Twitter expanding my Web2.0 world and a broken Facebook application

I signed up to Twitter months ago (primarily to squat on the username!) and have never used it, to be honest I have not really seen the usefulness of it, pointless short messages along the lines of "The dog has just broken wind", "I have a headache" and " Did I just hear Hall and Oates singing "Locomotion"? That can't possibly be right ... can it?" (thanks to Wil Wheaton for the last one)

But I decided to give it a go, and of course in the spirit of Web2.0 decided to install the twitter application on my new Facebook page but it bombed out with page full of compiler debug code, a little investigation and it seems I am not the only new user experiencing the problem.

AJ Vaynerchuk posted about the problem five days ago and there is a discussion thread on Facebook full of "me too" posts, but as yet no response and no fix from either party.

Interestingly it coincides with a number of articles and programs I have recently read and listened too concerning the dangers of building a product and/or business model on the top of a platform over which you have no control. If that platform changes, fails or disappears then your are in trouble. While am sure this is more likely to be sloppy coding it is an interesting portent.

Listening to this week's BBC World Service program Digital Planet it had an interview with Jonathan Zittrain who has written a book called The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It, the synopsis on Amazon.co.uk reads

In "The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It", Jonathan Zittrain explores the dangers the internet faces if it fails to balance ever more tightly controlled technologies with the flow of innovation that has generated so much progress in the field of technology. Zittrain argues that today's technological market is dominated by two contrasting business models: the generative and the non-generative. The generative models - the PCs, Windows and Macs of this world - allow third parties to build upon and share through them. The non-generative model is more restricted; appliances such as the XBox, iPod and TomTom might work well, but the only entity that can change the way they operate is the vendor. If we want the internet to survive we need to change. People must wake up to the risk or we could lose everything.

On the Amazon.com website it has a slightly different synopsis

This extraordinary book explains the engine that has catapulted the Internet from backwater to ubiquity—and reveals that it is sputtering precisely because of its runaway success. With the unwitting help of its users, the generative Internet is on a path to a lock down, ending its cycle of innovation—and facilitating unsettling new kinds of control.

IPods, iPhones, Xboxes, and TiVos represent the first wave of Internet-centered products that can’t be easily modified by anyone except their vendors or selected partners. These “tethered appliances” have already been used in remarkable but little-known ways: car GPS systems have been reconfigured at the demand of law enforcement to eavesdrop on the occupants at all times, and digital video recorders have been ordered to self-destruct thanks to a lawsuit against the manufacturer thousands of miles away. New Web 2.0 platforms like Google mash-ups and Facebook are rightly touted—but their applications can be similarly monitored and eliminated from a central source. As tethered appliances and applications eclipse the PC, the very nature of the Internet—its “generatively,” or innovative character—is at risk.

It is an interesting observation and prophecy

The Real Deal Podcast

While reading the webware.com news feed I saw mention of a podcast about cloud computing produced by The Real Deal for the CNet.com network.

Cloud computing seems to be the latest buzzword/technology, I heard mention of it in the BBC Digital Planet podcast only yesterday. It is fairly amusing to hear some people referring to the similarity between this 'virtual/shared technology' and the old time-sharing mainframe systems of the 1970s. Further proof that things come in cycles, be it that they are slightly metamorphosed on each iteration.

But I digress, this podcast is a fresh of breath air and I've listened to a couple of other episodes and what strikes me is the simple, layman like explanations and enlightening discussions of all these new buzzwords and technologies. The presenters are Tom Merritt and Rafe Needleman, Rafe is also the editor of webware.com which is a pretty good synopsis of all that is new in the Web2.0 world.

The Web2.0 Bloat!

Back in the early days of the interweb, when people used dial up modems, bloated large websites were frowned upon and the main criteria in their design was size and therefore speed.

Computers at that time were underpowered and would often fall over when confronted with graphic heavy sites and on-line video was often the preserve of the very wealthy who could afford the CPU, graphic card, memory and time for it to load!

Unfortunately as computers became more powerful, modems got quicker, telephone calls and ISP costs got cheaper there was a natural tendency for the page sizes to creep upward as graphics and multimedia were introduced. I am sure this was sometimes aggravated by spoiled designers with powerful machines at the end of leased lines or ISDN connection. The worst case of this was the completely unnecessary obligatory Adobe Flash 'please click to enter site' page which often took minutes to load.

Now as broadband becomes more prevalent the bloat has continued fuelled by the Web2.0 explosion. This bloat is often offset by the connection speed and the power of the computer. However I have noticed that on some of my older computers ( 1GHz of less, with modest memory and Windows 2000) that some sites now cause similar problems to the bad old days, unstable browsers, constant disk thrashing as the virtual memory systems struggles to cope leading to sluggish performance and navigation. I am sure that people still on dial-up have become increasingly disadvantaged.

Now research by WebsiteOptimization.com has put a figure on the flab as modern websites feed on their diet of Web2.0 lard.

The report states that the mean size of a web page has more than trebled since 2003 from 97.3KB to more than 312KB. The mean number of objects per page has meanwhile near-doubled from 25.7 to 49.9. The authors blame external objects for the majority of delays experienced by web browsers.

Last year saw websites really pack on the data poundage with widgets, gadgets, embedded video and other mashtastic tinsel (thanks to theregister report for that particular phrase). The average page swelled by more than 60KB to 312KB by the end of December and projections put next new year's figure at 385KB.

There's plenty of evidence in the report for the views of ISPs and other industry insiders claiming that the online video boom risks breaking the internet and net neutrality. The authors of the report claim that ten per cent of YouTube videos account for 80 per cent of streaming traffic, and use it to suggest that cached content delivery networks (as being considered by the BBC for iPlayer) are becoming an increasingly appealing proposition to improve performance.

Another interesting fact is that the increase in mean length of web video means more users are experiencing frustrations with re-buffering. According to the report, 87 % of web video streaming sessions are abandoned in the first ten seconds, but how much is due to that, or the fact that 87% of on-line video isn't worth watching?

Talking of the old days, I fondly remember getting a 14.4 modem running on Windows for Workgroups 3.11, which involved installing a third party WinSock (a TCP/IP protocol stack) Trumpet Winsock in my case!