WordPress, better cities, and everything else
Today I deleted my Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. It’ll be 30 days before it’s a permanent decision. And yes, I did this once before.
But why?
They’re addicting, and I don’t want to be addicted anymore. I also believe their businesses are morally reprehensible, dependent on exploiting human psychology.
But you can always reset your password so you can’t log in.
I did that. It’s like locking the alcohol in a cabinet that you still have the key to.
Blogs are cooler. You should blog too!
It’s time to iterate on the product formerly known as the RSS reader. Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr are going in a direction that emphasizes usability and ephemerality over durable value and utility. I want someone to do to the RSS reader what Apple has done to the iPhone. The iPhone is a phone — but it’s also a completely different paradigm.
Continue reading ““Phone” is to the iPhone as “RSS reader” is to ?”
Often, when a post is publicized to Twitter (or Facebook), the ensuing conversation then happens on the other platform. The challenge with this is two-fold: the conversation happens out of context of the original piece, and isn’t as accessible as time goes on.
It would be neat to pull in responses to or retweets of a publicize action back into the context of the original post. Furthermore, those external reactions should be ingested in a structured manner, and the comments iA should reflect the nature of type of reaction.
This isn’t a new idea as it’s been done before but it’s still something to be vastly improved.
Thought: One of the most valuable features of Twitter as a publishing platform is that the writer has a much better sense of who they’re communicating with. There’s a “Following” list which puts names and reputations behind a readership. Furthermore, the writer can indirectly assess the likelihood of their content being consumed based on followers’ account activity. “Blogs” and older publishing platforms don’t have this vibrance; they have pageviews, time on site, and other metrics distant from the purpose of publishing.
Bootstrap, from Twitter. Webapp in a box with base HTML/CSS for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, etc.
Density and Difference. Quick exploration of the information densities for Google+ and Twitter. With Twitter, updates are uniform, compact, easily scannable and a pleasure to read. Google+ puts an emphasis on distinguishing between objects such that you have to mentally process the content type before the content.
Recently, Google changed their accounts infrastructure so that Google Apps accounts behave more like normal Google accounts. You’d think this would be a good thing, but it’s had a very negative unintended consequence.
Previously, you could associate multiple email addresses, including Google Apps email addresses, with a single Google Profile. This has been extremely useful, especially for using a product like Google Groups.
Their recent infrastructure change reversed all of this. Specifically, I use [email protected] to log into my Google services, but use [email protected] and other email addresses with my Google Groups. Because the Google Apps email addresses can no longer be associated with my primary Gmail account, I can no longer participant in the myriad of Google Groups I’m a part of. Furthermore, I have no idea where else this problem is going to manifest itself.
Google won’t ever get social because they’ve just fundamentally broken the concept of one login for multiple identities and contexts. As strongly as I am against it, this is what Twitter and Facebook are doing right.
Judy Watson, associate dean at the J-School, asked me last week to pull together relevant usage and performance metrics for work we’re doing on the web. They’ll be a part of an annual report back to CUNY central. I thought it’d be fun to share them here too. Continue reading “Tracking data on everything: ’10-’11 web services stats for the J-School”
This Is Your Brain On Twitter. Fantastic response from Nick Bilton. Update from Bill Keller at the end also strongly clarifies his point, unlike the trollish original.
Yes, you can call me a hypocrite. Yes, I’m still a firm believer in portable data and identity. Pragmatism won out over idealism.
One, an increasing number of sites now use Facebook and/or Twitter exclusively for their user authentication. In this context, having a corporate-controlled ID is unfortunately better than having no ID. Two, at work I’ve had to ask other people to do tasks I should be doing and I’m done feeling weird about that.
This little ol’ weblog is still my preferred publishing residence and that won’t change anytime soon.