Mathew Duggan has a brilliant post called "Self-Hosting Isn't a Solution; It's A Patch". In it, he (correctly and convincingly) argues that compelling people to run their own computer services is a complex and distracting crutch for the current problems we face. It's expensive to self-host, there are moderation problems, and the difficulty level is too high for most people. But, in my opinion, I think he misunderstands something about self-hosting because, as a term, it is both misleading and …
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One of the most frustrating things in modern technology is the effort spent trying to artificially restrict abundance. Take, for example, this tale from museum-worker Aaron Cope: I was out with a friend who worked for Twitter and I asked them whether it would be possible for the museum to “create 200,000 Twitter accounts, one for each object in the Cooper Hewitt’s collection”. My friend looked at me for a moment, laughed, and then simply said: No. In that blog post, Aaron reveals that the…
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One of the reasons I'm still on the original Mastodon.social instance is that I am vain. I joined shortly after the project was announced and, as a consequence, I have a "joined" date of 2016 and a user ID of under 10,000. This doesn't make me an "elder statesman" and is rarely useful beyond bragging rights. If I moved to a different server, my "birthday" would be irrevocably lost 😢 But… what if I moved to a self-hosted Mastodon instance? Why! Then the database would be under my complete cont…
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I don't have a great memory. I often meet people who remember me, but I don't remember them. I've had whole conversations with people who clearly know me, but on whom I've drawn a blank. My phone's address book has a "notes" field, and mine is peppered with little aide memoirs about the people I've met. Things like this: And, I guess we've all got a contact like this, right? (Sorry, Geoff!) But there's no way to do that on Twitter or LinkedIn or any other social network I'm aware…
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I get a lot of random Twitter DMs from attractive women who are desperate to make friends with me. I usually report the obvious spammers. But a few weeks ago, one nearly slipped through the net. The woman was wearing a military uniform - a proper one, not a sexy Hallowe'en costume - and was asking a fairly sensible question of me. But something didn't sit right. Usually, these accounts have stolen photos and random names. But the name of the account matched the name on the uniform! A bit…
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Way back when Blackberry was the smartphone, my team at Vodafone obsessed over the idea of the "Unified Inbox". "What if," the marketing chaps said, "you could see all your notifications in one place!" Imagine a single inbox where your MySpace friend requests mingled with your Email. And your Facebook and Google Buzz notifications were in the same list. It was a lovely idea. And users all proclaimed that was what they wanted. But users lie. And good ideas fail when they come into contact…
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Play with the demo I was lucky enough to go to Number 10 Downing Street for a meeting a few weeks ago. A perfect opportunity for a photo of me by that famous door. Being the vain man that I am, I wanted to set it as my avatar photo. But Twitter and other social networks now use circular avatars. The "10" has been obliterated and part of my head is missing. So I've created a quick way to preview avatar images to see how they'll look on both squares and circles. It places a simple…
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The British are culturally predisposed to root for the underdog. I'd never been a massive fan of MySpace - but after the trials and tribulations it has gone through, I have a soft spot in my heart for it. So, when this email arrived, I couldn't wait to give it a go. Ok, so the email isn't formatted well for mobile - despite the fact that nearly 50% of all emails are read on the phone. With palpable excitement, I stabbed at the "Learn More" button. I waited with bated breath. Then - I…
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So, Yahoo! is to buy tumblr for $1.1 BEEEEEELLION. I don't understand money. Well, specifically, I don't understand how companies are funded, classify shares, or any of that finance stuff. But, there's something which has been bothering me about the recent sale of some social media properties. According to some estimates, tumblr has 170 million users. $1.1 billion / 170 million users is.... double checks workings $6.47 per user. Err... what? Even if those number are off by 50% - Yahoo have …
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Getting access to my Twitter archive opened my mind to the nature on transience of the media we create. Take, for example, this tweet and image: Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edenthttp://twitpic.com/2dhr3 - Loving #mint09 :-)❤️ 0💬 0🔁 012:24 - Mon 23 March 2009 Well... ok... fun at the moment it was taken, but does it have any use beyond that? On the off chance that I become a subject for scholars in the year 3723, perhaps. Should some media just be declared ephemeral? The word comes from th…
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We're in a fairly mature phase of social networks now. Broadly speaking, most social networks separate out into a few main groups. Eyes - e.g. services like Flickr for pictures and YouTube for moving pictures. Ears - e.g. AudioBoo for voices and SoundCloud for songs. Feet - e.g. FourSquare for where I am now and RunKeeper for where I have been (running). Hands - e.g. Etsy and Github show what I am creating. Mind - e.g. Twitter and Facebook for what I'm feeling and thinking, and…
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Only fools make predictions. So here are my predictions on the future of social media. In the original days of computing, every user had their own computer. Well, Turing had his own computer... Then, everyone had to timeshare on a massive mainframe. Later, every user had their own computer. Now, we're back to mainframes. Sure, we call it "cloud computing" or "thin clients" but it amounts to the same thing. That's the way technology works. It yo-yos between extremes. Think about web…
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