Humble brag alert - Micro.threads used up my free dyno hours on Heroku, for the 1st time. Plus few people successfully setup and used Blotpub. It’s gratifying to see something you build being of some help to others. May sound like minor wins - but for me, no win is ever minor 😁
🎥 I finished watching second season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel - boy, such a wonderful show this is. I don’t remember the last time when I loved all the characters in a show this much. Everyone’s charming, and goofy in his or her own way. And Mrs. Maisel? Marvelous! (★★★★½)
Social Networks won't fade away
Irrespective of what the popular belief is, the need for social networks is not going away — more so amongst those who are not technology oriented. Sure, some particular services that exist today may die down. But the medium won’t.
Just look at the history of the social media structures on the Internet. There has always existed a network of some form where every person that was connected could hang out. The initial users that adopted the digital life were techies, so their solutions were comparatively tech-savvy. I remember I have spent hours discussing and debating with my friends on IRC channels and on email groups and on XMPP-based IM clients.
I believe even in the world where not everybody and everything was connected, there existed mediums to communicate, to interact, to share. They might have been analog, or of forms that needed one to be in the presence of others. But they existed nonetheless.
In today’s age of smartphones, it’s become a lot simpler to get online and be “connected” with others. As a result, there are more people, more common non-techies, who are always on the look out for simpler ways to share their thoughts once they get online and stay in touch with others. They will sign-up with any service that promises them that. And they did.
Sure, the proponents of the open internet, myself included, dislike the current social networking behemoths - Facebook, and Twitter. But I think it is important to not let the disdain for these specific platforms turn into a complete rejection of the medium itself. There will always exist some structure that can facilitate communication in the form of text, images and other share-worthy stuff. The state became dire when we let a set of private entities wall this structure in their silos.
No doubt, Facebook and Twitter are in decline today. But the terrible scenario can recur if the common, but rising set of connected users is not provided with more open, more interoperable alternatives that are equally engaging and simple to use. And do so before other silos take over the medium again.
I know of the services that already meet the “open and interoperable” characteristic. But the majority contenders reek of “by-the-techies-for-the-techies” fervour. So there’s still a long way to go to meet the “engaging and simple” part — the one closest is Micro.blog. I believe there exists a group of brilliant minds that understands the importance of addressing this. It is incumbent upon this group to work towards that.
Apparently, Nokia is soon going to release a smartphone with five rear cameras. And two flashes. Yes, a total of seven holes at the back of your phone.
“Smile please”. “Sure. But which hole do I look at, again?”
I realised six months ago as I was using my Mac, using the menus, that I need these things — menus — in Codea. (…) So I set out to make the best menus I could make for iOS.
Though interesting, I do not like the concept of menus on iPhones. iPads? May be.
It is wonderful to slowly rouse from your sleep, you thinking it must be middle of the night, only to realise it is a perfect dawn outside. You know you have just had a calm, peaceful and healthy night of sleep.
I know am a bit late to share, but I always enjoy parsing through the findings from GitHub Octoverse. This year’s report is no different - some fascinating trends, some suppositions affirmed. Especially in the people part - “how, when and where developers build and learn”.
If you need to persuade someone to take action, you’re doing marketing.
Seth Godin on marketing. I believe my attempt earlier was to persuade more people to join Micro.blog. I didn’t want to use the word, but I guess I was marketing the platform.
xkcd, as always, gets it bang on why I dislike the smart computers of today correcting and reminding me continuously. And now they also start second guessing what I might say next. I cringe every time that happens.
It is always exciting to check the Pingdom monthly report. And always see zero outages with response times in 200-300ms range since I moved to a static site. At times, when intended purpose is simple, like a text-heavy blog, it’s better to select a solution that ain’t complex.