John McGarvey – web copywriter

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?

Online chatrooms seem somewhat passé now, and instant messaging is decidedly mainstream, at least for leisure use. But the number of companies using similar methods to communicate with customers remains stubbornly low.

Those which do try it generally do a pretty abysmal job. One trend seems to be to create a ‘virtual assistant’ – basically a front-end for a search engine that attempts to answer questions typed in plain English. The results aren’t usually very encouraging. Try asking Ikea’s Anna something. ‘How much is your cheapest sofabed?’ produces the following mine of information:

“We do our bit and you do yours to get high quality at low prices. Economically produced flat-pack designs, bought in bulk, keep costs down. So does leaving the planning and assembly to you. This means that together we can create a better everyday life for everyone!”

Nothing about a sofabed, and no prices. Rubbish. Still, if you click ‘turn sound on’, it does get read out by a non-Swedish sounding lady with a slight lisp.

Putting a real person on the other end of the keyboard seems as rare as ever. Strange really, as at first glance it looks like an obvious way to deal with simple queries quickly, and cope with more customers at once. Anyone who’s ever tried chatting in four or five instant messaging windows at once knows that’s much easier than holding four or five simultaneous phone calls.

When I think of internet-savvy companies willing to try new things, the Student Finance people doesn’t come anywhere near the top of my list. That’s why I was surprised to see an online chat option on its website.

I had a query about my years-old student loan, so I tried it. Sure – I had to wait about five minutes for someone to get to me, but as I didn’t have to hang on the phone listening to rubbish music, this was less annoying than usual. I carried on working while I waited, and when the chat window started flashing I punched in my query.

It worked pretty well. I got them to change my registered address and send out some previous statements. It was pretty efficient, and certainly less hassle than hanging on the phone.

I can see that there are still loads of things that would stop people using this. While I’m quite used to chatting online, there are many people who wouldn’t be comfortable with it. And had I taken a slightly more cynical approach to security, I might’ve resisted handing over my personal details in a chat window.

But I did, and it worked. I wonder if any other companies that I’ve had painful call-centre experiences with in the past would like to refine the concept a bit. I’d definitely use it.

Once of my favourite websites is Threadless. It’s an online t-shirt shop. It’s a thriving online community. And – I imagine – it makes money too.

I live in t-shirts, and I love unusual ones, so I’ll really go out of my way to find them. I stumbled across Threadless about a year ago after a tip-off from my sister, and it’s brilliant.

Much like CafePress.com, anyone can submit a t-shirt design to be printed. But on Threadless, the community really counts, because votes and comments help decide which t-shirts get printed. Ok, so like the FAQ says, ultimately it’s their call, but they’d be stupid not to listen to what their members are saying.

The site is criminally easy to use. You can see every single design, but because each shirt is printed in limited numbers, it’s better to see what’s available at a glance. The stock chart does just that. All the available t-shirts, on one page. It’s simple, but it works very well.

They keep people coming back by letting members blog and chat in forums. And they create innovative competitions that get the whole community involved.

None of it is revolutionary, but it’s a very good example of how to bring together a few elements of ‘Web 2.0′ to create something that people really identify with. Give it a go; their shipping charges to the UK are pretty reasonable too.

Around 5pm it usually feels like it’s time for a rest. Today wasn’t much of an exception.

I was trying to get to the Microsoft website and for some reason I typed www.google.co.uk/microsoft into my browser. I was surprised by what I saw.

I’ve hardly looked at it, but it appears to return search results relevant to Microsoft. There’s a similar page for www.google.co.uk/linux. www.google.co.uk/mac gives you a “Search Mac Sites” box as well as some handy Google downloads for Apple.

Google: are you having a bit of fun or providing a useful service? I reckon it’s a bit of both.

I’ve not really got into the social networking thing. Sure – I’ve been on MySpace a bit, but only ever to listen to new bands. There always seemed to be far too many 14-year-olds using it to actually be worth signing up to.

But over the last couple of weeks it feels like another site has suddenly reached critical mass: Facebook. Loads of my friends have been talking about it – even in the pub, when they should be talking about football, music or making rubbish jokes. And it seems like they’ve all been using it.

I signed up yesterday. It’s a bit of a MySpace for grownups. You can tell people what you’re up to, share photos, and generally exchange banter and gossip. I can see why some of my friends say it’s addictive.

It’s all about building networks. You start by adding the people you know as friends on Facebook. It’s really easy, because the website can read your Hotmail / Yahoo / Gmail address book and automatically add anyone in that to your list of friends.

Be careful – I nearly emailed 107 contacts from my Google address book, including former and current colleagues and clients. Could be embarrassing if all you meant to do was contact a few selected people.

Then you can see their friends, and add them to your friends list, and so on. I haven’t quite worked out the etiquette yet, but it’s clear that you don’t have to have met in person to be friends on Facebook.

It’ll put you in touch with former colleagues, schoolmates and all sorts. Which is fine if you want to talk to them all. I just can’t help thinking that sometimes you lose touch with people for a reason. And it’s a pretty open network – so I’d definitely be concerned about making too much personal information too public.

Having said that, I’ve hardly scratched the surface. I’ll stick with it and report back. My plan is to stay fairly low-key for the next week or so and see what happens. Then I might go crazy adding friends, just because I want to be popular.

One of the big success stories for the web has got to be online ticketing. It’s probably fair to say that the majority of tickets for gigs, festivals, sporting events and even the theatre are sold online.

I reckon the big companies like Ticketmaster and See Tickets are cleaning up – though many people (including myself) still have a gripe with their ludicrous booking fees, which can be over 10% of face value.

And it’s good to see smaller operators like We Got Tickets selling tickets for smaller venues and being a bit more innovative – like by not issuing paper tickets at all, and instead relying on a “give your name and reference number at the door” approach.

I imagine the people behind See Tickets were crossing their fingers last Sunday when tickets for Glastonbury went on sale. It’s always a busy day when this happens – already this year the Reading and V Festivals had sold out in a matter of hours.

People trying to buy tickets have to go through all the frustration of hitting the refresh button again and again to try and buy tickets from a website that’s struggling to deal with the whole world trying to access it at once.

This system’s more efficient, in that the tickets sell out more quickly. But you could say it’s less fair. Unlike a telephone queueing system, or standing at a box office, there’s no waiting in line. It’s a free for all, and priority goes to the lucky ones who get on the site first.

This year’s Glastonbury sale was a case in point. In a bid to eliminate ticket touts, you had to pre-register, sending a photo that they’ll print on your personalised ticket.

Then on Sunday morning, anyone who’d registered could try and get onto See Tickets to buy tickets. I spent almost two hours pressing refresh. I didn’t see the ‘buy’ page once. But a friend got on fairly quickly and was able to pick up tickets for all of us, by the simple means of completing one transaction, then pressing the back button to fill in the order form again.

The site didn’t seem to time out. If I’m right (and I don’t pretend to know the technical side of this very well), it means that once someone got onto the page once, they could go through the buy process again and again, picking up tickets for their friends as well as themselves.

With a network of friends on MSN Messenger, it was easy to keep track of who had tickets and who didn’t, and try and get them for everyone.

That was fine for us. But it seems a trifle unfair to anyone not so clued up on these things. We played the game, and won. But anyone who didn’t realise what the rules were is perhaps entitled to feel a little upset.

There’s no perfect solution, of course. And things have moved on a lot from when online ticketing was in its infancy. I really admire the people behind Glastonbury for taking such steps to stop the touts at all. But next year, maybe they can do something to make it even fairer.