I don’t understand why the web is pretty unusable without cookies.

I’ve taken to using the excellent Cookie Monster add-on for Firefox to eliminate the quite astonishingly array of advertising and tracking cookies that I’d picked up. Since then, no tracking cookies, but almost every site breaks at first until it’s explicitly permitted to write a cookie, most without any kind of warning or error message. This was abundantly clear when trying to buy a poster photo print at the weekend.

Cookies and sessions are not the same thing, and apparently the web programmers responsible for much of what’s out there don’t quite get that. Here’s a hint:

Sessions encompass the scope of my current interaction with your site. Not just this single stateless HTTP request, but my whole interaction. Feel free to put a session ID in the URL. This in no way precludes you from handling my entire interaction, whether it’s viewing the front page of your postcard site or actually purchasing something.

Cookies encompass the scope of multiple interactions with your site. That is, they provide a method for you to store a piece of information that enables you to correlate multiple sessions.

The functional difference to both of us is minimal: if I refuse your cookie, I’ll have to identify myself every time I establish a new session. That is a reasonable fallback and is my choice. I appreciate this might interfere with your ability to sell my browsing habits to all and sundry, but (shockingly) your and my idea of the role you play in our relationship is different.

In the end, I bought my photo print from a site that gave me the product I wanted without forcing cookies on me.

To the rest of you, fix it or f**k off.

</alex>

(Today’s modern) Social networking is largely defined by Facebook and Twitter. However, for me, both’s flaws are based on two incredibly simple statements:

- The Facebook model assumes that you have one, single, social network. At Harvard this was true; for the rest of the world it most certainly isn’t! All of Facebook’s privacy concerns and the endless stream of mindless junk on there boil down to this one fact. And when you can’t filter the single network, that’s when the problems occur.

- Twitter is nothing more than pub-sub text messaging. This is a model that works well only for those whose communication patterns follow the pub-sub model: namely companies who issue public statements of one kind or another; and celebrities. For all other users it is little more than an ineffective email.

So?

Well, I’ve been playing with Google+ and it seems to deal with these problems quite nicely.

Circles enable the definition of multiple social networks, providing both privacy and filtering capabilities – so simple and yet powerful enough to filter the wheat from all that chaff! For Facebook this is an interesting problem: introduce Circles-like functionality (and no, lists are not quite the same) and you risk your business which rests on whoring out information to all and sundry; don’t and you risk your business by losing users in droves.

Google+ doesn’t seem to provide any obvious method for direct communication with a contact. Don’t get me wrong… you can do it, but it’s not obvious. For me, this equates to them not trying to replace email with pseudo-email, which can only be good! (Think of getting Facebook emails telling you to log onto Facebook to get a message – why on earth did your ‘friend’ not just email you in the first place?!).

I left Facebook about 18 months ago because of the mindless pitter-patter of drunken photos, baby photos and generally garbled crap. As far as I can tell from Mrs Me, I haven’t missed anything in that time. But that doesn’t mean I don’t see a use case for social networking – I do. Just not the way Facebook does it.

So, with Google+, am I a social networking convert? Well, only if it meets my use case for social networking which, so far, it seems to. So far, it has none of the chaff due to its invite-only status – though even when it does inevitably arrive I can filter that out. It has built-in video-conferencing, giving it the potential to replace the oh-so-bloated Skype. And it has no ads. In short, it seems to allow me to share things with select groups of people.

Time will tell.

</alex>

This site has been a blank facade for quite a while now. There’s a reason for that: I tend to communicate with those I wish to via the traditional methods – email and the phone!

But, people get confused, and expect to find things here. So it’s re-opened.

This isn’t to say you’ll find endless witty or erudite posts… you won’t. But there are links above and on the right to some key services that I do provide – namely Webmail and file transfers, and some that I consider truly useful, like the excellent ITA Flight search tool.

Yes, I will post something here occasionally, but it will likely be work-related – thoughts on BPM (that’s the self-referential BPM Pattern Management acronym btw.) perhaps?

</alex>