Pro Bono Analytics Is Growing Social

Pro Bono Analytics is a program by INFORMS (the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, for the acronym-averse), "the largest society in the world for professionals in the field of operations research (O.R.), management science, and analytics". PBA "connects our members and other analytics professionals with nonprofit organizations working in underserved and developing communities". In other words, we hook up charitable organizations needing analytics or OR help with volunteers willing to provide it without compensation. Our volunteers are a mix of industry practitioners, academics, students and the occasional geezer retiree. I think the majority of the volunteer pool comes from the U. S., and a majority are INFORMS members, but we have volunteers from as far away as Australia, and a significant portion are non-members.

I'd encourage anyone with OR/MS/analytics skills to consider volunteering, and anyone who knows a charitable organization (particularly those of limited financial means) to let them know we're out there willing to extend a helping hand. Both potential clients and potential volunteers can find out more, and signify their interest, at the PBA home page (repeating the link above).

Our new (and apparently energetic) staff liaison, Tia Carrai, has expanded PBA's social media footprint. You can find us now on the following:

• Facebook: www.facebook.com/INFORMSProBonoAnalytics 
• LinkedIn: Pro Bono Analytics
• Twitter: ProBono Analytics (@ProBonoAnalytic) | Twitter

I'd also like to give a shout-out to Pro Bono O.R., a like-minded initiative by our sister institution in the U. K., the Operational Research Society.

Twitter via RSS: More Problems, More Solutions

I previously wrote about how the Twitter 1.1 API dropped support for Atom and RSS, making it a PITA to get feeds for Twitter timelines in a feed reader. (As an aside, I switched feed readers - again - a while back. I'm now using InoReader. I can't recall if I've mentioned that since I made the change.) Since that post, two of the solutions I came up with have run into problems. The Twitter RSS service is apparently gone: surfing to twitter-rss.com yields a page saying the domain name expired on February 6 of this year. I was also pulling some feeds from twss.55uk.net, which now produces a "service unavailable" error.

After a bit of surfing, I found a solution posted by Amit Agarwal (@labnol), titled "A Simple Way to Create RSS Feeds for Twitter". Simple is in the eye of the beholder, but it works, and there's a learning curve effect (creating the second, third, ... feed gets progressively faster). It uses a Google Script run under your account, which makes me nervous for a couple of reasons. First, it creates another failure point if Google decides to discontinue support for user scripts. (Remember the late, lamented Google Reader?) Second, the script has to be configured so that anyone can run it, but it runs under your account. The script looks pretty benign to me, and it's unlikely anyone else would stumble over the correct URL to run it, but on general principles I get a bit nervous being this permissive.

Anyway, the instructions are in Mr. Agarwal's post, and they are quite clear, so I shall not repeat them here. I've replaced four feeds so far, and things seem to be working ... for the moment ...

No More Twitter RSS Feeds

I like to aggregate most of the social media content that I want to see (blog posts, forum posts, certain Twitter timelines) in one place. Before its announced (and impending) demise, that was Google Reader. Of late it has been Netvibes. The key is that, in both places, I obtain content via RSS feeds. I have a separate Twitter client, but prefer that a few "important" Twitter feeds be included in my RSS reader. The reason is that I regularly check the RSS reader for new content, but I check the Twitter client extremely sporadically. (If anyone needs proof that I'm not a teenager, the preceding sentence should suffice.)

Much of the world, myself included, subscribes to the mantra that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Unfortunately, software developers have a different mantra: "if it ain't broke, it needs more features". Throw in possibly some concerns over security and/or a desire to assert more control, and you arrive at Twitter's recent decision to do away with RSS feeds. They retired version 1.0 of their API and replaced it with version 1.1, which supports JSON only (no XML, no RSS, no anything else). Quoting their developer site:

Consequently, we've decided to discontinue support for XML, Atom, and RSS, which are infrequently used today.

If you're curious about the definition of "infrequently used", I suggest you monitor Twitter, tech forums and the blogosphere for the ensuing howls of outrage by those of us "infrequent users" whose feeds are now broken.

If you have a web site (for instance, a blog) on which you provide users an RSS feed to your Twitter account, you will need to replace that. If your site contains a widget displaying recent posts from your Twitter account, and if it used XML or RSS, it will be frozen in time (or broken) until you replace it with a newer widget. If, like me, you used RSS feeds to read other accounts, you will also need to find an alternative.

Netvibes recommends installing the updated version of their Twitter widget, but that's not an option I fancy. The Twitter widget is apparently a full-fledged Twitter client embedded in the Netvibes dashboard, and the last thing I need is another Twitter client to ignore (see first paragraph). Happily, there is at least one other option available: the aptly named Twitter RSS site. (Hat tip to Social Media Slant, which is where I found out about the site.) Twitter RSS, which is apparently not a site owned by Twitter, is a free service that is extremely simple to use. Type in the Twitter handle (minus the "@" symbol) for the account you want to follow, and they will supply you with a URL that provides an RSS feed for that account.

So I've replaced my original Twitter RSS links in Netvibes with links provided by Twitter RSS, and now I just need to sit down and catch up on my reading. (It took me a few days to get around to addressing the problem, and you know how fast stuff piles up on Twitter.) I have no idea who is behind Twitter RSS, how long they will be around, or how long it will take the "infrequent users" of RSS to overwhelm their servers, but for now we at least have an option.

Update: The Twitter RSS web site is gone -- the domain name lease seems to have expired. I've found another possible solution, described here.

Impressions of Netvibes

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about my search for an alternative to Google Reader, which eventually led me to Netvibes. Having used it a fair bit, I think I'm ready to share my reactions.

Desktop

I'm very comfortable using Netvibes on my PC. My subscription is to the free service. There's a fee-based premium service that I think is targeted at commercial users, but the free version is fine for me. On the desktop, I use it in Firefox, but I tested it with Chrome and the interface unsurprisingly seems to be identical.

You can login the old fashioned way (email address and password) or via Facebook. I'd like to see a general OpenID login option, or at least buttons to log in through Google+ and/or Twitter, but that's a quibble. As with many browser-based applications, once logged in I stay logged in for extended periods, provided I load the page periodically. (I assume this is refreshing a cookie. Cookie-averse users may need to authenticate more regularly.) 

As I previously mentioned, import of my Google Reader feeds and folders was easy. I showed a couple of pictures of the interface in my previous post, so I won't repeat those. Here are some things I like about the desktop interface.

• You can show all new posts, posts from uncategorized feeds, posts from all feeds in a particular category, or posts from just one feed.
• You can show all posts (ones you've read using a "faded" font) or just new posts.
• You can read the post (or at least the initial portion of it, depending on the feed) inside Netvibes with a single click, or open the source document in a new browser window/tab with a single click. (The former marks the post as read, but the latter does not.)
• You can mark a single post or a subset of the displayed posts read by checking them off (one click per post) and then clicking a button (so n+1 clicks to mark n posts). You can also mark all displayed posts read with two clicks.
• Similarly, you can mark one, some or all posts as unread, with the same number of clicks. This is not something I do often, but occasionally I do mark a forum post unread so that I will come back to it.

Tablet

I also use Netvibes on a 10" Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) tablet. [Update: I've removed the previous link to information about Android 4.0, which was broken. If you're nostalgic for "Ice Cream Sandwich", you might want to have a look at this article from DailyWireless.] Netvibes currently does not have any native mobile applications, but for a tool designed to browse online posts, I'm quite happy to work within a web browser. On any mobile device, you point your browser at mobile.netvibes.com; the server detects your device type and apparently customizes the interface accordingly. The interface is almost the same as the desktop interface, so I'll just point out the differences.

• In the "reader view" (which is what I use exclusively; I can't recall if the "widget view" is available on the tablet), a menu of categories appears on the left and posts for the category you have selected appear on the right. The right-hand pane has a border at the top identifying the category. On the mobile version, this sometimes does not update when you switch categories: you see the posts for the new category but the header for the previous one. This is not exactly a high priority bug.
• As best I can tell, there is no option in the mobile interface to mark a post unread. This is problematic for me for two reasons. First, my hand-eye coordination being what it is, I sometimes tap the wrong subject line and read a post that I intended to leave for later. Second, when I'm screening posts from sources (weeding out what I consider to be the "chaff"), I may have to read a post to determine that it is in fact "wheat" (something I want to keep for later). Both the mobile and desktop versions provide a "Read later" category, and it is easy to add a post I've just read into that category. "Read later" is not the same as keeping the post unread in the original category, though. The original categorization is lost when the post goes into "Read later", and in any case "out of sight is out of mind".
• The option to select a subset of the displayed posts and mark them read does not seem to exist in the mobile version (at least on Android). I can mark all displayed posts read (two taps total), or read them one at a time (two taps per post). Again, when I'm looking at a forum, there are entire threads that I want to skip. On the mobile platform, that's 2n taps to get rid of n posts.
• There's a built-in menu to share a post. It has only three options: email, Facebook and Twitter. The desktop version has the same three options, but on the desktop I have no use for them, particularly as I never share anything to Facebook. On the desktop, it's one click to open the original source, then one click with the HootSuite hootlet to share to Twitter, one click of the Google+ bookmarklet to share to Google+, or two clicks to use the Firefox "email link" feature. Similarly, if I have Netvibes open in the default Android browser, it's one tap to load the original source document and then two taps to access the browser's sharing menu. That said, I have to give Netvibes a thumbs-up for the Twitter option on Android. Like other applications, if I select the Twitter option it gives me a choice of opening the tweet in any of the installed web browsers or in the HootSuite Android app (which I have installed). Unlike every other application I've used, where that last option silently fails, Netvibes really does open the tweet in HootSuite.

So, to summarize, I'm quite comfortable using Netvibes on the desktop and fairly comfortable using it on Android. I'd be quite happy on Android if they would add an unread option and a way to mark a selected subset of posts read.

Farewell to Google Reader

Google's announcement that it would be ending Google Reader service on July 1 caused considerable wailing and gnashing of teeth ... and that was just me. A lot of other folks are also inconvenienced, to put it mildly. I have no intention of slamming Google over the decision. They provided the service at no charge to me, and I'm grateful to have had the use of it. Now it's time to move on.

John D. Cook did a couple of blog posts about alternatives (see here and here), and there is no shortage of web pages devoted to the subject. I've spent more time than I care to think shopping for a solution. My requirements, in descending order of importance are as follows.

1. The reader must be accessible from both a web browser (on Linux, although that's unlikely to be an issue) or Linux desktop client (browser preferred) and an Android client (or browser application, but native client preferred).
2. The reader must synchronize between my Android tablet and my Linux PC.
3. I must be able to import my Google Reader subscriptions (preferably including the folders into which they are organized).
4. The reader should have straight-forward navigation, including the ability to flag articles as read. (I'm not worried about liking, +1-ing or other social features.)
5. There should be easy (one click) linking from the reader summary of an article to the source (original web page) in a browser.
6. I would rather not have a magazine-style interface. For me, it's just unnecessary clutter, and somewhat inappropriate. Some of my subscriptions are blogs, but I also use RSS to subscribe to forums and Twitter feeds, which just look dopey in a magazine layout.

It turns out that synchronization (my second priority) is an issue. Some alternatives currently sync very well, but they use Google's Reader back-end to do it. That leaves them scrambling to find alternatives by the end of June. Some do not sync at all, which is a deal-breaker for me. I'm busy enough that it's a bit of a struggle to keep up with the feeds to which I subscribe, and I really do not have time to spend flagging articles that I've already read on another device.

I thought that Dropbox might be an easy syncing solution. Brent Simmons, who I believe authored the NetNewsWire reader for Apple devices, argues in a blog post that syncing through a cloud file service like Dropbox is unlikely to work. So much for the easy way out.

Since Feedly grabbed far and away the lion's share of recommendations on several sites I checked, I tried that first. Importing my Google Reader subscriptions was trivial. The interface took a bit of getting used to, which is going to be an issue with any alternative to Google Reader. On the PC (in Firefox, using their extension), some articles were "featured" (displayed in larger boxes) than others. I found it easy to mark as read those that were not featured, but for the life of me I could not find an easy way to mark the featured ones read. It was either click on them and read them, or click on a different article to make it "featured" and then, with the original article no longer featured, mark it as read. That's a bit inefficient.

The Feedly Android client was actually a bit easier to navigate, once I learned that (a) swiping horizontally was the way to mark an article read or unread and (b) I needed to be very careful about not using too long a swipe. (A long swipe marks everything on screen read/unread.) Synchronization worked, although I found that I had to log out and log back in at least once on my desktop browser in order to catch changes from the Android client.

Unfortunately, one glitch in the Android application proved to be a deal-breaker. Tapping a link provided with each synopsis let me read the article in a browser, which was embedded in the Feedly client. In many cases, the article is a post on a forum, to which I want to respond. Finger-painting a response on an Android device is painful as it is. In at least a couple of cases, though, Feedly ate my response. After laboriously typing in the answer, I had to scroll up or down to access the button to submit the message. Feedly apparently interpreted the vertical swipe to mean "go back to the previous screen", losing my work in the process. I could not find a setting that would compel Feedly to send me to an external browser (either the default Android browser or Firefox) to read the full article, so that was the end of my Feedly trial.

I'm currently trying Netvibes. There is (as yet) no native Android application, so I access it via web browser on all devices. I can live with that. Synchronization seems to work (knock on virtual wood). Importing my Google Reader subscriptions (including folders), while not as easy as with Feedly, went fairly smoothly, although previous posts in some cases came in with very incorrect dates (as in, all posts from one source were dated seven minutes prior to import). I spent a bit of time marking things read, but that is a one-time phenomenon. The interface is quite clean. I find the "widgets view" more visually appealing but, for busy feeds, the "reader view" more functional.

Widgets View

Reader View

Update: After a week plus of use, I've posted my impressions of Netvibes.

Update #2: According to eWeek, Feedly has grabbed some 3 million Google Reader users (and counting) and is adding/improving features.

Update #3: I've now switched to Inoreader, mainly because I'm a bit more comfortable with it on mobile devices. After about a month of use, I'm quite happy with it.