The book club website, which can be found at http://bit.ly/wossybc (or wossybc.com soon), was initially created as a response to @Wossy’s tweet asking for thoughts on how a forum could work. It was never really meant for the big time, especially as it’s first iteration had an unclean design and lacked some of the vital features it really needed. Over the next few weeks the book club saw a decreasing trend in activity as we discussed The Strain, Me Talk Pretty One Day and Leaves of Grass. The forum was hard to engage with, and was easy to get lost in. There was a lot of data, with lots of people writing lots of stuff in a condensed time period. This made it hard to follow conversations – especially as replies weren’t threaded for the first few weeks. There was no mobile version, so anybody on the road at the book club meeting time got left out. It was also hard to communicate, with the site lacking functionality for @Wossy to send a little email or tweet or DM to people letting them know what’s happening with the book club.

Quite a lot of this changed, though, with a redesign implemented just before the book club … collapsed. The design was changed to have a cleaner menu bar and simpler functions. The site moved from being a forum to being a book club with discussions focussed on books rather than topics. A version of the site optimised for iPhone, and compatible with BlackBerry and Android, was made the default for users on mobile devices. Functionality and interactions that we see on the twitter.com web site were implemented on the book club: mentions, favourites and a delightful little popup to let you know when (and how) to refresh the page. Threaded conversations made it easier, but it’s hard to find an example of an actual discussion ever happening. There were no emails when someone wrote something directly to you, and the vast quantity of tweets being sent when people joined meant that everybody deactivated tweeting by the time it came to writing a reply. What would have been cool is to have been notified by email that someone had replied, had a mention show up in your timeline, and to have had a small popup show in the website (like a Facebook notification) with a link to see your discussion.

Unfortunately, though, there weren’t enough users left in the environment whilst this was all being developed and changed. I reckon, though, that with a few changes we can make something really cool and pretty damn popular. Here are my suggestions:

Reviews, not posts

Rather than writing a post, users should either write a review or a comment on a review. Each user can write one review for a book, and they get a grace period to edit and change their content. Once it’s written and they’re happy with it, the review is placed in the discussion on that book. Reviews could be shown in two columns. On the left there would be reviews that users have voted up – so the best reviews. On the right would be the latest reviews, reviews from users who normally write really good reviews, and a selection of random reviews that the system or a moderator thinks are good.

By default comments on a review are collapsed, but when a user engages in a review, the comments and a % like/% dislike count displays. Like and comment buttons should always be there, but the conversations need to be sorted and kept in proper places.

Short and tweet-like

Whilst book reviews need to be fairly long and meaty, it would be best if we could show users a short, tweet-like review first. This excerpt/summary/title would be tweeted from the user’s account, and attract another user’s attention like a headline, rather than being overwhelmed by a short essay. We could either make a summary ourselves, or ask the user to sum up or title their review.

Voting and rating

Two new interactions would help the book club gain traction both as a book club and as a way of finding good reviews. As I’ve mentioned, users should be able to vote a review up if they think it’s good, with the best reviews getting the limelight of being featured on the homepage. Bad or spammy reviews would go down, and all that junk being posted by (as yet) unknown authors would disappear toward the bottom. Users should also be able to rate a book out of 5, to give a quick summary of where the book club places the book. A rating system like this would also allow a neat little sticker to be placed on books, with a picture of @Wossy and the reader’s verdict. Which publisher wouldn’t want their books to be endorsed by the Twittering classes? (And, as we all know, @Wossy might want a new job too!)

Development platform

It would be awesome to let users build apps and add to the book club as a platform, potentially expanding the system and its content in to other areas. Creating a JSON based API would let developers create widgets and tools – perhaps a native iPhone app or the ability for a publisher to embed reviews in to their website. In this space monetization has huge potential – publishers could add iAd’s for related books, for instance. Whilst it would be cool to open up the development community, we can always restrict platforms just to our apps created in-house. Best of all we already have the skills within the community to create a couple of apps, which means we have the opportunity to perfect our API. We still have to sort out authentication though, as we use a positive connection to Twitter in place of a login powered by username and password.

Social integration

In the last year there have been huge developments in the social media space. Twitter is launching Annotations, a product that allows developers to append information to a tweet. For instance, a tweet from the book club telling a user’s followers about their review can carry metadata including the name of the book, the rating given out of 5 and the content of the review. It’s not clear how this information will be implemented yet, but it’s likely that popular clients will display annotations soon – at least for Twitter’s recommended types, which include books and reviews. Protocols such as Facebook’s Open Graph mean that we can integrate other social networks too: “Ben likes The Strain on the Wossy Book Club“.

Keeping in touch

The site already uses the favoured Twitter authentication technology, OAuth, which means we don’t have to go anywhere near the user’s username and password. This does mean we have to ask for the user’s email address, but we don’t force user’s to validate it. Development of the Twitter API with OAuth allows us to write even more tweets and send even more direct messages than before, as well as making it easier for users to take Twitter actions (for instance following a user) right from pages within the book club. Making it easier to follow the book club and being able to send more messages and interactions every hour will make it easier to keep in touch with the community. Improved communication is vital to developing the book club.

Video

Nobody needs reminding that video rules the web these days, and whether we implement HTML5 or Flash, there are exciting opportunities for adding films, interviews and a bit of commentary from @Wossy. Monetization can follow here, with adverts placed inside the video.

Administer

Moderators and administrators should be able to control all the data on the site nice and easily. Using structures that already exist and libraries of code I’ve already written, we can enable a really clever but easy-to-use administration panel for managing the site from.

These are just my initial ideas on functionality and interactions. Design is something to work on once we know exactly what the site should be doing, although it plays a major role in dictating content. I’d love to hear everybody’s ideas, so if you have any suggestions please throw them in!

It’s a huge system, pretty much doing everything except online payments. We invite clients in and store and sort all of their data for use by PilatesPlus staff. Every term the site goes through a rebooking procedure, managing all the queries and turning users input in to a meaningful data representation for staff. The first version is packed full of features I had put on the roadmap for version 2 or beyond, and some of the tools for data manipulation and social media integration are pretty cool.

The site works around my own library of functions and classes. There’s the odd piece of third party software – a very handy open-source GoogleAPI class from Justin Silverton and an adaptation of Abraham Williams’ Twitter OAuth class. Needless to say there’s some Analytics bundled in, with a pretty cool chart for administrators to admire. There’s no WordPress or Drupal, and definitely no Joomla. Everything the site needs has been crafted to work as part of the solution, with no ugly add-ons and plugins.

Best of all, the site’s using the latest technologies and web standards. With the exception of ancient versions of Internet Explorer, the site works the same in every browser, on every computer. All the Flash on the old web site has gone, or where it still lives there’s an almost-as-good HTML alternative underneath. Lovely curvy corners and subtle shadows render beautifully in CSS3 browsers such as Chrome, Safari and Firefox, and it all looks just as beautiful on iPhone.

What’s next? Well, I plan to package up the product as a Pilates/Yoga studio booking system and make it available to people everywhere, as well as developing a handful of new features. As far as I can tell there aren’t any other products that meet this (rather niche) market; but there’s no reason that businesses like these shouldn’t be able to make use of the latest web technologies. Oh, and I’d better start my new refurbishment project too.

“Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!” — @pauljchambers

Not only does this prosecution (taken by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), so supposedly ‘in the public interest’) represent a hideous misinterpretation of a joke, but also threatens our right to free speech.

There is no way that this tweet could be taken seriously. The tweet was posted in January, when Robin Hood airport was closed due to snow, and @pauljchambers was due to be flying out on holiday the next week. His tweet was meant in jest – he would have to take serious action if his flight was cancelled. (There’s a bit of a logical fallacy if blowing up an airport is your response to your flight being cancelled…)

The action taken by the CPS is most certainly not in the public interest. The cost to the police and CPS of arresting, gathering evidence and then taking out court proceedings is really not spending that can be justified on someone who made a joke on a micro-blogging service. More importantly the trial sets a precedent that is worrying – both for future possible CPS investigations, and private court cases against individuals who might have tweeted something offensive.

I’m not suggesting that people should tweet rude, potentially offensive or terrorist material as a matter of course, and before hitting ‘Tweet’ or sending a text to the service users should think about the content their sending. Most times I tweet or post to the Internet I go through a small and tortuous debate: What will people think? Will this make people unfollow me? Will new tweeps follow me if they read this? How might this affect my brand image? But there are times when you feel anger, a carelessness or just the need to say something; blogging – be it Twitter or any other social media service – services make the Internet the perfect space for this. Unfortunately hard-core terrorists do put content on the Internet too, and authorities will need to learn to establish between careless comment and serious threats better.

When people do tweet material that offends some, could be interpreted as offensive, or is terrorist or protests against a government or organisation, how do we deal with it? Personally – in my humble opinion – it is a violation of our human rights to be prevented from speaking our minds. People committing terrorist acts, whether it is our human right to carry them out or not, should be arrested and charged. And yes, this tweet constituted a potential terrorist act by our government’s laws. But this certainly was not terrorist in nature, for two reasons: 1) how many people planning to blow up airports post publicly about it? and 2) the context and humorous nature of the tweet make it clear that it was not threatening.

Having heard Shami Chakrabarti, the Director of civil liberties organisation Liberty, speak this week in Reading, it was made very clear to me that we really do need to protect our rights. Yes, people who are clearly terrorists need to be banged up, but when the authorities are banging people up or making their lives really difficult for simply saying things, well, our society is going somewhere wrong.

I think it’s time that we take a stand here; complain to the CPS, join a campaign against the trial, support the appeal for the @TwJokeTrialFund and support the protection of our civil liberties. If we don’t? Well, I don’t want a fine of £1000 and a Criminal Record for a tweet I write, and I’m sure you’d like the freedom to speak your mind – within reason, at least.

Bluntly, though, Buzz was a dissapointment. Google have taken Facebook’s status updating functionality, including comments and likes, and added some of Twitter’s best features – such as geotagging. In terms of functionaility, it does nothing more than Twitter and Facebook combined. I had been further excited by being led to believe that Google had integrated Twitter right in. Great, I thought, I can update Twitter straight from my inbox – maybe I can even share links I stumble across?

Unfortunately this is not the case. Twitter integration runs like adding your Twitter Atom feed into Google Reader. Periodically (some time after actually posting) your Tweet shows up in your Buzz timeline. Anything you write in Buzz doesn’t go back to Twitter, in fact Google doesn’t even get you to sign in to Twitter – it just reeds your RSS feed (which won’t work if you keep your profile private, even though Buzz could import your Tweets and post them out using it’s private feature). You can follow people that have Google Mail, but you can’t see the people you follow on Twitter, so Buzz becomes, rather than an aggregator, another service.

The same issues are true for Flickr and YouTube. Add something to Flickr, your Buzz buddies see it. Add media in to a Buzz update, it ain’t going back the way data gets through.

Seriously, how hard would it be to make a single social media site that does … everything? I love the design of the Twitter site, so that’s a definite starting point. Facebook has the best functionality, so that’s got to be there. Flickr is the coolest photo service out there, so you’ve got to be able to see a user’s photostream. The homepage has to be like both Twitter’s and Facebook’s, your friends’/people you follow’s status updates. At the top you should be able to post, anything. A photo should be sent to Flickr, and there should be a way of choosing a set to add it to. Your post should appear in Twitter, and Facebook should get all your media too. The Twitter layout would need the addition of Facebook’s user search bar, and profile pages should have tabs for photos and videos. But the service wouldn’t have to host anything itself – pull statuses out of Twitter, media from everywhere.

Easy…

Two new clients are in the offing, which I promise I’ll write about once the deals have been sealed. Work at Quantel is going well too – only one last section of the latest version of some of their Python based software left to debug! I’ve learnt a lot from working in Python recently, and it’s definitely increased by ability to code in general – knowing functions in different languages helps when finding solutions to tricky problems.

Finally, the future looks exciting with a recent tweet from @wossy. Since the last book club meet a mobile version of the site has been launched for iPhone and BlackBerry, some of the site’s been made easier to use with the addition of some AJAX code, the interface has been redesigned to make it cleaner and simpler, the site got a new domain and  it now works better with Twitter. Plus @sardo02 and I have been working on an API to power an Android application for the site.

I hope that everyone had a great Christmas, and are looking forward to the New Year. Bring on 2010!