Tag: socmed

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Twitter’s new management seems to want to limit the use of Tweetdeck to paying users only.

For many years, at least since the algorithm decided the timeline, I’ve used Tweetdeck as circumvention and as my interface to Twitter. It’s how I search for specific topics, follow some accounts, lists, tags etc. I had until recently some 70 columns in my Tweetdeck. Last year Tweetdeck became web only, and I suspected it wouldn’t be a net positive for my Twitter usage. It wasn’t. Mostly because it split up my different Twitter accounts over multiple tweetdeck set-ups where there used to be 1, and then made it harder to easily switch between accounts for posting and interacting. This last week it became mostly impossible to see any tweets when not logged in (which I never do on mobile).

All in all it looks like it’s time to discard Twitter fully. I haven’t posted in my accounts the last months, but kept the accounts if for nothing else than place holders. If even accessing Twitter is hobbled, then it’s finally time to let it go. One more platform that lives shorter than my own site.

Back in 2008 in presentations I used to share this list of what I shared online in which channel. Almost all of that is gone or disfunctional, where it used to be an integral part of my online interactions with my network.


A 2008 overview of social tools I used at that time. Slide from my 2008 talk at Politcamp Graz on networked life and work. Most of those tools no longer exist or I no longer use. Except for this blog.

I see lots of potential for social software still, and even again, just not social media.

[Update 2023/07/05: I have deleted all my topic oriented Twitter accounts and a few legacy ones, as well as my public main account (ton_zylstra). My private one (tonzylstra), I may keep for a while longer, unused though it is.]

Bookmarked Meta’s failed Giphy deal could end Big Tech’s spending spree (by Ars Technica)

This is indeed a very interesting decision by the UK competition and markets authority. I recognise what Ars Technica writes. It’s not just a relevant decision in its own right, it’s also part of an emergent pattern. A pattern various components of which are zeroing in on large silo’d market players. In the EU the Digital Markets Act was approved in recent weeks by both the council of member state ministers and the European Parliament, with the negotation of a final shared text to be finished by next spring. The EU ministers also agreed the Digital Services Act between the member states (the EP still needs to vote on it in committee). The DMA and DSA make requirements w.r.t. interoperability, service neutrality and portability, democratic control and disinformation. On top of the ongoing competition complaints and data protection complaints this will lead to new investigations of FB et al, if not to immediate changes in functionality and accessibility of their platforms. And then there’s also the incoming AI Regulation which classifies manipulation of people’s opinion and sentiment as high risk and a to a certain extent prohibited application. This has meaning for algorithmic timelines and profile based sharing of material in those timelines. All of these, the competition issues, GDPR issues, DMA and DSA issues, and AI risk mitigation will hit FB and other big platforms simultaneously in the near future. They’re interconnected and reinforce each other. That awareness is already shining through in decisions made by competent authorities and judges here and now. Not just within the EU, but also outside it as the European GDPR, DMA, DSA and AI acts are also deliberate export vehicles for the norms written down within them.

….the strange position taken by Britain’s competition watchdog in choosing to block Meta’s takeover of GIF repository Giphy. Meta, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) ruled, must now sell all the GIFs—just 19 months after it reportedly paid $400 million for them. It’s a bold move—and a global first. ……regulators everywhere will now be on high alert for what the legal world calls “killer acquisitions”—where an established company buys an innovative startup in an attempt to squash the competition it could pose in the future.

Morgan Meaker, wired.com / Ars Technica

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Some links I thought worth reading the past few days

  • On how blockchain attempts to create fake scarcity in the digital realm. And why banks etc therefore are all over it: On scarcity and the blockchain by Jaap-Henk Hoepman
  • Doc Searl’s has consistently good blogposts about the adtech business, and how it is detrimental to publishers and citizens alike. In this blogpost he sees hope for publishing. His lists on adverts and ad tech I think should be on all our minds: Is this a turning point for publishing?
  • Doc Searl’s wrote this one in 2017: How to plug the publishing revenue drain – The Graph – Medium
  • In my information routines offline figures prominently, but it usually doesn’t in my tools. There is a movement to put offline front and center as design principle it turns out: Designing Offline-First Web Apps
  • Hoodie is a backendless tool for building webapps, with a offline first starting point: hood.ie intro
  • A Berlin based company putting offline first as foremost design principle: Neighbourhoodie – Offline First
  • And then there are Service Workers, about which Jeremy Keith has just published a book: Going Offline
  • Haven’t tested it yet, but this type of glue we need much more of, to reduce the cost of leaving silos, and to allow people to walk several walled gardens at the same time as a precursor to that: Granary

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Dreaming of Tags
Shortly before waking up one morning, while camping in the Austrian Alps in the past weeks (as seen above) I had a dream about tags. Or rather I dreamt that my brother in law had created a database in which each data item was treated and useable as a tag as well. In my dream I was very enthusiastic about this idea. When I woke up Elmine asked me ‘what does that mean, that everything is a tag?’. We kept coming back to the topic, and at the end of the day had a conversation around it over a couple of Weizen beers.

Tags do Double Duty
Tags serve two functions. First they are descriptors, and in that sense subservient to the piece of data they describe. But they are also pivots, i.e. turning points in your path through data. A pivot allows you to see the same set of data, or a different set of data which overlaps the current one, in a different view.

If you go to the picture above and follow the tag ‘huben’ on the right, you are presented with a number of pictures that are also tagged ‘huben’, so you can navigate to a different photo within the context of ‘huben’ and so on. Pivots are the forks in the road of your surfing.
When everything is a tag as in my dream, then everything is a pivot as well. This reminds me of the view on data-items the people of Mediamatic have: everything is a thing. So a thing can be a tag, but also a list of tags, or the entire Flickr-database, or any part thereof. In my dream everything was a tag, a pivot.

Pivots in Social Software Triangles
My description of social software as triangles, which got quite a good response at the time, put tags as pivots in the center view: social applications allow you to navigate from one app to another through their tags as pivot points.

From a Flickr photo to a point on a Yahoo or Google map, to a location in Plazes, or to photo’s taken geographically nearby. The thing is, I cannot directly jump from a Flickr photo to the corresponding location in Plazes. I could if the Plaze itself was the tag. In my 2006 posting I already indicated that where now usually a tag is in the triangle, there basically could be anything. As long as the other two points are a person and a object of sociality. So you could theoretically jump directly from a picture to an event to a place to a review to the author back to the picture again. If tags could be more than just a descriptive word they would be better pivots.


(image from the triangle posting last year)

Need More Pivots!
Hence I concluded that my dream was basically a call for more pivot points in social media. So that we can navigate our web apps better, and build better personal information strategies.
Question remains who has the rights to the concept of a database where everything is tags: me because it was my dream, or my brother in law as he came up with it in my dream and showed me a working prototype 🙂