Dear twitter friends…
Dear twitter friends I have deleted my main account due to tired I am with twitter and it’s poor performance. I am in other places. I’ll catch you there.
I’m active on the web, spending thousands of hours a year connected to the web. As a result I have to log into a lot of sites often. I don’t like logging in though. That’s why I would love for big name publishers like the WSJ, NYTimes and others to sign an aggrement with Facebook so that I may log into their service without having to remember my account details.
It would actually serve them better. Facebook knows who my friends are, where I studied, what stories I recommend and in some cases why. It’s also a reflection of the times that are coming.
I went on a blog commenting spree last week and almost all blogs ask for three things, name, e-mail and website url. When I have to input the data I think twice about leaving a comment, and may recommend the story and write a comment in friendfeed instead. Too bad the publisher loses that bit of interactivity.
For those publishers that want me to subscribe to your website you can forget it. There’s no way I’m going to subscribe to a website I visit less than once a month. It’s just too much effort and too much additional information to remember.
What I love are blogs that use Disqus. That’s because when I leave a comment I can find them all in one place at the end of the day. If someone answers my comment then I can see what they wrote. It means it’s an automated attention solution. Anything where I can spend time looking at new content is appreciated. It’s especially true now that web forums have become extro verted rather than introverted.
You’ve probably noticed it too. How many forums are you still part of? In my case none. I prefer the friendfeed and feedly method of doing things, where I actively seek information and get it sent to a central point from which other people converge to comment, and head back out once they’re done. I love the web in it’s current form as a result.
Today during the walk I saw an orange van moving by the side of the road slowly. It was stopping regularly. I crossed the road and looked towards it. I saw an open door and a person placing traffic snow poles into the bollards at the side of the road. Winter is coming and the roads are being made ready for when it snows. I wanted to film but I was told not to, so I didn’t.
It would have been nice to film such a scene, because it signals the change from Autumn to winter. It doesn’t matter. I respect peoples’ right to privacy. I can’t think of a security reason not to film such an event.
Through Musk buying Twitter, and through its swing to the Far Right people have finally decided to dump twitter to try something else. That something else, for many, is Mastodon. People are re-discovering what some of us have longed for, for a long time. Social media and the social web, without adverts, once again. For many years the web was seen as an expense, and everyone questioned whether it was profitable, so it was filled with enthusiasts, rather than others.
Today, with the slow demise of Twitter (theoretically) people have chosen to emigrate from Twitter due to political differences. Instead of going to a centralised network with a single point of failure people are migrating to the federated web where activitypub is used to share content between web servers. In theory every individual and business could have their own server.
This is good. The flaw with Twitter is that it had a board of people who decided that they would agree to sell Twitter to a single individual. This move has made a lot of Twitter users uncomfortable, me included. Social media and social networks are about conversations and communities, and what Musk has done, and those that agreed to sell to him, is show that social networks with a single point of failure, are bound to fail at some stage. Twitter won’t vanish overnight but the golden age of capital driven social media is over. Users are regaining hold of the social web, and people like Musk will have spent 44 billion, for a network where users are volatile.
I don’t mean that they’re flaming each other. I mean that if you open the jar usage stats will evaporate. As Mastodon picks up users at an increasing speed, so it will be more interesting for people to migrate from Twitter to Mastodon, and leave the sinking ship behind.
The Internet, and the web, were designed to be modular and adaptive. If one site or node is taken down, we just move to the next, and the next after that. Wordpress has provided bloggers with this flexibility for decades. Now Mastodon provides the same, for microbloggers.
As if zombie slaying, vampire biting and sheep throwing weren’t enough the facebook lunacy has reached Twitter via Zefrank and the stupid colour wars. As if the conversation was not interesting and fulfilling enough for twitter users there is now a movement to create a colour war encouraging people to split into groups.
I dislike this movement for a number of reasons. For a start it’s a complete waste of time because it does not require people to do anything in the physical world. Just change your avatar and you’ve participated. That’s similar to the zombie wars.
As a second point it’s encouraging people to break into smaller clusters and groups, which although fun in certain situations where groups are too big is pointless on twitter. In particular I saw that for one colour the point was not to tweet but rather be tweeted at. Now why would you ask for people to remain silent when the whole reason behind twitter is status updates, firstly and conversations as a side effect of the first.
When few people used hotmail it was clean and e-mails were worth reading but as chain letters arrived so the usability went down. When geocities became popular so pages became flooded with junk, same with myspace and later facebook. I really don’t want to see this junk making its way into the twitter stream. I spend too much time there to appreciate it.
That’s why I won’t participate.
A few days ago I noticed that twitter was tweeting their programs as they were on in German and this looked like a good idea. I commented it was a shame that they didn’t have the same in French. Within a few days it’s there. This morning I saw Arte’s tweet for one program and so I’m watching a guy play some Chopin on the Piano.
I spend quite a bit of time watching the twitter stream so if someone gives me their program details, as an opt in then there’s a good chance that I will tune into the program on the spare of the moment.
If I had intended to watch the program at 2038 in three days time I would have forgottten about it. As things are that’s what’s playing on the right side of my screen now.
There are two communities on Seesmic, those that are English speakers and those that are French speakers. The French speaking seesmicers can be recognized by two things. The first one is the Racoon avatar, the second is that they refer to each other as the Francofous, the crazy french.
Last night Seesmic went down due to an upgrade gone wrong and as a result many seesmicers didn’t know what to do with their time. One seesmicer decided to create a skype conference call where over ten seesmicers were chatting for quite a few hours. I only found out about it via the discussion between Fred2baro and Sizemore and added Fred2baro. Quite a few of the French seesmicers were there and we discussed many topics and it lasted for at least three hours before it was cut short.
What made this conversation so interesting is how people came in and left at various points and how at one point Eric Rice and Purplecar joined the conversation. A few more people joined in including Loic Lemeur although his presence was short due to children in the background playing on a PSP.
I think that this is what the future of web interactions is about. It’s about a global community of people, at the moment early adopters, who have strong ties with friends and family in various parts of the world and no particular illustrated that such as the one of Kosso and Ifiz. They like to advertise that they met “in 140 characters or less”. That was a nice story and it shows the point of the new age of social interactions. I won’t give all the details here as you can easily ask them in person at a later date.
Yesterday I was climbing 5C comfortably and consistently for the first time. I often climb 5a, 5b and sometimes attempt 6a and 5c. Yesterday I skipped the easy grades and went straight for the 5C+. I expected it to be hard and I expected to struggle. I expect strength and fear of falling to be issues but they were not.
I believe that three factors contributed to this. The first of these is that last time I went climbing I was also bouldering. I believe that bouldering got me to work different muscle groups and that these muscle groups were primed for use when lead climbing.
The second factor that helped is that I noticed that the door frames in the building where I live have tiny ledges that I can grip and pull on laterally. By making this lateral effort I was strengthening my grip for tiny holds. I was using the strength I developed on holds that I would not otherwise have trusted. Amusingly it seems to have worked.
The third and most important factor is that I took a one week break from climbing. In this time my body had the time to recover and so did my mind. It had the opportunity to absorb what it had learned and desaturate from the previous climbs. In effect I arrived to the wall with a clean slate (no pun intended).
I love to go climbing because it is a wonderful form of escapism from all of the stress of adult life. It provides you with a workout and with an opportunity to clear your mind. Some would describe it as a form of meditation. As a former diver I would call it desaturation. You have the opportunity to live in and enjoy a moment with no past and no future. That’s why people love these sports. It can be summarised to one phrase. Well being. Yesterday’s successful climbs contributed to mine.
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Thought it was a joke but you really did it!
Impressive somehow…
I was on twitter for two years with an average tweet rate of 72.6 per day. And from one day to the next it no longer exists. Too many superficial people on the site. It was time for me to move on. I am using a secondary account but twitter is going to be a far smaller part of my life. So small that I will only go to check on twitter when I have replies or a new follow.
It's like that relationship you see going nowhere. It was time to break up. I made sure there was no going back and I'm happy for that.
I thought it was a joke at first as well, but I did see this coming.
Sounds like you've been pretty frustrated with Twitter lately. I followed your secondary account, but won't be offended if you don't follow back 😉
Best wishes,
Mark
It's no joke, I did delete that account. I have a backup of my last 3800 tweets on that account and thousands more are backed up on various portions of the web, either through tweetbackup, greader or others.
One of the reasons for my frustration has been how people speak and profess their knowledge of social networks yet are to conventional to actually use them to their full potential.
As a result I am still on twitter, but with a far reduced presence.
🙁 My nights aren't the same without your tweets. I understand your thoughts completely though. How many of your followers ever bothered to subscribe to this feed? [raises hand]
I thought I was better at using the social nets to their full potential, but Twitter and other places have exposed me to so many of them, that I use a lot, but none to full potential, something I will try to address in the coming weeks and months.
I'll be trying to keep up with you elsewhere now, keep us updated on the Twitterless life. 🙂
~Shawn K (@thattalldude)
I still tweet but just warza, rather than warzabidul as a twitter name and I am still following you from that account. Those who were following me, in large part were friends. Too many of them took too long to aknowledge my tweets so they were devalued.
Now it's a new twitter account and friendfeed. On friendfeed I'm one of the two hundred most active users of the site at the moment.
Follow my new twitter account.