Brainstorming Doesn’t Really Work

Interesting post from the New Yorker. The part of it that’s particularly damaging is the ‘no criticism of others’s ideas’ rule, it seems.

What's wrong with Google?

Gets to the heart of why Google seems to screwing up do many of its services right now, and pushing people towards Google+. It thinks it has to to survive and compete.

Thomyk Podcast: Retraction

In which Thom and Michael look back at the retraction of Mike Daisey’s episode of This American Life. Michael talks about watching Game of Thrones with his mum.

A rather ingenious approach to tackling anti-abortion bullies

A perfect win/win situation which avoids a huge, pointless confrontation. Nice work.

How to Get Away With Murder and Other Things the Killing of Unarmed Black Teen Trayvon Martin Teaches Us

A truly depressing story. Things can get pretty bad with race relations and the balance of power in violent situations over here in the UK, but at least so far, they’re not this bad.

Dorian Lynskey's review of Jeff Mangum's recent UK gig

I wish I could have been there. Sounds magical.

Show Homens Luzes - Wrecking Crew Orchestra

Absolutely stunning dance show using a black stage and lit costumes to amazing effect.

Source: twitter.com

Making Money From Twitter

Twitter are gradually rolling out ‘promoted tweets’ to apps now. Cue users being unhappy that a service previously unencumbered by ads is now selling you things you have no interest in. Your Twitter stream’s a personal thing, you don’t want it ruined by the odd advert popping up. That’s perfectly understandable.

I feel slightly differently. I don’t particularly want to see ads in my stream either, but what I do want to see is Twitter having a business model that’s sustainable for the foreseeable future. Luckily, Twitter doesn’t need to make as much money as Facebook, since it has a considerably smaller staff, but on the other hand it has nowhere near the number of users (especially regular users) and many of those users don’t use the web interface as their main means for interacting with the service.

Most of the supposedly ‘free’ services we use right now (especially Google and Facebook) get money out of you by selling your personal information to advertisers and anyone else who asks. As the now-common saying goes, if you’re not paying for a service, you’re the product being sold.

So, Twitter has some options in front of it of ways it can make money1:

  1. It can sell ads
  2. It can sell personal data & search
  3. It can charge users to use its service
  4. It can do some combination of the above

As far as I can tell, Twitter’s going for a combination of 1 and 2, and it’ll be interesting to see how that works out. Users already seem annoyed by the relatively innocuous adverts it’s testing out. They’re unlikely to be happy with this programme developing.

The most annoyed users of all will be shouting vociferously for the third option. “If you’re going to sell ads, why not allow a paid-for version” these people say2, “I love Twitter and I’d be happy to pay to avoid being advertised at”. I’d like to explain why I think Twitter aren’t going to offer this option any time soon, indeed, I’d like to argue why I think they shouldn’t.

If you’re a keen user of Twitter, you might be happy to pay, but the fact is that the vast majority of users won’t. If you run an ad-free service where a tiny minority of users pay, those users pay to support the rest of the customers. To some degree, the paid users are being ripped off. They might be perfectly happy with that, and that’s fine. Indeed, to some extent they’re paying for the other users because it’s those users that make the service better, and that’s part of the deal, but broadly, they’re getting a service that doesn’t cost much money extraordinarily expensively.

Of course, to pay for the free users, you can sell ads against them. This seems ideal, since it means that free users pay their way (through advertising) and paid users get the benefits of the extra feature of a service without advertising, whilst still paying their way. Everyone’s happy, right?

Well, no. The people that aren’t happy are the advertisers. In this model, on the one hand Twitter has to go to advertisers and tell them how great their service is to advertise on. Users will happily click on their ads and turn in to joyous, returning customers. At the same time, Twitter have to go to their users and say “you hate these ads, right? Here’s how you can pay to have them turned off.” If I was an advertiser, there’s no way I’d want to advertise on a network where my advert was used as a downside of the free service, as a stick to beat people into paying for Twitter PRO3. For this very reason, I’m constantly surprised that Spotify gets any advertisers at all4.

So Twitter has to make a starker decision. Do they choose the paid/free model, and thus have to think of what Twitter PRO would consist of - what are the services that people would pay for? How much would they pay for them? Do you sell corporate accounts? How much should they be? These are difficult questions, and it puts Twitter in the place of trying to make back the money that people have invested in the company by creating a two-tier service. The fact that you think you’re happy to pay for it is not all that important. The question is how much would you be willing pay? Finding that price-point is extremely difficult. Do you love Twitter enough to pay $25 per month? $100 a year? Your price might be simple to pin down, but is everyone else’s?

Or, do they chose the route they’ve gone for, and try out some means of advertising. To me, that seems like a simpler option. It removes the need for a two- (or three- or four-) tier Twitter, keeps the majority of users using the service (apart from those so disgusted by advertising that they leave, but, well, we’ll see) and keeps Twitter going for a few more years. I’m happy with that.

Update

Robert Brook has done a rather brilliant audio response to this post entitled ‘plankton’. I’m not sure there’s anything in there I’d disagree with. Also, if you’re not signed up to Robert’s newsletter, then you’re a crazy fool.

Also, Steve Lawson has suggested a Twitter app with no ads. I agree this is the best ad-avoiding option, and it’s a variant I hadn’t considered. Although I think that it still suffers from some of the problems outlined above, I reckon it’d be an easier sell to advertisers.

  1. in fact, Twitter’s had the options in front of it for some time, and it’s made its choice, but these choices are only really coming online slowly now. ↩

  2. Well, you know, they say stuff like that. I’m not quoting anyone in particular, but you can imagine someone saying that. Perhaps they have a jumper on. ↩

  3. You can have ‘Twitter PRO™’ for free. ↩

  4. Right now it gets nowhere near enough to support the free parts of the service, even at the reduced levels the free service now provides. ↩

The Budget: how will it affect fictional people?

Brilliant post from Tom Phllips on the budget:

Lord Henry Dashington, industrialist aristocrat, Hampshire Lord Dashington owns a series of failing manufacturing businesses, which he inherited after his father mysteriously vanished in the Congo, that have been hit hard by both the recession and his apparently dissolute lifestyle. But secretly, Lord Dashington is actually Britain’s greatest crime fighter – taking on the world’s most evil villains from his hi-tech base at Dash Hall, helped by his plucky niece Felicity and autistic savant butler Gerald. The budget’s moves on corporation tax, the 50p income tax rate and the decision to not implement a mansion tax will be of significant help to Lord Dashington – saving him enough money that he will be able to confront his greatest foe yet, the infamous Red Glove and his dreaded Six Fingers Gang, in the thrilling Adventure of the Bamboo Fish. Hurrah!

Neil Gaiman and Todd McFarlane: The Story So Far (March 1993 - March 2012)

An extensive timeline of the Gaiman/McFarlane saga, the main reason it’s still impossible to get a legal copy of Marvelman/Miracleman anywhere. A lot of work has gone into this from Pádraig Ó Méalóid. If there’s anything that becomes clear as you read it, it’s that McFarlane’s a bit of a dick.

OH HAI SEXISM

A briliant Storify from Guardian tech editor Charles Arthur on sexism in tech.

An ex Google employee on why he left Google

A user exodus from Facebook never materialized. I couldn’t even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, “social isn’t a product,” she told me after I gave her a demo, “social is people and the people are on Facebook.” Google was the rich kid who, after having discovered he wasn’t invited to the party, built his own party in retaliation. The fact that no one came to Google’s party became the elephant in the room.

Tax statements to be tailored to your idiotic, tribal prejudice

Nice piece from the Daily Mash on personal tax statements.

Chancellor George Osborne said he wants the public to know more about government spending and for them to use that information to become even more entrenched in their deliberate stupidity.

The House of Silk The House of Silk is Anthony Horowitz’s Sherlock Holmes story, written in the style of Conan-Doyle, and thus perhaps it’s a little unfair of me that throughout this book I found myself thinking ‘would Holmes act like that?’ or ‘would Watson say such a thing?’ - problems that clearly never trouble me in Sherlock Holmes books written by Conan-Doyle himself, since if they appear in one of those stories, then clearly that’s what Holmes or Watson did do or say. Since, in truth, Horowitz has done a good job here. The House of Silk is an engaging and satisfying story that pulls many different themes and tropes from the Holmes canon and ends up creating a story that, even if it doesn’t quite at times ring true as an original, is still an enjoyable read. If I have any criticism, it’s that Horowitz is a little too generous to himself with the range of characters he chooses from. Indeed, this book has appearances from the Baker Street Irregulars, Lestrade (in a pleasingly different light from usual), Mycroft, and even one other character who ends up being shoe-horned in in a rather unsatisfying manner, Watson makes many more references to other stories, where in the actual books, there’s relatively little cross-referencing. All that said, The House of Silk is a well-written story, contains some charming details from Watson explaining what has happened after the last of the previous stories were published and an afterword which is even rather moving. Although, as is inevitable with books of this type, it sometimes strays into pastiche as much as loving tribute, I find it difficult to imagine anyone doing a considerably better job other, of course, than Conan-Doyle himself. Buy The House of Silk on Amazon

The House of Silk

The House of Silk is Anthony Horowitz’s Sherlock Holmes story, written in the style of Conan-Doyle, and thus perhaps it’s a little unfair of me that throughout this book I found myself thinking ‘would Holmes act like that?’ or ‘would Watson say such a thing?’ - problems that clearly never trouble me in Sherlock Holmes books written by Conan-Doyle himself, since if they appear in one of those stories, then clearly that’s what Holmes or Watson did do or say.

Since, in truth, Horowitz has done a good job here. The House of Silk is an engaging and satisfying story that pulls many different themes and tropes from the Holmes canon and ends up creating a story that, even if it doesn’t quite at times ring true as an original, is still an enjoyable read.

If I have any criticism, it’s that Horowitz is a little too generous to himself with the range of characters he chooses from. Indeed, this book has appearances from the Baker Street Irregulars, Lestrade (in a pleasingly different light from usual), Mycroft, and even one other character who ends up being shoe-horned in in a rather unsatisfying manner, Watson makes many more references to other stories, where in the actual books, there’s relatively little cross-referencing.

All that said, The House of Silk is a well-written story, contains some charming details from Watson explaining what has happened after the last of the previous stories were published and an afterword which is even rather moving. Although, as is inevitable with books of this type, it sometimes strays into pastiche as much as loving tribute, I find it difficult to imagine anyone doing a considerably better job other, of course, than Conan-Doyle himself.

Buy The House of Silk on Amazon

3D Sistine Chapel Panorama

Someday I’d love to visit the Sistine Chapel. Until then, this tool from the Vatican’s website gives you the ability to see the chapel in 3D, looking around from the central point. Beautiful.