micro.blog | Chris Aldrich

🎧 Micro.blog on Social Media with Manton Reece | Geekspeak

Listened to Micro.blog on Social Media with Manton Reece by Lyle Troxell and Brian Young from GeekSpeak

We have been talking about the problems with Twitter, Facebook, and social media throughout the last year. Our guest has too, and he’s trying to do something about it. Manton Reece, talks about Micro.blog, the technology it is built on, and how he is being thoughtful about building something new.

Microblogging by Paul Robert Lloyd

Bookmarked Microblogging by Paul Robert Lloyd (paulrobertlloyd.com)

I stopped using Facebook because I didn’t trust the people behind Facebook. I had grown weary of the sly and underhand tactics used to grow their network and was unwilling to remain part of it. But if I’m honest, I couldn’t trust myself either. Visiting Facebook would elicit behaviour you could only describe as stalking; trawling through the feeds of my friends, seeking out people I vaguely knew. I had better things to do with my time. Almost a decade later, I’m having similar thoughts about Twitter.

He’s got some interesting, but subtle references to pieces of the “old” web including Small Pieces, Loosely Joined.

Books on Micro.blog by Manton Reece

Replied to Books on Micro.blog by Manton Reece (manton.org)

Today we’re introducing a search collection using emoji, starting with books. Just include the books emoji with your microblog text about a book you’re reading or related topic, and your post will automatically be collected on /discover/books.

@Manton has added an interesting new feature to micro.blog. He’s created a special book discovery page which users can use to see what others are reading or recommending.

Simply by including the books emoji 📚 in one’s post, the page will collect all those posts and display them at http://micro.blog/discover/books. In a sense, he’s using an emoji almost like a hashtag, though the mechanics of how things work are slightly different. I’m curious to see how it evolves.

Based on what I’m able to discern, I have the proud place of ownership for being the fourth book post to micro.blog with “The Library is finally unpacked” from several months ago. It isn’t a book recommendation, but it’ll give you and idea about what I think about books.

The sad part for me though is that he chose the books emoji 📚 . Why sad? Because for quite a while now I’ve been posting updates on my own site about what I read using various book-related emoji to indicate where I’m at with a book. I’ll use the bookmark emoji 🔖 to indicate things that I want to read. I use a green book emoji 📗 to indicate that I’ve started reading something, an open book emoji 📖 to indicate that I’m making progress, and a red book emoji 📕 to indicate that I’ve just finished or stopped reading a particular book. Most of my book status updates also have some notes or thoughts about what I’m reading as well as quotes, highlights, and other marginalia.

Since micro.blog’s discover page only uses one emoji, it’s missing out on all my past updates. For those who’d like to see them on my site, this link should have the entire archive. Not all of them are syndicated to Twitter, but this link will give folks an idea what these posts all look like there.

In a similar vein, I also often post what I’m reading online with glasses 👓 emoji. One of the things that’s always bothered me about Twitter was that people often share articles, but research has shown that very few actually bother to read them before sharing. (I’ve always gotten the impression that many don’t even bother to read the headlines.) Thus, following reading.am’s lead, I post everything I actually read online to my own website, but to indicate that it was read (from start to finish), I add the glasses emoji to the title. If I haven’t read it yet, it’s more likely hidden on my back end or, if it’s something I really want to advertise, promote, or highly expect I’ll come back to later, it will have a bookmark emoji 🔖.

I don’t publish all my reads publicly, a large number are published privately. You can find all of the public read posts here.

Lastly, for movies and television I’m watching, I include either TV emoji 📺 or film emoji 🎞️. I find that these emoji do really well for microblogging spaces which often have space restrictions.

Overall, I’ve quite enjoyed the evolution of micro.blog’s discovery features. While there are a few follow recommendations available, the service has a page with recent photos, so one can scan photos as a means of finding interesting people to follow on the service.

I can’t wait to see how the reading discovery page works out or what other new discovery tools Manton implements in the future. It’s nice to see a service that continues to evolve and change in reaction to its community.

Thanks Manton!

👓 How Twitter, Micro.blog & Mastodon could team up to compete with Facebook | AltPlatform

Read How Twitter, Micro.blog & Mastodon could team up to compete with Facebook by Brian Hendrickson (AltPlatform)

There’s a good reason for the “@“ character in the middle of your email address. It separates the two parts: your user name and your web site. Someday you might see something similar on social networking sites – Mark Zuckerberg could write on Facebook and mention Jack Dorsey “hey jack@twitter.com” and Jack could write back from Twitter “hi mark@facebook.com!” — that would be the Silicon Valley equivalent of Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson’s first telephone call. When small social networks like Twitter and Google Plus start to interoperate with open source networks and blogs, they could eventually form a large enough base of users to “flip the iceberg” and have more usage than the dominant, non-interoperable player: Facebook.

On micro-blogs like Twitter, the @mention (“at-mention”) is the way to link to another micro-blogger by user name. Facebook has a similar mention feature for calling out friends by name. But these versions of mention technology are missing the “web site” aspect, because they only work within one site.

On open source micro-blogs like Mastodon, cross-site mentions are already working – and for blogs it’s easy to install a Webmention plugin. These are the beginnings of what could eventually be a large collection of sites interoperating.

In 2008 the micro-blogging community proposed that Twitter interoperate with the micro-blog networks of the time. Twitter today could allow Mastodon and Micro.blog users to “follow” updates from its micro-bloggers. The Twitter search engine could aggregate updates from many different networks. Micro-blogging at Twitter would be a first-class open web experience, if it interoperated with other micro-blogs.

Open source tools like WordPress, 1999.io and Mastodon.social are creating many small networks of publishers, and popular tools like Twitter and Micro.blog could peer with them. If all of the social networks outside of Facebook interoperated at some level, they might eventually “flip the iceberg” and become the dominant form of social networking.

👓 Micro.blog, JSON Feed, and Evergreen Give Me Hope for the Open Web | Jonathan LaCour

Read Micro.blog, JSON Feed, and Evergreen Give Me Hope for the Open Web by

Jonathan LaCour (cleverdevil)

I've long been a believer in the power of the open web, but my passion for saving it has been ignited by the IndieWeb movement, as of late. More and more people are discovering their distaste for creepy, ad-driven content silos like Facebook. Today's post by Dave Winer on the evils of Facebook, and...

Title-less Status Updates for Micro.blog

Micro.blog just launched in beta recently and one of the biggest things burning up the airwaves there is how to easily post content from one’s own site as notes without including titles. Why? If a post has a title, then micro.blog thinks it’s an article and just posts the title along with a permalink to it rather than the desired content of the status update.

In the long run and for easier mass adoption, I’m hoping Manton can figure out how to parse RSS feeds in a simpler way so that users don’t need to do serious gymnastics to import their microblog posts from other sources. I’d imagine it’s far easier for him to adapt to the masses than for the masses to adapt to micro.blog. At the very worst, he could create a checkbox on the RSS import feeds to indicate which feeds are status updates and which aren’t and this would quickly solve the problem for the average user as most CMSes allow users to define custom feeds based on content type.

While there are a number of people doing things from simply adding date/time stamps (which micro.blog ignores) to functions.php tweaks to to custom plugins, some of which I’ve tried, I thought I’d come up with my own solution which has helped to kill two proverbial birds with one stone. (Note: I’ve listed some of these others on the Indieweb wiki page for micro.blog.)

The other day, I’d had a short conversation about the issue in the Indieweb chat with several people and decided I’d just give up on having titles in notes altogether. Most people contemplating the problem have an issue doing this because it makes it more difficult to sort and find their content within their admin UI dashboard which is primarily keyed off of the_title() within WordPress. I share their pain in this regard, but I’ve also been experiencing another admin UI issue because I’ve got a handful of plugins which have added a dozen or so additional columns to my posts list. As a result the titles in my list are literally about four characters wide and stretch down the page while knucklehead metadata like categories needlessly eat up massively wide columns just for fun. Apparently plugins aren’t very mindful of how much space they decide to take up in the UI, and WordPress core doesn’t enforce reasonable limits on these things.

So my solution to both problems? If found a handly little plugin called Admin Columns with over 80,000 users and which seems to be frequently updated that allows one to have greater simple control over all of the columnar UI interfaces within their sites.

In just a few minutes, I was able to quickly get rid of several columns of data I’ve never cared about, expand the title column to a reasonable percentage of the space so it’s readable, and tweak all the other columns to better values. Even better, I was able to add the slug name of posts into the UI just after the title columns, so I can leave status update titles empty, but still have a field by which I can see at least some idea of what a particular post was about.

My first title-less status update with a descriptive slug

👓 The duality of microblogging | Colin Walker

Read The Duality of Microblogging by Colin Walker (colinwalker.blog)

Further to the points I made in "Self-hosted microblogging - where does it fit?" I've been having more thoughts on how best to use Micro.blog and fit it into my own online ecosystem.