Archive for February, 2009

  • How to disable IE6 in your Rails applications

    Well, the uprising against IE 6 has begun, and not a moment too soon – IE 6 will be seven years old on August 27th. In fact, there’s even a service to say goodbye to the old dinosaur.

    You can do your bit for the Internet by showing a warning to IE 6 users in your Rails applications, or disabling it completely for those users, encouraging them to upgrade their browsers (or nag the relevant Sys Admin).

    Firstly you need to install the UserAgent plugin by Josh Peek:
    script/plugin install git://github.com/josh/useragent.git

    You then need to copy this script to your lib directory.

    If you want to just show a warning to people using unsupported browsers, you’ve got a valid_browser? helper method:
    <%- unless valid_browser? -%> ... <%- end -%>

    Or you can disable access completely:

    before_filter :restrict_browser
    def restrict_browser
    unless valid_browser?
    render :action => '/path_to_template'
    return false
    end
    end

    1 Comment

    1
    By Alex MacCaw

    27th February 09

    1 comment

     Made by Many

  • Google says hello on Twitter

    Math weirdos amongst you will no doubt find this hi-lar-i-ous but I just found it remote and even a tiny bit chilling. Does the Google brand have enough personality to cut it on Twitter? I’m not sure – their binary code greeting makes 2001’s HAL computer seem well-adjusted.

    These were the next four tweets:

    And only half an hour ago, this news just in:

    I’m not having a good relationship with Google on Twitter so far. I think something’s ‘not right’. But then you get something like this and it all seems okay again.

    And here’s Yahoo’s reaction:

    3 Comments

    3
    Tim Malbon By Tim Malbon

    27th February 09

    3 comments

     Social Web

  • Tutorial for restful_authentication on Rails with Facebook Connect in 15 minutes

    [Update (10 April 2010): we've edited the tutorial to bring it up to date with the current incarnations of Facebook Connect, Facebooker and Rails.]

    Back in June 2007 I wrote a popular tutorial on writing Facebook platform applications with Ruby On Rails. Time has moved on and Facebook has launched Facebook Connect which allows you to integrate Facebook into your own sites allowing authentication, registration, friend connecting, and Facebook feed posting in the context of your application. Mashable has a great post on 10 great implementations of Facebook Connect including Joost, Vimeo and Disqus.

    At Made By Many we are fans of the possibilites of Facebook Connect for lowering barriers to registration, extracting social graph and injecting your social media functions into the daily online life of users. There is little point trying to create a “new” facebook on your site. Your unique social proposition lies elsewhere with your content, community and tools.

    People have found the integration of Facebook Connect tricky and while great libraries like facebooker handle the API part, actually getting the profile linking and integration flow is harder. So I’ve written this tutorial to integrate the most commonly used starter plugin for authentication and registration in Ruby On Rails, restful_authentication, with Facebook Connect to allow your users to login and register through Connect.

    First of all, let’s state what this integration is going to achieve:

    • As a user I can register to the site through entering my details so I can access all that great functionality
    • As a user I can login to the site through my entered username and password
    • As a user I can register to the site through Facebook Connect so I don’t have to fill in that form
    • As a user I can login to the site through Facebook Connect so I don’t have to remember two passwords
    • As a user I can connect my existing site user with my Facebook Connect user so I can later login through Facebook Connect

    We also have a constraint we need to consider:

    • As a user if I register a user through entering my details and later login through Facebook Connect I want to make sure I retain my old user account

    So read on and I’ll have you Connected in 15 minutes.
    Read full post

    135 Comments

    135
    By Stuart Eccles

    26th February 09

    135 comments

     Made by Many

  • And here’s something else “they” will struggle to understand…

    “But why do people do it? I just don’t get it…”

    How many times have you heard people ask that question when they discover that you work in something to do with blogging, Twitter and Facebook?

    They start to struggle when you tell them most people don’t do it for money. That makes them very suspicious. Not for money? Must be something really suspect then – possibly perverted. Perhaps you’ll end up using *that word*: “altruism”. That’ll get them smirking nervously. Altruism. Oh yeah.

    Try them on the term “culture of generosity” and you’ll probably get personally abused, as if the very idea of human acts of online kindness between “strangers” marks you out as some sort of deranged and – quite frankly – dangerous fantasist with a weakness of character.

    Some of the coverage of Twitter over the past fortnight has been lamentably stupid. Elin’s post provides some hilarous examples. The come-latelies don’t understand the culture of generosity. It’s that feeling I get when I read the Mail: it’s-all-going-to-hell-in-a-handcart, glass-half-empty pessimism. People who just can’t bring themselves to feel good about other people. I honestly don’t know why.

    We should round these cynics up and bus them into London tomorrow night to watch ‘Us Now‘ – a new British documentary film the ways people are using the Web to support each other in non-commercial  activities across the political, social and cultural spectrum. The film covers a range of subjects: the site couchsurfers.com runs a system of free accommodation for travellers; slicethepie.com connects music-lovers to the demos of hopeful musicians, where they take their pick and pledge a fiver towards the making and marketing of that band’s CD, and of online fan-owned and managed football club Ebbsfleet United. The film’s on tomorrow night at 8.30pm at the Barbican.

    BTW I found out about this film through Twitter again (thanks to @leebryant) who provided a shortened link this morning to an article in the FT.com. If there are any nay-sayers reading this, that’s another great example of Twitter saving me time: I follow a network of people posting links to the things I’m interested in… it’s easier than searching.

    3 Comments

    3
    Tim Malbon By Tim Malbon

    24th February 09

    3 comments

     Made by Many

    Social Web

  • Social media and the recession

    Discovered this inspiring post via Twitter when I got in to work this morning. It makes a convincing argument for the role of community/social technologies in helping both citizens and the nation pull together and through the recession.

    Looked at very simply: hundreds of thousands of people are finding or are about to find themselves with a lot more time and a lot less money than they are used to. The result is at least three sets of needs

    • practical/financial (e.g. how do I pay the rent/avoid my house being repossessed?)
    • emotional/psychological (e.g. how do I face my friends? where do I get my identity from now I don’t have a job?)
    • directional (e.g. what do I do with my time? how do I find work?)

    Clearly, the thing to do if you find yourself out of work is to spend *all* of your newfound personal bandwidth on Twitter and Facebook, and generally turn yourself into what Nathan Barley would call “a self-facilitating media node”.

    We are indeed entering a new era of self-service – and that means sorting things out as much as mass-sharing of LOLcat images. According to the post (I have no idea if this is true) Finland’s  tech industry pulled the country out of deep recession in the 1990s, and you could argue (as one of the blog post’s commenters does) that Web 2.0 was born from the ashes of the dotcom bust. As Dougald Hine puts it: “There has never been a major surge in unemployment in a context where these ways of “organising without organisations” were available.” He proposes three ways this might be supported by government and others:

    • Digital resource-maps for people who have lost access to the market as a source of resources
    • Softening the distinction between the employed and unemployed is vital. In social media, we’ve already seen considerable softening of the line between producer and consumer
    • Real world spaces which reflect the collaborative values of social media – the digital equivalent of the working men’s club

    No Comments

    0
    Tim Malbon By Tim Malbon

    23rd February 09

    0 comments

     Made by Many

    Social Web

  • Barriers to understanding Twitter

    In the wake of a truly ghastly series of articles on Twitter, I am beginning to think that journalists will never write well on any thing that involves online communities or social media.

    Perhaps the problem is this simple: They just don’t have the time to spend on participating in these communities which a thorough understanding of these phenomena require. You can’t just sign up and click a few buttons. You’ve got to get involved. That’s time expensive when the deadlines are ticking.

    This is why, I think, journalists continue to fall prey to the most outrageously ridiculous claims from those with titles within fields like psychology who claim to understand something about human interactions in the online world. Journalists just don’t know how to vet what’s being told to them from the “experts”.

    Sweeping generalizations that misguide the public on the reality of what happens online is a big problem. Here’s what journalist Andy Pemberton of the Times Online learned via his informants about the stereotypical twitter user:

    “The clinical psychologist Oliver James has his reservations. “Twittering stems from a lack of identity. It’s a constant update of who you are, what you are, where you are. Nobody would Twitter if they had a strong sense of identity.”

    “We are the most narcissistic age ever,” agrees Dr David Lewis, a cognitive neuropsychologist and director of research based at the University of Sussex. “Using Twitter suggests a level of insecurity whereby, unless people recognise you, you cease to exist. It may stave off insecurity in the short term, but it won’t cure it.”

    Are you on twitter? Is this how you feel?

    I doubt it. How are Dr. Davis Lewis and Dr. James Oliver supporting their claims? I don’t see a study and I can’t glean from their web presence that they’ve got much background related to experiences in the online world. Obviously their descriptions will fit some people – but exactly how many? 1%? 20%? 87%? 100%?

    Andy Pemberton seems to have sought the advice from all the wrong sources when he sat down to write this article. His next move is to find someone who likens Twitter to a giant baby monitor:

    “For Alain de Botton, author of Status Anxiety and the forthcoming The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, Twitter represents “a way of making sure you are permanently connected to somebody and somebody is permanently connected to you, proving that you are alive. It’s like when a parent goes into a child’s room to check the child is still breathing. It is a giant baby monitor.”

    Alain de Botton is a writer. Of course he is going to use such metaphors.

    Bizarrely, I’m actually not monitoring anybody when I use twitter. I’m not there to be permanently connected to anybody either. In fact, I don’t know who most of my followers or people I follow are and I’ve got no anxiety about this any more than than I do opening my front door to leave my house and walk out in the world in the morning.

    Perhaps here’s where we are at the root of the problem. The terminology “following/follower” certainly suggests that you’re actively watching other people, and the “what are you doing” question followed by the tweet field suggest that whatever we type must be mundane. But the level of intensity in which we follow others is not quite at the level the doctors imagine.

    Most people who use Twitter, also use additional third party tools like Tweet Deck which allows you to group the people you’re following. I have three groups in addition to replies, direct messages and all: Work, Friends, Twitter friends. When I’m on, I follow these groups. Then I have a quick glance at the “all” stream to see what’s going on elsewhere. When I tweet, I’m either asking questions, sharing links to stuff I find interesting or amusing, or just “chatting” to friends as the day go by. I fail to see why this need to cause the psychologist so much distress.

    Tweet Deck interface

    This use of third party tools points to another problem when it comes to understanding the Twitter service. If you’re just looking at the Twitter site, it’s really hard to get how this service can be useful at all. It’s just a never ending stream with random tweets which grows constantly.

    Using tools like tweet deck to manage the tweets will help you filter the noise. This means the “mundane” type tweets the journalists go on about actually seldom pop into your stream.

    “Mundane” is also a very relative term – if a friend of mine tweets “homeward bound” or “eating a carrot” they’re inviting to some social banter between friends or providing me with info I’d like to hear. Perhaps I’m meeting up with this friend and now I know they’re on time. Perhaps it tells me that I’ve lost track of time at work and should be heading home myself.

    But according to Oliver James the psychologist, because this is being said on twitter and not by a person right in front of me, I’m fantasist:

    “To ‘follow’ someone is to have a fantasy of who this person you’re following is, and you use it as a map reference or signpost to guide your own life because you are lost,” says James. “I would guess that the typical profile of a ‘follower’ is someone who is young and who feels marginalised, empty and pointless. They don’t have an inner life,” he says.

    If I’m lost, it’s because I’m lost for words.

    I honestly don’t understand how James is capable of even thinking this stuff. Has the emergence of the online world moved the whole field of psychology is into shambles?

    13 Comments

    13
    Elin Sjursen By Elin

    22nd February 09

    13 comments

     Social Web

  • Hello World: I am so alone here on the internet.

    Lately, there has been lot of bizarre writing on how the hotspots of the internet, be that Facebook or Twitter or anything else, is bad for you.  The Guardian covers some of the fluff here.

    I must admit I am beginning to tire of the headlines, formulaic as they are. Apparently, Facebook can kill, divorce you,  deprive you of good old fashioned hugs, eat your pet and so on. (OK, so I made up the last one – slap me!)

    Twitter is even more disastrous – it can give you cancer as social isolation (read interacting in online environments) alter our genes.  (PDF link to piece of sensationalist research)
     I quote:

    One of the most pronounced changes in the daily habits of British citizens is a reduction
    in the number of minutes per day that they interact with another human being. Recent his-
    tory has seen people in marked retreat from one another as Britain moves from a culture of
    greater common experience to a society of more isolated experience. She is in good com-
    pany, as Americans too step back from one another in unprecedented magnitude.

    I feel like crying. For what exactly does it mean to interact with another human being?

    Every day I take the tube to work. Every day, there a millions on that tube. Every day, I stare at people while I hardly interact with anyone. Unless I bump into them, in which case they’ll let out some mean hisses before they turn their backs at me.

    Every day, I go on Twitter. Every day, I post replies to people who talk directly to me – people I know, people I don’t know. Every day, I respond to someone’s tweet with my own thoughts on a subject. I ask for favours. I return favours. We make jokes, we laugh, we share, and sometimes, we even meet up.

    I confess – I can’t hear their voices. I recognize them only by the way the present themselves (yes, those weirdly creative avatars or close up photos). And I can’t touch them (mouse clicks don’t count, do they?). So I guess, the moral of the story is this:

    All this time, I’ve been fooling myself. I’m retreating from the world rather then getting closer to it. In unprecedented magnitude.

    11 Comments

    11
    Elin Sjursen By Elin

    19th February 09

    11 comments

     Made by Many

    Social Web

  • Thoughts on Seth Godin’s London Session

     

    seth

    Seth Godin’s stated aim yesterday at the London Session was to ‘give us a headache’ – well, what he *did* do was give us food for thought – if he counts that as headache material! I’ve taken the table above, which he showed during his talk, from this old post of his. 

    He said a lot of interesting things, most of which was drawn from his books and his blog. The more interesting part was the 2-hour long Q&A session that followed, which I kept thinking to myself was like a free consultancy session from one of the smartest marketing brains in the world. There were lots of entrepreneurs, some musicians and even a vicar in the audience, apart from the usual advertising, marketing and B2B suspects. 

    So without further ado, and paraphrased in my own words, here are the main things I gleaned:

    1. Ideas that spread win.

    2. Some things are too important to be left to the marketing department: you need to be agile and ready to execute on-the-go. Bureaucratic delays while things are passed around from one department to another are likely to harm you in the long run. Pick it up and run!

    3. As Seth says here, the TV-Industrial complex, the model that we can interrupt people with ads on TV, is over. Now people will not look at your ad or product unless they want to. And to make them to, you need to tell a story. 

    4. Design stuff that people want to talk about, or stuff that they want. That’s the key to success. Not pushing something that people don’t want down their throats in the hope that sales will pick up. 

    5. Turn strangers into friends before turning them into customers. Then the longevity of your product is much more of a likelihood than otherwise. 

    6. The internet gives power to every individual. So like the Comcast technician found sleeping on his client’s couch, you can’t afford to be rude to someone in the hope that that will solve your problem. Seth spoke of a lady who repeatedly returned shoes she bought online but was never refused that privilege because the positive press from the larger decent majority was more important to them than the negative press they would have got if this lady shouted from the rooftops that their return policy was fake. What if her comments were numbers 1, 2 and 3 on a Google search for the company? Be Google-friendly. 

    7. Does your business have a story, like LittleMissMatched, which sells pairs of socks that don’t match to school girls because it gives them something to show off to their friends?

    8. Gatekeepers are no longer important. People like non-interfering middlemen who don’t try to own the situation. Like Kiva, which puts you in touch with the person you want to help directly, rather than the countless charities who decide what they want to do with your money on their own. Or Paypal. 

    9. The music industry is like the Seinfeld curve, which in Seth’s words is this: 

    The Seinfeld curve shows us Jerry’s life. If you like Jerry Seinfeld you can watch him on television, for free, in any city in the world two or three times a day. Or, you could pay $200 to go see him in Vegas. But there is no $4 option for Jerry Seinfeld. This is death. You can’t make any money in here. Because if you’re not scarce I’m not going to pay for it because I can get if for free. And one of the realities that the music industry is going to have to accept is this curve now exists for you. That for everybody under eighteen years old, it’s either free or it’s something I really want and I’m willing to pay for it. There is nothing in the center-it’s going away really fast.

    Recognise where your product’s strengths really lie. 

    10. Is your company trying to make products for customers or trying to find a customer for your products?

    11. Being a heretic is not always dangerous – in fact it can sometimes reward you more than you think. Take the risk. 

    12. Shun the non-believers. They are not going to like your product anyway. Instead, try to find the people who have the potential to believe. 

    13.  Consumers do open themselves to interruption if you are providing information that suits them. Like DailyCandy, a site that provides opt-in information to users, which was sold for $115 million 6 months ago. 

    14. Don’t bend down too low. Chiat/Day were known for rejecting clients who didn’t see things the way they saw it. And they are *STILL* known for the path-breaking Apple ad, among others. 

    15. If you can create something that will attract it’s own tribe, like Apple, there’s nothing like it. 

    The thing with Seth is that a lot of what he says is common sense but the way he says them and the examples he quotes are really things worth listening to. Getting inspiration and insight together – a deadly combination.

    3 Comments

    3
    Anjali Ramachandran By Anjali Ramachandran

    18th February 09

    3 comments

     Conferences

  • The Power of the Masses: The Pink Chaddi Campaign

    pinkchad

    For most modern Indian women, whether residents or non-residents of the country, February 14th this year was no ordinary day – and I’m not talking about the fact that it was Valentine’s Day. It was the day that over 43,000 of them (including some men) sent pink underwear to the Sri Ram Sene, a political party (often called the ‘Hindu Taliban’ in the press), that was responsible for a group of women getting beaten up for committing the ‘crime’ of going to a pub in January this year, and for threatening to force couples to get married if they saw any of them  together ‘celebrating’ Valentine’s Day, which, along with drinking and pub-hopping, they believe are ‘dirty’ habits spreading in India due to the so-called influence of the West.

    Clearly, they didn’t think of the backlash. Even more clearly, they didn’t know that times have changed. Thanks to the power bestowed on all individuals by the internet, an organization called the Bangalore Alternative Law Forum started a blog called the Pink Chaddi Campaign, calling for women who felt strongly about the issue to send pink underwear (or ‘chaddis’) to the Sri Ram Sene on February 14th. They also started a group on Facebook called the Consortium of Pub-Going, Loose and Forward Women, which, at the time of writing has attracted over 43,000 members (all this in the span of a couple of weeks). In the last week, the Pink Chaddi Campaign has been covered not only by the Indian press but by international media as well – from the New York Times to Fox News and the Huffington Post.

    After literally getting truckloads of pink underwear from across the country on the 14th, the Sri Ram Sene have decided, in defence, (after changing their mind on the issue thrice) that they will burn the packages of underwear that are still being delivered to them. The Campaign, meanwhile, aims to get the government to agree that ‘beating up women is against Indian culture’, for a start. More on their Facebook Fan Page here.

    I hope someone like Clay Shirky uses this as an example of the power of social media in a talk in the near future. I’d love for them to!

    2 Comments

    2
    Anjali Ramachandran By Anjali Ramachandran

    16th February 09

    2 comments

     Social Web

  • London Twestival – the place for us seen to be seen

    Tim, Stuart, Anjali, Oli and I had an Amazing time at the London Twestival yesterday. More than 100 cities all over the world hosted a Twestival to raise money for communities that don’t have clean, safe drinking water – something most of us take for granted. So far the Twestival in London alone raised $555.00 – the total for all Twestival cities is $13,175.30. It’s not too late for those of you who haven’t dropped our coins in the well – contribute here!

    One of the sponsors of the event was our own lovely Metrotwin – giving away two flights to New York!

    Here’s a little snippet from yesterday’s events….I’m just a bit perplexed at the number of “non” twitterer who showed up….

    (oh – and before you leave…. follow Made by Many at Twitter @madebymany, and I’m @elinesca )


    London Twestival from Rainy Boots on Vimeo.

    No Comments

    0
    Elin Sjursen By Elin

    13th February 09

    0 comments

     Conferences

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