Why I Switched

I was always unimpressed with Go Daddy’s marketing strategy. As a leader in the space, it was clear that “sex sells” was a mantra working well for them. Super Bowl ads and spokeswomen featuring fast cars and scantily clad women were the main selling points of the “service”. I felt that supporting Go Daddy was equivalent to supporting this tactic and confirming that the quality of the product mattered less than how much boob you could fit in a Super Bowl ad. This belief is further reinforced by the fact that it’s actually a terrible product. At every turn, Go Daddy’s site feels like a Las Vegas casino while every interaction feels like you’re buying from a used car salesman who wants to up-sell you two cigarette lighters with your vehicle.

The last straw was the video Bob Parsons, CEO of Go Daddy, proudly posted on his site earlier this year. In it, he proudly depicts a trip he took to Zimbabwe where he shot and killed a “problem” elephant, stood gloating next to the corpse, then carves up the elephant and hands it out to villagers wearing Go Daddy baseball caps. Even if there were “problem elephants” (which is untrue), it’s very clear from the footage that Parsons was rationalizing an expensive hunting trip as a “rewarding” thing to do in life. Indicatively, the original video has been edited. Though the poor grammar remains, the AC/DC’s “Hell’s Bells” overlay, the close-ups of villagers with Go Daddy hats, and the focus on Parsons making the kill have been removed. Thankfully, the internet, like elephants, always remembers:

Update 23 Dec 11: GoDaddy supported the misguided SOPA, and then dismissed boycotts, and finally, when business was clearly going to get hurt, rescinded on their support after 24hrs. Seriously, who wants to give money to these guys?

Registrar Criteria

Enough about No Daddy. With the decision to change domain registrars, I had to pick an alternative—and there were many highly recommended options. To help with the selection, I boiled down my needs to 3 main areas:

• User Experience: If the site makes it even remotely difficult for me to transfer, register, or find information, I’ll stay away from it. If the design makes my eyes bleed, I’ll assume their focus is much more on making money than on creating a pleasant service to use.
• Coverage: With the ever-increasing number of domain extensions, I wanted to make sure the registrar was one I could keep as many of my domains in as possible. I looked for companies that could register .com, .co, .io, .it, .me, .tv, and .us as a rough sample.
• Cost: As much as I am willing to pay a premium for a better service, this is a commodity service and a recurring cost.

What I did not look at were additional services such as hosting, SSl certificates, etc. Although Namecheap did have one of the lowest transfer costs (made even cheaper with coupon code SWITCH2NC), I didn’t seriously factor in that cost in my decision because it was a one-time cost. While a lot of registrars were recommended, there was a sharp drop-off after the first handful so I’ll only cover those.

Namecheap

By far the most recommended was Namecheap and for good reason. Their pricing is like their namesake—cheapest across many extensions (though tied with Name.com in many cases). They offer an average number of extensions (23). Their design isn’t spectacular but it’s friendly and easy to get around without the feeling you’re getting sold to every step of the way. I ended up using Namecheap due to the many recommendations. They also were voted best domain registrar on Lifehacker.

Gandi.net

Gandi.net was mentioned a great deal. I love their tagline “no bullshit” and based on their copy, I think their approach is great. Finding information was also fairly easy but I’ve read that they’re “techie” in past reviews and I feel the design matches that vibe. The services they offer seem to also support that their audience are those with much more technical and complex demands. They are a French company so their pricing is in Euros. Sadly, even if the € was a $, the price would still be the priciest of all the options by a large margin. One exception is in the international domains, where they are much cheaper. Given Namecheap doesn’t have nearly the same level of coverage, I may still use Gandi.net as the secondary registrar.

Hover.com

Hover has the best design among the registrars but their pricing is nearly the worst as is their selection (15 TLDs). Having their phone number right on the top of their homepage is a very encouraging sign that you get what you pay for in terms of service. If you don’t have too many domains and don’t tend to use international domains, Hover may still be worth a look.

Name.com

There were far fewer mentions of Name.com. I guess having the best domain name doesn’t make you the best domain registrar. Their homepage is cute, with the trendy sketch motif, but everything underneath the cover is pretty barebones. Finding the pricing information and TLDs was only possible through digging around in their footer. In terms of pricing, they are the best in many, though they’re three times the price for .it, one of the international samples I used. They also have a really large selection of TLDs and have additional services such as Name Grabber and auctions.

iWantMyName

Editor’s choice winner for Webhost Magazine, they’ve taken a Google-like approach in their design. It’s barebones, easy to navigate, and does the job. The have a huge selection of domain extensions but their price is the worst across many. It’s worth noting that of these registrars, only iWantMyName and the previously mentioned Name.com offer .io registration for now.

1&1

I still remember when these guys were offering free hosting back in the early 2000s for spamming your friends. I think I still have an old account with them somewhere.They also have a phone number posted which is definitely positive.  But overall, 1&1 is unremarkable. The offer the least number of extensions and are roughly comparable on the ones they do offer.

Pricing Summary

Again, I looked at a few different types of domain extensions to try to get a good cross-section and understanding of the cost distribution for common, international, and popular vanity  domains.

I actually did my domain switch before I was able to complete this in-depth comparison. Namecheap is where all my domains are now but looking at this chart, I might recommend Name.com instead to those asking. I have no regrets on my selection—the transfer experience was painless and the pricing very attractive. But now I need to have a secondary provider for some domain extensions. Of course, it’s only a matter of time before Namecheap offers more extensions, too.

Some additional views:

• Marco Arment on Why Is It So Hard To Be A Good Registrar?
• Chris Shiflett’s overview of domain registrars.

What registrar do you use? What factors are important to you when you chose yours?

@rodbegbie‘s Circles

Many discussions have ensued about how people are organizing their Circles. Many have also praised Google’s elegant and unique implementation as a clear answer to Paul Adam’s research entitled “The Real Life Social Network“.

I’ve been thinking about grouping and organization of friends for a long time. As an information architect, it’s in my nature to want to organize and tag everyone I know. I even wrote a post in 2004 about the organization of my instant messaging list. In thinking about this for a little while, I’ve decided to try to document my thinking so far on Google Circles, as well as the larger context of digitally grouping people.

Why We Need Groups

I’ve noticed from reading a number of articles about Groups, Circles, Lists, etc. is the variety of use cases and needs. We see so many implementations because there are many needs. There are different use cases for publishers and consumers, public and private, symmetrical and asymmetrical. Before I talk about the challenges I think Google Circles, and any similar feature faces, let’s look at some problems grouping attempts to solve.

Privacy

One reason for needing groups is because you’re only comfortable with certain people seeing what you’re talking about. For example, you may only want to share baby photos with family. Flickr’s Friends and Family settings are very much targeted for this use case.

Interest Context

Subtly different from privacy, you feel only these people need to know about what you’re talking about. An example might be asking for advice on what tires to buy from your car enthusiast friends. You don’t necessarily care that it’s public, you just want to make sure the right people read it. Currently, communities around interests is largely solved by services such as Yahoo!, Facebook, and Google Groups.

Local Context

Posts that are specific to your location such as “what’s going on tonight?” or “Anyone have tickets to the concert tonight?” should be targeted to friends within that geographic area.

Event Context

Similar to local context, when you’re at an event (e.g., Coachella music festival), you may want to communicate and publish only to your friends who are also at the event. Group messaging tools such as GroupMe and Beluga—and now Google’s Huddle—attempt to solve for this use case. Not surprisingly, all of these solutions are mobile-centric.

Organizational Context

Your college friends don’t know your ex-coworkers don’t know your softball team. Maybe you want to share a link about your alma mater or one on how your former company just changed CEOs.

Not Spamming Everyone

A corollary to the contexts is that one may not only want to publish a post to a specific audience, but may also feel self-conscious about spamming others with what’s deemed irrelevant material.

Targeted Consumption: Reading From a Specific Group

For any of the contexts above, you may also want to consume based on a grouping. Perhaps you wish to view only messages from friends also at Coachella. Or you want to read the latest tech news from the technology journalists and authors you follow. Twitter Lists is an example of a way to address such a use case.

What Google Circles Does Right

Anything that’s created this much discussion and buzz is clearly doing something right. While I think there are some challenges for Circles, they’ve done many things that I think are positive, innovative, or at least interesting.

Visible

Unlike Twitter Lists or Facebook’s Friend Lists (did you know you could organize Facebook friends into lists?), everyone in Google+ has to be in a Circle. This is a bold move and puts organization as the focus of the entire product. While forcing grouping may seem like a higher barrier to entry, their interface makes it as easy as adding a friend on other sites.

The Circle Interface

Circles is a delightful experience. It makes you want to add people just for the fun of it. I do feel the drag n’ drop interface is one that’s more suited for touch interfaces and may be too much effort for large collections of people. However, adding people to circles through their Suggestions is a cinch. If you haven’t tried deleting a Circle yet, you should. Delightful.

The Sharing Interface

Although not unique, the sharing interface is simple. I can easily type in the Circles I want to share a post with and it’s clear from looking at any post which Circle I shared it with. One caveat is that the Extended Circles option is a pretty confusing one, even for those of us immersed in this world.

Auto-Suggest Circle Members

In one of the first Circles I created, after adding only three people, Google started suggesting others to add and every single suggestion was correct. This made creating that Circle much easier. Unfortunately, none of the other Circles I created had suggestions. I suspect they are generated from the Google Group the members are a part of.

One Way Circles

I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure some people I think are my friends don’t think the same of me. Likewise, that guy who calls me his “buddy” doesn’t need to know that I put him in the “Acquaintance” Circle.

Why Grouping Sucks

When I first started using Google+, I had a sense of déjà vu as I categorized my friends. I’d done this before… on Flickr, on Facebook, on Twitter, on my instant messenger contact list, and in my address book. Shortly thereafter, I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t worth the effort to rigorously group everyone. Then I started thinking about whether it was ever worth the effort to do so. Because as much as one tries to emulate the real life social network and address Paul Adam’s research, there are some human subtleties we’re missing in the digital world.

The Soft Line

Have you ever had a Facebook or LinkedIn friend request where you weren’t sure whether to accept or not? There’s a soft line that separates a friend and an acquaintance.

It’s true that you can probably label everyone you met through an organization (school, work, etc.) but the boundaries quickly become blurred. Let’s say you met someone through your classmate but she’s not in your school. Does she belong in the school group? What about the person who sometimes hangs out with your group of friends? Or the guy you met dozens of times but only at parties?

We’re incredibly adept at knowing the right situations to include the right people. They’re not black or white rules and depend heavily on context: is it a party, who else is there, do they know any of the other people, have you talked recently, etc. Unfortunately, this skill and these implicit social rules we know are not easily translated.

Maintenance

I have a very close friend, Mike. We used to share an office together back in 2000. We talked about everything, went on trips, and hung out nearly daily. Today, I see him on average once every two months. We still share our thoughts and are there for each other for support, but life got in the way and our relationship is different now.

Sociologist Gerald Molenhorst has shown that we change half of our social network every seven years but there isn’t a Changing of the Guard ceremony here. It’s not entirely clear at what point Mike moved from one group to another.

Thus, maintaining digital groups has two problems. First, you don’t know when to move someone from one group to another because transitions happen gradually. Second, it’s simply a lot of effort to maintain. How often would you update the entire list? And if it’s not updated, how useful are the groupings, really?

Recall

I think I could run an open card sort for myself and probably come up with some good categorizations for my friends. However, once I’ve created these fancy Circles, will I actually remember who will see a given post? From my experience organizing my Facebook and address book, I’ve found that I don’t remember the complex taxonomies I dream up. In fact, I don’t know that I can list every person that’s in my “Family” group in Flickr even though it’s less than twenty.

When compounded with the high overhead of maintenance and likely outdated groups over time, it’s even less likely that I’ll know who I’m actually sharing a post with.

One use case where recall isn’t a concern is in consumption. If you’ve created a “Celebrities” group to read their content, it doesn’t matter if you don’t remember every individual in the group.

Can It Be Done?

The maintenance required for grouping our friends is too high and too vague. We simply don’t have the rules as clearly defined as programs require and even if we did, the parameters change. Your personal tastes change. The influential people change. Even your friends change. Keeping the groups accurate and remembering its members is a challenge.

The obvious question to ask is: what about automation? Google Buzz attempted to automatically determine social ties based on who you frequently emailed. That solution lead to disastrous results, linking a woman closely to her ex-husband.

However, Buzz’s nascent attempts and failures do not necessarily mean automation is untenable. If you’ve seen LinkedIn Labs’ InMaps, you’ll know that your network is simultaneously clustered and complex. You can almost make out the groupings but there are many nodes that overlap multiple categories or aren’t easily categorized at all.

A new app that launched last week, Katango, seems to be a technology demo of how we can use these clusters to auto-group your Facebook friends. I was impressed with how accurately they created logical groups that hadn’t occurred to me. Perhaps the smartest part of the app is that it then allows you to edit the group by removing people. This approach is smart because it’s easier to say, “this looks like my college drinking buddies… except that guy; he was only sort of with us” than it is to say, “this looks like my college drinking buddies… who’s missing?” Recognition over recall wins again.

Perhaps as we refine these patterns and technologies, we can start to not only recommend the grouping, but also recommend changes to the groups over time, thus lowering the maintenance cost. However, what I really wonder is whether we should be trying to mirror real life interactions at all. Instead of mapping, wouldn’t it be more interesting to change or create new behaviour?

Thanks to Dave Gray for his input and feedback on my draft (see his Google+ post on sharing) and to Coley Cheng for some masterful editing.

A couple of weeks ago, I attended Brooklyn Beta, a new two-day intimate web conference put on by Cameron Koczon of Fictive Kin and Chris Shiflett of Analog. I had the honor of being invited to present on some of our thinking and process behind #NewTwitter, the redesign of twitter.com.

Smaller, Smarter, More Intimate

The conference had only 150 people but all the speakers and attendees were incredibly bright and talented, working on a lot of great projects. By comparison, Twitter seemed like a large company which is amusing as we’re a mere 300 people working on one of the largest services worldwide. I’ve never once felt like I worked in a large company while here and in talking to the others, I understood why. Much of our approach and practices are identical to three-person startups and agencies and, if anything, our execution time is at least as fast if not faster.

Though there wasn’t any explicit theme, the talks all centered around having passion in the work you do. Christ Shiflett even said the conference itself was crafted out of love and you could tell from each presentation how much love was put into each project.

The Talks

photo by Chris Casciano

Shelley Bernstein (@shell7) is the Chief of Technology at the Brooklyn Museum. She talked about all the ways they use social media to increase exposure and create a better experience. Her talk was a highlight for me and I hope she can come visit Twitter HQ sometime to share her experiences. Shelley talked about how they allow photography, and the Flickr photos gave more exposure to the museum but also gave them more understanding of how people interacted with the exhibits, even in negative ways. She emphasized how personal voices from the authors added much more backstory to exhibits and photographs. But to keep the voices and the attention on Brooklyn Museum, they use ConnectTweet to have multiple people contribute to one account.

Facebook and Twitter are tools they use to continue conversations so that external articles (such as negative articles from the New York Times) aren’t the last word on the museum. Using these channels has also meant a different definition of working hours, as you have to be on when your visitors are.

Her use of Foursquare was particularly creative. They created a landing page on Foursquare so staff can add tips of places to eat near the museum. They also have the rule:

“If you are staff you should not be mayor.”

When the mayor checks in, they meet the mayor and take pictures! And in order to reward other visitors, they also created a “BK Art Star” badge.

Shelley then shared a story of how HBO found a photo of one of their statues, not in the Brooklyn Museum but “somewhere online”. The statue was featured in the series True Blood and Shelley only found out through Twitter and Facebook when visitors mentioned it. The engaged museum audience then asked HBO about the statue, inspiring the writers of the show to connect with the museum. For the season finale, which featured the statue, HBO sent photo to the museum as a preview and encouraged them to share it.

Elliot Jay Stocks (@elliotjaystocks ) talked about his process and struggles with his solo creation, a print magazine called 8 Faces. Like the founders of the conference, he wanted to make a special thing that’s unlike a regular magazine. Some of the key lessons he learned included how many unseen things take a lot of time. Examples include: getting ad placements, chasing people for their advertisement assets, getting payments, and dealing with after-sales support. Although he’d completed his interviews in February in March, the magazine wasn’t printed until August because it was his own solo project that happened over evenings and weekends.

One aspect he discussed, which was echoed by both Cameron Moll and myself, was the concept of focusing on experience first. He called himself an “accidental businessman” because money wasn’t the focus but he still succeeded. He didn’t focus on marketing but wrote a few blog posts and tweeted about the project as he would any project he was working on. This was enough to garner sufficient attention and, though he didn’t do a press release, the magazine was featured in the Independent and, at its peak, was selling 2.94 copies a second.

Cameron Moll (@cameronmoll), founder of Authentic Jobs, talked in detail of how he took a side hobby and turned it into his full-time project. The job board first started with a few people trying to hire him for full-time positions. When he declined, they’d naturally ask if he knew anyone he could refer. Soon, he was posting these openings in a sidebar on his blog. This process quickly grew into a full job board, as it became clear that companies were willing to offer money for the quality of candidates he could refer.

Like Elliot, Cameron didn’t ask for money first and didn’t focus on money. Instead, he focused on creating something that could connect job posters to job seekers and even guaranteed money back to companies (very few want their money back because they care much more about getting a good candidate than being reimbursed). In its 5th year now, Cameron is expanding the job board and offered a lot of heartfelt advice on balancing such an endeavor with giving back, and giving time to family.

Marco Arment (@marcoarment) is the former CTO of Tumblr and the creator of the popular mobile/web application, Instapaper. Continuing on the theme, Marco shared how he started the project as something he was building for himself and did so on train rides during his commute. He was frank and honest about his initial attempts which, in his words, “sucked”. Continuing on, after his first attempt, he created the current version of Instapaper. His first revision of 2.0 was built in a single weeknight as a challenge to himself to see if he could. Although ugly and missing some basic “paperwork” functions, it served its purpose as a way to read links later.

As a project that was built while still at Tumblr, Marco had much advice to offer for those thinking of working on side projects. He suggested not hiding the project from your employer, getting approval, and also getting very explicit clarifications around ownership. While side projects are incredibly rewarding, he also emphasized that “day jobs are great and you get paid more than you think”. But his best piece of advice is applicable to any job:

“Spend time, don’t waste time.”

Closing out the day was Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) from Union Square Ventures (investor in both Tumblr and Twitter). His talk was concise and informative, detailing the 10 Golden Principles in successful web applications:

• Speed
• Instant Utility
• Software is Media
• Make it Personal (Voice)
• Less is More
• Make it Programmable (through APIs)
• RESTful (everything should have its own URL)
• Discoverability
• Clean
• Playful

He then spent some time in Q&A discussing the traits he looks for in entrepreneurs. Amongst them, he sought people who had tenacity, salesmanship, and a passion/fervor for their product. He finds that founders who are good product people with a team of an engineer and a frontend engineer and design hybrid make an incredible team, though the mix may vary. In keeping with the theme, he also mentioned that he tends to avoid founders who are “business people” or, more specifically, those who are chasing the money.

The Demos

photo by Chris Casciano

Interwoven between some of the talks were early stage demos from small groups and companies. The demos included Goodsie, a site that makes it easy to sell merchandise online. With it, you can create a store in five minutes. Where’s It Up? is an expansion of the initial idea of Down For Everyone Or Just Me, adding location granularity to the information. Moontoast is a “social commerce platform” that allows you to embed your store elsewhere, and consolidate various communities.

Svpply is a product that’s been in private beta for awhile and is like a delicious for products/shopping. Gimme Bar, a scrapbooking tool to easily collect media and content around the web, had many conference participants saying, “gimme my gimme bar!” and Mapalong offered a more personal, open and visual approach to annotating trips, events or even your life.

My Talk

As a major site redesign, the overwhelmingly positive reception of #NewTwitter far exceeded our expectations. This level of success requires a lot of vision, teamwork, talent, passion, and a fair bit of luck. My talk described the process we went through as well as some of the thinking that went behind our decisions. Rather than recap the entire presentation here, I’ll save that story for another time and place.

What Others Are Saying

Finally, some of the other speakers have also written great summaries or linked to their talks:

• Simon Collison: Brilliant Brooklyn Beta
• Fred Wilson: Brooklyn Beta
• David Kaneda: Sencha Touch Workshop

Congratulations once again to Cameron and Chris and other organizers on a great conference!

1. “Why would I want to know every little detail about what my friends are doing from Twitter/Facebook/Friendfeed?”
2. “How do you not get overwhelmed by all the people you follow/friend?”

My short answer is I don’t treat it like a fire hose I have to drink down, I treat it like a stream I dip my feet in every so often. To explain this statement, I need to first talk about friends and travel.

I was born in Vancouver, spent my formative years in Hong Kong and then returned to Vancouver for the last two years of high school and college before moving to Austin for my first job. All this moving was a mixed blessing. I was able to experience many different perspectives and made a wide range of friends from all over the world. On the other hand, there were few friends that shared my experiences throughout.

Whenever I visited Hong Kong, which is roughly annually, I meet up with my childhood friends. Conventional thinking would say that, because we haven’t seen each other for a year, we’d have a lot more to catch up on than say, someone here in San Francisco that I saw just the day before.

Anyone who has experience with this can tell you that it simply isn’t true. When you’re apart that long, conversation topics feel like they need to be a minimum level of significance to be worth discussing: career changes, marital status change, buying of property, perhaps a new family member, etc. A sample conversation might be like this:

Friend: “So how’ve you been?”

Me: “Great. Things are going well. I got engaged!”

Friend: “Congrats! You still doing that computer thing?”

Me: “Yeah. Still at the same place. You still at the same firm?”

Friend: “Yeah, 3 years now.”

Me: “Wow…”

Friend: “MmHmm…”

In contrast, the friends you see every day or every week are the ones you can talk to for hours. Why? Because any topic is fair game. You don’t feel like you have to filter out the more mundane topics because it’s such a significant event to be catching up with the person. How was that movie? Did you go climbing yesterday? Did you see that crazy YouTube video? No topic is too trivial.

So how is any of that relevant to the information overload of Twitter and Facebook?

To me, Twitter and Facebook updates represent the mundane, everyday conversations that I could and would have with everyone if I could. By seeing the stream of updates from my friends, I have much more context into their lives, and a feeling that I can converse with them about smaller things. To use a clichéd term, I feel more connected to them.

When I see these friends, even after many months apart, I still feel like I’ve been talking to them and keeping up with them to some extent. Conversations flow more naturally and are much more rooted in the present than trying to bridge the gap since we last interacted in person.

I disagree with the fire hose terminology because it’s not something that is pointed at me. It really is a stream of information which I can look at anytime I feel like. When I don’t dip my feet in, the stream flows on, I’ve missed some updates, and it doesn’t matter.

We can look at it a different way, too. Whether we know it or not, each of us probably have at least 300 people we know and like enough to want to keep in touch with. If you saw each of these people for dinner one friend a night, you would see each person once a year. One solution is to simply forget most of these and hang out with the same dozen friends week after week. Realistically, there are far more than a dozen interesting and inspiring people worth interacting with regularly.

So going back to the original two questions:

1. “Why would I want to know every little detail about what my friends are doing from Twitter/Facebook/Friendfeed? ” Using it helps me stay closer to more of my friends in a way that’s impossible to scale with in person interactions alone.
2. “How do you not get overwhelmed by all the people you follow/friend?” I don’t try to read everything.

Don’t drink from the hose. Dip your feet in the stream instead.

It seems that Twinkle is taking advantage of their popularity in a completely irresponsible manner.

Before I go into details, let me quickly recap how Twitter’s conversations work. When you publicly reply to a person on Twitter, you type @USERNAME. So if my username was kevin, you’d type “@kevin that’s so true!”. Twitter and pretty much all Twitter applications support this syntax by providing a “replies” view which shows you every public Twitter that starts with @YOURUSERNAME. So you can see that it’s fairly important for these usernames to remain unique.

Enter Twinkle, who turn out to not just be a Twitter application, but a social network of their own. A person who uses Twinkle doesn’t have to be a Twitter user as well. They might just be Twinkle users, with Twinkle usernames. Thus, there are now two sets of namespaces with duplicate identities that might belong to two different people (a person named Peter on Twitter and a different person named Peter on Twinkle).

Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem. I have usernames all over the place. However, Twinkle decided that the way a Twinkle user should reply to other Twinkle users is also with the @ syntax and if the poster happens to use Twitter as well, that reply goes to Twitter.

What does this mean?

Let’s say there is a Twitter and Twinkle user and his username is Peter on both services. He has a friend who is on Twinkle only and her username is Jane. Suppose Jane says something witty on Twinkle and Peter decides to respond:

@jane LOL. That’s pretty brilliant, mate.

As a user of both services, his response goes out on both channels — Twitter and Twinkle.

At the same time, JaneB, a Twitter user who has never heard of Twinkle and  the owner of the Twitter username @jane, logs onto Twitter. She checks her replies tab and notices Peter’s message. Except she has no clue who Peter is, nor what he thinks that her last Twitter message about her aunt being ill is all that brilliant or funny.

Essentially, Twinkle’s poor product design, or if you give them less credit, their irresponsible product design, is hijacking Twitter usernames. I’m not the only one who’s noticed this, either. Their Get Satisfaction page includes a number of threads like this:

The poster is right. It is completely unacceptable. In an environment where we’re trying to find solutions like OpenID to consolidate our identities, Twinkle has managed to find a way to create an application that now muddies the definition of who owns a username. The question is, what can really be done? My suggestion is that Twinkle doesn’t ever cross post responses to Twinkle users to Twitter as well.

But the real question is, what’s to stop anyone from coming onto Twitter and creating a similar kind of clusterf**k, polluting or spamming every @name there is?

Update: It looks like in addition to using the @ syntax, they also allow spaces and special characters (e.g., commas, dashes, etc.) as usernames. So now if your username is @kevin on Twitter, you may be getting responses in your replies tab for people who say “@kevin spacey” or “@kevin.cheng”. If you wish to voice a complaint to Twinkle and Tapulous, you may want to add your thoughts on this thread.

First, you might find on Apple, this support document about how to do this. That process, though only 6 months old, is also outdated but it did help me figure out the real process.

Here’s the process to convert media to the format you want now:

1. Go to your preferences (iTunes>Preferences on OSX and Edit>Preferences on Windows).
2. Under the first tab “General”, there is an area where you decide how to deal with Audio CDs. Clearly, the import settings here apply to ALL import settings. Click on “Import Settings …”.
3. Under the “Import Using” dropdown, select the format you want to convert your media to.
4. Optionally, select the quality you desire.
5. Close all the preferences windows.
6. Select one or more songs from your iTunes library.
7. If you right click over your selection, you will see the option to “Create AAC version” or “Create MP3 version” etc. Or you can access the same option from the “Advanced” menu.

In case anyone is interested, before converting them to AAC, I used Audacity to format my music to a manageable, ringtone chunk.

However, a friend recently mentioned Facebook’s licensing policies as they pertain to photos and all content uploaded. I took a look and hear is what I found (emphasis my own):

When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

Now optimistically, this means, “we can use your stuff to help promote Facebook” but there is certainly sufficient language there to suggest they can do whatever the hell they want with it, including sell the photos. Granted, there’s a clause right after that says:

If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

But that hardly makes me feel better since wherever I store my photos, I plan to store for a long time. On Flickr, I can choose how my photos are licensed to the world and who gets to use them. As far as I know, nobody – not Flickr, not Yahoo! – can sell my photos or use them without my permission unless I explicitly set a license permitting such to the public.

Is this something that I’m just late to the game with? Is it common knowledge? Or am I reading too much into the text?

Update 2/16/09: The Consumerist posted about update to the TOS pointing out that the one “out” I quoted above has now been removed. Yikes.

Update 2/16/09 II: Mark Zuckerberg posted a response in which he states:

Our philosophy is that people own their information and control who they share it with. When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they’ve asked us to share it with.

Which sounds great but really doesn’t explain why they would need the right to “distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise”.

First, the practical question. Can i quote you?
[x] Yes, and you *must* use my real name (or any online handle/blog name you find useful)
[ ] Yes, but please use a pseudonym and don’t use any identifying information.
[ ] No, please just use this for your own weird thoughts.

1. Why do you use Twitter? What do you like/dislike about it?
I use it to broadcast short thoughts throughout my day or week or to share something funny I saw/heard that I think most people would find interesting or entertaining. I may also announce some news, “We came in third place!” or occasionally to just let people know what I’m up to—in the hopes that they’ll be seething with jealousy or very sympathetic to my plight.

As for what I like or don’t like, I like the multiple mediums I can access it from. I like how digestible the data is. I like the immediacy of some of the feedback (I’ve also used Twitter to ask for help or advice on something). I dislike the “@mrsmith” public Twitters that are in fact responses to individual Twitters because it assumes everyone else cares about both ends of their conversation. Whenever I’m doing a response Twitter, I either direct message or I publicly Twitter on the same subject matter without explicitly

2. Who do you think is reading your Tweets? Is this the audience you want? Why/why not? Tell me anything you think of relating to the audience for your Tweets.
My friends and acquaintances in the technology and design space. Also, there’s a large portion of followers I don’t recognize. I have no idea who these people are nor why they find a stranger’s Tweets interesting. I don’t really mind, either. I’m presuming at least some portion of them know of me somehow and I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting them.

3. How do you read others’ Tweets? Do you read all of them? Who do you read/not read and why? Do you know them all?
I know almost all of the people I follow with a few notable exceptions. One is the fictional Darth Vader Twitter because it cracks me up. The other is Scott Kurtz, the author and artist of PvP Online, whom I simply hope to meet. As for how, I mostly read them on the web or on Twapper on my phone in bursts. I rarely set it to update per Tweet unless I’m at an event like SxSW and need to know where the critical mass is.

4. What content do you think is appropriate for a Tweet? What is inappropriate? Have you ever found yourself wanting to Tweet and then deciding against it? Why?
Just about anything is appropriate but I tend to find repeated Tweets kind of silly (like 20 people talking about an earthquake and whether they felt it or similar number of Tweets on the weather). As I said before, the “@” Tweets are a pet peeve of mine. I’ve certainly been tempted at times but I stick to direct messages when I can.

5. Are your Tweets public? Why/why not? How do you feel about people you don’t know coming across them? What about people you do know?
Yes, they’re public and like blogs and Flickr photos, I am cognizant of that and make sure I don’t explicitly bitch about individuals or work. One is bound to regret that kind of thing later down the road. It’s public just because it’s an extension of a blog to me.

6. What do i need to know about why Twitter is/is not working for you or your friends?
It works because it’s accessible in multiple formats so you can consume (and create) in whatever way works best for you. As many have mentioned, it won’t scale. Twitter could be useful for a lot of other applications (like multiple authors Twittering to a team Twitter). The former Yahoo! project MixD actually dealt with a lot of these issues well but unfortunately had some fixable bugs that weren’t fixed and didn’t gain the traction it needed to continue.

Last October, Yahoo! held an Open Hack Day where we brought in developers and designers in the Bay Area to work on whatever they wanted to, and invited them to utilize Yahoo! APIs to make cool hacks … and that’s what people did. From Flickr Postcard mailers to a purse cam that sent periodic, geotagged photos to Flickr, there was a lot of great stuff that came out. And of course, there was Beck, the surprise performer.

This June, Yahoo!, in conjunction with BBC (“the Beeb”), are hosting a similar event but this time in the UK. A few of you UK readers probably already heard about this but if you haven’t, you should definitely sign up.

And yes, there will be a band playing. Not that you’re motivated by such trivialities.

Three things happened in quick succession this past week:

• Flickr limited number of tags to 75 and number of contacts to 3,000
• They also announced a date when the users who aren’t using Yahoo! accounts would have to merge their accounts with a Yahoo! ID
• Yahoo! launched a branded Wii site which includes a Flickr stream of all photos tagged Wii.

And what a reaction there was. People in an uproar over so many things it’s hard to enumerate. But as someone who is an old skooler and am inside Yahoo!, I really gotta say a few things to the whiners:

• Flickr has the best interest of the users in mind but it can’t make every last individual happy. Seriously, I know a lot of the people in there and they give a shit. You on the other hand, don’t seem to care enough to give the benefit of the doubt any time something doesn’t go EXACTLY your way.
• Get a grip. There is no conspiracy. You guys have talked about the doom and gloom and how Flickr was going to suck since the acquisition TWO YEARS AGO and guess what? It just kept getting better. Geo-tagging, guest passes, machine tags, printing of photos, half priced subscription … what the heck do you need as proof that Flickr is doing fine while in Yahoo!?
• Grow up. Tag bombing the Wii site by putting up “Yahoo! is Poo” images? Yahoo!, and many many many other sites, have been using tag streams of Flickr photos well before the Wii branded site. Sorry you were too clueless to notice that and it’s not because of Yahoo!’s Terms of Service vs. Flickr’s. Remember that whole Web 2.0 thing you guys love to be a part of? This is what it’s about. They’re public photos with creative commons license.
• There’s no point in lying about technological challenges. Flickr has some really smart people working on that plumbing and hey, when you build for millions of users and more photos than just about every other photo site out there, with real time ties in relationships, THEN say, “unlimited contacts should be easy.” Scalability is a hard problem. I don’t presume to know how you do your job.
• Does anyone actually know/remember 19,000 people? That’s not social networking. That’s playing MySpace Pokemon.
• Have they actually given you a reason to distrust them? Aside from “well I hate all things Yahoo!” which is completely irrational and devoid of logic, I mean. Yes, few of us are blind to the fact that Yahoo! has done some pretty crappy things with Geocities and numerous other things and we all know there’s a reputation issue but there aren’t many people around now that were around 5+ years ago. Leaving without even seeing it through seems kind of premature.
• Flickr has an API for you to go elsewhere. If that’s not a sign of caring about your data, I don’t know what is.
• Yahoo!’s sign in sucks. The namespace is polluted and it’s hard to get a good ID. The registration sucks. We know these things. We’re working on it. Having said that, the Yahoo! ID you use isn’t exposed on Flickr so having an unpretty name is actually not that relevant.
• Oh and, Thomas Hawk. Love your photos. Hate the way you continually troll Flickr forums while running a clone with a bad name (were two o’s and no e taken?) and an interface so similar it took me awhile to realize I wasn’t in Flickr.

There’s no question that there are problems with Yahoo! and a lot of the products. Flickr is not one of them and that hasn’t changed just because your sign-in is different. If you old skoolers find something better, let me know. I’m gonna bet you don’t.