I’ve been using social media for over a decade, since before people used the term ‘social media’. As I say in my Twitter bio, I ‘live on the internet’. I’ve met my wife on the internet, and so on, and so forth. I’m not just technically familiar with how the internet works, but I’m familiar with the social and cultural groups which have formed social networks (in the sense of ‘people forming groups of friends’, you know, what it meant before MySpace) on the internet. This is possibly the area where I have the greatest amount of life experience – and it gives me a much better understanding of what we now call ‘social media’ than most people who sell their services as ‘social media marketing experts’.

What my experience tells me is that almost everyone who thinks there’s some value for their company in social media marketing is wrong. The only people who can approach it as ‘social media marketing’ are companies with huge existing established brands who are looking for ways to reinforce their brand values in front of an existing demographic. (The targeting options for, say, Facebook ads, are perfect for this.) Even then you can’t use it to ‘engage’ or ‘have a dialogue’ with your customers. It’s no more engaging then billboards at a bus stop, just more narrowly targeted and easier to track some level of action.

That doesn’t mean that companies – large and small – can’t benefit from being on Twitter, and by doing it in a way that actually does engage with real customers and potential customers. I’ll look at an example of a small company first.

The Shower Guys (now retired) were a local plumbing company – they look like they were one-man-and-his-assistant. They are the only plumbing company in West Lothian I know, because they used Twitter at an individual, personal, level. They redid a friend’s bathroom, posting pictures to TwitPic of the work in progress. It wasn’t a faceless marketing drone sending out the standard broadcast-style marketing messages, it was a real person, talking about their real work and their real lives. In that respect, they weren’t engaging in ‘social media marketing’, they were just using Twitter like normal people do.

Twitter can be used to build up personal brands like this, which is why so many ‘social media experts’ on Twitter use their own accounts and followers as an example of what they can do for your brand. But unless your company is small enough that you can use Twitter on a daily basis like the people you’re trying to attract you’re not going to have much success. You also need to make sure that your target market actually uses Twitter – which pretty much means you need to be selling to consumers and not businesses. While everyone that works works for a business, if they’re using their personal Twitter account they will ignore business-related messages, and if they happen to be in charge of their company’s dreaded social media marketing then they’re going to be on Twitter solely to do that and not listen to your sales pitch.

That restriction is true for larger companies too – while even huge companies can make good use of Twitter, it doesn’t work well if they’re trying to sell to businesses. Vodafone are a great example of how a really big company can use Twitter to engage with potential customers and improve their brand. Yes, they had something go horribly wrong, but that can happen in any context – your customer service drone might decide to give his notice by calling every customer who calls your call centre a fuckhead. It certainly crossed my mind a few times when I was a customer service drone.

What makes Vodafone’s strategy work is that the people running the account are not behaving likes sales people. They’re customer service and pre-sales support. They look for people moaning about Vodafone and try and fix things (which is an excellent strategy I’ve seen VMWare use, and benefitted from). This is possibly the best possible use of Twitter any company can make. Find people who are being publicly unhappy, find out why, and do your best to make it better. People post angry venting messages to Twitter all the time, and every single one of them makes some company look rubbish. If you can turn that around you’ll win over a friend for life.

Once people realised that Vodafone were giving useful non-sales responses, they started contacting them directly using Twitter’s @-reply features. These are still public messages, so everyone can see Vodafone being awesome on the internet. It leaves a permanent trace of good customer service – which is something that is genuinely new and exciting about social media, since normally good customer service is invisible and vanishes. Twitter is now just another customer services channel – only a friendly and informal one where it’s easy to build up good feelings about an otherwise generic provider of telecommunication services.

As proof that it works, based on a colleague’s positive experience with Vodafone on Twitter, I’m considering switching my mobile phone contract. If Vodafone had just put out press-release style sales messages, I wouldn’t've even thought about it.

I’ve talked mostly about Twitter since that’s where I see most people trying this. Facebook lends itself more easily to a traditional ‘broadcast’ style of marketing, as does YouTube. In those cases there’s nothing hugely special about it, it’s just something to be aware of. If you have renowned adverts, make sure they’re on YouTube – or at least don’t set the lawyers on them when other people do it for you. My earliest experienced with social media were at LiveJournal, but its nature means that this isn’t really relevant. The community there has evolved to resist anything that looks like marketing. Having said that, I think The Independent has done well by partnering with LiveJournal for its commenting system, leveraging the existing social structures on LiveJournal. It’s pretty much a one-off for LiveJournal, though, and not something that could be done repeatedly.

But I think that’s the story of ‘social media marketing’, it’s not a magic bullet that will increase sales and make everyone love you. It’s a tool that you can use if you can find a way to make it fit your business and brand. Just using an automated tool to post press-releases or following people who say the right keywords won’t work – it’ll just make you look lazy and sloppy. Social Media isn’t for marketing, it’s for social interaction. If you can dress up customer service to look like social interaction, that can work well. If you can actually interact with your customers in a real and meaningful way, that can work well.

If you can’t, then don’t even try. You’ll just be wasting your time.

There are some amazing frameworks for making iPhone webapps. The first one I came across was jQTouch, which is a jQuery plug-in and is really really awesome. It makes it straightforward to make an app that looks and behaves pretty much iPhone-native, without learning ObjectiveC or signing up for an iPhone dev key. jQTouch’s future is a bit uncertain right now – it’s being merged in with a company that apparently has a bit of a bad history for changing licences and leaving people in the lurch. The jQuery guys have said that if it looks like jQTouch might be ‘lost’ they’ll either fork it or develop a replacement, so I’m not terribly worried. There’s a demand for this kind of framework, so someone will fill it.

After playing around with jQTouch a little, I discovered Dashcode lurking away in my Mac OS X developer tools. And then I discovered that it provides an Interface Builder-like interface for designing your app. And then I raved about how awesome this was to everyone at work, even though no one cared because we don’t do mobile development at all in any way.

It seemed so much better to me to be able to specify the layout in a visual drag-and-drop way, especially since this kind of webapp is really targeted at a single platform with a single screen resolution. You can take liberties that you’d never get away with on a traditional app. Dashcode also provides a lot of really good widgets and code snippets that could make apps look a lot slicker and speed up development.

So if Dashcode is so awesome why have the only two real mobile webapp projects I’ve done/am doing used jQTouch?

Part of it is familiarity. jQTouch works using normal HTML and JavaScript files which I can edit in TextMate. Dashcode is an entire IDE and it would take time to learn how to use it effectively. I struggle to find time and energy to work on this stuff as it is, and the extra overhead from learning an IDE might kill my wee projects before they even get started.

But I don’t think that’s the main reason. Both jQTouch and Dashcode have a high degree of magic to them – they both just work to produce slick iPhone webapps, but jQTouch’s magic is more accessible. You have to create the view structure and links yourself out of HTML and this gives you a handle on how jQTouch is doing what it does. The GUI approach taken by Dashcode hides that and makes it less immediately obvious.

Part of the reason I’m doing these projects is to learn new skills. jQTouch exposes more traditional JavaScript than Dashcode does. By using jQTouch I’ve been able to grok unobtrusive JavaScript, a skill that will be useful on my next non-mobile web project. The extra magic in Dashcode might be awesome and shiny and wonderful – but it gets in the way of learning how it all really works.

I think Dashcode can serve some people really really well: people who are experienced JavaScript developers and don’t need to take time to develop their skills, and people who are very inexperienced and don’t want to take time to develop their skills. If you just want to drag-and-drop an iPhone webapp together without learning how to use JavaScript properly, it’s definitely a viable option. If you’ve already been doing JavaScript development and want to learn a new IDE and use a graphical UI builder, it’s pretty awesome.

As for my new projects: one is a private app, but the other one will be getting a beta release soon. Expect more posts on that and the technology used, including client-side SQLite databases, which are both awesome and frustrating.

At a first glance, you could believe it. David Cameron has spent a lot of time talking about green issues and social inclusion. The New Labour project managed to turn around the Labour Party from being completely unelectable to being the party of government for the last 13 years. If Labour could do it, why not the Conservatives?

And if you’re in favour of smaller government, smaller taxes, then the New Conservative Party might seem like a good choice.

Except it’s not. The New Labour project worked because of the nature of the Labour Party and the Labour movement. The centralised collectivist nature of the party meant that they could more easily direct the fundamental changes required to move away from being business-antagonistic to business- (and voter-) friendly.

The Conservative Party can’t enforce those same kind of changes on their constituencies. The individual constituencies have a great deal more power and mostly they’re still run by ‘old Conservatives’. They’re not interested in hugging a hoodie. They’re not interested in equality and diversity. They don’t care about ‘green’ issues – they’re not a bunch of hippies!

The leadership debates have, in many ways, worked in the Conservative Party’s favour, by presenting the most broadly acceptable face of the party: David Cameron. It helps to reinforce the idea that a British General Election is like an American Presidential Election, where you’re voting for the person you believe will lead the country best.

You’re not. Unless you happen to live in Witney, Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, or Sheffield Hallam you don’t get to vote for any of the people in that debate. The Prime Minister is not chosen by you – it’s chosen by whatever internal party leader election system the party in government has. You’re voting for a local candidate, who may or may not have anything to do with the message being pushed by the party central office.

Maybe you live in Sutton and Cheam and you’re thinking of voting for a Compassionate Conservative. But your local candidate for the Conservative Party is Philippa Stroud, who hates gay people. (And believe me: anyone who claims to ‘cure’ homosexuality hates gay people. Ignore anything they say about ‘loving the sinner’ – it’s all hate.) Is that who you want to vote for? Look at the record of the existing Conservative MPs on LGBT issues. Does that reflect David Cameron’s sudden conversion to supporting Gay Rights?

Make no mistake: if you think you’re voting for David Cameron, it’s more likely that you’re voting for Philippa Stroud. If you want a Parliament that thinks gay people (along with anyone else who doesn’t fit the template of ‘normal’) are possessed by demons, that probably suits you just fine. But it does mean that you’re a bit of a cunt.

At least this one is still heavily tech-related. It’s about the Digital Economy Act, which I wrote an angry letter to my MP about. (Incidentally – no response to that latter, although he has contacted me on Twitter asking to explain himself.)

One of the provisions in the Act was to allow disconnection of ‘persistent’ file-sharers. That’s people who have been caught by the BPI and other rights holder groups and have had a series of increasingly sternly-worded letters posted, or possibly just emailed, out to them. There is no court involved in this procedure, and if you want to appeal it you’ll have to pay the costs yourself – legal aid is not available.

It’s basically a presumption of guilt based on the say-so of a commercial organisation, and is pretty appalling. That’s why Willie Rennie’s lost my vote, even pushing me to reach out to the Labour candidate (who sadly doesn’t reply to his email).

When defending this provision the government has always made it clear that this would only be used as a last resort against the most persistent offenders. It’s not something that ‘normal people’ would ever have to be concerned with. I suppose that sounds reasonable enough – while the metrics used by the affected industries (one download = one lost sale) are faulty, there’s obviously some sales lost to illegal downloading and there are people who never buy music or DVDs and just download absolutely everything.

At the same time, people of a more technical nature have pointed out that it’s not that hard to work around the kind of IP address tracking the BPI and others use to track down people sharing their material. You can get a VPN connection to another country that has no laws regarding this – I’ve not looked into this too much, but I believe you can get a suitable connection to a European country for around €5 a month. Configure your computer to send all traffic through that and there’s no reasonable way for anyone to trace it back to you.

The government’s response to this has been to point out that no normal person would ever bother with such a set-up and that only the most hardened and technical users would even try.

Again, that seems entirely reasonable. Most people have trouble using the basic functions of their computer, nevermind configuring a VPN client (at least without the aid of corporate IT support). Similarly, they’re not likely to pay even €5 a month for it, since the whole point to them is that the internet provides free things for them.

Except that when you look at both of these arguments together, it doesn’t make any sense at all. If disconnection only applies to the most hardcore users, and those same hardcore users are the ones likely to route around detection entirely, then almost no one will be disconnected.

The disconnection provision has easily been the most controversial thing in the Act. If it had been dropped the Bill would have had a much easier ride through parliament. The government could have used it to show that it was making major concessions and earned brownie points with the very vocal internet crowd who now hate them. I think that keeping that provision has hurt the government in the upcoming election more than it has helped them. So why has it been kept?

It’s not secret that this bill was largely pushed through parliament by media industry lobbyists. The front bench of both of the government and opposition wanted it passed, even though the opposition claimed to not support it. I guess everyone got a pile of money they needed to fund their election campaigns. Whoever wins will probably get a pile more money to ensure that Ofcom’s investigation into how ‘technical measures’ (such as disconnection) are applied produces a report which fits the media industry’s requirements.

The Act doesn’t set out the details for how disconnection will be applied. That’s going to be determined over the first six months or so of the next parliament. My expectation is that it’s going to apply a lot more widely than just a handful of ‘extreme’ file-sharers. Those people weren’t going to be caught by this anyway. It’s going to be aimed at making disconnection an eventual outcome for anyone who downloads any material the BPI’s members don’t want shared.

Expect it to be an automatic process – after some number of reports by the rights holders, you get a letter. After a number of letters, you get ‘technical measures’. Remember that there’s no court involved here – just a claim by a commercial organisation or a trade body that you’ve been doing Naughty Things. Enough claims, true or not, and you’ll have to pay for your chance to oppose it.

The big content producers are scared of the internet. They don’t know how to make money off of it yet. They wish they could make it go away. Passing a law that could allow them to bully you entirely off of the internet gives them a chance to do just that.

I’m not like the guy on ‘Freaky Eaters’ who only eats cheese, but it’s definitely far less than a normal range.

For the last 30 years it’s not really bothered me that much, but if you’re going to be social and mix with people, having really limited options for food is a huge problem. At the recent Scottish Ruby Conference I nipped away to a local pub both days because I knew that the lunch food on offer – while reasonable for normal people – wouldn’t be good for me. That’s a huge missed opportunity for meeting some of the really awesome people that were there.

So I’m going to do something about it. It’s not a huge radical change. I’m not going to rush out and start eating garlic pizza (garlic makes me want to puke, and I strongly dislike tomatoes, excluding all pizzas). Instead I’m drinking a lot of orange juice.

Orange juice is something that I dislike, but can tolerate when there’s nothing else available or I think I might die without some vitamins. My plan is to keep drinking orange juice until I don’t dislike it any more. Then I’ll try something else. If it still makes me grimace after six months, I might give up or try something else.

It’s a small start, but I’ve been a picky eater for the last three decades and I think it’s reasonable for it to take a long time to reverse.

There’s a Python one-liner I usually use for this sort of thing, but I don’t otherwise use Python and figured it would be better to do it in Ruby. I mentioned this on Twitter and Craig Webster delivered the goods.

There’s a slightly more advanced – but also clunkier – version in the comments which I’ve stuck in a shell alias to make life simple. Put this in your .bash_profile and you can use it too!

alias serve="ruby -rwebrick -e\"s = WEBrick::HTTPServer.new(:Port => 3000, :DocumentRoot => Dir.pwd); trap('INT') { s.shutdown }; s.start\""


Now I can just type ‘serve’ and navigate to http://109.224.145.50:3000/ to check out how the files being served from my laptop look on my iPhone.

Good times!

I’m deeply disturbed that despite a three-page letter you sent in reply to my query concerning the controversial Digital Economy Bill, you did not make the effort to attend the second reading of this bill on the evening of the 6th of April.

This bill is being pushed through despite potentially draconian measures which have been put in place as a result of heavy lobbying by the BPI and other entertainment organisations. It heavily favours large companies over smaller content producers (such as photographers who could find their pictures being used commercially without their consent). It is unconscionable that you could fail to attend such an important reading, and I feel that the message you are sending is that you care far more about attempting to maximise your chances of re-election instead of doing the job you have already been elected for.

By failing to turn up to vote against this bill – which your party voted against at conference – you personally have allowed this damaging legislation to pass without proper checks. I find it extremely hard to consider voting for you in the upcoming election given that I know you specifically will not act to represent me and my interests. In many respects, even if you had voted in favour of the bill it would have been preferable to not turning up at all.

I feel that I should add that anti-LibDem sentiment is extremely high now – your party is the ‘natural’ party of many people who are affected by this bill and given the closeness of the upcoming election the backlash against the party may be extremely damaging. Please see: http://openlettertothelibdems.net/ and http://stop43.org.uk/.

Can you give me an explanation for why you did not attend the second reading of the Digital Economy Bill? Given everything which has happened over the last year, my faith in our political system is at an all-time low, and your actions last night have done nothing to build it up.

Yours sincerely,

John Daniels

I’ll say it right at the start: it was a complete and unmitigated failure, but not in the way I was expecting at all. Which, in a roundabout way, makes it a success. Just a crap one.

Our plan was pretty simple: take advantage of the current trend for mobile phones built into watches, the availability of easy drop-shipping (which I’ll explain in a bit for those that aren’t familiar with it), and £75 of Google Adwords credit that randomly dropped through our door. Well, the broad outline was simple. The devil, as always, is in the details.

The first thing is catching the trend. I’d noticed the ruinously expensive LG watch phone was released last year. It’s the only 3G watch phone I’ve seen, which probably explains the cost. I’d actually registered a domain for this project last year in May before the LG watch was released, and in retrospect I wish I hadn’t sat on it for a year. Because it meant pushing outside of what I normally do, it got sidelined in favour of things that were less outside my comfort zone.

Watches that are also mobile phones is a pretty niche market, but that’s okay. A niche market is actually what you want for this sort of thing – I’m not exactly going to be able to complete with Carphone Warehouse on price, marketing, or customer service. Google’s information on the number of searches on the appropriate keywords seemed to suggest that it wasn’t too niche. There were enough people looking for these gadgets to support a market, and the bid price on AdWords didn’t seem too high. It all looked good, now to find a product.

Drop-shipping is a way that wholesalers let you sell things without keeping stock yourself. When you get an order from a customer, you place your own order with the wholesaler, and they ship it directly to your customer. There’s a few key things to make it work – they don’t put their own branding on it, so when your customer gets their watch they don’t know that it actually came from someone else. The other big thing is that in order to get a price that actually makes this affordable, you need to look for drop-shipping wholesalers in China. This does mean that the shipping cost is going to be higher – I just absorbed this into the retail price and offered free shipping. There’s another side-effect of this that I’ll come to later.

Working this way you don’t need to have capital to invest in stock, which really reduces the risk involved. The other thing that reduced the risk even further for us was a £75 Google Adwords voucher. We’d always intended that Adwords would be the primary way to get customers, so this was basically a chance for us to try it with no capital investment.

I looked at Google’s keyword tools and they suggested that the cost-per-click (CPC) for the keywords I was after would be around 5-7p. I figured that if I split the £75 over a ten day campaign that would be at least 100 clicks per day. Each sale would have a margin of around £50. Two sales in the 10 day period would be ‘break-even’ point, and would make the experiment a success. That’s a conversion rate of 0.2%. Break-even is considered a success because it allows the experiment to continue, and we could then do A/B testing to refine the site and improve the conversion rate.

A failure would probably mean no sales at all – which is exactly what happened. There’s a lot wrong with the landing page for the ads (which I’m not sharing here, because it’s just frankly too embarrassing), but given the market I was trying to aim for I think it would have worked out okay. It wasn’t terribly sophisticated, but from a sales point of view it was an acceptable start.

In the 10 days the experiment ran we had a total of 82 clicks on the adverts. To sell even one at that volume of traffic we’d need a conversion rate higher than 1%, which would be really amazingly high for this kind of market.

What went wrong? The first thing was that I’d grossly underestimated the cost-per-click for the keywords I’d need. Google’s keyword suggestion tool turns out to be pretty useless and doesn’t tell you what you need to be on the first page of search results, let alone in the top three. A week of obsessive fiddling with bid prices for specific keywords managed to help, but I found that Google still wasn’t displaying our advert often enough. When it was being displayed we were seeing click-through-rates that were all over the place – most keywords were at 0%, some as high as 21%. Even the keywords we had good placing, higher bid prices, and high click-through-rates didn’t get many impressions.

I expected to fail because the landing page would be rubbish, or because the price would be too high, or because people would buy the thing and then return it under distance selling rules, leaving me with a gadget to sell on eBay. I was concerned about the shipping from China resulting in people getting hit with import duty, and the potential trouble that could cause. There was a warning about it in the terms and conditions on the site, but no one reads those.

I didn’t expect to fail because Google didn’t fancy showing my advert enough to let me spend my whole daily budget. After the 10 day experiment I stopped the Adwords campaign, with around two thirds of our credit still left.

From reading I’ve done since then, I think that the longer your campaign’s been running the more Google likes you. If I’d started a year ago the CPC would have been lower (since ‘SWAP’ released their cheaper watch phone this year, there’s been a lot more attention – so a lot more people wanting to get this traffic) and by now it would have been more established. That would have meant investing in the advertising back then, and I don’t think we had the money to risk in this kind of experiment.

Clearly I’ve got a lot to learn about how Google Adwords works. Luckily, when I was at the Scottish Ruby Conference I won £250 worth of books. One of the books I picked up was ‘Google Advertising Tools’. Next time I engage in an internet money-making experiment, I’ll hopefully have a bit more of a clue what I’m doing.

In the meantime, though, I’m out nothing but my time and I think the time spent was a fair trade for what I’ve learned. If nothing else, it’s good to get out of my techy geeky comfort zone and try something very different. I plan to keep doing different things this year – as well as doing my usual stuff too. As the man said, specialization is for insects.

The main application I’m building with Adhearsion’s not ready yet, so I decided to build something quickly that I could use to show how Adhearsion works. Hopefully it’ll be a fun little app/toy in its own right, too.

Your 140 Seconds lets you call up a number (0131 512 0050) and post up to 140 seconds of audio to a shared Twitter account @y140s. There’s no users, no identification (other than an area code extracted from the caller ID), just 140 seconds of randomness. It should be fun.

It’s been a good project for me – it’s helped a lot for pinning down what I’ll need for deploying the other project, and it’s always nice to actually finish something.

The source code is on GitHub, with some notes on deployment in assets/notes.

Adhearsion’s a great framework and doesn’t require that much Asterisk configuration. I’m going to go over how y140s is set up here.

I’m using phone numbers supplied by UKDDI. They have options for logging into their SIP server as if you were a remote client, which matches how I’ve used Asterisk/Adhearsion before with SIPGate and Gizmo5. More interestingly, they also have options for sending the calls directly to your SIP server. This keeps the configuration needed down quite a bit. In fact, you should be able to get away with one change to sip.conf and one new stanza in extensions.conf.

In extensions.conf:

[adhearsion]
exten => 666,1,AGI(agi://127.0.0.1)
exten => 666,n,Hangup

This takes any call to extension 666 and punts it to Adhearsion, then hangs up if Adhearsion happens to return the call control back. (Normally you’ll want to tell Adhearsion to explicitly hang up in your app, since you’ll be handling the whole call flow there.)

You’ll also need to ‘include’ it in the default context – the default file includes the ‘demo’ context, just switch it out there.

On the UKDDI site, you’ll need to set your routing to something like sip:666@your.server.net, where the extension used matches whatever you picked in extensions.conf

In sip.conf all you need to do is change the default context for incoming calls from ‘default’ to ‘adhearsion’. This is set right at the start of the [general] stanza. Adhearsion expects to find a block for the context the call is being made in, like this:

adhearsion {
...
}

If the context doesn’t match anything in dialplan.rb the call will fail, so it’s really important to get the contexts matching.

On receiving a call, Adhearsion executes the contents of that block. There’s some special methods you get (like play, record, and menu) and you can call your own functions too.

The menu function is how you do IVR menus – it has an extra over standard Asterisk in that the menus can be interrupted while playing prompts. It uses call-backs defined outside of the main block (on_save, on_retry in this example) or each option can call a block in-line (as seen for on_invalid).

In this example app I’m not using the Rails integration, but it’s as simple as putting a line like this in config/startup.rb:

config.enable_rails :path => '../webapp', :env => :development

There’s more notes on the GitHub project, including the details of a little bit of hoop-jumping required to get beanstalkd working on Ubuntu 8.04.

If you’ve not used message queuing before, now’s the time to start. By default, adhearsion throws an exception and dies when a caller hangs up on you, so if you’ve not done your background processing before then it’ll never get done. Also, if you think people are impatient waiting on a web page to load while you do processing during the request cycle, imagine how much worse they are waiting on the phone?

If the call goes quiet for too long, they’re likely to assume that it’s failed and hang up – so it’s really vital that you keep it responsive by firing things off for processing elsewhere. Beanstalkd is a really lightweight system, which suits me. In a Rails app I’d just use delayed_job, and I am on my other telephony app, but it’s a bit of a pain to use without Rails.

My mechanism for picking items off the queue is really basic – a cron job calls a rake task once a minute. It’s simple and it works. It doesn’t scale very well, but if I’m seeing more than sixty calls an hour then other parts of the system will probably fall over first.

Overall, I’m quite pleased with this little app. It’s a good example of how things hook together when you’re using adhearsion and it’s been really useful for helping me consider deployment strategies for larger telephony applications. It’s definitely not perfect, so if anyone spots any bugs or has any suggests, please let me know – or even better, fork it on GitHub and send a pull request!

And that makes me so sad.

I touched on the reason why in my article about ‘open sourcery‘ – I want to see a world where understanding the machines we use every day is common rather than extraordinary. I want to see a future where people – ordinary people, not computer geeks – can create their own tools for whatever purpose they have.

The iPad future promises general purpose computing devices that are much easier to use, but which are completely impenetrable. At the moment you still need a ‘normal’ computer to use an iPad, but that won’t be the case for very long. Once people buy iPad-like devices instead of a traditional desktop or laptop computer you’ll have a class of computer users who can never learn to make their own tools, even if they wanted to.

We exist in a world full of machines, mechanisms, and devices that almost all of us do not understand. We can barely grasp the basic principles of how these things function, let alone the details of any specific implementation. Do you know how common-rail fuel injection in a diesel car works? I don’t. I don’t even know how beer works. Most people have a terrible understanding of simple mechanical principles. I only learned about the Geneva wheel the other day, and I was struck by how elegant a design it was. It’s used in film projectors and mechanical watches – more things that I don’t really know how they work. Until I read about the Geneva wheel I’d never even thought about the need for a frame of film to stay still for a fraction of a second while running through the projector.

There’s a ‘hardware hacking’ movement that’s trying to encourage people to void their warranties and open up closed devices to learn how they work. Working on hardware is difficult, and there’s always the risk that you could permanently destroy some expensive piece of hardware. I can understand why no one knows how common-rail fuel injection works – who wants to poke around in their car? It’s all dirty, and if you poke the wrong thing you’re going to have to call the AA to tow you to a garage to get it fixed. Hardware hacking is inevitably going to be a niche. I can accept that.

Software hacking is much simpler. It’s much harder to do permanent damage to something. It’s much more accessible – you can do it indoors, you don’t need to risk setting the curtains on fire with a soldering iron, you don’t even need to buy anything – if your computer doesn’t come with a programming language you can download all sorts of things for free that will get you started.

Writing software tools is hugely accessible. In the ‘open sourcery’ article I point to the Organisation for Transformative Works and their Archive of Our Own project, and I think this is a brilliant example of how a community of non-computer-geeks (albeit a community of generally well-educated non-computer-geeks) can create tools which empower their community. There’s plenty of existing software and websites they could have used, but they wanted to create something which was designed specifically to suit their community. They wanted to make it themselves, and because of the astounding quality of the open source tools available they were able to do it.

They’ve turned a bunch of writers into software hackers, letting them take control over the computer in a way that will be impossible in the future promised by the iPad. A future that makes software hacking as hard as hardware hacking. A future where to write your own tools you need to buy a computer capable of running development tools. That will be a device restricted to professionals and hard-core hobbyists only, like the tools you find in a garage.

In the iPad future owning what we call a computer today would be like having your own welding kit. Yeah, some people do, but not normal people. Normal people would just burn their arm off if they tried to use it. Normal people leave that to trained professionals.

The idea of ‘software’ – a complex tool that doesn’t exist in a physical form – is still very new. It’s completely different to the kind of tools we’re used to, this is why so much software pretends to be hardware – you have a ‘trash’, ‘paintbrushes’, little pictures of film reels and photo frames all over the place. The visual metaphors which have been used to make this entirely new concept accessible have tricked everyone into thinking that software is in any way like hardware. It’s not.

There is (essentially) no cost to copying software, to making small iterative changes. There’s no materials cost to trying out a new way of making a tool. If you want to take an existing tool and reshape it to do something different you don’t have to lose the existing tool. The cost of entry is extraordinarily low – a simple tutorial and a couple of downloads and you can make a simple tool. You’re not limited in the same way that physical objects are. Except in the iPad future.

In the iPad future software is just like hardware – it’s restricted and difficult to work with. You need to buy a bunch of weird stuff just to get started, and you can’t share what you’ve made with anyone unless it gets approved or you make a web application (and then you need a server and have to learn a thousand fiddly sysadmin tasks to get going – the cost of entry isn’t any lower there). It takes away, forever, the unique ability of software that can enable communities and individuals to create something of their own.

If someone released an iPad-clone with, say, Ruby on it, a decent text editor, a terminal application, and access to the filesystem it would pretty much eliminate my concerns. It could be used to create all manner of custom tools and it would be awesome. Except that it would also break the core changes that makes the iPad the future of general purpose computing: the control and simplicity. The single-application simplicity would make writing tools very difficult; the restriction on background processes – which is essential to keeping the system functioning at a ‘it just works’ level – would be horribly broken; the application restrictions that eliminate most malware risks would be lost; the whole system would fall apart and it would just be a very pretty old-style computer.

The iPad future doesn’t stop the normal person from creating new tools as a side-effect, it’s an intrinsic part of the entire concept. It forces software to behave like hardware because not even Apple have been able to find a way to make computers reliable without also making them unalterable black boxes.

As a device I think that iPad looks ace, as a concept I think it’s going to push the iPhone revolution into the mainstream computer space. I think that the people saying that this might change the world are absolutely correct and because that means the end of this brief period where software could enable and empower normal people, it makes me very, very sad.