The Data Transfer Project was formed in 2017 to create an open-source, service-to-service data portability platform so that all individuals across the web could easily move their data between online service providers whenever they want.
The contributors to the Data Transfer Project believe portability and interoperability are central to innovation. Making it easier for individuals to choose among services facilitates competition, empowers individuals to try new services and enables them to choose the offering that best suits their needs.
Current contributors include: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter
Tag: social media
🔖 The Data Transfer Project google/data-transfer-project
The Data Transfer Project makes it easy for people to transfer their data between online service providers. We are establishing a common framework, including data models and protocols, to enable direct transfer of data both into and out of participating online service providers. http://datatransferproject.dev
cross reference: https://boffosocko.com/2018/07/22/data-transfer-project/
👓 Why I Needed to Pull Back From Twitter | Maggie Haberman
The viciousness, toxic partisan anger and intellectual dishonesty are at all-time highs.
👓 Connections | Kathleen Fitzpatrick
There are still some wrinkles to be ironed out in getting the various platforms we use today to play well with Webmentions, but it’s a real step toward the goal of that decentralized, distributed, interconnected future for scholarly communication. ❧
...the upshot is that this relatively new web standard allows for round-tripped connections among discrete domains, enabling the conversation about an individual post to be represented on that post, wherever it might actually take place. ❧
The fun, secret part is that Kathleen hasn’t (yet?) discovered IndieAuth so that she can authenticate/authorize micropub clients like Quill to publish content to her own site from various clients by means of a potential micropub endpoint.
I’ll suspect she’ll be even more impressed when she realizes that there’s a forthcoming wave of feed readers1,2 that will allow her to read others’ content in a reader which has an integrated micropub client in it so that she can reply to posts directly in her feed reader, then the responses get posted directly to her own website which then, in turn, send webmentions to the sites she’s responding to so that the conversational loop can be completely closed.
She and Lee will also be glad to know that work has already started on private posts and conversations and posting to limited audiences as well. Eventually there will be no functionality that a social web site/silo can do that a distributed set of independent sites can’t. There’s certainly work to be done to round off the edges, but we’re getting closer and closer every day.
I know how it all works, but even I’m (still) impressed at the apparent magic that allows round-trip conversations between her website and Twitter and Micro.blog. And she hasn’t really delved into website to website conversations yet. I suppose we’ll have to help IndieWebify some of her colleague’s web presences to make that portion easier. Suddenly “academic Twitter” will be the “academic blogosphere” she misses from not too many years ago. 🙂
If there are academics out thee who are interested in what Kathleen has done, but may need a little technical help, I’m happy to set up some tools for them to get them started. (We’re also hosing occasional Homebrew Website Clubs, including a virtual one this coming week, which people are welcome to join.)
References
1.
Aldrich C. Feed reader revolution: it’s time to embrace open & disrupt social media. BoffoSocko. https://boffosocko.com/2017/06/09/how-feed-readers-can-grow-market-share-and-take-over-social-media/. Published June 9, 2017. Accessed July 20, 2018.
2.
Parecki A. Building an IndieWeb Reader. Aaron Parecki. https://aaronparecki.com/2018/03/12/17/building-an-indieweb-reader. Published March 21, 2018. Accessed July 20, 2018.
👓 1.7 Million U.S. Facebook Users Will Pass Away in 2018 | The Digital Beyond
In 2010 my friends Nathan Lustig and Jesse Davis (founders of Entrustet, which was later acquired by SecureSafe) used data from Facebook and the Centers for Disease Control to estimate the number of Facebook users who would pass away in 2010. They updated these numbers in January 2011 and Nathan updated them again in June 2012. I picked up the task in January 2016 upon the request of a major news organization. Another recent media query prompted me to revisit these numbers and provide new ones for 2018.
👓 This Bot Tweets Photos and Names of People Who Bought 'Drugs' on Venmo | Motherboard | Vice
Venmo transaction data is public by default. But a programmer has taken that data stream and is tweeting the username and photos of users who buy 'drugs'.
👓 Instagram issues | NextScripts
Instagram made some very big changes to authentication process. About 70% of our users are affected by them. Before the changes the process was quite simple: Sometimes Instagram decided that login from SNAP is “unusual” and asked for confirmation. You just had to open Instagram on your phone and...
👓 What happened with Facebook | NextScripts
Facebook made changes to it’s API access policy on May 1st, 2018. As the result we introduced our own Premium API for Facebook. We feel that we need to explain how exactly those changes affected SNAP. Since the beginning Facebook native API was unrestricted. Anyone w...
Reply to UnixSysAdmin about integrating with Twitter
Unix Sys Admin (Twitter)@jgmac1106 Out of interest what are you using to generate 'pingbacks' from Tweets to your website? #seemsneat
— Unix Sys Admin (@UnixSysAdmin) July 17, 2018These are called webmentions they are the glue of the #IndieWeb https://t.co/p3TnFqXuD5 (https://t.co/Iv1xaki5t6)
— Greg McVerry (@jgmac1106) July 17, 2018Do you need to manually paste your URL into the tweets or is there a plug-in for browsers?
— Unix Sys Admin (@UnixSysAdmin) July 17, 2018
Articles 1, 5, and 6 in this highlighted series for Twitter will get you most of the functionality (and then some). However once you’ve enabled some of these related plugins, you can also do so much more than just use your site to interact with Twitter.
👓 Unfollowing Everybody | Anil Dash
At this point, there's nothing novel about noticing that social media is often toxic and stressful. But even aside from those concerns, our social networks are not things we generally think of as requiring maintenance or upkeep, even though we routinely do regular updates on all the other aspects of
Perhaps a bit too tech-y a solution, but everyone should be doing this. I need to schedule some time to cull my lists.
I did spend some time recently and culled out the corporate feeds from my Facebook and Twitter accounts that I’m already actively following via RSS.
📑 Unfollowing Everybody | Anil Dash
To that point, I've also basically not refollowed any news accounts or "official" corporate accounts. Anything I need to know about major headlines gets surfaced through other channels, or even just other parts of Twitter, so I don't need to see social media updates from media companies whose entire economic model is predicated on causing me enough stress to click through to their sites.
Some good general advice…
📑 Unfollowing Everybody | Anil Dash
It turns out, I don't mind knowing about current events, but it hurts to see lots of people I care about going through anguish or pain when bad news happens. I want to optimize for being aware, but not emotionally overwhelmed.
👓 Twitter robot purge | Nelson’s log
Twitter purged a bunch of robot accounts this week as some sort of effort to clean up their platform. You can see the personal result for you by logging in to you’ll see the falloff. My perso…
👓 On Generosity and Obligation | Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Kathleen Fitzpatrick)I am returning, at last, to the thoughts I was exploring in my recent posts on Miranda Joseph’s Against the Romance of Community (post 1 | post 2), and I’m starting to wrestle this morning with the big one: obligation. Thinking about community as a strategic rather than an idealized concept, community in its pragmatic coalition-building sense, leads me to consider the work required to create and sustain communities. If the kinds of communities that I am seeking in trying to imagine a more generous relationship not only between the university and the publics that it engages but also, crucially, within the university itself are first and foremost voluntary communities—self-organizing, self-governing collectives based in affiliation and solidarity—what exactly can we be said to owe those communities? Do those communities and our relationships to them impose obligations on us?
Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia
I am generous with what I have—I choose to be generous with what I have—precisely because we are no longer committed to one another as members of a shared social structure. Instead, the shift of responsibility for the public welfare toward private entities displaces our obligations to one another in favor of individual liberties and, I think, leaves us queasy about the notion of obligation altogether. ❧
The game theory of things tends to pull the society apart, particularly when it is easier to see who is paying what. If the richer end feels they’re paying more than their fair share, this can tend to break things down.
I suspect that Francis Fukuyama has a bit to say about this in how democratic societies built themselves up over time. Similarly one of his adherents Jonah Goldberg provides some related arguments about tribalism tending to tear democracies down when we revert back to a more primitive viewpoint instead of being able to trust the larger governmental structures of a democracy.
👓 The viral #PlaneBae story is raising some serious questions about how creepy social media can be | Business Insider
An unlikely couple became unlikely internet celebrities overnight in the #PlaneBae saga, and their experience raises some serious questions about privacy and social media.