Why Twitter’s Dying (And What You Can Learn From It) — Bad Words — Medium is an interesting article about what the author sees as the core problem of social media, which is ignored by the operators: abuse, or (since "abuse" doesn't translate trivially) the antisocial behavior of many in these media, which drives away normal users and turns some networks into pure self-promotion machines for press organs. The latter part of the article, about the digital revolution, is then somewhat too dreamy.
asocialnetworks
reclaim hugo | Collected stuff from social networks - since the Reclaim Social project has now delivered the WordPress plugin in a first version, I have finally set up a site where I now collect my G+, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Github and YouTube activities. It already looks quite neat. By the way, I am using the Shprink One theme, which works very well with the formats and has a few nice features. And it is especially clean. And it works with different screen sizes, including mobile. Let's see how this thing behaves in continuous operation.
ThinkUp: Social Media Insights Platform. I definitely want to check this out - a tool that collects your own social activities (well, they're not always that social) via various APIs and combines them. And in a self-hosted database. Supports Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ and evaluates the data collection according to various criteria. And with Social Timeline there is then a tool for displaying as a timeline, which could be integrated into your own blog. This could even be a much more pleasant variant than importing all posts from social networks into your own blog.
Mellow Morning » Django Facebook 3.2 – Simple image upload and wall posts. Since FB is unfortunately still the only social network with a serious API (sorry, but G+ doesn't have a serious API as long as they only offer a level like RSS-over-JSON and the Diaspora API is unfortunately still internal - but Diaspora is in alpha anyway, so there will certainly be more in the beta), you have to deal with it. And the new features of django-facebook look like they could ease some of the pain (and maybe one or the other interesting toy could become interesting for me).
About Weavrs. Social Media Bots. Defined by keywords, they run around and simulate a defined personality. Can be further controlled by filters and topics. And here someone who is now getting started with the bots and releases several "personalities" on G+ in response to "Real Name Requirement". Of course, this won't convince Google that the Real Name Policy is completely bananas. But it's still funny.
Data Protection and Social Network Buttons
Just read: Data Protection & Facebook Like Button for Website Operators. I just played around with the various social buttons (they might still appear on cached pages for a while), but then I thought they will probably report more connections between accounts and page visits - and turned them off for now.
The linked article takes a closer look at the Facebook Like Button, the Google +1 Button should be very similar. The Twitter Button is probably not unproblematic either, at least when the server is queried for the number of tweets - but an unproblematic variant of the Twitter button should be achievable, because that is the simplest case after all.
Well, for now I have turned off the toy again, I still have to think about it. Because on the one hand it is of course interesting to enable visitors with active social networks to easily share in their networks - but what is the price?
Google+: Facebook prevents export of friends. You can think what you want about Google, but to block the export of your own data, they haven't sunk that low yet. With such an approach, Facebook is the absolute bottom of antisocial networks.
Snooping: It's not a crime, it's a feature. The great new photo network Color? It turns on your microphone to have another clue about location based on sounds. Did you expect that a photo-sharing app for the iPhone would eavesdrop as well, or?
Fuck you, Google « Fugitivus - why Google really screwed up with Buzz. This "automatically follow all regular contacts" is pretty much the dumbest idea ever, especially with their idea of opt-out-not-possible. I've been saying this for a while, just because they have "don't be evil" as a motto doesn't mean they also have "don't be stupid". It's hard to get much dumber than the introduction of Buzz.