Alex Muller

Last week, Tom wrote about how fairly new online services are affecting the way we communicate overseas. He’s right, of course. To me, the most interesting part is his third sentence:

For instance, it seems completely unreasonable that it should cost 10-20 pence for someone in the UK to send an SMS message’s amount of data to me in the US—of course negating the outlandish prices that are charged for SMS messages already.

The days of mobile operators being able to charge us way over the odds for communicating internationally are long gone. My two week holiday in South Africa is just coming to an end, so this is pretty timely: I’ve used about 400MB of mobile data this trip, which O2 would have liked to charge me something in the region of £2,400 for. Instead, I bought a local SIM card, put it in my unlocked iPhone and spent just under £20.

On previous holidays I might’ve sent a dozen text messages to keep up with friends, which would have cost something like £5. Indeed, my monthly bill during a trip to the US a while back was about double the usual figure. This holiday, I sent zero text messages. In fact, barely anybody has my South African phone number.

The difference, though, is that I did send 21 direct messages on Twitter and nine (slightly longer) messages on Facebook. And seven emails.

And the amount O2 are going to be billing me for roaming this month? £0. I can only imagine mobile companies are losing—or are going to be losing—a hell of a lot of revenue from lost international charges.

Last August, I wrote:

…this is where Twitter and Facebook fail (damn, I can’t remember who I read this from). There’s no easy way to see what I posted last Christmas, for example, on either of those services.

That’s now a lie. I installed Tweet Nest on my VPS^[1] a few weeks ago, and it’s been happily pulling in my poorly-worded thoughts since.

My Tweet Nest install is all set up, so new tweets are loaded with a PHP script and cron. You can view by month and date, and the search is rather bloody good. I’m a huge fan.

[1]: If you’re about to set up a Linode, I’ll send you my referral link.

I saw some of the talk about the Express article on the BBC’s Twitter presence, but never bothered to go in search and read it. After seeing Rowan taking it apart, I had to see the original.

Oh. The Express site reports that:

The article you are looking for does not exist. It may have been deleted.

Pffft. They’ve already lost my respect, but they could have perhaps clawed a tiny part back by leaving a proper apology in its place.

So, now I wanted to see the original even more. It’s fantastic; here you go:

As much as stuff like this shouldn’t affect my opinion of a company, it’s pretty nice to open up Tweetie on iPhone and see a reply from Virgin asking how my train journey is going. Wonder what the critical mass of companies using Twitter is before this starts getting annoying, and how long until we get there.

If I had more willpower, this would be enough to get me off Twitter forever. I wish I could leave.

Is this really what’s happened to the social network that used to have so much promise?

Figured it’d be useful to have a list of people actively using Twitter who are somewhat related to the University of York. I’ve never been a great fan of “groups”, so this is my way of getting the information out there.

Groups, Societies and Other Things That Aren’t People

• @yusu: Yep, our student union’s on Twitter. Oh, and they’ve got a shiny new site to go along with the start of the academic year.
• @UniOfYork: The main official account, as far as I can tell. @infocentre, the university information centre, is also on Twitter.
• @ChemistryatYork: In case you happen to be doing… well, Chemistry at York, I guess.
• @ystv: York Student Television, a society at the university.
• @yorknouse: Nouse, the student-run newspaper, and its sister account @nouselive.
• @theyorkeruk: The Yorker, another student media group at the university.

Some People I Like

From the student union: @tfngwena, the student union President for this year, as well as the other account, @yusuprez. And @lewbee, Democracy and Services officer at YUSU this year.

<

p>From Computer Science, there’s a whole load of people: @jalada and @x5315, @miketomasello, @amit_sinha, @aJanuary. And from YSTV, @njhowell, @brehonia and @annabucks .

And Finally…

Some people who technically aren’t related to the university any more, but they’re pretty funny. And hey, they used to have lectures and seminars and whatnot…

• @tomscott, last year’s SU President. Mainly because he makes things which somehow all happen to be quite cool.
• @unnamedculprit: I guess he could be described as Tom’s partner in crime. I’m not sure that definition’s accurate, but oh well.
• @pearfalse: See, now I can’t decide where the line between being a university student and not being one is…
• @cnorthwood, technical director for the student newspaper last year.
• @AliceBartlett: a graduate with a job. I feel like I should be surprised that I know a graduate with a job.

If I’ve done this right, everybody most people linked to above should have an unprotected account and be relatively active on Twitter. Most of them will make you laugh, which is just a bonus. Sorry for how spammy-looking this post is, but hopefully it’ll be useful to someone. Don’t think I’ve forgotten anybody, but it wouldn’t surprise me… let me know if I have.

I’m a big fan of making pretty maps, so when I thought up an idea yesterday morning, I had to see it through. For those who weren’t aware, last Thursday was exam results day for loads of kids all over the country, the day they found out where they’d be going to university. More than a few announced this via Twitter (as you do these days, I guess); and as they were copying and pasting from “the results site”, they were fairly easy to find.

So I stitched together a Google map of the UK, and set to work putting the points on a map; it made sense to do it by hand seeing as the sample size wasn’t massive. And here’s the result (click through for a massive version if you really feel like breaking your browser and my Amazon S3 account):

For reference, the blue dots map number of undergraduates against location. Both maps should be scaled sort of properly (there’s the same amount of red as there is blue, if my Maths hasn’t failed me). It was interesting to see how the many more results came from the universities in the middle the country when compared to their size.

And as though that wasn’t enough, I went and made you a Wordle of what subjects people are studying:

Oh, and I don’t claim that any of this is 100% certified guaranteed scientifically accurate™. It was just a fun little project for the day. My messy data’s available as a .csv should you wish to inspect it.

Facebook status after Facebook status after tweet of… people complaining that there are absolutely no summer jobs. I guess it’s to be expected (note please, I haven’t used the R word), but the effect is still incredible to see.

Twitter Search: summer job

(A way to search/filter my friends’ statuses would be nice, hint hint Facebook)

There’s no substitute for this kind of marketing, this direct contact with customers. They’re not even employees of the company; the Twitter bio reads:

We are Former Managers for IN-N-OUT BURGER, we are not from the corp. office

California beckons, and I can’t wait.

In-N-Out: you have a pretty big reputation to live up to, and I really hope you taste as good as you tweet.

You know what the stupidest part of this whole ridiculousness is? Twitter did it (ok, for technical reasons apparently – but we didn’t find that out until later) so that we wouldn’t see fragments of conversation. It’s right there in the original post:

However, receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don’t follow in your timeline is undesirable.

Except they haven’t even prevented that. If my friend replies to somebody I don’t follow, I now don’t see it – when I would have previously. If one of my friends then replies to this reply that I haven’t seen, I end up getting a fragment (only seeing half of the messages). Stupid.