I’ve tweeted this before on my Twitter pages @usabilitydesign and @socialmediamash, but I have to expand on this issue here because I think it’s going to be something that is going to become an issue for Twitter micro-bloggers.

In case you’re new to Twitter, or not familiar with how it works, when you post a 140-character-or-less micro-blog on Twitter that includes a link to something you’ve referenced, Twitter will either handle that link one of two ways. If the link is not too long, Twitter will convert it to a clickable link and leave the URL as it was when you entered it.

The usability issue

If your combined text and URL is greater than 140 characters, Twitter won’t convert the URL to a TinyUrl then count your characters based on the length of the shortened URL. You have to either provide a shorter URL yourself OR shorten the text part of your tweet, which is a usability issue. Why should a URL count in the 140 characters you’re allowed?  

However, your post is less than 140 characters long, but the URL itself is quite long, Twitter will automatically convert it to a “TinyUrl,” (see http://TinyUrl.com), which is a shorter format link that redirects to the link you had specified. Nice of Twitter to do that for you, but here’s the problem. 

The security issue

Anyone can set up a Twitter account if they have a valid email address, and unscrupulous people who are phishing for your personal data or trying to install a virus or worm on your computer can use TinyURLs to mask what URL they are sending you to. You don’t know what the URL is until you click on the TinyURL version and open the site. By then it could be too late for you,

The TinyUrl.com site actually offers a more secure way to share a link that is being rediercted by a TinyUrl. It’s called “Preview,” and if you use the Preview version when you are manually creating your TinyUrl, then people who click on your TinyUrl link are first redirected to the TinyUrl.com site where they can see the actual URL and decide whether they feel it’s safe to click through and go to the site or not.

When Twitter automatically shortens URLs to TinyUrls, however, we don’t have a way to let people review the link before they visit the site.

A reasonable solution for both issues: embedded URLs

 Here’s a solution that Twitter could implement, if they really care about this issue.

If Twitter gave their users the ability to embed a URL in the text of their tweet… e.g. instead of entering a long link such as http://digitalpractices.org/2009/04/15/twitter-links-are-a-major-phishing-risk that Twitter will shorten into a TinyUrl, the message could simply refer to this blog post that I wrote, and thus Twitter users wouldn’t have to use up so many of their allotted 140 characters to include an URL. This would solve a usability issue on Twitter.

As for security, Twitter followers and browsers could simply hover their cursor over the link to see what it is. That way, they can at least have a fighting chance at finding out whether the link looks like it point to a legitimate Website rather than a creepy phishing site or some shady IP address spreading malware.

What do you think? Are you concerned about phishing or malware attempts when you click on TinyUrl links in Twitter posts?

With social media, the emphasis is on interaction, collaboration, and user generated content. Unlike broadcasting or publishing an ad, getting your corporate message out via social media requires an understanding of the technology, an embrace of creativity and innovation, and a willingness to launch your corporate message and your brand identity into the blogosphere (as the world of blogs has been called), then wait to see where it lands.

There are all kinds of “social media consultants” out there selling seminars and books about how your business can benefit from it, but businesses need to look no further than DailySplice.com, a one-year-old social media software startup in Victoria, British Columbia.

Founded in 2007 by a group of business and computer science students at the University of Victoria, the company has developed a product called Splice Station that makes it easy for organizations to record podcasts (a digital recording of an audio or video broadcast delivered over the Internet or downloaded to an iPod) then deliver them on their own websites.

The University of Victoria has two two Splice Stations, one for business podcasts and one that plays Software Engineering podcasts. Vancouver Island’s AbeBooks, recently acquired by Amazon.com, is also using Splice Station to channel audio and video content through a specialized player on its website.

“It’s innovative and easy to use.” says Richard Davies, PR Manager for AbeBooks.com, a Victoria company that was recently acquired by Amazon.com. “Book lovers can find the world’s most interesting book reviews and interviews by visiting the AbeBooks.com website and looking for the Shelfsound logo.”

As if those examples from the world of business and the world of academia weren’t perfect enough illustrations of how social media can be used, another type of organization in Victoria Island has also started podcasting using Splice Station.

The Saanich Police have become perhaps the first police service in Canada to use audio and video podcasts on their website at saanichpolice.ca. Click on “Podcasts” on the homepage and you’ll find links to news and information as it happens (such as a live report about Pat Bay highway traffic) to crime prevention, safety tips, unsolved crimes, media releases and media clips.

The department’s public information officer, Sgt. John Price, says “Podcasting is the fastest growing communication medium in history…the Saanich Police want to be part of that medium.”

This article was originally published in Vancouver Island Business. Garth A. Buchholz is the President and Chief Usability Analystof DigitalPractices Media Inc. (Garth@DigitalPractices.com)

What if you could share your own private network with the people and organizations you trust, exclude all other Internet connections (Web, email, etc) unless it passed your own criteria for inclusion, and could police your network by blocking any sites or emails that violated your rules in any way? What we think of as “the Internet” could fast become “the Intranet (capital ‘I’)”.

While everyone’s still garnering an understanding of what Web 2.0 means, a Web 3.0 could creep up and overtake it because of bandwidth, security and proprietary content drivers.

EXAMPLE 1: BANDWIDTH AND ACCESSIBILITY

SavetheInternet.com is a coalition that has “banded together to save the First Amendment of the Internet: network neutrality.” Their site defines Net Neutrality thusly:

Net Neutrality is the reason why the Internet has driven economic innovation, democratic participation, and free speech online. It’s why the Internet has become an unrivaled environment for open communications, civic involvement and free speech. The nation’s largest telephone and cable companies – including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner – want to be Internet gatekeepers, deciding which Web sites go fast or slow and which won’t load at all. They want to tax content providers to guarantee speedy delivery of their data. They want to discriminate in favor of their own search engines, Internet phone services, and streaming video – while slowing down or blocking their competitors.

Their concern is that the open playing field of the current Internet, where everyone gets equal; bandwidth consideration, will be lost in favor of a Web 3.0 where private enterprise offers a faster, but more exclusive Net for those who can afford it.

EXAMPLE 2: SECURITY AND USABILITY

Personal InfoCloud, by Thomas Vander Wal of InfoCloud Solutions, talks about about how users have a kind of preferred way of accessing information online, what he calls the “Local InfoCloud”:

As the my understanding began to lean toward familiarity as a core component of the definition of Local InfoCloud, the term began to embrace the social and community aspects (I am working on shying away from the term community as it is a broadly used term and I am trying to be a little more precise). Interactions with people, services, networks, applications, etc. that are familiar are means of bringing information closer to us as people with data, information, and media needs. The Local InfoCloud eases access. It eases the ability to find and refind information. It is information that is closer to us, not necessarily in physical proximity, but in the ability to access, in which familiarity is bread. I spent much time considering changing the label from local to community or social, but there were elements that did not perfectly fit that either.

Location-based services may be created by a service, but understanding the mindset, terminology, dialect, and cognitive frameworks that are germane to that physical location the information can be structured to resemble or mirror the social elements of understanding in that place. I will get to a better understanding of this when I talk about the Location aspect of the Local InfoCloud. As well, thinking in the Model of Attraction framework the Local InfoCloud is that which is attracted closer to us than the Global InfoCloud.

What I extrapolated from Vander Wal’s blog is that the Internet, or the “Global InfoCloud”, could become much less appealing for users than their own private network where they could control how they find and refind information, and how they interact with more familiar people, services, networks, applications.

EXAMPLE 3: PROPRIETARY CONTENT AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

Back in the late ’90s when I wrote a weekly Internet column for our local newspaper, one of the things I predicted was that the Internet would become more proprietary, just like how online subscription services such as AOL, Compuserve and so on used to operate a few years earlier. That’s not to say that you won’t be able to access any content on the Net, but any content worth accessing would be fee-based.

In a recent New York Times book review, the issue of digital publishing is given another spin. When all books are digital, it makes it easier to combine and recombine information like never before:

Liberating books from their physical contexts could make it easier for them to blend into one another, a concept heralded by Kevin Kelly in an article in The New York Times Magazine last month. “Once text is digital, books seep out of their bindings and weave themselves together,” wrote Mr. Kelly in an article that was derided by Mr. Updike in his BookExpo polemic. “The collective intelligence of a library allows us to see things we can’t see in a single, isolated book.”

Of course, that should alarm the entire publishing industry, especially authors. Up till now, a book with its two sacred covers was a complete work, a product, a publishing unit of sale, a reference and an ISBN number. But if your book simply becomes a part of the swirling maelstrom of data on the Web, integrated into other databases and chopped into fine bits like the old K-Tel food processor infomercials we used to see on TV, who makes money on it? And who gets the credit if your content is simply hashed up into other dynamically generated pages of material?

Again, that’s where a network of private intranets would appeal to those who want to preserve the integrity of their intellectual properties. You control who can access it, who can buy it, and what they can do with it. I can think of many other reasons why Web 3.0 may happen sooner than we think, but I’d really like to hear from others on this subject. Post your responses here, or email me  and I’ll share your thoughts in this blog.

What inspired you to write your latest book, Corporate Conversations?

There is a fair amount of literature available on employee communications for communication professionals. But there’s very little geared toward non-professionals who want to figure out the why’s and how’s of internal communication. I wanted to produce a guide that business managers and leaders could use.

In terms of content development, do you think the corporate intranet is still treated as the poor cousin to the Internet site in many organizations? Are communications staff doing enough to make their intranet a tool for internal communications?

In most organizations, yes, the intranet doesn’t get anywhere near the resources the external Web site gets. The external site is seen as a profit center while the intranet is viewed as just another repository of information for employees. That’s not true in all organizations, though. If you look at IBM, for example, former CEO Lou Gerstner identified the intranet as the future of how employees would conduct business. Since then, it has become THE most trusted source of information, more than supervisors and peers combined. It has been the source of innovation, it is being used to proactively identify information employees can use to do their jobs, and it is driving business initiatives. But, as would be the case anywhere, it took senior management support to make that happen.

Communication staffs are doing what they can with the resources they have. Where I think they could do more is in making the business case to management for investment more in the intranet.

Over the last few years, have you found that communications staff becoming better online writers? Or are Web staff becoming better communicators?

Neither, in most cases. Online writing continues to be terrible, and IT people still don’t understand communication models. Of course, they shouldn’t have to. Expecting IT to become communicators is like expecting printers to become magazine writers.

In your experience what are the “seven deadly sins” that content developers commit on the Web?

I have to limit it to seven? Well, okay. Here goes:

1. There’s nothing on the home page that tells a visitor what the company is or what it does.
2. There’s no contact information, or it’s hard to find. I’m constantly amazed at the number of Web sites that don’t include a mailing address, for example.
3. They publish long tracts of scrolling text with few or no subheads.
4. They write content that is meant to be read instead of scanned. For most reference documentation on the Web, people scan and will not put up with text that requires them to sit and read.
5. They use graphics as though the document is print. Clip art and irrelevant photos that don’t enhance understand or scannability just get in the way.
6. They write lousy headlines.
7. They write lousy links that don’t articulate specifically what readers will find when they click the link.

What are some of the newest challenges in online communications, e.g. wireless content, corporate blogging, etc?

RSS is one of the biggest challenges. This is the most important online technology since the introduction of the hyptertext transfer protocol and yet few communicators are even aware of it. Applying is represents one challenge, but another one that is less understood is the fact that people who use RSS feeds read their feeds in a news reader. The last thing they want to do is click back and forth to Web sites. RSS readers will disintermediate much of the Web, and content producers will need to figure out how to make sure they can get their messages across when readers are reading their content somewhere other than their Web sites.

Corporate blogging is certainly another challenge from a number of angles, from the need to develop employee policies to figuring out how to employ them strategically and effectively. More broadly, recognizing the growth of social software and the demands from audiences to be more engaged is going to represent a challenge to organizations accustomed to using their communication channels primarily for one-way, top-down communication.

Are you working any new book projects? If so, can you share anything with us about them?

I have a few proposals out, but nothing that’s been accepted yet. I am updating my manual for IABC, “Writing for the Wired World.” The proposals have to do with the new face of the engaged customer, business blogging, and business podcasting.