Stephen Gately, tube workers and the power of Twitter

Monday, October 19th, 2009

This weekend saw a fascinating display of the influence of social networking, and how it harnessed its power to unify – and arguably lead – people to rally together against wrongdoing.

Events kicked off on Friday morning when the Daily Mail published an article by one of its columnists, Jan Moir, on the death of Boyzone’s Stephen Gately last weekend, in which she claims there was “nothing natural”  about the circumstances of the gay singer’s demise, and that Gately’s death struck a blow to the “happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships.”

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How would the Twitter generation have coped with 9/11?

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

There was a staggeringly good programme on Channel 4 the other night called 9/11: Phone Calls From The Towers. I say “staggeringly good” because I was expecting this to be a sensationalist, intrusive sham of a documentary that exploited the final moments of people who died in one of the most horrible ways imaginable. Instead, it was a sensitively made and fascinating insight into the moments before the towers collapsed.

What surprised me most about this documentary was the way the relatives of the dead cherished the recordings of those conversations. Several of those interviewed had kept the answerphone messages from their dying husbands, wives and siblings; one had recorded the voicemail message from his brother and kept it on his iPod. Instead of recoiling in horror from the emotion-strewn messages of their loved ones dying (as I expected they would), they were proud and comforted by the sound of their voice.

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Are Twitter, Facebook et al killing our businesses?

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

I’ve always been of the opinion that if people do the job they’re paid for, and they do it well, then it’s irrelevant whether they spend some of their working day using services like Facebook and Twitter. But I must admit that a piece by Theo Paphitis in today’s Daily Mail does ring a few bells.

“Sadly,” he writes, “the addictive, all-consuming  nature of online connections means that the worst internet offenders are reneging on their part of the bargain.” The bargain being that they’re there to earn money for the business, and themselves of course. (more…)

The Twitter freak show

Monday, August 17th, 2009

PC Pro’s online overlord Barry Collins is, as we speak, trying to be on holiday. This is something he’s not very good at, as evidenced by the fact that 12 minutes after the official start of him not being here, he emailed me about being here. The worst part of this is that he’s actually getting better.

However, in an attempt to prove that he really was going on holiday and wouldn’t be doing any of the things he’s so obviously doing, Barry handed over the keys to PC Pro’s beloved Twitter account, which he nourishes with the sort of obsessive care that even Gollum would consider a little excessive.

Before he “left” Barry instructed me to install Tweetdeck – which is essentially a window wiper allowing you to make sense of Twitter’s endless word rain. He couldn’t have done me any more damage if he’d stirred heroin into my tea. Once installed, Tweetdeck demands all of your attention and I’ve actually developed a tweet twitch from constantly flicking my glance to my second monitor looking for updates. What’s worse is that most of what flashes on my screen I don’t care about, and would live happily without ever having read.

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Sport and Twitter isn’t always a disaster

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

Twitter has been in and out of the mainstream press headlines over the last few month for a number of sport-related reasons. Some stemmed from ill-judged comments, others from a lack of understanding of how Twitter actually works, and the media seems to have pounced on the fact that an interesting tweet can make for a very cheap story.

Two jump out above the rest. In football, then-Spurs striker Darren Bent grew frustrated during protracted negotiations over his move to Sunderland and vented a series of irate tweets in the direction of club chairman Daniel Levy – not a great idea with the transfer still very much in the balance.

“Do I wanna go Hull City NO. Do I wanna go stoke NO do I wanna go sunderland YES so stop f****** around levy”

Spelling and punctuation issues aside, the papers jumped at the chance to write a story that contained both controversy and that newfangled web thing the kids are all talking about, so Twitter became the tool that earned Bent the move he wanted. (more…)

Twitter goes down (again) but will it soon be counted out for good?

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

Earlier today (Tuesday 11th August) Twitter went down, albeit briefly for around half an hour, with the official status blog reporting first “a site outage” but then changing tone later to say it was busy analysing traffic data to “determine the nature of this attack”.

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. (more…)

A bad week for social networking

Friday, August 7th, 2009

All in all it has been a bad week for social networking. It started on Monday with the leader of the Roman Catholics in the UK, Archbishop Vincent Nichols, saying that social networking sites undermined community life and would lead to teen suicides.

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. (more…)

The UK’s Top 40 tech celebs – and why Stephen Fry isn’t number 1

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

When I volunteered to write a feature about the most techie celebrities from these fair British Isles, I hadn’t anticipated the amount of work involved. I figured there would be around 15 celebs, maybe 20, who had been enticed into the wonderful world of Twitter, Facebook and blogging, but the list just kept on growing. I eventually settled on 40 as my cut-off point. Now to work out how to score it.

Fortunately my years working in the PC Pro Labs came to the rescue, and before I knew it I’d worked out a scoring system based on Twitter followers, interactivity, quality and quantity of blogs, techie knowledge and sheer amount of fame. Add it all up and out would pop a lovely number, somewhere between 1 and 100.

Naturally, the phrase “out would pop” is entirely untrue. I had to spend a good two weeks following each celebrity, checking for hints of their geekiness, before I could rate them with any authority. Then there was the small matter of trawling through blogs, Facebook accounts and even long-abandoned MySpace pages.

By the end, four men were vying for top position: TV and radio presenter Richard Bacon, comedian Dave Gorman, novelist Neil Gaiman and the inimitable Stephen Fry.

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How Habitat annoyed the Tweeting masses

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

Yes, it makes extremely comfortable and effortlessly trendy furniture, but it doesn’t get social media.

Habitat is in the middle of a disapproval-a-thon on Twitter right now, after the company, or someone acting on its behalf, added Iranian election hashtags to tweets about its “totally desirable Spring collection”.

Well, the idea was to attract attention, so it worked. In a way.

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Iran: Will Nokia achieve what Bush couldn’t?

Sunday, June 21st, 2009

Over the past week I’ve been dipping into the flood of “tweets” pouring out of Tehran. And I’ve been impressed: primarily, of course, by the spirit of the Iranian people, but also by the way Twitter has kept me informed with an immediacy and rawness that mainstream media coverage can’t match. What we’re seeing in the east is a landmark event, not only in geopolitical history, but also in the history of the internet

But while Twitter has undoubtedly played a major role in events, there’s a technology which I think has been even more pivotal. I’m talking about camera-phones — such as the one that captured the last living moments of a young Iranian woman named Neda, shot dead during a protest on Saturday in the streets of Tehran. (more…)