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…
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…
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…
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…
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…