I met James briefly at Young Rewired State a few days ago. Young, highly talented, and with a gift for tinkering with data.

Clearly a gift for more than that, it would seem – his Twifficiency service ran wild and viral today, causing alarm, outrage, and yes – sadly – a big old share of Twitterhate.

Why? He created an algorithm to do some clever mashing of various statistics to try and find something insightful about the way people use Twitter. Did the resulting coefficient mean anything? I don’t know. Maybe not. Maybe just a bit of fun. But that’s how creativity works, so often. Throwing together seemingly meaningless factors and seeking insight from the results.

It also hit that sweet spot of vanity in many: “Oh look – a score! A way of finding out how good I am at Twitter” (or something like that). I reckon that’s why it took off like it did, anyway.

A sweet spot that turned a little sour when the service then tweeted, without warning, the fact that User X was just a little bit vain (well, just that they’d used the service, of course, but you get my drift). The resulting flood of tweets triggered further interest, and so it all multiplied. As wonderfully, infectiously, viral things tend to.

Sure, James broke one of the Twitter etiquette rules (not tweeting from someone’s account without explicitly seeking consent). But this is the guy that created a Wolfram-type search demonstrator in just one week. At age 17. And within ten days created another innovative service out of the blue. And has probably done dozens more. I think we can regard his social network capital as firmly in the black, can’t we?

He wasn’t duping anyone. He acted with courtesy throughout, and made it clear on his site as soon as he was able that if you didn’t want an auto-tweet, nobody was forcing you to use it. No snark, no sarcasm. More than many of us could have managed in the circumstances, I’d say.

The whole kerfuffle brought out a few predictably bovine reactions, of course – not knowing OAuth from a smoking hole in the ground, some worried (needlessly) about exploitation of their account. Perhaps taking a few moments to understand how and why it worked like that might have been a better use of their time than blasting off their squeals of outrage. Even better, they might try building something themselves before being so fast to shoot down those that can.

To the genius who set up @jamescunt [no, I shan't grace it with a link - look it up yourself if you really want, but it's not worth the keystrokes] I pity you and your jealousy. Really I do. Do yourself a favour and delete the account now. Forget you ever thought it was funny. (I am so impressed by the sanguine approach of James who just laughed off his imitators – more than I could have done then, or now).

Perhaps a little guilty myself of RTing a bit of satire from @mjrobbins (which I thought beautifully showed up the gullibility of many), I thought a little bit harder about what had happened, and then wrote this.

Well done James – keep them coming. Break a few rules sometimes. In disruption lies creativity. I salute you, sir.

The Prime Minister has asked…

The government recommended that…

It was suggested by ministers that…

Number 10 has contacted…

Conservative party officials have acted to…

MPs demand…

The government will order…

Parliament to decree…

We see variations on these all the time. But what do they actually mean? Is there a hierarchy? Glyn Wintle was quick to spot the implications of the statement that the government had asked Facebook to remove a page it didn’t like – the Raoul Moat tribute page.

I am personally very uncomfortable about the Gov telling Facebook it should remove a group because the Gov does do not like it.

Well, quite.

“When does it become Gov?”, he later added.

I don’t know. Do you? There is certainly a difference between an MP asking for something in the House, and the formal machinery of the state swinging into action to making things happen. But where does “No.10 asking” fit in? I have absolutely no idea. But I’m not that comfortable with it either; in whose name is it doing the asking?

Digging carefully into the media, some reports were explicit about the No.10 involvement – some just mentioned the MP’s request and that the Prime Minister confirmed it was a “very good point”. Ultimately, the nuances don’t matter to anyone other than keen observers of Westminster protocols – the public impression is that a freedom-limiting manoeuvre has been made by the government of this country without any clear mandate, process or instrument involved.

And that’s worth appreciating. Thanks Glyn.

Well, it hasn’t really – not for a while anyway – but it’ll do as a title.

The massive problem of mobile phone handsets being stolen led in 2002 to a marvellous bit of innovation. If a phone was stolen, its unique reference number – the International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) – could be logged on a central database of blacklisted numbers, and it wouldn’t work any more. Not on any UK service, anyway, regardless of what SIM card you put in it.

Now, with an idea this brilliant in its simplicity there are bound to be a few drawbacks. (It’s also a really good illustration of problems that come up in any distributed system built around a central point, with a large number of players and variables involved.)

I haven’t managed to find out much in the way of fact about this mysterious IMEI database. I have established that it is known as the Central Equipment Identity Register (how Orwellian is that?) and that the Global System for Mobiles Association (GSMA) handles requests from mobile network operators (MNOs) to join the membership of those able to update it. Whether there is any more regulation relating to it than that is unclear. [Wikipedia tells me there are certain weaknesses in the non-uniqueness of IMEI numbers across handsets, and that handsets can be reprogrammed with a new IMEI number with enough effort. But that's incidental to the argument of this post.]

My main point is that from a process perspective, it doesn’t actually do the job it’s intended to. This is why.

One day my phone stopped working. I took it into the shop. “It’s not the SIM”, they said – “your handset’s been blacklisted. You have a SIM-only contract with us, nothing we can do. Our responsibilities stop there. Where did you get the handset?”

I explained that I’d bought it on eBay about 9 months before (from a very genteel lady in Dorking who didn’t want it as an upgrade). “You’ll need to find her, and get a receipt.” And then what? They looked blank. And what if I can’t? Blanker. “Nothing we can do”. Hmm, I thought.

Obviously, there was no chance of finding the seller – I had absolutely no idea who or where she was, and anyway, why should I? This was a mistake. Could the wrong IMEI have been put on the blacklist by mistake? “Yes.”

I made a big fuss. I tried to track down a regulator. I wrote to Ofcom. I did all the usual things that a public service process obsessive does. Nothing. Silence everywhere. I carried on making increasing levels of fuss to Vodafone – my only hope: with membership of the GSMA club and able to get their digits on the database. Finally, after much griping, emailing and phoning, they said “it’ll work now.” And it did. “It was a mistake,” they said. “Happens quite a lot.”

Which means that making a big enough fuss, being articulate and invoking stories of nice grey-haired ladies in Dorking will get your phone unlocked. Stolen or not. By anyone MNO you pick on to force the unlocking.

Which seems like a complete load of bollocks.

This is a hugely powerful system, capable of causing immense inconvenience due to a finger-slip by any of hundreds of people, scattered widely. It’s designed to provide a serious barrier to theft, yet it can be unpicked with a sustained bout of whinging and some smartly written emails.

It reminded me of some of the concepts of centralised identity management, which I’ve written about before. As soon as a centralised system becomes powerful enough to be any use, almost by definition it becomes unusable when exposed to many real world conditions. The blocking process might have been quite effective when almost all handsets came via your MNO, and you didn’t swap networks much. But those days are long gone.

Gary Gale reported a similar experience to this today, triggering thoughts that it wasn’t just me, and provoking me to write this post. Thanks Gary. Add any comments you like.

I’m not a mobile industry expert. If any of you are, and I’ve made a string of howlers above, I’m sure you’ll let me know. Is something missing here in terms of an independent point of contact to appeal mistakes like this? Who would run it? Who would pay? We can certainly forget a “well, government should just do it” solution in the current climate.

Today’s false memory syndrome in relation to dates supposedly appearing in the Back to the Future films reminded me of the Captain Pugwash urban myth.

You’ll probably have been told at some point that the risqué names “Master Bates”, “Seaman Staines”, and “Roger the Cabin Boy” all featured in the popular childrens’ TV show of the late 20th century. The only slight problem with this hilarious story is that it isn’t true. Master Mate, Barnabas and Tom the Cabin Boy are the closest you’ll actually find. This minor inconvenience didn’t prevent the story from spreading like wildfire when I was a student – it might even still be going around today. The truth was a very poor substitute for the lurid fiction.

Hence the Pugwash Effect: the inherent believability of any old rubbish that invokes childhood nostalgia.

1995 Bonfire of red tape

2006 Bonfire of government laws

2007 Bonfire of the bureaucrats

2007 Bonfire of regulations

2009 Bonfire of quangos

2010 Bonfire of cultural projects

2010 Bonfire of middle-class benefits

2010 Bonfire of policies

2010 Bonfire of Town Hall red tape

2010 Bonfire of the vanity websites

and a special mention for:
1947 Bonfire of controls

It would seem there’s a very definite increase in the number of bonfires raging this year…

Bonfire

What good customer service looks like:

I have a small problem with my web hosting: permissions have been scrambled somewhere and a file can’t be created on the server. I know how to resolve it – an email to my hosting company. It’s acknowledged immediately, and within minutes I get a personal response. None of this “no reply to this account” nonsense. I exchange a few emails with more information. The problem gets fixed. Then a nice touch; we exchange tweets afterwards. There’s a social aspect to what was a very easy transaction. Other people will see this and think: they’re good guys, they obviously love what they do. And they do.

The web hosting company is called A Small Orange. Big thanks to Dave Briggs for recommending them. They’re somewhere in the USA. I don’t know exactly where; I don’t need to. But I do know the names of their support guys. I pay the company a pittance each year for their hosting and their helpdesk, which is always prompt and courteous, day or night.

They’re my idea of what a good service organisation is (before the accountants move in and it all gets bigger, greedier, chopped-down and off-shored in an attempt to squeeze out a few more drops of profit).

What bad customer service looks like:

I went into my bank the other day. I only go into my bank for one reason these days – to pay in cheques. I’ve always taken a paying-in slip, filled out the details scrupulously and handed it over with my cheque. I used to get a paper receipt; a while ago that became instant electronic confirmation. Fine by me.

Time before last, I took my filled-in paying-in slip to the counter. Oh, just put your card in the machine there, I’m told. So I do. And I politely ask if I need to use the slips now. £-> No, we can do it all through the machine. So, I suggest, why don’t you tell people that? Before they’ve picked up a pen? Perhaps with a small sign above the paying-in slips? Or indeed instead of the paying-in slips (with perhaps a small, discreet supply for those who don’t have their card with them. Except they all will have).

Time freezes. Cold, reptilian stare from cashier. £-> We can’t do that. P-> Why not? £-> [now making it up, facial tics breaking out like England flags on builders’ vans] Because some people like to use the slips. P-> So offer them the choice? £-> We don’t do it like that. P-> Do you have a way of passing ideas like that up within the branch, y’know, to maybe get things to change? I’ve just spent a couple of minutes filling in a form I had absolutely no need to. £-> I’ll make a note and raise it with my manager [lie]. Then card in machine, 20 seconds later, all done.

Last visit, I marched straight to the cashier, slipless. More rolling of lizard eyes at me: £-> You can’t use the machine today. This one isn’t working. P-> What about that one? £-> I’m working here. Fill this slip in please. P-> Do they go down often? £-> Yes. And sometimes we turn them off, especially when we’re busy. They slow things down. (I gaze around empty branch. It’s 10.30am. And 20 seconds is SLOW? What are you measuring here, exactly? Your time or mine?). Here, I’ll fill the slip in for you if you give me your card. (Aha, a glimmer of customer service, at last?)

And then the final straw: the slip is hastily scrawled with account number, sort code and total amount (compare that with the fields on the picture below) and through the rollers it whizzes. It doesn’t get spat back out because there’s no signature or branch name. And if those scrawls were Optically Character Recognised I’ll be hugely impressed – the details were all rekeyed in any case as far as I could see.

So for how many years, LloydsTSB (yes, you, though I suspect all banks are similar) have you been making fools out of millions of your customers by making them fill in information you don’t even bloody well need? Want to add all that up and tell me you’re designing things around them?

It goes without saying that I pay Lloyds Bank rather more than A Small Orange each year for their services. Can I contact them at anything approaching a human level? No. Do they have the remotest culture of improvement and customer service? No.

Serious offer: I’d love to meet someone responsible for LloydsTSB service design and give them (a limited amount of free) advice on small, simple changes to design, process and culture, that might just make them look a bit more like small giants of customer service, rather than the antediluvian dullards they are today.

But I suspect they don’t read blogs.

Now, if only I can persuade A Small Orange to offer UK retail banking services…

If you HAVE to have a form – try this: (and perhaps say sorry at some point)

I am probably at the bottom end of the interest scale for World Cup matters. But I do try and spot an opportunity to make people’s lives easier, if it can be done with little effort.

I also do the odd Wikipedia edit – nothing serious, mainly adding a few photos here and there. So when I spotted the question “what’s the hashtag for the World Cup?” a few times, I thought I’d try something, mainly by way of experiment.

Bringing the worlds of reference orthodoxy and real-time together, by adding a line to the Wikipedia World Cup page: “The tag[defined] in most active use to identify content and discussion about the tournament on Twitter[defined] is #wc2010.”

It lasted 9 minutes. Then removed as being ‘unencyclopedic’. Yes. I understand what that means, and have no gripe with the Wikipedian who wielded the axe. But it raises an interesting question of policy – as real-time information becomes more than a nice-to-have and moves, through expectation, to necessity. Should Wikipedia change its stance in areas like this? Or will its insistence on citation standards for everything begin to erode its relevance in the long term?

I’m enjoying the latest flowerings of open data, and the recent quality posts from Ingrid Koehler and Steph Gray on what it all might mean. As well as quality action from Rewired State and others to actually demonstrate it in practice. (ooh, I just spotted that a reel of my photos is running on the Rewired State home page – thanks guys)

We’re getting a better understanding of what data actually is now that we’re seeing more of the things that were previously tucked away.

I’ll add my own observations: it helps me, at least, when thinking about complicated things to break them down a bit. My suggestion is to think in terms of four broad types:

1. Historical data

What’s happened in the past: how organisations and people have performed – what’s been said in meetings – what’s been spent – where the pollution has been – how children performed in tests…

2. Planning data

What’s projected to happen, or will shape what will happen: this and next year’s budget – legislation in progress – consultations – proposed housing developments – manifestos…

3. Infrastructural data

The building blocks of useful services. Boring stuff, doesn’t change that often, but when it does, it needs to be swiftly and accurately updated: postcodes – boundaries – base maps – contact directories – opening hours – organisation structures – “find my nearest…”

4. Operational data

The real-time stuff; what’s happening NOW: where’s my train/bus? – crime in progress – emergency information – school closures – traffic reports – happening in your area today…

These are not unrelated: what’s happened in the past will often guide what’s planned for the future. Today’s operational information becomes tomorrow’s history. And so on. There’s plenty of overlap. They’re intended as concepts, not hard definitions. The types can also be combined in every way conceivable: that’s part of the point of releasing the data in the first place.

I’m deliberately drawing no great distinction here between ‘information’ and ‘data’: the latter is a structured, interpretable incarnation of the former. That’s another set of issues in itself. I’ve also skipped over questions of interpretation and spin – this is a blog post, not a chapter of my book And I’ve omitted “personal data” as a type – this is woven through all areas and carries with it its own baggage. I’m thinking more about the basics of function and purpose. Which lead on to usefulness. Which, as I’ve said before, is the test that all this is taking us in the right direction.

“Useful to whom” does of course vary by type: 1 and 2 are great for those holding public service to account (press, public, whoever). 2 is for those who will make change happen. 3 will benefit of ordinary people in day-to-day life (and I’m careful here not to imply that these ordinary people ever have to see ‘data’ or an ‘e-service’ themselves: their local paper, toddler group, or community centre noticeboard are all valid intermediaries here). 4 will do things for the e-enabled – the mobile generation, the data natives, as well as for places that can serve an offline public (screens in train stations, visuals at bus-stops).

As a practical suggestion, I would love to see some of the current initiatives to build repositories and access to data recognising these distinctions exist. A little more signposting about the type of data that’s being released may help to highlight which types are being overlooked. For as we know, opening up the narrative helps to drive the change itself.

And how are we doing against these four types?

Pretty good on historical (it’s quite easy to dump old files online); weak on the future planning stuff (trickier, because if there’s no means of action accompanying the data, will publishing do anything other than frustrate?); getting there on infrastructural (though licensing, linking and standards offer the greatest challenges); struggling on operational (contractual, accuracy, standards).

That’s a one line summary. What do you think? Where should we putting more effort?

It’s happened to me. And to lots of people I know. It might have happened to you. (A hundred anecdotes make evidence, naturally.)

You find out one day that you’re not following someone you know you used to follow. And you’re dead sure you didn’t do it yourself. Either you or they have spotted the omission on a list, or they’ve tried to send a DM and failed. They might let you know about it. They might not. The relationship gets reinstated. Or it doesn’t. Life goes on.

So is this cock-up or conspiracy? A bug in the system that lets people slip through the cracks like this?

I don’t think it’s a bug at all, but a feature. A piece of very clever social design. Here’s why.

Real relationships aren’t binary. They’re analogue. You can like someone not at all, a bit, or a lot. That can change from day to day – sometimes from hour to hour. Independently of how much you like them there are other factors involved like distance and frequency of contact. You might adore each other but only communicate once a year.

Social networks can (so far) only provide the palest echo of this rich texture. You’re either someone’s Facebook friend, or you’re not. Twitter’s a bit more subtle in its branding of the relationship, but we’re humans. We’re tempted to attach emotional significance to everything to some degree. Unfollow me? You mustn’t like me any more. I’m sad. I don’t enjoy this experience much. Best keep away from it.

And to those who do the unfollowing and reap more than they bargained for, this brings its own problems. Retaliation. Icy silence. Worse. People will interpret the same fact in countless different ways. We don’t all operate according to the same textbook of emotional responses (mercifully).

So if you’re a savvy social designer, you want to design the sadness and badness out where you can. You want to keep your community happy. You want to keep your community there. So you need loopholes. Get-outs. And you quietly introduce a random unfollow ‘bug’. Just a small one. Perhaps 0.1% of relationships ‘accidentally’ broken in a month. Not enough to reduce confidence in the integrity of the system.

But enough to offer a face-saver to the unfollower. And a hope-giver to the unfollowed.

Genius.

I have similar thoughts about weather forecasts. I’m pretty sure (though lack a sufficient amount of source data to crunch) that five-day forecasts, averaged over the long-term, are consistently a few notches better on days four and five; only to gradually converge on today’s dull wet misery as the days roll on. And, in the early days of breakfast TV, it was bizarre how GMTV’s weather was always a little better than the BBC’s. Not enough to completely destroy confidence in the forecast, but enough to make you feel slightly happier, consistently, about one channel over its rival.

As with social networks, it’s all about the feelings. Black and white? Bad. Fuzzy? Much better.

Take a walk in Parliament Square. Try and find this. (It is still there; I checked today.) Take a picture of it and post it. Perhaps even find out who made it, and what it means. See if there are any conversations to be had. I have a real hunch that there might be, given where it is, and who lives and hangs out there. Use the tag #hypotoyeze on Twitter or Flickr. See where it goes. Find serendipity. Maybe.

This is the Hypotoyeze.

I was drawn to it – well, you can see why, no? And because after I uploaded the original picture back in November, the only reference to this wonderful malapropism on the internet (via Google, anyway) was that picture. And still is, for the moment.