In case anyone has shown up here, previous readers may notice I've moved to Blogger, new users should know, I've moved to Blogger. Also I'm still in the process of importing old posts. I'm not real sure why some of the images aren't showing up anymore as they worked earlier this morning.
I'll get the bugs worked out. I've got maybe 100-150 more posts to import over the next few days. Google only lets you import 50 per day.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Moving JoshMiller.net to Blogger
For various reasons, including the fact that self hosting a website is generally unreliable, I'm moving my personal blog to Blogger.
I'm also planning to move Lameazoid.com to Blogger assuming things go well with this.
If you're subscribing to the Feed, please add this feed....
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Joshmillernet
... in it's place. I can update the Feedburner feed take anything no matter where I'm hosted so it's your best bet anyway.
A few reasons I'm moving to Blogger over Wordpress...
Now granted, half of these do not apply to THIS blog since it's locally hosted but it's more of a set of reasons why I'm not moving back to Wordpress.com for free hosting and instead have chosen Blogspot.
I'm in the process of importing all of my posts over and eventually Joshmiller.net will simply point to this blog and I'll loose the joshmiller.net/blog. Unfortunately I can't import comments. It's a loss I've decided to take. I can fake my own static pages through various methods as well. Basically though I'm tired of my blog being "down" a lot. Technically I shouldn't be self hosting anyway as my ISP probably would frown upon it.
In short, this will be the last post on the blog in this form and for anyone using this RSS feed. Anything else will push through Feed Burner.
I'm also planning to move Lameazoid.com to Blogger assuming things go well with this.
If you're subscribing to the Feed, please add this feed....
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Joshmillernet
... in it's place. I can update the Feedburner feed take anything no matter where I'm hosted so it's your best bet anyway.
A few reasons I'm moving to Blogger over Wordpress...
- I've actually always preferred Blogger to Wordpress. Mostly I like Wordpress' ability to create static pages.
- I have several other Blogspot blogs going now already. This will simplify them.
- Blogspot is owned by Google so you get the benefits of Google with less work.
- I can map my Domain names properly for free as opposed to Wordpress.com's "charge you an obscene amount yearly" plan.
- Blogger supports Scripting in posts and the sidebar. I can properly embed videos from non Youtube sources.
- Blogger lets you run ads, if I ever feel included to do so in any serious manner.
- Blogger gives you full access tot he page code for Tweeking. Wordpress.com does not.
Now granted, half of these do not apply to THIS blog since it's locally hosted but it's more of a set of reasons why I'm not moving back to Wordpress.com for free hosting and instead have chosen Blogspot.
I'm in the process of importing all of my posts over and eventually Joshmiller.net will simply point to this blog and I'll loose the joshmiller.net/blog. Unfortunately I can't import comments. It's a loss I've decided to take. I can fake my own static pages through various methods as well. Basically though I'm tired of my blog being "down" a lot. Technically I shouldn't be self hosting anyway as my ISP probably would frown upon it.
In short, this will be the last post on the blog in this form and for anyone using this RSS feed. Anything else will push through Feed Burner.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Twitter on the Way Out?
I’ve noticed a growing trend recently that can best be described as “Twitter Backlash”. Basically people quitting Twitter or just in general getting irritated by it. I personally know that several times in the past few months I’ve considered dumping Twitter completely outright.
But why is the internet’s Glory Boy starting to loose favor? I can see a few factors at work here that likely have something to do with it.
Bloggers Want to Get Back to Long Form
Several years ago, I killed my Livejournal. Not really because I don't like Livejournal, I actually do rather like the way it works and the community aspects of it. No, I killed it because it had become a series of half paragraph updates and links. I promised myself I would move to a new platform, start again anew and make sure I never ever posted inane useless link based blog posts ever again.
Basically, if I didn't have something to actually say or add to the conversation on a topic, I didn't need to bog it. The rise of Youtube has changed that a bit so I do occasionally post blog posts that are just Youtube videos with a few lines of commentary but that is a bit of a different medium. Also I've more or less replaced this link based blogging with my Shared Google Reader page, which is what that system is designed for.
So now, what have I done? I've gone and gotten engrossed in Twitter which BY DESIGN is basically pointless short often link based "Blog Posts". So now, often, if I find something interesting where I SHOULD be doing a full commentary and blog post on it, I write a short one liner glib and post a link to Twitter and forget about it.
It just doesn't have the same impact if anything because Twitter is just so full of pointless crap and of course....
There’s No Control Over What You See
One big problem I have with Twitter is that there’s not good filtering mechanism. TweetDeck is the closest thing I can think of but Tweet Deck takes up a massive amount of screen real estate and requires me to install yet another “Helper Program” in the form of Adobe Air. Java, Acrobat, .Net, Flash, Silverlight, Air, How many of these damn programs do we really need?
Silicon Valley addicts are pushing the idea of “The Fire Hose of Information” that you “dip and sip” from. They suggest that you simply can’t consume all of the information. Frankly, that’s not good enough. I don’t want to consume it all but I do want to be able to put the fire hose through a system that gives me the choice bits.
Twitter just isn’t going anywhere or innovating. Of all of the web services I uses and even the ones I’ve dropped Twitter has changed the least. It has done absolutely nothing to solve most of it’s problems other than I get less Fail Whales these days. Sure, it’s good to keep it simple, but it’s easy to keep it simple with optional add ins if you want to use them. The simplest and most obvious way to do this would be to add Groups. I hear they are testing this currently on some users but it may end up being too little too late. The problem is...
Twitter is NOT RSS
I’m sick of people touting that “RSS is dead” and Twitter is its replacement. Without RSS, Twitter would be nowhere. Do you think I manually post Tweets when I add new blog posts? No, I stick my RSS feed into TwitterFeeder and let it do that work. I guarantee you CNN and the New York Times and CNet and all of those other big players are doing pretty much the same thing.
There isn’t anything wrong with pushing your RSS feed to Twitter, I’m just saying that RSS is the backbone of Twitter’s syndication model. Without RSS, Twitter has nothing for syndicated content.
The thing is though, my RSS reader is considerably more versatile than Twitter. I can group my feeds. I can selectively mark posts read as I go through them, I can mark them to return to later easily. Twitter has none of this. Every morning I get up and I run through 200 or so RSS posts over the course of a half hour. I don’t read all of them but I read a decent chunk. With Twitter, if a Tweet isn’t in the top 20-40 Tweets, I don’t ever see it. Who knows what decent information or link I’ve missed. The thing is...
I Don't Care About What I Missed
I can't. I used to but trying to keep up with every single Tweet of all of my followers got unwieldy after I passed 30 people I was following. Now I have lots of interesting people but some of them are in other countries so the majority of their tweets are from overnight feeds or I have a dozen or so News sources all of which I have to be in the right mindset to skim through the links.
The most frustrating time is when I check Twitter from my phone and I see a decent looking link. Ideally, I'd be able to mark these Tweets on my phone so I can come back to them on the PC since reading links on my phone sucks. The only process I have is to follow the link then email the article back to myself.
I guess what it comes down to is Twitter just isn't scaling well. I mentioned earlier that they weren't innovating. That's what I mean by not scaling. When it was little and you followed a handful of people it was great. Now that everyone is getting on it and there's no decent filtering mechanisms to work with it's just flat out unwieldy.
But why is the internet’s Glory Boy starting to loose favor? I can see a few factors at work here that likely have something to do with it.
Bloggers Want to Get Back to Long Form
Several years ago, I killed my Livejournal. Not really because I don't like Livejournal, I actually do rather like the way it works and the community aspects of it. No, I killed it because it had become a series of half paragraph updates and links. I promised myself I would move to a new platform, start again anew and make sure I never ever posted inane useless link based blog posts ever again.
Basically, if I didn't have something to actually say or add to the conversation on a topic, I didn't need to bog it. The rise of Youtube has changed that a bit so I do occasionally post blog posts that are just Youtube videos with a few lines of commentary but that is a bit of a different medium. Also I've more or less replaced this link based blogging with my Shared Google Reader page, which is what that system is designed for.
So now, what have I done? I've gone and gotten engrossed in Twitter which BY DESIGN is basically pointless short often link based "Blog Posts". So now, often, if I find something interesting where I SHOULD be doing a full commentary and blog post on it, I write a short one liner glib and post a link to Twitter and forget about it.
It just doesn't have the same impact if anything because Twitter is just so full of pointless crap and of course....
There’s No Control Over What You See
One big problem I have with Twitter is that there’s not good filtering mechanism. TweetDeck is the closest thing I can think of but Tweet Deck takes up a massive amount of screen real estate and requires me to install yet another “Helper Program” in the form of Adobe Air. Java, Acrobat, .Net, Flash, Silverlight, Air, How many of these damn programs do we really need?
Silicon Valley addicts are pushing the idea of “The Fire Hose of Information” that you “dip and sip” from. They suggest that you simply can’t consume all of the information. Frankly, that’s not good enough. I don’t want to consume it all but I do want to be able to put the fire hose through a system that gives me the choice bits.
Twitter just isn’t going anywhere or innovating. Of all of the web services I uses and even the ones I’ve dropped Twitter has changed the least. It has done absolutely nothing to solve most of it’s problems other than I get less Fail Whales these days. Sure, it’s good to keep it simple, but it’s easy to keep it simple with optional add ins if you want to use them. The simplest and most obvious way to do this would be to add Groups. I hear they are testing this currently on some users but it may end up being too little too late. The problem is...
Twitter is NOT RSS
I’m sick of people touting that “RSS is dead” and Twitter is its replacement. Without RSS, Twitter would be nowhere. Do you think I manually post Tweets when I add new blog posts? No, I stick my RSS feed into TwitterFeeder and let it do that work. I guarantee you CNN and the New York Times and CNet and all of those other big players are doing pretty much the same thing.
There isn’t anything wrong with pushing your RSS feed to Twitter, I’m just saying that RSS is the backbone of Twitter’s syndication model. Without RSS, Twitter has nothing for syndicated content.
The thing is though, my RSS reader is considerably more versatile than Twitter. I can group my feeds. I can selectively mark posts read as I go through them, I can mark them to return to later easily. Twitter has none of this. Every morning I get up and I run through 200 or so RSS posts over the course of a half hour. I don’t read all of them but I read a decent chunk. With Twitter, if a Tweet isn’t in the top 20-40 Tweets, I don’t ever see it. Who knows what decent information or link I’ve missed. The thing is...
I Don't Care About What I Missed
I can't. I used to but trying to keep up with every single Tweet of all of my followers got unwieldy after I passed 30 people I was following. Now I have lots of interesting people but some of them are in other countries so the majority of their tweets are from overnight feeds or I have a dozen or so News sources all of which I have to be in the right mindset to skim through the links.
The most frustrating time is when I check Twitter from my phone and I see a decent looking link. Ideally, I'd be able to mark these Tweets on my phone so I can come back to them on the PC since reading links on my phone sucks. The only process I have is to follow the link then email the article back to myself.
I guess what it comes down to is Twitter just isn't scaling well. I mentioned earlier that they weren't innovating. That's what I mean by not scaling. When it was little and you followed a handful of people it was great. Now that everyone is getting on it and there's no decent filtering mechanisms to work with it's just flat out unwieldy.
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