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…
Tag: social media
👓 All my Instagrams are MINE | Spitot 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
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:If you use an app like Talon, Tweetbot, Tweetings, or Twitterrific, there is no way for its developer to fix these issues.
- Push notifications will no longer arrive
- Timelines won’t refresh automatically
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.
🎧 ‘The Daily’: Can Facebook Be Fixed? | The New York Times
Five days after details about Cambridge Analytica were made public, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, broke his silence on his company’s role in the data breach.
Minutes after posting a statement on Facebook, he spoke with The New York Times.
On today’s episode:
• Kevin Roose, a business columnist for The Times.
Background reading:
• Facebook, in crisis over the Cambridge Analytica data breach, vows to bolster security and privacy.
• A transcript of Mr. Zuckerberg’s conversation with Mr. Roose and another Times reporter, Sheera Frenkel.
I think Roose humanizes Zuckerberg a bit too much in his discussion of his interview. Facebook has some of the best and brightest engineering talent and a multi-billion dollar war chest. They’ve known about their pending problem for quite a while now and should have long since begun building a remedy. The plain truth is that they’ve actively chosen not to. Worse, even with the swirling problems in the public consciousness, they’re not actively doing anything much to fix things after-the-fact other than paying it some lip service. If Zuckerberg is as seemingly naive as Roose suggests, he needs to be removed from his position.
I’m coming much closer to calling it quits on Facebook. I’ve outlined a plan for extracting myself and just need to begin implementation. I’ve even got a potential scalable plan for family/friends who would like to leave as well.
I actually feel like my remaining on the platform is subsidizing keeping many third world people on it, and the way Facebook has been and is operating in many other countries it becomes a moral issue which is forcing me to actively seek to leave it.
👓 Facebooked, Googled And Recovering Imagination | Identity, Education and Power – Medium
👓 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.
👓 Why Tweet? | Confessions of a Community College Dean
Some interesting and generally useful insight here. Sadly I didn’t see his Twitter handle attached to the post–at least on the mobile version. So much for the “promotion” accusation…
📺 Ricky Gervais: Humanity | Netflix
Live performance of British comedian Ricky Gervais filmed in London's Eventim Apollo.
I watched this in pieces over the last two evenings and finished of the tail end at lunch today.
I’ve often thought of Gervais simply as a crass entertainer, but there are so many interesting new dimensions which come out in “Humanity”, they give me newfound respect for who he is and what he’s doing now. This is far more complex than just simple comedy, he’s doing something much more significant with this particular performance.
I also haven’t laughed this hard in quite a while. Tears, literally tears. Perhaps most interesting is that he’s got a much wider range of emotions which he’s playing off of here than just the humorous.
Gervais has some really interesting philosophy hiding in here among the dark humor. He has an interesting take on comedy and what it does and doesn’t target. The bit at the end on social media was particularly interesting. His take on “The Commons” is quite solid and is something I don’t suspect many could expound upon so eloquently.
During the portion in which he talks about his favorite Twitter response ever, he looked down at his phone to quote the tweet. I was reminded of some of the comedy greats I’ve seen at clubs late at night reading out of their beat up notebooks to try out new material. For a moment I thought, “perhaps Gervais is trying out some new material live here.” If it’s the case, then he was genius, though I suspect now that it was just a useful prop to add to the narrative of the joke. Either way, just brilliant. I wonder when we’ll see comics at clubs reading off of phones instead of the old spiral bounds? I wonder if it’ll play an better than the index card or notebook?
His closer with the story about his mum’s death and the wonderful prank on the poor vicar put a wonderfully fine point on the entire piece. It is humanity indeed. If there were a god, I’m sure he’d bless Ricky Gervais.
📺 Zeynep Tufekci: We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads | TED
Zeynep Tufekci from ted.comWe're building an artificial intelligence-powered dystopia, one click at a time, says techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci. In an eye-opening talk, she details how the same algorithms companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon use to get you to click on ads are also used to organize your access to political and social information. And the machines aren't even the real threat. What we need to understand is how the powerful might use AI to control us -- and what we can do in response.
The IndieWeb has been compiling a list of silo-quits. If you know of anyone who has quit Facebook, feel free to either add them to the wiki or comment below with a note. #DeleteFacebook
I am tired of listening to comments on Facebook, mentioning it’s already too late or no point now or the platform is too valuable. We need to stop this. We are conveying to owners & other parties involved that don’t worry. It doesn’t matter how bad you screw up. You own us.
👓 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
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.
👓 Changes to Improve Your Instagram Feed | Instagram
I’ve got to think that this may not be the best week for making substantive changes to feeds on Facebook owned companies? This doesn’t seem too terribly intrusive as a change, but it still isn’t the linear ordering I wish they’d go back to.
👓 The Missing Building Blocks of the Web | 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
1.
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.
2.
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.
3.
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.