Tag: twitter

Twitterless Twaddle revisited

December 16, 2022 by futtta

Although I removed the “twitterless twaddle” byline from this blog years ago and I was present on Twitter with my @futtta-account, I’ve never been an avid user. That means I have no “social capital” there and given the Musk shit-show it has quickly become, I revisited the Mastodon account I created in April this year (when Elon declared he wanted to buy Twitter) and as instructed by God I happily “archived” my Twitter account by removing all my follows, protecting my tweets, changing my name and gently closing the door behind me (and I finally deactivated my FB account as well).

So if you want to get social with me, I’m https://mastodon.social/@futtta. Not that I’m good at doing the socials, not that I’ll have much to say there, not that Mastodon solves all problems with social media, but it does feel good to be on a federated/ distributed social network using open source software, not owned by one company or one person.

Hey! Widgets! Leave our privacy alone!

December 3, 2011 by futtta

After having NoScript disable the Facebook Like widget a couple of weeks ago, I felt really bad for Mark Zuckerberg who must have been feeling singled out by my actions. If only to make all widgets equal and as I don’t use them anyway, I’ve now told NoScript (only available in Firefox) to also block the Google+ and Twitter widgets with the following ABE User ruleset (under NoScript Advanced options):
# also stop google+ widget Site plus.google.com Accept from plus.google.com Deny INCLUSION(SCRIPT, OBJ, SUBDOC)
# and twitter Site platform.twitter.com Accept from twitter.com Deny INCLUSION(SCRIPT, OBJ, SUBDOC)

Out with Google Plus, in with Yammer

September 14, 2011 by futtta

I’m not a social network expert by any measure, but it seems to become clear that although the initial enthusiasm among the geek-crowd was big, Google Plus isn’t cutting it in the real world. I don’t have a Plus-tab open in my browser any more and when I do go Plus, there isn’t a lot going on in my circles which I want to participate in.
Compare that to the way Yammer took off at the company I work for; in less than a months time 800+ colleagues (out of approx. 1500 employees) joined and we’re getting to know new colleagues, discussing more or less work-related topics (1500+ messages) in the open or in multiple interest-specific groups (15 at this moment). Good times!
I don’t know how Yammer is doing in other companies in Belgium (and Europe by extension), but to me is seems that Yammer succeeds where Google Plus is failing; bringing together a group of people (in a more or less “private” environment) that share a common context but who didn’t share a social network before and allowing them to engage and to create engagement.
Google Plus might be neat from a technology & privacy point of view, but it essentially was (and still is, I guess) a “me too” exercise, trying to occupy a market that has already very successfully been taken by Facebook & Twitter. And yes, Yammer does have an API.

Remove “via @addtoany” from Twitter

April 27, 2011 by futtta

Although I don’t do Twitter and even though I removed AddtoAny from my blog over a year ago, people have been stopping by here while searching for ways to remove “via @addtoany” from Twitter.
If you own the site on which AddtoAny is used, removing the “via” is pretty straightforward and documented. Just add some javascript in your pages to define a “template” for Twitter, like this:

var a2a_config = a2a_config || {};
a2a_config.templates = {
    twitter: "Interesting read: ${title} ${link}"
};

Be sure ${link}, and preferably ${title} are in the template. The rest is up to you, really. And while you’re at it, you might want to configure AddtoAny not to do 3rd party tracking?

Don’t bury RSS just yet

September 16, 2010 by futtta

RSS is dead and Facebook and Twitter killed it! Or at least that’s what some web & trend-watching bloggers conclude from the demise of Bloglines, the once cutting-edge web-based feedreader. And indeed, people are increasingly discovering news items and memes through their friends’ status updates, re-tweeting or -sharing stuff they deem interesting. And yes Flipboard, which scans your Facebook & Twitter feeds for links (scraping content from the pages instead of using feeds, to the dismay of some publishers), is the talk of the iTown. Look ma, no RSS!
But hold your horses; do you know what the most requested feature for Flipboard is? Integration with Google Reader and the ability to include RSS-feeds is in high demand as well! And while we’re at it, Google Reader seems not to be doing too bad either, according to their own stats, probably because Reader -as opposed to Bloglines- continuous to evolve, integrating a slew of social features. Reader is also the primary source for Feedly, a popular browser add-on that offers a magazine-like view on subscribed feeds. And proving RSS is not dead yet, Automattic last week launched Subscriptions on wordpress.com, which displays your subscribed feeds in a stream-like fashion, including the writer’s profile picture and a ‘reblog’ and ‘like’ button (i.e. resembling what Peter Van Dijck proposed earlier that day).
Even if RSS-readers would ever become marginalized, RSS and similar standardized XML-based newsfeeds (think Atom) are indispensable to syndicate content from one site in another application. After all, how do you think news outlets and blogs feed their content into Twitter and Facebook in the first place?

Facebook voor lamzakken (en het gevaar van twitterish)

May 19, 2009 by futtta

Ik ben liever lui dan sociaal, zelfs op Facebook. Ik laat de software dus mijn werk doen; de feeds van mijn blogposts, mijn Google Reader shared items en mijn YouTube uploads en favorites worden geïmporteerd en verschijnen zo automatisch op mijn ‘prikbord’ en -als Facebook het correct doet tenminste- in de ‘stroom’ op de homepage van mijn virtuele vrienden ^(*). Dezelfde feeds worden overigens ook op de lifestream-pagina op mijn blog en op mybloglog geaggregeerd.

Twitteraars (nee, ik ben nog steeds niet mee) synchroniseren hun kortspraak met een Facebook-applicaties van Twitter zelf. Nu is die twittersphere een raar wereldje, waar ingewijden in hoog tempo tweeten en daarbij ook nog eens een heel eigen taaltje spreken. Want wat te denken als je op Facebook dit voorbij ziet komen;

RT @ubertwit: om 18h twunch met @twitaholic en @tweeter in #pizzahut gent, reply @twunch als je er ook zal zijn

Voor twitteraars een duidelijke boodschap (vertaling beschikbaar bij je twitterende buurjongen), maar als deze tweet volautomatisch in de context van Facebook wordt gegooid, is dit “utter gibberish” waar je FB-friends niets aan hebben. Nee, dan is de “Selective Twitter update”-applicatie een veel beter alternatief; enkel tweets waarin #fb voorkomt worden daarmee geïmporteerd. Ik zou mijn Twitterende Facebook-vrienden dan ook vriendelijk willen vragen om een beetje selectief te zijn met wat ze op Facebook gooien. Uw context is de mijne immers niet!

^(*)Hoe je zelf moet importeren in Facebook? In je profiel op de ‘settings’-knop onder het status-update venster klikken en je zou iets moeten zien dat op het screenshot hierboven lijkt.

Twitterless Twaddle

November 27, 2008 by futtta

Indien ik zou twitteren, dan had ik de afgelopen dagen misschien het volgende getetterd;

@blogologie: Skyfire doet flash zegt ge? Amper, probeer maar eens een flash-spelletje te spelen. En traag dat dat is!
Mensen die mijn naam googlen en zo op mijn blog terecht komen, zouden die aan het “researchen” zijn voor de RFP die ik uitstuurde?
@eskimokaka: Atheïsten zijn ook maar agnosten die geloven dat ze het beter weten.
Beseffen bloggers die hun commentsysteem vervangen door Typepad Connect of Disqus dat search crawlers dan helemaal geen commentaren meer zien?
@lvb: “Wordt Obama een Clinton of een Carter?” is een interessante titel, maar waarom gaat het artikel daar dan niet over?

Over Skyfire (eens kijken of ik een network sniffer kan vinden voor Symbian) en de social comment-hype heb ik het later nog wel eens, peins ik.