Apathy Sketchpad

I know it’s only February and I know there’s an election to look forward to, but if there’s a more completely absurd news story this year than the Gordon Brown bullying debacle then I’ll be very, very impressed.

The original story was pretty weird. The idea that the country was effectively run by a short-tempered, foul-mouthed Scot is, while not implausible, at least a bit derivative. It was pretty uninteresting when it was just allegations in a book, but then Christine Pratt of the National Bullying Helpline told ITN that they’d had several calls from Downing Street staff and rather than everyone saying “that’s shocking, thankyou for raising this important point,” which is presumably what she was expecting, everyone said “hang on, isn’t that a massive breach of confidentiality?” and then every single one of the charity’s patrons resigned. That two of those patrons were members of the Conservative party (one Ann Widdecombe, one a London councillor) and the website carries an endorsement from David Cameron doesn’t make the whole thing look any better. Pratt responded to this by promising to dig through thousands more confidential emails so she’d have “proof” (as if that was the problem). Now there are concerns that the whole charity was never anything more than a front for an anti-bullying consultancy firm. They’ve spent almost nothing and are behind filing their paperwork.

That alone would be plenty of stupid for one story, but then an Asian news channel helpfully animated the whole story in GTA-style. That, I would say, is the second layer of absurdity in the story.

The last story they animated is an enraged Gordon Brown hurling a tangerine into a laminator. This never happened. It was in fact a story invented by Robert Popper, author of The Timewaster Letters, which he phoned in to the ever-credulous LBC radio station, and was somehow uncritically reported by both The Sun and The Telegraph.

I can only presume that The Sun, in their zeal to make Brown look just as bad as possible, will literally publish any old fucking nonsense sent into them. If someone told them that Gordon Brown heated his house by burning stolen babies I’m confident it would be front page news the next day. The Telegraph just print whatever everyone else print because why check something if the competition can do it for you? Essentially the press in this country is nothing more than an institutionalised grapevine.

Of course, this rather took the heat off the National Bullying Helpline, so it was good to see them back in the news today, when one of the other ex-patrons accused Pratt of bullying her.

TV presenter Sarah Cawood…, a former patron of the National Bullying Helpline, says Christine Pratt left her in tears after accusing her of failing the charity. ”She was really pushy and I felt bullied.”

If the worst Labour’s critics have to throw at them is obviously made-up stories and allegations from corrupt charities then (a) maybe we might be spared a Conservative government after all, and (b) they haven’t been paying close enough attention.

I await with baited breath next week’s developments in this story. For my money, I predict that David Cameron will ask Gordon Brown about the tangerine story in PMQ, Christine Pratt will peel off a rubber mask and turn out to be David Cameron (or, more probably given his complexion, vice versa) and someone at The Sun will read this blog and run with the stolen-babies story. I’m available for quotes.

The Church of England have launched a rather silly new website called sayoneforme.com. The site mostly consists of a big friendly green box into which you type a prayer. Then you click the button underneath, which I swear is marked ‘Amen’. A cynic might (and did) suggest that for all the difference it would make this might simply delete the text and say God’s read it, but instead the prayer is emailed to a selection of bishops who will pass it on to God for you if you’re too lazy to pray manually or if perhaps you don’t know how.

There’s also a page of submitted prayers, so we can find out what Anglicans feel is worthy of God’s time but not theirs. (To be fair, God has more.) There’s also a rather worrying amount of personally identifiable information in these prayers, for example at least one full name alongside a description of the person’s problems, which seems pretty inappropriate to me.

I pray for Andrew – that he may find meaning and purpose in his life, and peace which passes all understanding.

The first thing that struck me as odd was that people pray in text-speak.

i love you jesus
keep me surrounded you
fill me wz ur holy spirit
let me know about you -ur ways -ur service
i need u
i love you jesus

It just seems rude to me. There’s even some all in capitals, as if that will help God hear it.

we pray for simon our vicar on his move. please set us the righr peauson to be our right vicar.

I do get annoyed when I mean to type “R” but instead type “AU”.

World peace is a common theme:

O God almighty I pray for all the countries with wars to settle.

Dear god,

please stop the wars from all around the world and let there be peace. please keep my family and my pets safe.

Dear God

Thank you for life and other people so i can make friends.And thank you for famlies if we didn’t have them i don’t know what will happen and please end war

Amen

Please stop all wars

dear god
please put a end to war
please make us give up somthing for lent
thankyou for making me

I think the biggest prayer was this one, although it is at least helpfully divided up into four sub-tasks for God’s convenience:

Our Lord in Heaven.
Please:
1- Give Peace for all the world.
2- Give health for all sick people.
3- Give work for all jobless people.
4- Let us love you, because you loved us first.

This is how democracy works in the Information Age. I don’t know if God is going to get away with not ending all wars now.

I thought this one especially sweet:

Dear God

Thank you for food. Thank you for animals. Thank you for birds that sing beautifully. I really appreciate all you have given us .

Amen

It reads like they just bumped into God in the office or whatever and it occurred to them they never really said thankyou properly. “Look, God, mate, I know I don’t tell you often but I thought you should know, we all really appreciate the way you created the universe like that. I mean, we use it all the time. Seriously, good work on that one.”

dear lord
sorry for leaving litter on your beautiful earth.

Games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto come in for a lot of stick, from simpletons who assume we’ll be violent in real life after playing them, and from moralistic fools who think we shouldn’t be playing them anyway because it’s ‘wrong’ to press a button that makes a machine draw a picture of how it imagines a man killing a prostitute would look.

But then I read that someone’s released the Bible on Xbox Live Arcade. It occurs to me that the events of the Old Testament would make for a violent, sex-crazed, prostitute-laden videogame that nobody could criticise. You could play as the Angel of Death, and storm down Egyptian streets slaying babies, or you could, well, drive around killing prostitutes. If the indiscriminate killing in Grand Theft Auto is too offensive, why not make a game based on Deuteronomy 2:33-34, where you run around a city killing everybody? A lot of people would be upset at this game, but I don’t see how they could complain because most of them are big fans of the book.

The New Testament game would be less fun, but easier because you’d get two lives.

Also the real-time-strategy element would probably be a bit unbalanced if all you have to do is march around the city a few times playing horns and the whole place falls down. What Biblical stories would make good criticism-proof videogames?

Five years ago, I subscribed to Amazon.co.uk’s e-mail newsletter because I thought it might be useful. It was. I thought it might alert me to offers I’d be interested in. It did. It has since become less useful. To illustrate why it is less useful now, and because I like them, here is a graph:

You may notice that December 2009 is not included on this graph. So far this month, I’ve had 9 e-mails, excluding ones related to orders. That’s equivalent to almost exactly 20 for the month as a whole, but I thought it likely they’d subside around Christmas, so it seemed fairest not to include it. Even without this datum, there’s a pretty clear trend: Amazon have stopped emailing me none-to-two times a month and taken to emailing me nine-to-twelve times a month. In the last week, Amazon have sent me six promotional e-mails. Their average for December is one every 36 hours or so. This graph reminds me of the terrifying one from An Inconvenient Truth. If it carries on at this rate then before too long it’ll catch up with the now glacially slow increase in my GMail storage quota.

Amazon have been spectacularly unhelpful in this regard. I e-mailed them about it and they said:

Dear Customer

Thank you for writing to Amazon.co.uk with your enquiry.

I’m sorry for any inconvenience caused in this regard.

I understand from your email that you are receiving more promotional emails everyday.

Please understand that these are automated and system generated emails. Unfortunately we do not provision to limit the number of emails which are sent to a specific customer.

We do have an option to unsubscribe from the mailing list.

If you would us to remove your email from the mailing list, please confirm using the link below:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/email

As an Amazon.co.uk customer or subscriber, you can receive e-mail updates about important functionality changes to the website, new Amazon.co.uk services, and special offers we believe would be beneficial to you.

Thank you for shopping at Amazon.co.uk.

Did we answer your question?

Well, no, it didn’t (and your link didn’t work).

I want my old, useful e-mail alerts back. I don’t want to run and hide from broken things; I want to work with their operators to improve them. I don’t want to start my own online shop. I’d be terrible at that. I just want one that works how I want it to so that I can buy things from it, and I’m happy to give a little of my time to help existing ones do that. I think if everyone did that we’d have a lovely little world where everything worked. But it needs the companies to co-operate with us, so I get cross if, when I give a company useful information for free, I’m fobbed off with a response like the one above. Worse still, there’s no real ‘reply’ option, merely a ‘tell us how we could have improved our response’ option, which is a needlessly roundabout and confusing question which I wouldn’t know how to begin answering.

So I’m replying here:

Dear Amazon,

No, you did not answer my question. (And technically I didn’t ask one.)

Allow me to reiterate: recently your e-mail alert system has taken to sending me a promotional e-mail every 36 hours or so. That volume of e-mail is neither useful nor solicited. You are abusing the contact details I provided you with to run a spamming campaign.

It sounds from your e-mail like your automated newsletter system has, for reasons best known to itself, elected to send me absurd amounts of increasingly useless e-mails. Let us be clear: this is a fault in your system and one which is costing you money. Fix it. Install a provision to limit the number of emails which are sent to a specific customer. I am happy to help you do this. A good start would be to stop sending people ‘deals of the week in electronics’ because they buy one memory stick a decade from you. Stop hectoring me to take out a trial of Amazon Prime. I don’t want Amazon Prime, because contrary to what your newsletter-droid apparently believes, I don’t use Amazon nearly enough to make it worthwhile. Don’t try to sell me shoes. I am never going to buy shoes from you; I have enough trouble finding ones that fit in real shops where I can try them on. Off the top of my head, perhaps you could weight each offer by how good it is and its relevance to my purchase history, and give me a slider for what ‘value’ threshold I’m willing to accept, or else give me a slider for how many e-mails I’m prepared to read every month and you can adjust the value threshold for me based on that. Maybe you could offer a weekly or monthly ‘digest’ email with anything this system filters out (obviously excluding offers which have by then expired).

It is in our mutual interest for me to when you have a relevant offer on. The system you use to alert me to this is massively broken. I thought you might be interested in this information but apparently you are not.

Suit yourselves,

Andrew

So Facebook has a new feature.

On the right hand side, it’s long since had little faces, with names, and the phrase ‘you have one mutual friend’. Which is fine when it’s that guy from uni who I never got round to adding but less useful when it’s a passing acquaintance of someone I randomly met at a pub after Facebook friending briefly became the new swapping numbers. And that’s passably useful, I guess, although there do seem to be only about six people going round and round in that slot like they’re terrifyingly stalking me and they have no idea.

Underneath that is the new feature. This is a someone on my friends list I’ve presumably not contacted in a while (or, I haven’t messaged on Facebook because I genuinely know them). It has their name and face, then says ‘catch up with him’ and ‘write on his wall’. The only use I can possibly think for this is that it will keep reminding me of which of my lesser-seen friends’ names connects to which human face. That’s a useful service, like flashcards for babies learning to speak, and naturally it’s only trying to help (and by ‘help’ obviously I mean, ‘ensure I do as much of my communication as possible via Facebook and not only read their ads but force my friends to read their ads’). I just feel like any day now Facebook is going to pop up a picture of an ex with a link saying ‘what happened to that nice girl you were seeing?’.

Well, thanks, Facebook. You’re helping a lot.

I was going to throw this up on Google Reader and let FriendFeed tweet it at you all, but since I have apparently become the standard reference for ‘perfect formula’ stories, I thought I’d stick it up on here. Presenting… The Respectable Face Of PR Science Formulae!

From the b3ta newsletter, it’s OK Cupid’s analysis of what words and phrases are more successful than others at eliciting a response to a first-contact message. Essentially, it’s a formula for the perfect on-line chat-up line, and it basically reads ’spell right, don’t be a creep, and mention specific interests’. It’s just a blog post, so it’s still not really Proper, Peer-Reviewed Science, but there are enough mentions of N and f and statistical significance — all used quite correctly — as well as a note about anonymisation, that my instinct says they probably did it right. And the results are a nice mix of the obvious (read the other person’s profile), the counter-intuitive (confidence is bad) and the interesting (mentioning a religion is good but mentioning atheism is better).

In any case, it does what the original ‘perfect formulae’ story tried to do (or at least what its creator claims he tried to do and I see no reason to disbelieve him), which is to combine clever PR with an actual attempt to show how science can be relevant. And it worked, because here it is in the Telegraph, alongside a photo of attractive young people kissing each other, for purely illustrative reasons, naturally. Wouldn’t it be nice if companies realised they could get the PR without the sneers of intellectuals if they just did these things right?

Also I’m inclined to like it because it seems to say that self-effacing male atheist physicists are sexy. And I think we can all agree that that’s basically indisputable.

I’m monumentally unimpressed by people who use AdBlock, or any other program or browser extension designed to hide adverts placed by website owners. My policy has always been that if a website has more ads than I’m willing to put up with, I don’t visit it. I’ve found that invariably advert-encrusted websites have bad content anyway.I don’t think it’s okay to download a website and then have software strip out all the bits that might be profitable before I see it. I think if I find a website useful that it’s only fair to allow the owners their revenue stream, especially since I’m not the one paying for it.

But, I thought, I routinely record TV shows then skip the ads when they’re on. Isn’t that the same? But no, I don’t think it is. My watching a show that was on while I was out doesn’t cost the broadcaster anything, and I’m doing it passively — I’m recording the shows out of necessity and then not feeling the need to voluntarily spend twenty minutes watching adverts. That’s not the same as going out of one’s way to avoid or ‘block’ them. When I watch TV at the time it’s broadcast I generally sit through the ads.

So, I thought, is this basically the same as copying CDs? I’m sure we can all agree that that’s both immoral and illegal and that anyone who thinks otherwise is simply better at rationalising their crimes than the rest of us, but still most people do it and clearly it’s not that big a deal or, necessarily, bad for the industry. But then I thought, no, people who copy CDs routinely also buy more CDs than the average person, whereas someone who uses AdBlock to filter out the mammoth reams of advertising on newspaper websites also uses it to strip out the relatively tiny ads on Google or Facebook, and these websites only survive because most people have either less technical know-how or more ethics than that.

The internet is built on advertising. It’s the best revenue stream it currently has, and while it’s not ideal, people are doing all sorts of really clever things to make it more relevant, less intrusive and more useful both to advertisers and consumers. Except, that is, for the users who choose to exclude themselves from this economy and simply scrounge off the wealth of tools and culture it has produced, while sucking resources out of it like some awful electronic leech, or a burglar. Not only that, but by filtering out easily-identified adverts, they encourage website operators to use more obtrusive, less clearly marked adverts the software doesn’t pick up. AdBlock is very bad for the internet.

If you use Adblock to filter out adverts from websites whose content and bandwidth you consume, I’d like to know what your justification is. Because my current theory is that you haven’t given it a second’s thought. Also I’d like you to turn it off for a week and see if online advertising really bothers you that much. If it does, I suggest you either change your web habits to visit better designed sites or just mellow the fuck out. If not, consider leaving it off and welcome back to the fold of contributing members of internet society.

I’m increasingly bored of this pigeon that’s supposedly faster than broadband. Here is ABC News’ monumentally crap coverage of the race, complete with inexcusably ghastly picture:

This week, a South African call-center business, frustrated by persistently slow Internet speeds, decided to use a carrier pigeon named Winston to transfer 4 gigabytes of data between two of its offices, just 50 miles apart.

At the same time, a computer geek pushed a button on his computer to send data the old-fashioned way, through the Internet.

Winston the pigeon won. It wasn’t even close.

It’s a cute stunt to highlight an apparently a bit rubbish internet connection. It’s just epically unimpressive because, as an actual experiment, it doesn’t make the slightest jot of sense. The two aren’t remotely comparable. If the pen drive had been smaller, broadband would have won. Had the distance been longer, broadband would have won.

Internet speeds are measured in data/time, with distance being less important. Pigeons travel distance/time, largely irrespective of how much data you tape onto them. If I was to copy 500GB from my laptop, through the Internet, to my desktop across the other side of the room, I’m confident it’d take hours even on a good day, but I could easily hurl my 500GB external hard disk the same distance and it’d get there in seconds.

I don’t mind this sort of thing being done, but it’s been over-reported to a ludicrous degree, and ABC’s line “just 50 miles apart” suggests to me that they think the short distance somehow makes this more impressive. Of course it doesn’t. Everyone who’s ever worked in an office must know that: you don’t email large files to your friend across the room. That’s what pen-drives are for.

And let’s not start on their throwaway and derisory use of the term ‘computer geek’.

Recently, I got a new phone. My old phone, a Sony Ericsson K610i, was just annoying me too much. It was falling to bits, the joystick didn’t work, it filled with dust, the screen was tiny, the paint was coming off the buttons, and the tariff was shit. So, I switched tariff and got myself a Nokia 7100 into the bargain. I’m not sure how the naming works, since I’m sure I had a 7110 years ago. I’m not sure when, exactly, but you can look it up because it’s the phone Neo used in The Matrix. Given that we owned The Matrix on VHS, I’m guessing we’re not talking about majorly up-to-date technology here. It had a black and white screen.

Anyhow, that was fine. That phone worked well. I’m bitching specifically about the 7100. It’s a great handset, don’t get me wrong. It feels satisfyingly sturdy, it’s got a decent camera and a good screen, it has a good four-way switch instead of a flimsy joystick, and although the button in the middle of that is too easy to press accidentally, it is, physically, one of the best phones I’ve ever used.

No, my problem with the 7100 is the software it runs. I’ve had it a few weeks now, in fact almost exactly three weeks, and I’ve already noticed the OS is crap. Here are my reasonings:

• When I open the phone, it takes two seconds to activate. That’s not a long time, but two fucking seconds? It’s a phone? What’s it doing?
• Google Maps doesn’t work. That’s the main reason I wanted a big screen. Not wanting to be unreasonable, I considered writing a hack on my webspace to feed the raster maps you get when you do a regular Google search to my phone. But…
• Even basic online content doesn’t work. I consider Twitter to be the basic, simple thing that any phone should be able to do. It’s simpler, even, than just being a phone. But if I try to use slandr.net, the phone locks up, sometimes whining about memory, and won’t do anything again until I take out the battery and hard-reset it that way.
• Today, an option was missing from the menu. I had no way of knowing what that was or if it was important.
• Today, the phone refused to lock the keys because it had a text it hadn’t managed to send yet (because it had no signal). Not sure what sense that made, but I guess the handset was never tested in a pub.
• Looking up contacts take a long time. Scrolling takes a long time, and it generally just takes a long time to do anything.
• The main menu is a 3×4 grid of icons. There is a 3×4 grid of buttons on the phone. The two do not correspond. Who thought that was a good idea?

I just can’t see how this can happen. Today I was in Tesco looking at the bread, and I thought, no, the bread I want is elsewhere, so I went to get that, but got distracted by one of the two hundred and ten other products in between. So I forgot to buy any. I realise this is partly my fault, but Tesco lost money on this (and so would I have if I didn’t have plans for lunch tomorrow anyway). I remember thinking that, by now, Tesco must have run enough shops for long enough that they’d be pretty good at it.

And I feel the same way about Nokia. By now, they should have written an OS for a telephone that could basically go from closed to making a phone call in maybe five seconds. It can’t. It massively can’t. It’s just not satisfactory on any level. I don’t see how Nokia, of all people, are still so shit at writing phone software.

And Sony Ericsson can do all that, but their handsets (while sturdy enough to be run over twice and keep right on truckin’) are shit. They fall to bits and fill with dust and the joysticks don’t work. But the software is great. You can run Google Maps, even if the screen’s not up to really doing it justice. The menus are fast and intuitive…

Is there a phone manufacturer that can do both? And that can do both with a real, actual keypad that isn’t a touch-screen with numbers drawn on? And if not, what the hell are these morons doing?

(Incidentally, I saw an advert today for LG phones, which advertised them on the basis of their interface. That’s amazing to me. It’s not why people buy phones — they buy them for the look and the features — but you spend days staring at and using the interface, so that’s exactly why they should buy a phone. It’s like an advert written by Aaron Sorkin!)

I’ve raised this issue with Facebook twice now and they’ve not responded, so I’m blogging it.

The crux of the matter, I think, is that Facebook wants me to see it as an entity in its own right, whereas I want it to be a tool. It’s arguably a meaningless distinction, but it can make a big difference to attitude. The email alerts are a big part of this. Because here is what happens when someone sends me a Facebook message:

1. Facebook emails me to tell me I’ve got a Facebook message from my friend.
2. I visit Facebook to read the message.

From: Clare Hunter <message1083610240352@facebook.com>

To: Andrew Taylor <taylor.andrew+facebook@gmail.com>

Subject: Stuff to do

How about going to see a film tonight?

View message in Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/n/?inbox/readmessage.php&t=1083610240352&mid=ee5fa4G3a92783G34fb8cdG0

Alter alert settings: http://www.facebook.com/account

From: Facebook <notification+5euiut_h_@facebookmail.com>

To: Andrew Taylor <taylor.andrew@gmail.com>

Subject: Clare Hunter replied to a thread on Facebook…

Clare sent a message in reply to a thread.

Re: Stuff To Do

“How about going to see a film tonight?”

To reply to this message, follow the link below:
http://www.facebook.com/n/?inbox/readmessage.php&t=1083610240352&mid=ee5fa4G3a92783G34fb8cdG0

___
This message was intended for taylor.andrew@gmail.com

Want to control which emails you receive from Facebook? Go to:
http://www.facebook.com/editaccount.php?notifications&md=bXNnO2zME0Zy5MjcMDMbODg0O3Q9MTA209NjM1zYxMDMjt0bz02MTQxNzM0Nw==&mid=ee5fa4G3a92783G34fb8cdG0

Facebook’s offices are located at 1601 S. California Ave., Palo Alto, CA 94304

Firstly, almost the whole of that email (including the entire first paragraph) is non-message related, which is to say, wasted space. But worse than that, I’ve got an email from Facebook instead of a message from my friend. My email software (in this case, GMail’s web interface) knows how to file messages. They’re from someone, to someone, and on a subject. So, if I want to search for messages from Clare about stuff to do, I can do that. Except I won’t find it, because this email is from “Facebook” and is about “Clare has sent you a message on Facebook”. It appears in my inbox as a generic Facebook message and I have to read it to see which it is. It threads with other messages Clare has sent me instead of other messages in the same conversation, and the whole thing just isn’t satisfactory. This sort of thing was fine in 2001. Now, it’s not good enough. The web has matured and Facebook hasn’t done well at keeping up.

Now I realise that the email above does include my friend’s message in its entirety, so you’d be forgiven for thinking that I’ve no reason to actually visit Facebook unless I want to reply. But if someone replies to a message before I’ve read it in Facebook, I don’t get another email. Facebook reasons, in the manner of those quaintly archaic ‘forums’ that just about still exist, that once I’ve got one message I’m committed to visiting Facebook to read it. So there’s no need to keep me posted. Here, again, Facebook is acting as if it is a website I actively want to interact with. It isn’t. I want it to be transparent to the point of being invisible.

It’s no longer good enough to import. It’s no longer good enough to be an application. Facebook has to become a server that I can use however I like. That is how it will survive. Twitter’s massive growth has been mostly put down to its excellent API that allows people to use it however they like. Facebook can import my Google Reader items and blog posts, but its outgoing RSS support is patchy at best. It can import my tweets, but it can’t tweet my statuses. It can email me when I have a friend’s birthday coming, but it can’t export them to iCal format (although someone made an app that does). Facebook has two RSS feeds and an impenetrable and limited pseudo-API that’s mostly used to annoy users with shitty quizzes. Recently I’ve been discussing with a professional network administrator who can’t figure out how to synchronise a Facebook page and an external website, because it doesn’t occur to Facebook that anyone would want to.

Facebook has ideas well above its station and needs taking down a few notches. Then it can focus on actually doing what users want it to do instead of what it would like to do.