Twitter is going down the drain and it has itself to blame

MAGINE a company stupid enough to follow the trajectory of MySpace and the now-deceased Digg.com by its very own choice. Enter Twitter.

Twitter was a rapidly-growing site back in the days. It was getting links everywhere, just like Digg had gotten a lot of buttons and links. But then came the OAuth ‘revolution’ and Twitter shot many applications (digital vehicles that brought it traffic) right at the head. It wasn’t an accident. Twitter ended up breaking hooks and denying access by some applications that I was using until 2010, e.g. in IRC. What a colossal mistake. Twitter never quite recovered since then. Au contraire — the site has been declining little by little, especially in recent months. Rather than encourage developers to get involved, Twitter is doing it again — dampening third-party contributions — this time even more aggressively than before.

The news sites took little note of what Twitter had done. Twitter’s API idiocy not only broke crucial parts in 3 Web sites of mine but also in some clients’ sites. Thanks for the trouble, Twitter. You break things and leave us all to collect the pieces.

Twitter is making irrational decisions like killing off RSS, third-party developers, off-site links, etc. Are they on a suicide plan?

Twitter’s own widget, which is apparently what Twitter is trying to promote, is not even valid (X)HTML, so they’re encouraging people to put broken code inside their Web pages while blocking the competition.

Twitter’s future, I would guess, is similar to that of MySpace and Digg.com. The US Library of Congress is saving all the contents, so one day when Twitter.com goes offline we might still remember that old site which committed suicide, taking down with it all of our data, more or less like identi.ca.

WEEK ago I asked my bank for clarifications on privacy. The bank manager never called back at all (they had promised s/he would), essentially making promises in vain and evading the serious issue. I contacted NatWest again, expressing disappointment that they broke their promise. An advisor told me they would call back shortly, but I have been waiting for many hours in vain. Here is the chat log:

You are now connected with an adviser.

Guri: Hi, you’re chatting with Guri. How may I help you?

Dr. Roy Schestowitz: Hi Guri

Dr. Roy Schestowitz: Last week I spoke with a Rep. called Manny

Guri: Hi Dr. Schestowitz

Guri: How may I help you today?

Dr. Roy Schestowitz: He spoke to his boss and said they would call me back by Friday

Guri: okay

Dr. Roy Schestowitz: That was a week ago, on Monday

Dr. Roy Schestowitz: He said they would have phoned by the end of the week, but did not

Guri: I am very sorry to hear that…

Guri: may i know regarding what he has arranged the call for you ?

Dr. Roy Schestowitz: I left my telephone number with him, can you please check this?

Dr. Roy Schestowitz: The cal was regarding data privacy in my 5 accounts, I said I would like my data not to be shared across nations.

Guri: May I know the sort code, your full name and first line of address to check the details for you?

Dr. Roy Schestowitz: Sort code: XXXX , Dr. Roy Schestowitz, XXXX

Guri: Thank you. I will locate your details. There may be a slight delay while I check your information. I appreciate your patience.

Dr. Roy Schestowitz: No problem

Guri: Dr. Schestowitz, If you want I will set a new call back for you and you will get the call within 3-4 hours

Dr. Roy Schestowitz: Please.

Guri: May I know your Telephone number?

Dr. Roy Schestowitz: XXXX

Guri: Thank you

Dr. Roy Schestowitz: I look forward to the call in a few hours, thanks and good day

Guri: I have arranged the call back for you

Guri: You will get the call within 3-4 hours

Guri: Is there anything else I can help you with today?

Dr. Roy Schestowitz: That’s all, thanks

it’s not over yet. They failed to call back twice in a row now. I think it’s deliberate because of the nature of the query. They want secrecy around their abuse of customers’ data.

raph theory is essential to the Surveillance Industrial Complex — the privatised branch which maps people and assigns risk levels to them, depending for example on who they meet/met and/or speak/spoke to. Facebook extracts an immeasurable amount of work previously carried out by the Surveillance Industrial Complex. It outsources the effort. The cost is being passed to the public in exchange for games and pseudo-status.

Recently, owing to a friend, I came to realise that Facebook no longer requires anything more than a person adding himself/herself to the site in order for surveillance to commence. Users are now prompted to inform on peers, even those whose accounts (profiles) are vacant or inactive. Family connections, geo-location, face recognition/tagging are all done by one’s peers now. The only thing more worrying than this degradation of privacy is people’s lack of awareness of the ramifications.

The prompting mechanisms add all sorts of relational metadata, adding to prompting for tagging of photos with names, even names of people who are not registered Facebook users.

I often hear arguments that go something along the lines of, “if you don’t like Facebook, then don’t use it.” Well, it’s not as simple as that. You may choose to leave Facebook alone, but Facebook will never — ever — leave you alone. The Surveillance Industrial Complex uses is to gather intelligence on everyone in civilisation. I can almost sympathise with countries that banned Facebook.

Identi.ca becomes part of the ‘Internet rot’ problem

“Wait, What? Identi.ca Doesn’t Care About My Data???”

ell, it just had to happen sooner or later. Face the facts. So-called ‘Cloud’ (or Fog as I prefer to call it) Computing is hype and it is dangerous not just in the security sense. Your data, or even your sentimentally-valued information, memories, etc. have no value to others, those who merely provide hosting for self gain or ego or whatever.

Over the years I have seen many so-called ‘clouds’ collapse, whereas with my stuff, almost everything is in tact, even what was online a decade ago (maybe IP addresses changed a little, but it is all still “up there”). This is because to oneself, data matters and data has value. It’s my data. To Fog Computing providers, your data is just mere “content”, something for other users to “consume”, potentially for “monetisation” by the managing party.

Even if the ‘cloud’ is built on Free/Open Source software, and even if that software is made available for download, there is no guarantee that data will be exportable from the database. Identi.ca is a good example of this point (more on that later). What a travesty!

“Why Are You Surprised?”

I previously wrote about my experience losing all my data and work at Digg and Netscape (see the posts “Digg Stabs All Users in the Back, Deletes All Their Content, EVERYTHING!” and “With ‘Cloud Computing’ You Can’t Keep Your Data Under Your Control“).

One could rename and do a rendition of “never fall in love again” as “never fall in cloud again”. Fog Computing is toxic, and the more years go by, the more people (and businesses) will recognise this. From losing access to new binary releases or newly-updated source code people are now losing access to actual data, which they never even retained on their own devices in the first place. What a suicidal decision that would have to be…

“Backup? Export? Where’s the Profit in That?”

Some days ago I made an effort to advise Identi.ca to preserve content and make old URLs accessible, for the sake of preservation. About a week earlier I enquired about the backup feature (experimental) being broken and not allowing me to export my data; this had been broken for years! I never receives a response Right now it says it “provides an incomplete backup” and finally I can actually export some data, but only the past month’s data (I have posted there for over 4 years).

Recently, having suffers another major ‘cloud’ data loss, I made a local copy of all my tweets. Twitter’s archive dump is well-formatted after Twitter announced the feature (months ago) and refined it over time, making it available to all users and not just select few, taking minutes to generate an archive and then sending a notification by E-mail, indicating an archive is ready for download (I have posted nearly 85,000 tweets). This is a commendable move by Twitter, but still, given that Twitter traffic declined 20% in the past 3 months alone (based on Alexa.com), how long will Twitter be hosting the tweets itself and thus keep URLs in tact?

“Sites Go Dark? Never!”

Well, actually it happens all the time, usually financial considerations being a major factor for the operator/s. Consider all the third-party image hosting services and link shorteners such as http://ping.fm/ that I used a lot in 2009-2010. These latter services are a nightmare even in the eyes of the founder of the World Wide Web as lacking any contextual information like link/page, the URLs are worthless; they are utterly dead and useless links, they cannot be recovered even through the Web Archive. Often enough this renders the tweets too rather useless. If people use shorteners in blogs, then they are truly misguided and they too will suffer the consequences.

“Didn’t Identi.ca PR Say it Was Just a Conversion

Identi.ca is trying to call this a “conversion”, but the only thing such sites seem to be planning to convert is user accounts, and not even many of them. Reading “Identi.ca conversion to pump.io” again, it seems clear all user data will be deleted (not left online, thrown away). As manual backup is trimmed/incomplete, this leaves users like myself unable to even pull the raw data while the site and the database are still online. What incompetence; what a betrayal!

“So New Software Platform Means Starting From Scratch?”

It sure seems to be the case. “The Identi.ca social network service will be moving to a new software platform on June 1, 2013,” says the announcement. This is a nice way of saying that the site is reassessing the way it operates and perhaps the business/operating model, neglecting all that was put into it by many users. It started by stating the migration would occur in one of the secondary domains and now this is coming to Identi.ca, as some people feared.

In a month-old post titled “Identi.ca conversion to pump.io” says:

Active accounts will be converted automatically to the new platform. Active users don’t have to do anything to continue using the service.

Accounts that have not been used since May 1, 2012 will not be converted. If you have friends or people you like on Identi.ca that you think should keep being users, please let them know. Just posting one notice will mean their account gets converted.

If you’re interested in seeing how pump.io works right now, you can set up an account by going to http://pump.io/ and clicking the “try it” button.

pump.io has a very different API than StatusNet. If you use a desktop or mobile client for Identi.ca, please check with the software developer to see if they’re planning to port to pump.io.

Backups of all public data will be available on archive.org after the switchover. You can also make a manual backup.

pump.io is under active development; some features you’re used to from StatusNet will be unavailable or will be implemented by third parties. There are a lot of things that pump.io does better, though. Social games, sharing pictures, and web-wide social buttons are just part of the new fun.

How hard would it have been to just keep the old CMS in tact, even for the sake of old URLs being accessible? Probably trivial bar space and CPU concerns, right? Identi.ca should reconsider its position on this. Maybe Evan (Identi.ca founder) can ‘kickstart’ a fund-raiser to help sponsor this; I would put my money in to preserve my data. Maybe others would, too.

New Identi.ca means the following: Heaps of broken URLs, disregard for people’s work which was posted online (essentially just like in the case of Digg, Netscape/Propeller, etc.), and elimination of many connections like “Followers”/”Following”. It was bad enough when theme-related information got dumped as part of the previous software upgrade. Not the same is being done with post data. Only user data is preserved (name, E-mail, etc.). Imagine if YouTube did the same thing, throwing people’s videos out with the bathwater… YouTube did throw away people’s theme-related information when it applied some updated, but these are often restorable with some effort. The same goes for Facebook with its layout tweaks. Imagine the outrage resulting from a Facebook announcement that it is dumping all old posts and photos…

“So It’s All Gone in a Few Days?”

Seems so, unless Identi.ca decides to keep the StatusNet setup in tact, as least for legacy purposes (I have thousands of links to Identi.ca URLs out there, and they are needed for context).

I have some mirroring of selected Identi.ca accounts in a IRC channel, which I back up and make available online for good. Alas, that is hardly a substitute.

“What Can I Learn From This Disaster?”

When your online work (including Facebook, Twitter, etc.) will no longer align with someone else‘s business model, say goodbye to it all. Yes, seriously. This is not a charity.

Yesterday I wrote about self-hosting one’s photographs. No guarantee of export options in Flickr, eh? Are you listening, Flickr MicroHoo! users? As my friend Tract put it in “Tracy’s photo album,” this is “better than flickr! I won’t lose all of my pics when flickr disappears.”

Recently, speaking to relatives or mine, I advised them to access Friendster to export or save their accounts’ contents before it’s too late to do so. A stampede to export would cost a site in the process of shutting down a lot in terms of bandwidth, reducing incentive to provide such an option, especially when there is no brand/reputation to protect anymore. And if you think Twitter and Facebook are any different, think again. The only difference is, those sites are probably quite a few years away from shutting down and throwing the content down the drain. Why else would the Library of Congress already amass tweets of everyone? Spying concerns aside (profiling people based on their posts from decades in the past), this shows that the US government too recognises that all Fog Computing ends up the same way — it ends up down. Not up, down. Offline, probably stored on some magnetic tape/disc in some warehouse owned by some company which had nothing to do with the data and not making accessible online, even to those who provided all this data. In due course this storage media too will erode, collect dust, and become inaccessible (incapable or getting salvaged), in essence destroying the data for good and not even giving data contributors a chance to preserve/curate the data themselves.

“What Should Identi.ca Do?”

It’s simple. Keep the data up. Keep the old URLS in tact. Make the privately-owned database accessible one way or another. If the backup feature permits complete download of all data for a given user, then it doesn’t resolve all the issues, but it may resolve some.

Hours on the line and several days just waiting at home for promised calls, all in vain

Y 2013 BT saga continues. At this stage, it’s not a technical fault, now it’s a support services failure. There is no excuse for being unable to call at a specified time several times in a row, especially when an automated caller dispatches formal reminders that those calls should be expected. It shows either arrogance or negligence.

For the uninitiated, my BT connection has been rocky since January of this year, leading not only to chaos with my professional and personal life (I am connection-dependent) but also to approximately a dozen hours on the phone (net total) with BT representatives overseas.

Diagnosis involved physical work from me too, all up to the point where actual engineers were sent to my house to address the issue by bypassing what might have been a faulty socket. It wasn’t conclusive. Why did it take BT so many months to send out engineers to the troubled site?

After the issue had been resolved I was promised that the supervisor (whose name I will omit) would discuss compensation with me. So I called up and spent a long time on the phone arranging for him to phone back (he was not working that day). I actually had to stay at home all morning and afternoon that day in expectation of that call. But he didn’t call. He must have ‘forgotten’. So then I had to call again — a call lasting about a quarter of an hour, with me addressing a person who never heard of my case at any time before and therefore had to spend time catching up. He said the supervisor would return a call but never said when. Apparently he phoned back when I was out (one cannot expect a person to be at home 24/7 by specifying no time, home is not a prison cell). Why did he not call at the specified time in the first place? This is becoming nonsensical, wasteful, and difficult for everyone.

So yesterday I had to spend another half an hour or so on the phone (a little less) only trying to get hold of the supervisor to get my compensation. So far I have spent nearly an hour just trying to get hold of the person who can issue the compensation. This is in addition to a dozen or so hours on the phone this year — hours spent in vain as they probably needed to send out an engineer to the house all along. Well, this is what it’s like being a BT customer. If your time has no value and your connections stability has no high priority, then BT might be fine. You will end up speaking to many different representatives, explaining your problem over and over again; solution can take weeks or months to be found, so satisfaction from the customer is clearly hard to attained.

The only reason I have not quit BT is that they kept making false promises that they would resolve the issue and changing ownership/management of the line to another company can take weeks in the UK (with wired connection being down). That’s the lock-in they have through landline. All I can do now is warn others that BT has very dysfunctional support services which fail to call back when they promise to call (this is not the first time they fail to phone back) and can’t send out engineers with equipment that can fix the problem because that may be ‘too expensive’ for BT (over the long run, not resolving the issue would prove even more expensive for both sides).

Update: the supervisor ‘forgot’ to phone again. This is at least the third time. It’s inexcusable. I called up with no anger but with a more assertive tone and got compensation, or so they claim (we shall see billing next month). I actually had to say that I would escalate this to their management in order to make real progress. It’s sad that being gentle and polite just doesn’t get things done. The supervisor, whose name I prefer not to share (for his own protection, which he may not deserve after repeated failure to call), tried to use the “I have been unwell” excuse for sympathy and mercy (fearing escalation to his superior), but why is he working then? Excuses for failures don’t make things any better, they make things worse. BT has a systemic issue in its hands and unless something is done about it, many other people will suffer the same way I suffered.

have bought a Google-branded ASUS device. It’s nice, but also not nice, depending on how one assesses it. As a technology rights person, it spooks me. The device is a privacy bomb. Everyone here ought to know that I’m a huge Android proponent and I wrote thousands of articles about it, tweeted about it nearly 10,000 times, and owned some Android-based gear before. On three separate occasions Google also tried hiring me, so my attitude towards Google is everything but negative. When it comes to privacy, it’s another matter altogether.

Like the Creative kit I bought on the very same day, this tablet works perfectly well out of the box. No complaints about the packaging, the components, etc. I love the USB charger. the tablet’s materials, the speed (essential for the decent voice recognition), and the screen, even though it takes a while getting used to, having moved from tablets twice this size.

To precede this informal review with a few words, all my complaints are about lock-down and spying. “Good hardware, ultra-crap privacy” is how I would summarise it. And this is where Google pushes computing. Subsidized hardware in exchange for lock-in is the business model.

The good points about this tablet are numerous. Good camera, quad-core processor with a nice package that’s metallic and quite light overall are only some of the many selling points.

The bad points are that it is too small (I prefer my other tablet, a 10.1-inch tablet), too limited, and also not so perfectly put together. No camera application installed by default to utilise the camera, which is a massive mistake. Development options are not present in Settings. Rooting not welcomed or made simple, either. But these are side issues.

Privacy is a total nightmare, trying to grab hold of the user’s identity all the time. Identify is demanded from the user even when not required, e.g. when going to native E-mail and even when opening a browser or trying to watch the image/video gallery. The purpose of this device is merely to drive data, traffic, and money to Google, thus it must be subsidised accordingly. Fair enough, but at what cost? Sure, Google uses this as a business recruiter without much pretense. The privacy issue has no excuses though. The first thing the tablet tries to do when switched on is insist very strongly on finding a wireless connection. it’s hard to even start using the tablet without completing this stage.

Google Play’s insistence on having a GMail account it also noteworthy. Google is making it hard to supply fake details. A real name is needed, but fake one can be given if one tries hard enough to find anonymity. Many widgets that give away location and such stuff by default make it easier for Google to guess who’s who. The insistence on geo-tracking is scary, but not as scary as remote backup of all the data, even private stuff (history on the Web, bookmarks, geo-location upon surfing, etc.). It is much worse than in my 4.0 tablet where these settings were inside the browser where toggling off was still needed. Well, now the browser reports clicks over the address bar, to name just one issue. The platform does not provide privacy at all. It is a lesson in how to get it all wrong on privacy.

Every Google Nexus 7 review should focus on privacy issues because that is what subsidies the hardware. The Nexus 7 has amazing hardware, but it’s extremely locked down such that not even development is available in it. It’s just a Google absorption vehicle. Chromebook Pixel must be similar, but it can boot into Ubuntu and Linux Mint, just like a real laptop, at least giving the option to everyone, so I recommended it today to someone who had planned to buy a MacBook Pro.

To summary, let it be repeated. The Nexus7 is SHOCKINGLY privacy-infringing in every conceivable way (more than I could ever imagine). It is not for everyone. I mean, a Google Plus account, which has absolutely nothing to do with the process followed in setting up Google Play, is being almost force-fed. The Nexus 7 has grotesque behaviour of tying. Want to install new software? Must open a GMail account, pushed to open G+ account too. The Nexus 7 can hardly even be started (from boxed state) without a wireless connection. I had to opt out from 10+ spying features one by one. Want to issue a voice command in Nexus7 ? Google will record everything. Open Gallery? Linked to Google cloud by default. Google even insists on remotely-controlled backup of entire tablet, not just bookmarks, history, photos, addresses… which is just shocking.

Google taught me how deep a privacy intrusion can get. And Nexus is where it all happens. Now I just try to undo the damage Google has done to a ‘vanilla’ Android installation. At least the hardware was cheap for its worth!

he title says it all. UPS brags about express services, but do not be shocked if it takes a month to merely get a service approved for dispatch. This is not a rant about prices but about bad service, bad procedural practices, and negligence. More recently their Web site turned out to have been dysfunctional due to bad programming. My latest correspondence with USP really covered much of what had happened, so I will paste it below and remove some sensitive details.

UPS:

[...]

Once you finish filling in all the empty boxes press the send button.

If you need any help please let me know and I will contact you to help you.

Roy:

I am Rianne’s husband.

Your Web site’s form does not work, neither with Chrome nor Firefox. It just jumps to the top when I press submit; I tried many times. My wife did too. It’s not that we don’t know how to use the site, we both have a degree in Computer Science. Our experience with UPS has been a *TOTAL* nightmare so far. Rather than express service my wife and I have wasted about 20 hours just trying to make a *VERY* simple import of a few pieces of paper.

I shall be writing about my bad experiences with UPS on my Web sites and I strongly urge you to get this service done ASAP.

UPS:

The form keeps on jumping to the top because you inserted ” ” in the contact person box. As it explains in the website you have to fill in the form without any signs or space- only letters. Also, the + sign at the beginning of the phone number should be deleted and then the request will be sent for sure.

Roy:

Hi,

I have just wasted yet more of my time. Your form is broken (see screenshot). Adjusting the values did not have any positive effect on submitting. The buttons don’t do anything, and it seems to be a result of bad programming at UPS. Maybe it’s some bad program who develops for only one Web browser; I don’t know and I don’t care as it’s sheer incompetence that will lose you many customers and waste you support hours.

Look, I have nothing against you personally, but USP ([your branch] at least) has turned out to be nothing but trouble. If someone was willing to really help ([anonymised] has been the ONLY person who really tried), then the import would have been done a month ago.

I am not willing to spend any more time on this. 20 hours by two people, lots of money spend faxing material which you then claim not to have received (what kind of business can call itself a business if it’s badly organised at the very basics).

My wife and I don’t lack the money for this service; we don’t lack the motivation to get done what needs to be done. We did everything that’s needed, but UPS is a procedural failure at many levels and I shall be expressing this sentiment online.

Thanks for wasting our time trying to get crucial documents. If you are willing and eager to really help, then you would assign this to someone who can just take the data and take responsibility for having this done. Having my wife sad and upset every other day for a month is not a possibility for me; I’ve got work to do here and I will spend no more time on it.

UPS:

Dear Roy,

I am sorry you feel this way but without this form sent to us via the website we cannot do anything about your request due to legal restrictions. There are still a few problems with your form and that is why it is not being sent

1. in the “Dimensions” box- take off the “cm” you wrote next to the numbers
2. in the “weight” box take off the “gr” next to the number
3. delete the 5$ declared value in the two boxes were you put it in
4. mark the “supplier” button where it asks you who should issue the invoice
5. at the last section “requested by”- please write your local number ([anonymised]) and not the international one

Once all of these will be fixed the form will be sent.

You have to understand that we not insisting on this just to make it harder for you- we cannot proceed with the request without this form filled in the correct way and sending it to us via the website.

I do not know what happened with this shipment before you sent us the request but once form will be sent to me I assure you that I will handle it today.

Roy:

My wife had filled it out correctly when she did but the form did nothing when she hit submit.

When I later did this in various Web browsers to replicate her problem I put some units in, but that did not in any way mean that the form got processed. When I hit “send” the page always jumps to the top again and does nothing.

I have made the amendments you suggested below, pressed “Send” and the outcome was precisely the same. No action, no feedback, just the page jumping to the top.

My guess is, someone did not develop this web form correctly.

I take your “assur[ance] you that I will handle it today,” but we are not there yet. Can someone at USP please fill this out? The form certainly does not work, not even with the validation of the data put in the boxes, and we’ve tried several browsers.

And here’s the screenshot I forgot to attach (form still doesn’t work).

UPS:

Hi,

I filled in the form for you and it sent it to our inbox- we are not usually allowed to do this but I am not sure what went wrong when you filled it in and there was no point to continue emailing about it
I will handle it now and send you the email with all the pickup and label details.

Roy:

Thank you, [anonymised], you are a good person and a good member of staff. I can see your sincerity in your response.

My comments about USP are addressed at a systemic issue; there is never, for example, a reason why my wife should leave the house and go to a place with a facsimile machine (fax) to send the same documents three times on three separate days. This take a huge toll, not just mentally but also on her job (which she needs to leave in order to do this). Imagine having to take some time off work three days only to discover that the recipient of the fax simply lost the paper, or being told on the phone that “they would phone back” and they always never do.

Regarding the form, it seems to me like whoever coded it is not a good programmer. I don’t know if it’s some Internet Explorer-only (and thus Microsoft Windows-only) form because I cannot check. My wife’s Android device and my computers just don’t work with that form; I filled it up from scratch three separate times.

I am telling you all this because I hope such information can be passed on and service can be improved so that future (prospective) UPS customers do not have to go through the same weeks-long nightmare that we have to go through.

I hope that from here onwards the papers will be processed with minimal burden on us.

With kind regards,

Roy

It should be noted that the above is just one ordeal among many. This latest one only wasted a couple of hours, but far more hours had been spent prior to that.

Update (3 hours later, same day): When UPS got threatened by bad publicity it finally took immediate action and the parcel was collected within hours, not weeks. The conclusion? Your time and your business as a customer don’t matter until it’s a matter of business risk (i.e. money) to UPS. I’ve made the following picture.