Henrik Carlsson's Blog

All things me.

Threads

posted this article on and tagged it with Handwritten Social Networks Threads

I wrote this headline in my notebook a few days ago, thinking that I should collect my thought on Threads under it. Up until now the page has remained empty. The thing is, the more I think about Threads the less I care about it.

Don’t get me wrong, if you’re on Threads and you are having a great time there then good for you. The same goes for having a good time on Instagram, TikTok or Twitter och Reddit or whatever. People having a good time on (or off) the internet is a good thing. I’m not here to say that Threads is meaningless or uninteresting on an objective level, just that it’s uninteresting to me.

∞
posted this note on and tagged it with Social Networks The open web Threads

According to the [Thread’s] own data privacy disclosure, Threads can collect information about a user’s health, finance, contacts, search history, location, and other sensitive information via their digital activity. The app can also forward data to third parties about a user’s sexual orientation, religious and political beliefs, race and ethnicity, body, and employment status.

Why Twitter Rival Threads Isn’t Available in the E.U. (time.com)

This seems like a lot of data to collect for a text-based social network. Perhaps the fact that it’s not available in the EU at the moment is not necessarily a 100% bad thing? I mean, we constantly whine about the power that big corporations have and how blatantly they disregard the rights and privacy of us, their users.

∞

Use your own ”printing press” from time to time

posted this on and tagged it with Blogging Social Networks WordPress

I think Dave Winer really nails it with this quote and elaboration:1

A.J. Liebling said, famously: ”Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” That’s so true, and with blogging everyone can own their own, and therefore be free. However, we’re trading that in for a bit more engagement.

– Dave Winer. (2015)

I will link to this post on twitter so likely most of you who read it will find it there. You’re likely tweeting quite a lot yourself, and that is a good thing. I don’t think you should stop tweeting, and I’m pretty sure Dave doesn’t think that either. I am, however, saying that you should also use your own ”printing press” from time to time.

Use your blog for some of your writing!2 Don’t have a blog? Get one!

I have a lot of bad things to say about WordPress, but if you want an easy-to-setup, easy-to-manage blog you should give it a try. (This site is a WordPress site.) It’s optimal if you self-host it. That way you definitely own every word on it.

Don’t feel like self-hosting? Get an account at WordPress.com. Yes, you are using somebody else’s ”printing press” but at least that somebody is somebody who is dedicated to open publishing and to ensure that you own what you write and that you can write whatever the hell you want.

Afraid that nobody will read what you write if it’s not on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or [insert whatever]? Write in on your blog and then link to it on your social networks of choice?

You can even use a tool such as Dave’s Radio3 that allows you to make a link blog, or a list of short status updates, and simultaneously publish to Twitter, Facebook, WordPress and an RSS-feed. It’s a great tool that I use for most of my tweeting these days. That way, what I tweet also ends of as link-posts or status-posts here on the blog as well.

But what if I really don’t like WordPress?

There are other options, for both self-hosted and hosted solutions. If you decide to go with a hosted one, the most important thing is to make sure that it has a clear and easy way for you to export everything you write in full fidelity.

  1. I should admit that I’d never heard of neither Liebling nor the famous saying before. ↩
  2. If you find yourself writing more than two consecutive tweets about the same thing, maybe it is not something that you be tweeted. Maybe it should be written as a blog post instead. ↩
∞

You’ll need a Facebook account to sign up for Spotify

posted this on and tagged it with Facebook Social Networks Spotify

According to information directly from Spotify you can no longer sign up for a Spotify account, be it an ad financed free account or a premium account, unless you have a Facebook account.

Unfortunately you will need a Facebook account to access Spotify from now on, unless you already have an account set up.

A my friend Emil put it in a tweet, being able to use your Facebook account is a good thing, being forced to do it is a bad thing. I like it when modern more or less web-related companies integrate with each other, but when membership in one requires you to be using the other it’s really not a good thing.

My opinion on Spotify in general

I’ve had a Spotify account for a really long time now. It’s always been a premium account, except for the first few months. I’ve been fairly happy with the service and selection they provide. However one thing about Spotify has bothered me. (The same goes for any other company that provides streaming media.) No matter how long I’ll be a member, nothing of what I chose to listen to will be mine. The second I quit my membership I will lose the ability to listen to the songs. Contrast this with money spent on a download service, like iTunes. When I pay for a download I purchase something. If I chose to throw away my iPod and iPhone, thrash my Mac and burn my iPad to ashes, the right to listen to the music I’ve purchased is still mine. Any computer or computer-ish device that can play AAC audio files enables me to listen to my purchased music. (Yes, of course I must make sure the actual files are present on the device.)

This is by no means Spotify’s fault. It’s an inherent flaw in the streaming business model. To some people it’s no problem, and to me the benefits of Spotify has counterweighted the limitations of the nature of streaming. However, I’ve noticed that I don’t listen to as much ”new” music as I would need to in order to really make full use of Spotify’s benefits.

Spotify’s change to the free accounts

Some time ago Spotify changed the terms for free accounts and made some cheap accounts available. Suddenly the free accounts had a limit to how many songs could be listened to in a month. This really pissed of some people. Apparently some people still thinks free music should be part of the human rights. (Let’s save that discussion for some other day.)

This didn’t really change anything for me. If anything it was just an indication that the advertising didn’t pay off as good as some people thought and that Spotify felt a need to limit the free accounts in order to gain more paying customers.

Spotify and Facebook

So far Spotify’s collaboration with Facebook hasn’t changed anything for me, since the new rules only apply to accounts created now and in the future. However, if it does start to apply to old accounts I will likely cancel my Spotify subscription and start spending the $10 a month in the iTunes Store instead. I currently don’t have a Facebook account and I will not create one just because Spotify wants me to. I pay money to Spotify to listen to music, not to have them forcing me to get a Facebook (or any other social network) account.

∞

More Google+, a response to Emil

posted this on and tagged it with Google Social Networks

A while back my friend Emil responded to my post on Google+. I should have answered it right away, but lots of stuff got it the way (mostly work). Here is what Emil wrote.

Men det går alldeles utmärkt att köra google+ utan javascript! Och för den delen tror jag du hade tyckt om Google+!

Update: Okej lite för snabb med att skjuta där, var från höften. Viss funktionalitet försvinner ju faktiskt. Men en del saker fungerar ändå.

For the non-Swedish speaking audience of this blog, what he says is that some things in Google+ still works, even without JavaScript. I’ll admit (as I did in my original post) that I haven’t really tested Google+ myself, that all of the writing was based solely on what I’d read about it. He also says that I’d probably like Google+.

Emil’s got a point. I really should have tried Google+ before coming down hard on it. I also might like it, if I tried. There is absolutely no ideological statement behind me not using Google+. (The same is true for me not using Facebook.) It’s just a lack of interest in immersing myself in yet another community/social network.

∞

The real openness of Google+

posted this on and tagged it with Google Podcasts Social Networks

In the spirit of ”give credit where credit is due” and as a follow up to this mornings rant about Google+ and what’s not opened about is, here is some praise to Google for what is in fact open.

According to the SitePoint podcast #120 Google+ has a feature called ”Data liberation” (or something like) that allows you to export everything on your profile in more or less open formats. That’s seriously awesome!

∞

Replies and comments

The closed nature of Google+

posted this on and tagged it with Google Social Networks The open web

I’ve never used Google+. This article is solely based on me reading other sources.

The word ”open” is often used by Google, and even more often by Google’s proponents, as an argument for why Google and their products are better than others (especially better than Apple, but occasionally Microsoft). In my opinion though that has always been about business strategy and marketing, not ideology (and that’s fine). Google is a company that wants to make money and there is nothing wrong with that. This is not going to be an Apple fanboy’s assault on Google. It’s going to be reflecting on the not so open world of Google+ and a concerned look at some of the not-so-great-in-fact-really-bad things about Google+ and it’s lack of ”openness”.

The semantics

The HTML of Google+ is an absolute nightmare. It’s <div> in <div> in <div> in <div> (repeat indefinitely). And the class names makes no semantic sense what so ever. On episode #32 of Build and Analyze Marco Arment speculates that this could be because the code itself is actually written in a higher level language and compiled into the HTML that makes up the page. That may be the case, but it’s still a complete disregard of everything that the Web Standards-people and the Microformats community (and others) have fought for over the years.

Semantics and well-structured HTML that validates can easily become a religion. Breaking these dogmas is not a problem for the sake of it. It’s a problem because it partially locks down the content on Google+ and makes it harder for parsers and crawlers to do something meaningful with it. Instapaper for instance had to have a completely specialized parsing algorithm written for it (again Build and Analyze #32). One of the main purposes of the new elements in HTML5 was to give developers simpler tool to mark up content in a way that makes sense semantically. Google has previously made a big deal about HTML5 so why not follow its semantics as well?

URL from hell

The urls for peoples pages on Google+ is horrible. People are identified by a long string of digits, not by a username or anything that’s easily rememberable. In practice this means that the most popular way to find people’s Google+ sites is likely to use Google Search to find them. Thereby Google, who makes its money from advertising, gets yet another chance to show you its ads.

With a bit of a tin-foil hat-mind this could be seen as a slightly anticompetitive move, but there are other search engines too, right?

Everything is a JavaScript

Every single part of the content of a Google+ page is generated with javascript. This is unfortunately not something unique; Twitter does it, I think Facebook does it etc. However, just because you are in good company does not mean you’re doing the right thing. Here’s some reasons why javascript-generated content is bad:

End game

I want to once again state that this is not an Apple Fanboy’s rant against a threat to the all mighty fruit, it’s a web developer who’s concerned about some of the directions being taken by one of the largest web companies in the world, and one that explicitly uses the word open time after time to tout its own greatness.

∞

Replies and comments

Instagram’s great success

posted this on and tagged it with Links Social Networks

In just nine months, the photo-sharing startup hit 150 million pix and more than 7 million users who upload about 1.3 million photos daily (15 per second).

[…]

It took Flickr, one of the world’s largest photo-sharing sites, close to 2.5 years to reach 150 million photos, which could be uploaded from any computer and shot on any camera. But it took San Francisco-based startup Instagram roughly just nine months to hit that same milestone–with just one mobile app, available on just one device maker’s OS (Apple’s).

The interview and article is from FastCompany.com. The interview is good but I think the comparison between Instagram and Flickr that’s made by the author is unnecessary and incorrect.

Instagram has grown faster than flickr, that’s true, but I don’t think the comparison is very good. To me flickr is clearly a service aimed at photographers, amateurs and professionals alike. The users main focus is to show photos as art. Instagram is much more of a ”traditional” social network, but with images instead of text.

Just to clarify, I love Instagram and use it as a way of telling people I know about what I’m up to. I also love Flickr.

(Extra bonus irony-points to the article for using a picture from Flickr for illustration. Tough, I don’t think irony was what they were aiming for.)

∞

Profile Photo © Henrik Carlsson