere heterosexual man, don’t understand the clever lesbian journalism. But see, here’s what I think: I think straight men and lesbians have pretty similar drives and emotions and the differences within each group dwarf the ones between them. So I think the question is not whether straight men “understand lesbians” as if they’re another species, but whether we understand what it’s like to be a minority. And I think I can say that quite safely, because I can only think of one person who could possibly make that comparison.

And since she’s described Bindel as “a homophobic… moron”, maybe I haven’t got it all wrong.

I’ll Give You “Logical Punctuation”.

There’s been a couple of blog posts, or articles, or whatever they are lately – one in the Guardian’s style blog and one in Slate — about “logical punctuation” and whether, UK and US differences aside, it actually makes sense to put commas and full stops inside quotation marks or outside them. Slate reckons the UK way is more logical. The Guardian reckons that what Slate calls “British style” is neither more logical nor widely used in Britain, and that neither it, US style, or actual UK style are all that sensible.

I thought I’d have a look at what truly logical punctuation would look like, with reference to HTML. That’s a structured, logical language designed for the display of text, and in the case of xHTML and other XML-based formats, can be used to convey meaning and semantics. Hence the semantic web.

In HTML, you can’t overlap tags. That is, if I want text to look like this, I can’t do this:

<b>if I want <i>text to</b> look like this</i>

I have to do this:

<b>if I want</b> <i><b>text to</b> look like this</i>

Or this:

<b>if I want <i>text to</i></b> <i>look like this</i>

I neither know nor care which WordPress will choose to use, simply because there’s no reason, in normal writing, to use such weird formatting. But the point is, an XML-based “logical” punctuation system would never allow you to start a sentence, then start a quote, then finish the sentence without first ending the quote. You couldn’t say

He said “it was a great triumph.”

even if “triumph” was the last word in his sentence, because the quote must be within the sentence or vice versa. Overlapping them breaks the nice ‘tree’ structure. (We already apply this rule to parenthesis, I think, and nobody would let you start a paragraph mid-sentence.) So if you wanted to quote his next sentence too, you’d have to write

He said “it was a great triumph”. “Everyone did very well.”

Just like I needed two bold or italic tags earlier, I need two quotes now. One inside the first sentence, and one containing the second. Or, I could do this:

He said “It was a great triumph. Everyone did very well.”.

Here, I’ve put two sentences in a quote in another sentence, which I assume is fine because there’s no logical reason why it shouldn’t be. I can do this sort of recursion as deep as I please as long as I’m careful, even having entire paragraphs in the quote, with the original sentence picking up afterwards. It would be confusing, but unambiguous, and in any case I do it all the time with block-quotes and nobody’s complained yet. Essentially we’ve introduced a use-mention distinction for whole passages of text. The full stop-quote-full stop ending is jarring but logical. Also, I’ve not put a comma or a colon after “said” for the same reason I didn’t put one after “put” just then.

You’d also be limited to quoting logical chunks of text: a paragraph; a sentence; a sub-clause; a noun with adjectives; a word. You couldn’t say

He said it was a triumph “and a joy to behold”.

because there’s nothing inside the quote for “and” to fix on to. By the same reasoning, you wouldn’t be allowed to start a sentence with “and” no matter how much in improved the prose. If you want to apply logic, do it consistently or don’t bother.

And I for one would introduce all sorts of esoteric marks derived from the current ones: question-commas, upside-down interrobangs to denote the start of an exclaimed question, a reverse-comma for use at the start of comma-delimited parenthesis and so on.

But it’s all a silly waste of time because people don’t talk or write logically any more than they love or paint or support Stockport County logically, and it would be a great shame if they started to. So there’s no reason why punctuation should be logical, and actually forcing it to be so just makes it harder to use and less expressive. So there.

My New Star Sign

The attention astrology receives amazes me. I’m told that around a quarter of people genuinely believe that the positions of celestial bodies can be used to divine the future, but nobody actually acts like they believe it. They just say they do in surveys. I’m therefore surprised when, say, a dating website works out my starsign from my date of birth and sticks it up on my profile as if someone will care. It does presumably filter out eleven twelfths of girls thick enough to base their romantic endeavours on the zodiac, so that’s arguably useful, and I suppose it also allows me to search for partners with birthdays that don’t clash with mine or with Christmas, but basically I’d turn it off given the choice.

Late last year LiveScience published an article about how the precession of the Earth causes the constellations to drift around the sky over thousands of years, and this meant that the signs of the zodiac were now out of step with the constellations whose names they carry. For example, the usual “tropical” zodiac makes me an Aries, but here’s (roughly) where the sun was when I was born:

Picture from http://my.execpc.com/60/B3/culp/astronomy/Fall/Zodiac.html

The Star Tribune published a comment, which included a calendar so you could work out your new starsign without looking up the sky map. This included the constellation Ophiuchus (or Serpentarius) which was dropped by the Babylonians because dividing a circle into 13 bits is too hard (or something; I don’t know how the Babylonians rolled). This went viral, because people love a good ‘they changed it’ story. It’s like when ‘they’ got rid of Pluto, or when ‘they’ abolished limbo — “they” in these cases being the International Astronomical Union and the Catholic Church respectively (although the latter story is mostly false even before you start questioning whether the Pope gets to choose what hypothetical planes of reality exist). However, according to a delightfully pointless article in Toronto’s Star entitled “Relax, says astrologer. You’re still a Virgo”:

It’s all in the planets, and the names of the signs are just a handy convenience that is a lot easier than saying, “when the sun is in the second house,” [Toronto astrologer Milada Sakic] told the Star on Friday.

Sakic, an astrologer for 20 years and teacher with the Canadian Association for Astrological Education, explains, “Astrology does not look at the relationship between the constellations and the Earth. We study the relationship with the Sun and the Earth and the planets.

The constellations, she reminds us, are “many light years away, illusions in our night sky. Their effect on us is very secondary.”

Quite.

So not only has nothing changed, but astrology has no governing body any more than English does, so there is no ‘they’ who can change it in the first place. Nobody can tell Milada Sakic she’s doing it wrong except by pointing out that her predictions might as well be based on the positions of the stars she sees when you wallop her on the head with an encyclopædia of actual facts for all that they have anything to do with future events. That both Sakic and Jacqueline Bigar, the Star’s resident astrologer, will have to do 8.3% more work if Serpentarius catches on is not mentioned.

But I still don’t really feel like Pisces either truly represents me or actually looks very much like any number of fish, so I took another look at the sky map:

Then I started adding my own lines:

And suddenly I realised what my new, true starsign is:

Here, therefore, is my horoscope:

Dawkins (March 14th — April 28th) — You are a British ethologist and evolutionary biologist. You are an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and were the University of Oxford’s Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008.

You came to prominence with your 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centered view of evolution and introduced the term ‘meme’. In 1982, you introduced into evolutionary biology an influential concept, presented in your book The Extended Phenotype, that the phenotypic effects of a gene are not necessarily limited to an organism’s body, but can stretch far into the environment, including the bodies of other organisms.

You are an atheist and humanist, a Vice President of the British Humanist Association and supporter of the Brights movement. You are well-known for your criticism of creationism and intelligent design.

Notable Dawkinses include Professor Richard Dawkins (born 26 March 1941).

It’s not bang-on, but it’s better than anything the old system gave. And it does work very well for at least one person.

I appreciate that this may not be the most important debunking of all time.

The auto-correct on the iPhone really is brilliant, but, as with T9 before it, if you’re in a hurry then one typo can totally alter your message. That is the motivation behind the latest online craze, DamnYouAutocorrect.com.

Damn You Autocorrect has amassed huge publicity and readership by collecting iPhone screengrabs where this autocorrect quirk has turned an innocent message into something disturbing, and it’s my opinion that most of them are fake.

I first started to suspect something was amiss when the following exchange was uploaded:

Your mom and I are going to divorce next month

what??? why! call me please?

I wrote Disney and this phone changed it. We are going to Disney.

I have an iPhone. This doesn’t happen. For one thing, there are seven letters in “divorce” and only six in “Disney”. The autocorrect can add in missed letters, but S is not near V and even further from O. I can’t see any way that you could aim for ‘disney’ and hit something that would correct to ‘divorce’, and nor do I think you would say “Disney” when you mean “Disneyworld”. (Obviously, just like Derren Brown’s lottery prediction show, there are people in the comments section giving all sorts of wrong reasons why the obviously fake thing is fake, including “Disney is in the dictionary”.)

I’m sure it’s possible to type this badly, and the submitter is defending it in the comments, but it’s so unlikely that anyone that incredibly bad at typing would surely read their texts back before hitting ‘send’? I mean, they’d have to, or else the text would say “Tour non and o ate going to divorce newt moth”. And at that point, you’d give up and just phone people.

It made me wonder how much of the rest of the site was fake, and being frighteningly anal, I checked. You probably have a qwerty keyboard in front of you now, so feel free to play along.

The last 16 updates contain the following ‘corrections’ I think are definitely real:

ORBIS = PENIS. O, R and B are right next to P, E and N (although ORBIS corrects to ORBISON).
UNOPENED = IMPLANTS. I’ve tried this and it works.

It also has the following typing errors, where the user simply typed the wrong word, which seem totally plausible but are on the wrong website:

Then there’s one I don’t understand, and a few that seem plausible but unlikely and I’m giving the benefit of the doubt:

SIT = SHIT.
ERRANDS = E TRANSSEXUAL. If you add a space after the E, RRANDS could easily be a typo for TRANSS, which is only really the start of TRANSSEXUAL. I can’t reproduce it but I’ll buy it.
FUTURE = FÜHRER. The umlaut lends this credibility, because the phone does add that, but I can’t make it happen or see how it could.

Then, there’s this lot, which I think are fake:

WHOLE = WHORE. So, your thumb is hovering over O, and you want to press L, immediately below, but accidentally lunge over the keyboard to hit something nearer R? Not buying it.
SALAD = SLAVE. SLAAD and SLADD correct to SPASS, and SLALD to SKALD. What did this guy type?
HERCULES = HERPES. Let’s say “HER” and “ES” were typed correctly, but two keypresses between didn’t register. The closest letter in “CUL” to P is the L, and HERLES corrects to HEELED.
HOME TOO = HORNY. I don’t know where to begin on this.
PIE = POO. Hitting O instead of I, sure, but really, you missed the E by enough to overshoot POW, POD or POT?
COKE = COCK. The words sound alike, but C is nowhere near K is nowhere near E, and COEK corrects to CORK.
YARD = VAGINA. No, it doesn’t.
LIVING = LICKING. At first I bought this, because C is right next to V. But the scientific method taught me that “LICING” corrects to “LIVING”, which is the word they were going for. Unless you hit KI instead of I, which is almost impossible on a touchscreen.

So, excluding the one I don’t understand and the two that could should be on DamnYouQwerty.com, we have 13 entries, of which at least 8 (62%) are probably fake. Even granting them the typos as valid, they’re 53% fake.

And, to be honest, even if the ones I’ve classed as ‘fake’ are real, sneerily blaming them on the tool rather than the staggering, megalithic incompetence of its users is so obnoxious I don’t want to know about it. There are websites full of bad pictures people have drawn, and they’re not called DamnYouPaint. The Daily WTF isn’t called DamnYouCompiler. Anything looks bad when it’s used by a buffoon, and it really annoys me when people criticise someone or something that a lot of work went into because it’s not fucking magic.

And for those reasons, I’m out.

On Twitter just now I was linked to this website, where SJ asks for $10,300 to finance a film called “Dead of the Nite”. Obviously, that’s an appealing and non-stupid title and, better still, big donors will get a cut of the profits and a spurious “producer” credit. Interested?

According to the Facebook page, SJ (who describes himself as a director) has written the flim himself. He’s also written the following promotional material for the site:

Former Pro Wrestler now a BAFTA Film Member, go figure!!

SJ learnt his trade through attending numerous workshops with people such as ‘Stephen Frears’…

…following the success of my feature documentary ‘Tattoos: A Scarred History’ (www.tattoosthemovie.com) which to-date, has quadrupled it’s income compared to cost to make.

It’s worth pointing out I’m taking these from two separate pages, one in the first person and one in the third, so this apparent inconsistency is not SJ’s fault. (Although the third-person article has the title “about me” so let’s not let him off too easily.)

As with my first project, I nominated a children’s charity to receive a portion of the films profits, therefore will be looking to do the same on this film if made…I truly believe in giving back to the World.

The film ‘Dead of the Nite’ will comprise of a mixture of youth and experience

Thank you for taking the time to read my pitch, whether you can help or not financially, please can you direct people to this page and share it on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc to raise the films profile and help us get a step closer to making the dream a reality!!!

This is the man who has written this film. This is how he thinks sentences are built. I appreciate it’d be pretty weird if a film’s characters spoke in standard English, but a writer should know the rules before he breaks them.

At first I thought it never occurred to him to hire a writer any more than it occurs to a lax self-publishing author to hire proof-readers or a cover designer. That stuff’s easy, right? Anyone can do it? I mean, it’s fair enough for a lay-person to forget certain jobs, and the way films are promoted the writer is as prominent as the best boy (whatever that is). But looking at how much experience he claims, I think he thinks he can write.

Abbreviate: a text-shrinking tool for Twitter

Tweetshrink is a web application designed to squeeze messages longer than 140 characters into a tweet. Personally, I don’t like it. There are a lot of nearly invisible cuts it could make and instead it just cuts out vowels and replaces ‘see’ and ‘to’ with ‘C’ and ’2′ respectively. Abbreviate is my version. Let’s see how they compare:

Original message: Let’s see how well Tweetshrink shrinks this tweet. (50 characters)
Tweetshrink version: Let’s C how well Tweetshrink shrinks ths tweet. (47 characters)
Abbreviate version: Let’s see how well Tweetshrink shrinks this tweet. (50 characters)

I should stress that Abbreviate only starts hacking off bits of your message when you actually go over the 140 limit (although you can change the limit if you want). Once you get under 140 characters, it stops messing about. So a very long message would suffer more drastic cuts than an only slightly overlong one.

Let’s try them on a longer message. Here’s a genuine tweet that was stretched over two tweets in my timeline:

Original message: I looked at the Twifficiency website — it doesn’t even say what the number means. Who cares what a number is if you don’t know what it means? And it needs access to your account. Anyone who knows their Twifficiency score has no right to complain about online privacy ever again. (278 characters)
Tweetshrink version: I looked at the Twifficiency website — it doesn’t even say wht the number means. Who cares wht a number is if U dont know wht it means? & it needs access 2 yr acct. Anyone who knows their Twifficiency score has no rt 2 complain abt online privacy evr again. (257 characters)
Abbreviate version: I looked@the Twiﬃciency website—it dœsnt even say what the#means.Who cares what a #s if you dont know what it means?& it needs access to your account.Anyone who knows their Twiﬃciency score has no right to complain about online privacy ever again (246 characters)

Okay, so the Abbreviate version is still too long, but it’s shorter and more readable than the Tweetshrink version, and any of the 18 changes Abbreviate has made to the tweet can be undone immediately with the links in the pink box. Once your tweet fits in the 140 characters you’re allowed, you can either post it using Abbreviate or copy-paste it into another client or the website. It’s all OAuth, of course, so I never see your password, and usernames, hashtags and URLs are all protected and won’t be abbreviated.

Anyhow, have a play with it and let me know if it’s useful and how it could be more useful.