Month: April 2018

A popular refrain is that “the user is the product” when speaking of networks like Facebook and this refrain should not be valid. The user should be seen as the primary investor. We invest our time, we invest our social network and we invest our attention. We invest anything from minutes a day to hours a week and days per year. In such an environment the primary focus should be the value that Facebook provides to its users.

The Economist | Unmarked https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21740401-both-facebook-boss-and-his-questioners-congress-fail-reassure-what-make-mark?frsc=dg%7Ce

As a follow up to Zuckerberg speaking to Congress “Over the course of his testimony, as the Facebook boss apologised for the leakage of data on 87m users to a political-campaign firm, his company’s shares rose by 5.7% and his own net worth by $3.2bn.” When normal companies have data breaches their value usually goes down and people walk away. In the case of Facebook, they are too endemic to contemporary culture to suffer much. We use Facebook for authentication, we use Facebook to stay connected with people who are not social media mobile.  If we want to preserve connections with friends spending less time on Facebook would result in knowing less about those we worked or went to uni with. It would also mean less sharing of images, videos and informal conversation. They have a monopoly which I hope will break. 

The “silo” that people have often complained about could become worse rather than better. “…the risk is that Facebook will throw up walls: its decision to kick third-party data-brokers off the platform has the convenient effect of both protecting users’ data and entrenching its power as a source of those data.” We are not a commodity. Facebook should not see its users as data but rather as communities. It should focus its efforts on encouraging community leaders, i.e sports organisers, event organisers and other people to interact with their users to create personal relationships that encourage people to spend time with each other offline.

In the early days of twitter, facebook and seesmic people spent so much time on networks that groups formed offline and then met in the physical world, in meat-space as it was called. Instead of looking at big data, at algorithms Facebook and twitter should focus on helping people find people with similar interests and passions. 

We should be in a reality where the more time you spend on a social network, the more personal connections you establish and as a result of this enrich your life.

Neither Facebook nor congress showed any interest in this. If we’re seen as users and data then what reason do we have to continue using Facebook? If we’re just entering data for marketers and shareholders to acquire wealth then we might as well blog, we might as well jump off of the platform. 

Mewe is like all other social networks were in their early days. In the early days it’s all about building a community, it’s all about privacy and it’s all about putting the user above commercial interests. Several years down the line they often shift towards trying to survive and even thrive if possible.

As I saw that Tim Berners Lee seems to support Mewe I decided to try the social network. It looks like every other social network and it seems to have a reasonable number of users. I skimmed through the groups and I noticed that “alternative” groups are more popular for now. I hope that this shifts towards being a community of people who prefer evidence based information. 

I am confused that a website about privacy encourages people to upload their contacts. This goes against the ethos of the site. Why would you need my contacts when you’re meant to be an organic community? Shouldn’t adoption result from sharing your profile rather than the other way around?

Why the shift? 

For me the web is a social place where people share projects and ideas. It is a place where quality conversations take place and where we establish new friendships. Facebook no longer covers that niche. It has over 2 billion users of which over one billion are monthly users. It has become too big to fail. 

Facebook does not assume the responsibilities that a network of its size and stature should assume. It controls what we see and in 2014 it played with our emotions. They never suffered the consequences of this.

A shift back to blogs

Mewe is an interesting idea but I would really like to see a shift back towards self hosted content and ideas sharing. I would like to see wordpress, wix and other projects gain traction. Diaspora and identi.ca tried to distribute online communities so that there was no single point of failure. They failed to reach critical mass. Wordpress, both self hosted, and shared hosting could fill that niche. The more active we are and the more content we have the more traffic we get, and the more traffic we get the more sustainable our participation could be. 

Hiking, climbing, cycling

If you write about hiking, climbing or cycling I would be happy for you to write guest posts on this blog. I’d like to keep sharing adventures but cut out websites like Facebook. We deserve an organic, chronological sharing of adventures and pictures. 

Last weekend I watched hours worth of
slow motion videos because I enjoy them. I also watched them because I was fighting one of the worst colds I’ve had in years. Slow motion videos are great because what is invisible to the eye, and hard to see in normal speed videos becomes boringly long when watched in slow motion. 

An event that would have taken a few hundredths of a second now takes seconds or even minutes to occur. We’re familiar with the photos of bullets going through apples from our childhood and we’re familiar with the footage of
slow motion rocket launches but have you seen the
saturn five launch where just the ignition sequence takes sixteen minutes? 

The video above shows the action in such slow motion that you can see everything that happens in a way that a live broadcast never could. Eight minutes from ignition to the moment the rocket leaves the shot. 

In this
video you see a nuclear blast for the first milliseconds. You can see the shape of the charge and the imperfections. It provides you with a different understanding of how these reactions occur. 

In the video above you see paint being flung from a drill in slow motion. The paint is flung upwards and sideways. You also see the drill as it oscillates up and down as well as from side to side. In
realtime you would just see a spray of paint but you would miss the intricacies of the globules of paint and how they move.  

In another
video you see how syringes of ink look as they spread in an aquarium of water. In slow motion you see the ink take on a velvet quality as it spreads within the water. It’s great to watch the first time you see such fluid behaviours. 

In another video, you can watch what happens when a drop of water falls into a body of water, how it goes down into the water, bounces back out and then hits another drop. Such motion is really interesting to watch. In real-time, we’re speaking of hundredths of a second but in slow motion, we’re speaking about seconds of motion.

In the video above we see how surface tension and bubbles of water interact. You start from a single drop of water that falls from a surface, bounces on the top of water multiple times and as it bounces halves and then halves again several times before finally disappearing into the water. This is behaviour that you would never notice with the naked eye but thanks to slow motion cameras you see it. 

When you watch the first slow-motion videos you don’t know what to expect but as you watch dozens, or even hundreds of events so you begin to understand how the world works at the nanosecond timescale. They’re worth watching
because your understanding of science and events increases. 

When we first joined Facebook it was filled with chronological timelines kept active by university friends. At that time algorithms did not affect what we saw or how frequently and there was a sense of community. In the last two or three weeks we have heard a lot about Cambridge Analytica and other companies because they have siphoned off user data and used it to manipulate people in a number of political events. 

During this time articles have been written detailing privacy and the threat that social networks pose. I have seen very few, if any articles looking at people and how easily misled they have been. I see very few articles exploring the issues surrounding how such a large portion of the population is susceptible to being misled. 

The events of the last week are a perfect demonstration of the Manufacturing of Consent that Noam Chomsky wrote about in his books and discussed at his lectures. He spoke about looking at the dominant headlines and looking at what was ignored. He spoke about taking an active look at what is being said and by whom. In theory, the very people that were misled by the manipulation are the people that would have been seduced by his rhetoric. 

What I really want to see, is a shift away from websites like Facebook towards blogs and online communities where users interacting with each other are not manipulated by algorithms. I want to go back to an age where web forums, chronological timelines and more, are the norm. Facebook experimented with emotions in timelines a few years ago, now they have allowed companies to syphon off data and most importantly they are being accused of helping aggravate the situation in places like Myanmar.

The best way to hurt a company like Facebook is not to delete your account. It is for them to lose your eyeballs. It is for you to stop using the site, to start using others, and to reduce their income. If they want to treat us like a commodity then we can return the favour. We can use them fleetingly. 

A few months ago, before the winter months came I was
happilly flying the drone up to four times a day. At the time I was running their old app and it worked flawlessly. You turned on the remote, turned on the drone and then you connected to the wifi
hotpot and within 30 seconds you could be flying. 

At some point in
November the cheeky people designing the app decided to “simplify” everything with QR codes which is theoretically fantastic. In
practice this locks you out from your own device. The remote and the drone work fine and I can fly the drone without a video display or telemetry and I can connect the phone to the wifi hotspot of the remote. 

The problem occurs when I try to connect the DJI Go4 app with the remote. At this moment the app refuses to recognise the drone and I’m stuck. I’ve tried resetting the remote, resetting the drone. I’ve tried re-installing the app and I’ve tried Android and iOS devices without any communications between the app and the drone.

If I had had these issues during my previous 90 flights and with a previous version of the app I would assume responsibility. As things are I am not to blame, the app breakers are. 

Remember that this is the prime season for someone to buy a new drone and I would be tempted by the air. How can I justify buying a new drone when the old one has a faulty app that other DJI drones use as well? 

I would strongly advise people against buying a drone that relies on their
dji go 4
app. It has a design flaw whereby you get locked out of your device.