For those of you familiar with twitter there are a number of ways of keeping up with information and my current favourite is Twhirl. What I love about using Twhirl is how well it works.
At first it feels clunky. You’ve got to download adobe air, then you’ve got to download twhirl and once this is done you’ve got to get used to the user interface. I went from twitterific to here and the transition was relatively painless. I missed one or two of the keyboard shortcuts.
Since then I’ve grown to enjoy using it for three key reasons. The first of these is that you don’t need to restart it as there are no caching issues. For someone who tweets as much as I do and follows as many a lot of time would be sent reseting twitterific. Not with Twhirl. It’s got over 5500 tweets right now and no sign of slowing down.
The second feature i love is how you can choose whether to @, DM, Favourite or re-tweet. Anyone using twitter is familiar with the first three. The re-tweet feature is fun. It allows you to retweet verbatim quite easily. I don’t see it used often luckily but it’s a nice gimmik.
The third feature that I enjoy are the shortcut keys specific to this program. R for replies, F for friends, D for direct messages and then there are two or three other such short cuts that could be of interest.
As an aside you’ve got the filter option although having not used it I can’t comment. It’s a nice package and anyone using Aero should give it a try.
This weekend I went by the lac D’annecy where there is a gorge to do some more canyoning. The canyon was quite an easy one but without much light. As a result you get some more interesting images. Here are the images taken with one of my cameras. Pictures taken with the second camera will appear later.
Trump’s next steps could strike even closer to home: His administration has drafted an executive order aimed at overhauling the work-visa programs technology companies depend on to hire tens of thousands of employees each year
Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft, Fitbit, Garmin and other companies benefit enormously from the international appeal that their products have. Not only do the products have great appeal but the environment within which they work is envied globally. Tech entrepreneurs from Europe and other regions migrate from Europe to the US precisely because they want to be part of the most influential tech landscape. By making this migration more complicated it could encourage technological development internationally.
According to a recent article in Le Temps scientists are considering a move from the United States to Switzerland, to continue their research at the EPFL.
By blocking migration from the rest of the world to the US people like Trump are reducing the flow of intellect and ideas for an industry that owes billions of dollars per year to international audiences. We saw the stories about Apple, the European Union and Ireland from a few months ago.
Under the Trump administration the US is saying “We want your money but not only will we not pay taxes in your nations but we will also not hire your skilled workers”. They are practically monopolising the global social media landscape at the moment. It would be nice to have European alternatives.
With the Trump administration I wish that I had EU alternatives to social networks. Could this be an encouragement to revert to blogging?
I took advantage of a rainy day to watch a series of documentaries by the BBC called Tudor Monastery Farm. It is a documentary series where three individuals live the life people would have lived at the relevant time period for a year. During this year they try farming, mining, fishing and other skills and crafts from the time.
For years or even decades I thought of this time period as a bad time period. I thought of the church as being an oppressive force. Through this set of documentaries I eventually felt sad that monasteries and the way of life that was illustrated in the series of documentaries was dissolved by Henry the Eighth.
Imagine a monastery with 20,000 sheep, imagine the work that was lost by stone masons as the need for monastery construction and other activities declined.
If you find this documentary series I strongly recommend watching it.
Due to the quantity of people using twitter it’s purpose has changed. From being a place where you tell people what you’re up to it’s become a place where you discuss what you’re up to and what you’re thinking about. As a result of this following people without them following you back is pointless.
I went through my twitter list this morning and it was at over 530 people being followed. I went through that list and started to remove people according to four factors. If they’re not following are they A) personalities, B) Amusing, C) active or d)responsive. If they met none of these criteria they were removed from my following list. Even those with attractive avatar pictures were removed.
That’s because twitter is a noisy place. People are tweeting about their activities 24 hours a day 7 days a week 366 days a year (since this year is a leap year) and if we start to listen and respond to those that can’t hear us then there’s a huge amount of noise generated.
It was a fast and easy process which too no more than half an hour to an hour and there is a big change. Now as I look through my timeline I find that I care about everyone in it. I know many of them well and there are quite a few I’ve met in person.
Yesterday for example it meant a lot to me when Jamie told me she was happy to have met me. It’s nice to be shown that you’re not just another piece of text on a screen. It’s nice to use twitter as a multiplatform instant messenger to chat both with old friends and to make new ones. That’s why so many people like twitter. That’s why I like it.
If you’re on twitter take the time to check who is following you and whether they react to your @ messages. If they don’t then it might be worth removing them from your follow list as they’re creating noise. Let’s keep the noise to a minimum and conversation to a maximum.
Twitter’s purpose has changed and I wanted to reflect it.
Social networks and social networks are based on people connecting with other people. Twitter is a glorified chatroom masquerading as a microblogging platform. As twitter shifts from being free, to being paying, it is losing it’s appeal.
Fifteen years ago there was plenty of discussion about Social Media silos and the social graph, and discussion about ROI for businesses, PR firms and personalities. They always forgot about the user. They exploit the user because the user, in their eyes, is an addict. This attitude make it okay to exploit social media users, in their eyes.
Screen capture of twitter dev account tweets about paying API
I am not worried about losing bots. Bots make a lot of noise, but don’t help Twitter, as a social network. What bothers me is the phrase “Twitter data are among the world’s most powerful data sets.” Facebook said the same thing, and then we read about Cambridge Analytica, emotion experiments, phone draining potential and more. We also read from books like Mindf*ck that Facebook was used to manipulate people to vote one way rather than the other. We learned that FaceBook could not be trusted with our data.
Now Twitter is using the same phrases. As I see the changes made by Musk I see that Twitter is becoming a silo, like FaceBook and Instagram. Twitter is no longer a social network. Twitter is a data farm where we are expected to pay, for content to be pushed on us, rather than seeing organic tweets, and where our data is mined by untrustworthy groups.
Through his actions Musk is turning Twitter into a data silo that I no longer want to be a part of.
Techcrunch addresses the topic from the reverse angle. “Twitter’s new announcement might impact research in different areas, including hate speech and online abuse.” On the one hand Twitter is making it harder to police what content is posted whilst encouraging others, with deep pockets to exploit that data.
TechDirt thinks that this move will encourage developers to move towards Mastodon but Mastodon is just one of many alternative websites. I would go further. By blocking access to the API twitter is encouraging people to lose trust in the company. First it blocks the apps people used to post and read tweets, then it blocked the API for bots, and tools for checking account related information, for example “map my followers” and other functionality. With the decline of those tools such actions will need to be manual.
The Washington Times phrased it as “Twitter shutting down free access to its public data”. Twitter should have become Not For Profit. It should have been made sustainable, whilst allowing people to converse globally. It is now sliding in the opposite direction, to become a silo, for people who want to exploit the data to manipulate people, rather than help spread news, information, friendships and conversations. Twitter, by moving towards becoming a silo, is removing the features that made it the strong, vibrant community that it was.
The Instagram API
I posted over 4000 images to Instagram over the years, until FaceBook bought and then destroyed the app. I used to post every single day, until I found that the app felt more and more lonely, and more and more of a waste of time. It had switched from being a social network to being an influencer network, where loneliness was the cost.
I tried to play with the API, to use Instagram externally but because of the blocks in place I couldn’t access my own data, without first proving that I should have access to it. That is what encouraged me to spend a few days trying to import the Instagram JSON file to WordPress. It worked, and I was happy. I had found a workflow to recover my data, and use it for my own website, rather than to provide content for a platform that did not respect me as a user.
Twitter is now doing the same. If we can’t access the API to use twitter as we want, then it does encourage us to move along, to the new alternatives, or, as I am doing, to write blog posts every day. This is day eighty of writing a blog post every single day.
If it wasn’t for the community I would have dumped Twitter years ago.
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I was so going to love twhirl, but it is crashing on me in Leopard. What platform are you running it on?
OTOH, I like to colors of the interface. 🙂
Update – comments as homage to twitter
I’ve been using it for an hour and no crashes with the most recent update.
Carry on.