If you use a paid-for web service at someone else’s domain you’re a tenant. A second class citizen. You don’t have much control. You’ll probably have to live with your landlord’s furniture and decoration and a restrictive set of rules. Your content will only exist at these URLs for as long as you keep paying the same people that monthly fee and for as long as your provider stays in business. Experience tells me that this isn’t very long. As a paying customer you’ll have a few rights under your contract but they probably won’t amount to very much. When you leave you’ll probably be able to get your data back in a useful format but when you put it back on the web somewhere else you’ll lose all your inbound links, search engine rankings and many of your visitors. This kind of service seems like a good deal until the day you need to move.

When you use a free web service you’re the underclass. At best you’re a guest. At worst you’re a beggar, couchsurfing the web and scavenging for crumbs. It’s a cliche but it’s worth repeating: if you’re not paying for it you’re the product not the customer. Your individual account is probably worth very little to the service provider, so they’ll have no qualms whatsoever with tinkering with the service or even making radical changes in their interests rather than yours. If you don’t like it you’re welcome to leave. You may well not be able to take your content and data with you and even if you can, all your URLs are broken.

The conclusion here should be obvious: if you really care about your site you need to run it on your own domain. You need to own your URLs. You’ll have total control and no-one can take it away from you. You don’t need anyone else. If you put the effort in up front it’ll pay off in the long run.

But it’s no longer that simple.

Anyone who’s ever run a website knows that building the site is one thing, getting people to use it is quite another. The smaller your real-world presence the harder it is. If you’re a national newspaper or a Hollywood star you probably won’t have much trouble getting people to visit your website. If you’re a self-employed plumber or an unknown blogger writing in your spare time it’s considerably harder.

Traffic used to come from three places: the real world (print advertising, business cards, word of mouth, etc.), search engines and inbound links. Whichever field you were in and at whichever level, you were competing against other similar sites on a fairly level playing field.

Social networks have changed all that. Facebook and Twitter now wield enormous power over the web by giving their members ways to find and share information using tools that work in a social context. There’s no obvious way to replicate this power out on the open web of independent websites tied together loosely by links and search engine results.

Not so long ago you had to be on MySpace if you were an up-and-coming band. Now it’s probably Facebook. Either way, your social network presence is more important than your own website.

If you’re an independent photographer looking to get established you probably need to get your pictures on photo sharing sites like Flickr where they can be easily found by millions.

Many of the most valuable conversations around technology and many other fields happen on Twitter. If you’re not there you don’t really exist, especially if you’re just getting started in your field.

You can turn your back on the social networks that matter in your field and be free and independent running your own site on your own domain. But increasingly that freedom is just the freedom to be ignored, the freedom to starve. We need to use social networks to get heard and this forces us into digital serfdom. We give more power to Big Web companies with every tweet and page we post to their networks while hoping to get a bit of traffic and attention back for ourselves. The open web of free and independent websites has never looked so weak.

Perhaps none of this would matter very much if the biggest player of them all — Facebook — wasn’t such a grotesque abuser of its position. Even before announcing Open Graph this week it was pretty clear that Facebook wanted to own everything everyone does online. Facebook currently has 750 million members. If it were a country it’d be the third most populous country in the world, bigger than everyone except China and India. The United States has a mere 312 million people — not even half the size of Facebook.

Facebook’s Open Graph technology allows third-party websites to tell Facebook what people are doing. It extends Facebook’s Like button to include any action that the site owners think might be interesting to Facebook. Play a song and your music streaming site tells Facebook what you’ve played. Read a newspaper article and Facebook knows what you’ve read. LOL at a lolcat and your LOL gets logged for all time on your indelible activity record. Facebook calls this “frictionless sharing”, which is their euphemism for silent total surveillance. Once you’ve signed up for this (and it is optional, at least for now) you don’t need to do anything else to “share” your activity with Facebook. It’s completely automatic.

Site owners and developers are lapping it up. Hosting company Heroku posted this incredible tweet the day after Open Graph was announced:

Huge Open Graph momentum with social devs, we’ve seen more than 33,800 new Facebook apps in last 24 hours #f8

Yes, that’s nearly 34,000 new Facebook apps created in one day by customers of just one hosting company. Astonishing numbers.

At least Facebook is up front about Social Graph. Facebook’s abuse of its Like button to invade people’s privacy is much less publicised. We all think we know how it works. We’re on a website reading an interesting page and we click the Like button. A link to the page gets posted to our wall for our friends to see and Facebook keeps this data and data about who clicks on it to help it to sell advertising. So much so predictable.

What most people don’t know is that the Like button tracks your browsing history. Every time you visit a web page that displays the Like button Facebook logs that data in your account. It doesn’t put anything on your wall but it knows where you’ve been. This even happens if you log out of Facebook. Like buttons are pretty much ubiquitous on mainstream websites so every time you visit one you’re doing some frictionless sharing. Did you opt in to this? Only by registering your Facebook account in the first place. Can you turn it off? Only by deleting your account.

This is where I draw the line. I’m well aware that everything we do online and many of the things we do in the real world creates a data shadow — a digital record of our actions. If you carry a mobile phone your location is continually recorded by your phone company. If you’re suspected of a crime or go missing then this data will be handed to the police. Most of us know this and choose to use mobile phones anyway. We know that when we buy things that transaction is recored by our bank and the shop unless we’re using cash. We know that our computers and our broadband providers record what we do online. But all these things are predictable and at least arguably necessary to provide the services we use. We might not like these intrusions into our privacy but we like the law enforcement, fraud protection and service quality that they buy us. It’s a compromise that most of us are willing to make.

What Facebook is doing is very different. When it records our activity away from the Facebook site it’s a third party to the deal. It doesn’t need this data to run its own services. Moreover, Facebook’s aggregation and centralisation of data across all our disparate fields of activity is a very different thing from our phone company having our phone data and our bank having our finances. Worst of all, the way Facebook collects and uses our data is both unpredictable and opaque. Its technology and policies move so quickly you’d need to be a technical and legal specialist and spend an inordinate amount of time researching Facebook’s activities on an ongoing basis to have any hope of understanding what they’re doing with your data.

As individuals we can opt out. It’s still possible to live a full life in the developed world and not use social networks. Some people may find it harder than others — missing out on event invitations that are only sent on Facebook, for example. Not being able to see your friends’ photos because they’re only posted to Facebook. Not being able to join conversations on Twitter. But for now there are sufficient alternatives for most of us. As with smoking, it’s easier to not start using the social web than to stop. Once you’ve signed up the cost of leaving increases with every “friend” you make, every photo you post, every tweet you send. That’s why I’m holding out against Google+ for now.

For organisations and business it’s very different. We’re already past the point where social networks can be ignored. If you don’t have a social networking presence your businesses is at a significant disadvantage compared with those that do. It’s where the attention, the traffic and the conversations are. Even public and government services are finding their social networking activities increasingly important. How long before they’re essential?

The promise of the open web looks increasingly uncertain. The technology will continue to exist and improve. It looks like you’ll be able to run your own web server on your own domain for the foreseeable future. But all the things that matter will be controlled and owned by a very small number of Big Web companies. Your identity will be your accounts at Facebook, Google and Twitter, not the domain name you own. You don’t pay Big Web a single penny so it can take away your identity and all your data at any time. The things you can say and do that are likely to be seen and used by any significant number of people will be the things that Facebook, Google and Twitter are happy for you to say and do. You can do what you like on your own website but you’ll probably be shouting into the void.

If I find any answers I’ll post them but right now things are looking bleak. It’s the end of the web as we know it and I feel pretty far from fine.

@adrianshort

And the evidence is all around us. Most websites aren’t that great, even those from well-resourced organisations that can hire teams of people to work on them.

Council websites are just about the hardest kind of website to design. Councils are large organisations that deliver an extremely diverse range of services within a sensitive public/political context. And they have to serve the whole community, not just most of it. And so while it’s undeniably true that many if not most council sites have a long way to go before they realise their full potential, I have every sympathy for those who are trying to deliver such complex designs with often very limited resources.

Good design means getting the big ideas right and then sweating the details. These are both really tough jobs and you don’t have forever to do them.

You don’t need to be an extreme minimalist to understand that every time you add something to a website you take something away. You increase users’ cognitive load. You draw their eye. You displace other page elements, or if you’re adding pages, you add another item to your navigation and search results. It all adds up.

I’ve never seen a website that was improved by adverts.

Every great website has come about because people worked hard and smart at stopping it being crap. They had the balls to say “no” more often than they said “yes”. They trimmed out flabby content, sharpened up the writing, weren’t satisfied with second-rate images. Engineers worked to progressively trim fractions of a second from the page load times, tweaking the front-end code, the back-end application and the server infrastructure. Titles and headlines were rewritten. Everything was meticulously researched and tested.

It’s hard to see how slapping a couple of ad blocks on the page is going to make this job any easier. And it’s not like the average council website is so fast, clear and simple that it can afford to take any kind of usability hit.

Ah, but they do it in the private sector. Indeed they do.

And their websites are undeniably worse for it. Of course they’d rather not do it, but if selling ad space on your site is necessary to bring in essential revenue to run it, you don’t have a choice.

The best private sector sites running adverts are very different from council websites. Take The Guardian. Although this is a big and complex site, essentially all most visitors are doing is finding and reading news. That’s just a single task. Council sites have to support hundreds of tasks. And The Guardian has design and development resources several orders of magnitude greater than any council. All their content is produced by professional writers and photographers, too.

So councils have the challenge of producing some of the most complex websites imaginable. But they also have the advantage that they’re funded to do that. They don’t need to raise revenue through the site itself. They can concentrate their resources on producing the absolutely best user experience possible without having to shill for a few pennies on the side.

Councils should fight for every inch of quality on their websites. Adverts are a completely unnecessary and harmful distraction from the real task at hand. Make your site great and the benefits will far exceed any cash you can drum up by encouraging people to click away from it.

I am very unhappy with some of the adverts that you are running on your website. Many of them are directly exploiting poor people such as the advert for “claim bankruptcy” that I found in your advice and benefits section today. (Click image above for full size view)

I wrote about this issue over a year ago and it’s also been featured on The Guardian’s website.

When are you going to stop running adverts that harm your residents and the council itself?

1. data experts and computer scientists who can use semantic web technologies;
2. software developers who can use XML, JSON, etc.;
3. power users who can use CSV, spreadsheets, RSS, KML/Google Earth, perhaps Yahoo Pipes;
4. general users who can use a web browser;
5. offliners who need printed materials, ambient displays, public screens etc.

Most of the focus seems to be on providing data for data experts and developers so they can build apps for general users and power users. We need more data suitable for power users to use directly and more apps for offliners. We’re all offline sometimes.

My own app for offliners is QR Code Posters which will print a poster from any RSS feed. See how it can be used here.

Sutton Open Maps caters for general users, power users and developers by showing draggable Google Maps of local features along with KML (Google Earth), XML and JSON downloads on the same page. Whether you want to just find a local recycling centre, download the data into Google Earth for a school project or build your own app from the data, you’re covered. (It’s open source, too.)

This post started life as a comment.

But if you work on a council website you can make a start today by simply removing all the stuff on your site that really doesn’t need to be there.

This will be both the cheapest and highest-value redesign you’ll ever do.

It will save you money on your hosting costs. Less stuff on a page means less data coming down the pipe. Lower bandwidth charges.

Your pages will load faster and you’ll be able to defer server upgrades longer.

People will be happier that their pages load more quickly.

People will be happier that they can find what they want more easily without having to wade through clutter and confusion.

You will save on development and maintenance costs. Deleted content and features cost nothing to maintain. You’ll never have to review, fix, redesign or rewrite them again.

With a bit of luck you’ll find that you don’t need a mobile website. Your current site, without the clutter, will do just fine.

And once you get into the habit, you’ll start to be a lot more discriminating about what you put on your site in the first place. The default answer is no. Anything that goes on has to fight for its place.

To get started you’ll need a structure and a strategy.

The structure is that you’ll remove one thing every day. It’s very unlikely that you’ll run out of things to delete, but worry about that “problem” when you get there.

One page.

One section.

One microsite.

One feature.

One sidebar.

One word, sentence or paragraph.

One link.

One form field.

One button.

One image.

One form.

Just something. Get rid of it.

The strategy is a little bit harder. How do you know what to delete?

The short answer is anything you can live without.

I’ve been through my own council’s website looking for examples. So far they break down into these categories, which should give you some inspiration:

Cargo Cults

A to Z navigation. Every council site has it. But what’s it for? Your site surely isn’t a phone book that needs an index. It’s probably a hold-over from the days of static sites that didn’t have a good search feature, if they had one at all. You probably had far fewer pages in those days too so the list of links on each letter page was much shorter. Sort out your search if you need to (make it prominent, fast and accurate) and drop the A to Z.

Cargo cults are things you do because other sites do them without you giving any serious consideration of the value they provide. Perhaps they’re required by some guidelines somewhere. Maybe they made sense once but not any longer. Question them. Challenge them. Think about it. Then do what you think is right as long as you can defend it.

Content

Badly written copy. Copy that’s too long. Stuff that’s too time-sensitive for you to maintain properly. Reams of instructions for things that should be simple enough to use without explanation. Fix the underlying issues if necessary, then delete them.

Feature Duplication

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Browsers and computers have got built-in features for changing the text size, adding bookmarks, displaying the time and date and managing subscriptions to content. Don’t waste your time doing things that are already done perfectly adequately elsewhere. Could your contact form be replaced with just a simple email address?

Images

A picture is worth a thousand words, several thousand bytes, quite a bit of money every year in bandwidth and a fair amount of time to source, resize, upload and review. They take up your readers’ time and attention too, often drawing their eye from the real content on a page. Imagine this page without the text headings. Now imagine it without the photos. See which one works?

So treat pictures as content rather than decoration and make every one count. If a picture isn’t high-quality and supremely relevant to the page then drop it. There should never be a rule that every web page must have a picture. Stock photos to illustrate generic concepts are nearly always unnecessary. Showing real people, places and activities at your council may well be fine, but not much else.

Forms

Every field you add reduces the chances of someone completing the form. If you don’t need to know something, don’t ask for it. You don’t need my postal address when I’m reporting some graffiti to you.

Multi-page forms are painful. They seem to go on forever and you never know what’s on the next page. They require some kind of navigation between the pages, which adds to the complication and the scope for error. Fit the whole form on one page, even if the page looks a bit long. People can scroll. You’re not designing for a bit of paper.

The one button every form needs is the Submit button, but it should probably be called Send or Save or Report It or something that makes sense in the context of the task. If you’ve got any other buttons like Reset (i.e. Delete everything I’ve just typed) ask whether you really need it.

And it’s worth asking whether the whole form is really needed at all.

So…

Getting rid of all the clutter on your website doesn’t require a great deal of design insight or technical skill. But it needs a lot of discipline. So once a day just delete something that you can live without and you’ll be working towards a faster, cheaper, simpler website with much happier users.

Variously, I found numerous ads that seemed to act against the direct interests of the council, preyed upon some of the most vulnerable local residents or were just downright sleazy or inappropriate.

Specifically:

• firms specialising in business rates avoidance on empty commercial properties
• payday loans at extortionate rates of interest, often over 1000% APR (you read that right)
• stag and hen nights featuring visits to strip/lap-dancing clubs
• pole dancing lessons
• solicitors specialising in defending people on tax and benefit fraud charges
• exercise and diet programmes of dubious worth including the infamous “1 tip of a flat belly”

It took me about 15 minutes to find all of these. The conclusion I drew was that Nottingham City Council either didn’t monitor which ads were served on their website or didn’t particularly care. Either way I found it hard to see how the council and the community got a net financial benefit from this advertising, quite aside from issues of appropriateness, likely offence and web clarity/usability.

Good reputations can take years to build and seconds to lose. Rightly or wrongly, many people are sceptical or outright cynical about the value and probity of their local councils. Councils should take enormous care to ensure that they are not seen to be endorsing or in the pay of businesses. People rightly expect government to be above the fray of commerce and private profit. That’s what supposedly makes government trusted and different — serving the whole community, not just the highest bidders or those with the ability to pay.

Assuming you even want to make the calculation, has anyone running ads on their websites actually balanced the net revenue from ads against the reputational risks?

Even if you value your corporate reputation at zero, you still need to consider the direct costs to the council of running certain kinds of ads, particularly those from Google AdSense. How many business rates avoiders, families impoverished through predatory lending, skilfully-represented benefit fraudsters and neighbourhoods plagued by anti-social behaviour due to businesses advertising on your website does it take to nullify any profit from running such ads? Not many, I’d suggest.

A bit of joined-up thinking is required here. Councils using Google AdSense are playing fast and loose with their reputations and taking big hits in revenue and costs in other departments for the sake of pennies coming back on their websites.

It’s just not worth it.

Someone famous once said that the true definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting the results to be different. Well I keep going back to the Sutton Council website and nine months after launch it’s still not any better. Arguably it’s worse.

Wibble.

In no particular order:

1. No redirect from sutton.gov.uk to www.sutton.gov.uk

That’s one small step for the DNS admin, one large dollop of timewasting annoyance for dozens of users every day.

Update 1 March 2010: This is still a problem. I thought it had been fixed but it was just a consequence of me using a smarter browser (Chrome) than previously.

2. Enormously bloated top navbar.

So useful that they let you hide it (now). Does that tell you something?

Update 1 March 2010: This bloated, visually heavy, space-invading top nav is still there. It’s grown a few new buttons, too.

3. No distinct visited link colours

Want to know which links you’ve already clicked? Tough. Perhaps the designers were off for Usability 101. So irritating that I wrote a Greasemonkey script to fix it. (Who says users never want to customise their council’s website?)

Update 1 March 2010: We still don’t get distinct colours for visited links. I’m still relying on my Greasemonkey script to provide this absolutely basic usability feature.

4. Abysmal RSS implementation

No autodiscovery. Homepage RSS icons link to a help page rather than the feeds themselves. On the help page even the enormous RSS icon isn’t a feed link either, just a pretty picture. And once you finally manage to subscribe, you have the exquisite pleasure of renaming “Latest press releases RSS feed” to “Sutton Council news” and “Sutton Council” to “Sutton Council jobs” in your feed reader. All of which makes me think that none of this was designed by someone who’s ever used RSS, let alone tested properly. Please fix it before one of us dies.

Update 1 March 2010: Sutton’s RSS feeds have improved but there’s still plenty of work to do. Good news: The feeds have been renamed with sensible names so users won’t have to rename them themselves in their feed readers. There are three RSS icons on the home page, two of which link directly to feeds (good) and one that links to another web page (very bad). There’s still no autodiscovery and the feed for Closed Consultations is completely broken. While I didn’t mention it in the original article, the major missed opportunity here is to provide full text feeds. RSS is a way of delivering your content to other applications so that people can read it conveniently, not a clever way to generate traffic back to your website which pretty much undermines the entire purpose of the exercise.

5. Distracting, patronising, juvenile stock photos

If the current homepage is to be believed, Sutton is the kind of place where people are ecstatic to have TWO ice creams, wear flowers in their hair and grow beards. This isn’t cool, it’s the dad dance of civic web design. How about letting the real content speak for itself without having to compete with this junk?

Update 1 March 2010: As summer passed, so did two-ice-cream girl and the hippy couple. Their places have been taken by different, non-contextual, distracting stock pictures. You do not have to fill every pixel on the page with stuff. Will the summer crew be back this year?

6. The clock/calendar anti-pattern

Put the entirely useless current time and date where the content date should go, then type the content date into the story titles. Is this really a content management system or is someone just bashing it out with FrontPage? (Extra bonus points will be awarded to any designer that can find the time/date on the screen of every user’s computer. Clue: It’s not in the browser.)

Update 1 March 2010: The clock/calendar is still with is and just as damaging to users’ understanding of the true age of the content as ever. Seriously, just delete it.

7. Search form uses POST rather than GET

Want to bookmark or link to a page of search results? No can do. Some basic instruction in the meaning and usage of HTTP methods required. Failing that, just copy every other search form on the entire web.

Update 1 March 2010: No progress here. You still can’t bookmark or link to search results pages. And it only takes changing “POST” to “GET” in a couple of lines of code to fix it, too.

8. No permalinks

1999 called — they want their URLs back. I wonder whether I’ll have time to fix all my inbound deep links and bookmarks to the site before they change them. Again. Permalinks are cool. Two-ice-cream girl take note.

Update 1 March 2010: Still no permalinks. We are still stuck in the link stability dark ages. How the CMS vendor can get away with this I have absolutely no idea, although it’s amusing to note that they don’t have permalinks on their own website either. Perhaps they should buy a decent CMS. :)

9. Don’t Contact Us

It’s there, but can you find it? Enjoy the multi-step form when you do. Wizards are magic!

Update 1 March 2010: The phone number is as small and hidden as ever and the multi-step contact form is just as forbidding. How about just publishing a general contact email address?

10. Subscribe to this page

Except it doesn’t work. Never has. Makes no sense. A small prize is offered to anyone that can explain clearly 1) What it’s supposed to do and 2) How you use it. I’m just a web designer and not a very bright one at that. Goes right over my head. (Tip: There’s already a general subscription mechanism for web content called RSS.)

Update 1 March 2010: The Subscribe to this Page feature is still there and doesn’t seem any different. I’ve still got no idea what it’s supposed to do or how it’s supposed to work. And RSS is still by far the best way to provide a subscription mechanism to just about anything.

11. £200K and rising

I had to help pay for it too. Now that really hurts. Got a spare £200K? You can get a site like this for your council too.

Gordon Brown has ordered an inquiry into the whole system. While this may produce useful reforms, former Commons Clerk Sir Roger Sands fears the inquiry itself is vulnerable to political meddling and sabotage. Given the sovereignty of Parliament, this is inevitable.

Parliament is structurally proof against any kind of effective regulation. The final veto on an MP’s behaviour lies with citizens’ votes in the ballot box. But how can citizens be sufficiently well informed to be able to make good choices?

I propose an open database of MPs’ expenses operating in near-real time. The government seem to be very keen on databases for the rest of us so I’m sure they will be keen to commit resources to making this happen.

Every line item from every receipt submitted for reimbursement is keyed into the system. We will be able to see exactly what has been claimed and which claims are pending, approved and rejected.

Every line item is tagged. This will enable people to see not just the claims submitted by specific MPs but to easily make comparisons across the group. Want to see all MPs’ claims for their televisions? It should be as easy as a visit to http://expenses.parliament.uk/tags/tvs

Given that websites shouldn’t discriminate against machines, every piece of data in the system will be available through convenient feed formats like RSS and an open API, allowing programmers to build useful mashups and visualisations of the data.

If the only way to stop cabinet ministers on £135,000 a year claiming 88p for bathplugs in their family homes is to put every such claim online within a week, let us make it so. Given that the historical data is supposedly on sale for £300,000, can we find 300,000 people with a pound each to get it?

The web is rife with discrimination of the most insidious and socially-destructive kind. It largely goes unnoticed as those that are well-served by the web care little for the plight of those that are not.

I’m talking about the web’s widespread discrimination against machines.

Conventional thinking about “websites” focuses almost wholly on human users. In the best-case scenario, people turn up to a website, find the information they want or do the thing they want to do, then go away again. If the website is useful and provides that information or service, and if it’s usable and accessible, people can do what they want to do with a minimum of fuss and effort and be satisfied.

Many websites are a long, long way from being able to provide a good experience for human users but I doubt many don’t have it as their goal, however ineptly they may deliver on the details.

By contrast, providing for machine users mostly happens either as an afterthought or not at all.

Machine users are other programs, websites or software systems that could interact with your website by extracting data, inputting data, or both.

The simplest example is an RSS feed fetching a list of news articles or job vacancies. By providing an RSS feed, a website makes it easy for other programs to capture that information and re-use it in any way possible. They might republish that information largely as-is, combine it with information from other sources in a mashup or even derive statistical information from it. Or all of these things.

More generally an API allows information to be read from or posted into another system. Can humans search your website? Then provide a search API for machines. Can people place orders and make payments online? Then provide an ordering and payment API. Every form on your website should have an API that makes provision for machine users to post in data and get a machine-readable response. Every sequential collection of information should be available as a feed.

Providing for machine users by building APIs and serving feeds is ultimately about serving human needs. Until machines achieve some kind of consciousness they will neither know nor care about accessing information on other systems. Every program is written by and provides information for people.

APIs make it possible for people to write programs to use your information and services in ways that suit them, in ways that you can’t anticipate, in ways that you don’t have the resources to provide, through systems that you won’t have to maintain. Many organisations won’t like this. It means the creation of infinite new layers of intermediaries, third-party services that provide new interfaces to your information and services or whole new applications that combine your services with others’. If you think you can provide the best interface to your services for every conceivable context you’re a fool. If you think you should be the sole gatekeeper of your services then prepare to lose your customers to other businesses or see your citizens disappear to third-party services implemented through any means necessary.

Let’s snap out of abstractions for a moment and look at an example.

As an activist with Living Streets I’m always on the lookout for maintenance issues and faults on the street, particularly where they affect pedestrians. I can report street faults directly to my local council or I can use FixMyStreet, a national service that ostensibly does the same thing.

I always use FixMyStreet. Why?

• It’s easier. The user interface is better.
• It’s geographically agnostic. I can report a fault anywhere in the country without having to know which authority is responsible for it.
• It’s public. There’s a lot of value for me in being able to see other people’s street reports as I’m interested in looking at the wider issue of urban design and maintenance, not just getting a specific fault that bothers me fixed. I can browse other fault reports and see statistics for each borough.
• It’s flexible. I can get reports sent to me by email or through an RSS feed. I can file a report on an iPhone and soon through many other mobile clients.

Overall it’s just better, and better in so many ways that my council and most other councils will not be able to emulate.

Smart councils would realise this and most probably abandon their local street fault reporting systems. They could put their resources into developing a clean API between their own faults database and FixMyStreet (or any other similar application). They could actually invest in FixMyStreet itself. It’s open source, so why not? It’s not going to disappear, and if it gets superseded by another, better, open-source system, no-one loses.

It’s APIs (and often, ersatz, hacky APIs) that make this kind of thing possible. It leads to better services, greater participation, and more flexibility, diversity. We need to put machine users on parity with human users so that people can be best served.

If you’re building any kind of website or online service, serve a feed for every stream and an API for every form. Let this be your mantra: DDAM, DDAM, DDAM. Don’t discriminate against machines.

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