A few weeks ago, after a bit of pestering from a couple of friends, I succumbed to peer pressure and signed up for Facebook. I keep hearing about how great these new social sites are meant to be, but nothing has hit me over the head with their Wow! factor yet.

So, a few thoughts after trying it out for a while. It's not too bad and I'll stay signed up and current, I suspect. For me, it's an interesting intersection of two, previously fairly disjoint, parts of life: the IT portion and the "everything else" bit. Most of my online presence is fairly invisible to the latter group, since I hang out in reasonably technical circles. Turns out a lot of non-IT friends are already on facebook, particularly the younger ones who are right into the school/university social stuff. That should make it easier for me to keep up to date with what they're doing (and vice-versa).

Being able to pull information in from other sources (a.k.a. Facebook applications) seems like a mixed bag. Setting aside the various toys that look like they'll have fad life-cycles, it's handy that I can display my Flickr photos without a lot of effort (although it did take a while to find an app that had a nice combination of display and ease-of-use). Somehow — and this is a slightly tricky problem — it would be nice if photos pulled from elsewhere could be labelled just as directly imported photos are. The tagging of people in photos and inter-connectedness feature seems nice. It could be done as an overlay that checks the existing image against a hash so that they don't overlay the details onto a changed image.

The whole relatively carefree way in which people label themselves and others in photos leads to another point, though: the whole place really is a stalker's paradise. Most profile information seems reasonably well protected by default — you can't view it without having been befriended. However, photos provide a leaky source of names and images. Maybe I'm overreacting (having been a casual teacher in a couple of all-girls schools in the past, this stuff was well highlighted by school regulations and local laws), but is there a whole generation or half-generation growing up without sufficient "stranger danger" sanity checks in their head?

It looks like the intention (of the Facebook owners) is that Facebook somehow becomes the centre of the social sphere for somebody and everybody views information through the Facebook lens. I can't see that working for me, at least. Trying to pack that much information into a single browser screen and a paned layout leads to a mess. Still, I will be making bits of information available through my Facebook page for others' benefit, since some people do seem to live there, from the frequency of updates. Can't throw stones too much, though, I live in my feed reader sometimes and on mailing lists at other times.

Syndication feeds are only used sporadically throughout the site. They appear in a lot of places, but are conspicuously absent in others. Might be work in progress, might be oversight, might be shallow, woolly thinking. Hard to say.

Trying to determine the current status of various things is a varying experience, too. I requested an addition of my high school a couple of days ago. There's no tracking ticket number supplied, no feedback; the request has just gone into the ether and either it's taking longer than they predicted, or it's been declined. Similarly, sometimes Facebook tells me I have a friend-request pending with somebody and sometimes it seems to forget (or I do). I thought maybe it dropped back to "add as friend" if the person rejected you the first time around, but that doesn't seem to be the case — one person I could add as a new friend accepted a weeks old invite. I have a bad memory for relatively unimportant things and I could have expected some kind of "you have requests pending to these people" list to be available somewhere. Not sure how ignores/rejections should be handled, though. Do they also have a "you have been found to be unworthy" list? Or just drop back to where you can try again (which is the current behaviour)? Social interactions, particularly disagreements about status, are tricky, so I suspect this is actually a hard question.

Conclusion: I can see why it's a hit with many people, particularly school- and company-based social circles. The cross-pollination between my tech and non-tech (but not Internet-ignorant) social circles is an unexpected surprise and makes it worth it for me (useful, in other words). Seems more useful than other social networks I've dabbled in (e.g. LinkedIn).

Topics: life, thinking, technology/web

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If you've tried to access various pages (particularly in the archives) here over the past couple of weeks, you may have been inundated with a bunch of warnings about an expired SSL certificate. I was seeing them, too.

What was strange, though, was why. None of the public portions of this site use HTTPS. So I couldn't work out why requests were being redirected to https://... URLs. Even after a lot of poking around, I still cannot work this out and I'm not a neophyte when it comes to debugging or configuring Apache. Short conclusion: restarting Apache seems to have cured the problem. Fingers crossed.

Updated a couple of hours later: And now it's back to broken again. This is just embarrassing. People are noticing.

Topics: meta/blog, technology/web

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Aside from reading a few dozen weblogs and commentary sites each day via RSS, the two main places I go for current affairs news are news.google.com and the local ABC news.

Over the weekend, the ABC website rolled out an update. It appears this is a new design and feature set across the board, not just in the news section. So program websites have been updated as well. All very slick.

A couple of impressions from using the news front page for a couple of days:

It's very "Web 2.0", both in look and behaviour. Somebody has put a lot of effort into keeping it functional, though. I don't have Flash on my normal desktop machine (64-bit linux, because I choose to live in the 21st century) and I don't lose out on anything there. Blue and green seem to be the new black for these 2.0 designers. Get's a bit tiring at times, but it's not too hard on the eyes, which is important.

A nice grouping of the top stories by recent items, popularity and state, under various tabs. Response time seems good. They've discovered tagging and used it well. Even a little (very tiny -- good eyesight required) plus symbol against each tag to easily add it to a watchlist of tags you're interested in. They've also gone back and put tags on older stories, so I can view stories from the last couple of years in my neighbourhood. Tags accessible both as a list and a cloud (a.k.a "actually useful" and "for the ADD types")

Most stories have a Google map embedded in them (one example). Unfortunately, the map is zoomed out to the maximum, but that at least places the story in the right part of Australia and you can zoom in as appropriate. That has to be a useful feature, particularly for non-local readers.

Other sections have mapping options, too. I can see Mr. Fleck getting some use from this page, for example.

URLs are sensible — the above story was http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/06/19/1955037.htm, for example. Section, date and slug. Removing the slug portion doesn't do the intuitive thing (a list of today's stories would be reasonable). Still, any big website and particularly one just after a new release is always going to be work in progress.

My only real complaint is that it's slightly less useful as a place to view the news right from the start. They've put so much effort into providing customisation and links to other content that the number and variety of headlines on the front page has decreased. It used to be there was a double-column list of eight sections ("just in", "weather", "science", "world", "sport", etc) and a few headlines under each one. So a quick scan of the latest stories in each section took five or ten seconds. Now, each section is only on its own page, so there is more clicking around required. Looks like that is fixable with the customisation features, though. There's probably a way to use the tags to get back the old functionality, so this isn't a real drawback as much as a "discoverability" (if I may invent a word) issue.

They get an A for this site. The web group have done a lot of planning and work to create something that is very useful. I'm normally a bit disappointed by new glitzy "new news" sites that are released all the time, since they don't seem to always manage to actually display the news very well (and, of course, there are exceptions to that). The ABC have avoided the traps and done well.

Topics: media, technology/web

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I am slowly becoming a more frequent user of del.icio.us. Mostly as a way to store my bookmarks where I can get to them from multiple computers, but the tagging functionality is pretty useful and the ability to post links for others is something I use from time to time. I realise they're not the only game in town in this space, but it's the site I use at the moment.

I've been using their Firefox extension for a while, mostly as a quick way to tag pages. However, the recent update they rolled out appears to be borderline brilliant. Much improved integration with Firefox — it works just like real in-browser bookmarks now (although God knows what the network traffic it generates is like). Anyway, if you use this extension, it's worthwhile grabbing the update and then sitting back and holding onto your chair.

That is all.

Topics: technology/web

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"Papa, papa.... why should website content be orderd in a readable way, rather than in the presentation order?"

Websites are designed to be read by other people. Sometimes the content will also be read by machines. If you don't like this, feel free not to publish on the web. If you choose to continue, please follow normal conventions, because Google may not be just reading your header elements looking for a title and you could end up looking like the Pakistan Dawn newspaper:

Not sure what combinations of bad luck conspired to cause this to happen (and it was only at the top of Google's page for a few minutes, it seems), but it's an object lesson in why using tables for markup, poor semantic layout, letting advertisers run riot over your markup, etc, etc, can lead to no end of problems. However, I suspect something went pear-shaped inside Google's AI, too, because what they have pulled out as a title is marked up in "p" elements in the source, from what I can see from a short examination of the site.

(The news item itself is fairly depressing and won't help Indian/Pakistan relations. Let's me be very clear, here: I'm sure. I am in no way poking fun at the content of the article.)

Topics: funny, technology/web

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(I should be finishing off a prototype for a client meeting tomorrow. So naturally, I'm browsing the web and thinking about other stuff instead.)

Dave Shea has rolled out a redesign for his Mezzoblue website. Naturally, being a blog, there is a post about the changes and choices. I am not a designer, but I like reading about how other people work and I know what I like to look at, so Dave's thoughts make interesting reading (he was the guy who started CSS Zen Garden for those recently returned from a three year stay on Mars).

One of the interesting ideas on the site is hist idea of grouping posts into collections for archival purposes. Go read the above post for details and links, but there is some interesting thinking going on at the moment about how to present archives outside of just a list of dates. I particularly liked his idea of tying the colour scheme for each page in a collection to the photo at the top.

Dave attributes this idea to (amongst others), the Absenter photo journal. Go and have a look at this site. Click "back" a few times and notice how well the navigation colours match the image. Beautiful. I deeply wish I had the skills to create something like that, instead of just being able to be amazed by the result. Not all of the photographs appeal to me, but the ability to take a shot with mostly a single standout colour time and again is pretty impressive, too.

Topics: art/design, photography, technology/web

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