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Strava – The Escape Plan
Strava – The Escape plan has the goal of getting people to move 15 minutes a day 5 times a week for four weeks. This includes all sports from Alpine Skiing to Yoga with walking, hiking, kayaking, cycling, swimming and more. In other words your walk to the shops, the café and the work commute are included.
With so many sports activities included in this challenge, it should be easy for everyone to achieve. You could walk to work the first day, cycle the second, swim in the evening on the third, play on one of the elliptical machines on the fourth and follow a yoga session on the fifth. There is no reason not to succeed. As I look through the list every one of these sports would be practised for extended periods of time beyond just 15 minutes. I can’t see many people going for a fifteen-minute hike. I would expect it to be for longer.
Most of the challenges on Strava are based on specific sports and specific distances. In these situations, you can compete with others and see whether you are in the top ten. In this case, you simply log a fifteen-minute activity and you’re done five days a week four weeks in a row.
This is a habit-forming challenge for those who either do not do fifteen minutes of exercise in one go on a daily basis or for those who never consider a fifteen-minute walk from the train station to the office as an activity.
As a point of reference, I am on day 71 of the move streak goal. It’s set at between 400-500 calories per day and requires at least an hour of walking to reach. I don’t need to “get moving”. I need to continue moving.
On the Detrimental impact of Chain Letters on Social Networks
In the 90s, people found it fun to share chain letters. At the time, this was something new to many of us, so we found them fun. We received and then passed them on, but over the volume of chain letters become a torrent of spam. The letter is fun the first time you see it. If twenty people forwarded it to 20 more, then we’re speaking about four hundred e-mails. We’re speaking about thousands of letters that have no productive effect on society.
After a while people grew bored with chain letters, so they blocked them, or they told off the people sending those messages. In 2007 or so, when Facebook was still young and moral people started to share chain letters through this network, and at first they’re fun, and we fill them in, and we share that info with friends, and we look forward to them doing the same.
There are two issues with chain letters. The first of these is privacy. By filling in and sharing chain letters, we are providing a lot of personal information that we may not want others to know about us. Polls and other tools were used to gather information to influence elections in a variety of countries.
The second reason for which chain letters are unpleasant is that they produce noise. Social networks easily become very noisy, and it takes constant care and attention to ensure that they do not become too noisy. If you tolerate chain letters once, be assured that you will get twenty more within a few weeks. If you put a stop to them immediately, then you avoid noise.
My reason for using social media is to establish direct connections with individuals, not to fill in silly chain letters. I want to have an exchange of questions of answers. Without questions and answers, I could be reading a book, or a blog. If I devote time to being “as live” I want to interact as if we were conversing.
“If it’s not hurting anyone, then don’t comment on someone else’s conversation.” In the grand scheme of things I used a retweet, which means that I was speaking to my own community, not that person’s. Second, chain letters do harm someone. Me. Social media is not my toilet break from family life. Twitter is my family life, especially during a pandemic.
My message is simple. Don’t spam twitter or other social networks with chain letters. It may look harmless, but it isn’t.
The Facebook and Friendfeed lifestye
Facebook and friendfeed are now the same thing. They both provide exactly the same thing but for different audiences. Facebook is a network of real friends, where you share everything with those that count on you as a friend. That’s where you get party pictures, relationship statuses and more. Friendfeed is where you go to get world news, current affairs and industry information from people you have yet to meet.
Both of them now allow you to filter your information by groups or lists. I for one have two twitter lists in Facebook, twitter friends I’ve already met and had a good time with, and a second twitter stream where it’s twitter friends I have yet to meet. That’s where I can follow those of you whom I have unfollowed on the real twitter, for lack of proper interaction.
On friendfeed I have a twitter stream as well, but this is raw, I can still react to your twitter stream by selecting to comment straight into the twitter stream or by proxy through comments in friendfeed. In part this evolves according to how willing you are to adopt the friendfeed lifestyle.
I’ve been thinking of friendfeed and how friends in news could use it. I spent four hours at work, off the clock, chatting with someone that works in news, but doesn’t use google reader and speaking about how we, as individuals filter our news. Everyone does it, but most people are happy jumping from one site to another to get the information. The website that person looked at does have RSS feeds which could be aggregated into google reader and feedly.
That’s an important advantage. It means that when you’re off work, in between shifts you can still get all the news coming to you, but without using the professional systems. It means that you shape the information flow, as well as it’s speed. The more sources you add to your reader, the faster information comes in and overwhelms you, if the right filters are not in place.
Look at the social media landscape now and it’s not that busy if you’re looking for hard news but that will change as people grow more accustomed to the way the current social media types use it.
We need to shift away from the social media types to the lifestylers. I use this term to describe everyone that uses the social media, not as a promotional tool for their activities and their blog posts, but instead for the content created by others with society at large as a source of information gatherers and sharers.
How would friendfeed look if the film and television industry used it. How much more conversational would the WEF Davos room on friendfeed have been if those participating in the conference conversed here, as much as at the events. A lot of conversation is invisible because those who talk about it do so with those in the industry. What if part of that discourse came online?
Look at the BBC website for example, and how it provides three top stories today, Madagascar and the new president, Russia and it’s rearmement plan and Fritzl. If the news editors for the News agencies met on friendfeed and discussed the top three international stories how much richer would the dialogue be? How many more related stories would we find?
We can get a taste for this from Google’s news page, according to country. You can see which stories are the most written about and see how the dialogue is advancing but that’s an algorithm. It requires little time or involvement to exist. As a result recommendations may not be that interesting, or that well selected.
Imagine a top three international stories room on Friendfeed and how that would progress, as news agencies provide items for national news bulletins. You could have sub sets to that room according to regions according to treaty alliances. There could be a room where NATO encourage Europt to work closer, making Europe as an entity more powerful. You see that with recent discussions from various recent Nato events.
I watched and listened to plenary sessions taking place in Africa during the changes-challenges.org when live streams were being made available by the event organisers for greater transparency. Some sessions were on the front page of the website. As a result even if you were not invited to the event there was a certain degree of transparency, the same was true of the World Economic Forum. As part of my work I have been streaming such events and I have tried listening in, to see what people were saying.
What is a shame is that at the moment there is no diversity in these online communities. Only the earliest of the technologically adopters are participating. the conversation, as a result is boring for anyone but those hyper-engaged within these communities. I use the term hyper-engaged because in reality there is a lot of information coming in. All of that information takes time to ingest. The best way to absorb all of that information is for us to watch it in real time.
Facebook have that option now, the real time view, if I remember the term correctly, and that will help to introduce a large portion of people to what is called the “Real time web”. The real time web is best demonstrated by the real-time view on friendfeed. People are finding new sites, commenting on links and more n real time. As soon as something is added to the stream you see it. If you’ve got two or more screens then you can monitor all of this in real time. There are apps to help with the assimilation of all this information.
Of course we’re not there yet, at the moment the geekiest of the geeks are playing with it, and some have more time than others to be invested in this. It’s just that it’s so well adapted to all professions that it will be interesting to see how Friendfeed and Facebook revolutionise the way we get our information and how we react to it. What I love most is that because facebook brings that to over three hundred of my university, school and work friends we, social media types have an easier job of driving adoption to the masses.
Paléo Festival De Nyon images, Nexus and Olympus
Here are some images of the Paléo festival.
These pictures were taken with the Nexus One
[flickr-gallery mode=”photoset” photoset=”72157624569201440″]
And these pictures were taken with the Stylus tough 8010 minimu tough 8010.
[flickr-gallery mode=”photoset” photoset=”72157624567505952″]
A Spanish View
A view of Calpe and the Peñon De Ifach from Portixol
The Post Social Media Age
Someone asked Is decentralization the future of social media? and I’d take an extra leap. I believe that the Fediverse, made possible by ActivityPub, and the other one, made possible by the Authenticated Transfer Protocol both point to a different future
Playing With WordPress, ClassicPress and Firefish
As we play with the fediverse, and we experiment with WordPress, ClassicPress and Firefish, among other instances or communities one thing becomes clear. The social media age could be over, replaced by something akin to the blogrings of the 90s. What I mean by this is that the fediverse is a gigantic web portal. We add photos via pixelfed, video via peertube, conversations by mastodon, notes via Firefish, and blog posts via WordPress and ClassicPress, among others. The point is we’re on niche platforms, talking with other niche platforms without logging in and out constantly. Log in, in one place, and we’re connected to everything within the fediverse. We’re on a community of communities.
Post Social Network
That’s why we’re in a post social media age. In the 90s and the first half of the zeros (2000s) we were on websites for our niche interests. Eventually with Twitter, Facebook and the explosion of websites it was decided that oauth was useful to make logging into and out of websites almost instant. We didn’t need to think of a user name, password and all that crap. It was automatic, so we could surf between services more easily.
Remember in Twit podcasts of the mid zeroes Leo Laporte and others were speaking about signup burnout, about being tired of having to fill in forms for every single website they joined.
Now we’re beyond that. Twitter is x-tinct and Facebook sees that it needs to join the fediverse, not to be irrelevant. I would argue that it is idiotic of Facebook to join the fediverse because it already has four billion users, on a planet with 10 billion people. Everyone that is on the fediverse, probably quit Facebook years ago, because of the crimes that Facebook has commited, from helping fascists reach power, encouraging genocide, playing with making people depressed, and more.
The New Era
In the age of the fediverse photo sharing is integral to the fediverse, video sharing is integral to the fediverse, blogging is integral to the fediverse, and conversations are integral to the fediverse. We can generate the content of our choice, and share it on the fediverse and everything is already integrated.
Google Reader, E-mail and FeedReaders
With Google reader, e-mail and feedreaders we could subscribe to RSS feeds to dozens, or even hundreds of feeds at a time, but every day you need to go through and mark things as read, either by scrolling through them, loading the post or other. It’s easy to have hundreds, or even thousands of unread posts. With the Fediverse we don’t have that problem, we jump in and out when we want, and we see what is recent, rather than what is recommended. We can see what is recommended, but in my eyes the people we “follow” are already recommending things for us to see.
Corporate Social Media and the Cost of Quitting
“We have been advocating for interoperability between platforms for years,” he wrote shortly. “The biggest hurdle to users switching platforms when those platforms become exploitative is the lock-in of the social graph, the fact that switching platforms means abandoning everyone you know and who knows you. The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized social media, but a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers. Which in turn, puts pressure on such platforms to provide better, less exploitative services. This is a clear victory for our cause, hopefully one of many to come.”
When Jaiku and Twitter were competing I preferred Jaiku, and when Twitter and Identica were competing I preferred Identica. I loved Google + but it was destroyed. I liked Google Reader but it was destroyed. I liked Instagram but it was bought by Facebook and destroyed. Facebook destroyed itself, by encouraging people to see stuff by strangers, rather than their friends, forcing people to seak new groups. Some of those groups were toxic, so I dumped Facebook.
With the fediverse you can be on three, four or five instances and follow all the same people across each instance. You’re not stuck to a single instance. There is no single point of failure. You can bounce from instance to instance, and occasionaly look for replies and reactions.
And Finally
One of the beautiful things about the Fediverse is that we don’t need to see ads anymore. We just see content, conversations and community. We don’t have to scroll down and see posts that look like posts, until you notice they’re selling cryptocurrency, magical cures, or other rubbish. Twitter was fun, but now we’re scrolling by an advert every fourth or fifth post, like it was with Instagram after Facebook bought it.
I like the Fediverse and what it represents.