apple juice

this was posted recently at ted.com

The Web We Lost – Anil Dash:

“This isn’t some standard polemic about ‘those stupid walled-garden networks are bad!’ I know that Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and LinkedIn and the rest are great sites, and they give their users a lot of value. They’re amazing achievements, from a pure software perspective. But they’re based on a few assumptions that aren’t necessarily correct.”

Really good post from Anil Dash. Important reading if you want to understand a bit more about the ongoing skirmishes between Facebook / twitter / instagram / tumblr / etc.

We need to use the Internet itself as social media. Then you won’t have to worry about Facebook putting their finger on the scale.: “Last night I was watching football on one of the big networks. It was a boring game so my mind drifted. I noticed that when they show the name of someone speaking on camera they also show their Twitter handle. I wondered if their lawyers had reviewed this decision. Had they read Twitter’s user agreement? Had they advised their client on how one-sided it is? That made me wonder if Twitter does special deals with big media conglomerates? I wonder what they look like? I follow Twitter pretty closely and I have no idea.”

(Via Scripting News.)

This is what I was talking about a few posts ago where I mentioned that having a personal blog is the only way to own your own words on the internet. You can take your data somewhere else. You’re in control.

You’re not in control of the experience you get on twitter or Facebook, and Dave Winer is exactly right in highlighting this. It is a little weird the twitter handle has become the de facto method of connecting with someone you see on TV.

I don’t know if app.net is going to be any better, (probably not — it’s not “free”) or if we simply need some sort of distributed system abstracted from an individuals’ blog or twitter-like feed that one can view from the web.

I watched the TED talk “Beware The Filter Bubble” by Eli Pariser recently. His basic premise is that with all of the algorithmic filtering and recommending that is happening on the internet, your online world is being narrowed in a way that prevents you from learning about alternative views and ideas.

He makes a very good argument for preserving your options and don’t narrow yourself too much, because if you do, you’ll end up in a “Filter Bubble”.

So I started thinking about ways that I had self-imposed a bubble, and one of the places I came up with was Facebook. I have 300-odd “friends” on Facebook. That’s way more than I can keep track of, and it seemed to me that recently I wasn’t seeing some people I care about. In addition, I knew there were few people I had blocked from appearing in the status feed, for various reasons.

As it turns out, I had blocked over 80 people from appearing, and there was a setting in facebook to show me “news and updates from people I interact with most often”. A little experiment ensued, where I unblocked all 80, and chanced the setting to “all my friends”.

The new situation is not much better… way too much noise from people I haven’t interacted with in years and years. Nothing against them, I just can’t handle it. And then I miss stuff from people I do interact with regularly. (Which sometimes leads to odd conversations where we sort of rehash each others’ updates from Facebook)

So, I’m thinking of de-friending a whole swath of people. I’m trying to come up with a snappy break point for doing so. Have I had dinner with this person in the past year? Would I have dinner with this person? Would I travel with this person? Would I go to a show with this person? I’m not sure what the break point is yet, but I’m working on it. Which leads me to Google Plus.

I’m on Google Plus now, and while there aren’t many of my friends and relatives on there yet, it’s clear that they’ve thought through one big issue that I have with Facebook: I don’t want to share everything with everyone. Facebook makes it hard to selectively post to people. Google Plus makes this easy (or easier, at least).

So we’ll see. Email is still pretty good at targeting just the people you want to talk to. But I’ve heard no one uses email anymore…

i just went through my facebook “friends” and removed some people. it’s nothing personal, i just think that friend should mean something… and maybe that something is that we’ve actually spoken in the past 10 years?

“spoken” could even mean that we chat with instant messaging.

spoken does not mean that we play status update racquetball on facebook.

anyway, it’s not that i don’t care to see your updates, or hear your comments on my updates, it’s just simply too much. too much info. all of these technological tools that we have are great at hoarding information, but what are you going to do with it?

or maybe we just need a new etiquette. for example, i post to facebook that i am making chicken soup. instead of receiving a bunch of “i love chicken soup” comments, perhaps i could receive a few great chicken soup recipies.

giving me a bunch of great recipes obviously takes more work on your part, my friends. but that’s what friends are for.

any person can tell me that they love soup. furthermore, any one can look up any recipe, ever. have you seen cooks.com?

but friends know that i love beans, lentils and other legumes. and friends give me the inside scoop on soups with beans.

so in conclusion, if we’re going to be friends on facebook, you’d better be willing to give me some good recipes, and I will reciprocate, because I know that you love different types of cured meats.

friends share recipes.

so I thought I’d change my name on facebook to A.J. Hussein Colianni.

Many of my friends have done so in a show of solidarity with Barack Hussein Obama.

It seems many people in the Republican Party can’t bear the thought of having a president with a name that doesn’t sound “like everyone elses'”

well, it appears facebook isn’t going to let me…