William Hague responds to my request for information on our Libyan strategy...
Yes, it’s end-of-the-week bug-bear time. Today I’m going to express a slight irritation over the handling of unread flags for social media inboxes by my various smart devices.
Let’s take the example of a simple twitter @ response. In this case one I received from William Hague (good in itself) to a simple question I posed to him about Libya on twitter (‘Why are we there?’) during a demonstration of the power of social media. I saw his response appear on my Blackberry and I retweeted it proudly. That all went well.
However, what is less satisfactory, is that I was also notified about this tweet mention on my android phone (ok so maybe I’m on odd in having two phones) despite already having ‘read’ it on my blackberry. I also was notified when I opened my Ipad by the twitter app that sits on there.
I don’t want to have to read things twice or even three times to flag that I read it. It’s a complete waste of time.
The problem is that the unread / read flag (as so often used by email inboxes) is not shared by the API or is not handled correctly by the various client software.
This isn’t a problem limited to Twitter – I get frustrated having to ‘mark as read’ LinkedIn emails online that I’ve responded to via my phone, via email or on the Ipad, it’s also a problem with Facebook messages and notifications – the Facebook for blackberry app currently shows 23 unread messages yet when I look online I’m all up to date.
It’s a problem that unless addressed is only set to get worse as we get more platforms and more devices – I like the convenience of accessing social messages from various devices but this is an issue I just wish would go away.
So, if you’re implementing a social media platform then please make sure the unread/read flag is part of your messaging API. If you’re implementing a social media client application then make sure you take account of the unread/read flag (thank you Flipboard who are quite good at this!) and you’ll make the information stream a better, less frustrating place to be.
End of bug-bear. Have a great Royal Wedding weekend!
Tagged: android, blackberry, facebook, flipboard, libya, linkedin, postaweek2011, twitter, william hague
Web 2 Concepts 
I agree this is a problem that needs to be solved, and am glad to say Google Chat (sometimes called Google Talk), based on Jabber, has got it down fairly well.
I’m usually signed in to it both through Gmail, using my desktop PC IM client (I use Trillian Pro), and also usually on my Android phone. When someone sends me an IM out of the blue, it shows up on all three clients at once (sometimes at *exactly* the same time!), but once I respond with one of them, the others stop receiving the incoming messages until things go quiet for at least 10 minutes (I think), at which point it assumes you may be away from the client and so all of them get the messages again. Obviously if I instigate the conversation, messages only flow to/from the client that I instigated it with.