Excursions

Nature and family get-togethers go along pretty nicely

I am kind of bummed that no one here had any interest in Yahoo! Pipes. I really wish there was an alternative to that wonderful service. It would be so useful to deliver single feed from multiple sources. Also allows us to capture all mentions to single place.

Remember Yahoo! Pipes? I had built so many custom feeds combining different feeds using that service. With my recent pull back to RSS, I really feel a need for some such similar service. I wonder though if anyone else shares this need too.

I wish micro.blog becomes bigger, more diverse with more voices spread across the world, the timezones, narrate their stories. It becomes difficult for a user from a non-American timezone to benefit from the timeline. It is either crawling or swings past as you stay asleep. I have to consume posts via feeds and depend on Micro.threads to pull out posts that lead to discussion overnight.

I fear though if the place becomes bigger before there are tools in place to handle the scale, we may inundate it with too many voices and interactions. Making it extremely difficult and unpleasant to follow along for any person. We need to tread carefully.

It is important the service attracts both established and diverse voices. I am sure the awesome people behind Micro.blog are already planning for this.

Date 2018-08-11 01:15

It’s amusing to see the weekly reports from Screen Time. I knew I have been spending far less time in Productivity/Reading categories (as compared to Social Networking). I didn’t know it was this bad.

And, no surprises, Micro.blog becomes first app to hit App Limit.

Throughout the day, I read so many article which I would like to share to others. It also is an exercise so that I keep track of all the articles I havr read and liked over the years. However, sharing them instantly was polluting the feed. I wouldn’t want to see that from others in my timeline. So it was only fair for me to not do the same.

Hence, going ahead I plan to share a list of articles I liked through the day as a list. This is the first edition of the post.

1. Dave Winer feels may be it’s a good thing that Twitter hasn’t banned Alex Jones yet. And he is unhappy with the journalists for bashing Twitter incessantly for that.

“Their unwillingness to follow the herd is a sign of hope that we may continue to use the net to speak freely, even if the majority wants us silenced. And what does it say about journalism that there are few if any dissenters? You see this regularly, they’re too scared for some reason to present all sides of a discussion.”

2. Rebecca Cook disagrees with Dave completely. And she shares one of the heartfelt experiences she had during a community she visited, on December 15, 2012 to back why.

And any media executive who can’t see the harm in protecting the publishing power of a person who denies what’s real with such utter cruelty and disregard for the pain of his fellow citizens should be asked to explain himself. And then to explain again. What do you really believe in?

3. Matt Levine summarises Elon Musk’s latest stunt, attempting to take Tesla private. And does so perfectly.

Musk amusingly named his promotional flamethrowers “Not a Flamethrower” to get around shipping rules banning flamethrowers, and he seems to have learned the wrong lesson from that stunt. I suspect that naming his public company “Not a Public Company” won’t actually work to get around securities laws.

4. The world of technology and science never fails to fascinate me. Another such eye opening article. I had no idea that the nuclear tests carried out in 1950s to 1980s were prominently used for detecting fraud in Californian wine. And apparently Fukushima’s nuclear disaster has affected those tests.

I have been reading a lot of views from people who are leaving Twitter. But it is different from the Facebook exodus. They aren’t quitting. And I wondered why?

I still am on Twitter - accessed from website only. It’s work to sidestep the noise. But the community there has worth.

I read this post first in my feed reader. I wonder how these reads will get translated into BAT. Not sure if consumption in feed readers is a sizable chunk of regular web. But I guess it should be amongst intended Brave users.

Dave Winer wrote few of his thoughts on how the search engines need to improve with time. He was focused a bit on how it can make blogging valuable. However he also had a underlying criticism for current search engines, mainly Google.

Sorry Google, your search engine is showing serious signs of age and boredom. We can do so much better. (…) It’s (Google) been stagnant for too long. They clearly need some competition.

I think it’s high time the way search results are presented to the user had some rethinking and redesigning exercise done. Search for anything and it is still a list of links (or an AMP carousel when it fits your business needs) even after more than 15 years since it was introduced. I do not think there is anyone who ever paginates to the third page of search results. I would bet more than 90% don’t even go to the second page.

I believe when people search for something they have a fair idea of what they are looking for. Search engines need to be smart in understanding if the user is searching for a place on the web or a general query around concepts. If it is the former, it should present every data it has about that place, in a manner that  easy to grasp. Dave’s list already has some good ideas. Give as much context as there is out there.

For later, it is important to focus on credibility and transparency. For example when a query is on some technical concept, it is good to show the discussions on Stack Overflow. In addition, it would be good to also show the articles that were referenced from those discussions separately. Don’t go along sweeping the web for all the key words. Without credible shares, it hardly matters and just gets exploited. Someone sharing it while discussions attaches a credibility factor to it.

Google’s attempt with Knowledge panel is good. But I believe it needs to be more transparent in communicating why it is displaying what it is displaying there.

I am reading a lot of views these days from people I respect deciding to leave Twitter. And this is after a similar exodus from Facebook pretty recently.

But this time it looks to be different; for one they are putting too much effort with their Twitter profiles. They are deleting their tweets, resetting their profile information to convey that they are not “here” and resolving to not posting on Twitter again. Well, some are even ready to pay some shady¹ services to get the tweets deleted.

Brent Simmons did it. Matt Haughey followed a similar approach. And there are many more people doing the same.

I, on the other hand, was just reading through the articles and sitting there wondering what’s different this time. I was looking for that one argument to not simply delete the account. Quit Twitter completely. Best I could get was from Matt.

I’ll continue to read twitter occasionally, and I might keep on liking tweets, but I’m not going to send another tweet until the service changes or the management changes in very drastic ways.

Well, if you are still not exiting Twitter, how’s it helping? I am afraid the place will only become messier with all the respectable voices leaving the platform.

It’s like being part of a coffee club that used to meet often in a coffee house of the group’s choice. Each one of the group would talk and discuss on varied topics. It was a fun place where you could learn so much. And get to know of so many new things and news all around the world.

But slowly the coffee house became louder, with some hateful voices propagating their distasteful views. You look to the owner of the place and hope that he doesn’t be a jack and acts; you hope he asks these people to leave. And block them from coming to this place ever and ruining the experience of many such clubs as yours. But when you realise that the owner isn’t going to do so, you decide you need to act. So you decide to take your group and discussion to a better, saner place.

The question to ponder at then is would you still visit the old coffee house daily and see what’s being discussed and voiced and promulgated?