Matthew Lang

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.

Did a stupid thing today and deleted a checklist from Trello that I was using. As far as I am aware, there’s no way of undeleting it and also no backup of the Trello board to speak of.

Perhaps it’s not only the source code that’s a valuable asset of a project. The supporting project management material that drives the development should be at least backed up or even under version control as well.

I’m wondering if this is something that might interest the users of Micro.blog.

I want to ask a question to Micro.blog users, but I don’t want the question to appear on my blog. Much like my replies don’t appear on my hosted blog, I would like to ask a question to the community and for everyone to see it on their timeline. Just not on my blog.

I know there are Slack groups for this type of thing, but perhaps Micro.blog is just as great a place for this type of thing.

Does that make sense?

My wife is thinking of setting up a Facebook account so that she can book in for a fitness class she likes and keep up to date with the kid’s school information.

Crazy, right?

Yes, Facebook will be the single way that my wife will be able to register for the fitness class in the future and yes Facebook is the only channel that the school regularly updates despite having a website and two native apps.

Frustrating? Definitely.

There’s a section of people that still see Facebook as the “default service of the Internet”. Facebook is probably easy to set up but other than that the only perceived benefit it has for these organisations is the numbers. They think most people are on Facebook, so they use Facebook.

Facebook is a crux technology and not a good one at that. The Internet has many tools for organisations to communicate and engage with audiences. So, why do so many organisations turn to Facebook?

I don’t know the exact reason why. It could be that organisations find it easy to use and they think that everyone else is using it. It’s true that most people are using Facebook, but it’s not everyone that’s using it.

It’s not Facebook that’s the problem, it’s the view that Facebook is the only way of communicating with audiences. 

How do you change that when the majority of people see Facebook as the only way of using the Internet?