Software : Opinion: The Samaritans Radar debacle proved Twitter needs to better understand its users

Opinion: The Samaritans Radar debacle proved Twitter needs to better understand its users
Opinion: The only thing crowd-sourced ratings tell us is that people are jerks
Netflix's 1080p app update sort of justifies the enormous iPhone 6 Plus
Blip: 'Hodor' the Google app and it will 'Hodor' you right back
Say 'goodbye' to Lync and 'hi there' to Microsoft's Skype for Business

Opinion: The Samaritans Radar debacle proved Twitter needs to better understand its users

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How Samaritans Radar went wrong

It took only ten days for the Samaritans Radar Twitter app to fall from grace. What was initially touted as a revolutionary and positive idea, something that would save lives, became a creepy, privacy invasive tool for stalkers and trolls, potentially in breach of data protection law, and something that distressed and alarmed exactly those people who it purported to help.

Why and how this fall happened has distinct and potentially important implications for the way that we look at Twitter. Some people will be looking on aghast – why should such an innovative idea be destroyed by a bunch of out-of-touch privacy-obsessed keyboard warriors? Others will be thinking that for once things have gone the right way – people have been able to fight and win against something they saw as deeply intrusive. Both sides have their points.

What the Samaritans Radar app was intended to do was relatively simple. If you authorised it, it would scan the tweets of all the people that you followed, perform what appears to have been a fairly crude form of sentiment analysis.

When it found a tweet that appeared to indicate that the tweeter might be having mental health difficulties or feeling suicidal, it would send you an email alerting you to that fact.

The intent was positive: if your friends are feeling vulnerable, you would like to make sure you don't miss one of their tweets, and hence not realise that they might need help. The problems, however, were manifold – starting with the assumption that the people you follow (and hence whose tweets are scanned) are your friends, and conversely that the people who follow you do so with your best interests at heart.

There seemed to be confusion in the app-backers' minds between the Facebook idea of 'friends' and the Twitter concept of following – as well as a general sense that it's 'OK' to analyse and process everyone's tweets because tweets are 'public'. That, in some ways, is the crux of the matter – and why the fall of the Samaritans Radar app has huge potential ramifications.

The Samaritans Radar app was launched with some fanfare on 29th October 2014 with generally positive press coverage, but the reaction on Twitter itself was very different. The overwhelming majority of tweets on the #SamaritansRadar hashtag were very negative.

Many people didn't like the idea of their tweets being scanned. They were aware that they weren't being asked for their consent to have their tweets scanned. Others recognised immediately how the app could be used by stalkers and trolls to find out when their potential victims were vulnerable and to immediately target them with more abuse.

Vulnerable people felt more vulnerable – but the community reaction was remarkable both in its swiftness and its power.

The first reaction came from what might loosely be called the 'mental health community' on Twitter – people who have experience of mental health issues, people who work in mental health, people with friends or relatives in those positions. But it soon spread as those people brought in experts in many different aspects of the story.

The campaign grew, including a vast number of blog posts, interviews and articles in the mainstream and online media, an online petition and more. There were legal objections – the app seemed certain to process sensitive personal data without any consent, but even the Samaritans weren't clear who the data controller would be – as well as practical and ethical ones.

The campaign was strong and sustained – and on the 7th November, just ten days after the launch, the Samaritans suspended the app, pending further review. It is hard to imagine, given the weight and breadth of the objections, that it will reappear in a similar form.

The lessons to learn from this app failure

Among the many lessons to learn from this, two stand out. Firstly, that online communities are stronger and better able to organise and resist interference than developers of apps like this might imagine. Initially those resisting were portrayed as irrelevant, almost as Luddites, complaining from some esoteric idea of privacy that has no place in the modern, online world – but they proved themselves to be something far more than that. The resistance came from the very people that the app was targeted at, and they were far more able, wilful and direct than the app-backers had anticipated. Indeed, they seemed to understand the implications of the app far more than the creators. That in itself should give app developers pause for thought – communities on Twitter can be tough and resistant, and have very strong views about how they like to use Twitter.

That brings out the second point – though the app developers had a simple view of how privacy worked on Twitter, the users had a more complex and nuanced view. To the developers, it was simple: tweets are 'public', so they're fair game for every kind of analysis, and people both couldn't and wouldn't complain if this kind of analysis took place. You always have the option of locking your account, to make it private, they told people, as though this wouldn't have other, negative consequences.

To the mental health community on Twitter, their tweets were in some senses 'theirs', and interference and analysis of them was not always OK. They looked at how they actually used Twitter – yes, for public pronouncements', but also for conversations, casual chat, and discussions about very personal issues, such as their own mental states. Those conversations, though in the technically 'public' domain of Twitter, they considered personal enough that if they knew they were being scanned and analysed, they didn't like it. It felt creepy – and, potentially, it would stop them saying so much. Indeed, a number of people decided not to use Twitter as a result.

So which is right? In one way – according to Twitter's terms and conditions, and indeed the law – tweets are clearly public. But the way that many people use Twitter, means they feel private – like having an intimate conversation with a friend at the pub. Private conversations in public places.

Whichever side of the argument wins, there are implications. If we can be assumed to have no privacy at all – that all our Tweets are entirely fair game, and anyone can do whatever they want with them without any kind of consent, then the effect could well be chilling, making people less willing to use Twitter or to use Twitter less, and in less interesting ways, making Twitter itself less attractive.

But if tweets aren't fair game, and people do have at least some sort of privacy – the kind, for example, that would mean apps need to get permission from the tweeter to analyse their tweets, then that places significant limits on the kinds of apps that can be developed.

More importantly, perhaps, it could cut off a potentially lucrative stream of income for Twitter. The Samaritans Radar app was developed for a charity, and on the surface seems not to be about money – but it was developed by a company from the world of marketing. If the app had succeeded, similar apps would have followed – but this time apps that make money from tweet analysis.

As it has not, it could be much harder for other such apps to succeed. With Twitter under pressure to find revenue sources – Standard and Poors have just given Twitter a junk credit rating – this could be bad news. Twitter has to find new ways to monetise its major asset – our Tweets – and the failure of the Samaritans Radar app could leave it scratching its head as to how to make this happen.

There is no easy way out of this – but one thing that the Samaritans Radar saga seems to have made clear is that developers, and indeed Twitter itself, need to become better at listening to and understanding not just the technicalities of the environment, nor even the laws that might apply, but the ways in which people use these systems. People matter – and in more ways than might immediately appear.

Opinion: The only thing crowd-sourced ratings tell us is that people are jerks

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The internet - and please take a moment to look around you and consciously record the world as it is now because in 41 words' time I'm going to rock it to its very core with a pronouncement of such devastating originality and novelty that it might be hard in years to come to remember just what the world was like before you heard it - is a place of extremes. Everything is either awesome, or it sucks.

Not on TechRadar, of course. Here we're all about the nuance and the subtlety and not at all about the writing of provocative opinion pieces.

Going to extremes

Anyway, what I wanted to say was: star ratings based on public reviews are meaningless and a waste of everyone's time. Human nature being what it is means that the distribution of star ratings when the public can set them looks a bit like this:

Chart

And that's because if you can be bothered to review something, it's because you've been galvanised by thinking it's either the greatest thing since sliced bread or the worst thing since Nazism; by definition, nobody gets fired up to write a three-star review. Meh begets meh, and since rage cancels out joy when you take an average, star ratings don't really tell you much.

Their intent is laudable, to be sure: to give you a sense of how good something is. You could argue (as I often rhetorically did when I was an editor) that you should scrap all gradations and just give everything a thumbs-up or thumbs-down rating - which is not unlike the 1-or-5-stars position. If you don't adopt that, though, you're just talking about shades of grey in your shades of grey.

Do you mark out of five stars, do you allow half-stars, do you express it as a percentage (as if anyone can seriously argue there's a substantive objective difference between a game getting 84% and 85%), do you break it down into sub-categories and derive the overall rating from that?

But arbitrary as they are, star ratings given by experienced experts can allow a buying public to differentiate between appalling, unexceptional and superb at a glance. Star ratings voted by the public and arrived at by an algorithm that might be no more sophisticated than a mean average can be a mushy, indistinct mess that helps nobody.

A mark of spite

This week, ustwo released an update to Monument Valley, a game which has been universally adored by reviewers to the extent that it's essentially become a shorthand for utterly lovely and beautifully crafted gaming experiences. It cost £2.49 when it was first introduced, and this week's update adds a collection of new chapters – an expansion pack, basically – for which the developers quite reasonably charged £1.49. Predictably, what happened next is that a lot of entitled babies – who apparently either have no idea how much work goes into creating things or don't care whether their creators can support themselves and their families – hied themselves to the App Store to rate the game one star and mash the keyboard for a bit to express their disgust, thus dragging down the average rating.

So for a while – until ustwo gently though exasperatedly pointed out the injustice on Twitter, prompting fans of quality and of developers being able to eat to counteract with a deluge of five-star reviews – if you'd been a regular punter browsing the Store for something fun to play, you would have gotten the impression from glancing at its rating that Monument Valley was a poor game rather than one of the most critically acclaimed games of the last couple of years.

The fault isn't really with the system, though, but with people. How else can you explain the 4.9/5 rating the first picture the Philae lander sent back from the surface of comet 67P currently has? What kind of towering arsehole looks at that picture – a picture taken 316 million miles away by a probe we launched 10 years ago and which landed on an object travelling at more than 30,000mph – and rates it anything other than five stars?

Star ratings don't really tell you much, then, except that people can be jerks. And we didn't really need star ratings to tell us that.

Netflix's 1080p app update sort of justifies the enormous iPhone 6 Plus

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The iPhone 6 Plus is enormous - so big that many iOS apps fail to completely take advantage of its increased screen real estate.

That's no longer the case with Netflix, which today updated its iOS app to better utilize the iPhone 6 Plus's huge screen.

The Netflix 7.0 update includes a more efficient layout, so more info is displayed on the screen while you're browsing for content, as well as 1080p video playback support for the huge 5.5-inch iPhone.

It's available now from the App Store, so give it a whirl if you have the iPhone 6 Plus, and start enjoying the phablet's comically large display the way you were meant to.

Netflix wants to pay you to watch shows - here's why

Blip: 'Hodor' the Google app and it will 'Hodor' you right back

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If there's one Game of Thrones character who was made to be a meme - despite being created two decades ago - it's Hodor.

The character is a gentle giant who, to the delight of almost everyone, is only capable of saying the word "Hodor."

And starting tomorrow, November 12, you'll be able to have a "Hodor"-off with the official Google app - say "Hodor" to its search box, and it will "Hodor" you right back.

Just remember what the men of the iron islands say: "What is dead may never die, but rises again, Hodor and stronger."

More blips

The night is dark and full of more of TechRadar's blips.

Say 'goodbye' to Lync and 'hi there' to Microsoft's Skype for Business

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Microsoft has announced a new "Skype for Business" client that it hopes will entice more enterprise users to its popular communication service.

Skype for Business combines the popularity of Skype with the business-facing features of the unified communications service Lync.

"We are bringing together the familiar experience and user love of Skype with the enterprise security, compliance, and control from Lync," Skype Corporate Vice President Gurdeep Pall wrote on the Skype blog.

Skype for Business will arrive in the first half of 2015 instead of a new version of Lync.

YouTube : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUetykHsxqQ

Best of both worlds

Pall said more than 300 million people currently use Skype "for messaging, calling and sharing."

The new service will take advantage of the strengths of both Skype and Lync, he wrote - for example, using Skype's familiar icons and interface, but adding Lync features like easy content sharing and call transferring.

Skype for Business also integrates video calling and the Skype user directory, adding plenty of value over existing versions of Lync.

The Skype for Business release next year will arrive in the form of a new client experience and server release, plus updates to Office 365, and it sounds like existing Lync customers will be able to upgrade fairly painlessly.

Satya Nadella wants to "reinvent productivity"

Yahuui Blog

Sunday, November 16, 2014