What’s Next?

As a recent convert to Twitter I won’t say I’m too inconvenienced by their decision to stop sending SMS updates free outside certain countries but I’m a little curious why they’ve yet again decided they don’t like money.

Let’s consider the situation: you are running a free service that costs you a lot of money and you can’t afford to run it any more. Do you:

A) Explain this to your customers and offer a premium service where people can pay for the service themselves (If you’re feeling daring you might throw in a little margin for yourself).

B) Shut down the service completely with no warning.

Naturally, Twitter goes down aisle B. Whilst the number of people willing to pay might be far smaller than the overall user base, I suspect it’s still a significant one. This is unimportant because the two rules of Twitter are a) No messages over 140 characters  b) Under no conditions make any money ever.

I can only speculate that once there are some real numbers on the page Twitter looks a whole lot less attractive to investors than the vague, cutting-edge, may-be-big-profits-someday-if-only-we-find-a-killer-app nothingness that they currently seem rely on.

mysociety need your help. Their amazing TheyWorkForYou site parses the official website, strips out all the awkward formatting and hard to search layout and reorganises it so it can be easily accessible. Now, given as they’re a small, ill-funded charity (go on, help them out!) they’d like it if Parliament took a little bit of work off their hands by instead of publishing in an obscure and hard to parse way to instead release its information in a nice, easy XML format (which is essentially pure content, no presentation) so use of it by them and by anyone else would be far more straightforward. Kudos to David Cameron for being quick off the mark in giving his support (can we buy him a tripod while we’re at it?)

So in the unlikely event this is the only blog you’ve read that’s brought up the subject (the mysociety guys tend to be treated as heroes by political bloggers and we’ll report if they sneeze), go sign up to their campaign now!

Something interesting from the mysociety blog:

A friend just pointed me to this by Danny Hillis from the Whole Earth Catalog, Winter 2000.

Like much of my generation, I grew up believing that I should try to “change the world,” presumably for the better. But I didn’t know how to do this. Looking at how other people have changed the world I concluded there are five ways of doing it:

Some people change the world by imposing their will on it.

Some people change the world by discovering a truth.

Some people change the world by changing people’s minds.

Some people change the world by creating things of great beauty.

Some people change the world by making new tools for change.

Danny Hillis goes on to say that the last one, the making of new tools for change, is the one that appeals to him the most. I think my friend was just flattering me, as that is what mySociety tries to do.

Mysociety is a group that tries to leverage the power of the internet to connect people, make politics more involving and strengthen the links between the people and those that represent them. They are responsible for TheyWorkForYou, WriteToThem, FixMyStreet and other fantastic services. Whenever people ask how the internet can really change the shape of politics, I point them to these guys. They are the pioneers and I am convinced that mysociety and projects and ideas like this will play a pivotal role in fixing our democracy and taking it to places those Greeks could never have dreamed of. I can’t wait to see what they think of next.

I also think they’re right that creating tools for change is the most appealing and powerful way of changing the world, because instead of you changing it directly you’ve made it so that a hundred or a thousand or a million after you will be able to affect change. What greater gift to the future could there be?

I’ve talked about Andrew Keen before. Last night he popped up on the Colbert Report.

Still not convinced.

BBC NEWS - Two-tiered net could be coming

…This is net neutrality! I didn’t think this was an issue in the UK. Worth keeping an eye on.