Archive : February 2009

Well, the uprising against IE 6 has begun, and not a moment too soon – IE 6 will be seven years old on August 27th. In fact, there’s even a service to say goodbye to the old dinosaur.

You can do your bit for the Internet by showing a warning to IE 6 users in your Rails applications, or disabling it completely for those users, encouraging them to upgrade their browsers (or nag the relevant Sys Admin).

Firstly you need to install the UserAgent plugin by Josh Peek:
script/plugin install git://github.com/josh/useragent.git

Math weirdos amongst you will no doubt find this hi-lar-i-ous but I just found it remote and even a tiny bit chilling. Does the Google brand have enough personality to cut it on Twitter? I’m not sure – their binary code greeting makes 2001′s HAL computer seem well-adjusted.

[Update (10 April 2010): we've edited the tutorial to bring it up to date with the current incarnations of Facebook Connect, Facebooker and Rails.]

Back in June 2007 I wrote a popular tutorial on writing Facebook platform applications with Ruby On Rails. Time has moved on and Facebook has launched Facebook Connect which allows you to integrate Facebook into your own sites allowing authentication, registration, friend connecting, and Facebook feed posting in the context of your application. Mashable has a great post on 10 great implementations of Facebook Connect including Joost, Vimeo and Disqus.

At Made By Many we are fans of the possibilites of Facebook Connect for lowering barriers to registration, extracting social graph and injecting your social media functions into the daily online life of users. There is little point trying to create a “new” facebook on your site. Your unique social proposition lies elsewhere with your content, community and tools.

But why do people do it? I just don’t get it…

How many times have you heard people ask that question when they discover that you work in something to do with blogging, Twitter and Facebook?

They start to struggle when you tell them most people don’t do it for money. That makes them very suspicious. Not for money? Must be something really suspect then – possibly perverted. Perhaps you’ll end up using *that word*: “altruism”. That’ll get them smirking nervously. Altruism. Oh yeah.

Discovered this inspiring post via Twitter when I got in to work this morning. It makes a convincing argument for the role of community/social technologies in helping both citizens and the nation pull together and through the recession.

Looked at very simply: hundreds of thousands of people are finding or are about to find themselves with a lot more time and a lot less money than they are used to. The result is at least three sets of needs

• practical/financial (e.g. how do I pay the rent/avoid my house being repossessed?)
• emotional/psychological (e.g. how do I face my friends? where do I get my identity from now I don’t have a job?)
• directional (e.g. what do I do with my time? how do I find work?)

In the wake of a truly ghastly series of articles on Twitter, I am beginning to think that journalists will never write well on any thing that involves online communities or social media.

Perhaps the problem is this simple: They just don’t have the time to spend on participating in these communities which a thorough understanding of these phenomena require. You can’t just sign up and click a few buttons. You’ve got to get involved. That’s time expensive when the deadlines are ticking.

This is why, I think, journalists continue to fall prey to the most outrageously ridiculous claims from those with titles within fields like psychology who claim to understand something about human interactions in the online world. Journalists just don’t know how to vet what’s being told to them from the “experts”.

Lately, there has been lot of bizarre writing on how the hotspots of the internet, be that Facebook or Twitter or anything else, is bad for you.  The Guardian covers some of the fluff here.

I must admit I am beginning to tire of the headlines, formulaic as they are. Apparently, Facebook can kill, divorce you,  deprive you of good old fashioned hugs, eat your pet and so on. (OK, so I made up the last one – slap me!)

Twitter is even more disastrous – it can give you cancer as social isolation (read interacting in online environments) alter our genes.  (PDF link to piece of sensationalist research)
I quote:

One of the most pronounced changes in the daily habits of British citizens is a reduction
in the number of minutes per day that they interact with another human being. Recent his-
tory has seen people in marked retreat from one another as Britain moves from a culture of
greater common experience to a society of more isolated experience. She is in good com-
pany, as Americans too step back from one another in unprecedented magnitude.

I feel like crying. For what exactly does it mean to interact with another human being?

Seth Godin’s stated aim yesterday at the London Session was to ‘give us a headache’ – well, what he *did* do was give us food for thought – if he counts that as headache material! I’ve taken the table above, which he showed during his talk, from this old post of his. 

He said a lot of interesting things, most of which was drawn from his books and his blog. The more interesting part was the 2-hour long Q&A session that followed, which I kept thinking to myself was like a free consultancy session from one of the smartest marketing brains in the world. There were lots of entrepreneurs, some musicians and even a vicar in the audience, apart from the usual advertising, marketing and B2B suspects. 

Tim, Stuart, Anjali, Oli and I had an Amazing time at the London Twestival yesterday. More than 100 cities all over the world hosted a Twestival to raise money for communities that don’t have clean, safe drinking water – something most of us take for granted.