Twitter Screws the Pooch

Twitter today with no notice made the optional mandatory.

For one refresh cycle of my Twitter web home page there was a one line notice that a change had been made to settings. It included a link to the Twitter blog for details, but there was no post yet.

The post is up now. 

The "Notices" tab under "Settings" no longer lets you configure how you get @replies aimed at people that you don't follow. Twitter unilaterally decided that us seeing @replies to someone we don't follow is a Bad Thing.

Probably half the people I follow I discovered because someone I already followed said something to someone I wasn't following yet. I wondered "What made them say THAT?" and took a peek. I'd be missing a lot of good Twitter friends right now if this had been the only option up till now.

Sure it can be confusing and undesirable to see half of a conversation while on mobile. There used to be a simple cure for that. Even if you forgot to change the setting before going mobile you could change it via the web browser on your mobile. For that matter, it was right there on the settings if you didn't want half conversations on the web or in your desktop client.

The Powers That Be at Twitter apparently believe that there is only one correct way to use Twitter. I disagree, I believe that there are almost as many ways to use Twitter as there are people actively using Twitter.  A few celebrities who can't be bothered to get an assistant to change the settings for them shouldn't lead Twitter to rob the rest of us of options that we value.

UPDATE: Some people are working around the issue by putting text in front of the name of the person they are replying to. While this works, it forces everyone following you to see all of your @replies whether they want to or not. Thus, by removing the choice Twitter has potentially made the situation worse.

UPDATE 2: If you visit the original post on the Twitter Blog, you'll see that over 75 blogs in multiple languages have responded to the change..

UPDATE 3: Biz Stone, one of Twitter's founders, has made a new post on the Twitter Blog responding to the objections. It's short enough that I'm going to just include 95% of it below:

We're getting a ton of extremely useful feedback about yesterday's update to Settings. The engineering team reminded me that there were serious technical reasons why that setting had to go or be entirely rebuilt—it wouldn't have lasted long even if we thought it was the best thing ever. Nevertheless, it's amazing to wake up and see all the tweets about this change.

We're hearing your feedback and reading through it all. One of the strongest signals is that folks were using this setting to discover and follow new and interesting accounts—this is something we absolutely want to support. Our product, design, user experience, and technical teams have started brainstorming a way to surface a new, scalable way to address this need.

Having been on the wrong end of scaling problems a couple of times in the past I understand that sometimes you have to take a step backwards before you can move forward. I hope Twitter will make this a priority.

Suicidal People in the Online World

A few weeks ago on Twitter a celebrity reportedly saved the life of another member who was threatening suicide. I mention this because a suicide or attempted suicide that you read about has different effects on different people. Some start thinking of suicide as a possible way out. Some become very sensitive about the subject and begin trying to save anyone who is even slightly depressed. And some see the fuss, and see a way to gain attention for themselves.

Monday night/Tuesday morning (depending on your time zone) there were a couple of people I know of who talked on Twitter about killing themselves. I'm not going to use any names here. If you think you know who I'm talking about you may be wrong. I only see the tweets of a couple of thousand people, there could easily have been more talking about the subject.

In the more than twenty years that I have been online, using a variety of services, I have known exactly one successful suicide. Call him "Xavier." It wasn't his name, or his nickname, or his online handle. "Xavier" had nothing to do with him, it's just a convenient way to refer to him.

Xavier didn't come into a chat room or a discussion forum and post that life sucked and he wanted to end it all. Oh, with 20/20 hindsight we were able to see a trail of breadcrumbs leading up to it. But we were ordinary folks, not psychological professionals. It didn't scream "Suicide warning!" at us. One night Xavier simply posted a chilling poem entitled "My Final Friend" on a message board in a poetry forum describing what he was going to do, then immediately went out and did it.

Xavier had already been dead at least a couple of hours before anyone who knew him read the post. That person thought Xavier was upset about something and wanted to see what was wrong. Nobody in chat had seen him that evening. Was the poem something to worry about? Not seeing him in chat was odd, but it was Saturday night, after all. Yes, the poem was dark and powerful, but he'd written powerful poetry before. We were still dithering when his ex-wife's roomie signed on and told us the police were there, and Xavier was dead.

Over the next few days we talked a lot about Xavier. We went back to the poetry forum message boards and reread all of his poems. Someone collected them and posted them consecutively as a memorial. Reading them all together, and talking about seemingly casual remarks he'd made in chat we reconstructed a trail that we thought should have told us what was happening. How the hell could we have been so blind? By the time we had beaten ourselves into emotional wrecks I'm sure we were seeing signs that weren't really there.

Fast forward maybe a month. I'm off in a far corner of the same online service reading message boards and explaining on those same boards why those who didn't agree with me were idiots. That system's equivalent of an Instant Message arrives. The conversation went something like this:

• Is El Cajon, CA anywhere near San Diego, CA?
  
• Maybe half an hour east of here, why?
  
• Get your ass up here to [chat room name]! We've got someone talking about killing herself and you're the only person in that area we know right now!
  
• On my way!
  

Call her "CryingBaby." Again, not her name, nor her nickname, nor the handle she used on line. Just a way to refer to her here. She was a Navy wife in her mid 20s. She was alone with her baby in a cheap apartment. Her husband was on an extended cruise and had never even seen their baby. She knew very few people in the area, and her life was an endless succession of bills and dirty diapers. She was lonely and depressed, and remarks wondering if it all was worth it had fallen on the virtual ears of a crowd of walking wounded who were determined that history would NOT repeat itself if we could help it.

I entered chat and introduced myself to CryingBaby. Fate was kind in one thing, I was a Navy Brat. I'd grown up seeing and hearing about the things, good and bad, that women with husbands gone for up to a year and a half did. We had an insider's lingo that made her more willing to talk. First an hour or so typing in chat, then she gave me her phone number. (During the time we were in chat anxious friends kept sending me messages that said things like "Don't let this one get away!")

Did I save a life? I don't think so in this case. CryingBaby was stressed, lonely, and depressed when I met her, but having a friend was all she needed. She got more friends, virtual ones, as I introduced her to people online. A couple of them were Navy wives who had been in her shoes, others were just folks to chat with. CryingBaby didn't want to die, she wanted not to be alone. The fact that Xavier had killed himself just a few weeks before had made us oversensitive, and we had gone into a panic without cause.

If you're still reading I'll talk about one more. We'll call him "Billy." Same disclaimers. Billy was 14. His mother was dying. His father was abusive. His sister slept around. Bullies beat him up. Billy told us he wanted to die.

We'd gone from the low of Xavier's suicide to the high of believing we had saved CryingBaby. Hey, we were Hot Stuff, we could help anybody now! Yeah, right. We were chumps just waiting for Billy's mind games.

Bear in mind this was before Google, Wikipedia, or any of the other multitude of online references that we now take for granted. So when Billy told us his mom was suffering from Something Awful we didn't have any quick and easy way of fact checking. This enabled Billy to lead us on for nearly a month. Ultimately his lies got too complex and someone caught on. We didn't want to believe, but we couldn't just write off our friend who thought Billy was a liar. In an effort to show that our friend was mistaken some of us made trips to our local libraries. Billy was indeed a liar.

Billy's mom was fine, she just worked a lot. Dad worked a lot, drank a lot, watched TV a lot. He didn't have a sister. Billy was lonely and wanted attention. He wanted that attention badly enough that he didn't care what he was doing to us. It was a kind of emotional  rape that still burns more than twenty years later.

Xavier, CryingBaby, and Billy were all part of the process of forming rules that I try very hard to stick with. These may sound harsh, but they will go a long way towards ensuring your peace of mind in the long run.

1. If you don't already know the person, either online or offline, don't get directly involved. If someone asks for help and you know how to do research that might lead to their identity, address, or phone, fine- But let someone who knows them, or at least has already made an emotional commitment to the situation deal with it.
2. If you don't know the person well, you can say supportive things. You can even tell their friends that you're worried. Once you've done that, stick with Rule 1.
3. You are not a psychological professional. Even if you are one there are barriers in online communication that may cause you to miss an important clue. If at all possible get the person in touch with someone they know offline.

If you still want to go forward do it with your eyes and your heart open. You can't help unless you're ready to give.

Barriers to Communication

I met my late wife online back in the Dark Ages, using a Commodore 64 and a 300 bps modem. By the time I married her, I had graduated to 1200 bps. (That’s “Bits Per Second. For contrast, a 56k modem moves at up to 56,000 bps and a cable modem might go a million bits per second or faster.) While a lot of things have changed since then, some things remain the same. I’d like to talk about a couple of them.

It’s easy to misunderstand people in the online world. There is no tone of voice, no inflection, no raised eyebrow, no gestures. This means that to a certain extent the people we meet online exist in our minds. We supply any missing elements, and that means that anything that you say online is going to be seen through the filter of what the other person brings to the table. All of the hints about what you really mean that we take for granted out in the Big Blue Room are missing.

On the surface, this lowers the first barriers to talking. But it can often be a barrier to communication. You have to say more, create more context, and be more ready to explain what you really meant. But it also means that the other person has to be willing to listen. Every listener in the online world needs to understand the limitations, and be open to listening as the person they are conversing with expands, clarifies, and even corrects what he was saying. Both sides have to make a genuine effort or there is no communication.

All of this brings me back to where I started. I met my wife online. The details are a story for another day, but we misunderstood each other fairly often. In fact until we established a common framework of shared references and knowledge about each other it often seemed that the more we talked the more we misunderstood each other. The misunderstandings didn’t stop when we met in person, they just changed their nature. We misunderstood each other through 19.5 years of marriage, and still managed to make a go of it because we cared.

One other thing I’ve learned, both from my own marriage and from watching others try online relationships, then try to turn them into 3D relationships is that if you think maybe there’s a romantic feeling there it is VITAL to meet each other in person ASAP. Remember, you’re talking online to someone you’ve built in your mind. In your mind you might not see the faults. He won’t leave the toilet seat up. She won’t try to strangle me by hanging pantyhose in the shower. Eventually you make up an ideal person that no mere flesh and blood person can live up to, and meeting in person is a disappointment. Meeting in person early in the relationship can prevent this.

People drop bits and pieces of who they really are in the online world all the time. It might be a reference to an expiring car lease and what the replacement will be, or it might be a reference to going over to a daughter’s apartment to have dinner or the desire for a Sonic Cherry Limeade slushy.

These little hints add up over time to a more complete mental picture of the real living, breathing person on the other end. But to gather these pieces you have to pay attention. That means you have to give a damn about the person you are listening to. If you don’t make the effort, you miss the best part of being online.

The Internet Ruined Their Marriage

Ever met someone who swears that the Internet ruined his or her marriage?  

Yup, that's right. That Eeeeevil Internet snatched away what had been a perfectly happy spouse, broke up a happy home, and caused no end of grief. Chat with enough people long enough, and you'll find one. If you're lucky you'll only find one. If you're smart you'll learn to recognize the symptoms after that and run like hell. Not being so smart, and being curious about how they thought a computer had ruined a marriage I've spoken with a few over the years.

I've also seen the supposedly happy spouse who left. They came online for a variety of reasons, but once they arrived they found they could play, or they could "talk" with  people who actually listened to what they said. They found people who would laugh at their jokes, and snark back at them in the same vein. They found interesting people who knew interesting things and were interested in them. So what was it that they found online? They found people who didn't take them for granted. 

Whether they were a news junkie, or a gamer, or someone researching genealogy or any of a thousand other hobbies that might have been the original reason for getting online, they found something they lacked. It might be that they had adjusted to that lack, and so outwardly looked contented with their lot, but they were missing something. 

(You get a pass if that husband or wife is one of the people you regularly talk with online because you're both hopeless geeks. I have to give you a pass, I used to send an IM to ask my late wife for a can of soda, and she'd send me an IM to remind me to take out the trash.)

Here's where the blame part comes in. Their husband or wife (though usually it seems to be a husband) didn't have a clue that their spouse was missing something, that there was discontent on one side of the equation. He (or sometimes she) thought everything was fine, and on the surface it might have been. Then that Internet thing came along and screwed up everything.

News Flash: YOUR life may have been perfect. The life of your husband or wife wasn't.

In almost 25 years of online life I have never seen a healthy marriage ruined by the Internet or online services. I have seen it, both online and in person, become the breaking point for a marriage that was already strained. But the problem was not the Internet. It wasn't the online service. It wasn't some heart breaker or home wrecker online. It was the marriage itself.

A relationship, online or off, is something you have to work at. If you're talking more to people online than to your husband or wife, take a look at your relationship. Fix it now. Because if it isn't the Internet, something else will surely come along.

No Substitute for Talent

You'll have noticed by now that this is a rather basic blog layout, picked from what Blogger supplies. There is a reason for that. When it comes to things like drawing, design, and layout I have absolutely no talent.

Geek stuff I can do, or I can learn. In the case of HTML it's partly relearn and partly learn the things that have changed since I last did a web site more than a decade ago. It was an incredibly ugly internal corporate site for a group I worked in, mostly a convenient place to hold documentation for various networks we supported.

Hardly a day goes by that someone doesn't invite the Twitterverse to look at a new web page they did and comment. Even when it isn't quite right I despair because I know that it's better than anything I could do.

At one time I thought that computers were the answer to my problem. I spent hundreds of dollars on various painting, drawing, and animation programs, first for my Amiga 500 and later for a PC. Each time I thought "THIS will be the tool that will reveal the hidden genius!" Each time I finally had to admit that this was not the tool to reveal my hidden genius.

Eventually I had to admit the truth: I have no hidden artistic genius. I have not even a smidgen of talent in that direction. Artistic power tools on a computer just help me make a mess much faster. There is no substitute for talent.

Manual Dial Modem

This is a tale from ancient times, when I had to push data uphill both ways in the snow.

When I first got online I was using a Commodore SX-64 with a 300 baud HES II modem.  By today's standards that's REALLY slow but it seemed a miracle at the time. An ordinary guy like me could not only have his own computer, but could connect it to others and communicate with people.

Another time I'll talk about how slow 300 baud is compared to the speeds of DSL and cable modems. The HES II was a manual dial modem, so today I want to describe the process of getting connected.

1. Set your telephone and modem side by side. This will be important later when speed is essential.

2. Boot the computer and load your terminal program.

3a. If your terminal program recognizes that manual dial modems exist, set it for manual dial, then select the system you are connecting to from the menu. The number to dial will display on your screen.

3b. If your terminal program removed the manual dial feature because you only have 64k of memory and the space was needed for other features then pick the system you want from the dialing directory. If you're using a program like this have the phone already in your hand as the program will expect you to dial as fast as it does.

4. Dial the access number. Yes, I mean "dial." With a rotary phone.

4a. Get a busy signal. If your terminal program supports manual dial, hang up and dial again. Repeat as needed till you get a modem tone, or till you're foaming at the mouth.

4b. Get a busy signal. If your terminal program doesn't support manual dial, watch the time out message appear on your screen. Hang up, go back to the dialing directory, reselect the system to connect to. Dial the phone number again. Repeat as needed till you get a modem tone, or till you're foaming at the mouth.

4c. Give up on calling that system for now and try another. Go back to step 3.

5. If you don't get a busy signal (or the voice of someone you woke at 3 am because you misdialed) then after the phone rings a few times you hear a modem tone. 

6. REALLY fast reach behind the phone and unplug the cord. Plug the phone cord into the back of the modem. 

7. Go to the front of the modem and flip the switch to the "Off Hook" position. (This switch tells the modem whether to be connected or not. It's a subject for another time when we discuss the joys of trying to get a friend to dial into your computer.)

8. Press the RETURN key.

If you've done everything fast enough you are now connected to the system you were trying to reach. (You can put down the phone, it's not connected to anything.) 

If not:

9. Hang up the phone.

10. Flip the switch on the front of the modem to "On Hook."

11. Unplug the phone line from the modem and plug it back into the phone.

12. Go back to step 3.

The process got a bit easier when I found a "Y" connector for a phone line at my local Radio Shack. This meant I could drop steps 6 and 11.

iPhone 3.0 OS Guide

Unlike a lot of geeks, I don’t own an iPhone, nor even a Blackberry. I’m still holding on to my Palm Centro and waiting anxiously for the new Palm Pre. But the big news in the smart phone world today is the new release of the iPhone 3.0 OS.

Gizmodo brings us iPhone 3.0 OS Guide: Everything You Need to Know.