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By Posted on Posted in W3C, Web 2 Comments

It’s time to have a serious talk about #!. If you’re a sharp-eyed Web user, it will not have escaped your attention that, for many Web sites (Twitter among them), the characters #! have started to appear in the address bar when visiting certain pages. Try it now. Go to my page on Twitter but check the URL I’m sending you to first – it should be “http://twitter.com/torgo”. Now – when you visit that link, check the address bar at the top of the page. Abracadabra, a mysterious #! (pronounced “hash bang” in geek-parlance, and we are firmly in geek territory here) has interposed itself between the twitter.com and the torgo bits of the URL. The appearance of #! is an artefact of a certain approach to Web application architecture. Many in the Web community have decried this approach (see more detail in Jeni Tennison’s blog entry), but to cut a long story short, the argument against using #! has been painted as largely academic by many Web application developers. This morning, I woke up and found my (very) local paper, the Archer, had been slipped through my mail slot. Something drew my eye to a box at the bottom of the page. “The Archer is now on twitter,” it pronounces. “Follow us on http://twitter.com/#!/TheArcherN2.” Ok, #!. Now, it’s personal. I’m not pointing fingers at the good folks at the Archer, by the way. They just did what Twitter told them to do. In good faith, they copied and pasted the URL that appeared at the top …

#!: This Time It’s Personal Read more »

By Posted on Posted in Web 2 Comments

I’m fed up with the state of online (and offline) “sharing.” I’m talking about the experience of seeing something you like and sharing that sentiment (and a suitable URI*) with a community you care about (your Twitter followers, for example). I had three sharing experiences over the long weekend, none of which were very satisfying. Example 1: The TechCrunch Europe article on start-up frustrations with BT’s Fibre roll-out. I was trying out an App, Pulse, and ended up reading the original article through this. Pulse is essentially a smart feed reader that downloads and caches articles – one advantage being that you can read them while off-line. (NB: when will someone write an HTML5 “app” that uses local storage to do the same thing?) Anyway, I wanted to share the article using the app’s built in Twitter button. That brought up a pop-up int he app which gave me a link shortened with Pule’s own link shortener (pulsene.ws). I wasn’t too comfortable with this because while I’m happy for the company behind Pulse to know that I’m using their app to send the tweet, I’m not so happy for them to be able to collect information on who’s reading my tweet. Plus I don’t know what that user experience will be when any other random person pulls up that URI. And I have no other option to use a third party shortener. Example 2: The David Mitchell column in the Observer. This was the most dysfunctional. First of all, I had been reading the article itself in …

Can I Share Something With You? Read more »

By Posted on Posted in Kids, Web 1 Comment

Late last year, I was asked to write an article for a “digital parenting” magazine produced by my employer, Vodafone. I was asked to write about (positive) trends I see in the future – I chose to focus on  the future of social networking, the future of human-computer interaction and the future of open data – three key trends that I see having a major impact on how we live, and have major implications for how we need to think about digital privacy. Besides my musings, though, the magazine is actually packed with great information for parents of young children who are just starting to explore the Web, social networks, texting and other forms of  digital media. As a parent, I really recommend reading it. To read the full article, you have to go to parents.vodafone.com and “click on” the “Digital Parenting Magazine.” It is also downloadable as a PDF.

By Posted on Posted in London, mobile 2.0, Web 2.0 3 Comments

photo credit: Charlotte Gilhooly I’m an early adopter, or possibly a serial alpha tester. I’m always willing to give something new a go, especially when it comes to new ways to get around my city, London. I was first off the block to get an Oyster card – a fantastic innovation that has transformed Tube and Bus travel, in my opinion. I was an early customer of the “OnePulse” combined Oyster-Visa-contactless payment card – less than fantastic, but that’s the subject of another post. So it should come as no surprise that I was one of the first to sign up for the new “Cycle Hire” scheme in London – cheerily called “Boris’s Bikes” by the press. (Us Londoners know they’re really Ken’s bikes but “Ken’s Bikes” suffers from a lack of aliteration so “Boris’s Bikes” it is.) They probably had enough work to do just launching the service and getting basic e-commerce systems up and running to worry about mobile app development and I’m aso guessing they didn’t have the expertise in house (though that’s just a guess). Many companies and organizations launching new services, particularly in government, might be in similar situations. They could have decided to bag mobile all together, but that would have been shortsighted. Clearly, this is a service that needed a mobile component.  So, as reported in the Guardian, TFL decided not to roll their own mobile app associated with the service but rather opened the field up budding mobile developers. They did so by releasing their data as an API to the …

Boris’s Bikes and Open Data Read more »

By Posted on Posted in Web 4 Comments Tagged with , , , , ,

Photo credit: Rob Pongsajapan. Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Lift conference and helping to run a workshop on user privacy. This was a workshop with a difference. My colleague Franco Papeschi came up with the idea of a privacy “game” (“Denopticon“) which would help participants explore the issues around privacy, personal information and data sharing. The game started with participants filling out an ID card with personal information about themselves. Participants earned points for finding out and recording personal information from others and additional points for fulfilling various secret missions. It was enormously fun and I hope to help run it again at other events. But besides being fun, it helped the participants, and the moderators, think about the key issues around user privacy. This was against the backdrop of enormous upheaval in the area of user privacy on the Web. I remember when privacy on the Web used to boil down to “turning off cookies.” Now-a-days if you turn off cookies, you might as well use your computer as a doorstop, and anyway the privacy conversation has so moved on. In a world where more and more of our communication is happening through social networks and socially connected applications, the whole concept of privacy is being turned on its head, to the extent that some (such as Christian Heller) are claiming that we are now living in a “post-privacy” world. And, of course, Google’s Eric Schmidt is on record saying “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, …

Can I Have a Word in Private? Read more »

By Posted on Posted in Web 2 Comments Tagged with

Meetings! We all hate them. Sometimes they are necessary. But what if you could minimize the number of meetings (and in particular status meetings) necessary to keep a project moving in the right direction. When I’m running a project, especially one with tight time-lines, I’m used to running daily (quick) “stand up” meetings in which each participant gives a quick status of what they’re working on; what they accomplished the previous day; what they plan to work on today and what challenges or problems they are facing. For a development project I’ve been working on for the past few months (“Agora” – more on that soon), we have largely abandoned this “stand up” style and moved all of this daily status sharing into Google Wave. This was partially necessitated by the fact that the developers and designers we have working on this project are in a few different physical locations, but the results have been surprising. I was sceptical at first that Wave would be a rich enough environment, but it has really enabled a kind of rich collaboration that. Developers can post screenshots of UI mockups or code samples or error codes and then generate discussion and get feedback on these. Commenting on the Wave enables people to talk about priorities. And as some of our developers are not native english speakers, using the Wave combined with web translation has enabled them to converse more easily and clearly than via voice or real-time chat. I approached this with an attitude of “Wave must be good …

The Meetingless Project? Read more »

By Posted on Posted in W3C, Web 2.0 2 Comments Tagged with ,

Interesting post over at Mashable today about the failure of many social network sites to take down personal images even after the user has explicitly “deleted” them. The issue of data take-down is one we’ve started discussing in the W3C Social Web Incubator Group. The example of deleting images you’ve placed online is a simple one, but what about all the other digital traces we leave on the Web? In a world where more and more of our identity is expressed online, should data take-down be a universal human right? We’re collecting user stories that illustrate concepts like this in order to provoke some thought, both about what the future of a more social Web should look like and what technical underpinnings need to be in place to make this happen.

By Posted on Posted in Mobile Web, W3C 3 Comments Tagged with , , , , ,

W3C are producing an online training course for mobile Web developers: “An Introduction to W3C’s Mobile Web Best Practices” which will run from May 26 to June 20 2008. This will be a great chance to get more information on mobile Web development practices from the experts — highly recommended for any Web developers out there who are interested in getting into mobile. W3C is organizing an online course to introduce Web developers and designers to W3C’s Mobile Web Best Practices. In this course you will: * learn about the specific promises and challenges of the mobile platform * learn how to use W3C’s Mobile Web Best Practices to design mobile-friendly Web content and to mobilize existing content * discover the relevant W3C resources for mobile Web design Participants will have access to lectures and assignments providing hands-on practical experience with using W3C’s mobile Web Best Practices. They will have direct access to W3C experts on this topic who are the instructors for this course. Participants will also be able to discuss and share experiences with their peers who are faced with the challenges of mobile Web design. More information at http://www.w3.org/2008/03/MobiWeb101/Overview.html Register now at http://www.3gwebtrain.com/moodle/

By Posted on Posted in Mobile Web, W3C 1 Comment Tagged with , ,

I was very lucky this past week to have been invited to Seoul (along with the other members of the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices, Device Descriptions and Ubiquitous Web working groups) to participate in something that came to be know as Mobile Web Week. The week of W3C working group meetings was punctuated by a day-long open workshop which we named W3C Mobile Wednesday. (Yes, my intention is to mobilize every day of the week – already we have had Mobile Monday and Mobile Sunday. Now Wednesday has fallen. Can Thursday be far behind?) Mobile Wednesday was actually a unique opportunity to hear from people working in Korea on the sharp end of the Mobile Web and to do a little bit of a sales job about the work we’ve been doing in the W3C Mobile Web Initiative and why it might be relevant there. One factor that greatly helped create a feeling of open dialog was the presence of simultaneous translation during the whole event. It’s a luxury I almost never get to experience, but it really can help to facilitate discussion when someone else is worrying about the burden of translation. The translators were a wonder – deftly dealing with sometimes very thick technical discussion, especially during the panel sessions. Besides Mobile Wednesday, I also had the pleasure of speaking to many Koreans living and breathing the Mobile Web, including representatives of the Mobile Web 2.0 Forum, the Korean W3C office, ETRI, and of the Korean companies involved in W3C activities, such as …

Reflections on the Mobile Web in Korea Read more »