Matthew Lang

To try to get back into regular blogging again, I have decided to take up this invitation to Small Web July.

Here are my guidelines for the month:

• Write at least one blog post a day - This can be anything from quoting another post, sharing some thoughts or anything else really. The one thing I want to do, though, is to move beyond just sharing the bare minimum. Far too many of my posts are short enough not to need titles on Micro.blog, and I want to start moving away from short posts to longer posts.
• Engage a bit more on Micro.blog - I noticed that my volume of replies to people and from people is relatively low. I used to reply to posts a lot in the past, but for some reason, I find myself rarely engaging with other people on Micro.blog.
• Spend more time reading - My reading habit is returning, but not as quickly as I would like. Some fiction books I’ve recently bought are not grabbing my attention. On a whim, I picked up Andy Weir’s book, Hail Mary, for my Kobo. I loved reading The Martian, so I’m sure this will be something I will enjoy reading.

That’s it for the month. I could have added more things to do, but with schools off here in Scotland, I tend to find that between now and mid-August is a time for setting aside any primary goals and just enjoying the boys being about the house and sitting in the back garden when possible.

I noticed that Annie Mueller is participating as well.

Is anyone else taking part?

This post at the MIT Technology Review emphasises what most of us already know. Still, it’s always worth reiterating the importance of having an open web with open protocols.

If we get this right, so much is possible. Not too long ago, the internet was full of builders and people working together: the open web. Email. Podcasts. Wikipedia is one of the best examples — a collaborative project to create one of the web’s best free, public resources. And the reason we still have it today is the infrastructure built up around it: the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation protects the project and insulates it from the pressures of capitalism. When’s the last time we collectively built anything as good?

— We need to protect the protocol that runs Bluesky

It is still early days for Bluesky’s AT Protocol. Still, I’m hopeful that such a protocol will herald a more open web with more collaborative projects not dictated by ads and capitalism in the future.

Anil Dash writes about the recent resurgence of the web. There are definitely many reasons why this is happening. Still, a key one for me is the growth of tools that make building websites easier for everyone.

While the core technology of the web is decades old, the tools that help make it and run have been quietly evolving into something extraordinary in the last few years, too. There’s a flourishing of powerful new frameworks that make it simpler than ever to build flexible, responsive, useful sites. New hosting platforms let those sites be deployed and delivered faster and more reliably than ever. And you can build one of these sites in literally under a minute, then collaborate with people anywhere in the world to iterate on making the site better.

— A Web Renaissance by Anil Dash

I might be pre-empting the return of the glory days of the web when blogs and RSS feeds were everywhere. As good as that would be, I don’t think we’ll ever return to those days. I do hope though, that we are seeing a return to the web as an open platform for people to build and share content.

With the internet shifting into huge companies’ hands, we’re losing the fight against the open web. Heather Burns reminds us of those times and why it’s down to Generation X to fight for that free open internet once more.

Today’s young tech policy professionals are are, quite rightfully, responding to the only internet in the only world they have ever known. The awful one. The one where the internet was and is a handful of billion-pound companies. The one where the internet has only ever been petrol on a fire. The one where the internet has been essential infrastructure like water and heat, not a thing you had to request and master. The closed internet made for them. Not the open internet I got to make.

— Why Generation X will save the web

I hate to play down the benefits of blogging, but I think the author here has a point. There used to be so many blogging platforms. Google even had a filter on their search engine for blogs. Now though, it feels like there are fewer blogs out there.

But they would be the one thing I’d bring back to the internet if I could bring one thing back. They’re the thing I miss the most and the most often. They were the most valuable thing on here, besides freer availability of news, free although low quality video content on YouTube, and I guess some kinds of social media. But blogs are something you can sit down and read and get really into to the point you forget where you even are, and think about how you want to try those things maybe in your life, or just enjoy their writing, and you can read deeper into them into past blog posts, and tune back in later and see what they’ve posted since the last things you read about them.

— If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

I think this is a bit ironic me pointing this out. I’ve definitely not been blogging as much as I have in the past. I’ve been struggling with blogging frequently again for the last two years, but the want to publish just isn’t there as much as it has been in the past.

As the World Wide Web celebrates it’s 30th birthday, Sir Tim Berners-Lee reminds us that a better web for all can be achieved.

The fight for the web is one of the most important causes of our time. Today, half of the world is online. It is more urgent than ever to ensure the other half are not left behind offline, and that everyone contributes to a web that drives equality, opportunity and creativity.

The Contract for the Web must not be a list of quick fixes but a process that signals a shift in how we understand our relationship with our online community. It must be clear enough to act as a guiding star for the way forward but flexible enough to adapt to the rapid pace of change in technology. It’s our journey from digital adolescence to a more mature, responsible and inclusive future.

— 30 years on, what’s next #ForTheWeb?

It’s great to see the Signal v Noise blog running under Basecamp’s own control again.

Beyond that, though, we’ve grown ever more aware of the problems with centralizing the internet. Traditional blogs might have swung out of favor, as we all discovered the benefits of social media and aggregating platforms, but we think they’re about to swing back in style, as we all discover the real costs and problems brought by such centralization.

— Signal v Noise exits Medium by David Heinemeier Hansson

I read today that Microsoft is reportedly throwing in the towel with their EdgeHTML browser engine and starting work on a new browser based on the Chromium engine.

My immediate thought was down-heartened. Another Google-backed browser to reinforce the popularity of Google’s own Chrome browser, but the problem may actually be worse than that (depending on your point of view of course).

Andre Alves Garzia explains more in his post:

We already lost the mobile world for a duopoly of Apple and Google, now we’re losing the desktop most used application, the Web Browser, to a monopoly from Google again, how much control do you want that company to have over the future of the Web? All this not counting the many Electron based apps we use in our daily lives such as VS Code, Atom, Slack, etc, which are all Chrome engine again.

— While we Blink, we lose the Web by Andre Alves Garzia

Even though I’m against any one company having too much control over any part of the technology stack, I’m supporting the use of Google, by using some tools that include the Chrome engine. I use VS Code daily as a web developer and of course the company I work for uses Slack as a communication tool between teams. Is there any getting away from the Chrome engine? Perhaps not at work, but I can make a concise decision to use other applications when I’m not at work.

I’ve been using Firefox and Safari as my preferred browsers for the last few years. In fact, I haven’t looked at Chrome since I decided to go Google-free a few years ago. As for the Chrome-based tools, I don’t use Slack outside of work, but I do use VS Code as my preferred text editor.

Perhaps it’s time to look at Vim again?

For the last few weeks, I’ve been using the lire app on iOS for reading through my RSS subscriptions.

There’s a number of great little features in lire, but the pull to a different RSS client didn’t last long. In the last few days, I’ve deleted the app and started using Feedbin again on iOS. As a client, Feedbin has everything I need and it doesn’t need to have space on my home screen in order to access it. Just a bookmark in my browser is enough to find it.

In the last couple of days I also noticed an article that was doing the rounds about the state of RSS apps on the macOS platform. Before I was using the lire app, I was still using Feedbin in my browser to read my RSS subscriptions when working through the day. A pinned tab in the browser is enough for my needs.

There’s only two cases where I’ll use a native app.

1. When the app’s core functionality isn’t available on the web like a text editor or source code control.
2. When I prefer to use a native app over a web based app for cases like email and chat.

Native apps do offer a number of great benefits over web based apps, but in most cases I prefer the flexibility of web based apps. Easy to access for users on multiple platforms and easy for the app’s developers to maintain.

So it’s back to using Feedbin on the web again, but more importantly back to using another web app again.

I’ve been moving over some lists and accounts over to Feedbin. The significant advantage of this is that I don’t need to open Twitter and scroll through my timeline.

It’s the same way in all social media platforms. You’re trying to find that point in the timeline where you left off previously, and you can’t determine what you have already seen. Throw in the different ways in which posts are promoted or injected in your timeline, and it makes for a very confusing experience.

Yesterday I opened up Feedbin at the end of the day and noticed that one of the lists that I have on Twitter had over 50 unread posts on it. Unusual for that particular list, but there was an event on, and so the activity was a bit higher than usual. Rather than pour through each post, I decided to flag the whole list as read.

I weighed up that the amount of posts that were unread wasn’t worth my time to scroll through, even on Feedbin. So I just marked them as all as read.

Seeing the number of unread posts in Feedbin allows me to quickly decided if a list, tag or feed is worth reading. If it’s too high, I can just mark everything as read.

The number of unread items on Feedbin is a small thing, but it’s a great indicator of what I’ve missed. I wish more services and social media platforms would use signs like this rather than trying to sort out your unread items for you magically.

A common observation around the slow uptake of RSS readers is that RSS is still something that people don’t understand.

RSS readers often rely on the user to add the feeds that they want, but unless users know where to look then users may be turned off by an RSS reader. A blank page with no suggested or recommended feeds in it isn’t going to demonstrate what an RSS reader can do.

I’ve noticed that podcasting apps like Overcast and Pocketcasts include discovery sections that show you podcasts that you can subscribe too. They provide recommended and categories sections that people can click and find out more information about that podcast. If they like it they can subscribe.

Perhaps it’s not only about adding subscribe buttons to our sites but also making RSS readers more user friendly by adding RSS discovery so that people can find the content they want.

_If my memory serves me right, Feedly does include such a discovery feature, so thumbs up to them! _

The subscribe button used to be everywhere on the Internet. It’s about time it made a return

Every blog should have a Subscribe button. In an open ecosystem this is a problem, a problem that silos don’t have. Which is the advantage Twitter (a silo) has over the open web.

— Scripting news

This is a great move for Feedbin. Rather than following a single collection of accounts, I can now subscribe to a core collection of users, lists and perhaps even some individual accounts.

You can start adding Twitter content to Feedbin the same way you would subscribe to a feed. Feedbin will recognize any Twitter URL that contains tweets. It also supports shortcuts for subscribing directly to twitter @usernames as well as #hashtags.

— Feedbin is the Best Way to Read Twitter

Best of all though is that I can read these tweets alongside my existing RSS subscriptions.

Today Feedbin announced a new feature to their RSS reader which allows you to subscribe to Twitter users, searches, lists and hashtags.

I’ve been looking at this for the last couple of hours to find a way that will allow me to continue to use Twitter, but without mhaving to check on my timeline as often. Here’s just a few ways that I see me using Feedbin’s new Twitter subscription options.

Vanity Searches

A few months ago I removed analytics tracking from my blog. It was a decision based on the fact that I’m not interested in the numbers anymore. I don’t want to see how many people viewed my blog in the last 24 hours, and I don’t want to see how many visitors I’ve had in the previous week. These numbers don’t drive why I blog. It’s the content that drives why I blog. It’s about getting links back to my blog from other bloggers.

To do this, I have a saved search in Feedbin that only includes blog posts that contain my name. Sure it doesn’t have the accuracy of analytics tracking, but through the blogs that I follow and the times that my name appears in this search, it’s a great indicator of what other bloggers like on my blog.

Feedbin’s new Twitter integration will allow me to broaden my reach so that I can use searches on Twitter to include tweets that either includes my Twitter handle or my domain name.

Better Reading of Lists

Twitter’s lists have always been difficult to use. I’m not a big fan of reading Twitter on my mobile and changing between lists on other apps is not great either. Feedbin’s new Twitter integration will make digesting lists a lot easier.

I have some accounts on Twitter I follow, but I would like to bundle into lists. I’ve tried in the past to do this, but I frequently forget to check these lists. Separating these accounts into lists makes my timeline much easier to follow.

With these new lists to follow through Feedbin, it is a lot easier to follow and scan through.

RSS to the Rescue

Right, so Twitter dropped RSS a long time ago, and since then it’s been difficult to follow people through anything other than Twitter on the web or through one of the many Twitter clients that are available. So it’s not RSS to the rescue but Feedbin to the rescue by providing a genuinely different way of consuming Twitter.

The next few weeks will see the accounts I follow tail off to perhaps around fifty or so accounts, but I’ll continue to use Twitter for sharing content from this blog and my micro-blog as well as responding to replies on Twitter.

Tom Critchlow is re-discovering the glory days of blogging. The tags, the blogrolls and much more. The simpleness of it all.

There’s something about the humble hyperlink that gets subsumed by hyperfeeds. The archive. The curation of tags and categories. Blog series.

— A few notes on blogging and independent feeds by Tom Critchlow

This is why I’m doting on Micro.blog so much. It’s blogging and syndication made simple. And RSS is much easier to follow than any hyperfeed.

The Trinet (Amazon, Facebook, Google) is a depressing prospect for the future of the web.

The War for Net Neutrality in the USA won a battle in 2014, but in 2017 we are seeing a second battle which is more likely to be lost. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are probably soon going to dictate what traffic can or cannot arrive at people’s end devices. GOOG-FB-AMZN traffic would be the most common, due to their popularity among internet users. Because of this market demand, ISPs will likely provide cheap plans with access to GOOG-FB-AMZN, while offering more expensive plans with full internet access.

— The web begain dying in 2014, here’s how by André Staltz

There’s still one thing that the web has in it’s favour. People are still willing to make it the best open platform it can be.

Google might have shut down their RSS reader but there’s been a number of replacements sprung up that people are willing to pay for like Feedbin.

Facebook might have the social internet sewn up just now, but people are continually challenging that with alternatives like Mastodon and Micro.blog.

Amazon might have the shopping internet market share, but how long can they continue that success? Retail is a never-ending cycle of new companies and stores trying to sell products. Can Amazon remain on top?

I’m optimistic that the web can still be and open platform for all. It comes from educating people about the sacrifices they’re making in using the Trinet’s applications and services and what the trade-off is. I suspect most people are not too bothered though, but there are people who are willing to support and work towards an open web.

I’m still grappling with Micro.blog but what’s reassuring is Manton dedication to staying the course for the platform with an eye to the long term.

I plan to stay the course. I’m inspired by the work of the IndieWeb, which was founded 6 years ago and is still gaining momentum today. I hope that the solar eclipse photos posted to indie microblogs today will last through the next North American eclipse 7 years from now, and longer.

— Flip the Iceberg by Manton Reece

Manton also includes a link to an article on AltPlatform that suggests blog-focused platforms could eventually become bigger than any of the existing social networks.

Open source tools like WordPress, 1999.io and Mastodon.social are creating many small networks of publishers, and popular tools like Twitter and Micro.blog could peer with them. If all of the social networks outside of Facebook interoperated at some level, they might eventually “flip the iceberg” and become the dominant form of social networking.

— How Twitter, Micro.blog & Mastodon could team up to compete with Facebook by AltPlatform

With so many different outlets and tools out there it can become difficult to decide on where to focus your energy.

I’ll cover my reasons for not publishing on the different social networks later on in the week.

Rachel Kaser over at The Next Web certainly thinks so.

Like it or not, social media provides an easy-to-use template that lets anyone make their personal information available — and most of those sites are a hell of a lot easier to use than even the mildest website creation software.

— It’s time to kill the personal website by Rachel Kaser for The Next Web

I can certainly see Rachel’s point. With all the progress we’ve made on the web, the days of self-publishing means that you don’t need to be tied to a domain or a way of publishing your thoughts online. Social media and blogging platforms make publishing online easy.

Where I disagree though is that while these social media platforms are easy to use, they require an investment of effort in order to be effective. In order to stand out you need to be publishing consistently and that requires investing time and effort in that platform. I’m just not prepared to make that investment in order to build my name when I can use a personal website.

Having my own website means that I’m only investing in the content at my own website and then optionally using social media to get my content out further. I not only control the content but I also having a simpler delivery method for people. I have a place where people can follow me without the pressures of social media timelines. You can visit my website or subscribe to my RSS feed. It might be less convenient than following me on social media, but when you consider that you can read my website in a less crowded environment, away from the timeline, then I think having a personal website is essential if you want people to actually read what you’re publishing.

Dave Winer ponders on the possibility of an open source version of the popular blogging platform Medium.

What if Medium had been designed from the start to be the Mother Node of a network of clones. The basic software would be available for installing on your own server, but if you want, there’s a place you can put your document today, now, quickly, where everyone will be able to read it, now and for the foreseeable future.

— What if Medium were open source by Dave Winder

This is the kind of thing that I can get behind. I like Medium’s approach to easy publishing but I dislike the fact that everything is on their network.

This week I finally got my invite to Micro.blog.

A few months ago Manton Reece wrote about a project he was working on to bring together micro-blogging using the format of RSS. He started a Kickstarter around it which went successfully. This week, I’m finally getting round to getting my account set up and following a few people.

The idea is simple. You can host your own micro-blog on Micro.blog or you can import an RSS feed from somewhere else so that it becomes your timeline. Rather than fencing people into the product, you can bring your own RSS feed and use that for your timeline. Neat idea.

First Impressions

At first the service looks pretty basic. Your own timeline is a simple list of recent posts from the people you are following. There’s options to reply, delete and favourite to posts on your timeline. So far so good.

While your timeline is a minimal affair in the styling department, your own feed can be tarted up with one of six designs that can pick from in your account preferences. There’s also the option to add some CSS styling of your own.

There’s also an app for the iPhone as well as the ability to post to it from the MarsEdit text editor should that be your preference.

Let’s not forget this is a bootstrapped product that began life on Kickstarter. I’m certainly not going to compare it in anyway to Twitter or Facebook, but compared the to launch of App.net it feels slower. It’s early days though and it’s live which more than can be said of what others have promised when it comes to challenging the establishment.

Using Micro.blog

I considered streaming a tagged feed from this blog as my main feed for Micro.blog but there were was one problem with this. The Ghost theme’s feed isn’t customisable, so there’s no way for me to omit these posts from my main feed. The reason I wanted to omit them is that I might be posting three or more times a day and I didn’t want to change the frequency of my blog’s posting for this.

So instead I think I might just post from the Micro.blog site and then map my timeline to a sub-domain of this site.

So where does that leave other social media outlets that I am a part of?

Well from here on in I’ll be largely using IFTTT to posting to Twitter. It will largely be an automated feed from my blog, my Micro.blog posts, Instagram and any other platforms that I use. Twitter has it’s uses and I’m not ready to bow out from it yet, but the for the foreseeable future it will be a “write only” environment for me.

After being burned by App.net, I’m aware that Micro.blog is still in the early days of its service life so I’m not going to invest too much time on it. A couple of posts a day should be sufficient.

I’m keen to see how this service grows over the next few months. I’m not expecting drastic changes overnight, but a gradual roll out of new features between now and the end of the year shouldn’t be out of the question.

You can find me on Micro.blog here.

… over at Feedbin.

I love using Feedbin. Such a great RSS reader and the fact that they keep adding to it and improving it just keeps making it better to use.

Installed Sidetrack this morning as a way of reading my RSS feeds from Feedbin.

Loving it so far.

Not a month goes by now without criticism of Twitter and it’s walled garden network.

I really don’t like that we are all putting our content, including those golden joke tweets, into someone else’s silo. You’re giving Twitter full control over all of your content. That’s a huge price to pay for the exposure, especially in the light of the fact that there are user-controlled alternatives.

— Let’s replace Twitter with something much better by Charl Botha

I don’t think Twitter needs to be replaced, but it certainly needs to be improved and Twitter is actively doing that. It’s a long-term goal so we the people should be patient.

So, should we replace Twitter? I don’t think so.

While I agree that Twitter isn’t considered an open part of the Internet, you only have to sacrifice a few privileges to use it. I say a few privileges because you can still create and run your own blog and focus on hosting your more premium content there rather than on Twitter.

Twitter is many things to many people, but if you’re a blogger it should be thought of as a delivery platform for your blog. Share your blogs posts on Twitter and have people come to your blog to read the rest of your content.

Twitter doesn’t need to be replaced it just needs to be used in a way that makes your life easier.

Dave Winer may be kick-starting an old service. Share Your OPML.

In 2006 I had a web service called Share Your OPML. It was fun. It was a way to see what other people were subscribed to, for news and podcasts. But we hit scaling walls, and the project fell into disuse, and eventually I took it down.

Now we know how to scale much better than we did then, and the community is growing more slowly. So I thought it would be interesting to try it again and see what happens.

So here’s the question – if I put up a web app that asked for your OPML would you upload it?

— Would you share your OPML, again? by Dave Winer

I’d love to see this happen.

Blogging on Facebook. A chance for the masses to have more of a say online or just another way to keep people in the walled garden of Zuckerberg?

I want to bring blogging to Facebook. I think it’s the only way we can get back on track, by giving the sources great tools to communicate with people who are thirsty for ideas and information. But we can’t do it without linking, styles, titles and links to rich media. We can’t boot up a culture of free thinking inside a silo without these basic features of the web. We need to be able to get our ideas into this space so they can engage with the people here and connect with ideas that live outside of Facebook.

— I still want to bring blogging to Facebook by Dave Winer

I might have been set against this in the past, but Dave’s arguments for blogging on Facebook make sense. It’s another way for people to connect.

A lot of people use social media as their means of keeping up with news, topics and communities. I’ve always struggled with this aspect of social media, as the number of accounts I end up having to follow results in a constantly updating timeline that often just makes me turn away. It’s too much.

It’s just an observation on my part, but I think more and more people are looking elsewhere for their fix of valuable content. Social media is a firehose of data and digesting it at a sustainable pace is close to impossible unless you keep a tight reign on how many people you are following. Thankfully there are other means of finding valuable content.

Newsletters

The humble email is still the most reliable and manageable form of content that you can get. Which is why newsletters are probably more popular than ever. Subscribe to the topics that interest you and digest them in your own time. It’s that simple.

Newsletters are more valuable than social media in this respect because they are curated so that you can read the entire thing in a few minutes and get all the relevant information.

You also know when it will arrive. Newsletters are delivered on a regular interval and that consistency means that you always know when you’ll get the next edition of that newsletter.

RSS

Social media networks might not be keen on including RSS feeds in their own websites or even for individual users, but the RSS is still as popular as ever.

Although Google retired their Reader app, there’s now an abundance of RSS reader apps available and almost all websites include an RSS feed to subscribe too.

This openness on the web means that you can pick and choose the content that you want to follow, including the most valuable of content.

Subscriptions

A newcomer to the digital world but certainly not to the old paper-based world of publishing is magazine subscriptions. I’m surprised that these are now offered on an increasing number of sites, but when you think about it, they’re a great way of digesting your topic of choice.

I’ve got a subscription going at the moment with [99U] and I must say I have enjoyed having the magazine sent out to my home so that I can enjoy it in a more offline environment.

Podcasts

Podcasts have also risen in popularity over the few years. The audio version the blog offers a much more personal experience when you listen to the host and possible guests discussing a particular topic.

I like to listen to podcasts while I’m coding. I probably shouldn’t, as I do notice that I miss half the things mentioned on the podcast, but it’s the only way that I can listen to them on a regular interval.

If I was being honest then I would say that this is my least preferred way of digesting content from the web. I like podcast shows that keep their episodes short, but many of the shows I listen to a close to an hour in length. Even with the speed boost on Overcast, it can still take a fair amount of time.

Social media is a great tool and it does have value but relying on it as the means of consuming information will have you checking that timeline more often than you need to. For the content that matters you should consider exploring some of the options above. They’re easier to manage and you’ll know exactly what you’ll be getting rather than the mixed bag of emotions, rants and knee-jerk reactions that social media provides.

The feed is dying. The reverse-chronological social media feed — the way you’ve read Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and blogs (which is to say, the internet) at various points over the last decade, updates organized according to the time they were posted, refreshed at the top of the screen — no longer really makes sense. The unfiltered informational cascade that defined the internet of the 2010s is going the way of the front-page-style web portal: It’s an outdated way of processing online information. The way we consume social media is being transformed and tinkered with as Silicon Valley tries to wring as much engagement, attention, and money out of it as possible. The feed is dying, and we feel shocked by its death — but we shouldn’t.

The Feed is Dying by Select All

RSS is the winner in all this. A chronological feed that you have complete control over.

It’s sad to see so social media feeds switching to curated feeds that promote content we might be interested in.

I can’t help but wonder though that if all these social media feeds were a paid for subscription service to begin with, would we even need customised social feeds?

The Awl remembers the glory days of Google Reader.

Instead, our websites now keep tabs on us, the better to target us and hold us down and turn us into money, like so many caged broiler chickens, puffed up with soybean meal. Doesn’t feel good, does it?

— O Reader! My Reader by The Awl

To be fair it’s not all that bad. People are still blogging and the demise of Google Reader as seen a growing market in RSS readers which is great for everyone. The glory days might still be ahead.

From time to time friends ask me what they should use if they want to start blogging, and for a while I was considering adding Medium to my list of suggestions, especially for non-technical writers. But I can’t support this kind of anti-web architecture.

— Dear Medium: Please stop hurting the web by Avdi Grimm

I want to like Medium but it’s fast becoming just another walled garden.

Next time you think about signing up to a free service, remember this:

via xkcd

… that is every Twitter user at the moment.

A well written post by “love him or loathe him” DHH on how Twitter now amounts to nothing more than a corporate advertising stream backed by a ludicrous amount of funding.

That funding has to be paid back and unfortunately Twitter’s users are the ones that are going to pay the price for it.

With every story like this I get closer and closer to deleting my account. I’m so close now to just hitting that ‘Delete’ button.

Barring a few replies out of common courtesy, it’s now been three months since I stopped posting to my Twitter account and moved over to App.net. So what’s the change of scene been like?

It’s good to hang out some place else, and while I may not have the following that I had on Twitter, I’m happy to post here for the foreseeable future. App.net doesn’t have the numbers that Twitter has, so at the moment I’m following most of the same people I follow on Twitter. Not many of these people are actively posting on App.net, but it’s forcing me to consider following others that I might not have considered before. Not a bad thing really.

The big change though that sets App.net apart from Twitter is that there is no free account. Yip, this is a paid service that you are using and you’re probably thinking that a service that doesn’t have a free account would be restricting itself, but this is precisely why I like App.net. Not only does it ensure the healthy and continued development of a product paid for by its users (or customers if you prefer), it also provides a barrier that many people aren’t going to cross.Twitter’s free service means that anyone can sign up, and while that’s all well and good for everyone, I’m not looking for a service that allows just anyone to connect with you.

The subscription fee that App.net charge ensures that there is little chance of accounts being created on the App.net network that currently pollute the Twitter network. Spam accounts, celebs and retail companies to name a few. I don’t follow any of these type of accounts on Twitter, but knowing that there is little chance of these kind of accounts polluting the App.net network means that the quality of posts by it’s users should remain higher and in turn be a much more interesting place to hang out.It’s early days though, but I for one am enjoying my change of network.

Twitter’s third party app lockdown continues with the removal of Twitter Triggers from IFTTT. I think the only way for Twitter to go from here is downwards. With it’s focus on advertising, Twitter in my eyes is just another Facebook.

via The Verge

While social networks might not be at the forefront of your worries, there has been a rising interest in Twitter recently. Tim Bray lists his reasons why people are looking at alternatives to Twitter.

I’ve found that I wasn’t really getting much from Twitter and have decided to take a little break from Twitter over the next few months to see if I really do need it.

For a few months now I have been thinking about reducing my time spent on Twitter. When I first started using Twitter, I used it solely for the purpose of finding useful tips and links for Ruby on Rails and conversing with the rest of the Ruby community. Now though it seems that there’s less and less interesting stuff being posted on Twitter and most people use it for day to day stuff. That’s all well and good if that’s what you use Twitter for, but I’m starting to find that it’s not for me.

The flip side of this is that I need another avenue to post my thoughts and other nonsense, which is why I going to be publishing more and more things on my blog.

After reading Scott Hanselman’s post on the subject, it’s pretty much cemented my feelings on the matter and I’m going to limit my time on Twitter for the foreseeable future. I’m still going to auto-post links from my blog to my Twitter account and the odd post from Path but other than that there won’t be much activity on my timeline.

So where can you contact me then? Email always works. You can get me at matthew [at] matthewlang.co.uk, and I’m also on Path as well if you’re interested.

Some influential posts that have got me thinking that Twitter isn’t really for me anymore.

The current problem with Twitter is not that they’re now trying to make money, it’s that they didn’t have a viable business plan from day one. They’ve turned those kings into serfs that are for sale.

— Twitter: Turning Kings in to Serfs by Curtis McHale

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I’m not quite sure if Twitter changed. But it seems to have, for me. And it is far more likely that I have or that I am. It is not currently a place I wish to be. I wish I could tell you why but I’m not sure I have examined it deeply enough.

— On Twitter

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Every developer should have a blog - Put yourself out there and make it findable. And still you tweet giving all your life’s precious remaining keystrokes to a company and a service that doesn’t love or care about you - to a service that can’t even find a tweet you wrote a month ago.

— Your Words are Wasted

You are not blogging enough. You are pouring your words into increasingly closed and often walled gardens. You are giving control - and sometimes ownership - of your content to social media companies that will SURELY fail.

— Your Words are Wasted by Scott Hanselman

The near opening paragraph to Scott Hanselman’s latest post has been resonating in my head for a day now. In it, he champions the blog over the increasing walled gardens that social networks have become.

I’ve been thinking long and hard about leaving the world of social networks like Twitter, and just pouring out all my thoughts here. Writing has been something I’ve neglected in the last few months yet I really enjoy doing it. Rather than checking my Twitter timeline countless times per day, perhaps I should spend the time writing through the day.

I’ll keep you posted on this one next week, however it’s increasingly looking like I will take some time out from Twitter.