On to the not-so-positives. The tweet box now pops up and steals the focus until you close it. A small change, you might think, but I regularly half-write tweets while I keep reading those of others, then react as I go. Sometimes I leave a tweet for ten minutes to decide whether it should really be sent (it usually shouldn’t). This prevents that, and it’s totally unnecessary. You also can’t send a tweet using Enter, and if you think you can go to Settings and change that, you can’t – it’s been pared back to the idiot-proof basics.

Tweets are now labelled with the number of days ago they were sent, rather than the actual time. That might not sound much, but I can think of many occasions when seeing a tweet was sent at 12pm or 12am made a big difference to the way I interpreted it. Every tweet now gives pride of place to the username of the sender, rather than the tweet itself. And unsurprisingly, the range of URL shorteners and photo services is cut right down, with Twitter’s own now the default.

It’s that oversimplification that constantly jars. When I first installed it and synced it up with my TweetDeck account, I was presented with a Home column of tweets, a Me column of mentions, and a Messages column for those all-important DMs.

But something wasn’t right. There were DMs I hadn’t sent or received. There were people in my Home feed I didn’t follow.

Now, I don’t just tweet from one account; I have three. I’m sure many people do the same, be it personal and work accounts, websites they run, or just a desire for different accounts for different needs.

New TweetDeck had taken it upon itself to make assumptions about my three accounts. The Home feed was taken solely from the team’s @pcpro account, which it had randomly assigned as my default despite there being seemingly no option to set an account as default. I’ve tried deleting all three accounts and adding them in a different order, but it always becomes the default. This also means every time I type a tweet, it assumes I’m sending it from that account, which I rarely do; if you see @pcpro tweet about its hangover on Saturday morning, blame TweetDeck, not me.

The Me feed and Messages column, on the other hand, automatically roll all three accounts into one, with no proper indication of which tweet came from which account. I don’t want to read my editor’s correspondence with our lovely readers mixed in with my own private messages; it’s confusing, a little bit scary and raises the potential for embarrassing blunders. I have three separate accounts for a reason; the decision to bundle them together should be mine, not TweetDeck’s.

Most of this can be fixed by simply deleting all of the default columns and creating new Timelines and Messages columns for each individual account, but to a long-term user like me it seems a perverse way of doing things. Don’t get me started on the way every link and photo now sends you to the browser, or clicking a tweet opens it over that column in the style of the Twitter web interface.

It’s not terrible, and I’m sure I’ll get used to some of its quirks. But for me the new client takes away much of what made TweetDeck so useful – namely the flexibility and control – and replaces it with much of what makes the Twitter web client so annoying. I don’t like the Twitter web interface, that’s why I use TweetDeck. Or at least it was until now. The former buying the latter means that distinction is only going to get narrower from here on in.

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.

Google+ has been gaining headlines this week over how quickly people have signed up for the social-networking strand of Google’s online empire.

Figures from web-traffic researcher ComScore suggest the service had reached 25 million users in just a month since launch – not bad for a project that remains in beta.

However, the thrust of the stories on the subject has been that Google+ is gaining traction far faster than social rivals Facebook and Twitter. According to the figures, it took Facebook nearly three years to attract 25m visitors, Twitter took more than 30 months and MySpace needed 20 months to reach the 25m mark.

It all sounds like Google+ is some sort of revolution, but it’s not. When Facebook started up, it was one spotty student, a computer and a few pictures of classmates. Likewise, Twitter started from small beginnings, with organic growth turning it into a mainstream application.

When Facebook started up, it was one spotty student, a computer and a few pictures of classmates

Google+ on the other hand, well, it’s from Google. It has unrivalled access to pretty much every desktop in the world through its search tools, its every move is documented through the media, and it already has a huge customer base for its other services.

Gmail alone boasts 200 million users, while Apps claims tens of millions of business users – all of which are already hardwired into the Google ecosystem.

Because of that, comparing growth rates for Google+ and its predecessors is worthless. It’s like making a fuss about the fact a new burger from McDonalds is selling faster than a revolutionary recipe from the late-night snack man selling quarter pounders outside Embankment tube station.

While MySpace, Facebook and Twitter were built from the ground up, Google has turned up at the party with a load of mates, heaps of beer and a louder music system than everyone else in the house. No wonder it’s making a noise.

In fact, if I was Google, rather than feeling smug about the number of people I’d signed up, I’d be wondering why, despite having a personal relationship with hundreds of millions of users, only 25m have stopped by to say hello.

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!

Twitter is having another one of those ‘I’m Spartacus!’ moments. The last one was when the powers that be decided someone making a joke post about blowing up Robin Hood Airport was a potential terrorist and prosecuted the poor sod.

The Twittersphere responded by retweeting the posting in question, on the basis that the police couldn’t arrest everyone. The same thing has now happened following the ridiculous situation where everyone and their dog knows the identity of a footballer who stands accused of doing what footballers seem to do when not kicking a ball around and earning obscene amounts of money.

An MP even used his Parliamentary privilege to suggest the footballer in question was Ryan Giggs. Something the masses on Twitter have been doing for the past fortnight or so, with tens of thousands of tweets and retweets naming the Manchester United player.

Most everyone, including it would appear the Prime Minister, has admitted the situation is such that these super injunctions are dead in the water and need to be looked at again. I say most everyone, as some lawyers who specialise in privacy law (surprise, surprise) think it’s outrageous that people on Twitter have ‘outed’ a poor footballer in this way and have called for every one of them to be prosecuted. Funnily enough, a certain footballer (who I shall refrain from naming) has allegedly instructed his lawyers to chase the Tweeting masses in just this manner.

Will the temptation be to try and control social networks and silence the voices of the tweeting masses?

While High Court Judges are notoriously out of touch with reality, those law makers a few decades younger and who live in the real world can surely not have failed to notice the power of Twitter. Which leaves me wondering which way they will swing: will the temptation be to try and control social networks and silence the voices of the tweeting masses? Or will they realise that free speech and the wisdom of crowds will always eventually expose stupid laws for exactly what they are?

I’m hopeful that it will be the latter, not least as the new Government appointed Twitter Tsar (or to be more precise the Executive Director of Digital Efficiency and Reform Group, Cabinet Office) is one Mike Bracken. While you may not recognise the name, you will recognise the web legacy he has left behind.

Bracken is a founder of the Mysociety Project, perhaps best known for the TheyWorkForYou website. This important site made it easy for ordinary folk like you and I to discover not only how to get in touch with our MP, but also exactly what they had been getting up to, how they voted, what they said in speeches and much more. Bracken has been a pioneering beacon in the world of the online democratisation of politics. As such, surely he would applaud the Twittersphere in helping to expose the daftness of the super-injunction culture that has exploded into the limelight this week?

Mike Bracken was unavailable for comment, unfortunately, so I can only guess that he would adopt a more sympathetic attitude to social networks than many in the corridors of power.  He doesn’t actually start the position until July, and although the fuss may have blown over by then the fallout will most certainly not have vanished. In his own blog  about accepting the new role, Bracken states “I’ve had the great fortune to work with hundreds of digital developers, and I know at heart they want to change the world and improve digital services from the users perspective. Now seems to be the time to give them a chance.”

Let’s hope that changing the world includes users as well as developers…

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.

Ah, the power of the accursed Twitter! A few minutes ago, @zensoftware tweeted that its Backup Assist Version 4 product was at end of life.

The BackupAssist website says: “Version 4 of BackupAssist was released in May 2007 and we have enjoyed providing you with support for this version over the past few years. We’ve made many improvements and additions to BackupAssist since then, including the release of BackupAssist v5 in October 2008.

“After releasing BackupAssist v6 last year, and adding even more functionality to the software, we decided that it was time to hang up the boots for version 4 in early 2011. While you can continue using BackupAssist v4, we will no longer be providing technical support for this version and you can no longer purchase upgrades for any of your version 4 licenses; you will instead need to purchase new BackupAssist v6 licenses at the standard price.”

I tweeted back, saying I thought this was a little draconian for a product that was launched only four years ago.

Within minutes, the company replied, saying “Fair comment. As a gesture, we’ll honour the std expired renewal price for customers who contact us quoting ref UKBAUPG4″. Which is better than a proverbial poke in the eye.

So if you have BackupAssist v4, maybe you should think about upgrading?

Twitter. Some people love it, some people don’t see the point. Others, like me, don’t see the point, make a song and dance about deleting their account, then sheepishly create a new one months later and admit that everyone else was right. Not my problem, Twitter must have got better in the interim.

But I think we can all agree that Twitter’s appeal lies in its short and sweet format. The 140-character limit is what makes “following” someone so appealing: it keeps things snappy, streamlined and often surprisingly creative. Even the most interesting Twitter user will post tweets that aren’t for you; the key is that every tweet is short and sweet and as easily skippable as any other.

At least it was, until a light bulb pinged on above the head of some bright spark at TweetDeck. Yes, its new deck.ly feature lets you keep typing beyond that 140th character. Instead of a warning red – you’re droning on… – you get an encouraging green: keep typing, you really are fascinating!

While visitors to your feed on the Twitter website will see a truncated tweet with the now-familiar URL link to the rest – a feature that I already find annoying – other TweetDeck users will see the first 310 characters of the tweet, followed by a Read more link that opens the full tweet in a popup.

It takes up the space of two standard tweets in your stream, so while the tweeter blathers on regardless, it’s the follower whose experience is impacted – and as far as I can see there’s no way to disable the feature, even if you don’t need or want it for your own tweets.

Worse than that, if this catches on and the huge number of TweetDeck users take it to their hearts, anyone not using the client could soon find their 140-character Twitter feeds clogged up with half-finished fragments. If it’s an attempt to get everyone onto TweetDeck, I pray it fails miserably.

I’m not against progress or innovation. I’m not going to campaign to stop people writing long tweets that spill over to a URL if that’s what they desperately want to do. In the previously perfect world I could simply skip over those few in the same way I do when Barry sends his hourly ode to Justin Bieber.

But I’m already seeing tweets of double length since the TweetDeck update began rolling out, and so far I’ve not seen one that wouldn’t have been improved by the existing character limit. Perhaps it comes from editing words for a living. Perhaps I’ll come to see the merit in more freedom on Twitter. I don’t think so.

For now all it’s succeeded in doing is make me want to uninstall TweetDeck, which is surely the opposite of what a feature update should achieve. So, in 140 characters or less… anyone know a good Twitter client?

UPDATE: Victory! As of update v0.37.3 TweetDeck will stop the double-height tweets, as well as give you the option of disabling deck.ly for your own tweets. It would appear I wasn’t alone in complaining!

What struck me this morning when I took a gander at someone’s Twitter feed, who’d only tweeted around 15 times, is that first tweet. The “hello world” kind of tweet of someone who doesn’t quite know what to say.

Which inspired me to take a look at the first tweets of some of the world’s most famous “tweeters”…

Stephen Fry (@stephenfry, joined July 2008)

Hello Twitterers. I’m About to fly to Africa for a new project and will be tweeting whilst I’m filming

Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer, joined March 2007)

Obsessing over twitter [although I prefer his third tweet, “tweet tweet!”]

Justin Bieber (@justinbieber, joined May 2009)

Check out my single “ONE TIME” on my myspace and spread the word for me. Thanks www.myspace.com/justinbieber

Ashton Kutcher (@AshtonKutcher, joined August 2009)

PUNK’D the MOVIE believe it! doesn’t sound like it makes sense but just wait.

Dave Gorman (@DaveGorman, joined January 2009)

not understanding what I’m supposed to do here…

Richard Bacon (@richardpbacon, joined January 2009)

watching telly

Ben Goldacre (@bengoldacre, joined June 2007)

procrastinating

Charlie Brooker (@charltonbrooker, joined January 2009)

I have been bullied into joining Twitter. Let’s see how long this lasts. I reckon 8 days

Bill Bailey (@BillBailey, joined February 2009)

just contemplating a Quorn-based dish

Brian Cox (@ProfBrianCox, joined July 2009)

Finally decided to tweet. Gia’s fault. At heathrow on way to Delhi to film eclipse on Wednesday next week. Its raining apparently

Jonathan Ross (@wossy, joined November 2008)

Hello me [okay, that was his second tweet really – his first was a far more mundane, “Getting to know twitter”]

Moira Stuart (@moira_stuart, joined October 2009)

Now Moira deserves special mention for her first three tweets… which are her only three tweets.

“moira_stuart… is new to Twitter and is confused” was followed by…

“Fiona Bruce” and then

“is new to Twitter”.

Now we don’t know for sure if that account is real, but if it isn’t then whoever set it up deserves a lifetime achievement award for services to entertainment.

My own first tweet, just for the record, was a far more mundane: “Proofing, proofing, proofing. Press week starts tomorrow. Anybody fancy reading eight pages about laser printers?”

To find your own, head to My Tweet 16. Be warned that it doesn’t work perfectly, and that oddly it believes some people joined Twitter in 1969. Which seems unlikely.

And if you can find any other particularly embarrassing ones, feel free to include them below…

UPDATE I’ve just been reminded by our deputy editor Barry Collins (@bazzacollins) that I wrote a feature about tech celebs last year, so it would probably be a good idea to link to it. He’s very clever that way.