James Marshall

Last night, as part of its public lecture series, the University of Reading played host to a lecture called "Twitter Nation – keeping up with the 21st century consumer".  Professor Moira Clark, of the former Henley Managment College, was the lecturer and while she was a good presenter I was left somewhat underwhelmed by her knowledge of the topic.

The evening kicked off with a full-length rendition of "Total Eclipse of the Heart" which grew more annoying and confusing every single second that it continued; it didn’t become apparent until much later that this was a link to a Cadbury’s marketing campaign ad, and it would have been sufficient to play a small section rather than the whole song!

Prof. Clark aimed the lecture quite suitably at the general public whose knowledge of the topic may be limited or non-existent.  For these people it would have been a great evening, but for the more involved it was more of a whilstlestop tour of the basic concepts and services out there. Statistics came thick and fast, but seldom had sources and had an almost feminist slant on them.

There were some interesting ideas brought up such as the notion that viral videos on YouTube can be more effective and better targeted than traditional advertising and that people put up a ’shield’ to protect themselves from older marketing techniques (TV adverts, cold calling, etc…) but there was nothing really ground-breaking that hadn’t already been well documented in the media.  As for the link to Twitter it was virtually invisible, the service just being mentioned in name rather than in any detail.  It would have been nice for her to touch upon hashtagging as a way of tracking topics and perhaps have provided an ‘official’ hashtag for the evening rather than leaving it up to us to come up with the unofficial #UoRTN tag.

The final message she conveyed was to ‘own’ or ‘claim’ your digital identity, an idea that ties in quite well to the This Is Me project but made absolutely no mention of it, despite it being run by the university.  I got the impression that her research and projects had been conducted without even approaching the one school in the university that actually knows about this topic.

Overall the evening was quite entertaining but was quite misleading in the title.

Shirley Williams has blogged about her experience over on RedGloo, a social network run by the University of Reading.

You can follow Prof. Clark on Twitter, @MoiraClark, although she doesn’t appear to use the service very frequently.

Facebook has a massive catalogue of applications to satisfy the desires of every single user.  Whether it’s uploading photos, or playing Scrabble, Facebook will have an app for you; even video… It’s just a shame that the video app is so rubbish!

Since YouTube closed my account a little while ago (for no apparent reason), I have decided to upload my videos containing people to Facebook.  It seemed to make sense, after all I can tag people on Facebook, and it brings everything together quite nicely; however, over the past few months I have struggled to get anything actually uploaded to the site. 

I have tried several browsers and even two different operating systems to see if it is a problem at my end but I’ve concluded that the application is fundamentally flawed.  What I don’t understand is why it can’t employ the same upload method as the photo application – which seems to work every time.

I have found that leaving the browser open and just walking away for a while seems to do the trick, but isn’t a guarantee of success! So, in order to upload anything you must have the patience of a saint, and a lot of time to potentially waste.

More and more people are using video cameras, for example on phones (particularly as the iPhone 4 now records in 720p HD), and you can bet they’ll want to upload their videos in the same way they already do with their photos; so why have the development team left this potentially brilliant application so painfully under-developed?

I understand that videos take up extra space, and of course Facebook is free, so giving away all this extra video capacity would lead to problems in the long-run, but surely they should be more transparent about it, or maybe adopt a freemium model where you can upload bigger, higher-quality videos for a price?

What are your experiences of the Facebook Video application?  Comments welcome.

James

As part of my degree studies at the University of Reading I was required to design and implement a either a Chatbot, or code analysis program in C.  I opted for the former project as I thought it would be a more interesting challenge.

The first considerations were: how do Chatbots work; how are they implemented; are there existing examples of source to reference?  Unfortunately it would seem as though C is not the best programming language to choose to develop a Chatbot; a point noted in a Tweet from Shirley Williams.

I looked around for quite a while at existing implementations and kept coming across A.L.I.C.E and ELIZA, two famous Chatbots that have been influential in the development of games and other software since their creation.  Needless to say it was unrealistic to expect a similarly functional program to be designed, developed and tested in the time allowed with the skills acquired over the course so far; so I set about desiging a very simple Chatbot to ask a few questions, remember information and perform some basic deduction.

The errors I continually came across were generally my fault; simple problems such as using an ‘=’ sign when not appropriate, or missing off a semicolon from the end of a statement, although there were one or two interesting issues that kept me thinking for hours at a time, most notably: getchar().

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printf("Ready? (y or n)n");
 
userAnswer = getchar();

This code should ask the simple question requiring a ‘y’ or ‘n’ answer, it should then read in the answer to the ‘userAnswer’ variable using getchar(); however, every time I ran the program it would seem to skip over line #58 and end the program.  I spent a long time searching for the answer, and eventually discovered that getchar() was registering a previous carriage return as an input, and was in fact working.  The simplest, albeit least elegant solution was to run the line twice, thereby avoiding the problem:

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printf("Ready? (y or n)n");
 
userAnswer = getchar();
userAnswer = getchar();

I also struggled getting my head round nested IF statements; not particularly hard in principle, but difficult to keep track of in practise.

I am not a particularly confident programmer, most especially in C, so I deliberately set out to keep the program small, simple and most of all – working! I know that the program will not work as intended on other operating systems, this is due wholly to the fact that I have used code to clear the output screen, and to pause the program that is compatible with Windows only; there are similar functions that will also work in Linux, but for the moment the program will only work in Windows:

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int clearScreen()
{
	/*	Function clears the standard
		output, only works in Windows.
	*/
 
	system("cls");
	return 0;
}
int pauseProgram()
{
	/*	Function pauses program,
		waits for user to press any key,
		only works in Windows.
	*/
	system("PAUSE");
	return 0;
}

In conclusion I would say that the assignment was challenging and enjoyable, but not without its difficulties. I would have preferred to develop the program in C++, most especially as our lectures had moved onto C++ already by the time the assignment started; remembering to switch back to C commands was an extra consideration which I think was a disadvantage.

I have certainly learned to structure my code and comment sensibly, as well as learning the need for a solid set of specifications rather than programming on the fly. Even if the specifications are small in number, it does not mean they are easy to implement.

James

Over the past 5 years ‘social networking’ has taken off in a big way. This year Facebook celebrates its 5th birthday, but how has the world changed in that time? Has the long-debated ‘Digital Divide’ widened and taken on a new social aspect? Ultimately, will those who choose not to use services such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter be worse off in the future?

Let’s start by covering some basics…

‘Social Networking’, to quote that hotly contested font of knowledge – Wikipedia, is: “a social structure made of nodes that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as values, visions, ideas, financial exchange, friendship, kinship, dislike, conflict or trade.” Now that doesn’t sound too palatable, does it? Essentially social networking can be viewed as a group of like-minded individuals, or causes joined together to share information, ideas and resources. The best and most popular example of a social network is Facebook.

As social networking becomes increasingly popular and successful the number of companies looking to cash-in on that success also increases. However, as much as the social networking scene was once viewed as a niche, something that would never last, it is now being taken very seriously as it is fast becoming the quickest way to disseminate information and news.

News services in particular watch sites such as Twitter and Facebook very closely as breaking news is increasingly being reported by the citizen: for example the Hudson River plane crash in 2009. The September 11th terrorist attacks were widely filmed, photographed and documented in 2001, but it would be very interesting to see how the coverage of the events would be different today with Twitter and Twitpic.

But what about those who choose not to, or cannot take part in social networking?

It is easy to get caught up in the hype surrounding social networking, especially in the technology communities, but the people who opt out of this new world should not be overlooked. Take for example the ‘Events’ feature of Facebook. Currently it allows users to create a forthcoming event, add details about its location, times, and perhaps even some pictures or videos. Invitations can be sent out to other users asking for them to ‘RSVP’. It is a simple, fast way to spread the word about an event and invite people without the hassle of posting paper invitations or making numerous phone calls; but it ultimately leaves out those who do not use Facebook.

It is conceivable that invitations could be drawn up separately for those individuals who do not use the service but for how much longer will this compromise remain acceptable? How long before our lives are run almost totally by technology? Will those people be left out totally?

A similar idea can be applied to news. We are living in a green-conscious environment and it won’t be long before someone points the gun at newspapers and magazines and brings about the mass exodus of these services to the web. How will people who either cannot access, or choose not to access the web cope losing such an important channel of information?

In spite of the perceived benefits of embracing social networking, there are still those out there who are wary of allowing a faceless company to take hold of their most personal details and publish them online. Right or wrong, this Orwellian fear of the system will eventually begin to cause problems for those who fail or refuse to see the point in social networking services. Or will it? Humans are social creatures, they enjoy physical interaction with each other and the objects around them and for the moment at least, that is something technology cannot usurp.

After checking my Twitter feed I saw the latest from @twestival with a link to this fantastic video:

I really hope my £5 ticket to the Reading Twestival helps to make a genuine difference to the lives of those who don’t even have such a basic service as clean water.

James

The Internet has seen many revolutions since its early beginnings in the 1960s; the most prominent and arguably most useful of these revolutions was the invention of the so-called World Wide Web.  Since the introduction of the very first web server and early websites there has been advance after advance in technology making the web more interactive, responsive, useful and enjoyable.  One of the most recent additions to the web canon is the micro-blogging service Twitter.

Twitter, for those who have not heard of it before, is a simple service on the web that allows users to post small messages (‘tweets’ to the uninitiated) of up to 140 characters to their profile and allows them to ‘follow’ the updates of other users and equally, to be followed in return.  Twitter has been the butt of many a joke by those who use it and those who simply don’t understand it as it is often seen as a pointless method of telling people what you had for breakfast, or what you’re doing ‘right now’.

In its’ early days Twitter sailed along with a small, but nevertheless loyal, user base that grew at a steady pace.  However, the service often used to get overwhelmed by its’ popularity amongst the tech-savvy community and so gave birth to the ‘fail whale’ – the infamous mascot that would display itself whenever anything went wrong. However, Twitter rose to the challenge and has since greatly improved its’ reliability and response times turning it into a fairly useful service.

While Twitter is still somewhat of an enigma to those who don’t understand it, it remains a viable and interesting method of communication with like-minded people (or not, as the case may be) – even celebrities are known to use the service, most notably Stephen Fry (@stephenfry).

So what’s the problem, you may ask? It’s a small service that gained massive popularity and is doing really well gaining thousands of extra users every week. It has gained many prominent users that include technology commentators, celebrities, companies, and news services. What on Earth could possibly cause me to doubt its’ future? Quite simply I think it will be a tragic victim of its’ own success.

As with many things relating to the web using Twitter has become, to some, a little bit ‘trendy’. It’s not enough any more to have a Facebook profile, or a MySpace page.  You’re nothing if you don’t tweet like a possessed bird. Also, because of the high-profile people who also use Twitter, there are an increasing number of users whose sole purpose for using the service is to follow and invariably attempt to communicate with these people.  Of course in many cases the person they are following is often not the actual person at the other end of the keyboard. It is well known that Stephen Fry is the actual man himself as he has confirmed in numerous interviews, Tweets and on his personal website. Equally the likes of Jonathan Ross (@wossy), Russell Brand (@rustyrockets) and Alan Carr (@alancarr) are all genuine articles but what of the celebrities who either don’t control or don’t even know about their Twitter aliases?

As I write this article I have 39 followers and I am following 39 people (you can follow me @jamesbmarshall). I tweet several times a day and I admit that sometimes my tweets are very boring (I can’t be interesting all the time!) but I find it a good way to keep my world up to date with my actions particularly as I have linked my Twitter updates to my Facebook status thereby killing two birds with one stone. I have noticed though, that the number of obviously ‘spam-ish’ tweets has risen massively from users desperate to be noticed by the celebrity ‘Twitterati’ that they follow.  It’s for this reason that I think Twitter will fail.

Virtually every time I check my Twitter feed it is different; rich with the latest tweets of all those I follow but what about all the tweets I miss when I’m not sat at my computer, or browsing on my BlackBerry? How am I meant to sift out what is actually useful? Soon, if Twitter continues along these lines, it will become a sea of commentary from both amateur and professional, commoner and celebrity alike. It will be so full and so fast paced that even the most hardcore user will struggle to keep up with all the replies, re-tweets, and direct messages they receive. It will have reached its’ peak, the zenith of what it set out to achieve and it will be utterly useless as a result.  Perhaps given time, like the economy, it will deflate, recover and become useful again as users stop tweeting and celebrities find the next vogue to become involved with but until that day arrives I can see Twitter heading firmly on course for failure.

James