I'll assume, for now, that you've been following the #amazonfail fiasco, as I don't have time right now to explain what happened. For now, I just need somewhere to post the following observations:

Amazon still have a lot to explain, and seem to think that if they (finally) issue a big apology, everyone will be so impressed with it that they won't need to give any more answers.

But we still don't know:

- If there's a real "No adult content" policy, or some variant thereof.

- Which state, nation or market they are implementing this for; it *seems* to be one at least as "conservative" as the christian right, and I wonder if it's an arab or asian market. Or possibly China?

- At what level this policy decision was made

- What criteria they are using to select "bad books" (both the "moral" criteria and the technical parameters to which they seem to match so badly)

- What form of crack their book taxonomy system is based on, anyway

- Quite how this big a technical fuck-up (presuming it really is a localised policy change that escaped into the wider world) happened

- How long this policy has been going on for

- Why it took them so long to respond coherently (and of course whether the "most official" response is any more true than the rest)

- How long it took them to work out what was wrong themselves, assuming they even have

When they explain that, preferably on the front page of Amazon.com, it *may* be time to say #sorryamazon instead of #amazonfail, but I very much doubt it.

I stood waiting for a bus last night. I knew it was a number 4; I knew it was suposed to arrive at 10:01pm, and that it should take about 14 minutes to get me to Waterloo, where I could catch a train home.

What I didn't know was when, or whether, it would actually turn up. There was no "countdown" display on the bus-shelter, so the information available was entirely based on paper, ink, and "should".

This struck me, in an age where the capabilties of our daily, hand-held technologies are developing at an ever-increasing rate, as frankly somewhat poor, even disappointing. Someone wasn't trying hard enough.

I own an iPhone. It's an incredibly polarising device; excessively loved by some, unnecessarily maligned by others. It does, however, have one point very much in its favour:

What it claims to do, it does. Well, and with excellent stability. In Apple parlance, It Just Works.

There are of course things it won't do. Copy and paste functionality is the classic example of what it lacks, much lambasted for the omission of such a simple, widely-supported feature. It's a bit of a riddle until you then ask yourself "but what is the standard, accepted way of supporting copy and paste on a multi-touch, gesture-driven device?" Of course there isn't one, and Apple's perfectionist attitude was that they'd rather not do it if they couldn't do it well. We'll see how well their implementation works in the mass market in a few months.

iPhones, after all, evolve. The device I bought on the launch day of the 1st gen phone was a very different machine when I sold it to get the 3G (mainly for the memory). The rule on "iPhone 1.0" was "This is a totally closed system; we give you maps, calendars, and the other standard PDA/smartphone basics, and if you want to do something clever, you go to the web". When I sold it of course it supported third-party apps, and had mapping capabilities vastly greater than when I bought it, among numerous bug-fixes & small enhancements. That process means that on those rare occasions when you do find a fault in the system, you don't feel you bought a dud device, just that you may have to wait for it to improve.

For copy and paste, of course, that wait was rather longer than we expected. But I digress.

The point I made above was that the iPhone does what it claims to do. I've been using smartphones and PDAs, generally from the Palm/Handspring stable for years. Their basic features all worked, but they were self-enclosed (trying to get them to talk to a PC or Mac was always hit-or-miss) and frankly clunky. Third party apps were of course supported, but generally pretty darn poor. Different versions of the Palm platform confused apps which frequently fell into disrepair, or just didn't work in the first place. Of course, the iPhone platform changes too, but with apps sold on a subscription model, they tend to evolve and be fixed in just the same way that the phone itself does.

My point, though, is not to write a paean to the iPhone; there's plenty of those around already. The focus is this: there now exists a stable, high-res, high-power, widely adopted portable platform with decent autonomy, and capabilities that until 5 years ago or less were science fiction, or at best divided into dedicated (and generally fairly dumb) gadgets.

The best example (and the best described, in terms of human impact) of these integrated Sci-Fi gadgets, by the way, are Kim Stanley Robinson's wrist computers from his Mars trilogy. The iPhone is, pretty much, that device. To use a phrase that's very popular these days, it is a "game-changer". And with the v3 OS coming out soon, it'll knock the game up to another level.

Fortunately, other companies are also trying to join the new game, but whether they're succeeding, or even outdoing the iPhone, is irrelevant to this post. The point is:

The platform exists, be it in one or many devices. What are we going to do with it?

And why did I start out waffling about busses and trains, and what does it have to do with the iPhone?

The latter question is the easier one to answer. On my iPhone, I can (simplifying only very slightly) click "Trains -> Next train home from where I'm standing" and it'll give me the answer, quickly and accurately. There's a few things it needs to know to do that:

1) Where I am.
2) What the nearest station to that location is.
3) How I define "home".
4) What trains are scheduled to run from 2) to 3), directly or indirectly.
5) Whether they're running to time

It uses quite a range of technologies to achieve this:

1) it solves by consulting the iPhone's "Core Location" service. This combines GPS location (gathered from a range of satellites thousands of miles away, of course) with ambient electronic clues in the form of WiFi hotspot idents, correlates them via consultation with a remote system, and returns the data to the app. Quite a trick in and of itself, but much more useful when it's an input to a system.

2) it solves by asking a remote database the question "Where's the nearest station to this location?" This requires network communications, a remote server infrastructure, and a geographically tagged list of every rail station in the UK. That's a fairly large database, although the proximity maths is reasonably basic trigonometry. In other words, it's consulting an expert third party.

3) Well, it asked me. If it was feeling really clever, it might have been able to look in my address book and find the entry marked "me" and work out a station from there, but frankly, people find that spooky. And interacting with the user, particularly when you give them a large amount of "usefulness" in return for minimal data, is still a pretty good idea.

4), like 2), is a remote database lookup, coupled with a routing algorithm that's probably quite complex.

5) again is a remote lookup, but with the crucial difference that's live data. It's not something I could find out in a paper timetable, rather it's a representation of the current state of the world, specifically of a really pretty complex railway system, that's updated every minute or so. That in itself is quite a trick of data transfer and management.

So, by use of massively complex national, international, and even orbital systems, I save a few minutes' time, or gain access to information that would have been unfeasibly complex to get by trying to follow the steps manually. Which it is depends on where I am, and how much I already know about the local area and services. Even if I know nothing, it can find me a route.

So, why the heck can't it find a bus?

Well, obviously busses don't run on rails or have to be scheduled through stations. But most of them do now report their locations to central systems, and there are databases and routing systems that can report on their intended locations and capabilities.

Basically, it can't find a bus because no-one's joined together all the systems that it needs to use to find a bus. The main step missing is a public interface to the "Countdown" data that's displayed on some bus stops, but it could also quite practically report on traffic and weather conditions along the route.

But there are a couple of other issues. There may be resistance to the public knowing exactly where all busses are at all times - people on those busses may feel uneasy, and I'm sure someone in Whitehall or TfL would consider it a terrorism risk. There are social aversions to this sort of sharing of data.

The company that's been most on the receiving end of those aversions recently is Google - both for their Latitude and Street View applications. The tabloid outcry (and you can classify most of the media in that category these days) has been somewhere between hilarious and utterly depressing. Classifying Latitude as "Google's spy in your pocket" has been one of the most impressive displays of hyperbolic, point-missing technophobia of modern times. Yes, it's technologically (if not actually) possible to create a system that will track people without their knowledge, but Latitude is categorically not that system; and if you claim "but Google are just saying that", you might as well believe that the spy's already in your phone, at the OS level. Latitude changes nothing at the technical level.

What it changes is the capacity for sharing that information - in scope, in precision, and in audience.

I know people all over the UK. All over the world, in fact, and they tend (and I) tend to travel. I can only guess how many times I've walked 2 streets away from a friend who lives in another country, and never met, and still not met them because I didn't know they were there. This might seem a slightly tenuous example of trying to force serendipity, but on occasion I've managed to do so, and enjoyed the results. Not by automated location sharing, but via Twitter and Facebook status - I, like millions of others worldwide, am manually pushing data out there to increase my friends' "ambient awareness" of me in the hope that it may lead to a meeting, or a laugh, or useful information. In extremis, it can lead to a new job, career, or lifesaving information.

I actually want quite a lot of people to know quite a lot about me.

Of course, there is also some information I don't want widely known, and possibly even some people I'd rather knew very little. Most people would generally prefer, for example, that their employers didn't know every pub and club they'd been into recently. And we've already heard too many cases where uptight employers have seen things on facebook that they've deemed dismissible offences, often such heinous crimes as "I wish they'd give me something more interesting to do", or "pissed again".

Of course in the latter case, the crime's not getting pissed. It's getting caught. After all, chances are the employer's doing exactly the same thing. It's hypocrisy, and it's not a technical problem, it's a social one. And it stinks. If we're going to make even comparatively innocuous data risky or guilty, we're going to have one hell of a problem with real ambient awareness, and geo-aware assistive tools.

Of course, it's not all just curtain-twitching; there are some real reasons why certain people don't want their location to be widely known - one friend of mine has a stalker who's life they'd rather not make easier. But, unfortunately, even without actively broadcasting ambience (that may be an oxymoron) no-one's location, or at least their dwelling, is an impenetrable secret. Ambience just makes it easier.

I don't claim to have a solution to that one, and we'll need one at some point, but, prudish attitudes aside, it's not a problem that needs to apply to most people. Frankly, the entity that most people mistrust with their location and ambience isn't other individuals, or their employers, but the government. And with good reason; their abilities to contain and manage data are on a par with an igloo's ability to contain a blast furnace. Even beyond that, there's too much evidence that they don't always act in our best interests - the number of people arrested or investigated under terrorist legislation for anything from peaceful protest to putting their bins out too soon attests to that.

If we could just fix the government, and people's attitudes, it'd all be so simple.

Well OK, that's obviously far from trivial; but it's worth recognising that:

1) Ambient awareness, and location-aware services, have the potential to be a massive benefit to us.
2) The problems with these systems tend to be more of attitude than of significant social or technical issues, and
3) That if we can't solve 2, we're massively limiting the use and usefulness of 1)
4) At the moment most of our apparent privacy and secrecy (and sometimes security) is a shared myth that it's doing us very few favours to perpetuate.

It's difficult to discuss these topics and maintain a fully consistent attitude with regards to personal privacy (although Emerson's comments that "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" may be applied; the world itself may not be consistent). We really have to ask what privacy we need, and why, and how we can maintain our freedoms and abilities if we shift that balance around for technical benefit.

That's *not* a topic I'm going to try to cover in depth right now, though.

I mentioned Street View above, too. Many people are, apparently, outraged that they've been caught in the act of walking in a street at an undisclosed date and time (although frankly, given the fuzzing, most people can only identify themselves, and that very rarely). Or they're energetically objecting to the fact that people can see their houses (from here). It's often widely forgotten that such ancient technologies as feet and eyes have had provided this capability for more than a few years. And there's probably more sensitive data in the phone book.

Again, though, there are edge cases where it matters more - if you're pissed and throwing up in the street you have little of my sympathy for your self-inflicted plight, but rather more for your colleagues' or employer's subsequent self-righteousness. If you're being treated by Paramedics, then I think it's fair that Google swap out that content when notified. But if you're upset about the deer being knocked over, please go watch Bambi and get a grip.

We might need to tidy the data up. But let's not just trash it on knee-jerk technophobia or future shock.

And you'd better get used to future shock too, because the future's accelerating. No, we don't have flying cars yet (thankfully), but we may still be at the first hints of the Accelerando.

At this point it's incumbent on me to mention Charlie Stross, not merely an excellent and humorous author, but quite possibly the UK's best futurologist. His Cthuloid spy stories and world-walking tales may not prove entirely predictive, but his near-future vision in Halting State is spot on (too much so sometimes, having seen two Halting State incidents in Eve Online recently). Equally, his canonical "Accelerando" is possibly the best tale of human reaction to future technological change, and even his far-future and whimsical Eschaton novels are excellent studies of humanity in technological extremis.

I don't want my flying car. I want my phone to tap my ear and put up a subtle glyph in my glasses if the Northern Line's packed up when I leave the office, or I'm looking at museums to visit online and the Overland's shut for maintenance. I want it to update my list of local eateries when that new Japanese place opens, and make me aware that Porcupine Tree are releasing a new album. I'd like to know that Jacques, who I worked with in Paris, just moved to Kensington. I want it to make my life subtly simpler, and help me connect with friends and old acquaintances.

Give or take the pretty poor state of eyeglass projectors at the moment, it's all entirely possible - and not merely possible in the Tomorrow's World, Martlesham Heath sense that "given enough boffins, we can make a proof of concept", but rather in the sense that 90% of it's already on the shelves and in people's pockets.

The future's very close. At some point, your phone may realise this.

On Twitter, everyone seems to have a different agenda. @snowvandermore even gives a list to chose from at TwitTip.

It can be tricky, when a random user follows you, to work out what that agenda is; what are they using twitter for, and why are they following you? The two answers can even be completely unrelated if, for example, a user is transmitting with one purpose and then using the account as a way of watching users that fit a completely different set of interests. So, do you block the user as spam, or assume you're doing something genuinely fascinating?

Personally, I don't tend to bother blocking users, but I was still pretty suspicious of @BN4WO08UUJ and @XTK1TLW55 (fairly enough as they now seem to have been suspended). Those were easy. What about @100MegsAskMe? Apparently a human, but the name's a mystery. @isevens is a complete mystery, as is @superiorcarcare. Is this last hoping I'll bring my Tesla to them for cleaning? I doubt it, I'm on the wrong side of the Atlantic and don't own a car. Are they fascinated by my blog posts? I've no idea. PHP developers and photographers are more understandable, but I'm a little more baffled by @scandicemorgan and @cindyreese, apparently two attractive young ladies who presumably want me to buy cameras from their "superpriceshop.com" sites.

I suppose it's also possible that I'm just far more witty and interesting than I'd realised?


On Twitter, no-one knows you're a dog, unless your profile pic is a dead giveaway. No-one can tell if you're a "Networking Expert" or "SEO guru" who operates by following everyone in sight as a substitute to providing interesting content.

So how do you guess?

Well, there are a few points I go by when deciding whether to follow someone back.

- Does your name (real or @handle) look like a human?
- Are you providing useful and/or readable content?
- Have you bothered to fill in your bio with something interesting?
- Have you provided a link to your site or blog? Is there evidence of a human there?

I don't want to be asocial and decide that people aren't "good enough" to follow, but I have a limited amount of time to read blogs. More critically, I don't want to feel like I'm being played as a sucker by advertisers, people who aren't "playing the game" of twitter - whatever that game is.

So - why do you follow people? What draws you in or puts you off? Do you bother blocking people?

While you're reading this, if you own an iPhone, go download the app and keep it on your phone until it's needed. It's free, and it's tiny.

And it's potentially extremely useful.

We live in an age of rapid information flow, but sometimes it seems that some organisations, particularly in local or national government, haven't quite got that memo yet - as my recent travails with the Post Office showed. MySociety is an organisation that exists to counter those delays, and help information flow freely to and from both local and national government. They, as volunteers, do a stunning job.

One of their sites (and they now have many) is "Fix My Street" site, designed as a convenient way to report minor (or major) problems with our roads. I'm sure we've all seen potholes, missing signs, broken streetlamps, and would have been quite happy to report them and get them fixed if we had the faintest clue how. The Fix My Street website is a good start, but you still have to remember the problem and get round to locating and reporting it when you get home.

Or, if you've got their new iPhone App on your phone ready, you can do it in-situ, have the phone's location services place you precisely, and take a picture of the problem while you're at it.

Reporting the problem is a two-step process; you provide basic information (enough to record the problem) in the application, and then receive an email with a confirmation link which takes you to a page where you can complete the process, adding a category and further detail. (Personally I'm not hugely keen on the two-step data entry, and I've given my feedback so we'll see whether any changes arise). The email confirmation step is common to pretty much all of MySociety's sites, as to be useful they *must* be kept nuisance-free.

Your report is then mailed to the right department of the right council (and that's the really useful bit!) to allow action to be taken. You can then see any other local issues reported and give feedback as to whether your own has been fixed. It's effectively crowdsourced bug reporting for towns and cities. And it's an excellent, if minor use of communications technology and mobile platforms.

Like I said; download it, install it, and forget it. It's tiny (0.1MB) and it'll sit on your phone and wait until it can help fix your town.

You'll probably have noticed that I'm somewhat fascinated by Twitter recently; it's recently reached critical mass among my friends and colleagues, and also gathering interest worldwide as it finds more users and uses. It's very much at the "cool new stuff" stage, with lots of new and innovative sites and information springing up around it.

As such, I thought I'd round up and recommend a few interesting links.

Firstly, for those wondering what on earth twitter (or the point of twitter) is, here's an excellent cartoon explanation courtesy of CommonCraft.

Tim O'Reilly explains why he likes Twitter.

Pistachio also have an excellent introductory roundup.

TwitTip gives tips on how to use twitter, and who to follow, albeit from a slightly commercial viewpoint.

Next, a few clients I'm rather fond of, as an iPhone / Mac user:

Twittelator Pro currently has pride of place on my iPhone.

On the desktop, Twhirl has recently given way to Tweetdeck - both are excellent, cross-platform and free!

Twit That! isn't exactly a client, but it's a useful bookmarklet that lets you share a URL you're reading in just a couple of clicks. TwitSnip is somewhat smarter, but a bit slower due to remote lookups. And for anyone wanting a full client in the browser, there's TwitFox.

One of the strengths of twitter is its openness (albeit with the auth issues previously mentioned), which means that there's massive potential for websites to integrate with it. Most of these provide ways to track the overall worldview of what's going on on twitter:

Twittervision is a fairly abstract global view with no real sorting, but gives a nice idea of the global reach of twitter.

Twistori gives an "emotional overview" of tweets. Again, abstract but fascinating.

TwitScoop is more structured, gathering worldwide topics in real time to show what's catching the world's attention. It's from this site that I learner about the Mumbai attacks, the arrest of Damian Green, and the recent earthquake off the California coast.

Twitturly does a similar task, but works on the URLs that are being shared via twitter (unpacking them from their shortened forms where appropriate). It's kind of a real-time, automated Digg.

Two more unusual uses are Tweetsgiving (a recent, successful charity intiative) and TweetPay (which appears to be an IOU system).

More whimsically, we have Twitter Image for free and custom Twitter Backgrounds, and Twitter Grader, which is mainly an ego engine.

For more links as I find them, follow my delicious twitter bookmarks.

Apparently there's a rule that every twitter user and blogger has to tell Twitter how to run their business, and now it's my turn.

OK, wind back a bit. Twitter is taking the world by storm; it's an excellent technology and has massive takeup; it may be a game-changer.

The bit that's (frankly) scaring everyone is that it has no income stream or business model. That raises the risk that it might Go Away™, and for large number of people who make serious use of it (or are building sites and businesses around it), that's an alarming possibility.

True, there are other services such as identi.ca, seesmic and brightkite, but none of these seem to have anything like the takeup. And I'm not sure that we can support a multi-provider environment as we have with instant messaging.

There are also two particular technical problems that bug people, and that they want fixed. One is the occasional downtime, and the other is the total lack of key-based or limited authentication in the API. The latter is that one that *really* bugs geeks; Twitter is perfectly placed to be the poster child for OAuth, but instead it's the king of the Password Antipattern - every site that wants to interact usefully with your twitter account has to ask for your username and password. This, frankly, sucks; any site can thereby easily hijack your twitter account and "spam" from it; and you can't de-auth one twitter-using site without de-authing the lot *and* having to re-auth all your twitter clients.

So, recommendation one: Let's have OAuth in Twitter. Free, please.

OK; we need money. Lots of money ideally. Ads aren't likely to go down well in a distributed messaging/ multicasting system. So we need to find an itch to scratch, something useful that's not essential (there's no point making basic accounts non-free, that'd kill the service) but would be Really Useful.

Various ideas spring to mind (which, frankly, the guys at Twitter have probably already thought of):

Paid "firehose" access - ie, access to *all* twitter posts. The problem here though is that's an astounding amount of data. Even if Twitter had the ability to send this data out to multiple source, most recipients simply wouldn't be able to receive it fast enough.

Increased feed calls: Every user is currently allowed 100 API calls per hour, which is plenty for basic users, slightly borderline for heavy users, and not nearly enough for "commercial" or professional use.

Customisable profile pages. At the moment, you can post a 160-character bio and set a background image. This has lead to some inventive solutions - even mine is quite decorative. There's capacity to improve this a bit, but how much, and whether people would really pay much for it, I'm not sure.

One thing I wouldn't ask for, though, is longer messages. Technical limitations aside, longer tweets wouldn't be the same thing; they'd be IM, email or blogs. In this case, twitter's limitation is its strength.

Premium service levels with increased uptime are also an idea that look better on first glance than on consideration. Improved service for some implies lesser service for others, and you have to be really careful with that.

I'm sure I had a couple more ideas. In the meantime, what are yours?

How do you find what's going on in the world? Google? The BBC or CNN?

Why wait?

We don't need to wait for the human delays inherent in data gathering and redisribution; we have the ability to go to the source. We can listen to the world tweeting.

I found out about the Mumbai attacks last night by watching http://www.twitscoop.com/ . It's one of a number of tools you can use to monitor the most common terms on twitter, and therefore find out what a significant subset of the world is thinking about. (The Age has an interesting piece on this event).

Right now, on Thanksgiving, most of them appear to be thinking about desert. This is an amusing artifact of the US-centric nature of the web, but twitter can also extend worldwide, even into less developed countries where most users tend to use handheld devices (for which microblogging is well suited). It's also telling me that "Conservative immigration spokesman Damian Green, has been arrested". Admittedly, this I could have found from BBC news by now - if I knew to look for it.

Twitter provides a particularly fine-grained form of what's now being referred to as "Ambient Awareness"; small packets of information from your friends and from the world that come in numberous forms and from numerous sources. Nowadays, everything is, or can be known, and it's becoming known every more quickly.

This can be overwhelming; as mentioned in my recent FoWA report it's referred to as "drinking from the information firehose". There is ever more information coming in to our daily lives, and we spend ever more time trying to manage it. Ignorance may not be bliss, but at least it gives you a rest.

Science fiction novels, and earnest speculation on the future, tended to assume that some form of "intelligent agent" would manage this for you. So far, those have conspicously filed to appear; the best we have as yet is filtering on things like google alerts, but trying to teach this system "everything I'm interested in" is still completely impractical.

There are tools under development to try and tackle this; Friendfeed (as discussed at FoWA) has some interesting ideas on this on the basis of the interests of your friends and colleagues; essentially using the "hive mind" of this group, coupled with your previous patterns of usage.

Twitscoop, then, taps the hive mind of a selected proportion of the whole internet, in much the same way that Google's "Zeitgeist" and trends do. But twitscoop is much quicker; twitter is more communication than documentation and so happens "live".

Sometimes, that can give you a peculiar insight into a terrible event like the Mumbai attacks. Sometimes it can tap into the group mind at a different, intruiging level and you see a brighter side of humanity.

This I also found recently via tweet trends in the form of "Tweetsgiving". 357 Twitter users got together and collected $10,591 (and rising) in 48 hours to build a classroom in a Zambian school. Obviously, someone set this up, but 300-odd people did it because they could see other people doing it; it was a group act made possible by the internet and the immediacy of twitter.

The rate of technical change, and information overload, that we currently face can be overwhelming. Maybe our best option to handle it is to share the work via something like twitter.