John McGarvey – web copywriter

I have a confession to make: I think Twitter is utterly fantastic. Sure, it can be a bit distracting at times, but that’s nothing self-discipline (and leaving the iPhone at home) won’t solve.

It seems not everyone agrees with me. Rather like Marmite or Manchester United, Twitter’s one of those things people love or hate. They get it or they don’t.

Well, in an effort to introduce you to the world of Twitter (and convert any sceptics out there), here are six reasons I think it’s great. It’s not just people saying what they had for lunch, you know.

• It’s a great source of information. People on Twitter are a friendly bunch all-round really. There’s always someone who’ll answer your questions, whether you want help buying a laptop, or advice on the best place to go for lunch.
• There’s interesting stuff to read. Where I used to turn first to Google Reader for my fix of interesting articles, I can now be pretty sure of finding handpicked gems in the stream of tweets from people I follow.
• It gives me an outlet when I’m working by myself. Working from home gets a bit lonely sometimes, but at least I can partake in some online banter with fellow tweeters if things get too boring. Think of it as an online watercooler.
• It’s good for networking. For me, LinkedIn seems too formal and Facebook is too much about people I already know. But with Twitter it’s easy to find people working in my profession, so I can share ideas, offer (and receive) advice – and maybe even pick up the odd client.
• You hear about news first on Twitter. All the major news outlets use Twitter now (here’s The Guardian and BBC News), but you’re more likely to pick up on breaking news as it spreads like wildfire through the system. The Hudson River plane crash is a great example.
• Occasionally you get free stuff. If it’s material gains you want, plenty of companies run promotions and giveaways on Twitter. I’ve blagged a free case of beer and a CD so far. It’s not quite the conveyor belt from The Generation Game, but there are opportunities out there.

I could go on, but if you’ve not been convinced by those points, there’s no hope for you anyway. Don’t use Twitter? Go on, sign up and give it a go. You can follow me for a start.

I’ve been booking a holiday recently and searching lots of sites for deals and discounts. Lonely Planet’s hotel booking service seems to need a bit of work – it broke more than once while I was using it.

Still, at least when it fell over, it didn’t display a dull generic error message:

Check it out! It’s a picture of a knackered bus – the type you might get in some the far-flung parts of the world that Lonely Planet can help you visit. (Full size here.)

Ok, never mind that in reality you’re probably just looking for a cheap week in Benidorm. This error page is a great example of how a bit of quirkiness can turn a negative (my hotel search not working) into a bit of a positive (making me chuckle).

It certainly put a bit of a smile on my face, and I’m more likely to give the site another chance as a result.

What could your site do differently to surprise its users?

I moved house this weekend and hired a car; a tank-like Vauxhall Vectra. Actually, despite having the appearance of a lumbering behemoth, it wasn’t that bad being behind the wheel.

Bizarrely enough though, the car’s indicators got me thinking about how important it can be to conform to people’s expectations.

Conventions abound in virtually every product we use. They make things easy-to-operate and easy-to-understand.

Imagine if every kettle worked in a different way, or if some door handles were postioned on the ‘wrong’ side of the door. Making a coffee would be a nightmare. And each time you opened a door would be a gamble; it might hardly move, or it might fly open and send you crashing through it.

As any web designer worth their salt will tell you, conventions work online too. Following them is a good way to make your website easier to use. Just ask Jakob Nielsen.

Put menus where people expect to find them, make the normal things happen when people click links and using your site will be a less-frustrating, altogether more pleasant experience.

Challenging conventions

Every now and then, a company tries to challenge a tried-and-trusted convention. Just occasionally, they’ll do so successfully; think of the iPod’s click wheel. Why use ‘up’ and ‘down’ buttons to navigate through lists when you can do the same thing faster (and more accurately) with a touch sensitive wheel?

But most of the time, these convention challenges fall flat. The Vectra’s indicators are a fine example – because they work in a different way to virtually every car I’ve ever driven. To turn them on, you push the indicator stalk one way. To turn the indicators off, you push the stalk the same way again.

It’s true that, like most other cars, you can also stop the turn signal by pushing the stalk the other way. But often it doesn’t work well; you simply end up signalling to turn the other way, and then get all confused.

Honestly, I’ve never driven another car like it, and I do apologise to anyone who had to share the Hanger Lane gyratory with me yesterday afternoon. I was trying to go right. Not right-left-right as you might’ve been led to believe.

I’m sure that, given time, you get used to this new way of doing things. But why bother when the old way works just as well?

Because this was a hire car, I was stuck with it for the weekend. However, if it had been a website with a dodgy navigation, I’d have been right out of there.

Clear benefits

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think challenging convention is always a bad thing. If nobody ever did it, all our vacuum cleaners would still have bags and the world wide web probably wouldn’t even exist.

However, if you do decide to do things differently on your website, remember that you’re asking a lot from your visitors. You’re asking them to learn a whole new behaviour, just for you. Essentially, you’re forcing them to do something different to what comes naturally.

For it to work, there has to be a definite benefit for them. It has to be easier, or faster, or better for some other reason. If it isn’t, don’t do it.

So be careful when you go against convention – or even when you bend it a little. Your great new idea might end up driving visitors away. If you’re running an online business, that could be costly.

Image © GM Corp

I’ve always found Digg an interesting place to kill a few minutes. There’s usually a story or two on the homepage worth a read, usually for amusement value.

A couple of weeks ago I noticed a trend: articles from the Daily Mail seem to make it to the front page quite often. At first glance, the decidedly right-wing tabloid isn’t a natural fit with the social news site, where there aren’t any editors and the combined votes of users determines which stories get most prominence.

But in defiance of that assumption, here are some of the Daily Mail stories that have appeared on the Digg homepage over the past couple of weeks:

• Air stewardess goes topless for captain
• Goth who walks girlfriend on lead is told no dogs allowed
• Man becomes first to clone himself
• Why do ugly boys get gorgeous girls?
• Why men find a leggy lady sexier
• Scientists develop computer that can translate dog’s bark
• Pupils discover their teacher in porn video on YouTube

There are more – you can search the site to see them.

A skim through the titles does reveal some common elements. The popular stories are frequently about sex, psuedo-science or some sort of miracle cure.

What does this tell us about the Daily Mail? To be honest, not much. I think there’s some truth in the idea that barely a week goes by without the Mail reporting on some miracle cure or hidden danger in something we eat, drink or do. It’s a similar story with sex; the paper’s love of family values and its focus on moral standards ensure that one of its staples is stories involving a person of responsibility being discovered in some sort of compromising or scandalous position. The articles about the teacher and stewardess above are good examples of these.

But has the Mail discovered a new audience in an unexpected place? I think maybe it has. I don’t know whether there’s been any attempt to ‘game’ Digg (rather like last week’s shenanigans involving stories from Times Online), but I doubt it. I reckon it’s just more likely that the type of story which is the Mail’s bread and butter is also the sort that appeals to people on Digg.

The lesson for the rest of us? Well, let’s be honest: it’s hardly rocket science. If you want your story to go hot on Digg, try and write about sex, sciency-sounding stuff and easy cures for common problems or diseases. Quick fixes are good – how to get better at something without having to make too much of an effort. And it won’t hurt if you can find a technology angle and drop in a photo of a young lady in skimpy clothing too.

Accordingly, the next post on this blog will be titled ‘How having sex with computer programmers protects against cancer and makes you a better person’. That should press most of the Digg crowd’s buttons.

There’s a story on the BBC News site today covering a series of rallies against climate change in Australia. The caption on the accompanying photo caught my eye:

“Australians are the biggest polluters in the world”

The story itself doesn’t seem to completely agree with that fact, saying only that Australia “is one of the worst polluters in the world, on a per capita basis”.

I can’t find anything online to suggest that the USA isn’t the biggest polluter (in terms of carbon emissions), both in absolute terms and on a per capita basis. Here’s one example. So I reckon the caption on the picture is just plain wrong.

It’s hardly the end of the world, but a little misleading all the same. I’ve emailed to let them know. Be interesting to see whether they change it.

I’ve been even quieter than usual lately because I’ve been on holiday. Just got back the other day – San Francisco is lovely at this time of the year, although I am still feeling the jet lag a bit.

Anyway, I’ll get to the point. I just stumbled upon a new way of booking train tickets in the UK, and if you ask me it’s the best out there. By a mile.

Admittedly, that’s not saying an awful lot. The current train ticketing websites are pretty much universally awful. For the full story, check out my previous post on the subject.

Virgin’s site was the best of a bad bunch, but now GNER’s new ‘mixing desk’ actually delivers a reasonably pleasant experience. It looks to be in some sort of testing phase, but you can use it to book tickets – I just picked up a return to Edinburgh as part of their handy five quid promotion.

Ok, I’d be lying if I said I’d given the site a thorough test, and they still have some design issues to sort out (it doesn’t render properly in Firefox, though my non-standard font size may have something to do with that). But give it a go – it makes it finding the cheapest fares much easier.

A definite step forward, and one that might force the other vendors to up their efforts in a similar fashion. From what I’ve seen so far: good work.

… writing a post about inappropriate advertising on Facebook. But then Wordpress destroyed all my hard work.

That means you’ll just have to make do with a screenshot of the advert that prompted the rant. I think it speaks for itself. It could’ve come straight from a piece of junk email. Honestly – don’t they have an advertising policy?

Buying a train ticket in the UK is fraught with difficulty. There are loads of different ticket types, depending on whether you want to travel at peak time or off-peak, first or standard class, and whether you’d rather buy in advance or at the last minute.

Just in case you weren’t confused enough already, sometimes it’s cheaper to buy a return fare as two separate singles. And it can be even cheaper if you split one single into two separate legs, even if both are on the same train. In short, it’s really difficult to be sure you’re getting the best deal.

This over-complex ticketing system is crying out for a website to make it easier.

Right now, each train company has its own website selling tickets. But most of them are based on the same underlying system – the one that powers TheTrainLine.

It’s really not that intuitive. When I tried to buy a ticket from Reading to Edinburgh earlier today, it gave me a choice of 19 different ticket types, ranging in price from £21 to £184.50. And it presented them in one huge table, with no advice about which would be the best for my circumstances.

Virgin Trains do it a bit better. They have a new website which seems to be bespoke. It claims to show the cheapest prices for your particular circumstances.

It certainly cuts down the number of options, but it’s still far from easy-to-use. You always seem to be several clicks away from actually making a purchase. And changing your journey details is difficult because the site’s not been designed with the ‘back’ button in mind.

Add in a random error or two (“Due to inactivity, this site has timed out. This is for your security.”) and it’s enough to make you queue up at the local ticket office instead.

Truth is, the Virgin site is the best of a bad bunch at the moment. The ticket model is screaming out for a decent online booking service to let you:

• Search just for the cheapest fares, or for flexible tickets
• View fares over different time periods, so you can see when it’s cheapest to travel
• Alert you (via RSS or an email) when the cheap tickets for the dates you want go on sale
• Enter a starting point and see the cheapest places to go to for a weekend away

The first train company to sort this one out properly will clean up. They’ve been doing it with plane tickets for yonks – why don’t they just get the people from Skyscanner or Expedia on the case?

Making the trains run on time is another matter altogether, of course…

So back to Facebook. Well, everyone else is talking about it…

A posting by Matthew Stibbe over at Bad Language got me thinking about about the security side of this popular social networking site. Then today I heard that my mum had been a victim of credit card cloning for the second time in a year. As everyone knows, two and two make five, so here’s a blog post combining these issues.

If I was a scammer (I’m not), I’d be seriously looking at Facebook as a potential source of income.

How? I think I’d try to take advantage of people’s natural tendency to want to add ‘friends’. I’d create a fictitious identity and try to add unsuspecting strangers as my friends. I reckon the line “don’t you remember me from school?” would get me surprisingly far.

Once I’ve got someone on my friends list, I’d probably be able to see their birthday in their profile (along with lots of other personal information).

From there, I don’t reckon it’d be too hard to convince some people to let slip a few other personal details.

Place of birth, first pet’s name, partner’s name … before you know it, they’ve given away everything I’d need to do a bit of telephone banking on their behalf.

I’m not sure anyone has tried this yet. But I’m convinced it’s only a matter of time until something like this happens. And so far I don’t remember seeing many security warnings on the site itself.

Don’t get me wrong – Facebook seems pretty addictive, and a great way of staying in touch with your friends. But before you release any personal information on there, just take a moment to think about how many people will be able to see it.

Stumbled across a gem of an advertising-related site today: adverbox, which showcases some of the most original pieces of advertising from around the world.

It seems like the role of traditional advertising and big-budget campaigns is evolving pretty rapidly at the moment, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that some of the stuff on this website is fantastically original and brilliantly executed.

I particularly like the WWF alarm clock and these rather arresting Amnesty International posters. Which are your favourites?