stormbrew

I doubt it’s news to anyone that Canada is about to get a new entrant to its lackluster cell phone market. WIND Mobile, partially owned by foreign interests, was temporarily blocked from using the spectrum they bought on auction last year, but managed to overcome that hurdle and are now gunning towards having phones on the market before Christmas.

I’m shocked at how quickly they’ve developed these plans, personally, given the risk of setting up their network when their right to use it was risky at best. Perhaps their willingness to push on in spite of that adversity is a sign of good things to come from them.

The really interesting, and positive, thing about their voice plans is the tendency for things to come in “unlimited” bundles. The base plan includes unlimited in-network calling. The next plan up unlimited in-province calling. And last, but not least, unlimited national calling. This is how plans should work. And it makes them extremely competitive. And they’re competitively priced at $15, $35, and $45 respectively. I’m impressed here.

Their smartphone/modemstick data plans are also unlimited, but they go out of their way to make clear that you may be throttled down to lower speeds if you go above 5GB/mo. I’m assuming this means you get deprioritized if you cross that threshold, and clients who haven’t get priority on the network. If that’s the case, it seems a reasonable approach to throttling. At $35 to add ‘unlimited’ data to an existing voice plan (including a full featured BlackBerry plan if that’s what you’re using) or $50 for a modem stick data plan, these are pretty good deals. Very competitive with existing data plans from other providers, and even good compared to the promotional $30/6G plan Rogers lured people to the iPhone with.

The phone selection is a bit mediocre, with BlackBerrys (yuck) dominating and no flip phones at all, and I suspect this is because of their use of the 1700MHz spectrum, which a lot of phones (including the beloved iPhone) don’t support. Hopefully this improves, and hopefully they aren’t too stingy about using unlocked after/graymarket phones. I don’t imagine they would be, because there’s no indication any of these prices are contract-subsidized. You may pay a little more for these phones than you would from Rogers, but you’ll also probably save a lot on your bill. Hopefully the next iteration of the iPhone supports the AWS 1700MHz spectrum too.

And now here’s the big downside: Coverage. If you look at the map on that page, their coverage is the little red splotch around Toronto. Judging from their PR, Calgary will be added to that soon. If you’re in there, all the above plans work wonderfully, I’m sure. Outside of that, though, you get some nasty roaming fees. $0.25/minute of talk time, $0.10/25kB of data. Incoming texts are still free, though it doesn’t say anything about sent texts.

Because WIND has to build out their entire network from scratch, this is going to be their biggest problem. Like Fido before it was bought out by Rogers, WIND will be stuck for a long time with only urban zones appealing. And like Fido before it, if they do succeed at that, they will become ripe for the taking in a buyout by one of the Big Three because of the massive capital investment it’ll take to actually build this network. One need only ask a former Clearnet or Fido customer how terrible that situation can become to see this possibility in the future.

So I see huge potential in this new entrant to the market, but I’m not sure if it’s all roses and puppy dogs. It’ll be interesting to see how it goes, and I look forward to them coming up to Edmonton. I don’t see myself moving away from my iPhone, though, unless Nexus One really is the second coming.

A few things converged to make this blog post happen, and it is a strange and mysterious convergence. First of all, the Fringe is coming up in a few weeks, and I’m super excited about it (more on that in a few paragraphs). Second, Mack Male posted a blog post to titled Discovering Live Theatre describing his early experiences with the Fringe festival. And then, last but not least, someone on an IRC channel I sit in mentioned that he saw Philip Glass today.

To which I answered, “did he buy a loaf of bread?”

Explaining this strange response requires going back to August 1997 or so (might have been 1998). You see, my father worked in Edmonton while our family lived in Red Deer. One thing that could always be counted on in those days is that my father would be out experiencing the Fringe Festival in late August. His claimed record stands, as I understand it, somewhere north of 30 plays in one season. This is a lot of plays to take in in one week. I thought it was a strange habit and didn’t really get it at the time.

Well, I was up in Edmonton visiting him and at the same time getting my first taste of the Fringe experience myself. One of the plays I saw was this one, as part of a series of shorts (don’t worry, it’s not long — just 5 minutes. Stick with it to the end):

This play, and all the other David Ives’ plays that were performed as part of this set entranced me. It was probably my first real experience with stage performance, and it was love at first sight. I’ve since seen a lot of plays, both at the Fringe and outside of it, and my love of stage theater has only increased since that experience. Especially small, short, quirky plays like this one. This play makes words dance in a way I’d never thought possible, and that is very powerful to an avid reader like me. It’s like interpretive dance (which I can’t get into at all) but for book nerds.

I’ve been back to the Fringe at least 5 of the intervening years, seeing anywhere from one play to my record of somewhere around 20 a couple years ago. Every year when I get my grubby hands on the Fringe guide, the first thing I do is search through it for any sign of a David Ives’ set. Someday, someone will do it again, and I’ll be there day one to see it.

But this leads to the really interesting thing I’ve learned about the Fringe, as well as myself, in all these years. I should explain that in the printed form, this play is very vague. There’s little stage direction, mostly just words. This leaves it highly open to interpretation. I suspect that every performance of this play is quite different, and looking at all the different youtube videos that suspicion seems to be the case. The one linked above is the closest to my fragile memory of what is to me the original of this play, but others may find other versions superior.

What I’ve learned is this: The beauty of the Fringe is the unique experience. No other entertainment venue I’ve ever experienced is so thoroughly dedicated to providing new, fresh, and unique experiences. Films are mass created for a mass market pretty much by nature. Music is likewise generally created always with the goal of the mass market in mind, and festivals around music are generally designed to pick out the next piece of the collective unconscious and give it wider voice.

But not the Fringe. Although I’m sure fame and glory are in the minds of more than a few of the playwrights, performers, etc. at the Fringe, it seems there’s an effort to create something special and unique, often deliberately designed to not function well as a mass market piece. The actors and playwrights may go on to bigger and better things, but their little Fringe plays rarely seem to. In that sense, it’s a venue for talent and not so much for product.

And that’s what I love about it. That’s what gets me back every year. It is my little rebellion against the collective consciousness, seeing things very few other people will ever see. Even fellow fringe lovers are unlikely to have seen the same segment of the hundreds of plays on offer as I did.

I’m gonna warn readers of my blog now: In a couple of weeks, there’ll be a lot of posts about plays I’m seeing. I do it every year, and this year will be no exception.

Traffic Shaping

On Monday, Canadian ISPs Rogers and Shaw went up in front of the CRTC to discuss traffic shaping. Traffic shaping is the practice of altering the way packets move through the network in order to (in theory) provide a higher quality of service. If you want to consider the tired analogy of the internet as a highway (super or otherwise), what ISPs do when they traffic shape is roughly equivalent to adding bus/carpool lanes. Common targets of this are things that need to happen very quickly (VoIP — internet telephony services, games, etc.) and things that they don’t want to happen at all (torrents).

ISPs catch a lot of flack over this practice. It often allows them to do fairly shady things. For example, Shaw could (and even might) slow down Skype (a common third party provider of VoIP services) and speed up their own “Shaw Home Phone Service.” But the thing that gets them in the most hot water with consumers these days is disrupting torrent use. At the moment, Shaw in some areas at some times will slow down torrents to a 10kB/s upload speed. And until this Monday, refused to admit they were doing it.

How Traffic Shaping Can Be A Good Thing

There are good reasons for Shaw to do this. Specifically, Shaw is actually giving you your bandwidth at a bit of a discount. A business user paying for a 10Mbit connection will pay substantially more per Mbit than a consumer. This is because business users tend to be saturating their connection most if not all of the day, while consumer users are not. ISPs overcommit their networks because, on average, it makes things better for the user.

If you use 10Mbit in bursts, and someone else does too, and you don’t overlap, Shaw gives two people a 10Mbit connection for the price of one. They charge less than business rates to each customer, but still make more overall than they would guaranteeing each user 10Mbit all the time. This is just good business sense and until recently has worked really really well. People who were around for the halcyon days of telephone modems may recall they did the same thing with phone lines. Every now and then during peak service you’d get a busy signal. Eventually, this got a lot worse until cable and dsl internet came along.

The problem is torrents change this game. Users running torrents are often saturating their connections 24hours per day. If not their download, then their upload. On cable, especially, that upload is shared among all users on the same node as you and performance *does* degrade for those other users. When people suggest that there’s no good reason for Shaw or any other ISP to be concerned and even act to limit use of your full bandwidth 24 hours a day, they are just plain wrong. There are good reasons.

But…

However, this is where the good sense ends. In their statements, Shaw and Rogers insisted not only that consumers unhappy with the shaping of their traffic would move to competitive services (this is true — I did, for example), but that they should be under no obligation to inform their customers of their traffic shaping practices. I hope I don’t have to explain the absurdity and insanity of this position. For consumers to make informed decisions about what product they use, they must have this information. For a provider to blatantly lie about their shaping practices is absolutely unacceptable. For them to insist that there should be no obligation for them to not lie is violently anti-consumer.

And it’s clear that customers are not informed of what they may be in for in the future. I’ve had discussions with people regarding my leaving Shaw for Telus where they insist quite strongly that they are not shaped by Shaw, and that that means Shaw is still the most competitive product out there. The reality, at the moment, is quite far from that, and Shaws ads are at best only slightly deceptive. It may be the fastest service per dollar, but only if you use the services Shaw wants you to use when you use them.

I hope the CRTC sees sense and requires ISPs to inform customers about their traffic shaping policies. I also hope they require them to wholesale their service to smaller ISPs without these restrictions (to allow for true consumer choice). And while I’m at it, I hope restaurants are someday required to put caloric information on their menus, but that’s another blog post.

Every now and then I find someone interesting to follow on twitter because of the links they post. Finding interesting links is a big part of why I use Twitter. It makes it so the links come to me with very little action on my part (thus fitting in nicely with the my lazy side). The other ways I know of to get links don’t really do it for me.

I’ve heard Twitter described as RSS 3.0, and I’d agree with that assessment. Twitter allows me to get new information on the basis of an ad-hoc network of people filtering that information. I follow people who are interested in similar things (and they do and so on) and bits of information get into my feed through retweets as well as original discoveries. In this way, all Twitter users are basically like the coffee beans in a coffee maker. A whole bunch of information (water) is poured in at the top, it gets absorbed into us, added to, and passed on, and then my follow list acts as a filter on the result. The disgusting gunk that’s left in the filter gets thrown out.

RSS, on the other hand, requires me to go to information sources and subscribe to them. I get either no diversity in this mechanism (just blog posts by the same people all the time) or far too much diversity (by following an rss feed aggregation that tends to include everything new under the sun — see also Digg/Slashdot — with no filtering at all). Twitter — and presumably other services like it — strike a perfect balance by allowing me to choose who I want to listen to. It’s a bit like finding your favorite movie reviewers and ignoring all the rest.

But sometimes there are threats to this filtering. Stuff like #moonfruit is one — by jamming as much noise into the pipeline as possible, it makes it hard to find any signal. Another, in my opinion, is FriendFeed. When someone uses FriendFeed as a client to Twitter, it does this very painful thing where it will turn links into ff.im links. Nothing wrong with a url shortener, but this one does something a little more.

Ff.im links have the painful problem of forcing me to go to a FriendFeed landing page before visiting the content. I have to be subjected to comments about a page I haven’t even seen yet before I can actually see the page. Not only does this not make sense, it also frustrates me. I get a lot of new links to look at on my twitter feed every day, and I almost never follow these ones all the way through to the content. At the moment of click, I usually know so little about the target that it’s just not worth it.

A big part of this is laziness, of course. I already admitted I am lazy above. But it goes a bit beyond that. FriendFeed is essentially advertising to me (I don’t mean banners, I mean they’re advertising their site/service to me) on every link that gets posted through them to twitter. As a non-user of their site (and I never will be one so long as they do this), I did not consent to be advertised to by them. Now that I recognize ff.im links for what they are, I just don’t follow them. And if someone I follow has this happen a lot on links I would otherwise be interested in, I unfollow them.

The first notable case of this was @Scobleizer, who provided a lot of the interesting links I read when I first joined twitter, but at some point all his links became ff.im links. I’m sure there are plenty of people who don’t care about this (I’m well known to care about things like this more than most people), but I’m sure there are also a lot of people out there who find this as frustrating and destructive as I do.

If FriendFeed really needs to tack on content to pages I view through their links, could they at least make it more like Facebook or Digg’s, with the bar along the top? As much as I despise those sorts of things too, they would be a huge improvement over being forced into an interstitial every time I click a link off twitter. Show me how many comments there are, allow me to expand that frame, and I’d probably sometimes even look.

There was a brief discussion on Twitter yesterday about whether meetings are a good thing or a bad thing. The question was raised, by a young and up-and-comer self-taught programmer and university student in what I understand to be one of his first office jobs (in the form of an internship), as to why others dislike meetings so much.

My off the cuff and simple response to this was to point out that he might understand better after he has a bit more experience and has been through more of these meetings. I don’t really like this answer, though, because it reeks of argument from authority. So I’m going to explain a little better, because I’ve found that meetings are often a source of frustration for people doing direct work (as opposed to managerial work), and I’d like to explain why I think that is and how it can be fixed from both sides.

The first, and most important, thing about meetings is that for them to be effective they must (in the words of another responder) have “purpose and progress.”

To expand on that, the “purpose” of all meetings is to inform. Sometimes in a single direction (for example, monthly status meetings from the CEO), sometimes in two directions (similar to status meetings, but with the added expectations of issues being raised from below), and sometimes in every direction (brainstorming).

Progress, essentially, means productivity. People should come out of the meeting feeling as if they have achieved something. This is difficult, since it’s hard for most people to think of being informed as something actually productive.

This much may be obvious. Beyond that, though, it’s important to realize that there is always someone who will find a meeting productive or it would never happen. That one person is usually the one who called the meeting. It is usually also the person in the most supervisory role who is attending the meeting. This person will always come out of the meeting feeling informed about something, whether it was the goal of the meeting or not. This is because their job is to supervise or manage, and management is all about information. Not just the overt statements, but the subtle cues of mood and interactions between their charges.

The problem is that meetings are not always called with the right people or clear enough goals.

I’ll cover the issue of ‘the right people’ first. From the perspective of the supervisor, it is always tempting to be as inclusive as possible because of the perception that that will help bring as much information to them as possible. From the lower positions, it’s always tempting to try to get involved in every meeting possible because of a perception that you might be missing out on something.

In the end, both of these desires can be somewhat self-destructive. They will create the illusion of productivity, since more is being said, but the value of the information being presented is greatly reduced. Consider it this way, though it is a bit of an oversimplification: Every person at a meeting is likely to have 10-15 minutes of potential contribution to that meeting if left unchecked. So, if the meeting is uncoordinated, a meeting of 5 people will take a little under an hour, or of 10 people will take about an hour and a half. If compressed, each person will have to cram information into shorter increments or leave potentially crucial information out.

Leaving information out and focusing on the essentials works really well if the people in the meeting are qualified to make those decisions. 15 minute developer scrums of 3-7 people work well because of this, since developers have a good sense of what’s important to convey to other developers. But this is not the case for the broader spectrum of meeting.

Also keep in mind that meetings cost money in terms of both opportunity cost and real hard cash. If the average hourly wage of all meeting attendees is $15/hr, there are 10 people in the meeting, and it takes an hour and a half, the meeting cost $225. Money that may have been better spent on work more productive on an individual basis.

In terms of ‘the right goals,’ on the other hand, status meetings are by far the worst offenders. Except when they can be organized efficiently and effectively like dev scrums, general status meetings lose effectiveness very quickly. This is because the goal is so nebulous and unclear that they tend to go off in many different directions. It takes a strong hand to direct this sort of meeting when it goes off the rails, and a lot of people are unwilling to provide that. Or, because they’re the supervisor and find value in ALL information conveyed to them at a meeting, they don’t entirely recognize when the meeting goes off the rails.

For all these reasons, I think it’s very important to take a skeptical attitude towards meetings. They are important, in fact vital, to the smooth operations of an organization. But at the same time, they are often a major source of frustration. Especially for people doing ‘real’ work in a company as opposed to having supervisory responsibilities. I think it’s important to say that this is not derogatory. I’m defining real work as the kind of work that has a clear and simple correlation between time spent and outcome produced. Coding is more or less like this, while managing a development team is not.

When people who do this ‘real’ work are pulled out of it to do a meeting, it is frustrating. It takes them away from the achievement that makes their job feel worthwhile. Some people can handle this, and they often go on to become good managers, while others don’t handle it so well. Recognizing this is key to making meetings successful for everyone.

What all this means is that in order for meetings to be successful, you need to always strive to have fewer of them, with fewer people. This is a case for efficiency, mind you, and not elimination. A good meeting leaves everyone feeling satisfied, and the more people or the longer the meeting is, the more likely someone comes out of it frustrated and bored. And this is a waste of time, money, and opportunity.

Last week we took in the Canada Day fireworks here in Edmonton. I’ll get right to the point and say that they were incredibly awesome. I’m pretty sure that they were, in fact, the best fireworks I have ever been personal witness to. Well choreographed, lots of variety, some really massive explosions (the kind that make your eardrums uncomfortable), and all ’round a really good time.

It felt good to be an Edmontonian. I’ve always felt the fireworks in this city are lackluster, and it was nice to see such a blatant example of an improvement in effort in this city. Say what you will of the broken window theory, but sometimes the small things are signs of big things changing.

As someone who has sometimes been depressed enough by the winters in this city to seriously contemplate running off to San Francisco, things like this are why I stay. The possibility of being part of something mediocre blossoming into something awesome is a huge draw for me. Even if this is a bit of a backhanded compliment, this potential is what I love about Edmonton.

Which brings us to the perennial debate about the Airport. I’m young enough that I don’t remember a time when Edmonton had a functional, consumer oriented city center airport, so there’s little nostalgia in it for me. I’m also young enough that I have only vague memories of downtown edmonton being home to a massive railyard, as well. I do have memories of being in my family’s car as we drove through the rat hole under what is now Grant MacEwan’s downtown campus, though.

I wonder, sometimes, during this debate: was there an anti side to that railyard being shut down and converted into land for Grant MacEwan and the Railtown developments? Granted I don’t think it was as large a parcel of land as the airport is by any stretch, but surely having a rail terminal in our core could also have been argued to have been important to business interests. Surely a lot of businesses had to move or shut down to accommodate the shift. A warehouse in what is now part of the downtown core, after all, would have become completely useless after it was shut down.

But it was done because it was, presumably, in the best interests of our city and its core. Railtown as a development may have its problems, but I’m still glad it’s there instead of a railyard and a track over Jasper. The railyard was shut down in the early 90s and took, really, until the early-mid 2000s to become what it is now, which echoes the fact that development of the ECCA will take time to be fully realized and that no one is or should be expecting it to turn around into something amazing tomorrow.

My biggest concern, here, is what will Edmonton be in 20 years? Or 30 or 40. The people in favour of keeping the airport open tell us it will be too difficult and take too long to close down, clean up, and develop that land. Well, in 20 years, will it take us any less time? Will we still be hoping and dreaming for our downtown to be free of a cumbersome limitation 20 or 30 or 40 years after that? I, for one, am not patient enough to reopen this debate in 20 years, when I’m 50, in the hopes that this city will be something when I’m 80.

In 20 years, if our downtown does not need buildings that exceed 150m in height (to put that in perspective, the Calgary Tower — which looks stunted and puny against Calgary’s growing skyline — is 200m) or for our downtown to grow into the areas with the most restricted heights (directly south of the airport, where Jasper 111 is the highest building), we will have, in my opinion, failed as a city to achieve our potential.

For us to achieve that potential, we *require* more density. To put this in purely monetary terms, a denser downtown means more tax dollars. For example, every person in my condo building pays property taxes, and per square foot of land footprint my building is almost certainly paying far more in tax dollars than any house. We dense city folk pay more in taxes overall and help fund all the services cities need, including, for example, public transit.

And this city suffers from a crisis of public transit. Our lack of density means we have to run buses farther out, on more routes that cover more streets, with fewer tax dollars per kilometer of bus route. We will always have suburbs, but they must be balanced by higher density in the core or we will all wind up paying higher taxes for poorer services.

Not only that, but for developers taller buildings are almost certainly far more cost effective. The costs of building amortize better after selling/renting with a taller and larger building. I’m not a developer, myself, but this is my understanding. And it is very likely that these limits are preventing developers from bothering with our city due to cost effectiveness.

And this is why our city must build up and not out. This is why the airport is an unacceptable burden on our city’s ability to grow and thrive. I love the idea of general aviation. I want to someday learn to fly myself, when I feel more able to afford it. But the current situation cannot stand. The 150m cap must be lifted sooner rather than later. The opportunity costs are just too high.

I don’t think anyone can say with certainty that either decision is absolutely, unequivocally, the better choice for everyone. And both sides of the debate seem to agree that there must be a decision on this and not just another deferral. The problem is, the only decision that can possibly be made, irrevocably, is to close the airport. Leaving it open will always be a deferral. And if we wait until we’re forced into this decision by immediate and pressing concerns, it will be too late. The developers, the jobs, and the people will go elsewhere.

Spammers on Twitter appear to have discovered how to use @replies to their advantage. For the twitter uninitiated, an @reply is essentially a public message. Prefixing a message with @username makes it so the target user sees the tweet in a special reply feed even if they aren’t following them, but it also allows everyone else to see it if they’re following both people or look specifically at the sender’s account.

Most spam on Twitter takes the form of someone who has 1-3 tweets following you, the idea being that you’ll look at their profile, find one of their tweets interesting, and click on one of them. Likely you’ll be taken to something completely different, but I don’t know because I don’t click on them.

(Note: You can easily tell a spammer since they usually have a username in the format FirstLast1234. Everyone knows real people don’t tack numbers on the end if they can’t find their username anymore. Except spammers I suppose)

Anyways, it’s interesting to look at the account I linked to in the first paragraph, because it offers a rare glimpse into the success rate of Twitter spam. We can tell that this user has sent out approximately 8,814 @replies about Lavalife to a presumably random selection of people. By tacking /info/ into his bit.ly link, we can also look at the Bit.ly info page for his link to see how many hits he’s gotten over the course of his ‘campaign’.

What we come up with is that 370 people apparently clicked on his link. Out of 8814. A clickthrough rate of a whopping 4%. That might not sound very high, but it’s not unheard of for banners to have clickthrough rates below 1%. I hate to say it, but it seems part of the reason Twitter spam is so successful might be because it actually works. I was really hoping for a different result here.

Though maybe this really just says something terrible about the banner industry, that it can’t even promote its clients as successfully as twitter spam.

Just read the blog post on Mashable calling the #moonfruit twitter tag “twitter promotion done right” and I couldn’t disagree more.

Purely from a financial perspective, I doubt it’s worth it. They are giving away 10 MacBook Pros. Each is worth, most likely, somewhere around $2500. So they are spending $25,000 on this promotion. This is a good $10k (or more) more than Squarespace would have spent on their supposedly ‘bad’ promotion (so labeled only because they were giving away gift cards and not actual devices), for a shorter amount of time on the trending topics list (10 days instead of 30). So if their goal was to have eyes taking in their name as often as possible for as long as possible, they’ve already done a worse job than Squarespace.

If their goal is to produce conversions in the traditional sense, then I suspect this sort of thing has a similar conversion rate as spam. Only they know the real conversion rate, obviously. Since this is so new a way of marketing, there isn’t even any precedent to work from. But my gut feeling is that most people who retweet moonfruit don’t care at all *what* moonfruit is. The 10 people who win may feel more engaged in the company, but the other million or so will just wander off never even googling the term (I know I haven’t). I really wonder if this will turn out better for them than buying $25,000 worth of google ads. That would get them 250 million ad serves at $0.10 cpm.

To me, for a viral marketing campaign to be done right, it must have actually engaged the audience somehow. Passing your company name along in a giant game of telephone doesn’t engage anyone, nor does it help anyone know what you are. I think if there’s one thing you can count on, it’s that a name attached to nothing is worth nothing. I wouldn’t be surprised if a poll of people participating in this campaign didn’t reveal a huge portion of them think it’s a promotion being put on by Apple. Or someone in their basement who stole a bunch of MacBooks.

And in the long run, I can’t imagine these campaigns working out well. I expect that we’ll soon see another. And then another after that. And then two at once. Hopefully at some point they fizzle out, because this is going to become a far more offensive form of spam than anything Twitter has seen so far. I can easily ignore follow requests from FirstLast23423, but half the people on my feed making inane #moonfruit posts? Nope, those are a little harder.

I commend experimentation and attempts to find newer, more engaging ways to advertise to people, but I think this is just the wrong way to go. There’s no entertainment value and they’re not helping me achieve anything. To me, these are the most important kinds of engagement viral marketing campaigns should strive for.

Oh, and I <3 Bees.

The Change

According to the New York Times, Facebook will soon be defaulting to having status’ (and by extension the replies that have largely replaced wall posts), photos, and videos show up as public content.

This follows on from the previous change that stripped Facebook of all of its filtering features and made it a twitter-like spamfest where all of your friends’ statuses are posted in chronological order and their pics/videos/etc. are less prominently displayed on the sidebar below the fold.

All of this amounts to Facebook essentially acting frightened of Twitter. In an effort to stem a tide away from their site, they try to make it more like twitter. I think this is a terrible idea, personally.

Why This is Bad

Facebook is completely missing the boat. This is a bold statement, since obviously facebook is huge, powerful, and hugely successful. What has, until the last few months, been an exercise in a well planned, masterfully focused campaign to drive people to a site because it serves a real and profound need has turned into typical startup-style flailing at a perceived competitor.

On the other hand, it’s not exactly a new sentiment. Every change facebook brings on there is a large and wailing group of users who complain that they don’t want it. I’d argue this is different. The previous layout changes merely changed the look and navigation of the site. These changes go much much farther. They change the entire purpose of the site.

The thing that made Facebook really catch fire was its ability to connect people who otherwise would not have been able to find each other. Not random connections, as a dating site creates, but connections with lost friends, distant relatives, and the people who throw the parties you love to go to.

But the truth is, no one wanted to see every waking thought from that group of people. The interest was in keeping general tabs on all of those people without overloading yourself with every single detail of their lives. Facebook’s recent changes threaten to throw every detail of the life of a third cousin twice removed you’ve met twice in your life at you, and this is highly undesirable. Especially when combined with all the other distant relatives and childhood friends who are likewise spamming you.

The reason this works on twitter is because I can run my twitter follow list like a petty dictator. I will unfollow an uninteresting or noise-spammy person on twitter at the drop of a hat without any fear of consequences. This allows me to filter the noise level to an extreme level. I can’t really do that on facebook, though, because unfriending relatives or other people in my real life circle of friends carries with it social consequences that are unacceptable.

So, there are two problems with this change:

• They leave people who want to have that general overview of their friends/family/childhood friends out in the cold. There is no service that can perform this task anymore.
• By making facebook more like twitter, facebook actually PROMOTES twitter. The more they sell people on the value of a spamfeed, the more people will want to go to a site that allows them the freedom to spam without social consequence.

But… Why Doesn’t It Matter?

In the end, though, it’s important to understand that all this doesn’t matter. Facebook right now is in the position that MySpace was in several years ago. They dominate the market so thoroughly that they can push these changes through and people don’t feel a sufficient pull of another product’s network effect for it to matter.

Twitter stands to gain from these changes, for the reasons above, because they do have a network effect in place and are growing strongly. There is a feeling of newness about Twitter that Facebook no longer has. Unfortunately, Twitter is not positioned to take complete advantage of this simply because they only supply one side of that coin. The people frustrated by Facebook turning into Twitter are not likely to move to something even worse for their needs than Facebook unless they find the appeal in that mode of communication. As long as their childhood friends and distant relatives and the only good event invite system everyone can agree on are on Facebook, there’s no point in leaving.

But if someone wanted an opportunity to take some of Facebook’s pie, now would definitely be the time in my opinion. I think it would take a company like Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo to push something like that through fast enough to take advantage, but I suspect they’re all too slow moving for that to be likely.

@ink_slinger linked to a City of Edmonton website today called “Idea Zone”. I was intrigued, so tried to find out what it was.

Go ahead, visit the site. See if you can find out what it’s all about. I can wait…

Did you visit it? What did you learn? Probably nothing, because in order to find out what this site is, you have to register. I don’t know about you, but I like to know what a website is before giving it my vitals. And its registration form is quite detailed. Although the more intimate fields (address and phone number) are not required, they are still asked for, which is quite intimidating.

So step one in how not to crowdsource is: Require me to register to find out what your site is.
And while we’re at it, step two is: Ask me for this much detail without buying me dinner first.

Thankfully, Edmonton blogstar Mack Male has a blog post that explains it all. Not a terrible idea, overall. I think they should have taken a bit more of a lesson from the low signups at the ICLEI Congress that there must have been something terribly wrong, but that’s a whole other matter.

The purpose of the site (for people who don’t want to click) is to get ideas for how to make Edmonton a better city. I sometimes think too much effort is put into finding ways to make this city better, and far too little into actually doing anything about it, but more input from a broader spectrum probably isn’t a bad thing.

So I register. Leaving out the gory details of my location, age, and phone number as I see no reason for them to have them. They do one thing right here and skip the activation step, so kudos on that. They miss the boat on the benefit of that step being skipped by not just having me logged in immediately.

So rule 3: Make me activate my account with a link in an email. Then make me log in even though I just gave you my username and password and so can’t possibly be faking who I am.

So I log in. Before I can do anything, I have to agree to this obscure set of rules about how my submission may or may not be used. I don’t really care. By now, I have gone through several forms, been frustrated and limited in what I can do at every turn, and am not really interested in submitting anything at all.

So a final rule before I sum up: Make me agree to rules I don’t care about even though this could have been a simple checkbox in the signup page.

But I go on, because now I’m on a roll and writing a blog post about it. Somehow I just can’t stop myself. I find that, since Mack’s post, there have been 10 new users and *no* new ideas posted. This comes as absolutely no surprise to me. I’m also too tired of signing up to enter an idea now.

I guess the city is using this software because they’re using a version of it internally with a stronger workflow. This is the public-facing version of that software. Well, I’m just going to come out and say it. The public facing side of it is crap.

When you’re crowdsourcing, your goal should absolutely not be to try to filter users out early. This is a super important thing for most sites to do because they’re looking to filter out all of the rough at the expense of some diamonds. Unfortunately, in crowdsourcing, you can’t afford to do this. The entire purpose of this process is for *you* to find the diamonds. That means a bit more work on your part, but it also means a less frustrating user experience.

Not only should users be able to see what the hell this site is without logging in, they should be able to see submitted ideas and even submit their own ideas with either a minimal (username/password) account creation or no account creation at all. It should be moderated, filtered on the level of word-triggers (no one will suggest to improve the city with anything to do with penis’ for example), but it should be *easy* to submit ideas.

Championing those ideas, commenting on ideas, there you can increase the barriers. But if your goal is to find new ideas, you must make this process much easier. It’s important to realize that internal and external tools rarely work well from the same package (see for example the dreadful WebCT — great for teachers, terrible for students).

To sum up all the rules in one sentence: Make it hard for users to submit ideas!