Tag: socialnetworking

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Endured

So…

Edited December 2024 to reflect current reality.

I am, apparently, Twitter user #79,903. That’s almost 16 years on the hell site – out of what is nearing 30 years online – so it is easily the longest internet platform I’ve ever engaged with.

Like practically everyone, I don’t have much faith in what’s to come. I don’t expect it to fall apart overnight, but like most of the internet, nothing good can stay good forever. (And really, Twitter has been bad long before recent events. But it’s also had critical mass in a way few sites have.)

I don’t know quite what the future holds for Twitter. I will undoubtedly keep passively reading it and engaging when necessary. But my energy has already been going elsewhere for a while.

I’ll spare you a treatise examining years of my mixed feeling about social media and leave it at this:

A. The majority of my social energy these days in on Discord. I’m remyvja, although my privacy settings are such you’ll probably need to have a mutual server with me first.

B. I have a small, private Discord community of my own. I have no desire to cannibalize the other small communities I’m in. But if you want to join a small circle of folks that I’d vouch for, drop me a note wherever you normally contact me.

C. I’m on Bluesky at (surprise) @vjarmy.com. After some fits and starts this has effectively replaced Twitter for me, which is to say most of my short form daily nonsense is there. It’s also not lost on me this is perhaps the first social network I haven’t gone by some form of “Remy” on.

D. I’m still on a bunch of other places. The ones I’m most active on: Instagram, Steam, Foursquare/Swarm, Letterboxd.

E. Acknowledging I am not at all at the right age bracket, I’m on TikTok, and it’s mostly where my wrestling clips have been going.

F. I’m also on Cohost. It’s got a very non-serious vibe that I’ve missed. The longer, navel-gazing stuff will probably still end up here. RIP Cohost.

G. I’m also, as of March 2023, on Mastodon. I’m as surprised as you probably are. Mastodon never truly clicked for me and I’ve let the paid account I generated though Medium lapse.

That’s all for now. Good luck and do your best.

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Recommended

Out With The Dodgeball, In With The Brightkite

While I have been a faithful Dodgeball user for over 4 years, it’s not been a service that has been taking strides to make me love it. The site exists now almost exactly as it did back then, save using Google Accounts after they were bought out in the spring of 2005. While it remains functional, it has been losing mindshare in the face of stiff competition. Yelp does reviews better; Twitter does messaging between friends better; Facebook handles connections between friends better.
The only place Dodgeball still had a hold on me is for checking in; announcing to your friends where you were.

That was until I saw this demo of the Brightkite iPhone application:


Brightkite for the iPhone from Brightkite on Vimeo.

I’ve been tangentially aware of Brightkite through their Twitter integration, but between the app and the service, any use I had for Dodgeball is essentially gone:

  • While Dodgeball was limited to 22 cities, Brightkite is US-wide. Ironically, this is because Brightkite leverages the Google Maps API – something that Google has failed to do with their own service.
  • Dodgeball is all-or-nothing with location data, while Brightkite has tiered access so that not all of your friends – or the world – get your precise location data.
  • Brightkite integrates with Twitter and FireEagle; Dodgeball essentially silos your data.

Consider Dodgeball’s coffin nailed shut. Brightkite.app is the sort of app I’ve been waiting for since the iPhone SDK was first announced.

Brightkite.app is available now.

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Recommended

iUseThis for the iPhone

It’s been just over two years since I started using iUseThis, a neat web tool for tracking OS X apps you use. A social network for software junkies, I suppose.

As part of iPhoneDevCamp, Marcus and Arne have launched an iPhone-centric version of the site, allowing people to track and comment on their iPhone apps.

This is one of those things that I didn’t realize I was missing until I saw it. While the App Store does have plenty of methods of app feedback (user reviews, popularity ratings), it does tend to be a bit low on the signal to noise ratio. IUseThis works better, with a del.icio.us or Digg like method of popularity. The more people that mark they use an app, the higher it goes.

You can find my app list on my profile.

(Before anyone starts marveling as to the number of apps I have purchased: dumping five years of spare change into an iTunes gift certificate via Coinstar makes all the difference in the world.)