![\"A](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2024/6c4ced55a6.jpg\")
\nI had some fun with ChatGPT and the image this conjured up for me.
There is engagement to be harvested at the extremes of everything.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-30T06:56:16-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/03/30/there-is-engagement-to-be.html", "tags": ["Productivity","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2025/12/07/i-decided-to-create-a.html", "content_html": "I created a Connect page on my site that is simply an index of my profiles on various platforms.
\n", "date_published": "2025-12-07T11:36:38-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2025/12/07/i-decided-to-create-a.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2025/11/22/i-dont-know-when-or.html", "content_html": "I don’t know when or what app did this but I finally purged a bunch of Twitter “profile” values from my Contacts database. Little housecleaning. Related.
\n", "date_published": "2025-11-22T10:18:02-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2025/11/22/i-dont-know-when-or.html", "tags": ["Productivity","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2025/11/17/farewell-weekly-thing-forum-and.html", "title": "Farewell Ponder and Weekly Thing Forum", "content_html": "In September 2023, I introduced the Weekly Thing Forum with the hope of creating a space for readers of the Weekly Thing to connect with each other and continue topics that may have started in the Weekly Thing. The Forum itself is hosted on Ponder, which aligns closely with the ethos of the IndieWeb and the Weekly Thing. Recently, Good Enough, the makers of Ponder, announced that Ponder is being shut down. With that, the Weekly Thing Forum is also going to come to an end.
\nIn the two years of the Forum, we had 86 people join and 107 discussions. We shared some exclusive POAPs, experimented with some different things, and did many other things. I briefly considered finding a new home for the Forum, but nothing made much sense. If folks really have an itch for that, there is the (very quiet) Weekly Thing subreddit at r/WeeklyThing.
\nI want to thank the gang at Good Enough for taking a run at something like Ponder. I also applaud that they gave everyone the ability to download a usable HTML archive of any groups on Ponder, as well as to delete their group’s data. They kept their focus on those core values even when things weren’t going the way they wanted, and I applaud that.
\nI will bring back the “Reply All” section whenever it makes sense. That will bring conversations that arrive in my mailbox from issues back into the newsletter at times. As a final nod and Thank You to Ponder, I decided to create a Farewell Ponder POAP and share it with users of the service. If you would like one, send me an email and I’ll get you a claim code!
\n", "date_published": "2025-11-17T20:34:54-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2025/11/17/farewell-weekly-thing-forum-and.html", "tags": ["Weekly Thing","Blogging","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2025/07/10/it-makes-me-super-nostalgic.html", "content_html": "It makes me super nostalgic that digg is back on the web — my profile. I felt compelled to order a shirt in celebration. 🎉
\n", "date_published": "2025-07-10T21:29:11-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2025/07/10/it-makes-me-super-nostalgic.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2025/05/15/this-is-a-bit-goofy.html", "content_html": "This is a bit goofy but I like goofy. 😊
\nThe initial run of 500 copies sold out in less than 24 hours.
\n![\"Yellow](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2025/458201db2e.jpg\")
\n",
"date_published": "2025-05-15T19:00:00-05:00",
"url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2025/05/15/this-is-a-bit-goofy.html",
"tags": ["Books","Social Media"]
},
{
"id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2025/05/02/a-reasonable-mental-model-for.html",
"content_html": "A reasonable mental model for X.com is as Elon Musk’s personal blog, with commenting enabled.
\nIt is no more a “platform” than a casino is a park.
\n", "date_published": "2025-05-02T22:26:27-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2025/05/02/a-reasonable-mental-model-for.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2025/04/26/im-having-fun-with-my.html", "content_html": "I’m having fun with my new profile photo. My previous one was the very first time I tried the Vision Pro and it was great, but I am loving this one with the bird on my hat from Discovery Cove. Perfect for the arrival of summer. 🤩
\n![\"Man](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2025/f79f35b72c.jpg\")
\n",
"date_published": "2025-04-26T21:39:19-05:00",
"url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2025/04/26/im-having-fun-with-my.html",
"tags": ["Social Media"]
},
{
"id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2025/04/03/blogging-as-a-gift.html",
"title": "Blogging as a Gift",
"content_html": "Engagement is the powerful drug of social platforms. Sometimes it is blatant and in your face, such as a notice that your post is trending. More often it is wrapped as a feature, such as analytics as addiction letting you know how many views, likes, and other such engagement your post receives. This feedback loop is a slot machine: random, addictive, and unpredictable.
\nBeing a blogger removes all of that. As Manton Reece, the creator of micro.blog, recently shared no one cares (for now), and that is okay. This is writing on the web. First off it is almost always harder to write a blog post. This post has structure, sentences and paragraphs, not just a “blurb” spewed into the melee. Actual thoughts strung together with English grammar. The open web lacks engagement devices such as those views, likes, and “re-whatevers”. You may trigger an email. I got one of those this morning from Manu on a post I wrote yesterday. That’s rare. And no one else knows. No one sees that I received a “❤️ 1”.
\nSo why do it? Why write post after post into the void with nobody engaging? Why bother with a more difficult approach?
\nI’ve been blogging for two decades. It isn’t all that different from journaling, but it is completely open and world readable. I would encourage bloggers to not think about the individual post. Instead, think about the collection of writing, over weeks and years, as a body of work. It is a body of work that you are constantly adding to. Growing and improving. The individual post is but one breath. It comes and goes. But over the course of time this adds up. It is the cumulative action that creates something truly great.
\nBut who is your audience? Who is this for? You. Yourself. Your family. Your friends. Your friend’s friends. Your neighborhood. And they can have it whenever they want. As a gift. A gift from you to them. Not a gift to be measured in engagement, but instead as a body of work. A gift to the web, which is a gift to people.
\n", "date_published": "2025-04-03T07:05:22-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2025/04/03/blogging-as-a-gift.html", "tags": ["Blogging","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2025/03/16/twitter-interview-from-years-ago.html", "title": "Twitter Interview from 16 Years Ago", "content_html": "While doing my blog gardening today I noticed that it was 16 years ago today that I was a guest on MPR’s Midmorning show talking about Twitter! I decided to give it a listen, and while I was at it I ran the audio through Whisper Transcription and added a transcript to the post. Listen or read! 😊
\nIt all seems very quaint in retrospect. I had been on Twitter at that time for 27 months and as John Moe shares in the intro it had 8 million users at the time. Moe quotes Joe Sucheray saying Twitter was “the end of the world.” He was maybe seeing better than Julio Ojeda-Zapata, my fellow panelist and I. I had almost forgot that John Hodgman joined us on the phone and that one of the callers “Dave” who teaches “Greek and Latin” is a friend of mine!
\nHashtags weren’t a thing. Moe even says “number sign”. The word “tweet” was only just forming. I refer to the “Twitterverse” at one point.
\nIt did give me a big warm smile at the end though when I got a plug in for using RSS! As Tammy reflected, some things never change! 😁
\n", "date_published": "2025-03-16T16:19:03-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2025/03/16/twitter-interview-from-years-ago.html", "tags": ["Blogging","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2025/01/23/i-have-about-posts-with.html", "content_html": "I have about 130 posts with embedded “tweets” on my blog. If those folks delete their account I delete my embed of those. It seems like every couple days I get errors because the original tweet has been deleted, and the account is gone. The steady stream of folks off of X continues.
\n", "date_published": "2025-01-23T22:00:03-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2025/01/23/i-have-about-posts-with.html", "tags": ["Blogging","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2025/01/18/i-could-not-care-less.html", "content_html": "I could not care less about Tik Tok, and would consider it an upgrade to the Internet for it to be removed from the US, and frankly everywhere else. The fact people care so much is proof of its intentional addictive design.
\n", "date_published": "2025-01-18T23:29:30-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2025/01/18/i-could-not-care-less.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2025/01/12/if-i-was-born-and.html", "title": "If I was born and brought up in the time of modern social media, would I even blog?", "content_html": "I saw Jatan Mehta reflecting on this question (on micro.blog no less — 👋 @moonmehta) and I couldn’t help but ponder the question myself.
\nFor context let’s get some things in order since the question is premised around time.
\nSo given the above it may not surprise you that my “too long, didn’t read” response to this question is a resounding yes, I would absolutely blog.
\nAnd I think it is worth noting that I only had a blog for about 30 months before getting on Twitter.
\nThinking more about the question though I think it is interesting to look at the framing.
\nProgression?
\nOne view is that this is like time and progression. We had vinyl records, then cassettes, then CD’s, then digital music. While records still are used they are an atypical use and we tend to think of this path as progress. One being better than the other. Is this appropriate for blogs? Are blogs the records and social media the CD’s? This would suggest that you can do the same things on either one which you cannot. I can’t even use simple bold and italics text on a modern social media platform in 2025. The very first blog ever made can do that. I can write long posts like this with paragraphs and complete thoughts. Most social media platforms do not allow this.
\nI would suggest that in reality the only things that social media and blogging share is some idea that a person is writing something, with or without limitations, that others may read. The book wasn’t replaced by blogs. There are many reasons and use cases that people will share their writing and they are not a progression. They can just be different.
\nEfficiency?
\nAnother view of this question is to look at efficiency or improvement. In the past we may have rode a bicycle, then we had a car, now we even have buses and trains. Fundamentally a bus or a train is far more efficient than a car. If so, why not get rid of our cars and use those only? How about apartments? An apartment is more efficient than a single-family home. Yet we haven’t decided to only live in apartments designed for maximum efficiency. This analogy to me is the one that resonates the strongest in this area because of the desire for self-expression.
\nSocial media is a lot like living in an apartment. There is a landlord who can decide to allow you to rent or not. There are rules and limitations. You cannot just paint the walls whenever you want and you certainly cannot just remodel the kitchen. You also have to modify your behavior. You cannot play your stereo super loud in the middle of the night. Consider that for a moment and it sounds like most social media platforms. You get an apartment — your profile. You can post as long as the landlord is okay with what you say. You cannot change the way your writing is displayed — no remodeling here. And as long as the landlord keeps the building up your words will be there. But you don’t own anything, and when they decide to sell the building you will go with it.
\nHaving a blog is like having a single family home. Want to remodel? Okay. Want to play your stereo? Okay, within the noise ordinances. Want to change the way the living room is laid out? Fine, none of our business. This is why I have a blog. I want to have my own space, and do my own things, and not be under a landlord. That also means I have to mow my grass, tend to the rain gutters, and manage the upkeep. And just like houses some take more of that than others.
\nCommercialization
\nThe final way I would look at this question is around the role of companies in our daily lives. Here there are some interesting paths. Let’s look at money. Most of us, including myself, have largely given up our right to transact freely and privately with cash. The tradeoff and convenience of credit cards is so great that we’ve largely agreed that we will allow a company to manage the engagement we have with others for money. With the rise of Venmo we’ve even done this for paying back our friend for an evening of bowling. Rather than handing him a private and secure $10 bill, we decide to allow multiple companies to sit in between that exchange because it is more convenient. To be honest I dislike that but I make that trade-off today.
\nSo how does that apply to me sharing my ideas. Well, before the web and before blogging we actually were in that model with companies in the middle. I could really only get my words to a lot of people if I had a company in the middle. Some publisher or media organization would have to decide that it was beneficial to them in some way to share my writing with others. They got something out of it, and also had their own opinions. The web changed all that forever. In the world of news Dave Winer captured this in 2009 with Sources Go Direct. But it isn’t just news. Thanks to the web and blogging I’m typing these very words on my computer on a Sunday morning. I’m going to hit publish soon and with no concern to the content you will read it. Are there still companies in the middle? Sure, but none of them cared what I wrote. They weren’t a publisher.
\nSo in this case the question about social media or blogging would be better stated as “Should we revert back to a model where companies will only share your writing for their benefit and people do not have their own voice?” While the modern social media company claims to not be editors (even though they are, especially with algorithms) they are only publishing your words because it is in their economic interest. In this case to get data, sell ads alongside, and algorithmic addict others, including you. So no, I don’t think we should go back to that.
\nOther blog posts on this:
\nCongratulations to Manton on the launch of micro.one! I have been a happy customer of micro.blog since launch and I love this new simplified version that makes blogging even more accessible at a super low $10 a year!
\nLiving inside the little box that a social media platforms give you, in exchange for your personal data, is oppressive. Having a voice on the web means having your own domain. Even the simple act of formatting with bold, italics, and using hyperlinks freely can only be achieved on your own blog. Take a moment to consider that. Using these massive surveillance systems is fundamentally curtailing your ability to express yourself. In return for what? Being fed an algorithmic stream of garbage to addict you?
\nHaving your own website has never been easier. And it isn’t free which is also how you know it is honest! My Grandpa, and probably yours too, taught me there was no free lunch. $10 a year to be able to express yourself on the web? So cheap. There is no way I know of to take a photo, attach a few sentences, and put them on the web better or easier than this.
\nIn celebration of the launch I would love to sponsor some micro.one users. Email me if you’d like to get your own blog but the $10 is a barrier… it is an extension of my Weekly Thing Christmas Blogs!
\nThere are organizations that I think are making the web better every day: Wikimedia, Let’s Encrypt, Internet Archive, Creative Commons. I think I need to add micro.blog to that list!
\n", "date_published": "2025-01-11T11:30:23-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2025/01/11/microone-making-blogging-more-accessible.html", "tags": ["Blogging","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2025/01/07/threads-moderation-changes.html", "title": "Threads Moderation Changes", "content_html": "There has been a lot of noise today about Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement on Threads about their moderation policies. My position is unchanged — private companies can choose their policies and along the lines of the law they can do what they wish. I don’t think it is even right to call it censorship. Am I being censored if I get kicked out of a mall for being a jerk? Nope.
\nI did find it wild that he posted this all exactly four years to the day from when he blocked Donald Trump from Facebook and Instagram:
\n\n\nWe believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great. Therefore, we are extending the block we have placed on his Facebook and Instagram accounts indefinitely and for at least the next two weeks until the peaceful transition of power is complete.
\n
I actually temporarily disabled my blocker so I could access this. Text of Zuckerberg’s statement today, in normal text instead of a “Thread-storm”. Seriously people, blogs exist and you can type more than a sentence in a post. How about fixing that?
\n\n\nIt’s time to get back to our roots around free expression and giving people voice on our platforms. Here’s what we’re going to do:
\n\n
\n- Replace fact-checkers with Community Notes, starting in the US.
\n- Simplify our content policies and remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.
\n- Change how we enforce our policies to remove the vast majority of censorship mistakes by focusing our filters on tackling illegal and high-severity violations and requiring higher confidence for our filters to take action.
\n- Bring back civic content. We’re getting feedback that people want to see this content again, so we’ll phase it back into Facebook, Instagram and Threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.
\n- Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.
\n- Work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more. The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world and the best way to defend against the trend of government overreach on censorship is with the support of the US government.
\nIt’ll take time to get this all right and these are complex systems so they’ll never be perfect. But this is an important step forward and l’m looking forward to this next chapter!
\n
![\"Screenshot](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2025/threads-zuck.png\")
\n",
"date_published": "2025-01-07T21:10:41-05:00",
"url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2025/01/07/threads-moderation-changes.html",
"tags": ["Social Media"]
},
{
"id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2024/12/15/hey-linkedin-do.html",
"content_html": "Hey LinkedIn,
\nDo you remember in 2013 when you started routing emails through your proxy server without asking users about it?
\nI do.
\nBecause of that you will never have an app on my device. You are only allowed in the web browser where it is safe.
\n![\"LinkedIn](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2024/ac462b8cf7.jpg\")
\n",
"date_published": "2024-12-15T22:13:10-05:00",
"url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2024/12/15/hey-linkedin-do.html",
"tags": ["Privacy \u0026 Security","Social Media"]
},
{
"id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2024/12/15/this-twoway-comment.html",
"content_html": "This two-way comment system that @manton has setup with Bluesky is pretty cool to see in action. I replied to a comment left via a Bluesky authentication on my blog and it showed up as a post on Bluesky a few moments later. Pretty cool! 👏
\n", "date_published": "2024-12-15T08:35:31-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2024/12/15/this-twoway-comment.html", "tags": ["Blogging","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2024/12/07/the-start-of.html", "content_html": "The start of a list. Social media is…
\nCould the micro.blog discover section take a very different approach? The curation was nice but I doubt sustainable.
\nHow about a sampling technique using a percentage of all posts that are not replies and including them? I feel like that would work pretty well. Not algorithmic, just a sample rate.
\n", "date_published": "2024-11-26T20:58:05-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2024/11/26/could-the-microblog.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2024/11/16/you-can-find.html", "content_html": "You can find me on the web.
\nSo much chatter lately on leaving social platform this to go to social platform that.
\nThe new thing.
\nThe better thing?
\nWhat is everyone chasing?
\nI’ll be right here on the web.
\nSame place I was before.
\nSame place I’ll be in the future.
\n", "date_published": "2024-11-16T20:19:47-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2024/11/16/you-can-find.html", "tags": ["Blogging","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2024/11/16/rip-thingles.html", "title": "RIP @thingles", "content_html": "The steps…
\nWhen I joined Twitter in December 2006 as user 82,903 it was fun and new. It was an open platform with a lot of experimentation. Twitter clients were super innovative. I remember posting via SMS! The creation of “retweets” by the community before the platform figured it out.
\nBut the fun turned sour over years. I don’t believe there is a good form of social media. It isn’t the logo on the front or who is running it. It is the fundamental thing. It is addictive software patterns and amplification of engaging content with no regard for our health or wellbeing.
\nI honestly can’t think of an innovative new thing to come from social media in the last several years. It isn’t about the product anymore, it is just marketing.
\nSo in November 2024, it was time to cut the last vestige of social media I had. It was time to delete my Twitter X profile. I had destroyed everything else I had on that site but had left my profile there. The only utility of that was to hold my username. But I don’t want any connection to these networks. It isn’t about the brand. I believe they all end up in the same place. There is no healthy cigarette. No good form of gambling.
By way of this post please be aware that any content or information that may appear on X is absolutely not from me.
\n
\nI had some fun with ChatGPT and the image this conjured up for me.
I’m seeing a lot of people that I was connected with on Twitter X deleting their profiles. This actually ends up having an impact on my blog because of embeddings. When I left Twitter years ago I exported my archive and imported it into my blog. Over the years I’ve merged that content in as “native” as I can. The reality is that Twitter status updates are often very different than a blog post.
There were a number of retweets that I did that I also migrated. When I did those I used Hugo’s ability to embed a Tweet using a shortcode. That results though in build errors if those Tweets become unavailable. I get an error that looks like this (I anonymized the identifiers).
\nError: ERROR Failed to get JSON resource "https://publish.twitter.com/oembed?dnt=false&url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fusername%2Fstatus%2F123456789123456": Failed to retrieve remote file: Forbidden, body: "{\\"error\\":\\"Sorry, you are not authorized to see this status.\\",\\"request\\":\\"\\\\/oembed?dnt=false&url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fusername%2Fstatus%2F123456789123456\\"}"
I debated how to approach this and decided that I would delete my references to these as well. That seems like the best way to honor the original authors intent. They deleted that content themselves. The result is that I’ve deleted several historical posts on my blog in recent days as people have deleted their accounts on X. Mostly those posts had no meaningful content from me.
\n", "date_published": "2024-11-16T12:14:44-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2024/11/16/how-im-handling.html", "tags": ["Blogging","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2024/11/09/the-business-of.html", "content_html": "The business of social media is the business of addiction.
\nThese are the tobacco companies of our time.
\nAt some point in the future…
\nWe’ll learn how they knew all along their product was bad for us.
\nEventually society will shun it as a bad habit.
\n", "date_published": "2024-11-09T09:51:16-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2024/11/09/the-business-of.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2024/05/18/microblog-just-added.html", "content_html": "Micro.blog just added a new feature to comment directly on a blog post on a hosted blog, instead of having to do it in the timeline on micro.blog. This also allows you to authenticate a comment using Mastadon or Blue Sky, in addition to micro.blog itself. Easier commenting now available!
\n", "date_published": "2024-05-18T17:48:38-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2024/05/18/microblog-just-added.html", "tags": ["Blogging","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2024/04/13/the-open-foundation.html", "content_html": "The open foundation of the Fediverse continues to pique my interest and outweigh my disregard for social applications. I created Mastodon profiles and setup syndication for @jamiethingelstad@mastodon.social as well as @weeklything@mastodon.social. I currently publish to BlueSky and Nostr as well.
\n", "date_published": "2024-04-13T08:12:07-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2024/04/13/the-open-foundation.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2024/01/30/backed-project-tapestry.html", "title": "Backed Project Tapestry from Iconfactory", "content_html": "Iconfactory launched a Kickstarter campaign for Project Tapestry today. Iconfactory is a great company that has built some of the most delightful experiences (Linea, Frenzic, Twitterific). Tapestry intends to be an open “timeline” of content from a variety of services. I’m intrigued because of the focus on open systems and the world-class skills of Iconfactory. Backed!
\n![\"Promotional](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2024/fc7f09514c.png\")
\n",
"date_published": "2024-01-30T19:45:00-05:00",
"url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2024/01/30/backed-project-tapestry.html",
"tags": ["Technology","Social Media"]
},
{
"id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2024/01/29/online-handle.html",
"title": "Online Handle",
"content_html": "Jim Nielsen’s Online Handles blog post caught my eye. I figured I would share too.
\nRecently I started using jthingelstad just for clarity. However, decades prior I always went by thingles, which was my very first Unix account username at the U of MN. It was just my last name truncated to eight characters, but the list had misspelled and transposed the e and l in my name.
\nI embraced it, but it aggravated even more the most common misspelling of my name.
\n", "date_published": "2024-01-29T21:55:30-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2024/01/29/online-handle.html", "tags": ["Technology","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2024/01/15/ive-been-finding.html", "content_html": "I’ve been finding micro.blog a bit noisy lately. I was contemplating what to do about it and then I remembered that there is an option to “Show posts but no replies” for the timeline. I switched to that and am finding it much more relaxing again.
\n", "date_published": "2024-01-15T15:56:21-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2024/01/15/ive-been-finding.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2023/12/23/i-won-the.html", "title": "Everything happens so much.", "content_html": "I won the auction for the “10 of 10” museum quality brass plaque that Jeff Atwood auctioned in his I Fight For The Users post. It arrived today and is even more awesome in person! 🤩
\nDescription from the eBay listing:
\n\n\nLet’s celebrate the death of Twitter in style, with the best tweet of ALL TIME! This museum quality brass plaque features a famous tweet on June 28th, 2012 (which just so happens to be Elon Musk’s birthday) by @Horse_ebooks that reads, “Everything happens so much.” It’s almost 8 pounds, 14" wide by 8" tall, and will outlive all of us, regrettably. Includes brass bolts for mounting, too (not pictured). All proceeds are donated directly to The Trevor Project charity, which provides 24/7 crisis support to LGBTQ young people.
\nThis is a unique item, 1 of 10 in the world, and it’s for a good cause, so bid appropriately :)
\n
![\"Black](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2023/5103b9c54b.jpg\")
\n![\"Dark](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2023/a69c3952db.jpg\")
\n",
"date_published": "2023-12-23T15:49:33-05:00",
"url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2023/12/23/i-won-the.html",
"tags": ["Social Media"]
},
{
"id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2023/09/22/introducing-weekly-thing.html",
"title": "Introducing Weekly Thing Forum",
"content_html": "I’ve been sending the Weekly Thing for six years. Every week I will get a few replies from people about a specific article, topic, or comment from that week. Getting those replies is great, and sometimes I’ll get multiple replies on the same thing and think it would be interesting to extend this conversation. I’m putting the Weekly Thing Forum out there for just that reason, to create a broader dialog and to continue to learn together.
\nPlus I hope it is just fun, in an old-school Internet sort of way.
\nBefore the Forum I have tried some very limited experiments to create some further dialog. I tried chat platforms like Telegram, Signal, SimpleX, and Wavelength Messenger. Only Telegram and Wavelength got more than a handful of people, and it just didn’t fit well. Chat platforms are very high frequency and that didn’t match well with the Weekly Thing. They don’t suit themselves to well thought out dialogue.
\nI played around with Reddit and Discord as well. Discord is way too much of a commitment. Reddit is crazy land. So neither of those were good fits either.
\nThen I got an email from a Weekly Thing reader, Barry Hess. Barry is one of the principles behind Good Enough where he and some other like minded technologists are passionate about creating principled products. Ponder is one of them. Barry reached out to see if I might want to use Ponder for the Weekly Thing. 🤔
\nThe fun thing is that my friend Garrick Van Buren had already introduced me to Ponder via a group he had created. So I was familiar and thought it was a great, simple, clean and easy-to-use place to host a Forum. No privacy concerns. No algorithms. Just a place to connect with people in a thoughtful and meaningful way.
\nOver the summer I mulled this over and decided to give it a go!
\nSo here we are, the Weekly Thing Forum!
\nI don’t know exactly where this will go. I think it would be great to continue dialog about articles that are in the Weekly Thing. It would be fun to do “Ask Me Anything” kind of things. It would be super to bring in additional perspectives. Overall, I’m hoping to increase connection and shared learning.
\nThanks for checking it out! Thanks for reading the Weekly Thing! And thanks for being great!
\nJoin the Weekly Thing Forum!
\nThis messages is also posted in the forum.
\n", "date_published": "2023-09-22T18:08:08-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2023/09/22/introducing-weekly-thing.html", "tags": ["Weekly Thing","Blogging","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2023/09/06/thank-you-elon.html", "title": "Thank You Elon", "content_html": "I signed up for Twitter on Wed Dec 20 21:25:24 +0000 2006, claiming user number #82,903.
\nTwitter quickly became one of the services that I used multiple times everyday. I published thousands of Tweets over the years and followed hundreds of people. I got so into Twitter that my blogging suffered. Over time I became very critical of social media. My opinion has only gotten more convicted about that. For years now I’ve blocked every Facebook property to avoid their surveillance ecosystem. I’ve deleted or disengaged from nearly all social platforms.
\nExcept for Twitter.
\nI experienced Twitter in the early days when it was so fun. I used Twitter over SMS posting and receiving updates (they weren’t called tweets yet) via text messages! Twitter was such a fun and playful place. I made a Twitter Bot that shared the temperature in my attic. In fact, at one point I had at least eight different Twitter accounts for various projects.
\nI tried to quit Twitter, multiple times. I’d delete the apps from my phone. I deleted all my tweets. I even unfollowed everyone, destroying my social graph. I still kept a little trickle of Twitter by using an RSS feed to track some key people. Then I would get sucked back in.
\nUntil now.
\nThank You Elon! Truly, you have helped me get out of a 17 year addictive relationship with Twitter. I had tried so many times to disengage from Twitter, but it never lasted. But now, it is easy.
\nThere is no Twitter.
\nI can’t tell you how much easier it is when the thing your addicted to just goes away.
\nI realize there is something now called X. I have no idea what that is. I didn’t sign up for it. The logo is ugly. I have no interest at all in X.
\nTwitter though, that was one heck of a drug. Thanks for helping me to kick the habit.
\nPS: Thank you for making Tesla because it is a great car and has moved the industry along. I’ll likely buy another in the future. ⚡️
\nPPS: Also thank you for SpaceX cause that is changing the game for space access. 🚀
\n", "date_published": "2023-09-06T22:28:19-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2023/09/06/thank-you-elon.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2023/07/17/suggested-rule-the.html", "content_html": "Suggested Rule:
\nThe quality of a social network decreases by the square of the quantity of posts about social networks.
\nGet above 10% and there is nothing left.
\n", "date_published": "2023-07-17T16:01:16-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2023/07/17/suggested-rule-the.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2023/07/09/im-not-particularly.html", "content_html": "I’m not particularly enthusiastic about Bluesky but I do have it setup and have micro.blog syndicating my posts. I do like how Bluesky supports using your domain as your profile name and was happy to set that up. You can find @jamie.thingelstad.com and @weekly.thingelstad.com.
\n", "date_published": "2023-07-09T18:57:52-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2023/07/09/im-not-particularly.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2023/07/08/what-if-facebooks.html", "content_html": "What if Facebooks only goal with Threads is to damage Twitter.
\nIn this context, Twitter looks like Fitbit and Threads like Apple Health.
\nFull platforms versus a feature.
\n", "date_published": "2023-07-08T12:20:29-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2023/07/08/what-if-facebooks.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2023/07/02/thanks-to-very.html", "content_html": "Thanks to very detailed directions from Matt Langford (@mtt) I was able to add NIP-05 Verification to my micro.blog hosted site with a custom plugin to create the nostr.json link.
\n", "date_published": "2023-07-02T08:54:41-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2023/07/02/thanks-to-very.html", "tags": ["Blogging","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2023/06/11/i-had-wished.html", "content_html": "I had wished for a micro.blog plugin for NIP-05 Verification and then I realized there are many things that use Well-Known URI including NIP-05 Verification and Lightning. Maybe a micro.blog plugin to create Well-Known endpoints would be better? Could have templates for services.
\n", "date_published": "2023-06-11T08:14:35-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2023/06/11/i-had-wished.html", "tags": ["Blogging","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2023/06/08/wish-list-microblog.html", "content_html": "Wish List: Micro.blog plugin to create the static file needed for self-hosted NIP-05 verification. I think this would be really easy to make? And would be a nice compliment to recently added Nostr cross-posting support. 🤞
\n", "date_published": "2023-06-08T22:50:32-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2023/06/08/wish-list-microblog.html", "tags": ["Blogging","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2023/05/31/today-microblog-added.html", "content_html": "Today micro.blog added cross-posting support for Nostr! I’ve been having fun playing with Nostr using Damus as the client. Now I’ll be able to syndicate my blog posts to my Nostr profile as well. 🎉
\n", "date_published": "2023-05-31T21:36:51-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2023/05/31/today-microblog-added.html", "tags": ["Blogging","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2023/05/26/i-now-have.html", "content_html": "I now have a Bluesky Social account (thanks Maique for the invite!) and with micro.blog syndication anything I post on my blog will appear there too. Curious to explore Bluesky and see what it does well.
\n", "date_published": "2023-05-26T17:05:04-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2023/05/26/i-now-have.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2023/05/19/great-session-nostr.html", "content_html": "Great session “Nostr vs. Everything” with Will Casarin, Vlad Stan, and Pablo Fernandez moderated by Rockstar Dev at Bitcoin 2023.
\n![\"Panel](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2023/5572a76f00.jpg\")
\n![\"Packed](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2023/8f871e0446.jpg\")
\n",
"date_published": "2023-05-19T09:27:32-05:00",
"url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2023/05/19/great-session-nostr.html",
"tags": ["Travel","Crypto","Social Media","Bitcoin 2023"]
},
{
"id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2023/05/10/created-a-nostr.html",
"content_html": "Created a nostr account to play and see how it works. Using Damus on iOS for client. My public key is npub19qj5v5hx54pm7gqtn5zallvrtc2pf4mudgvyj3x9y97ggtse8nmq0tas0s.
I ran across this Adopt a Character campaign from the Unicode Consortium and felt like a donation made sense. But what emoji to pick? After thinking through a few I decided Thinking Face. 🤔
\n![\"Round](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2023/7f8b8600c1.png\")
\nThis is fun, but I think it would be so much cooler if this program worked by selling NFTs. It has all the right characteristics with Gold and Silver levels being limited, and Bronze being “open editions.” It would be really fun to have this in my wallet as proof of participation.
\n", "date_published": "2023-02-19T14:55:24-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2023/02/19/i-adopted-thinking.html", "tags": ["Crypto","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2023/02/05/not-writing-for.html", "title": "Not Writing for the Timeline", "content_html": "I’m done writing for the timeline.
\nThere is a concept in Indieweb communities called POSSE. The acronym stands for publish on your own site, syndicate everywhere. This approach is an attempt to give you the best of all worlds. You can own your own content. Solve the not your domain, not your words problem. Then use various tools to syndicate your content to other services.
\nIt is a fine idea but in practice I think it is broken.
\nThe medium affects the message. Ultimately how you write and publish affects your writing. Social media brought with it whole new norms. No titles for content. Short posts. No rich markup so images and links are handled as metadata.
\nSome of this, like titles being optional and brevity, are probably good things.
\nBut others are not. And when you syndicate to various platforms it is hard to not have that ultimate destination impact your writing.
\nWhat does this look like?
\nOn micro.blog limiting myself to four photos because I know that when it syndicates to Twitter it will only include the first four.
\nBeing cautious about which hyperlink to use first because that is the one that will show up on Twitter regardless if it makes sense for the content.
\nNot using titles because it changes how syndication works.
\nI’ve even seen posts use hashtags and @username conventions on a platform that is ignorant to them, but are solely intended for the service it is syndicated.
\nI disconnected my blog from all syndication and it is interesting how freeing it has felt.
\nI use titles more. I use the number of photos I want. I add links where they make sense.
\nWriting for a timeline is a job. The timeline is a distilled and sterile system to give the algorithms an equal chunk of content to drive engagement. The limits of those chunks are non-sensical outside of that timeline.
\nLet’s break free of the timeline.
\nLet’s make the web weird again.
\n", "date_published": "2023-02-05T16:28:22-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2023/02/05/not-writing-for.html", "tags": ["Blogging","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2023/01/22/antisocial.html", "title": "Anti-Social", "content_html": "Social media is a mess.
\nI’ve lost track of what is social about it. It is a Skinner Box of addiction. The reductionism of a timeline is tiresome. The dopamine inducing likes are there to create some saccharin view of engagement.
\nI recently noticed that I was falling back into behavior I had broken out of years ago. I was again finding myself checking the Twitter timeline to see what is happening. Then I would feel bad about introducing into my brain all this random crap. The coach part of me knows this isn’t what I should be doing. But the monkey brain loves to see new things, chase them down, and play with the ideas in my head.
\nThe problem is me Twitter, not you. Actually that is wrong. The problem is both of us. The problem is actually the entire social media model. It is an apparatus of addiction built around nothing. There is no there to find. There is no end to reach.
\nSo I unfollowed every account. If you notice I unfollowed you on Twitter, don’t take it personally. It’s me, not you.
\n", "date_published": "2023-01-22T20:57:18-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2023/01/22/antisocial.html", "tags": ["Productivity","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2022/12/28/on-audience-capture.html", "title": "On Audience Capture", "content_html": "When I first started writing the Weekly Thing the email service showed me two reports that I knew I didn’t want to see. The first was who opened the email, when, where, on what device, and how often. That was a clear violation of privacy. What business do I have knowing what you do in your mailbox? None. The second report was which links got clicked on the most. This caused me grave concern right away. I felt certain that knowing what links people clicked on would influence the content I wrote about each week. Even if I could somehow convince myself that I wouldn’t be influenced, how could I possibly prove that I wasn’t? Thankfully the service allowed me to turn off both of these capabilities.
\nThe thing I was worried about was audience capture. Particularly with a project like the Weekly Thing, where I’m exploring the topics that are interesting to me and sharing that journey with others, audience capture has the potential to impact me as the author in ways that could change my journey and where my exploration took me.
\n\n\n[Audience capture] involves the gradual and unwitting replacement of a person’s identity with one custom-made for the audience. — The Perils of Audience Capture
\n
I do many things to limit the amount of advertising I’m exposed to. I pay for ad free versions of services if I can. I run an ad blocker. Frankly I just limit the amount of advertising supported content that I’m exposed to. I also work hard to limit algorithmic promotion of content. Some of that is about protecting my privacy, but more important to me is protecting my liberty.
\nWhen I think of my liberty I’m considering the ability to act as I please, without constraint and on my own discretion. That last part is the one that I worry about in regard to advertising, or algorithms prompting me with information. It is also the primary concern about audience capture.
\nThe mechanics of audience capture on the web tend to start with analytics. We have analytics for nearly everything. All social media platforms show you analytics on your profile like the number of followers you have, as well as analytics on each item you share in the form of views, likes, shares, and more. I believe services have weaponized this, making analytics as addiction, and the same features open the door for getting captured by your audience.
\nThis bit from the Waking Up podcast is what got my head spinning on this topic in the first place.
\n\n\n[27:01] “If I’m alert to anything, it is to not getting captured by my audience. If ever I were to find myself not wanting to say something for fear of how the audience will respond even though I think it’s true and important, that’s the thing I know I can’t do. There’s obviously a problem of audience capture in the podcasting and alternative media space. This is true wether one is getting support directly by subscription or donation, and it’s also true if you are running ads. And in several cases the evidence of audience capture is absolutely clear. There are people who’ve done 50 episodes more or less in a row on the same topic as though they had lost interest in every other thing on Earth. What’s going on there? There is some training signal coming from the audience, and almost certainly a bad economic incentive that is capturing that podcast host.” — Sam Harris, On Disappointing My Audience
\n
That whole bit from Harris is compelling, but I bolded the key component that I think we need to be mindful of. The same way that we can train an algorithm given a data set and a target, we can also train people by giving them a training signal from the audience. That training signal is the stream of analytics.
\nI think you could take this further. Something akin to a principle or rule:
\nThe more detailed metrics you have on an audience, the more likely you are captured by that audience.
\nThe metrics provide a mirage of insight and influence. It “feels like” you are learning more about the audience, but you may be modifying yourself to fit the pattern of what you see in the data. Your audience engages a lot with this one topic? It seems far too likely that more of that will start appearing in front of you. In reality all of this data bends and shapes the creator to fit into the mold of their audience.
\nThe opposite is also true. The fewer metrics you have, the less likely you are captured by your audience. I publish the Weekly Thing using Buttondown and I have no tracking of open rates or any links that people click on. Since I have no way of knowing what links people click on, I have no way of being captured going forward. I know that the next set of links I select are for sure not driven by what I think people will click on, since I don’t even know what people click on!
\nIn general, as a creator, I think we need to be very cautious about what data we collect, and how we plan to use that. Don’t collect data unless you know how you are going to put it into action.
\nAudience capture is an interesting concept for people that publish things. Bloggers, podcasters, newsletter writers all have obvious audiences. But it no longer stops there does it? Thanks to social media services we all have an audience, in fact many audiences. You have a set of followers on Facebook, or Twitter, or LinkedIn. Those services give you many metrics about how your “followers” engage with the content you share. This is a perfect setup to be captured.
\nMuch has been written about how social media damages discourse and how people do all of this performative dunking. Typically that is connected with the idea of eroding civility, or not knowing the person as a person but as just an avatar. But some of that performance could obviously be for your audience as well. And if the likes pile in the right way, the vicious cycle will continue. You become what your audience rewards. If you are in a room full of barbarians, be mindful of what they will reward!
\nAs we ponder the challenges of social media, perhaps it is worth considering if we really need another audience — and if so, how will this audience influence us and impact our identity.
\nAudience capture is easy to personify in the form of a person, particularly an individual creating something. Clearly the activities of thousands of people in the audience can have impact on that one creator. However, I don’t see any reason that an audience can’t capture a brand or a company.
\nA company doesn’t have liberty or free will. So the capture of a company or brand is very different. In fact, many brands may want to be captured. That may be their ultimate goal. And for some there may be no downside to that. Harley Davidson is probably a better company if they are captured by their audience. They may call that customer obsessed!
\nBut take a moment to think of media. Is media bias accurate? Or is it more accurate to say media is captured by their audience? This is a bit of a chicken and egg question, and perhaps the end result doesn’t really matter. But as we think of modern media organizations they tend to obsess about data. They have a never ending “training set” of data on what their audience likes. The smartest thing as a company may be to feed more content into that known topic. Repeat. More engagement. And magically audience capture.
\nWhere this lands us may be no different than media bias, but it speaks to a totally different cure.
\nMedia bias says that the actors in the media are intentionally biased to one perspective or another. Certainly true for some, but I don’t believe true for all. And I don’t know how you can fix that. Likely you just give up and say everything is biased. But if we frame this different and suggest that modern media has gotten itself trapped, captured by their audience, then the answer is pretty simple. Ditch the analytics. Stop telling the creators what the audience engages in. Starve them of that feedback loop and the capture will die away.
\nThe last area of audience capture that I’ve been thinking about scares me the most. Most teenagers use some form of social media. They are acutely aware of their follower counts, likes, retweets, and whatever other feedback loops these platforms have. They have an audience, and that training set of data is coming right at them. Now, lets consider two things about this point in someone’s life:
\nAdding an audience to a child that is still developing their own identity will forever alter that persons identity.
\nYes, you could argue that there is nothing new here, this is just part of growing up and forming your identity. To an extent that is true. You maybe had an audience in Chemistry class that you performed for. You might have had a club that you connected with that was a form of audience. But not really. In-person groups are totally different. They are not an audience, they are friends and acquaintances. There is no training set here. You don’t get a data feed of likes and engagement scores at the end of the event. The performative behavior for an audience that social media enables is completely different.
\n***
\nThinking more concretely about audience capture highlights for me the importance of collecting very little data, and on platforms that you cannot opt out of it, try to avoid it at all costs. Want to know a shameful secret of mine? I take note of how many likes and retweets my content gets on Twitter. I’m not proud of it. I don’t know that it has changed what I write about, but I also don’t know that it hasn’t. That notifications section on Twitter is one of the things that makes me want to disengage from that platform.
\nI know there are certain topics that I blog about and mention in the Weekly Thing that are not popular. Some folks don’t like one topic or another. I know that because they have told me directly, not through analytics. That is fine, but I’m going to keep writing about whatever I want because I’m not selling a product to get maximum engagement. I’m sharing my journey of learning. And where that goes is only up to me. Liberty!
\nSo ask yourself, are you captured? What audiences do you have? How are you protecting your liberty?
\n", "date_published": "2022-12-28T21:11:39-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2022/12/28/on-audience-capture.html", "tags": ["Weekly Thing","Productivity","Blogging","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2022/12/18/im-glad-i.html", "content_html": "I’m glad I grabbed a screen shot of the “Promotion of alternative social platforms policy” because now that same URL returns a 404 and appears to be deleted from the search index.
\n", "date_published": "2022-12-18T21:37:42-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2022/12/18/im-glad-i.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2022/12/18/i-feel-like.html", "content_html": "I feel like Twitter is disrespecting micro.blog by not including it in the banned list of platforms you can link to. Show some respect! Post is on there and it’s been around for 5 minutes.
\nFollow me @jthingelstad on micro.blog!
\n", "date_published": "2022-12-18T17:34:32-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2022/12/18/i-feel-like.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2022/12/18/this-new-promotion.html", "content_html": "This new “Promotion of alternative social platforms policy” on Twitter deserves memorializing for the pure idiocy of it.
\n![\"Twitter](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2022/4bd1a1b99b.png\")
\n",
"date_published": "2022-12-18T17:33:34-05:00",
"url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2022/12/18/this-new-promotion.html",
"tags": ["Social Media"]
},
{
"id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2022/12/17/not-your-domain.html",
"title": "Not your domain, not your words",
"content_html": "In the crypto community there is a common and very important saying:
\nNot your keys, not your crypto.
\nMeaning if you don’t manage the private keys to your wallet, someone else is. And whoever that someone else is, they actually own your crypto. A lot of people are learning this lesson again with the fraud at FTX.
\nI think we need another saying for social media.
\nNot your domain, not your words.
\nIf your writing is on some website where you don’t control the domain in the URL, then it isn’t your writing. Whoever controls that domain name, they can do whatever they wish. This lesson gets confused in hand wringing about censorship and freedom of speech.
\nIf you want your words to be yours, get your own domain name, and put a website on it. There are several services that make this easy for a small fee.
\n", "date_published": "2022-12-17T07:25:15-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2022/12/17/not-your-domain.html", "tags": ["Crypto","Blogging","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2022/11/22/i-was-intrigued.html", "content_html": "I was intrigued by the interview on Pivot with Waze founder Noam Bardin on his new offering Post. He’s taking the community features that made Waze successful and applying them to social media with a focus on news. 🤔 I’m on the waitlist.
\n", "date_published": "2022-11-22T20:56:53-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2022/11/22/i-was-intrigued.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2022/11/05/ive-seen-a.html", "content_html": "I’ve seen a lot of people trying out Mastodon. I use micro.blog and it supports Mastodon, so if you would like to follow my writing follow @jamiethingelstad@mastodon.social and I’ll be in your Mastodon feed.
I decided to give Reddit another try. In 2015 I deleted my account. Reddit hasn’t clicked with me, but I want to give it another go. I created a r/WeeklyThing community, which I think could be interesting there. I’ve found r/candlemaking fun. 🙂
\n", "date_published": "2022-10-30T08:09:19-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2022/10/30/i-decided-to.html", "tags": ["Weekly Thing","Blogging","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2022/04/25/all-the-chatter.html", "content_html": "All the chatter about Musk buying Twitter and taking it private misses an important point: Twitter failed as a public company.
\n", "date_published": "2022-04-25T20:15:32-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2022/04/25/all-the-chatter.html", "tags": ["Work","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2022/02/13/introduction-to-mrbeast.html", "title": "Introduction to MrBeast", "content_html": "Tyler is a pretty big fan of a handful of “YouTubers”, and usually at the top of his list is MrBeast. I’ve been more pessimistic about MrBeast and frankly I’m not sure what to think of the whole YouTuber thing. Tyler decided since it was his birthday we would all get a proper introduction to MrBeast.
\nWe started with Curiosity Beyond the Spotlight: MrBeast. I signed up for the free 1-week trial so we could watch the video. Overall, both Tammy and I left with a more positive view of MrBeast than when we started. Jimmy, MrBeast’s actual name, seems like a reasonable person trying to have a positive impact in the world.
\n![\"Curiosity](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2022/7cdddee6a8.jpg\")
\nWe then watched three additional videos from different “channels” of his.
\nUnbelievable Street Magic! on MrBeast Reacts.
\n10 vs 1000 Player Manhunt!\non MrBeast Gaming.
\nHit The Target, Win $300,000\non MrBeast.
\nAfter it was all done, we were even inspired to make donations and become part of #TeamTrees and #TeamSeas!
\nI have to admit, we were actually a bit inspired by his random acts of kindness.
\n", "date_published": "2022-02-13T11:10:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2022/02/13/introduction-to-mrbeast.html", "tags": ["Family","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2021/10/04/on-my-internet.html", "content_html": "On “my” Internet Facebook and all of its properties are blocked every day, so I didn’t realize they had some downtime today. The Internet works just fine, better even, without it.
\n", "date_published": "2021-10-04T21:42:03-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2021/10/04/on-my-internet.html", "tags": ["Technology","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2021/08/25/ive-been-experimenting.html", "content_html": "I’ve been experimenting with Literal.club to connect and discover books and reading connections. If you are on Literal, I am jthingelstad. Lets connect! 📚
\n", "date_published": "2021-08-25T22:03:47-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2021/08/25/ive-been-experimenting.html", "tags": ["Books","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2021/07/17/sun-setting-behind.html", "content_html": "Sun setting behind sailboat on Cannon Lake.
\n![\"Sailboat](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2021/a986d27bb8.jpg\")
\nI shared this photo on BitClout and a couple of hours later it hit the global feed and Ani15 posted a painted reply to it.
\n![\"Colorful](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2021/4d57536242.jpg\")
\nWhat a great image and I love the creativity in the response! Sent some 💎 in response.
\n", "date_published": "2021-07-17T22:17:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2021/07/17/sun-setting-behind.html", "tags": ["Crypto","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2021/07/09/bought-a-little.html", "content_html": "Bought a little more Bitclout $CLOUT to play with creator coins and Bitclout NFTs shortly. Buy the dip? I’m jthingelstad there. It reminds me of what Twitter was like when it first launched.
\n![\"Bitclout](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2021/42effc23f0.png\")
\n",
"date_published": "2021-07-09T21:58:53-05:00",
"url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2021/07/09/bought-a-little.html",
"tags": ["Crypto","Social Media"]
},
{
"id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2021/04/16/i-like-the.html",
"title": "Emoji Vaccine Status",
"content_html": "I like the idea of using Emoji to indicate status. Fun!
\n\n\n\n\nOkay, looks like we're doing this. If you also want to participate, change your Twitter profile name like:
— Brad Fitzpatrick 🌻 (@bradfitz) April 16, 2021
Name 💉⏳
Name 💉💉⏳
Name 💉💉🎉
Name 💉🎉
(Where 🎉 means your post-final shot waiting period is over and ⏳ means you're waiting for either 2nd shot or freedom) https://t.co/5gEebRhUMp
Related: Cocktail Emoji Triples.
\n", "date_published": "2021-04-16T13:16:28-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2021/04/16/i-like-the.html", "tags": ["Tweets","Social Media","Current Events"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2021/01/24/capturing-the-moment.html", "content_html": "Capturing the moment with the Bernie Sanders Mittens Meme and the Peanuts Tree. Image by the artist himself, Adam Gale.
\n![\"Tall](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2021/48763f2ec0.jpg\")
\n",
"date_published": "2021-01-24T20:44:50-05:00",
"url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2021/01/24/capturing-the-moment.html",
"tags": ["Arts","Social Media"]
},
{
"id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2021/01/07/this-seems-like.html",
"content_html": "This seems like a moment in time worth noting. The founder of Facebook and one of the richest people in the world (also holding special shares of stock that makes him unaccountable) just banned the President of the United States from the biggest social platform in the world, with very good reason. These are very odd times.
\n![\"Mark](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2021/4c57b31105.jpg\")
\n",
"date_published": "2021-01-07T22:59:24-05:00",
"url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2021/01/07/this-seems-like.html",
"tags": ["Social Media","Current Events"]
},
{
"id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2020/12/20/twitter-th-anniversary.html",
"title": "Twitter 14th Anniversary",
"content_html": "![\"Twitter](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/4c17337a25.jpg\")
\nHow about I celebrate with a blog post instead. 👍
\nTwitter notified me today that it was my 14th Anniversary on Twitter. I signed up on Wed Dec 20 21:25:24 +0000 2006, claiming user number #82,903. This was before the big unveiling at SXSW in 2007. My very first tweet (although they weren’t called tweets then), sent shortly after setting up the account…
\n\n\nOn a conference call!
\n
I love that. 😂 You can’t see that on Twitter because I use TweetDeleter these days to delete all of my tweets after 60 days, and I purged all 8,000+ tweets from my profile. I grabbed a complete archive of my Tweets before doing that though so I can still see them. That first tweet was the 1,443,783rd message on Twitter according to the backup. I’ve had Pinboard’s Twitter archiving turned on since Aug 25 2008 so it has most everything archived as well.
\nWhen Twitter first launched it was very silly. Most early users didn’t understand what it was useful for. I remember giving a presentation to a bunch of news people showing them how Twitter could be used as another channel to distribute news. That same silly product now has a protocol to hand over the Twitter account between one President to the next.
\nSome thoughts on 14 years of Twitter:
\nI haven’t authored any content on Twitter for over three years now. I write everything on micro.blog and then it cross-posts that to Twitter. I still see a lot of engagement on Twitter though and I do keep connected to people with it.
\nMy hope for Twitter is that it finds it’s footing, it sheds the hate, rid the bots which would easiest by moving to a paid model. I keep thinking a Twitter where every user pays $5/mo or $50/year would be amazing. Maybe ditch the likes too, and try to get rid of the popularity contest.
\n", "date_published": "2020-12-20T20:37:21-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2020/12/20/twitter-th-anniversary.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2020/10/18/trying-tagging-people.html", "content_html": "Trying tagging people whose articles I am commenting and sharing in the Weekly Thing. Example on LinkedIn and Twitter for issue 161. Will be watching to see if this is appreciated or seen as tag spam, and if it results in additional awareness.
\n", "date_published": "2020-10-18T23:03:38-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2020/10/18/trying-tagging-people.html", "tags": ["Weekly Thing","Blogging","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2020/10/11/facebook-and-twitter.html", "title": "Facebook and Twitter Have Lost Control", "content_html": "From recent actions I think that we must conclude that Facebook and Twitter have now explicitly acknowledged that their platforms are being used in ways they do not understand, are not able to manage, and without a doubt have an impact in elections. To most people this has been obvious for years, but they have hid behind many excuses to try and avoid any accountability. These two headlines are two days apart.
\nOct 7: Facebook Widens Ban on Political Ads as Alarm Rises Over Election
\nOct 9: Twitter Will Turn Off Some Features to Fight Election Misinformation
Both of these companies are finally admitting that they are not able to fix the problem here. They have built platforms that others have weaponized, and they are unable to fix it. I think it is important to highlight here that I think Kara Swisher has it right when she emphasizes that people are not abusing these platforms, they are using them exactly as they were intended to be used. Nobody has been hacked. These systems were built to surveil their users, catalog their interests, and then alter your intentions in the direction of an advertiser. The part nobody seems to have considered is that while some people want to sell you toothpaste, others may want to sell you a destabilized government or some deep state conspiracy theory.
\nThe real question here is can they be fixed? If the flaw isn’t an abuse, but is instead an intended use, what is there to fix?
\nI am happy to see that we’ve finally left the realm of these for profit companies cloaking themselves in First Amendment rights and disavowing that they have any impact in something like an election. (Funny isn’t it that they certainly would be clear that they can get you to buy a different toothpaste though. Those T-Rex arms in full effect.)
\nI’m in the camp that for Facebook I don’t think there is a fix. I think there is a fatal component in their design and at the scale they are today it cannot be undone. Twitter on the hand I do think could be fixed. Make all accounts cost $5 or $10 a month. At that price bots go away. Get rid of the active users metric that makes them magically inept at finding bot accounts. Get rid of retweets without an additional comment. And clean up the dark corners filled with hate, racism and sexist garbage. Mostly Twitter is small enough that it could still be fixed, and the core user base is addicted enough that they would pay and if 90% of of the garbage accounts went away none of the core users would know anyway.
\n", "date_published": "2020-10-11T21:14:50-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2020/10/11/facebook-and-twitter.html", "tags": ["Technology","Social Media","Current Events"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2020/10/11/this-weekend-i.html", "content_html": "This weekend I wired up two additional platforms that I’m syndicating to. I’m now sharing to Mastadon and am @jamiethingelstad@mastodon.social. This is built into micro.blog so I decided to turn it on for those that may prefer it.
\nI also configured Zapier to share the Weekly Thing to Medium. If you prefer Medium you can find jthingelstad there and this is a full share, with all the content. Right now I’m only sharing the Weekly Thing to Medium.
The best way to get all of of my stuff directly is still via RSS or Email.
\n", "date_published": "2020-10-11T17:17:33-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2020/10/11/this-weekend-i.html", "tags": ["Weekly Thing","Blogging","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2020/10/04/cocktail-emoji-triples.html", "title": "Cocktail Emoji Triples", "content_html": "I was texting recently and wanted to reference an Old Fashioned and it dawned on me that there was a perfect emoji reference for that drink!
\n🥃🍊🍒
\nIt captures the bourbon, and then the two dominate flavors of orange and cherry.
\nCould Emoji Triples be used to describe any cocktail? So I took a run at some.
\n🍹🍋🏖
\nNice drink. Lemons, and something you might drink on a beach.
\n🍹🥥🍍
\nThis is definitely an umbrella drink. Coconut implies sweetness. Pineapple?
\n🥃🐴🇷🇺
\nThis one seemed harder. Copper mug? Cocktail tumbler. Mule? Bring on a horse. Moscow? Let’s use a Russian flag.
\n", "date_published": "2020-10-04T14:25:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2020/10/04/cocktail-emoji-triples.html", "tags": ["Drinks","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2020/06/03/refusing-to-amplify.html", "title": "Refusing to Amplify is not Censorship", "content_html": "Recently Twitter made the decision to tag some of President Trump’s tweets as incorrect and limit distribution of them. Facebook decided the same content was fine. I’m going to skip over the actual decision here for a moment, and address the matter of calling this censorship. These platforms are not censoring, they are deciding to not amplify, and there is a big difference.
\nYouTube, Facebook, and Twitter are all for-profit public companies. They have as much obligation to carry your message as the Mall of America has to allow you to protest inside of it, which is none. Their Terms of Service are controlled by them and they can do whatever they want, including change their Terms of Service. But these companies are not the only ways to publish content on the Internet. Their refusal to do anything with your content is not censorship!
\nYou have every right to create your own website, and put those messages on it. The Internet is wide open for that, and it costs very little to nothing. There is nothing keeping those millions of people on Facebook from getting your message on your site. It’s just laziness on all sides to want to put it all through these platforms. To be spoon fed and manipulated by algorithmic newsfeeds. But that laziness comes with a tradeoff of control. You cannot, and should not, expect to control that message. Probably the control of your message will drive with whatever makes the most money for the platform. It is absolutely not driven by importance, or truth, or value.
\nMany social platforms have tried to position themselves as “the commons” and talk about things like Freedom of Speech. This is all a bunch of nonsense, and frankly it has tied them in knots that make no sense for private companies to solve. If you want to get your message out, own your site, publish it. It has never been easier to do that. Need an audience? Earn it. Build it.
\nNobody, not you, me, or anyone else have a right to amplification, and none of us is being censored.
\n", "date_published": "2020-06-03T17:20:34-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2020/06/03/refusing-to-amplify.html", "tags": ["Privacy \u0026 Security","Social Media","Current Events"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2019/12/06/i-like-to.html", "content_html": "I like to use emoji to bring fun to unexpected places on my devices. Command line prompts, OmniFocus tags. My new favorite is emoji folder names for my Favorite boomarks in Safari. 👍
\n![\"Safari](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2019/dee165bf57.jpg\")
\n",
"date_published": "2019-12-06T09:52:36-05:00",
"url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2019/12/06/i-like-to.html",
"tags": ["Productivity","Social Media"]
},
{
"id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2019/08/22/linkedin-is-now.html",
"content_html": "LinkedIn is now prompting you to identify your teammates, and then asks you specifically to reflect your current and past reporting relationships. Isn’t this just a way to mine org chart data from companies?
\n", "date_published": "2019-08-22T22:54:02-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2019/08/22/linkedin-is-now.html", "tags": ["Privacy \u0026 Security","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2018/07/17/happy-world-emoji.html", "content_html": "📅 Happy World Emoji Day! 🙌🎉🎊
\n", "date_published": "2018-07-17T16:29:42-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2018/07/17/happy-world-emoji.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2018/05/04/when-twitter-updates.html", "content_html": "When Twitter updates Terms of Service I get notices for multiple accounts that I deactivated/deleted a long time ago. Do others get this? Shouldn’t the accounts be deleted and no notice given?
\n", "date_published": "2018-05-03T20:03:59-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2018/05/03/when-twitter-updates.html", "tags": ["Privacy \u0026 Security","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2018/01/13/a-smartphone-filled.html", "content_html": "A smartphone filled with social apps is a manifestation of Buddhist monkey mind.
\n", "date_published": "2018-01-12T21:38:36-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2018/01/12/a-smartphone-filled.html", "tags": ["Fitness","Technology","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2017/12/20/really-happy-to.html", "content_html": "Really happy to see micro.blog public release today! I’ve been enjoying micro.blog since the first day of the Kickstarter launch (this is my 574th post!). Amazing work by Manton Reece! 👏
\n", "date_published": "2017-12-19T21:42:01-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2017/12/19/really-happy-to.html", "tags": ["Blogging","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2017/12/03/scanning-twitter-moments.html", "content_html": "Scanning “Twitter Moments” is pretty good confirmation that Twitter and I parted ways a long time ago. 😳
\n", "date_published": "2017-12-02T20:51:02-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2017/12/02/scanning-twitter-moments.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2017/05/19/why-is-it.html", "content_html": "Why is it that when Twitter updates their Privacy Policy I get email notices for Twitter accounts that I supposedly deleted years ago. Were these accounts actually deleted? 😕
\n", "date_published": "2017-05-18T20:52:17-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2017/05/19/why-is-it.html", "tags": ["Privacy \u0026 Security","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2017/04/29/the-photo-posting.html", "content_html": "The photo posting from the micro.blog iOS app is pretty slick. Especially for beta.
\n", "date_published": "2017-04-28T20:40:22-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2017/04/29/the-photo-posting.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2017/04/28/poking-around-microblog.html", "content_html": "Poking around micro.blog → Very nice work Manton!
\n", "date_published": "2017-04-28T13:50:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2017/04/28/poking-around-microblog.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2017/04/28/ive-been-looking.html", "content_html": "I’ve been looking forward to the launch of micro.blog and am excited for it to be here. I’ve been growing increasingly concerned about the Twitter ecosystem and strongly believe in owning my own content.
\n", "date_published": "2017-04-28T13:42:14-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2017/04/28/ive-been-looking.html", "tags": ["Blogging","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2017/04/28/t857780228105654273.html", "content_html": "Waiting for my micro.blog invite code. ⏳
\n", "date_published": "2017-04-27T21:15:17-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2017/04/27/t857780228105654273.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2017/04/26/t857041437560639489.html", "content_html": "Got the iOS app installed via TestFlight today. Now just waiting for invite.
\n\n\n\n\n", "date_published": "2017-04-25T20:19:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2017/04/25/t857041437560639489.html", "tags": ["Tweets","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2017/03/06/have-been-really.html", "content_html": "Long day. Great questions and feedback about https://t.co/KrFEuTQtGo. Just posted a new episode of Timetable with some day 1 and 2 thoughts.
— Manton Reece (@mantonsblog) April 26, 2017
Have been really disconnected from Twitter lately, and it’s good thing.
\nIt’s rather a hot mess when you look at it with fresh eyes. 😕
\n", "date_published": "2017-03-05T21:04:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2017/03/05/have-been-really.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2017/02/18/creativity-vampires.html", "content_html": "I have observed in myself this dynamic of low-effort, low-value\nactivities removing the need to do high-effort, high-value activities.\nThe graph below illustrates what I mean.
\n![\"Urge](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/3952491954.png\")
The more I tweet, the less I blog.
\nTweets are easy, simple and fast. They are also low-value, ephemeral and\nsimple. When I tweet I satisfy this urge that I have to write and\nexpress myself. It reminds me of constantly taking the pressure out of a\nsystem.
\nThe problem with this is that I never build up that urge to express a\nmore complex thing. I find that if I limit these low-value frequent\noutlets, I eventually feel a pressure inside me to create, to express\nmyself. Then I make something that is much more valuable (at least to\nme!) and expresses a complete thought as opposed to a digital belch.\nIt’s not even an option to me because I will get a need to do it. That\nneed never happens if I’m constantly relieving the pressure.
\nThere is something here related to the concepts in Amusing Ourselves to\nDeath, which\nwas written before the social sharing digital world we are in now, but\ncontinues to be relevant.
\n", "date_published": "2017-02-18T14:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2017/02/18/creativity-vampires.html", "tags": ["Blogging","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2017/02/01/hoping-httpstcovygeqzvq-from.html", "content_html": "Hoping micro.blog from Manton Reece will come in time to save me from what Twitter is turning into!
\n", "date_published": "2017-01-31T21:07:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2017/01/31/hoping-httpstcovygeqzvq-from.html", "tags": ["Blogging","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2017/01/09/now-wrapping-my.html", "content_html": "… wrapping my head around having been on Twitter for 10 years.
\n", "date_published": "2017-01-09T11:01:52-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2017/01/09/now-wrapping-my.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2016/12/03/httpstconnlrarzb.html", "content_html": "👏🏻
\n\n\n\n\n", "date_published": "2016-12-02T22:25:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2016/12/02/httpstconnlrarzb.html", "tags": ["Tweets","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2016/12/01/thats-pretty-great.html", "content_html": "Spotted so far @newstandards Holiday Show --> @MNBrian @thingles @toddhauschildt Hi all!!
— larsleafblad (@larsleafblad) December 3, 2016
That’s pretty great!
\n\n\n\n\n", "date_published": "2016-11-30T23:38:21-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2016/11/30/thats-pretty-great.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2016/12/01/like-this-a.html", "content_html": "Biggest foosball table ever #Reinvent2016 pic.twitter.com/ID8qi3wWXA
— Jason Montgomery (@rampantmind) December 1, 2016
Like this a lot.
\n\n\n\n\n", "date_published": "2016-11-30T19:43:48-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2016/11/30/like-this-a.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2016/11/23/continue-to-feel.html", "content_html": "Asked about evolution, this is the best model I have to explain it, I've used it consistently for a decade and no, it's not diffusion - pic.twitter.com/EaMDUqL3Sm
— Simon Wardley (@swardley) November 30, 2016
Facebook Said to Create Censorship Tool to Get Back Into China ← Continue to feel great about leaving Facebook
\n", "date_published": "2016-11-22T21:24:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2016/11/22/continue-to-feel.html", "tags": ["Privacy \u0026 Security","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2016/11/16/looks-great-httpstcouvffkpjxyq.html", "content_html": "Looks great.
\n\n\n\n\n", "date_published": "2016-11-15T20:16:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2016/11/15/looks-great-httpstcouvffkpjxyq.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2016/11/07/httpstcoezsqkribg.html", "content_html": "New Super Mario Run gameplay video added to the post: https://t.co/2pDEfuY8Nl
— Federico Viticci (@viticci) November 15, 2016
💯
\n\n\n\n\n", "date_published": "2016-11-07T16:56:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2016/11/07/httpstcoezsqkribg.html", "tags": ["Tweets","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2016/11/02/this-httpstcozyjfpai.html", "content_html": "I’ve developed an allergy to clip art on slides. Makes my eyes red.
— Michael Nygard (@mtnygard) November 7, 2016
This +1,000! 👍🏻
\n\n\n\n\n", "date_published": "2016-11-02T13:50:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2016/11/02/this-httpstcozyjfpai.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2016/04/30/000000.html", "title": "Deleting Old Tweets with TweetDelete", "content_html": "Remember: Impostor Syndrome only affects competent people who know what they’re doing. You almost certainly don’t suffer from it
— Pinboard (@Pinboard) November 1, 2016
I’ve been a long-time user of Twitter (user #82,903 joining in December 2006) and while I’ve had ups and downs with the service and generally think of it as a guilty pleasure I continue to use it. However, I have always thought of Twitter as ephemeral. Tweets to me are very different than blog posts. They often do not stand on their own but are really meant to be understood in the context of the moment.
\nMany years ago, before the Twitter API introduced OAuth requirements I used to run a script on one of my machines that would delete tweets after a while. This became annoying to manage after the API changed and I stopped running it.
\n![\"TweetDelete](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/d1052a028e.png\")
\nNow there is TweetDelete! I found this service via another user and it does exactly what my script used to. You authenticate the service, tell it how long you want your tweets to live, and then they delete them after that period of time. I set 90 days for mine. TweetDelete is free and is a service from Memset. I did check the TweetDelete privacy policy and terms of service and was pleased to find this clarification in the terms:
\n\n\nWe never store any of your tweets on our servers, we only delete them on your behalf.
\n
How terrible would it be if a service like this actually archived the tweets and then sold it for advertising purposes to 3rd parties. Terrible, and in the modern Internet it would be completely unsurprising so I was glad to see this stated clearly in their very human readable terms of service.
\nBut what about archiving? While I do view my Tweets as ephemeral I do keep them for myself. I see little to no value for others in what I tweeted 10 years ago, but I do like to have a diary like record for myself. That is where Pinboard comes in! Pinboard has always had a feature that archives the tweets of up to 3 accounts and I’ve had that on for several years so I still have a personal archive of everything which I like. By the way, it’s an archive I pay for and know isn’t shared with others. I love the ethos of Pinboard!
\nI would encourage you to ask if there is a reason you want your old tweets around and if not have Tweet Delete take care of it for you. Think of it as helping poor Twitter not have to keep so much data around.
\n", "date_published": "2016-04-30T00:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2016/04/30/000000.html", "tags": ["Privacy \u0026 Security","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2016/04/19/love-this-awesome.html", "content_html": "Love this! Awesome Nathaniel Andersen!
\n\n\n\n\n", "date_published": "2016-04-18T19:44:13-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2016/04/18/love-this-awesome.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2016/04/12/very-true-httpstcobjjbgtcffk.html", "content_html": "#teamsps knows how to run unicorns in aws! https://t.co/EWwAuwIsNf
— Nathaniel Andersen (@nrandersen) April 18, 2016
Very true! 💯
\n\n\n\n\n", "date_published": "2016-04-11T22:50:03-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2016/04/11/very-true-httpstcobjjbgtcffk.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2016/04/01/the-april-fools.html", "content_html": "Great food for thought from @gtdguy. He has a way of cutting through all my BS & getting right to the matter. #gtd pic.twitter.com/hwBfph5vup
— Mike Williams | Author (@askmikewilliams) April 11, 2016
The April Fools thing online should have gone away with your dialup SL/IP connection.
\n\n\n\n\n", "date_published": "2016-03-31T22:21:32-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2016/03/31/the-april-fools.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2016/03/16/wow-never-do.html", "content_html": "Internet Jackass Day is the only time of the year when I dislike my job.
— John Gruber (@gruber) March 31, 2016
Wow. Never do a Twitter search related to politics. Frightening.
\n", "date_published": "2016-03-15T19:38:21-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2016/03/15/wow-never-do.html", "tags": ["Social Media","Current Events"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2015/12/02/truth-httpstcohaophoms.html", "content_html": "Truth!
\n\n\n\n\n", "date_published": "2015-12-01T20:40:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2015/12/01/truth-httpstcohaophoms.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2015/11/23/great-add-httpstcoflyknbe.html", "content_html": "The most annoying coder you’ll ever work with is you from six months ago. And you’re always stuck cleaning up their crap
— Pinboard (@Pinboard) December 2, 2015
Great add!
\n\n\n\n\n", "date_published": "2015-11-22T20:41:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2015/11/22/great-add-httpstcoflyknbe.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2015/10/29/absolutely-cc-ajdomie.html", "content_html": "Looks like @SemanticMW 2.4 will support case-insensitive regex searches! https://t.co/1x0YWhM0Xg #MediaWiki
— Jeroen De Dauw (@JeroenDeDauw) November 22, 2015
Absolutely!
\n\n\n\n\n", "date_published": "2015-10-29T12:12:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2015/10/29/absolutely-cc-ajdomie.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2015/10/25/this-should-be.html", "content_html": "Cameo by @lozzd in @beerops’ talk, because graphs! #velocityconf pic.twitter.com/vABKlMLsA5
— Bridget Kromhout (@bridgetkromhout) October 29, 2015
This should not surprise anyone. Do yourself a favor and delete your Facebook profile.
\n", "date_published": "2015-10-25T16:55:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2015/10/25/this-should-be.html", "tags": ["Privacy \u0026 Security","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2015/10/02/omg-millions-of.html", "content_html": "Millions of Facebook Users Have No Idea They’re Using the Internet ← Oh my. 😫👎🏻
\n", "date_published": "2015-10-01T22:22:58-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2015/10/01/omg-millions-of.html", "tags": ["Technology","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2015/09/29/amazing-that-snowden.html", "content_html": "Amazing that @Snowden has almost 700,000 followers just a few hours after joining Twitter.
\n", "date_published": "2015-09-29T18:48:45-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2015/09/29/amazing-that-snowden.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2015/08/14/ive-become-a.html", "content_html": "I’ve become a huge fan of Twitterific muffling.
\n\n\n\n\n", "date_published": "2015-08-13T21:39:49-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2015/08/13/ive-become-a.html", "tags": ["Technology","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2015/08/11/google-profile-deleted.html", "title": "Google+ Profile Deleted", "content_html": "Behold the true power of Muffling in Twitterrific. A nice primer from @Skeskali. http://t.co/EWSRbBedsZ
— Twitterrific (@Twitterrific) August 14, 2015
Was fun to do this one.
\n![\"Google](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/598890e95d.png\")
\n",
"date_published": "2015-08-11T00:00:00-05:00",
"url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2015/08/11/google-profile-deleted.html",
"tags": ["Social Media"]
},
{
"id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2015/07/30/very-interesting-approach.html",
"content_html": "Very interesting approach!
\n\n\n\n\n", "date_published": "2015-07-30T18:44:21-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2015/07/30/very-interesting-approach.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2015/07/22/fyi-ajdomie-jolexa.html", "content_html": "#MediaWiki has needed an anti-spam tool for some time. @halfak's work on Revision Scoring looks like it might help. http://t.co/viUiWLSq9y
— Mark A. Hershberger 🐀 (@hexmode) July 30, 2015
👍
\n\n\n\n\n", "date_published": "2015-07-21T21:36:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2015/07/21/fyi-ajdomie-jolexa.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2015/07/12/see-ya-reddit.html", "content_html": ""Developers should not be thinking about machines. They should be thinking of jobs and tasks." #kubercon
— Matt Trifiro (@mtrifiro) July 21, 2015
I’ve never been an active user of Reddit. I have an account because I tend to make accounts at websites I go to. I deleted it today. All the controversy at Reddit got me thinking more about this site. Also read So long, Reddit and The Death of Reddit.
\n", "date_published": "2015-07-12T00:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2015/07/12/see-ya-reddit.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2014/12/21/logged-off-facebook-for-good.html", "title": "Logged off Facebook, For Good", "content_html": "A couple of weeks ago I submitted an account deletion request to\nFacebook, logged off and erased my Facebook cookies. If you’re looking\nfor me there, trying to tag me, or otherwise wondering why I’m not\nreading your Facebook posts this is why.
\n", "date_published": "2014-12-21T02:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2014/12/21/logged-off-facebook-for-good.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2014/11/28/twitter-spam-nfl.html", "title": "Twitter Spam #NFL", "content_html": "![\"Apple](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/35c9d53ff4.jpg\")
\nIf you have a Twitter account, or have many like I do I’m guessing you got this email from Twitter. I sure hope the NFL paid them a pretty penny to annoy all their users.
\nI really have 13 Twitter accounts? Well, not really. @VeloTweets,\n@thinglesBot, @SenateTweets and @Wikinosh are accounts I’ve\ndeleted. Odd Twitter, why do you send email to deleted accounts?
\nI’ve now unsubscribed 13 accounts from this type of message, which I\nthink I did already, but maybe “#NFL promotions” is a new type of\nmessage I have to unsubscribe from?
\nCouldn’t Twitter at least have done some looking at my feed and\nrealized I don’t follow anything football, never tweet about\nfootball or show any interest in this?
\nNow on ello at https://ello.co/thingles. Thanks Michael Fransen!
\n", "date_published": "2014-09-25T20:39:10-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2014/09/25/now-on-ello.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2014/06/14/how-facebook-improves.html", "title": "How Facebook ", "content_html": "![\"20140614-225148-82308205.jpg\"](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/2806c62337.jpg\")
Improving ads, wow, how excited should I be? Just to be clear what this message really means is that Facebook is now actively collating all of the data that it collects about you from every website that you visit that has those cute little Facebook Like buttons and is using that to target ads at you in a better way.
\n“improving” and “giving you control”. Bullshit.
\n", "date_published": "2014-06-14T00:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2014/06/14/how-facebook-improves.html", "tags": ["Privacy \u0026 Security","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2014/05/11/keybase-and-mediawiki.html", "title": "Keybase and MediaWiki", "content_html": "I’m really intrigued by what Keybase.io is doing with identity. The ability to cryptographically prove your identity on the web without a centralized party like Twitter or Facebook owning the approval process is a needed function. I setup my profile and you can now prove on your own that I am who I say I am on Twitter, Github and five of my domains.
\nI’m trying to figure out how this could be extended to MediaWiki. I would love to be able to prove that my user account is me at:
\n\nThis seems really hard. The method used on Github is to public a Gist, and you could certainly have a wiki user publish something on their user page, but that can also be edited by anybody.
\nBut if we could do this, it would be a great way to allow Wikipedia editors to claim ownership with proof of their identities (if they wish) and would benefit thousands of self-hosted MediaWiki websites.
\nI think something more like the Twitter proof could work. How?
\nHere are the last 5 revisions for my User page on WikiApiary (API call).
\n{\n "query": {\n "pages": {\n "43": {\n "ns": 2,\n "pageid": 43,\n "revisions": [\n {\n "comment": "This is my message for keybase.io to prove I am who I am!",\n "parentid": 884728,\n "revid": 904406,\n "timestamp": "2014-05-11T13:10:17Z",\n "user": "Thingles"\n },\n {\n "comment": "remove gittip button",\n "parentid": 569866,\n "revid": 884728,\n "timestamp": "2014-04-30T02:55:26Z",\n "user": "Thingles"\n },\n {\n "comment": "",\n "parentid": 569864,\n "revid": 569866,\n "timestamp": "2014-02-21T01:56:28Z",\n "user": "Thingles"\n },\n {\n "comment": "added badge",\n "parentid": 552628,\n "revid": 569864,\n "timestamp": "2014-02-21T01:54:59Z",\n "user": "Thingles"\n },\n {\n "comment": "add babel box (needs templates and styles)",\n "parentid": 528928,\n "revid": 552628,\n "timestamp": "2014-02-15T19:36:51Z",\n "user": "Thingles"\n }\n ],\n "title": "User:Thingles"\n }\n }\n },\n "query-continue": {\n "revisions": {\n "rvcontinue": 528928\n }\n }\n}\nNow that we have the revid we can find the information for this revision to continue to claim proof (API call). The key is that the title of the page “User:Thingles” matches with the user that made the change “Thingles”.
\n{\n "query": {\n "pages": {\n "43": {\n "ns": 2,\n "pageid": 43,\n "revisions": [\n {\n "comment": "This is my message for keybase.io to prove I am who I am!",\n "parentid": 884728,\n "revid": 904406,\n "timestamp": "2014-05-11T13:10:17Z",\n "user": "Thingles"\n }\n ],\n "title": "User:Thingles"\n }\n }\n },\n "query-continue": {\n "revisions": {\n "rvcontinue": 884728\n }\n }\n}\nAnd now I’ve proven my identity. The only trick is that the comment must contain all the data, and that should be easy since keybase already does something similar for Twitter.
\nAnd here is another example of me making a proven comment on my user page on Wikipedia (en) (API call).
\n{\n "query": {\n "pages": {\n "14604697": {\n "ns": 2,\n "pageid": 14604697,\n "revisions": [\n {\n "comment": "Here is my message for Keybase from Wikipedia.",\n "parentid": 551074105,\n "revid": 608054849,\n "timestamp": "2014-05-11T13:56:25Z",\n "user": "Thingles"\n }\n ],\n "title": "User:Thingles"\n }\n }\n },\n "query-continue": {\n "revisions": {\n "rvcontinue": 551074105\n }\n }\n}\nI have my profile setup on Keybase.io. Keybase is an interesting product using public key cryptography in a decentralized way to allow identities to be known without having to meet people in person, but instead through public proof.
\n", "date_published": "2014-05-11T00:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2014/05/11/keybaseio.html", "tags": ["Privacy \u0026 Security","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2014/05/10/profile-photo-may.html", "title": "Profile Photo (May 2014)", "content_html": "![\"Man](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/02daf85a5c.jpg\")
\nI figured it was time to move to a new profile photo on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Heck, even Google Plus. I try to use the same one everywhere to be consistent. Putting this blog post here so I can easily find it to use in the future.
\nIf you login to Twitter and go to your Direct Messages you press a button to mark all as read, and then you have to confirm. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a “Mark all as read” button that looks so foreboding.
\n![\"dont](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/35d1552a6b.png\")
That looks like a “Watch out what you push because everything will be deleted” red button that you need to be very, very careful with. Terrible for this function.
\n", "date_published": "2014-05-10T00:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2014/05/10/the-worst-mark.html", "tags": ["Software Development","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2014/05/07/love-this-rajivpant.html", "content_html": "Love this!
\n\n\n\n\n", "date_published": "2014-05-07T17:46:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2014/05/07/love-this-rajivpant.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2014/04/29/frontline-generation-like.html", "title": "Frontline: Generation Like", "content_html": "CTO = Culture + Technology + Operations
— Rajiv Pant राजीव पंत 潘睿哲 🪷 (@rajivpant) May 7, 2014
Tammy and I watched this Frontline: Generation Like tonight. If you are at all curious about how the social media ecosystem works, where the revenue is, what the motivation behind the users is check this out. Very well done episode with a lot of insight.
\nSo much of what happens in this social ecosystem seems like bubble gum. It always leaves me wondering what impact would it have if this effort went to doing something worthwhile, instead of selling tickets to movies.
\n", "date_published": "2014-04-29T00:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2014/04/29/frontline-generation-like.html", "tags": ["Movies","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2014/02/08/has-anyone-done.html", "content_html": "Has anyone done a network sniff in Facebook Paper to see what behaviors it is reporting back to the mothership? #notrust
\n", "date_published": "2014-02-08T10:35:55-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2014/02/08/has-anyone-done.html", "tags": ["Privacy \u0026 Security","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2014/02/02/facebook-wont-let.html", "content_html": "Facebook won’t let you delete a friend list!? Only archive it? There is ad targeting value in that too? (removed all members instead)
\n", "date_published": "2014-02-02T08:59:13-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2014/02/02/facebook-wont-let.html", "tags": ["Privacy \u0026 Security","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2014/01/22/congrats-awesome-mt.html", "content_html": "Congrats! Awesome!
\n\n\n\n\n", "date_published": "2014-01-21T20:58:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2014/01/21/congrats-awesome-mt.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2013/11/04/slapped-with-a.html", "title": "Slapped with a Large Trout", "content_html": "Looking forward to talking at @mtnwestdevops in the company of such illustrious folks: http://t.co/zYScuFwZf7. Exciting! :)
— Bridget Kromhout (@bridgetkromhout) January 21, 2014
A funny thing happened on Twitter yesterday. My wiki project that keeps a database of nutrition facts Tweets every 6 hours with a random food from its 28,000+ entries. Yesterday, it highlighted trout:
\n\n\n\n\nNutrition facts for Fish, Trout, Mixed Species, Raw http://t.co/8XmR9NlCrl #food #random
— Wikinosh (@Wikinosh) November 4, 2013
Which promptly received an IRC-style trout slap!
\nTweet from The IRC Trout has been deleted (theirctrout / 397243070736904192).
\nSo great. Two bots being surprisingly funny. Trout slapping is a meme that started the 1990’s in IRC. It warms my heart to see it alive and thriving on the modern web. 😀
\nSee also, trout slapping on Wikipedia.
\n", "date_published": "2013-11-04T01:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2013/11/04/slapped-with-a.html", "tags": ["AI","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2013/10/11/time-to-delete.html", "content_html": "Facebook to rip search opt-out from under those who were using it ← Time to delete account yet?
\n", "date_published": "2013-10-10T22:21:40-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2013/10/10/time-to-delete.html", "tags": ["Privacy \u0026 Security","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2013/08/27/linkedin-yes-i.html", "title": "LinkedIn: Yes, I know my daughter!", "content_html": "Tonight while on LinkedIn I was prompted for some people I might now, including this one.
\n![\"screenshot\"](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/17ce45672b.png\")
So, yeah, in fact I do know my 8-year-old daughter. I didn’t realize she was on LinkedIn? I wonder what professional updates she might have to share with me? What?!
\nI know for a fact this isn’t a real LinkedIn account. Anyone know where LinkedIn gets this? And what are they doing here? My best guess is that the LinkedIn iOS application sucked this email address and name from my contacts and is now prodding me to click the “Add to network” button to allow them to start sending emails inviting this address to join LinkedIn?
\n", "date_published": "2013-08-27T00:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2013/08/27/linkedin-yes-i.html", "tags": ["Privacy \u0026 Security","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2013/01/09/wow-just-observed.html", "content_html": "Wow. Just observed a guy on the bus using Google+. First time for that. Facebook dominates the bus with a smattering of Twitter.
\n", "date_published": "2013-01-09T18:43:59-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2013/01/09/wow-just-observed.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2013/01/08/nice-wikiapiary-mediawiki.html", "content_html": "Nice!
\n\n\n\n\n", "date_published": "2013-01-08T18:15:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2013/01/08/nice-wikiapiary-mediawiki.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2012/01/02/nice-rt-pinboard.html", "content_html": "#MediaWiki website Dungeons and Dragons Wiki http://t.co/tKoWd7gr registered.
— WikiApiary (@WikiApiary) January 8, 2013
Nice!
\n\n\n\n\n", "date_published": "2012-01-02T00:39:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2012/01/01/nice-rt-pinboard.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2011/05/19/why-i-run.html", "title": "Why I run my own websites", "content_html": "ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: Wikipedia article, thanks to @dreamyshade! http://t.co/7cLCsSvd
— Pinboard (@Pinboard) January 2, 2012
Marco Arment had a blog post today on the recent changes to Twitters API. He highlights that “Twitter is not Ours”.
\n\n\nTwitter can do whatever they want.
\nIt’s the simple, brutal truth. Twitter must do what’s best for\nTwitter. They owe us nothing.
\nIt’s not a public good. It’s not a right. It’s a private, entirely\ncentralized service with no meaningful competition and a massive\nnetwork-effect barrier to competitive entry. Twitter has all of the\npower in its relationship with users and developers.
\n
You can replace Twitter in that reference with nearly any other social network or hosted blogging platform on the Internet.
\nThis is why I run my own websites, on servers I pay for and administer, using open source software.
\n", "date_published": "2011-05-19T00:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2011/05/19/why-i-run.html", "tags": ["Blogging","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2011/05/18/technotarian.html", "title": "Technotarian", "content_html": "I was reading this very interesting article on Bitcoin by Jasan Calacanis and used the term “technotarian” and then defined it in a footnote as:
\n\n\nWe made this term up to describe the “good people” of the internet who\nbelieve in the fundamental rights of individuals to be free, have free\nspeech, fight hypocrisy and stand behind logic, technology and science\nover religion, political structure and tradition. These are the people\nwho build and support things like Wikileaks, Anonymous, Linux and\nWikipedia. They think that people can, and should, govern themselves.\nThey are against external forms of control such as DRM, laws that are\nbought and sold by lobbyists, and religions like Scientology. They\ninclude splinter groups that enforce these ideals in the form of\nhacktivism, such as the takedown of the Sony Playstation Network after\nSony tried to prosecute a hacker for unlocking its console.
\n
Great term. A quick search also brought this 1995 definition of Technological Libertarianism.
\n", "date_published": "2011-05-18T00:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2011/05/18/technotarian.html", "tags": ["Technology","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2011/04/11/odd-facebook-conversations.html", "title": "Odd Facebook Conversations", "content_html": "On Facebook I follow a handful of people who are semi-famous, and I don’t know but I know there work. One of those people is Jim Brandenburg, the renowned photographer that calls Ely, Minnesota his home. Anyway, he posted today that he was selling some of his gear, and it really seems that “Ellen” isn’t quiet getting it. Awkward. The ALL CAPS is just bonus.
\n![\"Facebook](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/cd78e98a43.png\")
\n",
"date_published": "2011-04-11T00:00:00-05:00",
"url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2011/04/11/odd-facebook-conversations.html",
"tags": ["Photography","Social Media"]
},
{
"id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2011/02/12/wow-launching-twitterific.html",
"content_html": "Wow - launching Twitterific 4.0 with the “light” theme is a breath of fresh air. Upgraded my license! Yeah for normal windows!
\n", "date_published": "2011-02-11T21:50:29-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2011/02/11/wow-launching-twitterific.html", "tags": ["Technology","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2011/02/09/basic-currency-of.html", "title": "Basic Currency of the Internet", "content_html": "Great quote from OkTrends, the\nOkCupid blog:
\n\n\nThe basic currency of the Internet is human ignorance, and, frankly, our database holds a strong cash position!
\n
Feels so true at times.
\n", "date_published": "2011-02-09T01:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2011/02/09/basic-currency-of.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2011/02/06/linkedin-inmap.html", "title": "LinkedIn InMap", "content_html": "LinkedIn created this cool InMap visualization of your network.
\nUseless really, but it sure looks nifty. 😀
\n![\"Network](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/04c5c585f9.png\")
\n",
"date_published": "2011-02-06T01:00:00-05:00",
"url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2011/02/06/linkedin-inmap.html",
"tags": ["Software Development","Social Media"]
},
{
"id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2011/01/24/i-just-posted.html",
"content_html": "I just posted a 7 character URL that Twitter “shortened” to 12 characters and obfuscated in the process. 🤷♂️
\n", "date_published": "2011-01-24T04:46:56-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2011/01/24/i-just-posted.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2010/12/10/twitter-spam.html", "title": "Twitter Spam", "content_html": "It’s clear to me that spam on Twitter continues to be a growing problem. Tonight I posted a simple question about weather apps on the iPad.
\n![\"Tweet](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/bfe2716557.gif\")
\nWithin seconds I got these really helpful replies from four attractive women that supposedly follow my every message, including one that seemingly has no clothes and only a bra to wear for her avatar.
\n![\"Four](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/5a48259fd5.gif\")
\nI reported the accounts as spam. This stuff is so blatant though. You would think that Twitter could be doing a much better job blocking this stuff if they put any thought into it. Too much traffic? Somehow firewalls manage high traffic loads. Too complex of a problem? Don’t buy it.
\nMaybe they don’t mind it. After all, aren’t each of these yet another Twitter user which increases the theoretical worth of Twitter?
\n", "date_published": "2010-12-10T01:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2010/12/10/twitter-spam.html", "tags": ["Privacy \u0026 Security","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2010/10/21/check-out-eventburn.html", "content_html": "Check out Eventburn. Built by my friend Dan Frankowski and Max Harper. Social media view of events. Cool!
\n", "date_published": "2010-10-21T13:16:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2010/10/21/check-out-eventburn.html", "tags": ["Tech Community","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2010/10/02/i-finally-spent.html", "content_html": "I finally spent some quality time on Quora. I like it. Here is my profile.
\n", "date_published": "2010-10-01T22:47:31-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2010/10/01/i-finally-spent.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2010/09/12/221707.html", "content_html": "The Lightroom 3.2 → Facebook workflow is very, very slick. Only problem is you cannot replace a photo. Republish deletes and uploads again. I expect that is a Facebook limit.
\n", "date_published": "2010-09-12T22:17:07-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2010/09/12/221707.html", "tags": ["Photography","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2010/05/27/social-media-iphone.html", "title": "Social Media iPhone Icons", "content_html": "Noticed this on my iPhone screen the other day.
\n![\"Three](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/1c38e3f964.jpg\")
\nWhat is it with the blue? These companies are supposed to be thought leaders but they can’t help but fall all over each other to have the most boring, bland and similar logos?
\nWhere is the red? C’mon people. Make it at least seem interesting!
\n", "date_published": "2010-05-27T00:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2010/05/27/social-media-iphone.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2009/11/11/twitters-new-retweet.html", "content_html": "Twitter’s new Retweet mechanism needs a global setting to turn of ALL retweets, in addition to the per user capability.
\n", "date_published": "2009-11-11T12:19:37-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2009/11/11/twitters-new-retweet.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2009/11/11/just-got-the.html", "content_html": "Just got the new retweet features turned on in my account. Looking forward to being able to disable nearly all retweets! :-)
\n", "date_published": "2009-11-10T21:54:59-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2009/11/10/just-got-the.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2009/10/27/my-twitter-account.html", "content_html": "My Twitter account just got lists enabled. This is seriously useful. Now Tweetie needs to get lists integrated too.
\n", "date_published": "2009-10-27T16:09:36-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2009/10/27/my-twitter-account.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2009/08/28/how-to-expire.html", "title": "How to Expire Tweets on Twitter", "content_html": "A lot of people consider Twitter a microblogging platform. I don’t really agree with that. I think Tumblr and Posterous are great examples of microblogging platforms. Twitter, to me, is much more like a “micromessaging"platform. As such I think it has more in common with email and instant messenger than WordPress and Tumblr.
\nI’ve been thinking more recently about the digital trails we all leave and it struck me that Twitter really should be managed more like messaging applications. In those applications, I tend to have an expiration date for things. To be formal about it, there is a retention policy for that content. Twitter needs a retention policy. Do I really care to have archived forever the Tweet about lunch from three years ago? No. Does Google need to index it? No. The only practical use I can think of for a long history on Twitter is to be able to profile me for advertising better. No thanks.
\nI did a little looking and couldn’t find anything to do this, so whipped up a Ruby program with the handy Twitter4R library to do what I want.
\nThis script requires Ruby, the Twitter4R library and is intended to be ran on a schedule with a utility like cron. Edit the code to use your login credentials and set the days that you want to expire tweets after. This program will then repeatedly look at your timeline and delete status messages that occur more than the number of days you specify ago.
\n#!/usr/bin/ruby\n#\n# Get requires out of the way\nrequire('rubygems')\ngem('twitter4r')\nrequire('twitter')\nrequire('time')\n\n# Configuration parameters\ntwitter_username = "YOUR_USERNAME"\ntwitter_password = "YOUR_PASSWORD"\ndelete_after_days = 14\n\n# Let's get a Twitter Client created\nclient = Twitter::Client.new(:login => twitter_username, :password => twitter_password)\n\n# Expire deadline\nexpire_before = Time.now - (delete_after_days * 60 * 60 * 24)\nexpire_ids = []\n\nputs "Expiring all Twitter updates prior to #{expire_before.to_s}."\n\n# Iterate through timeline\n# Purposefully get a large number of updates. As written, if your delete_after_time does not\n# occur within the number of updates this script will never see an update that is old\n# enough and never delete anything. It would be nice if we could request the timeline from\n# the oldest tweet forward, but I cannot find a way to do that with Twitter4R. (The :since\n# parameter does not seem to do anything for a :me request)\n# If you have problems with this scripte set the count to something like the number\n# of tweets you would create in delete_after_time days.\n# Using the defaults, if you Tweet more than 200 times in 14 days this will never expire\n# anything. If you try to use an expire length that is very long, like 365, this many not\n# work at all.\ntimeline = client.timeline_for(:me, :count => 200) do |status|\n if status.created_at < expire_before\n puts "Queueing delete status ID #{status.id} created at #{status.created_at} (#{status.text})."\n expire_ids.push(status.id)\n end\nend\n\n# Now we'll sort the array, this will have the affect of putting the oldest items first in\n# the list to be deleted.\nexpire_ids.sort!\n\nputs "Deleting #{expire_ids.length} tweets."\n\n# Now let's delete the stuff\n# The Twitter4R library delete method seems to be completely broken. So, rather than a simple\n# client.status(:delete, delete_status) we are going to go right to the API methods on Twitter\n# this is ugly, but we are just going to spawn curl to do this work for us. And I'm sure I\n# could do this without execing curl in the shell, but, whatever...\n# Note: the delete method is not rate limited.\nexpire_ids.each do |delete_status|\n puts "Deleting #{delete_status}..."\n `curl -s -u #{twitter_username}:#{twitter_password} --http-request DELETE [twitter.com/statuses/...](http://twitter.com/statuses/destroy/#){delete_status}.xml`\nend\nThis script does not do any checks to make sure the delete commands succeeded. Consider yourself warned. I don’t think it matters much since if it fails a delete it will just try again the next time.
\nSince the delete method is not rate limited, you could run this whenever. However, I would suggest to run it at once a night, perhaps late in the evening, so that you don’t interfere with the Twitter API usage from your normal Twitter clients.
\n", "date_published": "2009-08-28T00:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2009/08/28/how-to-expire.html", "tags": ["Software Development","Privacy \u0026 Security","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2009/08/13/000000.html", "content_html": "I’m trying to suck all of my Tweets off of Twitter and there seems to\nonly be 3,200 tweets. However, Twitter says on my profile page I have\ntweeted 4,237 times. Where are the other 1,037 tweets? Reason #75 why\nhosted services don’t deserve our content.
\n", "date_published": "2009-08-13T00:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2009/08/13/000000.html", "tags": ["Privacy \u0026 Security","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2009/07/01/xefer-twitter-visualization.html", "title": "Xefer Twitter Visualization", "content_html": "This graphic can generally be put in the pile of visualizations of stuff that isn’t important, but the display is cool. This tool from Xefer looks at your Twitter behavior distribution over days of the week and time.
\n![\"Bubble](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/7060820128.png\")
\nHappily, it seems I don’t use Twitter in my sleep.
\n", "date_published": "2009-07-01T00:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2009/07/01/xefer-twitter-visualization.html", "tags": ["Software Development","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2009/05/12/why-do-cyclists-tweet.html", "title": "Why do Cyclists Tweet?", "content_html": "I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from the release of VeloTweets. Thank you everyone for that, and please help spread the word about the site. These projects are about creating something that people love. There is no business behind it. The more people that like it, the more likely we are to make further improvements to it.
\nThere is a secondary question that people have asked about extending something like VeloTweets into other sports. I think it is possible that could work, but I think that cycling has some unique characteristics that make it particularly well suited for Twitter. Through Twitter the peloton can send two really clear messages.
\nAnyone who even casually watches cycling knows that doping is a huge problem. I’ve written before about doping in cycling, and sadly the sport continues to be plagued with this. Cycling is an endurance sport that is won by fractions of percentages. The slightest advantage, no matter how small, can be the difference between winning and losing. Sadly, some cyclists turn to illegal measures to get that last 0.1% performance edge.
\nLance Armstrong does something very interesting in his Twitter stream. Most times when he is randomly tested, he sends a message about it.
\n\nSorry, I meant #27. I'm losing count. And I'm tired.
— Lance Armstrong (@lancearmstrong) May 13, 2009
\nSurpise doping control. #26 for those counting.
— Lance Armstrong (@lancearmstrong) May 13, 2009
\nGood morning from Jesolo (outside of Venice). UCI blood control this am prior to the start of the Giro.
— Lance Armstrong (@lancearmstrong) May 7, 2009
\nUCI anti-doping control. #25. Been awhile. Thought they forgot about me.
— Lance Armstrong (@lancearmstrong) April 30, 2009
The themes here are pretty simple and powerful.
\nIn the past riders have sent messages about the negative effects of the anti-doping controls on their performance, most notably by stopping in the middle of a race, or waiting several minutes to start at the beginning. Sleep is critical for endurance athletes, and having that disturbed with hours of testing in the middle of a Grand Tour is understandably frustrating.
\nThe other message that you see when you look at the messages from riders in the professional peloton seems obvious, but it’s worth noting.
\nThey ride their bikes all the time!
\nThe pictures that cyclists post, the messages they send clearly show how much effort and time is put in on the bike. This is the secondary message to the doping message, and says strongly “I have earned this!”.
\nI think these two messages are great for cycling and I think that the message comes through directly and indirectly. As such, I would not be surprised to hear of riders really encouraging other riders to take up Twitter. It is an amazingly simple and easy way for them to directly reach the fans and rebuild the image of the sport.
\nThis is a great social media marketing plan and it will be really interesting to see how well it works.
\nHaving said all this, I’m sure there are many reasons why cyclists have found Twitter useful. For example, being a professional cyclists is a life on the road and Twitter is very mobile friendly. Living out of a suitcase on a team bus works with Twitter.
\n", "date_published": "2009-05-12T23:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2009/05/12/why-do-cyclists-tweet.html", "tags": ["Cycling","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2009/05/12/introducing-velotweets-the.html", "title": "Introducing VeloTweets - The Pulse of the Peloton", "content_html": "![\"VeloTweets](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/7a1c5b0688.png\")
\nA couple of months ago I started to notice that there were a lot of professional cyclists that were getting on Twitter. Lance Armstrong (@lancearmstrong) was really active, as were a couple of dozen other riders. I was interested in what they had to say, but I also didn’t want to have thirty or more new feeds in my Twitter stream. So, I decided to just subscribe to the RSS feeds of these riders and put them in Google Reader.
\nAs I read these feeds I started to see some really cool trends. When the early spring classics were happening you could get a sense from other riders on how they thought the races went down. You could see a first person view into what was going on in the peloton.
\nIt hit me that there was something interesting here and that if these Twitter streams were put together with the right display as well as some additional metadata it could be a really interesting way to experience the sport from a never before seen perspective. The idea of VeloTweets was born!
\nI liked the idea, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to do this on my own. Luke Francl and I had chatted about cycling and I knew he was into it. Luke approached Norm Orstad about the project and Norm was into it. I asked my friend Chris Hatch, who is a rabid cycling fan, if he would help with some editorial work. Everyone was in, and we had a team with no budget and limited time. The best way to hit a side project. :-)
\n![\"VeloTweets](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/ab4509fc44.png\")
\nLuke put together all the code, Norm did the designs and Chris did the research while I played sweeper behind everyone and helping out on the edges in all the areas I could.
\nIf you curious how the application was built, you should read Luke’s Rail Spikes post about VeloTweets.
\nThe utility around VeloTweets comes from aggregating the Twitter streams together and then applying a thin layer of metadata on top of that. Team affiliations and nationality are the ones that we added in the first release. We really wanted to add jersey counts to show how many jerseys a rider held by each type (yellow, green, polka dot, white) but we couldn’t find a free source for that data.
\nThe point was to level the playing field and provide the insight that someone who knew the sport well would have to those who did have that background.
\nAfter our first of 2 days getting together to build the site I was struggling because I felt it looked too much like Twitter. A stream of status updates, not really adding much value. As we discussed this we had a breakthrough that helped a lot. Norm suggested the analogy of a baseball card and we quickly came up with the idea of having a grid where each rider is only shown once, with their most recent message.
\n![\"Four](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/9f9ad6c14c.png\")
\nThis was a winner right away and solved a bunch of problems. Now the group was equalized. If you were really active or not, you would only show up once in the grid. The grid gave us a dynamic layout that we could use in any instance. For example, maybe we just want to see the information for Team Astana.
\n![\"Four](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/15a339e2cd.png\")
\nThis view gives the reader the ability to quickly scan the breadth of the group, without getting stuck in the depth of any one rider.
\nWe also started to dive into the information in the messages. We tackled pictures sent with the messages, specifically TwitPics and aggregate those into VeloPics. Now we can do something that you can’t do with any other client or feed mashup and show the aggregated set of pictures from the group (or team) in a grid to browse. There are bound to be some awesome shots of bikes and other riders in there and this aggregation lets you see them all.
\n![\"Collage](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/b0abf6f3a0.png\")
\nWe also put a “Message of the Day” on the site so that you instantly know what is going on that day. If there is a grand tour going on, it will highlight the stage for the day. And, most of the time (no guarantees) it is even updated to reflect the outcome of the race. This is a great grounding point to understand the context of the messages from the group.
\nWe also have integrated a race calendar so we can show when races are. We’d love to add some other data sources over time, we’ll see. All part of being the Pulse of the Peloton.
\nMy huge, huge thanks to Luke, Norm and Chris for their help getting this launched. It was enormously fun to work with these guys and to see what we could get done with the limited time available.
\nIf you want to stay tuned on updates to VeloTweets follow @VeloTweets on Twitter!
\nNow, back to the Giro…
\n", "date_published": "2009-05-12T00:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2009/05/12/introducing-velotweets-the.html", "tags": ["Cycling","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2009/04/22/proposal-tag-means.html", "content_html": "Proposal: Tag “140++” means a SIMPLE SOUNDBITE is ridiculous to deal with a complex topic. Twitter FAIL. Life isn’t that simple.
\n", "date_published": "2009-04-21T21:55:34-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2009/04/21/proposal-tag-means.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2009/04/20/took-about-minutes.html", "content_html": "Took about 3 minutes to realize that Tweetie for the Mac is going to be my preferred client. Time to get a registration code. Nice v1.0!
\n", "date_published": "2009-04-20T10:12:58-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2009/04/20/took-about-minutes.html", "tags": ["Apple","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2009/04/17/suggest-that-twitter.html", "content_html": "Suggest that Twitter no longer “Fail Whales” but is instead “Harpooned!”.
\n", "date_published": "2009-04-17T14:59:07-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2009/04/17/suggest-that-twitter.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2009/04/16/prediction-twitter-will.html", "content_html": "Prediction: Twitter will NEVER make as much money from me as the various Twitter client developers have made from me on various platforms.
\n", "date_published": "2009-04-16T09:11:10-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2009/04/16/prediction-twitter-will.html", "tags": ["Work","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2009/04/15/okay-so-i.html", "content_html": "Okay. So I just had to try out Birdhouse. It’s actually pretty fun and it is very fast since it’s not pulling in Twitter info, just pushing.
\n", "date_published": "2009-04-14T23:09:56-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2009/04/14/okay-so-i.html", "tags": ["Apple","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2009/04/03/httptwitpiccomqtuu-mentioned-my.html", "content_html": "Mentioned my Twitter info at the end of a talk I gave today. Looks like some picked up my Tweets. :-)
\n![\"Line](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/031a3e16d8.png\")
\n",
"date_published": "2009-04-02T20:24:00-05:00",
"url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2009/04/02/httptwitpiccomqtuu-mentioned-my.html",
"tags": ["Social Media"]
},
{
"id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2009/04/02/friendly-social-urls.html",
"title": "Friendly Social URLs Using Redirects",
"content_html": "Have you ever thought it would be nice to be able to easily give someone the URL to your Facebook profile? It’s not easy with the id number URL that Facebook uses. Just try saying “go to facebook dot com slash profile dot php question mark id equals six hundred and five million seven hundred seventy six thousand fifty seven”. Bzzzt, nope. Even something as easy as a custom URL for LinkedIn can be hard to remember. It hit me the other day that there is a really easy solution to this!
\nIf you have your own domain name, and host the DNS somewhere, you are almost guaranteed to be able to easily create URL redirects. I use Namecheap and it is very easy to do. I created these URL redirects to make it a lot easier to tell people where to find me!
\n| Friendly | \nDestination | \n
|---|---|
| facebook.thingelstad.com | \nwww.facebook.com/profile.p… | \n
| flickr.thingelstad.com | \nwww.flickr.com/photos/jt… | \n
| linkedin.thingelstad.com | \nwww.linkedin.com/in/jthing… | \n
| reader.thingelstad.com | \nwww.google.com/reader/sh… | \n
| twitter.thingelstad.com | \ntwitter.com/thingles | \n
It’s so much easier to say “Just go to flickr.thingelstad.com” to see my pictures on Flickr! Or “go to facebook.thingelstad.com”. Even Twitter allows people to just know my name, and not need to remember my Twitter username, and just go to twitter.thingelstad.com!
\nNice huh? I like it.
\n", "date_published": "2009-04-02T00:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2009/04/02/friendly-social-urls.html", "tags": ["Technology","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2009/03/30/tracking-twitter-followers.html", "title": "Tracking Twitter Followers with Cacti", "content_html": "Two weeks ago I was one of the guests on Midmorning on Minnesota Public Radio for a show about Twitter. The result has been a lot of conversations lately about Twitter. I was intrigued to see how many people had started following me from the show and before you knew it I felt the absolute need to see Twitter follower graphs in my favorite graphing tool, Cacti. I did a quick search and was surprised to not find anyone doing this already.
\nAs with anything Cacti-related there was a lot of trial and error to getting this working, and I’m positive smarter people than I can do this with much more elegance, but I got it working good enough for me and the output is pretty slick.
\nIf you’d like to join me in graph-tastic, RRDtool, Twitter navel gazing here is how. And I do know there are services that do these graphs, but I don’t believe any of them do anything more than daily counts. This samples every 5 minutes.
\n![\"detail-thingles-followers.png\"](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/213ccfc3bc.png\")
I figured I’d do this in Ruby just to make the Perl lovers in the crowd uncomfortable. At first I tried to use the Twitter4R gem to get to the Twitter API but that had issues, mainly it couldn’t deal with paging in the Twitter API and thus just returned 100 followers. Instead, I went straight to the Twitter API and found a better call in the social graph functions that just returns the id’s of people you follow or follow you. Less data, lighter, and no paging! Yeah! Here is the incredibly simple code that we’ll use to get Cacti the data it wants. All the comments will make this easy to follow. 😊
\nrequire 'rubygems'\nrequire 'open-uri'\nrequire 'json'\n\ndef get_count(url)\n buffer = open(url, "UserAgent" => "Ruby-Wget").read\n result = JSON.parse(buffer)\n return result.length\nend\n\ndef get_follower_count(user)\n url = '[twitter.com/followers...](http://twitter.com/followers/ids/') + user + '.json'\n return get_count(url)\nend\n\ndef get_friend_count(user)\n url = '[twitter.com/friends/i...](http://twitter.com/friends/ids/') + user + '.json'\n return get_count(url)\nend\n\nfollowers = get_follower_count(ARGV[0])\nfriends = get_friend_count(ARGV[0])\n\nputs "followers:#{followers} friends:#{friends}"\nNote that all this does is output one line that looks like this:
\n\nfollowers:464 friends:117\n\n
Cacti uses a simple name:value format to parse output from shell scripts. This little bit of Ruby does have some Gem dependencies, mainly a JSON library to parse the mess we get back from the API calls into something that Ruby likes.
\nThis script takes the username as a command line parameter. This is so you can multiple twitter accounts in Cacti. Not only can you gaze at your own navel, but you can gaze at your friends navels too!
\nLet’s get to the point and show what the win is for this before we go through the Cacti configuration stuff. Here is the simple graph that we can use to track follower and friend counts over time.
\n![\"graph](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/09ddd370f3.png\")
I didn’t create Cacti templates for any of this, if you want to set it up yourself here are screen shots of the setup.
\nAfter you have put the follower-count.rb script somewhere and verified that it works from the command line you need to make a data input method in Cacti to get the data. Here is what that looks like (click on the image to enlarge). This is where you will pass in the Twitter username. If you want to track more than one Twitter account you just create another Data Input Method and pass a different username.
\nIf you tried to track dozens or hundreds of users using this method I expect you will start hitting Twitter API request/hour limits. I currently track three accounts, which is 36 requests an hour. I haven’t hit any problems with that, but I would expect that if you were trying to track 100 accounts, and thus requesting 1,200 API calls, you would be denied.
\n![\"data-input-method.png\"](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/2f27fe5827.png\")
After you define the Data Input Method we need to create a Data Source. This one is the most tricky to get right. You need to make sure that you have the right RRA’s selected and it is very important to get both of the Data Source Items defined and mapped to the right Internal Data Source Name. Just make the screens look like this and it will be fine. It is very important that you do not have a Maximum Value defined. By default, Cacti will sometimes put 100 in there and cause the scripts return value to be ignored!
\nRemember that you will need to let a couple of poller intervals pass before the data is available for graphs to work. If you make the graphs right away expect some errors until data is available.
\n![\"data-source-1.png\"](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/17ff5f08d3.png\")
Here is the 2nd Data Source Item defined.
\n![\"data-source-2.png\"](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/188dd301b4.png\")
After all this we need to make the graph itself. Here is where it would be really nice for everyone else if I defined a graph template. However, I have no clue how to make a graph template so you’ll have to do it like I did, by hand. You can do this however you like, here is the most typical setup I use with 8 Graph Items.
\n![\"graph.png\"](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/6267b744a2.png\")
If your count of friends or followers is very high, and dissimilar, you may find it helpful to graph followers and friends on different graphs so you can see changes easier. This is what the first graph in this post shows that you cannot see if you put that same line on a graph with a bigger range for a Y-scale.
\n", "date_published": "2009-03-30T00:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2009/03/30/tracking-twitter-followers.html", "tags": ["Software Development","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2009/03/29/twouble-with-twitters.html", "title": "Twouble with Twitters", "content_html": "Current just posted a video mocking the “twittersphere”. Well done, and pretty funny too. :-)
\nOf course I saw this via mkortekaas on Twitter. Hmmm…
\n", "date_published": "2009-03-29T00:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2009/03/29/twouble-with-twitters.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2009/03/28/twitter-and-onions.html", "title": "Twitter and Onions", "content_html": "garrickvanburen: Cullect has shown me that indexing, archiving, and ranking tweets has much in common with peeling an onion.
\nthingles: does that mean it makes you cry? :-)
\ngarrickvanburen: more often than I’d like :)
I’m already exhausted and bewildered considering all the iPhone Twitter clients getting push notification. Please make sure it’s optional.
\n", "date_published": "2009-03-22T22:47:59-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2009/03/22/im-already-exhausted.html", "tags": ["Apple","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2009/03/16/guest-on-minnesota.html", "title": "Guest On Minnesota Public Radio's Midmorning Today", "content_html": "This morning I got the opportunity to be a guest on Midmorning at Minnesota Public Radio. The topic was Twitter! We were on the 2nd hour of the Midmorning program.
\nWe were hosted by John Moe and I was joined by Julio Ojeda-Zapata and there was even a call-in from the awesome John Hodgman!
\n![\"MPR](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/0a85fc92ae.png\")
\nListen here…
\n\nI ran this episode through Whisper and created a transcription. There may be errors.
\nJohn Moe
\nThis is Midmorning on Minnesota Public Radio. I’m John Moe, in for Kerry Miller this hour.
Twitter, what it means and what it is.
\nSo I used to host this show called Weekend America, right? Maybe you remember it? It was on the weekend here in America. Anyway, before I hosted it, I was a reporter on that show and a couple years ago I was hunting around for stories. One of the websites I would sometimes go to was technorati.com and it serves up a list of terms that are receiving the most buzz online. And one day, the top word was Twitter, capitalized. Well, what was this about?
\nGoogled it, found twitter.com, registered. It wanted me to say what I was doing right at that moment in 140 characters or less. Letters, punctuation, spaces, 140 characters, no rambling, get to the point, get out. And then people could subscribe to read what I wrote and I could subscribe to what they wrote too. “Signing up as part of research for a possible radio story on this for Weekend America.” I wrote that first day and I immediately felt completely stupid. This was getting buzz? I didn’t do the story. There was no story.
\nI mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m vain enough to write books and host radio shows. I have no problem sharing myself with the world. But if I’m vain, I’m not arrogant. Why would anyone go here to keep updated on me? Or anybody else for that matter? I forgot all about it.
\nSo about a year later, I started getting emails about people who were following me. Not in a creepy way, in a Twitter way. Well, maybe that’s kind of a creepy way. Former co-workers, acquaintances, acquaintances of acquaintances. And now the pressure was on. I was being read. People were waiting. So I started to write. Jokes mostly. Then more people followed me, so I followed them back, not wanting to be rude. And I read what they wrote. And it was often funny or interesting or bizarre. So I kind of kept going with it. Well, it just kind of snowballed for me. And I kind of got hooked. And so did lots of other people.
\nTwitter now has over 8 million users, including movie stars, athletes, musicians, politicians, and plenty of imposters pretending to belong to all those groups as well. Plenty of, we’ll go ahead and be mild and call them skeptics, have emerged as well. Including St. Paul Pioneer Press columnist Joe Suchere, who calls Twitter “the end of the world”. Not sure how much tongue was in how much cheek in that particular description.
\nWe’re going to explore Twitter this hour, and I really don’t mean to pass judgment on it and call it either the coolest thing invented by humans or a big pathetic waste of time. Not that those are mutually exclusive terms. But just to give definition here as we embark on this adventure, the postings one makes on Twitter are sometimes called tweets, in order to make you feel sillier, I guess. And we are going to be live tweeting this show at twitter.com/mpr.
\nNow, you can get updates on what’s happening in the show there as you listen, or instead of listening, I suppose. But please listen. You can participate and make comments through Twitter when you use the hashtag #MPRTwitter. So that’s a number sign and then all one word, #MPRTwitter. I’ll be monitoring those from here. I’m not sure, I think it might be the first instance of comments on an MPR talk show through Twitter hashtag.
\nAnd I want to throw out a challenge to the Twittering, tweeting listeners. What is Twitter? Define it in the limited space you have. I’ll read some of those on the air and maybe help the people who don’t get it. A lot of people don’t. I’m not sure I get it. Maybe that’s why we’re doing this hour. You can also call us on the telephone. Some people still use telephones, right? If you’re in the Twin Cities, call 651-227-6000. That’s 651-227-6000. Anywhere else you’re listening, call 1-800-242-2828. That’s 1-800-242-2828. You can also log in at minnesotapublicradio.org. Click on “Send a Question.”
\nTo gauge if this is the future of society or just a big dumb fad, we’re joined by Julio Ojeda Zapata. He writes the Tech Test Drive column for the Pioneer Press. And he’s the author of “Twitter Means Business, How Micro-Blogging Can Help or Hurt Your Business.” Hey, Julio.
\nJulio
\nGood morning.
John Moe
\nAlso with us in the studio is Jamie Thingelstad. He’s the former CTO of the Wall Street Journal Digital Network, now an entrepreneur in residence with Split Rock Partners and an early adopter of Twitter. Welcome, Jamie.
Jamie
\nGood Morning.
John Moe
\nLet’s have you guys to give this one a shot. If you run a little bit over 140 characters, I won’t penalize you. What is Twitter?
Julio
\nWell, Twitter is basically conversations. It’s people gathered around a water cooler, kind of chewing the fat. That’s really the bottom line.
Jamie
\nI think that Twitter can be many things to many different people. Some people, Twitter’s a means to keep up to date with what’s happening in the world and breaking news. For other people, it’s a way to keep up to date with friends that they don’t see on a regular basis.
John Moe
\nAnd how do you do it?
Jamie
\nYou go to Twitter, you create a profile or create a login, get yourself a username and start answering that question just like you described. You can decide how you want to access the site. If you want to do it through some kind of a client where you can download third-party applications on your Mac or Windows machine or on your iPhone and start sending those updates. Start following a few people and see what kinds of things interest you.
John Moe
\nOkay. Well, then I guess the big question I was, I was, I heard from, I have two older sisters and they’ve both registered for Twitter. They’ve put up very tentative posts, but they said something that a lot of people I talk to say, “I don’t get it. I don’t understand.” So I guess instead of what is Twitter, maybe we should ask why is Twitter? You’ve written about this a lot.
Julio
\nWell, I’ll speak for myself. I had an epiphany the other day with Facebook versus Twitter. It kind of dawned on me that these are completely different services. The reason a lot of your relatives and friends don’t get Twitter is because, you know, they already sort of grok Facebook and they know they can interact with you that way.
John Moe
\nYeah. My sisters told me about this while on Facebook, I should point out.
Julio
\nExactly. And my epiphany the other day was I need, the services need to be used in different ways. For me, Facebook is a way to interact with people from my present and my past people I already know. The wonderful thing for me about Twitter is that it’s primarily for meeting new people. Most of the people I interact with on Twitter I did not know pre-Twitter. And it’s vastly expanded my professional circles. I’ve made a lot of friends on Twitter that have subsequently become offline friends. It’s really been wonderful. It’s been a fantastic way for me to connect with the human race.
John Moe
\nWhat do you like to write about?
Julio
\nIn my case, it’s a real hodgepodge. I write about my family. I write about thoughts. Twitter started with the idea of what are you doing and quickly evolved into what’s on your mind. That’s what I like about Twitter because if I have a thought or a gripe or something that’s really bugging me or a question that I want to throw out to people professionally or personally, I can do that on Twitter. It’s become a reflex. Whenever I’m really freaking annoyed about something, I’ll vent on Twitter. It’s just kind of a habit at this point.
John Moe
\nIt’s a 140-character soapbox.
Julio
\nExactly. My Comcast internet connection was malfunctioning one evening. I griped about it on Twitter. Here’s where we get to my book. Ten minutes later, I had a phone call from Comcast saying, “Julio, can I help you?”
John Moe
\nAh, okay. Jamie, why do you Twitter?
Jamie
\nI Twitter as a way to keep up to date with people that I don’t get to see on a regular basis. Twittering for me is a way to, when I see something that’s of interest or when I have a thought that I think is provocative, I’ll send that out to the Twittersphere. It’s also just a way to have fun and to pass the time. If I’m waiting for an appointment, I’ll check and see what’s happening on Twitter.
John Moe
\nJulio, I get to say you’ve written the book on Twitter. It’s presumably longer than 140 characters long, your book. What was the deal with the company in terms of history? How did it start up? What was it designed to do?
Julio
\nWithout going into a great deal of detail here, it was basically a sideline to another company that had to do with podcasting. The principles at one point spun it off and it became an entity onto itself. They initially, as I understand it, did not see it as a social network, but more of a communication tool, somewhat akin to email or instant messaging with social media aspects. Unexpectedly for the people who founded Twitter, it blossomed into something comparable to Facebook in terms of being a social network where people interact. Twitter is competing with Facebook for the attention of people that just like to interact on social networks.
John Moe
\nWhy do you think it’s caught on so much in the last month? It’s a hockey stick spike in terms of number of registered users.
Julio
\nWell, there’s been a little bit of a snowball effect with very prominent non-nerd, non-tech people getting their heads around it. I was expecting this to happen sooner or later and it just happened. It’s sort of entering the mainstream to the point where a lot of the tech nerd types that were kings of the hill on Twitter are now getting eclipsed.
John Moe
\nJamie, you got on board with Twitter fairly early. Tell me about your early experiences with it and tell me about how it’s evolved for you in terms of how you use it.
Jamie
\nI went back and looked. My very first Twitter was actually in December 2006 and Twitter launched in early 2006. I was curious. At the time, a year ago, Twitter had less than a million users and I’m not sure how many people were on it at that point, but it was a very small number, particularly in regards to where it is now. My very first experience, I went on it, my very first tweet was on a conference call. I reflected upon it and my comment was, “Just tried Twitter. Don’t get it. Maybe I’m old.”
John Moe
\nThe two first comments most people make are either, “I am registering for Twitter,” or “I don’t understand what I just did.”
Jamie
\nI used it for a little while and coaxed several of my friends and coworkers to get on it. It was interesting. Early on, the usage was principally over texting on a cell phone, not via clients because there weren’t that many clients. It was just a way to keep up to date with folks. We early started to see some things. At the time I was with Dow Jones, we started to see things like CNN being on Twitter. We tried an experiment and put MarketWatch on Twitter just after a couple months later and put breaking news bulletins on. That got a lot of followers. The use of it really evolves and changes over time.
John Moe
\nWe’re talking about Twitter this hour. On mid-morning, I’m Jon Moe in for Kerry Miller. You can make comments about this conversation while you’re on Twitter when you use the hashtag #MPRTwitter. We’re filtering through some of those. Joanna OC says, “I use Twitter to learn from experts who share their links, ideas, to eavesdrop on the world, to share with friends old and new.” This is the difference between this and Facebook, isn’t it? You might not really actually be friends with all the people who are your Facebook friends, but at least there is some link, some approval process. With Twitter, it’s more strangers, isn’t it?
Jamie
\nThere’s a key difference in the Twitter ecosystem in that the friend relationship can be a single direction. You can choose to follow somebody and they do not necessarily need to follow you. Facebook requires that two-way handshake to share information. That creates a very different kind of community than what you have on Facebook. It highlights one of the things that Julio said earlier, that the two are just very different. I think that quality is one of those key differentiators. Twitter can be a broadcast medium, and Facebook is really not as much of a broadcast medium because of that two-way friending agreement.
John Moe
\nA lot of the focus has been on personal use. You talk about learning from people you can follow. There’s the thrill that I want to talk about in a little while of following celebrities like Shaquille O’Neal or Ashton Kutcher, or following people pretending to be various celebrities. Julio, I want you to expand a little bit on what you talked about, how companies are using Twitter in a professional way, and how they’re navigating that line between being spam-generating machines and being helpful professional organizations.
Julio
\nTwitter is thriving to the point where a lot of companies are detecting that energy and they want some of that to rub off on them. They’re creating Twitter accounts and trying to blend in with all the other Twitter users. At that point, some companies do this the wrong way and some do it the right way. The companies that do it the wrong way use Twitter as a dumping ground for press release links. They’re just broadcasting information unidirectionally. Companies that use Twitter more effectively are the ones that realize that, as I said before, Twitter is a conversational medium. It’s people talking in both directions. Companies that grok that and figure out that they really should get down from the mountaintop and interact with the masses, just as any other Twitter user would, are the ones that find more Twitter success. They realize that it’s a conversation with their customers.
John Moe
\nBut I wonder about the risks as well for professional organizations. If I’m following maybe an organization whose product I believe in and it turns into a vehicle to start selling me things, I’m going to drop it like a hot rock.
Julio
\nThat’s a very good point. In my book, I wrote about Graco, the baby product maker. I interviewed a very prominent Twitterer at Graco. She told me that at one point she did a quick tally of the interactions that she has with Graco customers and realized that maybe 5 to 10 percent of those are specifically company or product related. So, this woman just shooting the breeze about the weather, about anything with her customers, just having conversations that have nothing to do with selling products. That’s good. That’s what a lot of companies that use Twitter effectively are doing. They’re just getting to know their customers on a one-to-one basis.
John Moe
\nWe’re talking about Twitter, the online communication tool, which has had a rapid spike in popularity and a concurrent spike in people saying, “What in the world is this?” and “Am I wasting my time getting involved with it?” We invite you to give us a call. 651-227-6000 in the Twin Cities. If you’re anywhere else, 1-800-242-2828. Let’s talk to Marty in St. Paul. Hey, Marty.
Caller
\nGood morning, gentlemen.
John Moe
\nAre you a Twitter user, Marty?
Caller
\nYes, very much so. I mean, it’s a great tool for journalism, and I happen to work as a freelance reporter, so it’s an excellent tool for that, but there’s a dark side to Twitter, and I’ll say this. It can take a toll on you. If you think about it, if I think about when I first was on Twitter, I’d look and I’d say, “Gosh, it’s great. I have like 60 people following me. This is awesome,” and then I go and look at Julio’s, and he’s got like 8,000 people following him, and I feel, “Oh, geez, I’m not nearly as good as that,” or there’s this part that makes you question whether or not what you’re putting out there is important or not, but I will say this. I’ve gotten breaking news from Twitter that I would never have gotten from the mainstream or other media outlets because it’s so immediate and so fast.
John Moe
\nLike what?
Caller
\nFranken stuff, for instance. I get tweets about that. Well, I was getting them until they wrapped up the trial here, but, you know, and stuff going on at the Capitol and stuff going on in other places in our country, tweets about stuff that Michael Steele says or other people are saying that are important in the news or getting attention. Oftentimes, that information will come to us considerably before it comes from mainstream media outlets, so I’d say it’s a great tool in that regard.
John Moe
\nThanks, Marty. Julio and Jamie, do we over-mystify Twitter as a culture? Because it does have the funny name and the tweets and all this, I mean, Marty just used the word “tool.” Is it really just another way of serving up information, or is it something larger than that?
Jamie
\nI think that one of the things that Twitter has done is created this new concept of a real-time channel. And before Twitter, we didn’t really have this kind of real-time vehicle for disseminating information in a broad way. The web was great at putting all this information out there, and Google was great at spidering it, but having a real-time channel that people could self-select to join is entirely new. I do tend to describe Twitter as a pure platform opportunity in that what Twitter is, as I said before, is different things to different people. It’s a bit of a chameleon. Who you decide to follow will directly influence what value you get out of Twitter. And so if you choose to follow Breaking News, as he referenced, then it becomes a great opportunity to get news updates.
John Moe
\nWe’re getting some feedback through the Twitter hashtag that we’ve been using for this show, which is #MPRTwitter, for those of you who do tweet. I still feel silly when I say “tweet.” And I’m talking about this big organization, millions of members, having an effect—maybe not revolutionizing, but having an effect on the way we communicate. I still feel kind of dumb when I say “tweet.” I can’t get around that. But we’re getting some interesting tweets about the way people are using Twitter. “Twitter increases my tendency to procrastinate. I should get going on the phone calls, housework, etc.” And then we get another one that says, “Twitter, colon, ask a question, get answers from humans instantly,” versus “Google, ask questions, get web pages.”
Jamie
\nI like the lazy web comment. People tweet regularly, “Ask a question,” and take it lazy web. It’s really just the way that they’re indicating, “I could do search, but I don’t want to go through the effort.”
John Moe
\nMarty and St. Paul brought up an interesting point, too, Julio. Do you have 8,000 followers?
Julio
\nIt tells me about 3,500 for my main account. Marty, who is a journalist—and by the way, Marty, please let me know who you are later so that I can follow you. Marty raised a good point. Twitter is a marvelous journalistic tool. As a journalist, for me, it’s been amazing because if I have a question or I need a source for a story, I can just throw my idea or my question or my query out there and get a response. I had a frantic email from Pioneer Press Copy Desk the other night. They were doing a story about how the Twins are broadcasting their games in Spanish, and somebody wanted to know, “How do you say ‘play ball’ in Spanish?” I’m from Puerto Rico, and baseball is big in Puerto Rico, but I was stumped. I didn’t know. I interact with a lot of Twitter-using Puerto Ricans, who, by the way, are known as Twittericans. I threw my question out there, and as it turned out, there is no easy way to say “play ball” in Spanish, but I got an answer to my question within minutes. It’s really amazing.
John Moe
\nBut isn’t it a bit—I don’t want to say elitist, necessarily, but it’s a bit of a rich-get-richer situation. You have 3,500 followers, so you can do that. If somebody has 10 followers, this whole idea of “I throw out a question, and the world shouts back an answer,” that doesn’t really work.
Julio
\nWell, the way to get followers to a large extent is to, A, follow a lot of people, people that have interesting things that you’re interested in, people you want to get to know. Follow them, and a hefty subset of those will follow you back. And number two, once you’re following a lot of people, actually engage. Engage in a lot of conversations. Be active on Twitter. Talk to people. People will talk back, and your follower count will increase over time.
Jamie
\nI think what Julio said is spot on. Don’t worry about it right away. Start using it and gradually adopt it. Tweet from time to time. Don’t tweet too much. If you tweet too much, that will also get people to say, “I’m not going to follow you. You’re just too chatty.”
John Moe
\nWell, that seems awfully abstract. What’s too much?
Jamie
\nIt depends. A lot of people that I know say that if your name appears two times in a row in their follow list, that’s too much. Going on and on, dozens and dozens or hundreds of tweets a day. Some people will choose to say, “That’s too much. I can’t keep up to date with it. It becomes a tax for me to follow that person.”
John Moe
\nWell, that kind of brings up this larger issue of rules. Are there rules to being on Twitter? We’ve kind of hinted around what you should do and shouldn’t do, but there isn’t much in terms of a handbook to go off of. How do you navigate that?
Julio
\nI’ll just say that the power of Twitter is largely in its simplicity. It’s a very spartan, very streamlined service. This is power because it makes Twitter very adaptable. Twitter, as a result, can be used for a wide variety of purposes by a wide variety of people and organizations, some of which might tweet frequently, some might tweet infrequently. In each case, it’s a perfectly appropriate use of the medium. There are no rules. There’s no handbook. There’s no right way to use Twitter.
Jamie
\nI would say that on top of that, remember that Twitter is a very transparent medium. Make sure that you’re okay with everything that you’re tweeting being out there. I’ve heard many, many stories of people tweeting about coworkers or their bosses and not realizing that that’s easily exposed and available to the web.
John Moe
\nLet’s talk to Stephen in Apple Valley. Hey, Stephen.
Caller
\nHi. Thanks for taking my call.
John Moe
\nWhat do you think about this? How are you using it and what do you think it means?
Caller
\nTo be honest, I don’t use really any of those networks, but my thought about it, and I’d like to hear your guys’ feedback on it, is kind of tied in with the previous story that you just had about the church and the religious section of the country as it is right now. The thing is that nowadays, the tweeters, the MySpace, the Facebooks have become the religion. It’s a transfer of information, just like going to church, having a conversation with other people, kind of like you were just saying, that one person brings up something and another person has a thought about that and the conversation continues. What’s your thoughts?
John Moe
\nGuys?
Julio
\nNot quite sure what you mean by religion, but Twitter, again, I’ll speak for myself. Twitter has been a transformative force in my life. That sounds kind of grandiose, but it’s really the truth. I’m a guy with a wife and a kid and a busy life and not a lot of time to physically get out there and meet new people. It sort of enriched my life by making contact with the rest of humanity. Twitter has been my epiphany, has been my vehicle to connect with a broad spectrum of people, some of them local, some of them all over the world. I’ve reconnected with the human race in a way that’s very, very powerful. The best part of that is a lot of these people I’m hooking up at the local coffee shop after initially meeting them on Twitter, they’ve become my good friends. That’s really amazing.
John Moe
\nThat’s something I wanted to follow up on and I’m glad I didn’t interrupt you there like I was tempted to do. You talk about these connections, but I was going to say, really, 140 characters from somebody with some crazy name somewhere and that’s a human connection, but you’re using it as a gateway to actual human contact.
Julio
\nThe key with Twitter is find people that share your passions. I’m into tech, I’m into Macintosh computers, science fiction. It’s very easy on Twitter to find people that share your passions and a subset of those will be local. As a result, after you interact with them, you go back and forth with them for a few weeks or months. You say, “Hey, would you like to grab some coffee?” I’ll tell you a really quick story. I sold my condo recently and I did not have a new permanent residence lined up and I panicked. I was having visions of my family out on the street with our belongings on the curb and I panicked. At one point, I sent out this frantic plea for help. Does anybody know where I can live? Because I couldn’t find a short-term rental. It was panic time. I put that out on Twitter and almost instantaneously, I hooked up with somebody that I already knew on Twitter who happened to have a spare, a second residence on Summit Avenue and he fixed me up. He offered me such a ridiculously low rent that I actually raised it on him.
John Moe
\nNice pad on Summit. That works out.
Julio
\nMy Twitter saved me. It found me a place to live until I could finally close a deal on a house.
John Moe
\nWe’re talking about this idea of Twitter being not just a way of, you know, certain columnists in the Pioneer Press talked about it’s just a recitation of the mundane facts of your life, but you’re talking about it being more than that. I want to talk to another Twitter expert here. John Hodgman is a former professional literary agent, Daily Show resident expert. You might have seen him in some commercials. He’s got a number of Twitter followers. Hello, John Hodgman.
John Hodgman
\nGreetings @JohnMo
John Moe
\nHow are you @Hodgman?
John Hodgman
\nI’m very well, thank you. I’m trying to keep it short.
John Moe
\nYes, please. We’ll cut you off. We have an automatic feature.
John Hodgman
\n140 characters or less.
John Moe
\nYou’ve popularized the phrase, and you use it in all caps, “HIVE MIND.” Tell me about the HIVE MIND.
John Hodgman
\nWell, I refer to my band of extremely gracious and surprisingly numerous Twitter followers as HIVE MIND. I hate the term follower because really they’re readers, you know. I see Twitter as a tool.
John Moe
\nThey’re not in a van outside your house.
John Hodgman
\nYes, exactly so. I’m glad to say those are other people. Those people aren’t on Twitter. It’s a tool for writing. Among all the many, many things I do, I realize now in this Great Depression that I am at core a writer first. So it’s an opportunity to write these little kind of prose haikus and interact with an audience of readers. That’s what’s fun for me. But what I’ve also discovered is that this audience of readers is spread out all over the country and come to the table with lots and lots of expertise of their own and opinions of their own. It’s amusing and often enlightening to ask them questions and hear their responses on where I should go for dinner in a particular town or whether I should keep a particular sci-fi reference in the paperback edition of my book.
John Moe
\nDoesn’t this jeopardize your celebrity status by putting yourself on the same level of other people?
John Hodgman
\nOh, no. I mean, first of all, my celebrity status is minor at best and largely developed only because of my ability to interact with the readership online from the very beginning. I started out writing for McSweeney’s and then doing my own variety programs here in New York and all of that was built on building a readership directly in contact with people online. So for me, this is very much more of the same sort of exciting interaction that I’ve always enjoyed as a creative person.
John Moe
\nYou wrote the other day, I’m going to stop saying tweet, you guys, I’m done.
John Hodgman
\nTweet is something that, based on my investigations and my own visit to Twitter headquarters in San Francisco with Jonathan Colton last fall, tweet is a pure creation of the Twitter ecosystem. It is not top down.
John Moe
\nIt’s not mandated.
John Hodgman
\nA single Twitter would be called a tweet is an idea that was born and grew in the hive mind.
John Moe
\nOkay. Well, you wrote the other day about your distaste for the word “meh” spelled M-E-H. And, you know, lots of people state opinions, but yours really turned into something kind of strange.
John Hodgman
\nIt was kind of a nerd fight.
John Moe
\nYeah, what happened there?
John Hodgman
\nWell, first of all, “meh” is a term that is used on the Internet, particularly on common sections of blogs and stuff to indicate kind of disinterest, or uninterest, and scorn at the same time. And I don’t mind the disinterest or the uninterest. I mean, that’s fine. But I feel the best way to express that on the Internet is to not reply at all. You know, you can go on your own life and starve the idea that you don’t like of oxygen. Do you know what I mean? But I do have a, you know, I do take issue with scorn, especially if it’s not backed up. You know, I think I don’t have a problem with any word. People can use whatever word they want. “Meh” is just fine so long as it’s being used to advance an argument. And that often happens. Do you know what I mean? But lots of times it’s just the single reply, the single word “meh.” So while Twitter, I think, exemplifies an admirable brevity on the Internet, to me that’s simply too brief to simply register scorn and then walk away. That was sort of my position. And a lot of people said “meh” to that idea. And, you know, that’s the way it goes.
John Moe
\nAnd yeah, it got actually picked up by the Associated Press, I saw. Oh, did it really? Yeah, your comments about “meh” metastasized into something else.
John Hodgman
\nI think that the “meh” mind, as I refer to it, really comes from this idea that drives the Wikipedia and everything else on the Internet. You know, you have a lot of people who are, and a lot of smart people primarily, self-selected, smart computer users who are curious about the world, who are being marshaled by one idea or another, and they can solve problems and they can create moments of interest for the culture. They can get you from one place to another. And I think that’s a fascinating thing to play with. And I think Twitter, among many other possible uses, is a great tool for interacting with large groups of peers and figuring out what they’re thinking about and what they think of you. “Meh,” apparently.
John Moe
\n“Meh” is right. And, John, before I let you go, where will this go? Is this a fad or is this the new way? I mean, will we eventually be writing our Twitters telepathically and encoding things in our cerebral cortex or what?
John Hodgman
\nYeah, I’ve been writing my Twitters telepathically for a long time.
John Moe
\nI can tell.
John Hodgman
\nNo one else is listening, apparently. No one else shares my gifts. Does it matter where it’s going to go? I mean, that’s the thing. Oftentimes, people look at these sort of waves of ideas, whether they’re tools or even just concepts on the Internet, and they instantly want to know, “Is it a fad?” And I think that it has to do with a kind of old media nervousness about being replaced, which they should get over because they’re being replaced. And also just kind of desire to be cool and to be ahead onto the next thing that is going to happen. And I find this to be a very enjoyable and useful tool for me. I will use it so long as it is useful for me. And when it becomes unuseful for a large enough group of people, they might move on to something else. But why does it matter when that happens?
John Moe
\nI don’t know that it does. John Hodgman can be found on Twitter @Hodgman, and you can also find him in all other aspects of our media. Thanks, John.
John Hodgman
\nThank you very much.
John Moe
\nLet’s talk to Carolyn in Edina. Carolyn, how are you using Twitter?
Caller
\nI’m sorry, what was the question?
John Moe
\nHow are you using Twitter?
Caller
\nI use Twitter to keep up with my foreign language skills. I follow a couple of people in different countries, and because they’re tweeting in their native language, it kind of forces me to try to figure out what they’re saying and try to respond, which I’m not very successful at most of the time. But it keeps me on my toes as far as keeping my languages a little bit in the forefront of my mind.
John Moe
\nAnd do you put calls out to your followers? Do you actively shop for new followers in furthering these uses?
Caller
\nNo, I just have a couple people that I follow. One guy in Costa Rica and somebody over in France. And I read their tweets and then I see if I can understand them. And if they’re interesting or I have a little comment, I’ll throw them out a little comment. And they usually send me something back. So it’s fun.
John Moe
\nAll right, thanks, Carolyn.
Caller
\nSure.
John Moe
\nWe heard from, I believe it’s Janelle or possibly JL in St. Paul via our website. There’s so many ways to keep track of to keep in touch with people now. It says, “What concerns me with Twitter is the need to need to be connected. Before my cell/Facebook/Twitter, I had more real friendships and not virtual friendships. And I noticed also I moved to the Twin Cities from Seattle about a year ago, and my Facebook usage and Twitter usage ramped up because I just didn’t know that many people around here yet. I guess it is contact, but it’s kind of a new version of contact. How have you guys dealt with Twitter as a reflection of real human friendship and contact, Jamie?
Jamie
\nIn many ways, I think it augments that personal connection that you have with people. I have also written on my blog that I feel that it can cheapen it. One of the things that I’ve thought of before is it struck me that there would be times when I would meet somebody after having not seen them for a few days. We wouldn’t really have much small talk because they followed me on Twitter and they knew exactly what I had done. But they knew a very thin version of that. You can’t really describe what you did on a weekend in just 140 characters, at least not typically. But it does give that nugget of information. There are many times when the opposite happens and you get together and somebody says, “Oh, I see that you went here or you did this. What was that like? Did you have fun? Tell me more about it.” It can be the starter of that conversation. I think it can help and make that a much more rich experience.
John Moe
\nI think it’s easy to narrow it all down into this is bad for communication, this is bad for friendship, this is good for business. But we’re really just talking about a device. We’re talking about a doohickey, aren’t we, Julio?
Julio
\nWell, Twitter can be trivialized in 140 characters. How much can you say? But what’s really marvelous for me is 140 characters plus 140 characters. When you get into a conversation with somebody that is tweet by tweet over time, that’s a very deep, very substantive conversation that you can have. You can really get into stuff on Twitter. And the other thing is I’ve gotten to the point where sometimes I have to stop and rack my brains and figure out, is this person that I know really well? Did I meet this person physically initially or did I meet this person on Twitter? Or if I run into somebody physically that I know, have I actually met this person physically before or is this a first time physical meeting because we only knew each other? I’m getting to the point where I can’t remember. It’s all glomming together. And for kids, for teens on their cell phones, this is second nature. They don’t even wonder or marvel at this. It’s just the way it is.
John Moe
\nIt’s the way the world works.
Julio
\nThat’s the way the world works. It’s all glommed together.
John Moe
\nWe get somebody writing. I’m not calling it a tweet anymore. This has been my big revelation this hour is the liberation from the word tweets. This is what Dr. Richardson wrote on Twitter. “When asked how to construct a tweet, imagine you’re in an elevator and have 10 seconds to convey a pithy, helpful comment to a casual friend.” We’re inviting your comments on Twitter using the hashtag #MPRTwitter. So you go on there and what you write includes the number sign and #MPRTwitter. It shows up here. You’re part of the conversation. You can search for that on Twitter and see what everybody else is saying. That’s how I’m doing. I just have a browser pulled up here in front of me. If you would, in the time we have remaining and in the time yet to come after this show goes off the air and this discussion keeps on going, we heard about the use of Twitter in foreign languages and in translation services. You talked about your Twittericans and the translation that you were able to get to. Tell us some novel ways that you’re using Twitter. What do you use it for? John Hodgman used the Hive Mind to do research for his writing and just cool restaurants to go to when he’s in a given town. Dave is in St. Paul. Dave, how do you use it?
Caller
\nI am a professor of Greek and Latin at one of the local colleges here. My wife’s been on Twitter for over a year now. She’s been encouraging me to try to find some way to use it. What I do is it’s kind of like a pop quiz where I put out a vocabulary word in Latin and then my students Twitter back at me with the answers. Whoever gets there first gets a certain number of points and second gets a certain number of points. I can’t do it for credit because I can’t expect every student to have a cell phone or whatever. There’s a contest and they get excited about it. At the end of the school year, there will be prizes.
John Moe
\nIt sounds like it might demystify your position as a professor a little bit too.
Caller
\nWell, a little bit. There’s still some issues with boundaries and setting it up. I don’t follow them in case they want to be Twittering about their private lives or whatever. It was an attempt to make a fairly old language a little bit more current. But the interesting thing I should just say is that none of my students were Twittering on their own and most of them seemed to regard it as something older people did.
John Moe
\nThat’s interesting. This is something that I’ve heard from a lot of people is that it’s an older person’s idea of something that hip young people would do.
Julio
\nI can echo that. Every time I speak before a room full of college students, I always make a quick poll and I say, “How many of you guys are on Facebook?” and every hand goes up. Then I ask, “How many of you are on Twitter?” and then you hear, “Cricket, cricket, cricket.”
John Moe
\nWhy is that?
Julio
\nIt’s what you just said. Twitter for some reason is a little more popular among the 30 to 40 something. Initially it was a tech nerd crowd and it’s gravitated to some other people’s celebrities. It tends to be kind of an adult, a slightly older adult medium. The college kids, they have their Facebook. They’re fine with that. Some recent changes to Facebook have made it very Twitter-like.
John Moe
\nI wanted to ask about that as well. Facebook recently had a redesigned Facebook, in case you don’t know, it’s also a very popular social media platform. They kind of redesigned so that it’s a lot more of an immediate kind of feed of what your friends are thinking.
Jamie
\nThey have added real-time updates to the front page and the status updates are now flowing in real-time. It is worth noting, we quite often reference Facebook and Twitter in the same sentences as if they’re kind of equals. Facebook has 175 million users compared to Twitter’s 8 million. There’s no game there. The age issue is a real one. The research just last week from Pew showed that Twitter is the oldest of the networks between Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Although it’s splitting hairs in that it was 31 years medium age versus 27, but it does trend slightly older. I can personally say that I have a sister who is 10 years younger than me and she loves Facebook. She has been on Twitter several times and her comment is always just, “Well, everybody I know is already on Facebook and I can do that on Facebook.” Interestingly, it’s not even limited to 140 characters.
John Moe
\nThere is a limit, but it’s higher.
Jamie
\nYou can write a lot in a Facebook status message. I don’t even know what the limit would be. You could probably write chapter and verse for quite some time.
John Moe
\nDoes this remind anybody else of CB radios? I hate to be a stuffy old coot here. I hate to be a young codger. When we’re talking about Twitter, we have these fake names that we give ourselves and then we announce things out to the world. It’s not truckers. It’s people on computers around. What I wonder then is, is this doomed to be just the thing that we do the same communication with until we come up with a new way to do the communication? Is this just a better CB radio?
Jamie
\nAt the core of it, you could argue that the core concept here is public conversation, to have a conversation that everybody can see and engage in. Certainly, CB radio had the, “At this time on this frequency, this group of people are going to get together.” I also think of the technology that’s been on the web and is still used actively, internet relay chat, which was used by a lot of people. I think the difference is that as the technology evolves, the technology barriers to using these things and the ease at which they can be used. I certainly am not going to buy and set up an antenna. When I first got on the net in the early ’90s, to get on internet relay chat, you had to download source code, build it. You had to know a crazy amount of technology. It just becomes more and more open and easier for people to adopt. That expands that public conversation. That, in most ways, is a good thing.
Julio
\nAn interesting thing is happening that I’ve noticed. The walls are crumbling. I think it’s eventually going to be incorrect to say there’s Twitter and there’s Facebook. These are all little silos because the barriers are starting to fade. I’ll give you an example. There’s a way to connect your Twitter to your Facebook so that whenever you update, whenever you post or tweet on… I’m sorry. I said tweet. Sorry.
John Moe
\nYou’re welcome to. I’ve made a personal decision in my life, Julio.
Julio
\nWhenever I update on Twitter, it’s automatically reflected on my Facebook. I do that because my mother is on Facebook but not on Twitter. Whenever I tweet, she can see that. There’s also a little browser plug-in that you can stick in your Firefox to see your Facebook friends’ updates on your Twitter page. It’s all starting to mix together. This is only the beginning. This is going to happen more and more. It’s almost eventually going to be beside the point to say I’m on Twitter or I’m on Facebook. It’s all going to blur.
John Moe
\nGo ahead, Jamie.
Jamie
\nI offer a slightly contrary opinion on that. I’ve actually talked to a number of friends of mine who have turned off that feature where they can feed Twitter into Facebook. I actually turned it off myself and for the exact same reason. My mother follows me on Facebook and not on Twitter. I find that the audience, the people that I’m connected with on Twitter are a very different set of people than I’m connected with on Facebook. Quite often, Facebook status update is less conversational. It’s less public discourse. I found that when I would meet people who, when I touch base with people that were friends of mine on Facebook, they’d say, “What is all that stuff? I don’t get it. What are these @ signs? It doesn’t make any sense.”
John Moe
\nHashtags.
Jamie
\nThere’s a deepening of that community. I also think that Facebook is most likely going to win the war for that broad white pages of the internet kind of thing. That doesn’t say that Twitter doesn’t have a place. I find the communication there to be of a very different quality than what occurs. I actually check them separately and get a different benefit out of them.
John Moe
\nOn using the hashtag #MPRTwitter, we got a comment from Jason Barnett who says, “There. The hive mind has decided a tweet is now a post. You will be assimilated.” Then we get another, oh, where is it? Somebody else said, “When I put the call out about what do you use Twitter for, somebody just said, ‘I use it to meet girls.’” That’s really what it’s all about. Julio, a minute ago, and we just have a few minutes here left, although using the #MPRTwitter hashtag, let’s just keep this going on in perpetuity for the rest of our lives. As you talked about there being Facebook, instant messaging, Twitter, you made a gesture with your hands that our radio audience couldn’t see where your fingers kind of linked together and everything kind of came together. I think that’s what scares people is this idea that these different areas that they’ve kept separated for so long, it’s not so much that they’re scared of Twitter, it’s that the idea of convergence of all communications in their lives, that’s kind of freaky.
Julio
\nYeah, but one of my gripes is having to monitor all these different places, all these different cells where different interactions are going on. I think, for me at least, the Holy Grail is one place where I can sort of keep an eye on all of this stuff. One of my gripes with Twitter is DMing, the private messaging, which in many cases has become a replacement for email. The Google CEO referred to Twitter as a poor man’s email. He’s right on the money because DMing on Twitter is no substitute for email. It’s not as good and that really bugs me.
Jamie
\nI wish they would allow you to turn it off.
John Moe
\nReally?
Jamie
\nIf anybody DMs me, I have a script that runs every few hours that just replies back and says, “Please email me,” and gives the email address.
John Moe
\nDo you guys follow the celebrities? The Shaquille O’Neal, Rainn Wilson?
Julio
\nI follow Will Wheaton and other nerd/celebrity types that have one foot in the tech world and one foot in the showbiz world.
Jamie
\nThere are notably Lance Armstrong. He’s a very active Twitter user. I actually choose not to follow him because it kind of clouds up my feed, but I do follow him via RSS. That’s something that I think is an often overlooked capability. If there’s somebody that you want to see what they’re saying but you don’t necessarily care about it in real time, you can use an RSS reader to keep up to date with what they’re putting out there. That’s how I see what Lance is up to.
John Moe
\nDid you catch the Twitter litmus test?
Jamie
\nThe stolen bike?
John Moe
\nWhat?
Jamie
\nThe stolen bike?
John Moe
\nNo, I don’t know about the stolen bike.
Jamie
\nLance’s time trial bike got stolen and he tweeted about it, twittered about it, wrote about it.
John Moe
\nHe twot about it?
Jamie
\nYeah.
John Moe
\nHe twot around on the subject?
Jamie
\nIt started a chain of reactions and he got the bike back.
John Moe
\nWas it because of Twitter?
Jamie
\nYou can make a strong argument that the immediate mobilization of people searching for it was entirely because of Twitter.
John Moe
\nWow. And then of course the US Airways crash in the Hudson River is sort of a famous case of that as well, of people spotting that. A picture went out and that’s how a lot of people learned.
Jamie
\nEvery time there’s any earthquake in California of any size, the first place you’re going to see it is on Twitter.
John Moe
\nAll right. It’s a news source as well. Well, have we answered the “do I get it” question? I’m not sure. I think we’ve explained the what and the possible whats of it. Do you get it now? I’m not sure if you do or not, but we tried our best. The conversation can keep going, I suppose. Julio Ojeda Zapata writes the Tech Test Drive column for the Pioneer Press and he’s the author of “Twitter Means Business, How Micro-Blogging Can Help or Hurt Your Business.” Julio, you are on Twitter at?
Julio
\nJ-O-J-E-D-A.
John Moe
\nJ-O-J-E-D-A. Jamie Thingelstad is the former CTO of the Wall Street Journal Digital Network, now an entrepreneur in residence with Split Rock Partners. Jamie, you are at?
Jamie
\n@THINGLES.
John Moe
\nAnd you’ve got several of these things, right?
Jamie
\nI’ve got a robot that you can follow as well.
John Moe
\nJamie’s got a robot that you can follow as well. That’s what it all comes down to. We bring in guys who got robots that you can follow as well. follow @MPR.
I was a fan of the original Prologue, and this new iteration of it looks even better.
\nI’m struck by how easy it would be to setup a private Twitter-like service for just the people you want to hang with. That could be fun, particularly as Twitter becomes less and less interesting and more and more overcrowded.
\n", "date_published": "2009-03-11T00:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2009/03/11/p-the-newprologue.html", "tags": ["Blogging","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2009/02/19/enough-twitter-already.html", "content_html": "Enough Twitter already!
\n![\"Printed](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/b6b4f6ee65.png\")
\n",
"date_published": "2009-02-19T01:00:00-05:00",
"url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2009/02/19/enough-twitter-already.html",
"tags": ["Arts","Social Media"]
},
{
"id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2009/01/14/stopping-twitter-updates.html",
"title": "Stopping Twitter Updates on Facebook",
"content_html": "If you are a friend of mine on Facebook you are going to see a lot fewer updates from me going forward. I’ve decided to no longer send Twitter updates to my Facebook profile.
\n![\"Twitter](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/f0291c6e82.png\")
\nI was having a great lunch with my friend Jim Bernard and he had mentioned that he had severed the Twitter-Facebook bridge and I was curious. He explained to me his reasoning and much of it rung true to me. I also reflected on feedback I got from people that I know on Facebook and they were commenting that I updated a lot, usually with a note of annoyance. The reality was I used Twitter a decent amount, and I never do Facebook updates.
\nTwitter was one of the early applications deployed when Facebook opened up their platform to third parties. I quickly added it and never thought much about it. Plus, at that time, the people I had connections with on Facebook were largely the same people that I had connections with on Twitter. So it seemed to make sense to just mirror things.
\nThat has changed a lot. Facebook is a very different community than Twitter. There is a lot less overlap between my social network on Facebook than Twitter. Twitter users expect a different volume of updates, and have a wider range of context for those updates. Lastly, sending a lot of Tweets to Facebook just creates a lot of noise. The two systems have different cultures: Twitter is a hot tub, Facebook is a high school reunion.
\nIf you want to still get my Twitter updates, you can follow me on Twitter. If we aren’t friends on Facebook, check out my profile page. I will continue to syndicate my blog posts to my Facebook profile.
\n", "date_published": "2009-01-14T01:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2009/01/14/stopping-twitter-updates.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2009/01/05/how-to-remove.html", "title": "How to Remove Your Facebook Wall", "content_html": "I’ve become more of a fan of Facebook over recent months (see my profile). They have made a number of improvements that I really like, and the number of people joining the service seems to just increase more and more over time. I’m really amazed at home many people you can find on it. I think they are well on their way to being the de facto White Pages of the Internet.
\nWith that said, I don’t like the Wall feature of Facebook at all. For whatever reason, I’m just not real hip on anybody coming to my profile and just typing away. I’ve turned my wall off for a long time, and enough people have commented to me “Hey, you don’t have a wall! How did you do that?” that I thought I would share how to remove your wall.
\nNow, to be clear, we are not removing the wall per se. Facebook will not allow you to remove the Wall application. Instead, we are going to adjust privacy settings to hide the wall entirely. First, go to your privacy settings.
\n![\"Facebook](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/d409e7eb82.png\")
Now click on your profile.
\n![\"Facebook](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/2094f3094c.png\")
In this screen, scroll down a ways and you will find the “Wall Posts"section. Simply change your settings to look like this. Uncheck the “Friends may post to my Wall” box and change the privacy option.
\n![\"Facebook](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/32cfba8c9f.png\")
\nYou could set this so that only you can write on your wall if you want. There are a couple of different options. I have it set like above which effectively removes the wall.
\nJan. 8, 2009: I’ve gotten some questions from people saying this doesn’t work. I think the challenge is catching the result. I’m adding this section to help illustrate what this does.
\nNow that you have made this change you probably want to check to make sure it worked. This is a little hard on Facebook since it’s not terribly easy for you to see your profile as someone else. Facebook does have a feature that allows you to test this out, in your Profile Privacy settings, where you changed your wall privacy options, you can type the name of a friend and see your profile as they would see it. This works great for testing, particularly if you are using Facebook groups to assign privacy levels differently for various people.
\n![\"Facebook](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/1082098055.png\")
\nYou may be confused that even after these changes your profile will still have a tab called “Wall”. That is impossible to remove, per my earlier comment that we cannot really remove the Wall. It’s integral to the functioning of Facebook. All we did was remove the ability for people to write stuff on it.
\nBefore these changes this is how a friend would see your wall.
\n![\"Facebook](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/1f965f8f91.png\")
\nNote the option to Write on the wall. After making these changes a friend sees your wall like this.
\n![\"Facebook](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/05051c09d7.png\")
\nThe option of writing on your wall is gone now.
\n", "date_published": "2009-01-05T01:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2009/01/05/how-to-remove.html", "tags": ["Privacy \u0026 Security","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2008/11/04/facebook-election-widget.html", "title": "Facebook Election Widget", "content_html": "This election year is the first with a very well established social networking world. I thought this real-time counter that Facebook put up today was really cool.
\n![\"Facebook-Election-Day-Widget.png\"](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/92c6090472.png\")
You can watch the number go up and up in as people report in. This was a screen shot at 9:44 am central time.
\nI love this trend. Socially we know that people tend to act in groups and if they see a million other people on Facebook have voted it will encourage people who might not take the time to vote, to get out there and do it.
\n", "date_published": "2008-11-04T01:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2008/11/04/facebook-election-widget.html", "tags": ["Social Media","Current Events"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2008/10/31/stop-twitter-direct.html", "title": "Stop Twitter Direct Messages", "content_html": "My relationship with Twitter ebbs and flows. Sometimes I find it very enjoyable, and at other times it seems like a worthless distraction. However, there is one part of Twitter that I have never liked, direct messages.
\nWhy not like direct messages? I’m not a fan of anything that creates another queue that I have to monitor and respond to. I try to keep everything in one workflow, and that workflow is email. My annoyance isn’t limited to Twitter direct messages, but extends equally to Facebook messages and any other website specific inbox. I think Facebook could actually do their members a huge service by making their message system IMAP-capable. It would make it infinitely more useful and you could happily sit in your choice of email clients. On the other hand I would rather just not deal with Twitter direct messages.
\nI’d thought for a while that part of a Twitter Pro premium service could be to turn off direct message function. I decided to take matters into my own hands and rid myself of direct messages now instead. You can use this little program to do the same for you.
\nThe first thing to do is tell Twitter to stop notifying you of a direct message. Go to your account Settings and in the Notices tab uncheck the Direct Text emails option.
\n![\"direct-text-email-setting.png\"](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/8f5b60a51a.png\")
Now, this 28-line Ruby program will simply respond (via direct message) to any direct messages you have received and then delete the direct message from your account, leaving no queue behind. If you don’t like the delete, you can just comment out line 24. To make life easy this uses the Twitter4R library for Ruby. You will have to edit lines 9 and 19 to your credentials and personal message.
\n# Get requires out of the way\nrequire('rubygems')\ngem('twitter4r', '>=0.2.0')\nrequire('twitter')\nrequire('time')\n\n# Let's get a Twitter Client created\n# Put your credentials in here\nclient = Twitter::Client.new(:login => 'USERNAME', :password => 'PASSWORD')\n\n# Get Direct Messages\nmessages = client.messages(:received)\n\n# Loop through any direct messages received\nmessages.each do |message|\n # Reply to the message\n # Set the message text to what you want, make sure it is Twitter length compliant\n response = Twitter::Message.create(\n :text => 'PUT YOUR MESSAGE HERE. YOU PROBABLY WANT YOUR EMAIL IN HERE.',\n :recipient => message.sender,\n :client => client)\n\n # Delete the message\n client.message(:delete, message)\n\n # Put a brief pause here just to make Twitter happier\n sleep 5\nend\nThere is no error checking and by default it outputs nothing. It is intended to be invoked via cron at whatever interval you would like. If you do not have the Twitter4R Gem installed just run gem install twitter4r.
Looking to extend my AIM network via Twitter. Use AIM, @ me your username. You can find me on AIM under “jthingelstad”.
\n", "date_published": "2008-10-01T10:29:43-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2008/10/01/looking-to-extend.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2008/09/26/which-is-it.html", "title": "Which is it?", "content_html": "This was from a couple of weeks ago when iPhone OS 2.1 came out. It’s so common on the web to research a product and find completely contradictory opinions. One person will say it’s horrible, doesn’t even work. Another says it’s amazing. Rarely do you see those differences right next to each other in Twitter though.
\n![\"Two](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/771c870206.png\")
\n",
"date_published": "2008-09-26T00:00:00-05:00",
"url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2008/09/26/which-is-it.html",
"tags": ["Apple","Social Media"]
},
{
"id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2008/09/22/trying-twittelator-on.html",
"content_html": "Trying Twittelator on iPhone. Like the more advanced features.
\n", "date_published": "2008-09-21T23:36:20-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2008/09/21/trying-twittelator-on.html", "tags": ["Apple","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2008/09/19/facebook-should-make.html", "content_html": "Facebook should make an IMAP interface to their messaging system. Growing annoyed that I have to check it. 😕
\n", "date_published": "2008-09-19T10:21:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2008/09/19/facebook-should-make.html", "tags": ["Productivity","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2008/09/19/like-much-of.html", "content_html": "Like much of the new Twitter layout, but not a big fan of these super big tabs on the right.
\n", "date_published": "2008-09-19T10:13:54-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2008/09/19/like-much-of.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2008/09/04/playing-with-twhirl.html", "content_html": "Playing with Twhirl for the first time in a while. Really nice.
\n", "date_published": "2008-09-04T17:14:23-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2008/09/04/playing-with-twhirl.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2008/09/04/trying-out-tweetdeck.html", "content_html": "Trying out TweetDeck for the first time.
\n", "date_published": "2008-09-04T16:54:31-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2008/09/04/trying-out-tweetdeck.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2008/08/17/linking-brightkite-into.html", "content_html": "Linking Brightkite into my Twitter account in preparation for our London Summer of Love extravaganza.
\n", "date_published": "2008-08-17T15:42:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2008/08/17/linking-brightkite-into.html", "tags": ["Travel","Social Media","London 2008"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2008/08/13/grooving-on-brightkite.html", "content_html": "Thanks for all the Brightkite invites – Barry Hess to the rescue! I’m all setup now.
\nI must have been the last person on Twitter to get on Brightkite. 🙂
\nGrooving on Brightkite. It’s pretty cool.
\n", "date_published": "2008-08-12T21:49:58-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2008/08/12/grooving-on-brightkite.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2008/07/30/095243.html", "content_html": "Seems like a lot of “spam friends” coming on Twitter lately. It needs to be easier to identify these and block them.
\nYour friends list on Twitter.com should show basic stats of friends and provide 1-click actions. That would help a lot.
\nClearly Twitter is going to need to deal with a recent sharp increase in spam activity.
\n", "date_published": "2008-07-30T09:52:43-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2008/07/30/095243.html", "tags": ["Privacy \u0026 Security","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2008/04/30/i-wish-that.html", "content_html": "I wish that anyone that did anything with avatars would just get their act together around one source. They need to be universal.
\n", "date_published": "2008-04-29T20:57:30-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2008/04/29/i-wish-that.html", "tags": ["Software Development","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2008/04/29/something-seems-to.html", "content_html": "Something seems to be driving increased Twitter adoption. I’m getting a lot of people I know signing on and following me. Welcome!
\n", "date_published": "2008-04-29T09:27:19-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2008/04/29/something-seems-to.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2008/04/24/t795952639.html", "content_html": "For some reason I feel like I need to avoid Facebook chat as if it were some virulent strain of bird flu.
\n", "date_published": "2008-04-23T19:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2008/04/23/t795952639.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2008/04/14/t789216868.html", "content_html": "I sent this tweet four hours ago. Your getting it now, in the future, from me in the past.
\nOne of the tweets highlighted in my MarketWatch Farewell Video.
\n", "date_published": "2008-04-13T19:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2008/04/13/t789216868.html", "tags": ["MarketWatch","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2008/04/01/t781062973.html", "content_html": "Getting tired of the more and more elaborate April Fools things from various Internet sites. Perhaps I’m being lame.
\n", "date_published": "2008-03-31T19:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2008/03/31/t781062973.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2008/03/25/friendfeed-duplication-via.html", "title": "FriendFeed Duplication via Mashing", "content_html": "I’ve been working with financial news for years now and there is a really common problem in financial news, deduplication. The issue is when several news outlets will cover the same story or even redistribute another sources story, creating duplicates that readers find annoying. As the web becomes more mashable, I saw the first sign of this same problem on FriendFeed today. One of the people I follow had both Twitter and Tumblr feeding into his FriendFeed. But, he also had Twitter feeding Tumblr. In flowed the dups!
\n![\"FriendFeed](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/e108d2b770.gif\")
\nHe removed the Twitter to Tumblr feed to stop this, but it was a glimpse of a feature that FriendFeed is going to need to consider. In this instance, deduplication would be pretty easy since the content is exactly the same.
\n", "date_published": "2008-03-25T00:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2008/03/25/friendfeed-duplication-via.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2008/03/25/more-friendfeed-fun.html", "title": "More FriendFeed Fun", "content_html": "I wrote earlier about FriendFeed and I’m continuing to really enjoy it. I’ve played in the past with aggregation and this is by far the best solution for “life streaming” out there yet. Here is the perfect example of why FriendFeed is cool.
\nFind missing image uploads/2020/18e4b47555.png.
\nThe Twitter and Flickr actions tied together; open and mashable in a “Web 2.0” way. Very cool.
\n", "date_published": "2008-03-25T00:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2008/03/25/more-friendfeed-fun.html", "tags": ["Family","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2008/03/18/friendfeed-is-pretty.html", "title": "FriendFeed is Pretty Cool", "content_html": "![\"FriendFeed](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/5b4a267343.png\")
\nIn September 2007 I came up with the idea of using a Yahoo! Pipe to create the Thingelstad Superfeed. The basic idea was to provide one feed that you could get all my “stuff” with. It seems it was a good idea, since a couple of companies are now doing exactly this. I setup a profile on FriendFeed to play with and I have to admit that I was more impressed than I expected.
\nFriendFeed replicates a lot of social networking concepts, but to use it as a basic way to consolidate information on friends it works really well. It makes adding additional feeds really simple, and has built in hooks to many of the most popular websites out there.Check it out, you may find it pretty cool, and feel free to add me as a friend.
\n", "date_published": "2008-03-18T00:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2008/03/18/friendfeed-is-pretty.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2008/03/11/hello-again-twitter.html", "title": "Hello Again, Twitter", "content_html": "![\"Twitter](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/39c4fd7ce5.png\")
\nLast November I decided to pull the plug and wish Twitter “buh-bye”. Those that follow me have realized that I’ve returned to Twitter. So, what gives?
\nI’ve settled on a few simple things to make Twitter work for me.
\nI’ve stopped using Twitter over SMS and don’t expect to start. My main Twitter access is via the wonderful Twitterific on the Mac and Hahlo on my iPhone. I’ve found that I need to keep SMS traffic down and limit it to mainly texting with other people. Twitter on SMS became obnoxious. The problem for me is that SMS creates a queue of unread Tweets that you need to catch up with. This is what I refer to as not standing in the river. Instead, just dip in when you wish. No worries if you missed a bunch of stuff. It’s old anyway.
\nHere is the thing, protecting your updates just creates this sense that you could create a private tweet. There is no such thing. Remove the protection and just assume everyone reads your tweets. The other impact of this is that more people will follow you because they can see your tweets. More followers also makes Twitter more fun.
\nPerhaps the corollary to the item above; start following more people. This seems odd since the first impression is “Hey, isn’t that going to make it more of a problem?” Well, that would be the case only if you stood in the river. I choose to dip in when I want, so I’m free to follow a larger group of people. This also makes Twitter more interesting, since distance helps.
\nFollowing people on Twitter that you see all the time is fine, but, start following some people that are thousands of miles away.
\n", "date_published": "2008-03-11T00:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2008/03/11/hello-again-twitter.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2008/03/11/t769628625.html", "content_html": "Looking forward to South by Southwest being over and Twitter returning to normal.
\n", "date_published": "2008-03-10T19:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2008/03/10/t769628625.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2007/11/04/buhbye-twitter.html", "title": "Buh-Bye Twitter", "content_html": "I’ve tweeted my last tweet.
\nIf you’re a diligent visitor to my blog, you’ll notice that the Twitter section on the right hand side is no longer there. My iPhone is noticing that the volume of SMS messages has dropped way down. Most importantly my brain is feeling less distracted.
\nI’ve been a big fan of Twitter for a while now. So far I’ve created 1,281 tweets. 1,281 little 100 character updates sent who knows where. Now I think I’m done though. There are a number of reasons I decided to get off the Twitter bus.
\nTwitter is addictive, at least for me. The distraction was too pronounced, and while it’s fun to keep up with a number of people you wouldn’t otherwise see that much – it also pulls you out of the experience you are having right then.
\nI prefer blogging, and the complete sentences and paragraphs that surround it. While blogging is not incompatible with Twitter, I feel that I’m blogging less in part because I Twitter in between things.
\nIt has the potential to lessen the value of in-person discussions. When catching up with a friend I’ll think “I saw that on your Twitter” and then we move on. But really, could a 100 character SMS really sum up the richness of a trip to the zoo with your kids?
\nI don’t mean to condemn Twitter. Different strokes for different folks after all. And I do think it’s a great platform for mobile live blogging. I’ve kept my account active even though it’s disconnected from my phone and everything else just in case I want to use it to live blog the Folk Festival or something. But for now, I bid adieu.
\nIf you happen to follow my robot, that account has been deleted.
\n", "date_published": "2007-11-04T00:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2007/11/04/buhbye-twitter.html", "tags": ["Productivity","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2007/10/22/t353321412.html", "content_html": "I had a lot of fun on Jyte today.
\n", "date_published": "2007-10-21T19:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2007/10/21/t353321412.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2007/10/06/super-cool-avatars.html", "title": "Iconize Me Avatars", "content_html": "I’m giddy! It’s like Christmas around the Thingelstad house. Why? We have new avatars!
\nSeveral weeks ago a friend of mine clued me in on this service at Iconize Me! Iconize Me is the brain-child of Paul Sahner who decided to start creating caricature based avatars for people online. Iconize Me! is a great service, but it’s completely overloaded. They’ve stopped taking pre-orders again. Huge plus, you get vector images back. Can’t wait to make my 10 foot poster!
\nI think this is brilliant. I’ve always just used a head shot photo but using a real photo is, well, a real photo. A drawing is a little less personal but still gives you that individual identity. Enough of the words, here is my new avatar. (These images are all much bigger than would be typically used.)
\n![\"Cartoon](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/0232d981c8.jpg\")
\nOf course I didn’t want to be the only one around the house with a cool avatar, so we got them for the whole family!
\nHere is Tammy’s
\n![\"Cartoon](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/6acc3c984f.jpg\")
\nMazie got one too of course. She does have an account on the iMac after all.
\n![\"Cartoon](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/b59fffe8c7.jpg\")
\nAnd lastly I as trying to find a good option for an image for this website and to use as “cover art” in iTunes for home movies. Voila!
\n![\"Cartoon](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/7e231e0b97.jpg\")
\n",
"date_published": "2007-10-06T00:00:00-05:00",
"url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2007/10/06/super-cool-avatars.html",
"tags": ["Arts","Social Media"]
},
{
"id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2007/09/18/t276874282.html",
"content_html": "First Twitter reference just made at OPA Tech Day.
\n", "date_published": "2007-09-17T19:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2007/09/17/t276874282.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2007/08/16/t208478642.html", "content_html": "Deciding to give Pownce a chance.
\n", "date_published": "2007-08-15T19:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2007/08/15/t208478642.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2007/05/29/my-robot-and.html", "title": "My Robot and Steven Wright", "content_html": "A friend of mine forwarded this screen capture from a friend of his who grabbed this great Twitter moment. It seems my robot and Steven Wright (also on Twitter) are on similar wavelengths.
\n![\"twitter-snapshot.png\"](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/138ccd5d72.png\")
Wondering if anyone I know uses StumbleUpon? If you do, ping me.
\n", "date_published": "2007-05-27T19:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2007/05/27/t81069952.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2007/05/11/t59544312.html", "content_html": "Wishing that Twitterific would dual-post to Twitter and Facebook.
\n", "date_published": "2007-05-10T19:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2007/05/10/t59544312.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2007/05/03/t47972522.html", "content_html": "Wishing Twitterific could post in the same way Spotlight allows a search to be done. Avoids a big window having to come up.
\n", "date_published": "2007-05-02T19:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2007/05/02/t47972522.html", "tags": ["Apple","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2007/04/24/t37651392.html", "content_html": "Pouting after Jim hurt my feelings.
\nOne of the tweets highlighted in my MarketWatch Farewell Video.
\n", "date_published": "2007-04-23T19:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2007/04/23/t37651392.html", "tags": ["MarketWatch","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2007/04/16/t29917611.html", "content_html": "Wanting something…
\nOne of the tweets highlighted in my MarketWatch Farewell Video.
\n", "date_published": "2007-04-15T19:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2007/04/15/t29917611.html", "tags": ["MarketWatch","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2007/04/13/000000.html", "title": "Mr. Mom Weekend via Twitter", "content_html": "I’ve been a bit enamored with Twitter for a bit now. Mr. Mom Weekend was a great time to do some “tweeting”. For posterity sake, here is the Twitter stream from the Mr. Mom Weekend.
\nPer the last line there, her diaper was fine. She just took a really long time to go to sleep.
\n", "date_published": "2007-04-13T00:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2007/04/13/000000.html", "tags": ["Family","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2007/03/26/t12712431.html", "content_html": "Just installed Twitterific 2.0. Very nice!
\n", "date_published": "2007-03-25T19:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2007/03/25/t12712431.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2007/03/26/t12712971.html", "content_html": "Thinking that Twitter has tied into more “systems” faster than anything that has ever existed.
\n", "date_published": "2007-03-25T19:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2007/03/25/t12712971.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2007/03/11/introducing-my-robot.html", "title": "Introducing my Robot", "content_html": "![\"Cartoon](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2020/87c2962313.png\")
\nA couple of months ago I heard about Twitter for the first time. I logged onto it, created an account, and pretty much instantly decided that it served no purpose. Honestly, I just didn’t get it at all. A friend of mine, mostly on a lark, decided that he was not going to let Twitter die so easily and started using it. This slight encouragement got me to the point where I finally “got it”. Now I find that I really have fun with Twitter and am using it fairly regularly (who knows for how long). We even have a Twitter use case at work, where we make all of the MarketWatch breaking news bulletins available to Twitter users.
\nAbout a month ago I had an idea for an additional use of Twitter. I have a lot of things at home that I use a variety of scripts to monitor, or use tools like cacti to graph them. The problem with these is that they are typically never looked at after a while, and have no way of reaching me other than email. Thus my robot was born. Through Twitter, I created another account for thinglesBot. This account is the personification of my robot.
\nInitially my robot was obsessed with temperatures. Four times a day he provided the temperature outside the house. He also provided updates on the internal temperatures in the house, including the attic and very popular utility room. (Said friend above monitors the temperature in my utility room with glee.)
\nI’ve now made him a bit smarter, adding more event-based things. He now tells me when our solar panels turn on and off, provided there is enough sun to get them going. This is a great feature for me, and helps me feel better about all the investment into alternative energy. He’s also dipped ever so lightly into my office giving an update on how many emails I have in my inbox at the end of each day.
\nIn reality my robot only exists via Twitter. He is nothing more than a collection of scripts that run on a handful of computers and post messages via curl. However, Twitter allows him to exist as “him”, and be friends with me, and oddly, other people as well. Two people that I’ve never met, and don’t even live in the same state as I do, have made friends with my robot. Why they care to know the temperature outside my house is beside me, but cool nonetheless.
\nWelcome to the world, my robot.
\nPS - As an interesting aside, and a possible extension of my robot into the physical world it would be fun to have a Nabaztag WiFi rabbit as my robot’s familiar. He could speak through the Nabaztag. Hmm….
\nUpdated with new robot icon and current features.
\n", "date_published": "2007-03-11T01:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2007/03/11/introducing-my-robot.html", "tags": ["MarketWatch","Home","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2007/02/15/t5527679.html", "content_html": "Wondering how many connections the most connected person on LinkedIn has.
\n", "date_published": "2007-02-14T19:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2007/02/14/t5527679.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2007/02/07/t5360274.html", "content_html": "Considering if Twitter will be the new Enterprise Resource Planning package of 2010.
\n", "date_published": "2007-02-06T19:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2007/02/06/t5360274.html", "tags": ["Software Development","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2007/01/11/t2602433.html", "content_html": "First CNN on Twitter. Now the BBC. How long until we have MarketWatch on Twitter?
\n", "date_published": "2007-01-10T19:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2007/01/10/t2602433.html", "tags": ["MarketWatch","Social Media","Current Events"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2007/01/07/t2296193.html", "content_html": "Noticing that CNN is using Twitter for breaking news!
\n", "date_published": "2007-01-06T19:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2007/01/06/t2296193.html", "tags": ["Social Media","Current Events"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2007/01/07/t2296463.html", "content_html": "Just installed the Twidget Twitter Mac OS X Widget so I can Twitter without even launching the browser.
\n", "date_published": "2007-01-06T19:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2007/01/06/t2296463.html", "tags": ["Apple","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2007/01/06/twitterific.html", "content_html": "Have you played with Twitter? If not, try it. Be\na friend. Tell me what you think. It’s\npretty crazy. You can even link Wordpress with\nTwitter.
\n", "date_published": "2007-01-06T01:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2007/01/06/twitterific.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2005/08/04/delicious.html", "title": "del.icio.us", "content_html": "I just discovered del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is a social bookmark manager. What’s that you say? Essentially a way for you to manage your bookmarks across any number of computers using a tagging metaphor like Flickr. And, even better, you can see what other people like that you like, etc.
\nI’ve added the last ten things I’ve tagged on del.icio.us to the right hand navigation bar of my website for fun.
\n", "date_published": "2005-08-04T00:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2005/08/04/delicious.html", "tags": ["Technology","Social Media"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2004/07/03/internet-oddities.html", "title": "Internet Oddities", "content_html": "I ran across this Tron suit page and was stunned, confused and frightened. Just had to share it.
\n", "date_published": "2004-07-03T00:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2004/07/03/internet-oddities.html", "tags": ["Social Media"] } ] }