Guest blog: Twitter and Facebook vs the work-life balance

Guest blogger Trefor Davies is co-founder and chief technology officer of communications provider Timico. Check out his own blog, over at Trefor.net, for opinion on everything broadband related.

We live in a roller coaster world where so much happens so quickly that sometimes I find my brain is all in a tizz!

For example, six of us sat in a meeting today discussing a technical problem. It was a difficult one, so we needed a few engineers on the case from different parts of the business. Suggestions for fixes were submitted into the conversation and comments came in quick succession.

Each comment had been carefully considered before the individual concerned said anything. Each line of reason led to others, until either the suggestion was accepted or discarded. But the discussion moved so fast I struggled to keep up - I had to put my hand up to say woa, slow down.

This might be a very niche example of the pace of life these days, but all the engineers concerned earned their living in internet technologies. We are hit with so many new internet developments these days, it’s a wonder anyone keeps up. So how do we do it?

In one sense, we don’t. Despite being snowed under with new sites to join, more username and password combinations to remember (or do you use the same one for everything?!) how many of them do we really use?

I doubt I regularly visit more than half a dozen websites. I sometimes think I might be a bit on the boring side, but actually I can’t cope with more - those half a dozen sites consume 16 hours of my day. Okay, that’s not completely true; I also have a job and a family, but my job intermingles with how I use the internet and I quite often communicate with my family using Facebook - from wherever I am in the world.

Everything is intertwined. I can’t separate them. Everyone I come into contact with at work is also a potential friend on Facebook or twitter. Some try to keep work and home life separate: I don’t and it will be an increasingly harder thing to do.

The common denominator for all the sites I use is ease of use. I have recently tried a couple of new ones because they were recommended to me as the next sliced bread, dishwasher, wheel – you know what I mean.

But they have both disappeared from my list of home page tabs and if they aren’t there, they aren’t going to get mindshare. I won’t tell you their names - you might be tempted to waste your time trying them. Their problem? Using them wasn’t intuitive and I don’t have time to spend ages reading the manual, assuming there is one.

There is a temptation for some sites that began with a simple, clean cut, white space ethos to begin to add complexity. Take Google for example. Google got me hooked with search, but now I use gmail, calendar, docs, iGoogle, feedburner and analytics. Navigating between these isn’t necessarily the easiest thing to do. I’m not going to stop using Google because of it, but it has to be careful not to lose sight of its original simplicity. Not easy I suppose, for what is now a global multinational.

Facebook is another one. Facebook is almost getting to the point where you have to have a university degree in the subject to navigate around the site. Particularly when it comes to trying to strike the right balance between open access to your information so that people can find you, and the need to keep your important data secure. If anything I'm nearer dumping Facebook than Google. Some of my friends have already done so. In fact, the number of active 'Friends' seems to be dwindling.

Twitter has so far kept true to its roots, still being pretty much the simple tool it was when it began. Enhancements such as twitpics have not added complexity. Hopefully the twits at twitter will look across at the faces at Facebook, see where they are going wrong and stay away from that place (no offence meant boys).

Simplicity is everything. The strange contradiction is that whilst on the surface the internet needs to stay simple, under the bonnet that same internet is a hugely complicated place. In some ways that is a good thing, as it keeps some of us in a job.

The internet isn’t one network. It is tens of thousands of networks loosely joined together using standard technical ways of working. It is worth noting that often the standards that make the internet work are ambiguous and open to interpretation, which can lead to one bit of the internet not being able to talk properly to another.

These technical standards also evolve and improve with time. How many of you have had a problem with using old versions of Internet Explorer that just can’t cope with the way a modern website has been designed? You probably just upgraded to a newer version and everything was okay.

The point is the internet is complicated and it breaks easily. This complexity also makes it difficult for people who don’t live and breathe the internet to understand it. When these people are in charge of running the country, the fact they don’t understand the consequences of some of their decisions makes them dangerous.

Would you let someone who couldn’t tell the difference between left and right drive a car from the UK to France? You would have to sit down and explain to them how to tell the difference. Perhaps tie a piece of string to one of their wrists, I don’t know.

The point I am getting to is the country has been run by politicians who, by and large, don’t know the first thing about the internet. This month we have a new intake with at least a third of them being new, and presumably younger, blood. We haven’t really seen them going through their paces yet but now, as they find their new office for the first time, learn where they keep the paper clips and load their briefcases with House Of Commons stationery, now is the time to act.

The last Government made a huge mistake when it rushed through the Digital Economy Act (DEA). It threatened many of the tenets of democracy that we hold dear and in particular the right to remain innocent until proven guilty. The DEA says that you have to prove your innocence when accused of online copyright infringement. In the extreme you could have your broadband cut off. In the extreme, this Act could also lead to the barring of websites such as Google and Facebook.

The new Parliament offers us an opportunity to put it right. Fortunately the Open Rights Group has made it easy for you to contact your MP to express your concern. The Digital Economy Act didn’t feature highly in the election campaign but it now needs to feature on the agenda of the new Government – before it gets too far down the line.

Click here to ask your MP to support the repeal of clauses 11-8 of the DEA.

Click here to sign the petition.

(Think you've got what it takes to be a Broadband Genie guest blogger? Then get in touch)