Excursions

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?

Here’s a snapshot with all the “new” Android smartphones being sold online, placed right next to one another. Yeah, there is so much of innovation, so much of “choice” in this space. 🙃

When you have “magic” in your name, you tend to suffer later. I was always sceptical of the promises Magic Leap was making. Demos looked too good to be true. Finally, their marketing team have realised they’ve overstayed their welcome. Back to reality.

Another day, another AMP horror story. AMP has to be the ideal use-case on how an incumbent on web muscles its advantage to make others embrace its proprietary non-standard technology. Will anyone even consider AMP without its prominence in search?

This is a running list of things I need to implement in Blotpub. I intend to pour my thoughts and prioritise. This may also go to github on things to come once finalised.

1. [Low] Support like and reply with data pulled xray. I am not sure what I plan to achieve out of this. It is primarily when I like a twitter post or an image posts, xray gives data in nice format. I would want to use that.
2. Media upload as multipart. I thing this should address the need for photo upload, mainly from quill. It is simpler as I have a reference of voxpelli’s project.
3. Media endpoint(?q=config). This is a big ask. First need to implement one without any reference. Second use it for photo upload.
4. Syndication (?q=syndicate-to). This should be simpler. Need to support sending posts to twitter. Again, I have the reference from voxpelli’s project.
5. Support for update/delete posts
6. Handle authentication issues reported by micropub.rocks

I would like that world. However, I think we tend to ignore the social aspect that Twitter has enabled. Yes, people need to own their content. But there will always be space for that one place where they can share their content and trigger discussions.

It would be important, and is incumbent on all players involved to not let that place become a mess like Twitter. Engaging community guidelines and stringent checks & policies for bots would need to be ingrained in the design.

It is important, but extremely difficult, to hit that right balance between being productive and being healthy. I often tend to hit the zones when I ignore my health, the sleep primarily, just because I do not know when to stop. I need to learn to say “no” to myself.