Tickets are fast running out, but I really recommend you grab a ticket if you can to this year’s event – last year’s was great (and I gave a presentation on SVN). It’s all happening at Mandy Land Blackpool Pleasure Beach in the Paradise Room – same place as last year, but it’s being held in July instead of October this time round.
I really do hope that if I do television journalism when I’m older – which is what I’d really like to do – I hope I never cause a scene like that. It’s quite unbelievable this even happened.
I’ve been on Facebook for a fair few years. Enough to find it extremely useful and great for keeping in contact with friends, and discovering new people through who I know. I’ve also been quite comfortable, at least to a degree, about sharing personal data, photos and more with my friends through Facebook, as I’ve always known the ‘ins’ and ‘outs’ of the privacy settings and held tight control over who can see what. Having finely-tuned privacy online is something I value quite a lot, and it’s fair to say that I wouldn’t share half of the things I have done if I could not have chosen exactly who can and can’t see it. So it’s no surprise that I was rather alarmed by the series of relaxations to Facebook’s privacy stance, from the push to sharing with ‘Everyone’ to the new default of showing location, events and friends to anyone online.
Now, as concerned as I am about my own privacy online, I am even more worried that there are many people out there who don’t understand the concept of sharing with ‘Everyone’ actually means everyone - not just their friends. Unlike me, many people will share anything and everything on their Facebook profiles, from basic things like their school or work to pictures of themselves drunk at parties – things that they would rather not let an employer or their teacher see. People haven’t yet realised that Facebook can happily share these things to search engines that will store links to them for years, and even if you decide to delete your photos, Facebook’s policies clearly state that they can keep the image itself online for as long as they find ‘reasonable’, so anyone still could find the image itself on Facebooks’ servers years down the line.
I can control who I share with all I want, but that’s just for things I share myself. What’s stopping any friends with lax privacy settings uploading photos of me to the web, and then tagging me in them? I can go as far as untagging myself in the photo, or stopping people from viewing photos like that of me, but beyond that there’s nothing I can do. Oh, and don’t forget, Facebook own all your data you share with them. All of it. Yep, everything. And their Terms of Use even go as far as saying that if you don’t keep it up to date, they have the right to delete your account.
Isn’t it worrying that one large company with questionable privacy ethics now has control over almost everything we share on the web? At anytime they could change their policies and everyone could be burned – what if, for example, they decided that all your contact details could be made public to ‘Everyone’, and stop you from changing that? Sure, it’s probably a far-fetched example, but it can happen, and Facebook are perfectly allowed to do it within the Terms of Use we agreed to when we signed up. Probably a more realistic example would be that of Facebook’s relationship with advertisers. What if Facebook sold your user data to advertisers who then used it to target products at you? Facebook have tried it already with Beacon (and automatically opted everyone into it), and had a fierce backlash from users. It was only after considerable complaining that they let you opt-out of the service.
It seems like they’re trying to do it again with Social Plugins. Even though they were only announced a few weeks ago, many sites have now added the ‘Like’ button to their pages, and Facebook will automatically share this back to your profile if you interact with it. Think about the tracking they can do with that – not only can they see what and who you interact with on Facebook, they are able to track what websites you visit even when you leave the Facebook site. And if that’s not bad enough, Facebook recently rolled out a feature where they will automatically share all your information to selected websites and services as soon as you visit them, without your consent. And those sites can store it forever – as they are no longer bound by 24-hour limits. They call this “instant personalisation” – but it’s an opt-out scheme which is hidden deep within the privacy settings if you want to disable it.
As I’ve described, Facebook plays games with your privacy, constantly pushing the boundaries on what they will do with it. Yet, as much as I want to join the people who are flocking away from the site, the service it provides is invaluable for keeping in contact with my friends. I think the amount of data (and the control of it) that Facebook has over its users is extremely worrying, but without a decent solution to the whole ‘one site’ problem, there’s nowhere else for users to go.
What I would love to see is a specification for social information along the lines of OpenID but with the flexibility of blogging – where all my social profile data would be stored on my own server at a web address, and then people can add me as their friends by entering my social address. The system would be completely open, so people could make clients or server-side software on whatever platform they liked, and for those who don’t have websites, they could sign up using an online provider – akin to how so many services allow you to sign up for an OpenID without the need for a server. The main problem with such a system is that it would seem over-complicated to users. Why would the average user, who may possibly not even know the implications of privacy, let alone care about it, move away from Facebook, a simple site to share content, to a strange system where they reference users by their web addresses?
However, to see an open platform like this be established would be great, and a positive step in the direction where we can truly be the exclusive owners of the content we share online, without the worry that one large service can hold all our photos, contact details, connections and our online activity, with no guarantees that they will look after it.
This is a really interesting analysis by my friend Francis – I recommend you have a read of his other blog as well.
I wonder how different things could have turned out if Labour had maybe thrown out Tony Blair, reworked their policies and approach, and brought in Gordon Brown, before the 2005 election. My best guess is that the same thing would have happened, given that the dawn of the economic crisis was unknown at the time, and has been used a lot in Tory campaigns against Labour recently.
It looks as if Firefox is playing catchup with Chrome (again). In the last few months alone, Google Chrome has made significant growth – and Mozilla has seen the threat. Not only is it adding the tabs-on-top idea, it’s already tweaked the browser speed and integrated Personas directly. Now it’s trying to match the simplicity of Chrome’s extensions with a redesigned add-on manager based directly as a browser window. Sound familiar?
During an election campaign, it is inevitable that at least one politician will make some sort of slip-up under pressure, and the exciting campaign for 2010′s General Election is no exception. After a slip-up with a microphone, Gordon Brown was recorded as calling a widow a ‘bigot’ for challenging Labour’s policies and the subsequent media frenzy has been phenomenal. (Sky News showed non-stop footage for 45 minutes of the woman’s white front door after Gordon Brown returned to apologise later in the day.)
At the start of the day, Labour were trailing behind the Lib Dems in the polls. The disrespect that Gordon Brown showed to a voter could be damaging to his campaign, especially after how publically he paraded the woman before he got into the car. It’s too early to see what effect this will have but, given the speed he apologised to the woman (and the amount of times he apologised), the public may be somewhat forgiving. It will be interesting to see the YouGov poll in the morning.
However, I don’t think all is over for Gordon Brown. If, tomorrow night at the third debate, Gordon Brown prevails, defending the economy, whilst at the same time roping David Cameron into exposing his plans for the economy, he still has a chance. Yet, as the previous two debates have proven, it’s all up for grabs, and there can be such a big change overnight.
And who says this is the last gaffe we’ll see before the election is through?
I’ve changed my blog design to a new theme I’ve coded, taking the minimalistic design elements of the Bliss theme by Justin Tadlock, recoding it with some basic CSS and adding a simple sidebar, and adding the ability to just post links – taking advantage of WordPress’ custom post types in 3.0.
You might remember Young Rewired State held at Google’s UK offices in August last year. It was fantastic, and several really good ideas came out of it. Towards the end of March, Rewired State – an awesome bunch of people who organise hack days to show the government the benefits of open data – held a few more events over a series of weeks which were aimed at furthering this goal. I was lucky enough to be able to attend National Hack the Government Day, and Rewired State: Culture held the following weekend, both at The Guardian’s offices at King’s Place.
National Hack the Government Day was really fantastic. I met a load of people who I knew from Young Rewired State, and was thrilled and extremely grateful that other devs would happily lend me a hand with my project. I decided to look at the Digital Economy Bill, and soon took up @charlesarthur’s challenge to try and develop a tool to compare differences between subsequent revisions of a Parliamentary Bill – something which he originally described in a Guardian article, and I discussed in a post on the Tomorrow’s Web blog before the event.
I first decided to look at the PDF versions of Bills – after all, they came in one file which contained everything, and I could just strip away all the headers and footers, line numbers and page numbers, and it would all be fine, right? Nope. After doing all that, I ended up with paragraphs of text with odd line breaks, formatted for print, yet rather unreadable by machine. I went back to the drawing board. I was rather reluctant to use the HTML versions because I knew they contained even more external formatting such as the site headers and footers, but I was determined to give it a try. With a little beginner Ruby help from Ben Griffifths, I scraped the contents page of a Bill, grabbed all the links to other sections of the Bill and scraped the contents of those as well. I stripped away all the nonsense such as line numbers and page numbers and combined it all together to get a finished, clean copy of a Bill. I then modified some code written by Ross Scrivener to compare the two bills and it worked really well.
After adding a caching layer, I’ve made it available for download here, and an online version has been kindly hosted by GetAVote.org here. The Rewired State project page for more info can be found here. I won a Vodafone 360 phone* for my project, along with a project called expendituremap. There were some really cool projects shown at the presentation, which ran alongside the presentation for the DotGovLabs event.
The following Saturday, I was back again for Rewired State: Culture. After having some really nice bacon barms on arrival at The Guardian, I worked with James Darling, Dan Morris, Johnathan Lister and Lawrence Job (who I worked with on TFHell last year 
) to create TAPCulture, a concept to encourage young people to visit cultural venues such as museums and art galleries through location-based social networking. We mainly made more of a concept, but James and I did manage to geocode every museum and art gallery in the UK (resulting in a ban from the Google Maps API), so you could type in your town and see all the museums nearby.
I thoroughly enjoyed both events, mainly because of the amazing developers who attend, the fantastic people who organise them and the great sense of community spirit you get when you’re working on a project. I can’t wait for the next events and give a massive thanks to everyone who helped make it what it was.
* Quite bizarrely, the phone was in Spanish, the power supply was European and the phone is locked to Vodafone Spain. Any help would be appreciated in getting it unlocked for use in the UK
Well, it’s been a week or two since BuddyPress 1.2 was released, and so I decided to take another look at the platform. The last time I used BuddyPress was a pre-release version running off trunk, and it was missing quite a few core features. It also required WordPress MU, which is a hassle to upgrade without having to worry about BuddyPress too…
This time round, BuddyPress doesn’t require MU, and you can install it as simple as searching for it in the plugin browser of WordPress. This also simplifies updates as it can be upgraded automatically through the Plugin Manager. bbPress Forums come packaged out of the box within BuddyPress for groups, and the BuddyPress developers have put together a tool for easily adding compatibility for BuddyPress to your existing theme.
Talking of themes, BuddyPress’ new theme is awesome. A lot easier to customize using child themes, and the theme itself has a lot more scope for customization with a large header background image (similar to the WordPress TwentyTen theme) and a slick transparent admin bar.
There’s still a few things I’d like to see put into it – one of the big features it’s currently missing is Photo Galleries – and I’m sure that on the backend, several settings pages could be moved over to templates rather than being hard-coded
I strongly recommend you check it out, and I’m anticipating several big-name WordPress sites possibly integrating some of BuddyPress’ community elements into their themes soon.
P.S. If any BuddyPress developers happen to drop by, please could you get this filter added into the bp-groups package?
For the last week or so, I’ve been buried away working on a secret project. Today, it’s been approved on the CodeCanyon Marketplace and I hope that the hard work has paid off…
Introducing the Awesome Contact Form – it’s a class-based, PHP contact form which is pipsqueak-easy to setup and comes with a ton of features – including sending an auto-response to the sender, two anti-bot measures (a CAPTCHA and a human-verification question), field filters and custom error messages. You can also set a success message or use your own. It’s built for customization and integration, and doesn’t force you to stick to the default fields or make you edit the core code to make it work how you’d like to.
And on top of all this, the script comes with an extensive user guide, covering the installation, every configurable option with examples, and tutorials on how to get the most out of your script.
So what are you waiting for? You can get a copy today, it’s only $8 from CodeCanyon 
Jordan