Software death

Over on Rubenerd[^lasthope], Ruben is upset about the death of his favourite feed reader, the Digg Reader.

First of all, who knew Digg still had products that people wanted to use. Second, I’m sort of in the same boat myself. Having just killed my Facebook account, while simultaneously soul searching about what I really want from social media, I’ve thought that maybe I can go back to consuming RSS feeds like I used to.

Only, I’ve logged into my self-hosted instance of Fever and fired up the beautifully made Press (RSS Reader) only to discover that Fever was shuttered and Press hasn’t been updated since 2014. Which isn’t a huge deal for now, as both still work (although Press can’t be found without a direct link), and they both work as well as they did two or three years ago when I stopped using them. The problem is - if I start using them again, relying on them like I used to rely on Google Reader (or as Rubenerd relied on Digg Reader) what will happen when they finally actually die like they inevitably will?

Ruben added a pretty exhaustive list of self hosted software including feed readers, which I will certainly go through and take a look at, but teasing out the right replacement is going to be a pain considering I need to ensure:

  • The software works well and is pretty (I can’t pretend I can use functional ugly software).
  • There’s an equally well made Android client so I can read on the bus.
  • I can install it on my rudimentary cPanel hosting that may or may not allow Ruby/Python etc, but will handle PHP like a champ.

And finally, breaking out of my dot-points into a fully fledged paragraph - I’m not certain a plain feed reader is going to cut it for me any more. When I said I’d been thinking about what I want from social media, I realised that Facebook was not doing it for me because it was full of the opinions of my friends and family, and not a lot more. People might have been posting stuff, but the Facebook algorithm was letting me down, and only showing me page after page of stuff I just wasn’t interested in[^offensive].

On the flip side, I use Reddit a lot, and the thing that has me wasting hours of my life there is that it surfaces the quality stuff that thousands, or tens of thousands of people have upvoted from thousands of different communities all in one place. So I can flip from reading a joke, to watching a Russian dashcam, to poring over an article about some new scientific discovery all from a single app. It means I’m not reading the same type of stuff over and over[^minusreposts], but a massive and diverse range of opinion and types of content from all over the world. And I just don’t think there are any other sites quite like it.

Again, there’s nothing that means I need to replace Reddit today either, just like I don’t need to ditch the feed reader that’s still working, but I also didn’t have to ditch Facebook when I did. But I truly believe as responsible modern citizens we need to make better choices about where our software takes us, and the technology we use to get there. Part of that is to stop using stuff that frustrates us, when the only reason we keep doing it is because everyone else is.

So I’m looking for the next Reddit, the next Facebook and the next feed reader all in one. Something that can keep me in touch with people I know and love, but also give me more of what other people I don’t know find funny or sad or inspiring. If something like this already exists, please let me know. If not, I’ll be waiting over here using technology that just hasn’t figured out its days are numbered.

[^lasthope]:One of the last remaining bloggers [^offensive]:No offence everyone! [^minusreposts]:OK, yes I’m not counting reposted content here

Unfriendly

I haven’t properly “blogged” here in so very long. With so many other social sites around like the Facebloops and the whatnots, it’s seemed a little pointless putting anything up here where no one would read it. I could post a pic of my kids on that site that everyone has an account for and get a bunch of interactions there instead, so putting the effort into this site seemed pointless.

The sheer lazyness of it is exactly what Mark Zuckerberg is counting on. Posting on Facebook takes no effort, it’s simple, and your pictures and rants and low effort posting gets seen and liked and commented on, and no one ever wants to leave, unless they held out for years and never joined in the first place. And if you want to chat to your mum, or your wife through anything other than SMS, are you really going to make them install something else like Telegram instead of just using Messenger?

But I can’t be lazy any more. I quit Twitter years ago (and finally deleted it a week ago), and this week I’m quitting Facebook. All the cool kids are doing it, but none of the cool kids I know do, so I’m the dumbass who has to look like a hipster wannabe rebel and close down my account. So I’m not “closing” it - I’ve simply deleted most of what information there was about me, unfriended everyone, and left a public message that people should email me or visit my site here from now on. I hope people don’t get too offended. I’ve already been told off my my wife for removing the fact that we’re married from her profile… I probably didn’t think through some of the side effects here.

I’m holding out for something new and federated. Something where I can own my data, but still share it in a way that’s easy and lets old friends and family I never get to see know I’m alive. There are promising beginnings out there, but they all suffer from not being easy to set up, or not having enough people, or just plain not being what I’m really looking for. And no, Slack isn’t it - it’s just as closed and proprietary as Facebook.

If you’ve come here from Facebook to see what I’m doing or get in touch, you can email me. My personal email is Josh (my name) at demands.coffee - I know it doesn’t look like an email address, but trust me it is. And if you want to instant message me, download and [add me on Telegram] - it’s the closest thing to Facebook Messenger I’ve found that actually cares about privacy, security of your messages, and is just plain useful. And if you’re really paranoid, I’ve got a Wickr account too.

You Won't Share This Post

Not so long ago, there was a much wider gap between the various methods for acknowledging online content. At one end, you had the option of reading something and then doing absolutely nothing. On the other, you had things like leaving a comment, emailing the post to a friend, or writing a blog post in response to another you read elsewhere. - Len Kendall - Don’t ‘like’ this post

A 'word cloud' in the shape of a fist in thumbs up gesture with the work 'Like' in big letters in the middle

by Like - Thumb Up by SalFalko

The habit of “liking” things on the internet would be difficult to break. But it inspires me a little because it gels with an upcoming experiment I have planned for The Geekorium.

To “like” (or +1) something is the lowest form of interaction you can have with someone’s post, and it saves you from having to put actual thought into your response. I think I’d rather have “likes” on my posts than nothing at all, but I’d certainly appreciate some thoughtful comments more.

Len points out that the “like” button is one-size-fits-all. There’s no way to say “I appreciate you posting this, even if I disagree with the content”. There’s no difference between liking your favourite noodle bar and liking news of your friends newborn son. And with the rise of sponsored posts on Facebook, your “like” on the noodle bar page now puts ads for that noodle bar front and centre above more important things like births, deaths, and marriages of the people I actually care about.

I expect this behaviour is here to stay, but I will try and think a bit harder before liking things in future, and I’d appreciate it if you’d do the same too.

Google+ (or Google Plus if you wanna be search-engine friendly)

So I’m hanging out on Google+. I mean literally of course - the second1 new social network that Google has launched in the last couple of years has a “hangout” feature where you can chat with lots of friends simultaneously via video. I’ve never tried it, so I’m sitting here in the hopes that someone will join in with me. No one has come past yet, but I think that says more about Australian/American time difference and my own social ineptness than the popularity of the feature. I hear very good things about it.

This article isn’t about that feature specifically. This is about Google+ in general. The new social network that totally isn’t trying to out-social Facebook2. It seems quite a hit! But then so was Buzz initially. You remember Buzz? The social network built knee-deep into GMail that a lot of people tried, but no one really liked3. There was also Wave - but that never made sense to most people4. I mock, but only out of love. Google, despite their failures are not a company to give up on something once they have it in their sights, and understandably they want to get in on this “social” act.

What “social” means exactly is anyone’s guess, but in vague terms it means somehow putting all that information you generate when you browse the web and share the cool stuff you find with your friends to use. Sites like Facebook are all about giving you a central place to post videos and photos you like so other people can see how witty and clever you are for liking Transformers before they were ruined5 by Michael Bay. This sort of sharing has come a long way since the web was made. It used to be that you had to own your own website and manually copy/paste links and videos into your pages and hope to hell that people might find, and occasionally re-visit, your site. Then sites like Blogger and Wordpress came along and made that somewhat easier, then Tumblr and Facebook - making those sorts of short and snappy link sharing posts easier and easier to do. Now you wave your mouse in the direction of the Facebook tab and it pulls out that it’s a Youtube video and picks out the title and description and even embeds the video, and you barely have to do anything. Well now Google is heading one step further. They aren’t there right now - Google+ is still a lot like Facebook on the surface - but deeper down the steps are there to become something massive.

Google+ is a service where you share your links, photos and videos with people in your “Circles”. You group the people you know into named Circles to make sharing easier and less prone to accidents of the “sharing photos of myself drunk with Aunt Sally” variety. For example, you create a “Work” circle, a “Family” circle and potentially a “Drunk shenanigans” circle. Then each time you post a picture or a report, you can easily assign it to be seen by the appropriate group. For the record: Facebook offers a similar option, but I’ve rarely used it, and I can’t imagine my mum has ever bothered.

Then there’s the Hangout feature I’ve mentioned above. When you’re online, you can set up your webcam for chats with whichever friends happen to be browsing Google+ at the time.

The third major feature at launch is “Sparks” - a kind of automatic interesting article finder. Type in a few keywords about what you’re interested in, and you get your stream filled with articles that match those keywords. I find this feature somewhat limited at the moment. A few of the articles it’s uncovered have been interesting, but mostly it’s just more of the same sort of thing I can get at one or more of a dozen similar services. Once it’s fully integrated into everyone’s Google account though - like my mum’s - I can imagine it being useful for some people to find new and interesting articles they might otherwise not go searching for.

Thus we get to the crux of the matter: integration. Google practically runs the web right now, despite the valiant efforts of Microsoft and up-and-comers like Duck Duck Go, and despite the sneak-in-from-behind services like Twitter and Facebook. If you want an answer to something you most likely start at Google and work your way from there. But Google recognise it’s only a matter of time before someone takes that “social” power that other sites like Twitter and Facebook have and turn it into a more useful information finding service. The power of social is to hopefully take it one step further and start recommending things to you before you even recognise you were looking for it. To help you dig out more reliable information - reliable because a friend or relative has already used it and shared about it6. Google is the biggest search engine on the planet and has been for years. On top of that, Google has sites like Blogger (for web pages) and Picasa (for photos) and - because you might not have actually heard of those - Youtube for video.

Google’s plan with Google+ has already started. You can “Plus One” any search result to indicate to other people in your networks that a particular website is a good result - similar to Facebook’s “Like” button, but on your search page. Now website owners can embed these buttons onto their sites, and you can “Plus One” after you’ve visited - the results are shown to your friends in their Google searches.

The next step will be to turn this functionality on on Youtube and their other properties. When you “Like” a video - soon to become “+1” no doubt - this will be added to your list of +1s on your profile and I’m imagining eventually integrated into your stream. As more and more Google properties are built onto the Google Plus platform, stuff you have found useful or beautiful or interesting will be offered to your friends and family as reliable content that they might also find useful or beautiful or interesting. It’s all part of Google’s plan to find ways to understand what you do on the web and make themselves more useful so you use them more7. It’s a grand vision. It’s easy to imagine this as the start of something big, which is why I’m so excited about it.

Screenshot of the Introduction presentation for Google Plus

Of course at the moment, it’s all seems much like the other services we know and love. This is not a bad thing. The fact that you can take your knowledge of Facebook (or Buzz etc) and move into Google+ is a huge bonus at starting time. If Google can layer more functionality over the top of this simple base, I imagine Google+ being a powerhouse of sharing and a massive database of knowledge.

This is just my initial reaction/summation of Google+. The best way to find out what it’s about is to give it a go. I’ve got some invites if you’d like to try it! Check out my +Josh posts and put me in one of your circles.


  1. or third? 

  2. But is really - everybody knows, you guys 

  3. not really deep down 

  4. although I never knew why - it was pretty straight forward 

  5. or exploded 

  6. It’s also to make advertising more profitable, but that’s another story 

  7. and see and click on more ads 

It's time this ended

OK, time to step it up a notch.

You have insurance…
        Right?

This poke war has gone on long enough