Really? So what sparked the riots of three decades ago? A ZX Spectrum and a fleet of Raleigh Grifters?

Given the blame pointed at social networking for the recent round of riots, it’s amazing that the 1980s rioters managed to throw a single petrol bomb without the internet for instructions and social apps to organise their street mobs. Same with the French Revolution, the Tolpuddle Martyrs and the fall of the Soviet Union. How did they get off the ground without networked communications tools?

Social movements do not need Twitter, Facebook or BlackBerry messaging to succeed — they need any method of communication (like talking to the bloke next to you) and a sense of injustice (or futility or boredom) to motivate action.

Social movements do not need Twitter, Facebook or BlackBerry messaging to succeed

Of course, rioters do now have better technology and it would be naïve to think smartphones wouldn’t be harnessed for malevolent purposes, but to assume it is the driving force behind youth unrest is equally short-sighted. Would the police really, for example, be able to kettle so many protesters in London if the potential rioters were really all hard-wired into Twitter, with a rolling news feed of where the police were erecting barricades?

While some tweets might have tried to act as a call to arms, the majority appeared to be supplying a rolling news feed on what was happening, but written by the man on the street rather than a media that is less trusted with every phone-hacking scandal.

Restricting access

It seems the social media critics are edging closer to advocating for networking services to be restricted when there is a riot taking place, which would re-establish an advantage for the police, who could still communicate using their radios.

It’s a thought that might go down well with an establishment that has yet to come to terms with the power of the social web, but it would also be rank hypocrisy. Barely six months ago, news agencies and political thinkers were hailing the social networks as a major tool for change, for giving a voice to the people as they rose up during the Arab Spring.

Egypt was blasted for blocking internet access and disrupting mobile phone coverage in a bid to stop protesters on the streets from communicating and organising into more effective groups to target oppression. One man’s social-network pariah is another man’s freedom-fighting tool.

The events in Tottenham and elsewhere across London have little in common with Egypt, but similarities remain in terms of communication, and the UK’s authorities need to address how they deal with rioters and protesters accordingly.

The US (and, presumably, Britain will join in) recently announced a move to monitor trends on Twitter and police might be well advised to follow the odd #riot tag themselves.

If the rioters really are using social networks to organise themselves, surely the police could also use them to get a handle on upcoming flashpoints — given today’s news that the computer crime team has been expanded they might even have the resources to do so. But to blame the riots on social networks misses the point entirely — social uprisings don’t need tech to take off.

We keep getting told that Google+ is Facebook’s biggest threat, that it’s on the rise faster than a 1990s house price and the only way is up. We’re told it already has 10 million profiles – or is it 20 million?

But is Google+ really catching on? I mean really, as in outside this little tech industry bubble we love to confine ourselves to?

I have a Google+ profile, but have to say I haven’t exactly jumped on board yet, and the biggest reason is that so few of my friends have. My feed right now comprises a lot of posts from several prominent Twitter personalities, a couple of IT friends who clearly like it a lot – and not much else. If I switch streams to seeing just my friends – as in my real, proper, non-PC Pro friends – there’s one person, and his last update was a week ago.

To fix this, I decided to import my entire Facebook friend list over to Google+ to breathe a bit of life into it. There’s no official way of doing so – Facebook doesn’t want you to, for obvious reasons – but it’s very simple to do using a Yahoo Mail account, as this blog post explains.

The result?

Of the 53 Facebook friends who weren’t already in my Google+ circles – so that’s excluding all my work colleagues and one early-adopter mate who jumped in and got bored as quickly as I did – this import found that a grand total of zero had Google+ profiles.

Yes, zero. And most of my friends are tech-literate and in their late twenties/early thirties. The prime Google+ audience.

Some have suggested it’s the lack of invites that’s the problem, and that lots of people are just waiting to be allowed in. But most people I know who wanted in have found a way – I did.

And of course, any number of these 53 people may have created new GMail accounts in order to sign up to Google+, so their Facebook email wouldn’t be recognised. But if so, none of them have mentioned their new Google+ accounts on Facebook, as you’d expect of someone trying to fill their circles.

So is this like being on Twitter during the AV vote, where my entire feed suggested YesToAV was the only possible outcome, then the real non-tweeting world said otherwise? Are we in a bubble of our own making? With the number of tech sites currently writing eulogies to Google+, and the paucity of real-life conversation on the subject, it certainly feels that way.

Try the import for yourself and let me know in the comments how many of your friends have dived in. I’d be interested to see if Google+ is anything but hype.

Everyone, that is, except for Mr Matthew Brock of Swiss Cottage. I have it on good authority that the gentleman in question, an old friend of mine, is giving Google+ a miss.

It’s not that he dislikes social networking as such. He long ago signed up to Facebook with only a cursory grumble, and he’s frequently to be found sharing photographs on Twitter (@_mattbrock, if you’d like to be friends). But he tells me he’s uneasy about Google’s continued expansion into ever more online markets – and, in this case, about its acquisition of a huge amount of personal information to add to its already vast database. He has therefore decided to be a conscientious objector.

As podcast listeners will know, when it comes to issues like this, my personal privacy policy is “get over yourself”. If Google’s gurus reckon they can make money from me uploading pictures of Mike Jennings in a daft hat then I say good luck to them. Even as I nodded sympathetically along with Brock’s explanation, I admit I felt he was being perhaps a little paranoid. Did he really suppose Google had some evil master-plan?

Little did I imagine that within 24 hours I’d be eating those, er, thoughts.

Changing details

My epiphany began innocently enough that evening, when I decided to change my email address. This isn’t something I do very often, but there comes a point when a mailbox receives so much spam there’s nothing to do but abandon it and move on.

There comes a point when a mailbox receives so much spam there’s nothing to do but abandon it and move on

I should have realised I was opening a can of worms when I discovered there’s actually no way to change a Gmail address. To move to a new address, you must open a new account. That only takes a minute, but I was piqued to find I was unable to migrate my contacts, and to transfer my mail across I had to set up a rather roundabout POP3 transfer.

That wasn’t the only problem, as I realised when I tried to move my Google+ account to my new address. It turns out this isn’t possible either: each profile is permanently linked to the Google account it was created under. Since my Google+ profile was only a few weeks old, it wasn’t exactly stuffed with memories, but it was still irritating to have to ditch it and start afresh.

At that point my phone chirped to tell me I had a new email, and it hit me: my phone too was tied to my old Google account. A quick web search revealed that the only way to set my new address as my primary account would be to perform a factory reset and set the phone up again from scratch.

In the end, moving to a new email address meant losing access not only to my archives and my Google+ account, but also to my Android Market purchases, my Google Docs, my Google Calendar and my Google Checkout history. I also ended up losing all my stars on Angry Birds. (It may have been this realisation that really made me question the wisdom of allowing Google to control so many different services.)

Big mistake

To be fair, the root of the problem isn’t Google’s size as such, but the way it ties its services together. A well-designed database should use some sort of anonymous internal value, such as a serial number, as the key field, so that personal information can be freely modified without breaking the links between tables. Google appears to have ignored this fundamental principle, instead using the email address as the key field. That’s quite literally a schoolboy error – I learnt about key fields way back in GCSE Computer Studies – and Google should be ashamed.

But it wouldn’t be a problem if Google weren’t tying everything together in the first place. Facebook, Twitter and even PayPal accepted my new address without a murmur. If only Android were similarly decoupled from the main Google database, I’d still have my golden eggs right now.

So – to my admitted surprise – I find myself in sympathy with Brock’s position. I’ve never really believed that a big company must necessarily have a malicious agenda; but now I realise you don’t need a plan to cause havoc. With the best will in the world, people – and hence companies – make stupid decisions from time to time. The bigger we allow Google, or any company, to grow, the more scope those stupid decisions have to screw us all.

Update: I’m most grateful to Alan Robertson, in the comments below, for pointing out workarounds for some of the problems mentioned above. The latest version of the Android Market application (which, oddly, doesn’t appear to be available from the Android Market itself) does indeed allow you to install purchased applications from multiple accounts – although this of course means you have to keep your old Google account active alongside your new one, which is a pain.

More usefully, as Alan also mentions, if you have an Android phone or tablet you can configure it to sync your contacts and calendars from your old account – then switch over and resync them to your new account. I’m not sure how you’d do this without an Android device though, as importing contacts directly across Gmail accounts isn’t supported. And it’s still the case that to switch your primary account you must perform a factory reset.

In all, it seems Google is gradually addressing the problems involved in using multiple or changing identities, but there’s some way to go. And, as I mentioned above, the problems are largely ones that in a more diverse market would never have arisen in the first place!

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is credited with inventing the web, but that doesn’t mean he loves everything that’s on it — and that includes Twitter and Facebook.

Sir Tim has a well-documented aversion to social networking, previously describing the walled gardens of Facebook and LinkedIn as one of the threats to the web. But those who prefer the more open-natured Twitter over Facebook shouldn’t feel favoured by the web-creator’s sporadic tweets — he doesn’t have kind words for the nature of updates being shared.

Speaking at a W3C conference in Oxford, he said he was monitoring tweets containing the word ‘neutrality’ when the FCC was voting on net neutrality earlier this year.  ”Watching the Twitter stream go by, I noticed what people said — people who understood what it [net neutrality] was and people who didn’t understand what it was —  all of the tweets were extreme,” Berners-Lee claimed.

How do you design a form of Twitter, how do you change the retweet system, so that Twitter will end up gathering a body of reasoned debate?

“They were just foaming at the mouth, frustrated with how stupid President Obama was that he didn’t do complete net neutrality, or foaming at the mouth at how stupid President Obama was because he was sneaking this net neutrality thing in to take control of the internet before the next election so that he could win. They were all foaming at the mouth, furious.”

Berners-Lee said there were sane tweets — “hmm, there seem to be two sides to the net neutrality arguement” — but those comments weren’t being retweeted.  ”One possibility is that Twitter, in that case, is a medium which was only amplifying the emotionally charged,” he suggested.

With those criticisms, he set a challenge to attendees — and I hereby extend it to the rest of the world.  ”How do you design a form of Twitter, how do you change the retweet system, so that Twitter will end up gathering a body of reasoned debate?” he asked.

Stretching for Facebook friends

Berners-Lee had some suggestions for Facebook-style social networks, too — and it wasn’t just to do with open data and walled gardens.

Sir Tim said social-network systems are very good at introducing us to people we already know, letting us communicate very well “in our own little online dialect with our friends of our friends in a tightly knit bundle”, but not at “stretching” our ability to meet new people. Consider your own friends list, and it’s hard to say that isn’t true.

How do we build the web so that every now and then it introduces us to people who are not friends of friends

“How do we build the web so that every now and then it introduces us to people who are not friends of friends,” he pondered. For example, if you were a “white male geek living in London, speaking English, you’re Church of England, and you like fishing” and it introduces you to someone just like that, who likes skiing, “to see how that stretches you, to find how you can communicate with skiers, and try to explain to a skier why you spend all that time fishing.”

Or, it might suggest someone just like you, living somewhere entirely different. “Could you actually count that person as a friend,  join a group a people who are bridging national divides? That might be more of a stretch. How could we make the web push people so that they break down barriers?” he wondered, calling for people to “make use of the web so it connects people together… and breaks down barriers more than it builds them up.” Again, Berners-Lee issued a challenge for developers to create a social network that does just that.

“The real challenge of web science is being able to understand when you build a little system what the big effect will be,” he added. “People don’t calculate what the big effect will be, they tend to just launch it and see what happens.”

So rather than try to be the next Biz Stone or Mark Zuckerberg, create a system that doesn’t just get a lot of users and make you a billionaire, but actually tries to make the world a better place. Yeah, it sounds cheesy — but hey, it’s what Berners-Lee did.

There are, in all honesty, many other things which take priority when it comes to worrying Mr Winder: when will the central-heating boiler start working again, how much snow is going to fall today and what will my nose look like by the end of the week after surgeons have finished operating on my face, for example. Yet, for tens of thousands of Facebook users the question has obviously been weighing heavy on their minds. At least that is the only explanation I can think of to explain why a rogue Facebook app is running riot right now.

“OMG, OMG, OMG! Now you can see who viewed your Facebook profile” the scam message doing the rounds suggests, and a click on the link allows you to download an app to reveal all.

Apart from the small fact that it does nothing of the sort, of course. Indeed, click the link and you will end up on a Facebook clone page where you will be forced to jump through many hoops of the ‘I like this page and will tell all my friends’ variety before being able to download the rogue application.

If having to ‘like’ something you have yet to actually download and use doesn’t ring alarm bells then there is obviously something seriously wrong with your common sense functionality. Mind you, that’s something of a given if you have arrived at the page after responding to a message which starts with ‘OMG, OMG, OMG!’.

So, the ePrivacy, or Profile Watcher V2.1, or ProfileSpy app (it comes in many flavours) will not let you see who has viewed your Facebook profile, and for very good reason: that functionality doesn’t exist on Facebook at the moment. The official Facebook comment being “No, Facebook does not provide the ability to track who is viewing your profile, or parts of your profile, such as your photos. Applications by outside developers cannot provide this functionality, either. Applications that claim to give you this ability will be removed from Facebook for violating policy”.

What the app will do is enable those behind it to access your profile (so I guess you could say that you know one person who has done so) and spread the OMG link message via your wall. Indeed, you will need to allow it access to your profile, your friends, your wall and your data in order to download it.

If you’ve been caught already by this one, then you can delete the app by checking out the ‘applications and websites’ bit of your privacy settings. Better change your password while you’re at it, just in case.

I saw The Social Network last week, as our good friends at Den of Geek had a spare ticket to an advanced screening. Thanks to a bizarre embargo, I’m not allowed to review the film yet, despite many takes already hitting the web (but when it does come out next week, go see it; it’s fascinating and very funny).

While the film has certainly made its producers very happy by winning top spot at the US box office over the weekend, and being described as the best picture of the year so far by unencumbered reviewers on the other side of the Atlantic, many tech pundits are crying foul over the negative portrayal of founder Mark Zuckerberg.

That the 26-year-old billionaire comes out looking a bit of a jerk in the film shouldn’t come as a surprise, as the story centres on two legal cases against him – and people are rarely flattering when they’re suing you.

Zuckerberg (as played by Jesse Eisenberg) is portrayed as a geek in the old-school, not so charming way: he’s brilliantly sharp, but a weird loner, rude and cruel to women, who rarely smiles. There’s something wrong with him; he’s without friends, and for good reason. According to TSN, Zuckerberg created Facebook in order to get into a club at Harvard – a claim he has denied.

I’ve never met the Facebook founder, but I’ve seen him speak at a developer event. Zuckerberg’s comedic timing is a second or two off, but he clearly has a sense of humour. Ironically, however, Zuckerberg is rather guarded about his personal life and there’s no clear picture about what he’s like as a person, leaving The Social Network the only major source of information about the Facebook founder.

It’s not only Zuckerberg who’s portrayed as a nasty sort of geek, as the film also takes aim with its “get back in the lab, you loser” gun at Napster-founder Sean Parker (played brilliantly by Justin Timberlake).

Why does it matter?

With the filmmakers, Zuckerberg and Facebook’s PR team all stressing TSN is a work of fiction, why does any of this matter? Because regardless of whether I’d enjoy sitting down for a beer with Zuckerberg (and I think I would), what he’s created deserves respect. He’s one heck of a better role model than many others his age. Wouldn’t it be better if 16-year-olds looked up to Zuckerberg, rather than, say, Wayne Rooney?

Over the past several years, the number of students studying computing in the UK has halved – despite everyone using tech more and more in their daily lives. Why? Because they say it looks boring. But there’s nothing dull about what Facebook has achieved; its a perfect example of how the internet and computers have levelled the playing field, letting talented people of any age or class truly change the world using tech.

Even if Zuckerberg is a bit of a weirdo, he’s worth celebrating for that alone.

The Wall Street Journal doesn’t quote Schmidt directly, but reports that: “He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.”

Let’s assume he is indeed serious. Most Facebookers and Twitterers have posted impetuous comments only to later delete them in embarrassment, or lived to regret their friends tagging them in a goofy, drunken photo, so it’s no wonder years down the line it may seem time to hit reset.

This isn’t a new phenomenon, hating the stupidity of our younger selves — don’t believe me? I dare you to share a photo of yourself as a teenager, then — but Schmidt is right that our childish ideas, foolish dress sense and drunken silliness have never been so publicly documented.

But will the teens of today go so far as to reboot their lives in mass embarrassment when faced with applying for their first jobs?

No. Instead, what I think will happen — or hope will happen, at least — is that the world will grow up and realise you can’t judge people by a status update posted years ago, that we shouldn’t all live in fear of things we’ve said just because our outbursts and silliness are now archived and searchable.

I can’t put it any better than this swear-filled comic from XKCD (really, let me warn about the naughty words in very large font), which argues we shouldn’t temper our lives to fit a mold, or hold back for fear of shaking things up.

And you know what? We’re already pretty good at forgiving mistakes. The US has elected presidents knowing they’ve smoked joints or battled cocaine addictions. We forgive stupid drunken behaviour and celebrate missteps as at least showing some character.

Decades from now, someone’s who’s had a Twitter account since their teens will stand for PM, and we’ll surely see that feed picked apart. Tabloid headlines will scream the unsuitability of someone who once got drunk and silly, felt it necessary to review the weird new sandwich they had for lunch, or dared to share an unpopular opinion.

Hopefully the rest of us will have the good sense to ignore all that and remember we’ve all done it too, whether or not it’s a matter of public record.

Twitter gets an awful lot of criticism as being a useless waste of time, but a friend just tweeted about something that I reckon is the most brilliant use of the technology ever: a tweeting oven called BakerTweet. Now confession first: this isn’t new. In fact, the BakerTweet was installed last year. But this is the first I’ve heard of it and it reminded me just how fantastic technology can be.

The idea is simple enough. You run a bakery, people like your crumbly delights, so how do you let them know a fresh batch of pain au chocolats are fresh out of the oven? You could send out alerts via a Twitter client on a mobile or laptop, but that’s easy to forget. And besides, that phone is going to be covered in flour within days.

Poke, the company behind BakerTweet, set it all up using an open-source CMS, a Linksys Wi-Fi adapter and various bits of electronics and interfaces. Whenever something fresh comes out of the oven, the bakers select what it is from a pre-made list and press the button: tweet sent. The bakers can also customise the message as they see fit.

I spoke to Poke’s sound and creative director Nik Roope earlier today, and he emphasised it was very much a labour of love. “It was purely selfish in a way. We’re across the road from the Albion’s Oven bakery and were having a chat at lunch, wondering if they had anything fresh from the oven – but there was no way to know.”

So, rather than follow the time-honoured recipe of despatching your youngest team member to go and check, they instead dedicated their own time to building a device that could tell them from scratch.

“It was genuinely just for fun,” said Nik. “One of our engineering staff had been playing with this Arduino kit, a RAD platform, and we thought we’d have a tinker.”

Though what lies at BakerTweet’s heart is specialist electronics, some of it falls under the cobbled-together category. In particular, the knob is from a cooker, while the box is a standard catering case.

So what next? “We’re talking to a chocolatier and a zoo,” said Nik, raising some curious images. While he admitted that both projects are complicated and may never come to fruition, it’s this sort of brilliant thinking – combining cutting-edge technology with highly localised services – that highlights just what the likes of Twitter can do.

Of course, while the Twitter servers may well have been up and running in under an hour of going down, the same cannot be said of third party applications which took considerably longer to recover it would seem. Not, it has to be said, as bad as last week following the 15 fat Russians in a revolving door DDoS attack which saw the Twitter service impacted for days and some third party apps struggling to get back up to speed for days after that.There is, as yet, no word from the Twitterati as to exactly what did cause this latest downtime, and if it was indeed an attack then what kind and from where. I suspect, whatever the official reasoning, whatever the evidence, that the damage could well have been done. The DDoS attack, which also hit Facebook and LiveJournal remember, which appeared to have been directed at keeping one vocal blogger off the InterWeb to quiet his political arguments, impacted on Twitter way harder than might be reasonably expected of such a popular service.

You might be forgiven for thinking that the social networking come microblogging site du jour would be able to repel borders with a little more techno-savvy vim and vigour, after all Facebook and Livejournal managed to do just that and were not suffering like Twitter for days.

If the hackers and botnet merchants don’t bring Twitter down then, at least according to a new Gartner report, general disillusionment might. In the wonderfully entitled ‘Hype Cycle Special Report 2009‘ which evaluates the maturity of 1,650 technologies and trends in 79 technology, topic and industry areas, Gartner argues that the Twitter explosion has meant that the “inevitable disillusionment around ‘channel pollution’ is beginning”. It’s not all bad news for Twitter though, Gartner reckons that once business gets past that period of disillusionment Twitter will probably find widespread acceptance as far as mainstream implementations are concerned.

Assuming the next big thing has not already come along to swallow it up by then, of course. And assuming that it can get past the ‘buy your followers here‘ and ‘celebrity obsessed‘ phases it is going through right now that is.

His concern was that teens were treating friendships as a commodity to be traded – the fact that more people might follow someone you know on Twitter than follow you might be seen as a reason for suicide. One might have thought with the Roman Catholic Church’s attitude to sex, they might prefer social networking liaisons to real ones – but we better not go there.

In the middle of the week, we had the story that ITV is to sell Friends Reunited to the Beano for £25 million pounds – a loss of £150 million in four years.

I don’t suppose we should be surprised by this. After all, ITV has a large number of problems which are not related to social networking and it does need to concentrate on its core market. Friends Reunited was never really a social networking site in the way that other sites were.

I will admit I did register on it myself but was disappointed that few of my school colleagues were there. One of them did contact me but he did not seem to have changed from school. Maybe that was Friends Reunited’s problem – you stay in contact with people from school for a reason and those you lose contact with, you do so for a reason.

And now today, Twitter and Facebook have apparently been taken down by the Russians. Personally I don’t believe it. I think there are two much more plausible theories.

Firstly I think it was the Iranians trying to take down the sites after their involvement in the aftermath of the Iranian presidential elections. Don’t forget, it happened the day after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was sworn in as president.

Secondly it has been raining and all those potentially suicidal teens could not go out and were adding to their Facebook and Twitter pages. After all, the summer weather has been dreadful and all those teens sitting at home must have overwhelmed the social networking services.