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.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.
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.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Twitter Screws the Pooch
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Suicidal People in the Online World
- 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!
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
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
Friday, March 27, 2009
No Substitute for Talent
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Manual Dial Modem
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
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.
Death of the Internet
Every couple of years we hear about The Impending Death Of The Internet. The latest death of the Internet meme is that we’re running out of IP address space, the numeric addresses that lie behind the “friendly” addresses made of words. We remember words more easily, but computers work better with numbers. We’re running out of those numbers.
One of the more interesting articles about the problem is this one, because it suggests a solution to the problem. Let the people who have excess IP addresses sell them. Renumbering a network takes time and money and can disrupt the operations of an organization, so this makes sense to me.
The first time I heard of The Impending Death Of The Internet was in the early 1990s. The number of routes that the routers that direct traffic in the core of the Internet was growing rapidly and the existing routers soon wouldn’t have enough memory to handle the load. Obviously we survived it, as routers with more memory and more powerful processors came on the market. We also survived various shortcomings of various routing protocols as they were adapted, updated, or abandoned over time. This isn’t even the first time we’ve been on the verge of running out of IP addresses.
We’ll survive this particular threat too, whether it’s by selling IP addresses, using some form of coercion to make organizations give back addresses without compensation, or by getting the really big service providers to convert to IPv6 on their backbones and give up the IPv4 addresses they currently use for the backbone. (The problem is already critical in Asia, who came late to the table when IP address space was handed out. I have worked with companies in India that exist behind four layers of NAT (Network Address Translation.)
This doesn’t mean that there is no problem. There is a problem, and the technical community has to solve it, and convince those who pay the bills for tech to pay for the next solution. But the ordinary user doesn’t need to get in a lather. The sky is not falling.
Monday, March 16, 2009
First Post
First Post
Welcome to Beregond’s Bar. This is where I plan to ruminate on things about life, mainly online life. I’ve been living in the online world since 1985. At one point in my life I had an offline job in telecommunications, an online job, and various online activities I pursued as a hobby. I didn’t think of it as a job, another job, and a hobby. It was more like an obsession that expressed itself in different ways at different times.
I’ve always been fascinated by what people do online and why, and by the stuff behind the scenes that makes it possible. I’ve been taken to task more than once for thinking about stuff way above my pay grade. I keep doing it though, hence this blog.
I expect to avoid politics on this blog, except as it directly affects the online world. I’m planning on a blog to talk about politics but it doesn’t exist yet. I’ll put up a link once it does.