Category: Technology

Jobs By Twitter: Doing it the right way

My employer, Jobsite, picked up the Candidate Service Award at the onrec Awards 2010. One of the cited services that we launched over the last year towards this was Jobs By Twitter. In my capacity as Lead Software Engineer I performed the construction, based on the vision of Gary Robinson.

My interest in the web, hypermedia, security and so on also gives me an affinity towards the buzzword-heavy realm of social media. It has been interesting following its development but those with a background in electronic communications, especially those from the pre-Internet days of modems and bulletin board systems, will have a natural grasp of the social concepts and etiquette that apply. When your content downloading was restricted to a 1200/75 baud modem (on a good day) you quickly learned to follow the tenet of the time: “Do not excessively annoy. Do not be too easily excessively annoyed”. This is a great guideline to follow even today.

This brings us neatly to Twitter. Its broadcasting model makes it so easy to do so many very annoying things but it is far more beneficial to take a step back and think: “SHOULD we do this? What is actually the best, and definitely not annoying, thing to do?”.

The trend right now is to just spam Twitter to death with jobs. It is completely missing the point of social media and engaging with people. You don’t just wander into a room at a party and start reading a script, ignoring everyone. You have conversations. This is to startlingly simple that it amazes me that some STILL just don’t get it.

I get several Follow requests a day from accounts which are nothing more than just streams of jobs. If I am looking for a job I will be proactively hitting a job board or networking by actually talking to people. Social media definitely comes into play with this latter point but that doesn’t include reading a static list of jobs on a feed. I’ll be using powerful search tools on a dedicated site. Key point: Use the best tools for the job. Twitter is not a panacea. “It adds SEO” is a weak argument.

Laziness comes into the above. It is EASY to spam content into Twitter. Plus it ticks the social media checkboxes that those in management may be obsessed about. It is quick and easy to do the wrong thing that (just about) gives a good impression to those holding the clipboards. You may even be able to sell it to other companies as an amazing Internet service using the ‘wooo, wavey hands, social media!’ sales tactic.

Our design at Jobsite was to embrace how Twitter is actually used: People choose who they follow. They unfollow them again if they find them uninteresting. These choices can change over time. Any service provider must respect the wishes of the user at all times.

With our service, the user opts to follow us and we then let them set up their search criteria. Thus the feed we provide them is fully customised. The eligible jobs are sent by Direct Message (privacy concerns – job hunters are quite likely to not want their desires made public). The user decides how often they get jobs. The user can change any of these settings at any time.

Another feature is that the user does not need an existing Jobsite account. This makes it very quick to be up and running and this is very important with the speed of getting things done on the web nowadays. Add too many hoops to jump through and the user’s initial interest will have gone and they will be distracted by something else shiny on their Twitter feed. We are intending to perform tighter integration with our site and others but making the ride a smooth one is very important.

We have a form of engagement in the above but it is not conversational in scope. That’s an area that there is so much potential in and we have plenty of ideas. We do have to tread carefully, however: The recruiters pay our wages! We can never stop (nor should we) candidates discussing jobs and recruiters but if we are the ones offering them the service and it becomes heated…well, you can see the conflict of interest that suddenly arises. This crosses over into communities, however, and more on that in a future posting.

From an engineering perspective, there have been a few challenges. Firstly, the Twitter API is a little twitchy. I ended up having to put several levels of cross-checking as I ultimately couldn’t always trust what it was telling me. It is also a shame that there is no ‘callback’ system where Twitter can inform you that a new follower has popped up. That would be preferable than having to always determine this by checking an account’s entire Follower list. We also had to balance Twitter’s request throttling with ensuring users got a quick response. We think we have got it right.

I would love to hear your comments on our service and approach plus any other examples of use of Twitter in this area… good or bad!

Rentokil: Playing cute over social media mishaps only goes so far

Rentokil are not doing themselves any favours right now in either PR nor social media. On the PR front, the fact that they blatantly misled the media about infestations on public transport was gloriously picked apart by Ben Goldacre of Bad Science blog fame.

Rentokil essentially lied. You can’t play cute and send out figures saying WE FOUND THIS IN TRAIN COMPARTMENTS only to then attempt to distance yourself by saying, “Actually, umm, that was just theoretical… for something like a train compartment… which no-one ever cleaned or even visited”. I’m not sure whether the cockroaches or Rentokil’s PR machine make me want to scrub myself down more.

Of course, the whole furore was quickly picked up by Twitter users everywhere which brought more pressure on Rentokil. However, as Ben Goldacre’s blog details, they only reacted BECAUSE of this pressure as opposed to doing it because, well, trying to put the record straight is the decent thing to do. Ben had been asking their PR for the actual sources on the dodgy figures for a while but getting nowhere initially.

It’s pretty simple: Social media is about engagement with people. When engaging with people you should not do evil things. Facebook, Twitter, blogs, the community site of your choice… they follow those same guiding principles of other forms of communication over the years. The only new element is the sheer number of people using all this stuff.

Rentokil claim to be just finding their feet in social media, hence cute posts about why they are following people on Twitter. Spam follows are, strangely enough, annoying. I get followed by an increasing number ‘social media experts’ or accounts which just spam quotes (or both in some cases!) let alone pest control ones.

The thing is, that cuteness does not go very far when Rentokil state themselves that they are being advised by ‘social media partner’ Wonderful. Well, clearly something is going wrong there somewhere. The public isn’t falling for the, “Hey, isn’t pest control kinda quirky, and hey, we don’t know much about social media, sorry for any mistakes!” line and it is pretty bad that they are trying it in the first place. Rentokil is actually paying money for this sort of advice.

You can’t lay all of the blame at their social media partner though. It is just an unfortunate bit of timing that Rentokil’s own PR team decided to have a bit of a lapse of ethics and then not having the social media savvy to control the situation properly. That said, if you do something REALLY bad (like, you know, lying about infestations to the media to try and sell a product…) no amount of social media tinkering is going to allow you to save face.

Unless, of course, you back it up by taking strong action. A cute apology does not count as strong action.

Tell the user what is going on!

At work I rebooted my desktop to be delightfully told the following by Windows on startup:

“Installing managed application: Symantec Endpoint Protection”

Or words to that effect. So far, this is doing well with regard to this post’s theme of telling the user what is actually happening.

However, the UI is pretty bad here in that the message is static. There is no indication that anything is actually happening behind the scenes. At this point, the user is not able to actually do anything other than wave the mouse pointer around.

This is not usually a problem when the actions behind the scenes complete quickly. In this case, I was staring at the same screen ten minutes later, with my eyes flicking to the hard drive activity light.

I rebooted as I was not convinced anything was happening and this time just logged straight in. It did not try installing again.

I spoke to the guys behind the scenes and was told I should have waited for fifteen minutes instead.

Some very much common sense guidelines in this area that really should be followed:

  1. When something big is happening behind the scenes that takes control away from the user, provide a progress indicator! This is pretty standard for normal installations. The same should happen as the “Managed install” level. I wonder if this is fixed in Windows 7?

  2. Okay, the first one is not fixable in this situation. So, sysadmins who are looking after these things: Tell your users about the install! A simple email about what is going on, saying to wait for fifteen minutes, and everything is okay would suffice. Always avoid just rolling out arbitrary changes which impact everyone without proper notification.

Microsoft Songsmith + Auto-Tune = World Domination

Microsoft are not stupid. Their video advertising campaign for Songsmith is horifically tacky but it has gone viral and the download sites are taking a bit of a hammering.

I am still downloading the product to check it out but it strikes me that Microsoft may have cunningly found a way to recoup some of the money they may lose as a result of the EU chasing them again. If they combine the product with some form of Auto-Tune (automatic pitch correction, some modern releases are smothered in it), they will probably make enough money to buy the world.

By the way, be careful when looking up examples of Auto-Tune. Once you get the feeling for the shimmery-ness (technical term) it adds to recordings, you can’t miss it! Well, when it is abused, anyway. This is similar to not being able to un-hear the major compression abuse, such as on the new Metallica album.

Syncing iPhone with Outlook – Calendar time warp

I am now the happy owner of an iPhone 3G. Full review to come, and in particular, I am going to compare and contrast with the HTC Touch Pro that I owned previously.

I was having a problem with syncing the iPhone calendar with Outlook. All my appointments were making the journey but they were being time shifted seven or so hours.

My time zone was correct on both the iPhone and the PC, but I missed something: There is seperate time zone support in the Calendar application.

If you have this problem, here is the fix:

1. Go to Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendars.
2. Scroll down to the ‘Calendars’ section.
3. Go into ‘Time Zone Support’, and ensure that the Time Zone also matches where you are. Mine was set to California!

For reference, the general time zone for the device is set as follows:

1. Go to Settings -> General -> Date & Time.
2. Adjust “Time Zone” to suit.

Windows Mobile, Vista’s Sync Center and Bluetooth

I have a battered Orange SPV M3100 (HTC Hermes), which normally syncs fine over my USB connection at work, but is currently being somewhat sporadic with my Vista laptop.

Sometimes, nothing will happen. The mobile will draw power from the laptop, and you can even establish Internet Connection Sharing, but the phone will not be detected for syncing or file transfer.

So I decided to give Bluetooth a go. No wires! What could possibly go wrong?

Firstly, Toshiba’s Bluetooth stack was no help at all. When pairing the laptop and mobile, it would give “Connection refused” errors. So much for always installing the official drivers! Waste of time. I uninstalled the stack and let Vista manage it. Much simpler interface, and this time the pairing worked.

Now, I ran into a “Gotcha!” here. You have to explicitly enable Bluetooth connections in Sync Center’s configuration. But then you have to RE-ESTABLISH THE PAIRING! You see, when the mobile first connects, Vista doesn’t offer ActiveSync as an option due to it being disabled, and it will not detect it after the fact either!

Nothing too complex, just annoying.

Then it’s just a case of going into the mobile’s ActiveSync software, and selecting “Connect via Bluetooth” in the menu. Once done, Sync Center picked it up and it all “just worked”.

I still don’t know why the USB connection is no longer working though. USB is explicitly enabled for syncing on both the laptop and the mobile… grr…

Low-Cost Multi-point Interactive Whiteboards Using the Wiimote

It’s fantastic to see Yet Another Cool Thing created using the Nintendo Wii hardware:

Since the Wiimote can track sources of infrared (IR) light, you can track pens that have an IR led in the tip. By pointing a wiimote at a projection screen or LCD display, you can create very low-cost interactive whiteboards or tablet displays. Since the Wiimote can track upto 4 points, multiple pens can be used.

Blog announcement.

More detailed information, and other cool Wii projects.

What’s Wrong With Windows Mobile (Truth)

A great article which speaks the truth:

This was originally going to be a piece about how Microsoft had no idea what the consumer wanted, where I would explain what I thought Microsoft needed to do to fix it. Oh, I still discuss the flaws, but while talking to the Windows Mobile team, I learned about the next two versions of the mobile OS. Turns out, Microsoft knows exactly what’s wrong with the WM platform, and it knows what to do to fix it. Trust me: there’s hope on the horizon.

Now, the article is great at spelling out the flaws with Windows Mobile. I have a WM device myself and the UI is certainly very klunky indeed, and just doesn’t flow very well at all. Things which should be gloriously simple (like, errr, making a phone call?) just aren’t. I also suffered horrendous freezing issues when I started playing around with third-party apps (Nowadays, any OS should be bullet-proof no matter what an application is doing – we’ve come a long way from the Amiga’s Guru Meditations).

However, I’m quite cynical (or, dare, I say it, “realistic”) when it comes to companies delivering on their promises. I’ve seen plenty of examples of, “The product WILL do THIS”, and in the end it was just a tale of bitterness and despair.

That said, I hope the next releases do show-case a great new UI. Really, Microsoft should be feeling a little embarrased that Apple’s first mobile phone release was stunning in comparison. Not without its flaws, of course.