2013-05-10
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Ashlee Vance in Bloomberg Businessweek. via Tom Insam, who comments
This is presented to make the point that “Netflix use a lot of space”. But I see it more as “Facebook is already 50% the size of all of Hollywood’s output ever”.
(via tominsam)
2013-04-12
post/47792495685
Sven Eberlein paraphrasing the large companies in his post / open letter What’s the matter with “The Google Bus”? (via)
I’ve noticed more and more people (and I have a lot of sympathy with them) saying “if these kids want to work at Google, then they should live in Mountain View”. It’s either that, or Google (and Facebook et al) should set up headquarters (or at least large satellite offices) in San Francisco.
Within the last year Twitter’s proved you can house 1,500 odd employees here, and I’d be amazed if they don’t have contingency plans to at least double that. It’d be so much better than these “invasive species”, as Sven puts it.
2013-04-09
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“I screen shot this from a live web cam feed in Trafalgar Square in London…” by Staci Frederick on Facebook.
2013-03-26
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(via iamdanw)
2013-03-06
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Étude De Nu, 1940, by Laure Albin-Guillot.
A promotional post by Jeu de paume, Paris on Facebook for an exhibition of his work had to be censored after Facebook blocked their page for a day. (Image via mapetitemelancolie.)
2012-11-09
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(via iamdanw)
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2012-10-30
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this app made me feel really dirty when I downloaded it. It’s called Badabing! and it basically goes through your friends’ photos on Facebook to pull out the ones of them at the pool or beach. In other words, we’re talking about scantily clad photos here.
I of course, for the sake of technology journalism, had to download the app and give it a whirl. It actually kind of works and it’s really creepy.
2012-10-15
post/33629949691
Alexis C. Madrigal, in the Atlantic: Dark Social: We Have the Whole History of the Web Wrong.
Perhaps this crystallises why I’m upset with the state of the internet at the moment: I’m following everyone else in looking at the corralled data stacks, not at the edges where, it seems, many people’s experience of the network still is.
2012-09-18
post/31796707216
Features from a handful of alternate Twitters:
- the ability to edit a tweet. There are several patterns in community software for handling the “I responded and then you changed what you said” pattern. One of then is versioning. The other is a short window of edits. It’s a question of balancing how much you prefer the conversational integrity vs the benefits of a little hypocrisy to a person’s self expression.
- privacy. I was an early thorn in Twitter’s side about supporting the privacy settings. But honestly it was just always too much work to respond manually to follow requests or to maintain two separate accounts. Per status privacy and per status geo-privacy would go a long way towards changing the nature of what people share on Twitter away from re-publishing Mashable headlines.
”Two points from Kellan Elliott-McCrea’s post, App.net and Cargo Culting, which suggests things that the new short message site App.net might want to consider implementing.
Both of the features I’ve picked out are hard. Allowing people to go back and edit data (and metadata) means not only providing a graceful UI, but also breaking the model of storing data once and being able to treat it as read-only. Per-post and per-feature privacy is also, obviously, pretty tricky, both in UI terms, and in the model of interactions that start happening. (If Eve is a friend and Brenda is family, when Anna posts a photo that’s friends and family but with location locked to family only, there’s lots of combinations to check.)
Of course, just because they’re hard, it doesn’t mean they’re not possible. Flickr has supported editing metadata (and even, for pro users, replacing the image data) along with a sophisticated (albeit arguably overcomplex) privacy model, while Facebook allows editing of comments (for a short time), and various Google services manage a mix of both.
It’s Twitter that, for whatever reasons (engineering expedience? a desire for simplicity?) not only ended up with both the inability to edit anything after the fact and an almost-not-there privacy model, but did so in such a way that a crop of services following along copied them. I’d single out Instagram, which made almost exactly the same design decisions. (You can’t change an Instagram photo’s caption or location once it’s post, or have different privacy settings per image, or (again) for location. Hell, they don’t even return whether a user is private in the API responses. At least Twitter, which otherwise has the same limitations, gets that one right.)
Obviously, there are some good reasons to implement systems the Twitter way rather than the Flickr one. I just wish - and I think that Kellan feels the same - that occasionally people would consider whether the richness that’s been lost might be worth spending some effort on.
