I’m posting this from my phone, so apologies in advance for any typos. But I wanted to share this article from Felix Salmon on how the Wired/Wikileaks discussions of the last few days have highlighted a problem with Twitter’s new role in online debates:
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2010/12/30/the-evanescence-of-twitter-debates/

As commentators use their blogs for increasingly journalistic content, the conversational aspect of blogging moves on to Twitter. This leads to two problems.

First, these conversations become very hard to join mid-stream. If you weren’t following from the beginning, you’ll have a hard time catching up. This is especially true of conversations that involve more than two people, as the “in reply to” functionality is no help. A commment thread on a blog or forum, on the other hand, can be read from the beginning even if you’re coming late to the party, and its linear structure makes it easy to catch up.

The second problem is that Twitter loses these discussions after a couple of months, so they’re not available for future reference. This ephemerality is part of Twitter’s appeal for users, but from an archiving point of view it’s definitely a weakness. It’s good to be able to look back on how topics were discussed in their time, but Twitter currently doesn’t let us do that.

Maybe Twitter will evolve to address these problems over time. If it doesn’t, however, there could be an opportunity for third party products that do.

I wrote a few weeks ago about my growing concerns over Amazon, the Kindle and censorship. Amazon – with its Kindle e-reader – is asking us to give it absolute control over what we can and can’t read. Now imagine books you own disappearing from your home without warning, just because another country’s government has deemed their contents politically undesirable. Would you tolerate that? If yes, the Kindle is for you – but if not, you should think twice before embracing it wholeheartedly.

Yesterday, the Register published an article about further signs of censorship within the Kindle system. This censorship isn’t political – instead, the books affected are erotica novels with themes like incest and so on – but it’s still concerning.

[Jess Scott, one affected author] went on: “I see other similarly-themed books still available for purchase, and see books with the subjects of rape, bestiality, etc, available for purchase (books that have not been deleted from Amazon’s catalog). If underage sex is illegal, why is Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita still available for purchase?”

The reply from Amazon, according to Jess, boiled down to a simple statement that they would judge each case on its merit, and they would act as their own judge and jury in cases such as these…

It looks as though the Kindle marketplace is going to become something like an iTunes App Store for books, where unexplained and arbitrary decisions are made centrally about what users are allowed to access. That policy isn’t great when applied to apps, but it’s even less appealing where books are concerned.

I find these shady shenanigans especially annoying because I really like my Kindle, and I’d like to store books on it just as permanently as I do on my bookshelf. At the moment I’m investigating how to “jailbreak” the Kindle, and when I get round to it I’ll post up a guide here.

(Edit: less than nine hours after I posted this article, Yahoo! announced plans to shut down Delicious. I guess there’s a reason why people call Yahoo! the place good ideas go to die)

If you haven’t heard of Delicious, all you need to know is that it stores your bookmarks on the web. This is handy because you can access them from anywhere and share them with other people.

Delicious used to be pretty exciting. Social bookmarking, tagging, RSS feeds – the potential seemed mind-boggling. But then Yahoo! bought it and it started losing its edge. Nowadays there isn’t much excitement about Delicious, but it’s still useful.

One thing that makes Delicious particularly useful is the availability of various browser extensions. These extensions put a little button on your browser, allowing you to add and tag a page really, really quickly. Because it’s quick to add a page, you find yourself adding more pages – and the more pages you add, the more useful Delicious becomes.

I use the Delicious extension for Google Chrome quite a lot, but I think I hate it. Here’s what it looks like:

So you click on the “tag” button,  and then this appears:

So far so good. But when you use this several times a day, you’ll notice some annoying and even hateworthy things about it.

The first thing is that it has no persistence. If you’ve typed a brief, witty description of the page in the Notes field, and then carefully selected some tags to go with it, you don’t really want to go through that process again. But if you accidentally click outside the extension, that’s precisely what you’ll have to do – because it forgets what you’ve entered! Having to re-enter stuff I’ve already typed isn’t something I enjoy, even when it’s a relatively small amount of text.

The second thing I hate about it is the placement of the Save and Cancel keys. You’ll notice that Cancel is in the bottom right, which is slightly unconventional – primary actions (Submit, Confirm etc) are usually placed to the right in forms like this. They’re also very close to one another. These two design choices conspire to make it a little bit too easy to hit Cancel by mistake – especially when you’re working quickly. Hitting Cancel closes the extension, meaning that – you guessed it – anything you’ve typed will need to be typed again.

So these are the two reasons why I hate the Chrome extension for Delicious. If it remembered the stuff you typed, however, I would probably love it. This shows how fine a line there is between love and hate in user interface design, or (more likely) how much of a pedant I am about these things…

In a bizarre twist, Amazon is currently selling a Kindle book that contains the Wikileaks diplomatic cables. Obviously it’s not going to be up for much longer but it’s still a strange development:

As you’d expect lots of fun is being had with Amazon’s user-generated tags:

But the reviewers who are laying into Amazon are missing the point, which is that the book is obviously going to be taken down in the next few hours, if not minutes. There’s no way anyone at Amazon has done this deliberately – a Kindle seller has uploaded this and it’ll be gone soon.

It’s either naked commercial opportunism or a cheeky prank. Even still, it’s pretty odd.

Update at 18:11 GMT – well I was wrong, a few hours have passed and the book is still on sale. And Amazon can hardly be oblivious given that even the BBC has picked up on it:

“In a twist to the story it has emerged that Amazon, which last week refused to host Wikileaks, is selling a Kindle version of the documents Wikileaks has leaked…”

So what’s going on at Amazon? Are they just being cynical?

Update at 21:11 GMT – it’s finally been taken down! I wonder what’ll happen to the copies that people bought and downloaded? Will Amazon offer refunds?

"Bye bye book"

A few days ago Google announced its new operating system, the Chrome OS – here’s a link to the official announcement.

One thing that caught my eye was this graph showing the growth of the Chrome browser since its launch in 2008:

Chrome usage since September 2008

See the dip that comes only a few weeks in? I was part of that, because I abandoned Chrome around then too. If my experience is anything to go by, that dip was largely caused by people going back to Firefox because they missed the add-ons.

You’ll also notice an even more dramatic upsurge that comes in the first quarter of 2009. What made so many people start using Chrome back then?

It wasn’t support for extensions – they didn’t launch properly until January 2010. It might have been the Chrome TV ad, but that wasn’t aired until May 2009. So what could it have been? This is going to be annoying me all day…

I saw this window display at the Moorgate branch of Gap this morning:

"Social media whiz" wants "epic hat" (click for full size)

I don’t know where to begin…

I’m not sure exactly how much I’ve spent with Amazon in the last year, but it’s a lot. If I buy something online, I’ll probably buy it from Amazon even if it’s slightly cheaper elsewhere. I buy books, MP3s and big-ticket items like computers too. So I guess I have a strong “brand relationship” with Amazon.

Like many people, I’m re-evaluating this relationship after Amazon dropped Wikileaks in an apparent concession to US government pressure (their official statement didn’t impress me much either) and I may stop buying things from them.

But here’s a good question – if you plan on boycotting Amazon for not hosting Wikileaks, why not boycott every firm that doesn’t host Wikileaks? This is my answer, and it’s grounded in Amazon’s ambitions (specifically the Kindle) rather than a general sense of corporate morality.

The Kindle strategy: mediate between reader and book

When Amazon started out, it just sold books. As it grew it started selling lots of other stuff (encountering more than a few UX problems along the way) but books and their readers remained key to its identity, as was affirmed by the launch of the Kindle in 2007.

Before the Kindle, Amazon’s relationship with the reader began with browsing for a new book and ended soon after it arrived. The packaging discarded, the book was opened and Amazon was forgotten: the relationship was now directly between the reader and the book.

With the Kindle, this relationship was to change. Rather than just enabling the book’s purchase, Amazon would remain in the equation while the book was being read. The relationship, instead of being a direct one between reader and book, would – through the Kindle – be mediated by Amazon, who would enjoy a more meaningful connection with the reader.

It’s a great strategy, and well-executed too: the Kindle is a joy to use. But underlying this strategy – and this is where Wikileaks becomes relevant again – is the increased need for trust between Amazon and the reader.

Trust, neutrality, and moral failure

Trust isn’t important when Amazon sells me a book. I need to trust that they won’t rip me off, yes, but that would be illegal – the trust is backed up by law. And once I’ve got the book in my hands, what can Amazon do? They can’t stop me reading it.

In the world of the Kindle, however, trust changes and becomes absolutely essential. This is because, in this transformed relationship where Amazon is the mediator, Amazon can remove books from your Kindle. It can do so remotely, without warning, at its own discretion, even if you paid for them or got them elsewhere. The reader must therefore trust Amazon not to do this. If she doesn’t, her relationship with the written word is no longer free.

When Amazon remotely wiped 1984 and Animal Farm from Kindles in 2009  this trust was damaged. That was due to rights & ownership problems – it wasn’t political, it was commercial. But the Wikileaks incident shows that Amazon will remove content for reasons that are ultimately political.

This doesn’t just damage that trust, it destroys it completely, and with it Amazon’s credibility as an organisation fit to mediate my relationship with the book. What if there was political uproar over a controversial novel, and Amazon was pressurised to remove it from the possession of people who had paid for it? We know now that they’d do it, and the implications are depressing.

In fact they’re so depressing that I feel glad that the Kindle wasn’t invented a century earlier. How much more effective would Soviet suppression of samizdat have been if the Kindle was in widespread use back then? What would have happened to Lolita, Lady Chatterly’s Lover, Ulysses, or any of the hundreds of books that were banned and burnt in supposedly less enlightened eras? How much would we have lost?

The banning of Wikileaks raises questions that are particularly sensitive given Amazon’s lofty aspirations. How can you promise to manage someone’s relationship with the written word – and therefore with culture, politics, literature, and arguably thought itself – when you can’t be trusted to remain neutral and impartial? Amazon has to be held to a particular moral standard, and it is this standard it has failed to meet. We were within our rights to expect more.