It’s always fascinating to see how applying good practice in one area can lead to unforeseen benefits. The article on version control with subversion in the latest issue of A List Apart is a fine example of just that. Not only is the use of version control a good way to manage your own projects, it’s a vital enabler for significant shifts in working practices and management styles.

Those of us who’ve been building software for a while and keep tabs on best practice in that arena are unlikely to see version control as anything new—CVS has been around since the 80s, after all—but it’s arguably only now really coming into its own as we see social practices, work practices and coding practices coming together. And of course we’re finally starting to see promising mac subversion clients, which has to help.

On a related note, John Gruber noted a couple of days ago:

It strikes me as an odd coincidence that two serious Subversion clients would debut at a time when many developers are starting to switch away from Subversion to distributed revision control systems such as Git and Mercurial.

You could argue that it isn’t really a coincidence at all. Perhaps the fact that technologists have found a superior model for managing versions, and matured it to a point where many of us are starting to use Git is a consequence of really getting to grips with what tools like subversion allow. We’ve become good enough at communicating the features and flaws of one generation of tools that we can both provide friendly tools, and simultaneously witness a more widespread migration to their progeny?

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I was pleased a few months back to see Calvin College sign up for twiter. A small college in the Michigan town where I lived for three years up until last summer, the college is my wife’s former employer, a previous client of mine, and a place that dominated quite a bit of our social life in Grand Rapids. Twitter seemed a simple way to keep up with what was going on without much effort. But within a couple of months I stopped following them, partly out of frustration with some recent political developments on the campus but primarily because their twitter presence felt far too much like an anonymous broadcast, and close to an abuse of the medium.

It’s an example I’ve had on my mind while pondering the possibilities for official twitter usage at Greenbelt. Twitter is easy to use as a broadcast medium, and (recent stability concerns aside) works very well for getting messages out quickly to those who choose to hear them, but to treat it solely that way fails to engage with the realities of how it’s used, or the set of expectations that have emerged within the community of its users.

There are contexts in which a broadcast-only approach can work. The automated twitter feeds for things like Tower Bridge and Low Flying Rocks are quite understandably just broadcasting updates. They represent inanimate objects and are simple prototypes of how a system like twitter can change the way we interact with such objects. At the same time the way that the Mars Phoenix twitter account has been used has been fascinating, making use of the fact that there are human intermediaries involved to engage with its audience and answer questions.

Barack Obama’s account has been broadcast-only so far. I find that far more understandable as a campaign schedule of the sort he lives within doesn’t make engagement easy, but also a little disappointing as that aspect of politics desparately needs more interaction and transparency. The Downing Street account occasionally offers responses and it’d be good to see that from the Obama team, along with some information on how Obama’s tweets come to be. Are they along the lines of John Edwards‘ which I’m told were approved in communications team meetings but sent by the candidate himself, or is there some other process/person making it happen?

I’ve been enjoying the Channel4News offering lately. That too has yet to respond to any of its followers (so far as I’ve seen), but the slightly irreverent tone of some of the posts really helps give some insight into how their editorial process works, how things shift through the day, and the fact that they don’t take themselves entirely seriously.

The recent Innovation Edge conference and Social Innovation Camp made pretty good use of twitter. In the former case it was entirely focussed on the day of the event, but modelled good interaction between official-tweeter and those in the audience also using twitter. What it was lacking was some transparency: it wasn’t until after the event that it became clear who was posting on behalf of the event. SI Camp has continued to operate, and it’s a good way to keep up with the thinking and projects that have stemmed from the camp. At the event it offered a really good communications channel, identifying different groups’ needs and interesting comments, but since then it’s not been clear if it’s a personal account or entirely focussed on the followup to the event. Some clarity there would be helpful.

Obviously any high profile use of twitter shouldn’t be expected to respond to every message sent its way, but setting expectations and demonstrating some engagement with the conversation is vital for any user whose tweets aren’t entirely automated. Establishing transparency by identifying who is actually doing the posting is very helpful, whether per post (eg. “(from @jystewart)”) or simply in the bio (”with posts of official news, gathered by X, Y and Z”). And it’s probably best to be flexible, and adapt an approach based on how followers respond, just as twitter itself was adapted in response to the community’s use of @replies.

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Conversations about privacy are an increasingly vital part of any planning process for a membership-driven website. Having been engaged in such a conversation for a new project and fielding support emails for an existing one, it’s been on my mind quite a bit lately.

We’re all managing a lot of personal data, whether we’re running sites that might be described as “social networks” or simply a blog that provides a way to connect up a commenters contributions. On any new project questions inevitably come up about whether or not users should be able to hide their profiles or specific pieces of information, often influenced by the way facebook’s closed walls give a sense of privacy by not letting google index profile data. I’m given to thinking that facebook’s approach has actually hurt such discussions, by implying a level of privacy they don’t really offer.

The problem is that approaches like facebook’s are far more about an illusion of privacy than any actual protection. The artifacts of our online presence, our comments, our photos, etc. and perhaps more importantly our friends’ comments and photos, are never going to be entirely shielded just because we can hide our profiles, but hiding profiles can make us think that protection is there. Similarly attempts by some sites to hide profiles from users who aren’t logged in offers an illusion. Because there’s a hurdle to see your profile it’s tempting to think that it’s protected, but that’s simply not the case.

Our designs need to guide people to be careful about what they’re putting in their profiles rather than having those profiles hidden, and to remember that their online artifacts will last even if the attention given to them dips from its initial high. Unless we’re providing something much more secure than a “hidden” profile, we should avoid the implication that our tools (rather than their behaviour) are what will offer privacy.

[Obviously there are some cases where our architecture needs to work harder to offer privacy, but that's far from the general case]

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Along with many others I’ve been responding to the recent unreliability of twitter by checking out a few of the alternatives that are out there, particularly the dreadfully named but fairly cute plurk.

Plurk has quickly gained quite a few users but didn’t make a good first impression with me. The first thing that I was asked after signing up was to hand over my IM username and password to allow them to import my contacts. Being asked for passwords for such a purpose isn’t rare, but as Jeremy Keith so eloquently noted, it’s a very bad idea and—as dopplr show—increasingly unnecessary. That the developers ignored those sorts of details in an attempt to quickly build critical mass for their service makes me wonder how in step they are with other ideas of best practice on today’s web.

The timeline view that is plurk’s main interface is a nice idea, but it really doesn’t work as a primary way in to your data. Not only is there no fallback when javascript is switched off (neither progressive enhancement or graceful degradation here) but it quickly gets cluttered and when a “thread” gets large it proves very slow. The mobile interface, and per thread interface (as seen for jenny’s collaborative storytelling experiment) are an improvement but they lack the simplicity (elegance?) that twitter offers.

Rather than building a more robust twitter, plurk have experimented with new features, and in itself that’s a good thing. The icons are amusing, the timeline’s a nice visualisation for a small number of messages, and the threaded view works fairly well in very specific contexts. But the essential strengths of twitter—its open API, the way its team adapted the service based on how its users were interacting—aren’t there. And as Lloyd pointed out it requires too much “total attention.” With less focus on flow (and no sign of an open API that would allow clients like twitterific) it can’t become part of the general ambient noise of your day. And as Stowe Boyd observed most of the UI niceties would be pretty easy to layer on top of twitter using its API.

Can anything displace twitter in the near future and claim the space it currently owns?

On one level, we don’t yet need to ask that question as while twitter is a big part of the lives of many of us, the space it occupies is still pretty small and there are no guarantees as to how or even whether it will grow to the scale of facebook et al.

On another, I suspect that the next step from twitter is not a competing service, whatever fancy new features they offer, but is instead a shift from twitter-as-product to a far more distributed architecture that recognises that tools that help us engage with “the flow” of online chatter are a significant part of the infrastructure of how we live on the web, and so need to be built as infrastructure.

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With its complex yet penetrating arcs and careful unravelling of a fictionalised but well-rooted version of Baltimore, The Wire quickly became my favourite television show of recent years. So following its recent conclusion I’ve naturally been devouring every article I can find, not quite ready to let go.

The following paragraphs from a piece by executive producer David Simon struck me as an unintended example of why newspapers (his previous profession) have generally fared so poorly over the past few years, and a reminder of how easy it can be to miss the possibilities new technologies :

It would not have been easy for a veteran police reporter to pull all the police reports in the Southwestern District and find out just how robberies fell so dramatically, to track each individual report through staff review and find out how many were unfounded and for what reason, or to develop a stationhouse source who could tell you about how many reports went unwritten on the major’s orders, or even further — to talk to people in that district who tried to report armed robberies and instead found themselves threatened with warrant checks or accused of drug involvement or otherwise intimidated into dropping the matter.

These are areas that the technologies we use on the web should have helped papers become more effective. Improved scraping, syndication, and the tools that make sites like EveryBlock possible make it easier for people to track the data and offer new ways to identify potential grounds for investigation. The technology doesn’t remove the need for beat reporters, but it might let them find the leads more quickly, and help newspapers find the story. Instead, too many have simply looked to the short-term, aiming to raise ad revenue by becoming increasingly generic.

The story is the same outside the confines of the newspaper world. When approaching new web projects we need to make sure we’re not simply being reactive, but proactive. How can we take what we do well, and do it better?

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