social media | Chris Aldrich

👓 Export your Facebook posts to WordPress | Chris Finke

Read Export your Facebook posts to WordPress by Christopher Finke (chrisfinke.com)

I’m a big proponent of owning the data that you create. I use WordPress (of course) wherever I blog, and I use the Keyring Social Importers plugin to make backup copies of my Twitter updates and Foursquare checkins. And as of today, I am also syncing my Facebook updates back to a private WordPress blog using Keyring Social Importers. Not familiar with Keyring Social Importers? That’s too bad, it’s amazing. Install it, and within minutes, you can be importing data from any one of a dozen sites to your blog. Remember all of that data you put into Myspace/Jaiku/Bebo/Pownce and how it disappeared when the site shut down? Wouldn’t it have been nice to be able to save a copy of all of that? That’s what Keyring Social Importers makes possible.

I was kind of hoping for something slightly different when I searched for something and found this, but it is interesting for those who don’t know about Keyring Social Importers and it had an interesting comments section.

I was looking for something in the range of a bulk Facebook Importer to exit Facebook altogether whereas this solution keeps you addicted to it. I would classify it more of a PESOS solution than a POSSE solution.

👓 Someone Photoshopped Mark Zuckerberg as Data from ‘Star Trek’ and it’s incredible | Mashable

Read Someone Photoshopped Mark Zuckerberg as Data from 'Star Trek' and it's incredible by Brian Koerber (Mashable)

Wow.

This photo is just too awesome for words. It almost makes up for the pitiful excuse for what these hearings actually represented. I’m hoping that they’re more politics than actual substance at the end of the day. The hearings are another great example of how completely disconnected our representation is to the actual world in which we live. The saddest part is that Mr. Data actually has some pre-programmed in morality while it seems that Zuckerberg doesn’t even have a shred.

👓 Fed up with Facebook, activists find new ways to defend their movements | Tech Crunch

Read Fed up with Facebook, activists find new ways to defend their movements (TechCrunch)

Malkia Cyril Contributor Share on Twitter Malkia Cyril is founder and executive director of the Center for Media Justice (CMJ) and co-founder of the Media Action Grassroots Network. More posts by this contributor The benefits of police body cams are a myth In the wake of revelations that the person…

👓 All my Instagrams are MINE | Spitot Design

Read All my Instagrams are MINE by Bryan Hoffman (Spigot Design)

There was a time in the early days of social media that I signed up for every service that came out. The username @spigot is mine across most services you can find. By the time Instagram started, I’d started to grow weary and standoffish to new services. I’m sure you know what I mean. So I held ...

👓 Apps of a Feather

Read Apps of a Feather …Stick Together (Apps of a Feather)

Third-party Twitter apps are going to break on June 19th, 2018.

After June 19th, 2018, “streaming services” at Twitter will be removed. This means two things for third-party apps:

Push notifications will no longer arrive

Timelines won’t refresh automatically

If you use an app like Talon, Tweetbot, Tweetings, or Twitterrific, there is no way for its developer to fix these issues.

We are incredibly eager to update our apps. However, despite many requests for clarification and guidance, Twitter has not provided a way for us to recreate the lost functionality. We've been waiting for more than a year.

Twitter seems to finally be closing off the remainder of their open API that allowed full-fledged Twitter clients to still exist. This certainly creates a chilling effect in the future on developers spending any time or resources on projects like it that aren’t completely open. This also makes it much harder to build competing services to Twitter which have a similar financial model. I remember the heady days when there were dozens of awesome Twitter clients to chose from and interesting new things were happening in the social space.

If I was sitting on a huge pile of Twitter related code with a full set of Twitter related reading/posting functionality, I think I’d head toward some of the new open protocols coming out of the IndieWeb to build a new user base. By supporting feeds like RSS, ATOM, JSON feed, and even h-feed (possibly via Microsub) for the feed reader portion and building in the open Micropub spec, one could rejuvenate old Twitter apps to work with a myriad of microblog-like (and even traditional blog) functionality on platforms like WordPress, Drupal, Craft, WithKnown, Jekyll, Kirby, Hugo, micro.blog, and a myriad of others in the future. Suddenly all those old Twitter apps could rise from the ashes and invigorate a new, more open community. Given the open “architecture” of the community, it would give developers much more direct control of both their software and futures than Twitter has ever given them as well as a deeper sense of impact while simultaneously eating a nice portion of Twitter’s lunch. With less than a week’s worth of work, I suspect that many of these old apps could have new and more fruitful lives than the scraps they were getting before.

If the bird site doesn’t heed their cries, I hope they’ll all re-purpose their code and support the open web so that their hard work and efforts aren’t completely lost.

👓 Librarian tweetstorm by @green_grainger

Read Librarian tweetstorm by Georgia | Saoirse (Twitter)

So there was a MYSTERY at the library today.

A wee old women came in and said "I've a question. Why does page 7 in all the books I take out have the 7 underlined in pen? It seems odd."
"What?" I say, thinking she might be a bit off her rocker. She showed me, and they did.

I asked if she was doing it, she said she wasnt and showed me the new book she was getting out that she hadnt even had yet. It also had the 7 underlined! "I don't know, maybe someone really likes page 7?" I said, assuming of course that there is a serial killer in the library.

I checked some other books. Most didn't have it, but a lot in this genre did - they're "wee old women" books (romances set in wartime Britain etc). Lots of underlined 7s. The woman who pointed it out shrugged and went on her way, "just thought you should know".

My manager came back from doing arts and crafts with some of the kids and I decide to tell her about the serial killer in the library.
And that’s how I found out that a lot of our elderly clientele have secret codes to mark which books they’ve read before.

Our computers do it automatically but many have been doing it since before that was possible, so Esther might underline page 7, while Anne might draw a little star on the last page, and Fred might put an “f” on the title page. Then when they pick it up, they can check!

It’s quite clever really but now I’m dying to just underline page 7 of every new wee old women book we get in.

So, good news: there’s not a serial killer in the library whose MO include the number 7 and wartime romances. Bad news: people are defacing books rather than just asking us to scan them (smiling face with smiling eyes)

I'm now concerned that the amount of people enjoying this thread means there's going to be a new spate of readers using secret codes - apologies to librarians everywhere!
(although, in truth, I find it hard to be annoyed about it - better than torn pages and felt pen graffiti!)

(Also, I am new to the library job, hence why I hadn't seen it before! The library and our customers are great though (smiling face with smiling eyes))

Just had another victim of the page 7 vandal returned!!!
(Now checking every book that looks like it might be their taste...)

This is such an interesting little story including some cultural anthropology.

👓 Dear Facebook user 752461218193242 | Vicki Boykis

One of the best takes on the Facebook “Issue” I’ve read in the past two weeks–and I’ve read almost all of them at this point.

h/t to @vboykis

Dear Mark,
Thank you for writing me that letter in the New York Times recently. I wrote you one, too.

Sincerely,
(mostly former) Facebook User 752461218193242https://t.co/P0JbAXXn43

— Vicki Boykis (@vboykis) March 30, 2018

👓 It’s Time For an RSS Revival | Wired

Read It's Time For an RSS Revival (WIRED)

After years of letting algorithms make up our minds for us, the time is right to go back to basics.

This article, which I’ve seen shared almost too widely on the internet since it came out, could almost have been written any time in the past decade really. They did do a somewhat better job of getting quotes from some of the big feed readers’ leaders to help to differentiate their philosophical differences, but there wasn’t much else here. Admittedly they did have a short snippet about Dave Winer’s new feedbase product, which I suspect, in combination with the recent spate of articles about Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, motivated the article. (By the way, I love OPML as much as anyone could, but feedbase doesn’t even accept the OPML feeds out of my core WordPress install though most feed readers do, which makes me wonder how successful feedbase might be in the long run without better legacy spec support.)

So what was missing from Wired’s coverage? More details on what has changed in the space in the past several years. There’s been a big movement afoot in the IndieWeb community which has been espousing a simpler and more DRY (don’t repeat yourself) version of feeds using simple semantic microformats markup like h-feed. There’s also been the emergence of JSON feed in the past year which many of the major feed readers already support.

On the front of people leaving Facebook (and their black box algorithmic monster that determines what you read rather than you making an implicit choice), they might have mentioned people who are looking for readers through which they can also use their own domains and websites where they own and maintain their own data for interaction. I’ve written about this in more depth last year: Feed reader revolution.

One of the more bleeding edge developments which I think is going to drastically change the landscape in the coming years for developers, feed readers, and the internet consumption space is the evolving Microsub spec which is being spearheaded by a group of projects known as the Aperture microsub server and the Together and Indigenous clients which already use it. Microsub is going to abstract away many of the technical hurdles that make it far more difficult to build a full-fledged feed reader. I have a feeling it’s going to level a lot of the playing field to allow a Cambrian explosion of readers and social related software to better leverage more easily reading content on the web without relying on third party black box services which people have been learning they cannot fully trust anymore. Aaron Parecki has done an excellent job of laying out some parts of it in Building an IndieWeb Reader as well as in recent episodes of his Percolator microcast. This lower hurdle is going to result in fewer people needing to rely solely on the biggest feed readers like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for both consuming content and posting their own content. The easier it becomes for people to use other readers to consume content from almost anywhere on the web, the less a monopoly the social networks will have on our lives.

I truly hope Wired circles around and gives some of these ideas additional follow up coverage in the coming months. They owe it to their readership to expand their coverage from what we all knew five years ago. If they want to go a step or two further, they might compare the web we had 15 years ago to some of the new and emerging open web technologies that are starting to take hold today.

👓 Build an instant Twitter dashboard, with just a little code | PushPullFork

This is a cool looking little tool for Twitter analysis. Includes some useful outline for setting up and using the tool as well.

I could see this being an interesting thing to study the recent #DeleteFacebook movement.

👓 How to get Twitter back on song? #NoMoreRetweets | the Guardian

Read How to get Twitter back on song? #NoMoreRetweets by John Naughton (the Guardian)

They make up a quarter of all tweets, but at long last someone has found a way to turn them off…

This is an interesting theory. I’ll have to dig into the mechanics and try it out. I often find that don’t pay as much attention in general to retweets as I do to original content. I even far prefer people who are excellent aggregators in focused topics and post their content as bookmarks to the article rather than retweeting content.

👓 The Missing Building Blocks of the Web | Anil Dash – Medium

Read The Missing Building Blocks of the Web by Anil Dash (Medium)

At a time when millions are losing trust in the the web’s biggest sites, it’s worth revisiting the idea that the web was supposed to be made out of countless little sites. Here’s a look at the neglected technologies that were supposed to make it possible.

Though the world wide web has been around for more than a quarter century, people have been theorizing about hypertext and linked documents and a global network of apps for at least 75 years, and perhaps longer. And while some of those ideas are now obsolete, or were hopelessly academic as concepts, or seem incredibly obvious in a world where we’re all on the web every day, the time is perfect to revisit a few of the overlooked gems from past eras. Perhaps modern versions of these concepts could be what helps us rebuild the web into something that has the potential, excitement, and openness that got so many of us excited about it in the first place.

Anil is great at describing a fundamental problem on the web here. I feel a bit like he’s written a variation of this article a few times now.^1–3

I wish that when he pivoted from ThinkUp he’d moved towards building an open platform for helping to fix the problem. He’s the sort of thinker and creator we could use working directly on this problem.

I do think he’d have a bit more gravitas if he were writing this on his own website though instead of on Medium.

References

Dash A. The lost infrastructure of social media. Medium. https://medium.com/@anildash/the-lost-infrastructure-of-social-media-d2b95662ccd3. Published August 10, 2016. Accessed March 23, 2018.

Dash A. Rebuilding the Web We Lost. Anil Dash. http://anildash.com/2012/12/rebuilding-the-web-we-lost.html. Published December 18, 2012. Accessed March 23, 2018.

Dash A. The Web We Lost. Anil Dash. http://anildash.com/2012/12/the-web-we-lost.html. Published December 13, 2012. Accessed March 23, 2018.