GitHub’s new status feature

Posted on January 24, 2019 by Ben Cotton

Two weeks ago, GitHub added a new feature for all users: the ability to set a status. I’m in favor of this. First, it appeals to my AOL Instant Messenger nostalgia. Second, I think it provides a valuable context for open source projects. It allows maintainers to say “hey, I’m not going to be very responsive for a bit”. In theory, this should let people filing issues and pull requests not get so angry if they don’t get a quick response.

Jessie Frazelle described it as the “cure for open source guilt”.

THIS IS THE BEST! Now maintainers can be out of town or actually take a vacation and inform others that's what they are doing! Take breaks! https://t.co/CICY6UWH01
— jessie frazelle ??‍? (@jessfraz) January 9, 2019

I was surprised at the amount of blowback this got. (See, for example the replies to Nat Friedman’s tweet.) Some of the responses are of the dumb “oh noes you’re turning GitHub into a social media platform. It should be about the code!” variety. To those people I say “fine, don’t use this feature.” Others raise a point about not advertising being on vacation.

No! We should not set a community expectation that maintainers should reveal details about their personal lives (like whether or not they are at home) on a totally open/public professional social network!
— Peter Wang (@pwang) January 9, 2019

I’m sympathetic to that. I’m generally pretty quiet about the house being empty on public or public-ish platforms. It’s a good way to advertise yourself to vandals and thieves. To be honest, I’m more worried about something like Nextdoor where the users are all local than GitHub where anyone who cares is probably a long way away. Nonetheless, it’s a valid concern, especially for people with a higher profile.

I agree with Peter that it’s not wise to set expectations for maintainers to share their private details. That said, I do think it’s helpful for maintainers to let their communities know what to expect from them. There are many reasons that someone might need to step away from their project for a week or several. A simple “I’m busy with other stuff and will check back in on February 30th” or something to that effect would accomplish the goal of setting community expectations without being too revelatory.

The success of this feature will rely on users making smart decisions about what they choose to reveal. That’s not always a great bet, but it does give people some control over the impact. The real question will be: how much do people respect it?

We can’t replace Facebook with personal websites

Posted on December 28, 2018 by Ben Cotton

Facebook is a….troublesome…company. The rampant disregard for personal privacy or the negative effects of the platform are concerning at best and actively evil at worst. So it’s not surprise that Jason Koebler’s recent Motherboard article about replacing Facebook with personal websites got a lot of traction, particularly among my more technoliterate friends.

But it’s not an easy solution as that. In the late 90s and early 00s, we had a collection of personal websites. There’s a reason that the centralized social media model (MySpace, Facebook, etc) took hold: a decentralized social network is hard.

The first hard part is getting people to use it. Facebook, to a degree not previously seen, made it really easy for the average person to have an online presence. They could easily share updates and post photos without having to know much of anything about computers or the Internet. They don’t have to worry about keeping anything except their content up-to-date.

I agree and disagree with this.

Agree: there's a reason I host my own blog.
Disagree: sites like Facebook gave a web presence to people who would otherwise not have one — not everyone can take on the burden of site maintenance.https://t.co/Y1g6ImaXJy
— julia ferraioli (@juliaferraioli) December 21, 2018

The other hard part is connecting to those other people. It’s easy to broadcast your message out to the world. It’s harder to find those you want to keep up with. If someone is on Facebook, they’re findable. If you’re not sure it’s the John Doe you’re looking for, you have additional contextual cues like mutual friends, etc to make it more clear. That’s less clear with John Doe’s WordPress site.

And Facebook provides more social features. You can tag your friends in photos (for better and worse). It has group communication features. It has event management. It provides access control. Sure, you could put a decentralized version of that together, but that increases the complexity. At some point, if you want it to be widely used outside of the tech community, you need some kind of centralized service to act as a directory. And then at that point, why not just make the centralized service the host?

I’m not saying that a company like Facebook is inevitable. With regulation or better ethics (or both!) Facebook or a service a lot like it could provide similar value without trampling on democracy and privacy. But it’s clear that “just have a personal website” is not a real replacement for Facebook.

How are you?

Posted on December 26, 2017 by Ben Cotton

Ed Sheeran got rid of his phone two years ago. He says life is better — more balanced — now. I don’t know how well Mr. Sheeran’s experience can be applied to the general public. He’s an internationally famous musician and probably has People™ to help him manage his affairs. His status as a celebrity almost certainly affects the key line in the article:

…he got rid of his phone in part because even though people were contacting him constantly, no one was asking him how he actually was.

(Credit to Heidi Moore for bringing this to my attention.)

Certainly part of celebrity is that people are often more interested in what they can get from you than what they can do for you. That’s true for us normal folk as well, of course, but the ratio is a little more balanced. But still, we’re not as engaged in how people are doing as perhaps we should be.

I don’t blame social media or smart phones for this phenomenon. They’re merely tools that amplify our behavior. It’s much easier for us to broadcast how we’re doing (even if we’re not honest about it) and to have others passively consume it. There’s less of a need to actively ask how our friends are doing because they’ve already told us.

But there’s something to be said for the act of actively asking. The very fact that it scales poorly makes it more intimate. Even if you spend your day broadcasting how you are, it can feel good when someone takes the time to check in on you.

The passive trap is easy to fall into. I tend to think of even the most casual of acquaintances as dear friends (whether they reciprocate or not). As a result, I try to be a good friend to many, many people. This is an impossible task, so I end up being a poor friend to most of them. Maybe I should focus more intently on fewer people. Or at least pick one person each day and be more active in how I engage with them.

Who gets your Facebook messages after you die?

Posted on June 19, 2017 by Ben Cotton

Last month, a court in Germany ruled that Facebook should not be compelled to give access to the account of a teenager who died to her parents. The girl died after being struck by a train. Her parents, trying to determine if it was a suicide, wanted to look for evidence that she had been bullied. The initial court ruled in favor of the girls parents, but Facebook prevailed on appeal.

This is an excellent example of the “hard cases make bad law” adage, though I think the court arrived at the right decision here. The girl’s parents argued that it was the digital equivalent of a diary, which is an interitable item. I understand their argument. As a parent myself, I don’t doubt that I would make the same argument were I in their case. But I think the appeals court made the right decision here, although it took some thought to get to that.

It’s more than just a diary

The “it’s the same as a diary” argument makes sense only if you intentionally exclude the ways it’s not. Yes, people use Facebook to share personal musings and reflections the same way they might in a diary or journal. However, Facebook (and other social media) have an interactivity that a diary does not.

This goes beyond the fact that others may leave comments on posts. The owner of an account is not necessarily the originator of the content within the account. What I mean by that is that the messages may be initiated by someone else. Granting account access to the girl’s parents is not really about protecting her privacy, it’s about protecting the privacy of those she has communicated with.

But that’s the point, right?

The girl’s parents wanted to find evidence of bullying. Why should the privacy of the bullies be protected (in the very narrow context of their messages to the girl)? Because they’re probably not the only people who sent the girl messages. What if another friend had confided in the girl about personal matters? What right do the girl’s parents have to that communication? None, of course.

I have a hard time justifying why the girl’s account should be made available to anyone given the risk of harm to innocent third parties. If the situation were different – if the police or prosecutor were ask for specific searches as part of a case – that would be more reasonable, in my opinion. In that case, the structure and process of the investigation would minimize the harm of disclosure.

This is a hard problem

In the pre-digital age, it was less complicated. Conversations that didn’t happen face-to-face (or on the telephone) probably happened via letter. Any letters that were not destroyed became part of the estate. Some heirs probably destroyed them, others not. And though there are many threats to privacy these days, the electronic age has made possible a form of privacy that was hitherto unknown.

I’m certainly in favor of people being able to explicitly opt in to allowing someone to inherit their accounts. And not all accounts are created equal. When I die, I’d like to think someone would keep my meager website around in order to provide a legacy of sorts. But I’d also like to think that my death won’t result in the correspondence my friends have sent me in confidence. It’s not my privacy I want to protect after I die, it’s the privacy of my friends.

Snapchat sunglasses? Why they could be successful

Posted on September 26, 2016 by Ben Cotton

Snapchat’s founder announced on Friday that the company is working on a new, non-software product: sunglasses. Set to go on sale this fall, these sunglasses will include a camera that, when activated, will record 10 seconds of video. Presumably, this video will be posted to Snapchat by way of the user’s phone.

Some of the reaction I’ve seen so far is pretty predictable: “it’s like Google Glass, but less featured!” and “what a great way to announce that you’re a d-bag.” Haters gonna hate, as they say, and I’ll admit that the design is not my style. Still, there are reasons to believe Snapchat’s Spectacles will have the sort of wide consumer adoption that Google Glass never did:

Price. At less than one-tenth the price of Google Glass, it’s much more affordable. The price is in line with normal sunglasses, for those of us who don’t buy our sunglasses off the spinny rack at the drug store (full disclosure: I buy my sunglasses off the spinny rack at the drug store).
Branding. Oh sure, Google had great brand recognition when Glass launched. But Google’s brand is more about utility. Snapchat is about social. And this lines up well with the respective eyewear, but I think the fact that Snapchat is a social media platform, not a “know everything” platform helps in this case.
Obviousness. Both Google Glass and Spectacles are pretty obvious externally, but Spectacles will apparently have an LED light to indicate when it was recording. The fact that Spectacles are sunglasses, not a fixture on general-purpose glasses, means that some of the more obvious privacy concerns (particularly bathrooms) are avoided because people probably won’t be wearing them inside. Plus the limited duration shortens the window for privacy violations. It’s more “I have my camera ready to go” and less “I am recording your every move.”
Simplicity. Yes, Spectacles have very limited use, but that also means they’re really easy to use. I haven’t used Glass, so I can’t speak for the ease of use, but it’s hard to beat “push this button.”

None of this is any guarantee that Spectacles will be a success, of course. It will be interesting to see how this affects Snapchat usage. Anecdotally, while I have many friends of a variety of genders, ages, and interests on Snapchat, it’s a small group of mostly twenty-something women that post stories (perhaps there’s greater usage 1:1?). There’s a lot to be said for being able to share your experiences from your own point-of-view, so now we’ll have to see what Evan Spiegel and company can do.

Getting support via social media

Posted on August 15, 2016 by Ben Cotton

“Twitter wants you to DM brands about your problems” read a recent Engagdet article. It seems Twitter is making it easier to contact certain brand accounts by putting a big contact button on the profile page. The idea being that the button, along with additional information about when the account is most responsive, will make it easier for customers to get support via social media. I can understand wanting to make that process easier; Twitter and other social media sites has been an effective way for unhappy customers to get attention.

The previous sentence explains why I don’t think this will end up being a very useful feature. Good customer support seems to be the exception rather than the rule. People began turning to social media to vent their frustration with the poor service they received. To their credit, companies responded well by providing prompt responses (if not always resolutions). But the incentive there is to tamp down publicly-expressed bad sentiment.

When I worked at McDonald’s, we were told that people are more likely to talk about, and will tell more people, the customer service they experienced. Studies also show complaints have an outsized impact. The public nature of the complaint, not the specific medium, is what drives the effectiveness of social media support.

In a world where complaints are dealt with privately, I expect companies to revert to their old ways. Slow and unhelpful responses will become the norm over time. If anything, the experience may get worse since social media platforms lack some of the functionality of traditional customer support platforms. It will be easier, for example, for replies to fall through the cracks.

I try to be not-a-jerk. In most cases, I’ll go through the usual channels first and try to get the problem resolved that way. But if I take to social media for satisfaction, you can bet I’ll do it publicly.

Reporting severe weather via social media

Posted on December 14, 2015 by Ben Cotton

It feels weird writing a post about sever weather in mid-December, but here we are. Over the weekend, storm chaser Dick McGowan tried to report a tornado to the NWS office in Amarillo, Texas. His report was dismissed with “There is no storm where you are located. This is NOT a valid report.” The only problem was that there was a tornado.

Weather Twitter was awash in discussion of the exchange on Saturday night. A lot of it was critical, but some was cautionary. The latter is where I want to focus. If you follow me on Twitter, it will not surprise you to hear that I’m a big fan of social media. And I think it’s been beneficial to severe weather operations. Not only does it make public reporting easier, but it allows forecasters to directly reach the public with visually-rich information in a way not previously possible.

But social media has limitations, too. Facebook’s algorithms make it nearly useless for disseminating time-sensitive information (e.g. warnings), and the selective filtering means that a large portion of the audience won’t get the message anyway. Twitter is much better for real-time posting, but is severely constrained by the 140 character limit. In both cases, NWS meteorologists are experts on weather, not social media (though there are efforts to improve social media training for forecasters), and there’s not necessarily going to be someone keeping a close eye on incoming social media.

I don’t know all of the details of Saturday night’s event. From one picture I saw, it looked like the storm in question looked pretty weak on radar. There were also several possible places Dick could have been looking and it didn’t look he made which direction he was looking clear. At the root, this is a failure to communicate.

As I said above, I’m a big fan of social media. If I need to get in touch with someone, social media is my first choice. I frequently make low-priority weather reports to the NWS via Twitter. For high-priority reports (basically anything that meets severe criteria or that presents an immediate threat to life), I still prefer to make a phone call. Phone calls are less parallelizable, but they’re lower-latency and higher-bandwidth than Tweets. The ability for a forecaster to ask for a clarification and get an answer quickly is critical.

If you do make a severe weather report via Twitter, I strongly encourage enabling location on the Tweet. An accurate location can make a big difference. As with all miscommunications, we must strive to be clear in how we talk to others, particularly in textual form.

Social steganography?

Posted on November 2, 2010 by Ben Cotton

Steganography was in the news this summer when the FBI revealed that Russian intelligence agents were using steganography to pass secret messages. Unlike encryption, which mathematically changes a message so that it can’t be read by a third party, steganography hides the message in plain sight — in this case in image files. With the buzz in the news, there was some discussion on blogs as well. I’m not sure how I came across it, but Danah Boyd penned an article about steganography in social media. Boyd talks about a girl named “Carmen”, who quoted lines from a Monty Python movie to communicate distress to her friends while hiding it from her mother.

I took serious issue with the article as an example of steganography. While it may technically meet the definition since Carmen’s mother apparently does not realize a secret message is being sent, that’s more a matter of serendipity than message obfuscation. Frankly, it’s a better example of “Carmen’s mom has no taste in movies” than “teens can hide secret messages in Facebook”. If Carmen’s mom had seen “Life of Brian”, which is undoubtedly older than Carmen, then the steganography fails.

Steganography only works if the recipient knows not to respond in the clear, too. If Carmen’s friend “Jane” had said “aw, what’s wrong”, the whole thing is blown. It’s possible that Carmen and her friends have worked out a protocol ahead of time, but that’s more of a code than a method. While it would be very trivial to share secret messages on Facebook, but song lyrics from a beloved movie is a pretty bad way to do that. To me, this article reads like another “OMG YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT KIDS ARE DOING ONLINE” piece designed to scare gullible parents.