notes.husk.org

A Manifesto.

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 20:36:24 +0000

You need to stop automatically dumping your feeds from one account into another.

Look, I know it’s tempting. New service, not sure how you’ll keep up with the ever demanding maw and there’s the “import your content” button, right there in the sign-up process. A quick trip through a login screen or an OAuth link and there you are: All your stuff automatically aggregated into a new one-stop-shop of the genius things that pop out of your head

Look, just go and read the original, ok? Ta.

"in its totality, Twitter operates a lot like a wiki: as a knowledge-sharing, co-creation platform..."

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 14:07:57 +0100

“in its totality, Twitter operates a lot like a wiki: as a knowledge-sharing, co-creation platform that produces content and allows its consumption.”

- Mark Drapeaul, in Twitter is Not a Conversational Platform on O’Reilly Radar.

Twittering Everything

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 13:51:00 +0100

I always thought that one of Jaiku’s big mistakes is that it did too many things. In trying to be a repository of presence, it managed to build everything Twitter has, but submerge it in a pile of other features, such as conversation and aggregation.

By contrast, Twitter always did one thing, and arguably, for significant chunks of the time it’s been around, it’s not even done that well - take a short text string and propagated it to your friends, and (possibly) interested bits of the world. Yet, three years into the site’s journey from alpha geek hangout to claims (and denials) of infrastructure status, all the features Jaiku built in from the start are slowly, painfully, being hacked in (almost always by third parties).

For example, the in_reply_to attribute (where it’s not left off by sloppy coding or usage) allows threading of conversations, although there’s still not an interface as nice as Jaiku’s single page. However, it’s really aggregation I’m curious about. Twitter is now being seen as a fine place for link propagation, despite its numerous flaws - searching is hard, there’s no ability to show page titles, let alone tags or a decent length description, and of course the URLs end up obfuscated by shortening services¹.

In addition, people are wedging photographs onto the site, using Twitpic and similar services; music, via Spotify, ping.fm and suchlike; and of course there have been RSS to Twitter services for years.

This is all despite the fact that, as archival systems go, Twitter is beyond useless - the shift to the infinite-page ‘More’ button and the complete lack of any sort of dated archive mechanism means finding things you’ve said in the past is almost impossible. No, the motiviting factor is almost certainly because Twitter is excellent for getting audiences: “I’ve seen/posted/listened to this and you really need to know that!”

Personally, I want my stuff collected in one place that I control, and I still prefer to put things in the place they fit best; photos on Flickr, links on Delicious and so on. Maybe this is going to seem as old fashioned as wanting separate electronic devices when something converged can do it all, even if it’s not as good at each individual function.

¹ Waking up in the morning and going through the stack of windows opened from links from Twitter is an exercise in “who posted this and why?” far more often than I’d like. I should probably try to remember to use Microplaza more.

2008

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 22:20:00 +0000

A running total as I tot up my online activity throught the year. Hopefully all of this will turn into pretty over the next day or so.

Status updates on Twitter: 1218 (on 347 distinct days)

Links posted to deilicous: 856 (includes non-shared)

Photos posted to Flickr: 492
Photos marked as a favourite on Flickr: 714
Flickr photos where I added a comment or note: (tricky)

Images posted to ffffound: approx 310
Images bookmarked via ffffound: approx 265
Images added to ffffound (post + bookmark): approx 575

Notes posted to notes.husk.org: 299
Broken down as: photos: 212, posts: 38, videos: 18, links: 15, chats: 6

Long-form posts on Vox: 70 (includes private)
Long-form posts on chaff: 1

ffffound_mirror.rb

Sun, 11 May 2008 20:21:00 +0100

ffffound_mirror.rb:

Today’s half-finished code hack will scrape ffffound, downloading the original image URL and site along with the ffffound id, URL, image and related IDs, and various metadata, and then put them into a big JSON file.

Known bugs:

posts newer than about two days don’t get a date. Will try chronic later
dates may not be completely accurate: I’m not sure which TZ ffffound uses

To do:

~~populate database not JSON~~ see update below
argument driven
re-run-able (incremental running; abort when matches ID)
determine post vs found (cleverly or by brute force - see ‘type’)

Harder

something like flickrtouchr?
delish style UI

Question

Does the presence of javascript:FoundAPI in the page source mean anything?

Update OK, I hacked in a database. Create it with ffffound_create_db and back up to it with ffffound_mirror_db. It handles interrupts gracelessly; use the sqlite command line tool to ‘delete images’ for now.