I go on a short holiday to visit my family and friends back in the motherland, and what happens? My Twitter account is suspended.

Why? No fucking clue. If I were to hazard a guess I’d say my account was flagged by some automated (and deeply flawed) spam-detection script and suspended without further human interference.

Over time I’ve come to rely on Twitter for a lot of things - keeping up to date in my field of employment, maintaining my network of professional and personal contacts, finding new viral content early, and generally keeping my finger on the pulse of the internet.

Now my account is suspended for no apparent reason. I’ve looked at Twitter’s rules and can’t find anything I’ve done that would incriminate my account. Twitter hasn’t provided a reason for this suspension either - the account has simply been closed. I didn’t receive any email. I had to find out about my account’s suspension from a friend who dropped me an email during my holiday.

Naturally I’ve contested this with Twitter’s support department, but to say they’re not very quick on the draw is a ridiculous understatement. Continental plates move faster than Twitter support. It’s been 6 days since I submitted a support ticket, and aside from an automated response I’ve received no word, despite two further requests from my side.

Even worse, Twitter’s standard text on account suspension states an account may be suspended for a minimum of 30 days pending ‘research’. This means I could be disconnected from a large part of my personal and professional information stream for over a month.

Creating a new account and starting from scratch isn’t really an option. Not only would I lose the valuable network I’ve built up over more than a year of Twitter usage, the rules also bluntly state that any account created to replace a suspended account faces permanent suspension.

It’s a good thing this has happened though. It has made me realise the amount of power a single social network can have over your day to day routines. This account suspension has made me feel disconnected from the internet as if I wasn’t online at all. I’m out of the loop. I’m not up to date on what’s happening any more. It’s somehow liberating and suffocating at the same time.

And it’s made me understand that Twitter, as a victim of its own popularity, is thoroughly incapable of handling its own success. Automated processes to detect and suspend spam accounts obviously don’t work, and Twitter seems reluctant to invest sufficient human resources to handle the emerging problems in an acceptable manner.

I suppose since Twitter is a free service I really shouldn’t complain. Yet most social media sites are free to use and that doesn’t stop us from revolting en masse when something goes wrong. Twitter however is unique in that despite its massive success has failed spectacularly in monetising its sudden ubiquity.

So I’ll give Twitter a bit of leeway. Another week, maybe. If they haven’t fixed my account by then, they can fuck off and I’ll start using FriendFeed instead.

UPDATE: After 17 days my account was re-activated. I never got an explanation for it, but I suspect it was because I was a little careless with my password and my account got taken over by a spammer during my holiday. Serves me right I suppose, but a little quick action from Twitter would’ve been appreciated.

According to Doug Rushkoff, author of Life Inc, Google’s announced operating system will help unchain us from the shackles of corporate interests.

“As the Google Apps suite of programs finally graduated from its ‘beta’ status this week, Google also announced its plans to release an operating system on which to run them. Google Chrome, based on the company’s new browser, will invite us all to spend a lot less time, energy, and money on our computers—and in the process, it may force the technology industry to consider how to make money after people no longer require expensive machines and software to do their work.”

Of course what the Chrome OS will really do is transfer power over our office productivity from Microsoft to Google. We’re simply exchanging one corporate juggernaut for another. Rushkoff doesn’t see this as a bad thing though.

“And luckily for us (if not the company’s shareholders), Google tends to do things because they’re neat, and worry about business models later. While it may imagine its OS will provide new opportunities to sell advertising space, chances are Google is hoping to benefit purely from the increased Internet traffic catalyzed by an always-on, always-connected, and always-collaborating network of users.”

So basically we’ll have to rely on Google’s promise to do no evil.

I’m not so sure about the Chrome OS. At least with MS Windows and Office I can still manage, encrypt and and delete my own files. With Google’s OS and Apps, it all resides in the cloud. How do I know that when I delete something on Google Apps it’s really gone? I don’t. On the contrary, it’s likely my docs will continue to exist in some form or another out there on the interwebs.

And until the Chrome OS can run F.E.A.R. 2 with a frame rate of at least 40fps, I’m definitely not switching.

(Via Boing Boing)

Apparently Facebook wants to challenge Google for the title of World Champion of Teh Interwebs. A new Wired magazine piece explains how Facebook thinks it can beat Google by using people, instead of algorithms, to fuel search:

Facebook encourages its 200 million members to use Microsoft’s search engine, which it installed on its homepage late last year as part of the deal struck between the two companies. At press time, it was also planning to launch Facebook Search, allowing users to scour one another’s feeds. Want to see what some anonymous schmuck thought about the Battlestar Galactica finale? Check out Google. Want to see what your friends had to say? Try Facebook Search. And it will not only be for searching within Facebook. Because Facebook friends post links to outside sites, you will be able to use it as a gateway to the Web—making it a direct threat to Google.

… In December, Facebook launched Connect, a network of more than 10,000 independent sites that lets users access their Facebook relationships without logging in to Facebook .com.

… In April, Facebook announced its Open Stream API, allowing developers to create mashups using Facebook’s constantly updated stream of user activity.

… Connect and Open Stream don’t just allow users to access their Facebook networks from anywhere online. They also help realize Facebook’s longtime vision of giving users a unique, Web-wide online profile.

But where Google tries to maintain an image of transparency and trustworthiness (”Don’t be evil“), Facebook is an obvious corporate enterprise with profit on its mind, even at the expense of its users:

In November 2007, Facebook launched Beacon, a ham-fisted attempt to inject advertising into News Feeds. Users felt violated; after a month of protest, Zuckerberg publicly apologized and effectively shut Beacon down. Then, in February 2009, Facebook quietly changed its terms of service, appearing to give itself perpetual ownership of anything posted on the site, even after members closed their accounts. Users complained so vociferously—millions joined Facebook groups and signed online petitions protesting the change—that the company was forced to backtrack. The event left many people fearful of the amount of personal information they were ceding to a private, profit-hungry enterprise.

I’m not sure Facebook packs the punch to knock out Google’s 800-pound Gorilla.

Mary Meeker from Morgan Stanley gives an annual presentation about the state of the internet at the Web 2..0 Summit. While I often think that big corporate analysts tend to be out of touch with what’s really going on, I felt that this presentation gives a good overview of what’s going on and where we’re headed.

Seth Godin’s new book Tribes is just out.

The freely downloadable companion volume, the Tribes Casebook, is co-authored and edited by the few thousand lucky souls who managed to become a part of Godin’s triiibes.com social network.

I wrote a case study that got included in the casebook (page 124 - “David and I”) and I’m excited to see it in there. I was skeptical at first about this triiibes.com experiment, but I’ve come to see the value of it. There are a lot of intelligent, inspiring people in there who freely share their tips and ideas.

I hope that this tribe will continue to exist for a long time to come, as it’s become a valuable part of my online social groups.

I recently attended the Design for Conversion conference that was held on the light boat in Amsterdam. The venue was small and had a bar/nightclub feel to it, which promoted an informal atmosphere and made it easier to start conversations with total strangers.

The attendees were divided into seven groups of each about 12 - 14 members, with two or three team captains. Each group was assigned a case to work on in between the keynote sessions, and at the end of the day every team had to give a short 3-minute presentation about the ideas they had to improve the conversion rate of their case subject.

The group I was put in had the KPNvandaag.nl portal as our case topic. The objective of the case was to promote usage of the portal, find a way to integrate KPN commercial messages in the portal, and how to gain valuable user insights from usage of the portal.

The team captains of our group were Lotte Zwijnenburg (info.nl), Boris van Beek (ikki.nl) and Reinout Wolfert (webanalisten.nl). Some of the more active participants were people from small agencies, IT companies, freelancers and insurance companies. The final 3-minute presentation for our group was given by me (no one else volunteered).

Our ideas for the KPNvandaag.nl case:

• More openness in the portal to allow for more customization, more news sources for users to add, and more widget functionality (calendars, email overview, etc).
• Integration of KPN services into the portal. Examples: SMS/phone history, personalized phonebook, sending SMS messages direct from the portal, overview of your phone activity, remotely program your digital TV DVR to record a TV show, watch TV, subscribe to digital TV channels, etc.
• Integrate relevant commercial messages into the widgets on the portal in a subtle way.

_____
Keynote 1
Andrew Chak - Getting the Next Click

Andrew Chak wrote a book a few years ago called Submit Now. He spoke about the core tenets of conversion optimization and divided them into three principles:

1) Start with the user and where your users are
Find the sites your users are active on (also search engines), and advertise on those sites.
Create different landing pages or microsites based on the needs of your users. Specify your message to different types of users and their specific needs.
Users only see what they are looking for, so be specific to that user type and use their own words.

2) Don’t sell, help them buy it
Help them find the basic information they need to make an informed decision.
Help them choose, be clear about your offer.
Influence the choice with highlighting, scarcity, user ratings, recommendations, etc.
Help them evaluate the different choices (feature table).
Help them see the result of their actions.
Be honest, authentic and complete.

3) Remove the barriers
No upfront registration, give (partial) content before you ask for user details.
Remove ALL unnecessary fields in your forms.
Remove uneducated choices.
Add persuasion elements (recommendations, scarcity, special offers).

_____
Keynote 2
Steve Jackson - Combining 4 techniques to improve your conversion rate

Steve Jackson has been a conversion optimizer since 1999, and he’s been writing a book about conversion optimization and web analytics which will appear in April 2009. He has created a model for conversion optimization called the insight model and explained it with a high-level view in his keynote.

The Insight model

There are 4 elements to conversion optimization in this model:

1) Persona - create a persona that is somewhat typical for our userbase, and view your website through the eyes of this persona. Be detailed in creating this persona and be honest to the choices this persona would make.

2) Competitive data - what works for your competitors? What sites are good sites with good conversions? Don’t be afraid to steal ideas from your competitors.

3) Clickstream data - use web analytics to gather information about what your users do on your website. What pages do they click through to, what pages have a high bounce rate, what pages are exit pages? Find the troublespots and correct them.

4) Experience data - you know from your own experience as a user and a professional what works and what doesn’t. Apply this knowledge to your optimization.

Steve also mentioned some other quick ideas:

• Use error pages to your advantage. You can turn a 404-error page into a better experience for the user. You can for example add a site search engine to your 404 error page, as well as quick links to the major pages in your site.
• The REAN model: Reach, Engage, Activate, Nurture.

_____
Keynote 3
BJ Fogg - The Elements of Behavior Change

BJ Fogg is a professor at Stanford university in California. He has written several books and does classes on human behavior, how to influence it, and how to apply this knowledge to the online realm.

BJ sees three main elements to human behavior that need to be present:
1. Motivation - people need to want to do something
2. Ability - people need to be able to do something
3. Trigger - people need to be triggered to do something

Motivation

There are three core motivators that you can use to create motivation for an action:
- Pleasure / Pain
- Hope / Fear
- Acceptance / Rejection

Use the lightest touch that works. Avoid over-motivation.

Ability

Users need to be able to do what you are asking. Increase the ability factor by simplifying the action, not by training your users. Make your conversion action as simple as you possibly can.
Reduce behavior to one click, one step, one action.

Simplicity has six elements: time, money, physical effort, brain cycles, social deviance, non-routine.

Triggers

There are three types of triggers, tying in to the three elements of behavior change:
1) Facilitator - makes behavior easier
2) Spark - motivates behavior
3) Signal - indicates behavior

Learn what already works for your target behavior and apply it to your own situation.
Often enough the motivation element already exists. Focus on facilitation (ability) and triggers.

_____

Conclusion

It was a good and informative conference with an informal atmosphere that made it easy to talk to other attendees. The case studies could’ve been better, but for a first-time conference it was very well organized. I’ll seriously consider attending the next one.

A while ago I read an article from Nicholas Carr titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid“, and I thought he brought up a good point.

And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I too have been experiencing greater difficulty with concentrating for long stretches of time, and I’m more easily distracted. I now prefer my information in small bite-sized chunks, going for quick summaries instead of the full depth of the content.

But Carr has his critics, among them such technological luminaries as Kevin Kelly:

Carr is a self-admitted worrywart, who joins a long line of historical worrywarts worrying that new technologies are making us stupid. In fact Carr does such a fine job of rounding up great examples of ancient worrywarts getting it all wrong, it’s hard to take his own worry seriously.

Kelly however fails to provide a solid counterargument against Carr’s case, save for pointing at previous technology’s critics and how wrong they all were. Not a very convincing argument.

As someone who’s made a career our of the things the Internet does, I should be exclaiming the online world’s manifold virtues and limitless possibilities. And often I do.

But I’m also worried about what the Internet is doing to us, both as individuals and as a society. It’s not all good, and I think we need to be honest about that. Regardless of how much we’d like to see the Internet as the solution to our global problems, we must face the fact that the online realm creates new problems of its own.

Adaptive Path and Mozilla Labs collaborated to create a concept video about how web browsing might look in the future. It looks pretty awesome. I’m sure some of the things shown are already possible in some form or another, but the video shows a level of cross-compatibility and mixability that’s still beyond our grasp.

Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

(Via Boing Boing)

I’m not exactly sure what the experiment is about, or what we’re supposed to do (if anything) as members of this network, but I suspect it’s something not particularly obvious and perhaps not particularly profound either.

Imagine you could create your own website in just a couple of hours. It’ll be a very slick, professional looking website with a fantastic design and full of cool animated features.

You can manage this website through an incredibly easy and intuitive interface, dragging and dropping images, text boxes, navigation items and widgets to exactly where you want them on the site. You can customize almost every aspect of the site, including colors, fonts, layout, and design.

The site will be search engine friendly as well, and to top it all off it’s free.

Can you think of a reason not to use this system? Neither can I.