Monthly Archives: March 2009

Lessons from Twitter #1: Don’t use TwitPic

Twitter,

TwitPic is a sort of add-on for Twitter. You can upload an image via their website, a 3rd party twitter client from your mobile or send them an email/MMS with the picture. They then tweet on your behalf with a link to the picture.
The problem is that sometimes the picture they link to isn’t your picture. Below is an example of what happened to Philip Schofield during the Brits last month.

Schofe Schofe 19:38
http://twitpic.com/1k1ya – Nearly showtime!
Schofe Schofe 20:08
http://twitpic.com/1k2l3 – Oh my God!
Schofe Schofe 20:23
http://twitpic.com/1k2vr – Nearly took a pic of Girls Aloud! Name that TV exec?
Schofe Schofe 20:24
http://twitpic.com/1k2wj – Nearly took a pic of Girls Aloud! Name that TV exec?
Schofe Schofe 20:37
http://twitpic.com/1k36f – Coldplay!
Schofe Schofe 21:10
http://twitpic.com/1k3wr – Take That proper show biz!

As you can see unless Take That had gone abroad to do their piece, the picture wasn’t the one which Philip Schofield wanted. The give away to the picture being wrong is the grey “bars” at the bottom of the image.
From my guess it would seem that an image got stop part way through a process to resize and then attached to the wrong users tweet. You know that no one has hacked Phil’s account as the words follow from the previous messages.

So far not really a problem, Phil noticed the issue and applogised for the lack of Take That. However this wasn’t the case for BBC Tech corospendant Rory Cellan Jones.
He spent quite a large amount of time at the BBC News studios covering the YouTube / PRS story, and showing of Twitter to the journalists took some pictures.

ruskin147 ruskin147 18:18
Tellng George Alagiah about YouTube and music. http://twitpic.com/1yki0
ruskin147 ruskin147 18:38
Now BBC World with the lovely Tanya Beckett. http://twitpic.com/1yl1w
ruskin147 ruskin147 19:32
And now Joanna Gosling and Ben Brown on the News Channel. Ben has just joined Facebook. Not so keen to tweet.. http://twitpic.com/1ymo3

Now two images have been removed (from TwitPic, so the links go to an error page). The one of Tanya Beckett was quite a nice shot of her. However the picture of Joanna Gosling and Ben Brown clearly wasn’t them. Nor was it safe to view whilst at work.

Rory followed up with these tweets:
19:37 oh my god i’ve been hacked – really really sorry.
19:46 Very very shaken by that Twitpic hack. Has that happened to anyone else? The tweet was genuine – but not the picture
20:01 Not sure how keen I am ever to use Twitpic again. Is there another way to link pix?
20:51 To clarify for those who missed my Twitpic horror earlier I uploaded a pic of BBC studio – instead something very post watershed appeared
21:59 Twitpic tell me I wasn’t hacked – it was “a random bug that we are working on..”. Oh, fine! About to go live on 10 – hope no random bug

So the simple lesson is AVOID TwitPic.

Phone Mast applications

Featured, Mobiles,

When I was a councillor on Lincoln City a total of three applications for phone masts came in front of the Planning Committee.
Due to a prejudicial interest I never took part in the discussion however I was pleased to see that the councillors understood the laws around the applications. Two of the applications were accepted without much fuss.
The third was from O2 at the Birchwood shopping centre. It was a retrospective for a 13 metre poll with 3g aerials on top. They had already got consent (via appeal) for a 13 metre poll with 2g on top, but put up a 3g mast instead (only real difference was an extra 10cm in diameter of the bit at the top). It was felt by the committee that the overall shape of the structure was detrimental to the visual amenity of the area, however the planning inspectorate appeal again overturned the committee.
Continue reading Phone Mast applications →

eBay “free” listings

Other,

Good news acording to the eBay news feed:

Zero insertion fees on qualifying auction-style listings on eBay.co.uk
From 12th March 2009, there’s no insertion fee if you’re a private seller and you list your item in an eligible category in the auction-style format with a starting price of up to 99p. Don’t forget, your first picture is also free.
If your item doesn’t sell, you don’t pay a penny. All you pay for are optional listing features and upgrades

Sounds great, but lets take a closer look.

* The free listing fee is only for those with a starting price of 99p and under, any thing else still has the same listing fee.
* The final value fee has again gone up. Instead of a sliding scale starting at 8.75% it’s now 10% up to a maximum of £40.

With a bit of a back of a fag packet (excel spreadsheet) during my lunch I’ve come up with these figures.

An item selling for £1 will now have a fee of 10p instead of 19p (9p up).
£5 will have a fee of 54p instead of 50p (4p up).
£8 will have a fee of 80p, the same as before.
£10 will have a fee of £1 instead of 98p (2p down).
£20 will have a fee of £2 instead of £1.85 (15p down).
£40 will have a fee of £4 instead of £3.25 (75p down).
£100 will have a fee of £10 instead of £6.40 (£3.60 down).
£150 will have a fee of £15 instead of £9.02 (£5.98 down).
£250 will have a fee of £25 instead of £14.27 (£11.73 down).
£400 will have a fee of £40 instead of £22.15 (£17.85 down).
£750 will have a fee of £40 instead of £34.90 (£5.10 down).

Only when an item sells for more than £1090.05 will you end being better off again. On top of this, with the forcing you to offer PayPal, eBay can take a second hit at your money.