Matthew Lang

Tolerance is something that many of us were able to exercise before the Internet, now though it seems that tolerance has been cast aside and replaced with knee jerk reactions.

It's amazing how much lower our tolerance levels are as citizens of the Internet. As soon as something is wrong, the stage is set for an outpouring of protest. It could be thousands, hundreds or even one person reacting to an incident that otherwise would be considered harmless. With the option to broadcast our opinions though, we have become a generation of Internet users who are quick to scorn those who we consider to have done us wrong. I've already read a couple of these type of posts this morning and it's just gone past 11am.

Take for example the post I read this morning. A person complaining they are getting spammed from the service that they pay for. There's lots of ways to interpret this. Is it spam? Did they sign up to their 'marketing' list?

The person's response was to stop using the service and encourage others to follow. Have we become so intolerant that we're happy to jump from one service to another just because we got a marketing email from a company whose product we use? Okay, I agree the email may in fact be classed as spam and unwanted, but is it so bad that we should stop using the service altogether?

I've faced a number of situations in the last few months where I questioned the actions of a service provider I use.

The first case was Github's initial handling of a delicate situation involving one of their CEO's and a now ex-employee (they eventually followed up with a better response). Rather than going into the whole story, I just thought Github initially handled the situation wrongly. I wasn't happy with the way it was going. I wanted to take some action. Did I stop using Github? No. I did however downgrade my account and it continues to run on their free account.

Could I stop using Github altogether? No I can't and the reason why is that a number of my clients use Github so I still need to be able collaborate with them on Github and that means keeping my account. From an incident that I wasn't happy with, I was able to take some action without causing disruption to my workflow and clients. Since then I've found a nice alternative to Github called BitBucket. Sure BitBucket might do something bad in the future but I haven't completely discounted Github.

The second case was the appointment of Condoleezza Rice as a new member of the board for Dropbox. Now I've been a happy customer of Dropbox for a number of years now and yes I questioned the appointment but I just simply couldn't afford the time to spend looking for alternative cloud storage service that done everything I need it to. Also I like using Dropbox. I like using it alot. Am I really going give myself disruption by moving to another cloud storage provider?

Tolerating the decision in the long term with an eye to reviewing it in the future was the best solution I had. Compared to the first case, this isn't such a bad incident. Sure the new board member has a background in American politics that many might question, but it's not like Dropbox are just handing the keys over to someone else.

In both cases I questioned the actions of the service. Yes, the first reaction of many in each case is to stop using the service entirely, but then what happens when a similar action happens down the line with another service provider? Do I stop using them and move onto the next available service I can get? Hardly ideal given that I would eventually run out of adequate service providers to use and I would eventually end up with a tools and apps that at best meet half my needs. That's not what I want.

It’s amazing what prompts people to stop using a service or app. Even the smallest amount of inconvenience now seems to make people want to switch to something else. In the Internet world this is an initially easy thing to do, but in the real world it's not so simple.

There's a supermarket chain in the UK that has become something of a superpower in the amount of land it owns. This supermarket chain bought land in the centre of our town with plans to put a store there, however it has since put the plans on hold and now there's an eyesore of derelict land sitting unused in the centre of town. Hardly a benefit to the town. I choose to largely not shop at this chain now, but it's not always ideal. If I need something urgent then I wouldn't be against using the chain to purchase the goods that I need. Most of the time though I choose to shop elsewhere.

Back to the digital landscape that is the Internet though, and while you could move from one app to another there comes a point where you look back and think that the service you got from a provider wasn't so bad. When it comes to supermarkets, I choose to shop elsewhere when I can but it's not always ideal. Could you honestly say that you will stop using a specific service forever? I don't think I could.

If your level of tolerance is so low that you're prepared to switch from one service to another then eventually you're going to run out of options and have to consider one of those services that you couldn't tolerate in the past. Rather than letting knee jerk reactions guide your decisions why not be more tolerable of the mistakes that services make. They're run by humans therefore they're prone to the same mistakes that everyone makes. You just have to decide if that mistake has consequences that affect you or others. So what, they took a feature away or they had some downtime. Big deal, as long they are not harming yourself or others then where's the problem?

Nicholas Bate once again with advice on becoming wealthy

Hint: It's not about working your ass off.

The desire and willingness to create things that genuinely help people is the only business plan and personal brand you need. With this, you can get started today. No fancy website or business cards needed.

— My Personal Brand by Patrick Rhone

No mention of domain names, icons, or even social networks. It just takes the need to create and help others.

I'm glad I came back to using Instapaper when I did. They've just introduced a new UI and now you can also highlight sections from what you're reading.

Assumptions about the Internet based services we use lead to the fact that only the more popular ones are catered to when it comes to subsequent tools being built.

Assumptions on the Internet are everywhere. It's in the networks that we can share articles to, the growing number of companies using Facebook as their sole Internet presence and in the ways that we can connect services together.

For someone like me it's pain in the backside.

There's a campaign at the moment to stop the development of greenbelt land in our town. The local council want to sell the land to developers to build a thousand more homes for our town. Trying to coordinate with other campaigners on this issue has proved difficult. The only point of contact I can find are on Facebook and even there they don't give an email address to contact them. The assumption here is that everyone has a Facebook account but that's just not the case.

Then there's the services that require you to register using an existing social network account without providing users with a chance to register with their email address. Assuming that we're all on once social network or another is a bad assumption to make and in the end it's only going to lose you potential users and money.

I make an assumption on this website with the sharing links at the bottom of each article. You can share to App.net or Twitter. I choose these because at the time I did have accounts on both, but now I only have an App.net account. Am I going to reduce the sharing options to just App.net? Definitely not, as I see that these are two of the quickest ways of sharing links now.

When compared to the assumptions that bigger companies and organisations have made about social network choice and prescence then my site doesn't seem so important, so I guess then that my assumptions are not too damaging to others. More of an inconvience really, but there are other ways of sharing my website.

Not everyone is connected in a way that we can be accessed on any of the more popular social networks. Some of us even choose to stay away from these in favour of reaching people directly through email or publishing updates to an RSS feed. The good thing about these is that they're the most open formats avaialble for the sharing and consumption of data. No one controls email or RSS feeds, they're free for everyone to use.

I'm more selective about the services and tools I use. I try to use services that provide open endpoints such as RSS so that I can connect services together. They don't depend soley on specific social networks and give me more of a choice. Choice is good, assumptions are bad.