5 User Engagement Problems Twitter Should Fix this Week

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Twitter’s mobile app needs help.

Of all of the social networks, engagement on Twitter is dismally low. Even the people who like the app don’t spend nearly as much time on Twitter as they do on other social media. There are some obvious problems with the app that Twitter could fix, but they don’t.

iPhone with badged icons

Which one will you click?

Until a few months ago, Twitter’s iPhone app didn’t support badge notifications. A badge is the small red number that appears on the app’s icon letting you know that you have Notifications. Twitter’s iPhone app didn’t have them. You could look at your phone’s screen and see that Facebook, LinkedIn, MeetUp, and NextDoor had messages waiting for you, but not Twitter. A glance at your screen and the small red numbers taunt you – Check FaceBook! Check your email! Check Messages! Badges are a simple way to get you to start up that app and engage.

1. Fix Notifications

With a recent update, Twitter finally added badge notifications. Only problem is, they don’t actually work. The badge will appear with a “2” on it, I’ll start the Twitter app, and the “Notifications” icon indicates that there’s something new. I click it, and there are no updates. I can check the “Me” link and see that I have 2 more followers, but they’re not listed on the Notifications screen. If I log into the TweetDeck web app I can see who the new followers are, but the iPhone mobile app pretends they don’t exist.

2. Make it easy to engage with friends

Ever have a conversation with a friend on Twitter? It’s next to impossible to follow replies, comments, or have any sort of conversation using the tools they provide on their mobile app. If Twitter wants to increase user engagement, they should get rid of the Messages tab and make it a “Mentions” tab that shows private messages and allows for threaded conversations. Alternately they could add a “swipe left” feature or even a “view replies” icon to view the replies to a message, in threaded order. Make it possible for people to have a conversation about the things that they’re posting, and they’ll stay on engaged for longer.

3. Show me what posts are trending

The Home button shows me the latest messages from everyone I’m following in order by time posted. What if I want to see the posts with the most retweets? Or the most hearts? Or the most replies? You know, the messages from the people I’m following that are the most interesting/funny/relevant? Get rid of the “Moments” section and give me a “Trending” section that shows the items from the people I follow with the most retweets, likes, and replies. I guarantee I’ll spend more time in that section than I do looking at “Moments”.

4. Load more items in the “Home” feed

I use an iPhone with “service” from AT&T. I also ride BART, which means that I spend about half my commute with no data service. (Newsflash to AT&T: People on trains spend most of their time on their phones. If you cared about your customers you’d send a tech to ride a train with a signal strength meter a couple of times a year and fix the dead zones.)

Since mobile data service is spotty, you’d think the Twitter app would start downloading items for my “Home” feed as whenever I have a signal, so I’d never run out of items to read. Unfortunately that’s not the case, and I routinely hit the end of the list of things on “Home” to read just as BART enters another AT&T dead zone. I sit there watching the spinner for a few seconds, then quit Twitter and load another app – one that was smart enough to download content in the background so it’s ready for me to view.

5. Cache some damn profile pictures

I only follow 361 people on Twitter. Each one of them has a small profile picture that rarely gets updated, so why does Twitter download and render a the same, identical profile photos every time I open the app? I’ll be scrolling along, and I can see it download and render the photos one by one. If I’m in an AT&T dead zone, I’ll just see a bunch of empty boxes instead of profile pictures in my feed. How hard could it be to cache a copy of the photos on my phone? The app can always check for new photos and update them if one is available, so why is it downloading them every time I open the app? If I don’t have a connection at the moment it’s OK to show me someone’s 24-hour-old profile picture – it’s better than showing me an empty box.

That’s it. 5 simple things that Twitter engineers could fix this week to increase the amount of time people spend using their mobile app.

Full disclosure: I own shares of Twitter stock. If someone at Twitter fixed these problems I might be making less of of a loss on those shares. In addition, the Twitter stockholders meeting is this week. I won’t be there, but if you are feel free to share this article with the people in attendance.

Policy-based Cloud Storage

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This is a talk I gave last week at the SF Microservices Meetup titled Policy-based Cloud Storage, Persisting Data in a Multi-Site, Multi-Cloud World. In it I cover Apcera‘s approach to storage for containers and how to use policy to manage very large scale application deployments.

Adding a LUKS-encrypted iSCSI volume to Synology DS414 NAS and Ubuntu 15.04

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I have an Ubuntu 15.04 “Vivid” workstation already set up with LUKS full disk encryption, and I have a Synology DS414 NAS with 12TB raw storage on my home network. I wanted to add a disk volume on the Synology DS414 that I could mount on the Ubuntu server, but NFS doesn’t support “at rest” encrypted file systems, and using EncFS over NFS seemed like the wrong way to go about it, so I decided to try setting up an iSCSI volume and encrypting it with LUKS. Using this type of setup, all data is encrypted both “on the wire” and “at rest”.

Log into the Synology Admin Panel and select Main Menu > Storage Manager:

  • Add an iSCSI LUN
    • Set Thin Provisioning = No
    • Advanced LUN Features = No
    • Make the volume as big as you need
  • Add an iSCSI Target
    • Use CHAP authentication
    • Write down the login name and password you choose

On your Ubuntu box switch over to a root prompt:

sudo /bin/bash

Install the open-iscsi drivers. (Since I’m already running LUKS on my Ubuntu box I don’t need to install LUKS.)

apt-get install open-iscsi

Edit the conf file

vi /etc/iscsi/iscsid.conf

Edit these lines:

node.startup = automatic
node.session.auth.username = [CHAP user name on Synology box]
node.session.auth.password = [CHAP password on Synology box]

Restart the open-iscsi service:

service open-iscsi restart
service open-iscsi status

Start open-iscsi at boot time:

systemctl enable open-iscsi

Now find the name of the iSCSI target on the Synology box:

iscsiadm -m discovery -t st -p $SYNOLOGY_IP
iscsiadm -m node

The target name should look something like “iqn.2000-01.com.synology:boxname.target-1.62332311”

Still on the Ubuntu workstation, log into the iSCSI target:

iscsiadm -m node --targetname "$TARGET_NAME" --portal "$SYNOLOGY_IP:3260" --login

Look for new devices:

fdisk -l

At this point fdisk should show you a new block device which is the iSCSI disk volume on the Synology box. In my case it was /dev/sdd.

Partition the device. I made one big /dev/sdd1 partition, type 8e (Linux LVM):

fdisk /dev/sdd

Set up the device as a LUKS-encrypted device:

cryptsetup --verbose --verify-passphrase luksFormat /dev/sdd1

Open the LUKS volume:

cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdd1 backupiscsi

Create a physical volume from the LUKS volume:

pvcreate /dev/mapper/backupiscsi

Add that to a new volume group:

vgcreate ibackup /dev/mapper/backupiscsi

Create a logical volume within the volume group:

lvcreate -L 1800GB -n backupvol /dev/ibackup

Put a file system on the logical volume:

mkfs.ext4 /dev/ibackup/backupvol

Add the logical volume to /etc/fstab to mount it on startup:

# Synology iSCSI target LUN-1
/dev/ibackup/backupvol /mnt/backup ext4 defaults,nofail,nobootwait 0 6

Get the UUID of the iSCSI drive:

ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid | grep sdd1

Add the UUID to /etc/crypttab to be automatically prompted for the decrypt passphrase when you boot up Ubuntu:

backupiscsi UUID=693568ca-9334-4c19-8b01-881f2247ae0d none luks

If you found this interesting, you might want to check out my article Adding an external encrypted drive with LVM to Ubuntu Linux.

Hope you found this useful.

Why adding a .conf or .cfg file to /etc/sudoers.d doesn’t work

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I needed to add some sudo access rights for support personnel on about a hundred Centos 6.6 servers. Currently no one one these hosts had sudo rights, so the /etc/sudoers file was the default file. I’m using Ansible to maintain these hosts, but rather than modify the default /etc/sudoers file using Ansible’s lineinfile: command, I decided to create a support.conf file and use Ansible’s copy: command to copy that file into /etc/sudoers.d/. That way if a future version of Centos changes the /etc/sudoers file I’m leaving that file untouched, so my changes should always work.

  - name: Add custom sudoers
    copy: src=files/support.conf dest=/etc/sudoers.d/support.conf owner=root group=root mode=0440 validate='visudo -cf %s'

The support.conf file I created copied over just fine, and the validation step of running “visudo -cf” on the file before moving it into place claimed that the file was error-free and should work just fine as a sudoers file.

I logged in as the support user and it didn’t work:

[support@c1n1 ~]$ sudo /bin/ls /var/log/*
support is not in the sudoers file.  This incident will be reported.

Not only did it not work, it was telling me that the support user wasn’t even in the file, which they clearly were.

After Googling around a bit and not finding much I saw this in the Sudoers Manual:

sudo will read each file in /etc/sudoers.d, skipping file names that end in ‘~’ or contain a ‘.’ character to avoid causing problems with package manager or editor temporary/backup files.

sudo was skipping the file because the file name contained a period!

I changed the name of the file from support.conf to support and it worked.

  - name: Add custom sudoers
    copy: src=files/support dest=/etc/sudoers.d/support owner=root group=root mode=0440 validate='visudo -cf %s'

Hope you find this useful.

Here’s a snippet from /etc/sudoers.d/support if you’re interested. The “support” user has already been created by a separate Ansible command.

# Networking
Cmnd_Alias NETWORKING = /sbin/route, /sbin/ifconfig, /bin/ping, /sbin/dhclient, /usr/bin/net, /sbin/iptables, /usr/bin/rfcomm, /usr/bin/wvdial, /sbin/iwconfig, /sbin/mii-tool

# Installation and management of software
Cmnd_Alias SOFTWARE = /bin/rpm, /usr/bin/up2date, /usr/bin/yum

# Services
Cmnd_Alias SERVICES = /sbin/service, /sbin/chkconfig

# Reading logs
Cmnd_Alias READ_LOGS = /usr/bin/less /var/log/*, /bin/more /var/log/*, /bin/ls /var/log/*, /bin/ls /var/log

support  ALL = NETWORKING, SOFTWARE, SERVICES, READ_LOGS

Use Web of Trust (WOT) to thwart scammy web sites

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My friend Shannon Phillips recently updated her Facebook status with:

Word to travelers: do not book hotel rooms through TripAdvisor. They will funnel you through sketchy third-party sites (“Amoma” is the one who burned me) who advertise made-up rates, take your money, and then get back in touch two weeks later to tell you oopsie, they can’t make a reservation at that hotel after all.

I guess it’s a nice scam while it lasts, but in this age of networked, instant word-of-mouth reviews, that kind of business model won’t hold up long.

I suggested Shannon try installing the Web of Trust (WOT) plug-in for her browser. I use it in all of mine, and it’s stopped scam sites from being loaded into my browser.

WOT works for the web like Waze works for driving. Here’s the explanation from the Web of Trust home page:

WOT displays a colored traffic light next to website links to show you which sites people trust for safe searching, surfing and shopping online: green for good, red for bad, and yellow as a warning to be cautious. The icons are shown in popular search engine results, social media, online email, shortened URL’s, and lots of other sites.

The cool part is, the rating is based on the aggregate ratings of all of the people who use a plug-in. Get burned by a site? Click the WOT icon and rate the site as untrustworthy. Have an excellent experience? Click the WOT icon and rate the site as trustworthy. The more that people use it, the more accurate and reliable the ratings become.

If a site is really untrustworthy, WOT will stop your browser from loading the site unless you tell it that you really want to go to that site. You can still go anywhere you want, but you’ll be warned about sites that others have had problems with.