2012-12-23 Social Media this Year
I’m looking back at my blog and trying to remember the things that happened.
Google+ replaced Twitter, for all my talk about role-playing needs. For a while, my tweets were all about gaming. These days I use Twitter as an alternative to RSS for the kind of news that I might want to look into every now and then without wanting to read everything.
- EFF
- BoingBoing
- Techdirt
- Anonymous
(Although I’m following Ars Technica on Google+, so perhaps everything will end up on Google+, eventually.)
I also have a few friends on Twitter that aren’t very active elsewhere.
I’m not sure how long I’ll be hanging out on Twitter and Facebook. I heard somebody say that Facebook is for the important people you know and Google+ is for the interesting people you don’t know. 2012 was also the year I stopped using identi.ca (a free, federated Twitter alternative).
I think that in general this blog has had few readers to begin with and has lost some. There are less comments because I write less about Emacs and tech issues. I guess I get a few comments on Google+ every now and then. I have never been one to try and maximize comments, however. I’m getting what I’m aiming for, I guess. 
In general, therefore, the blog has also lost a bit of urgency. I no longer post little one-paragraph posts talking about the movies I saw. (Before yesterday it was Cloud Atlas which was nice, but not mind-blowing; yesterday it was The Hobbit part one, which was very beautiful; I could spend hours in Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth. Today I saw Beasts of the Southern Wild which reminded me of one of the best movies in recent years, Winter’s Bone. But then it started to stretch and had some surreal elements I didn’t like, so in the end I wasn’t as happy with it as I was at the beginning.)
At the same time, with the ads and the privacy issues of Facebook and Instagram, operating my own blog has become more important. I still host my pictures on Flickr and I’m happy I never stopped doing that. I pay their hosting fees and hope this means I don’t need to suffer ads and privacy violations.
My blog still uses Oddmuse. It’s a Perl script that I’ve been maintaining for over a decade, now. It still works! I use the same software for Emacs Wiki. Since many people are used to the many editors of Wikipedia and the features of MediaWiki, they criticize my choice every now and then. 2012 was no different. This time, however, I wrote a longer reply: How Emacs Wiki Works. (In fact, a separate wiki called WikEmacs was created using Mediawiki. I’m not sure how well it does.)
One of the benefits of the services I no longer like that much was that they allowed me to keep in touch with my family. My sister, my cousin and my mother in law are on Facebook. My mother, my half-sister and my half-brother are on Twitter where we all have private accounts linked to each other such that it occasionally feels like a family chat. I’ve started using Instagram as a way to tell people that I’m alive and invite the occasional comment by automatically uploading the pictures to this family chat on Twitter and to Facebook. I think it worked really well and now I’m not quite sure what I should be using instead. Rely on IFTTT?
The use of Instagram and all the ironic hipster hate online has revealed that I had already been a hipster long before it was cool!
There was also a tiny flash of activity on Community Wiki. A Facebook group for the wiki got created. Fierce editing did not resume. Wikis as a discussion medium seem to have gone the way of the Dodo. When I look at MeatballWiki, I don’t understand what’s going on. The wikis I was interested in as a discussion of social media are no longer active. Perhaps social media must be discussed using itself. I wonder where Instagram gets discused. Using screenshots?
2012-05-07 iPhoto and Facebook Privacy Disaster
I created a new album on Facebook and picked a particular list of people to share this album with. I used iPhoto to share pictures on Facebook using this album. After some clicking back and forth I noticed that my album was no longer restricted the list of people I had picked! The album had been reset to the default visibility settings for albums.
What a major fuck-up!

I have resolved to delete all the Facebook albums with non-standard permissions.
Comments on 2012-05-07 iPhoto and Facebook Privacy Disaster
das muesstest du speziell auf facebook publik machen! Die versuchen alles um an deine privat informationen zu kommen: und ich will nicht jedem auf facebook zugaenglich sein… also bitte von mir keine fotos auf facebook!
– mom 2012-05-08 20:56 UTC
Apart from the reprehensible FB behaviour, which is par for the course, after all, you are not the customer, you are the product being sold, how do you alter the letter spacing in “no longer” and “major fuck-up” ?
It’s a nice way of emphasis on the screen. It might not work so well in print. It showed up in the RSS feed too.
– AlokSingh 2012-05-09 03:49 UTC
Ah, letter-spacing…
– AlokSingh 2012-05-09 03:59 UTC
AlexSchroeder The emphasis style is called Sperrsatz and was used in German for fonts without italics. Some older fonts, like Garamond, didn’t have bold and italic variants if I remember correctly. Thus, some texts still use letter spacing for emphasis. To be honest, I’ve only seen it in reprints of philosophy books. Here’s an example from Nietzsche:
– AlexSchroeder 2012-05-09 12:15 UTC
2011-03-15 Eine schwarze Liste für Facebook
Probier das Folgende auf alle Fälle mit Freunden aus bevor du es mit einem Chef oder anderen Leuten anwendest, mit deinen täglichen Aktivitäten auf Facebook nichts zu tun haben.
Im Facebook:
- Konto → Freunde bearbeiten
- +Liste erstellen
- Name “Schwarze Liste” eingeben und Liste erstellen
- Konto → Privatsphäre-Einstellungen
- Wir wollen Benutzerdefiniert → Benutzerdefinierte Einstellungen
- Beiträge von mir → Benutzerdefiniert bearbeiten
- Das vor folgenden Personen verbergen → Schwarze Liste → Einstellungen speichern
- Diese Einstellung je nach Bedürfnis auch für die anderen Dinge machen, zum Beispiel so:
Familie → Nur Freunde
Beziehungen → Nur Freunde
Interessiert an → Nur Freunde
Biografie und Lieblingszitate → Nur Freunde
Webseite → Alle
Religiöse Ansichten und politische Einstellung → Nur Freunde
Geburtstag → Nur ich
Orte, die ich besuche → Nur ich
Mich im „Personen, die jetzt hier sind“-Abschnitt anzeigen nachdem ich angegeben habe, wo ich mich befinde → nicht aktiviert
Fotos und Videos, in denen ich markiert bin → wie oben: ohne schwarze Liste
Kann Beiträge kommentieren → Nur Freunde
Freunde können an meine Pinnwand posten → zugelassen
Pinnwandeinträge von Freunden → wie oben: ohne schwarze Liste
Freunde können angeben, dass ich mich an einem Ort befinde → Gesperrt
und so weiter…
- Sehr nützlich: Vorschau für mein Profil – da kann man ausprobieren, wie das Profil für andere Leute aussieht!

Es ist mühsam, ich weiss! 
Selber verwende ich sogar drei Listen: Eine Freundesliste, eine weisse Liste und eine schwarze Liste…
Die Idee hatte ich vom Artikel How-to: manage your Facebook privacy settings with three simple lists.
Tags: Facebook 
2011-01-18 Facebook Werbung
Ich habe mal beschlossen $20 in die Hand zu nehmen und etwas Werbung für meine Rollenspiel Zürich Facebook-Seite zu machen. Ganz schön interessant!
Mein erster, deprimierender Versuch:
Geschätzte Reichweite: weniger als 20 Personen
- die in Schweiz leben
- die im Umkreis von 40 Kilometern von Zürich leben
- die rollenspiele mögen
- die noch nicht mit Rollenspiel Zürich verbunden sind
Mit der folgenden Werbung hatte ich zwei (!) click-throughs:
Geschätzte Reichweite: 1.420 Personen
- die in Schweiz leben
- die im Umkreis von 40 Kilometern von Zürich leben
- die spiele mögen
- die noch nicht mit Rollenspiel Zürich verbunden sind
Jetzt habe ich die Kriterien etwas erweitert:
Geschätzte Reichweite: 39.880 Personen
- die in Schweiz leben
- die im Umkreis von 40 Kilometern von Zürich leben
- die spiele, rollenspiele, dd, dsa, role playing, roleplaying games, roleplaying game, rpg, rpgs, tabletop rpgs, abenteuer, final fantasy, dragon age, world warcraft, guild wars, vampires, wow oder fantasy mögen
- die noch nicht mit Rollenspiel Zürich verbunden sind
(Wobei dd = D&D)
Wow, die Computer-Rollenspiele sind schon verdammt populär! Am allerpopulärsten sind aber die Vampire. Das hat mich echt erstaunt.
2010-08-12 Facebook Question
I’m posting as “Alex Schröder” on Facebook. I created a page called “Rollenspiel Zürich” (Roleplayin Zurich). When I comment or post on that page, Facebook calls me “Rollenspiel Zürich” instead of “Alex Schröder”. That’s creepy. How can I fix this? Must I really log out, create a new account just to create the page, and then return as Alex and transfer ownership somehow before I can comment using my real name?
Comments on 2010-08-12 Facebook Question
Well, Facebook pages are intended as somewhat official channel for companies, products and so on. So it makes sense that the “employees” of that company will post as the company. But it get’s worse (for you): even if you create a second account… as far as I know you can not transfer ownership of a page. You can only add additional admins, but not remove the initial creator. At least that’s my experience with the DokuWiki facebook page. You probably want a facebook group, not a page.
– Andreas Gohr 2010-08-12 13:52 UTC
Gaaah! I already have a Facebook Group and I don’t like it. For no apparent reason, Pages are better supported than Groups – eg. the iPhone Facebook App only supports pages, not groups.
Thanks for the confirmation of my fears, though. 
– AlexSchroeder 2010-08-12 13:56 UTC



AlexSchroeder Ugh, Meatball Wiki is full of spam.
– AlexSchroeder 2012-12-26 13:30 UTC
PhilJones Well, you already know but I still think wiki has a future, as pointed to by Smallest Federated Wiki. There are some flaws / issues with SFW, mainly I think because not enough people are working on it, but it’s still the signpost for how wiki could evolve.
Would still love to see you and other UseMod / OddMuse people look at ways to engage, even if you don’t switch over.
2012 is the year when it just became more and more clear that we need our own space and shouldn’t be dependent on Fb / Tw / G+ etc.
Fb / Tw / G+ offer two compelling things : 1) an aggregate river of stuff from people we care about, 2) really easy transclusion from various rich media sites.
We could have a distributed river architecture if we took RSS and some kind of pubsub architecture (eg. RssCloud) seriously. SFW has made transclusion protocols central to its philosophy. If we pick up on both, figure out how to get the most important things we get from the mainstream working smoothly, we can create a compelling alternative on our terms. And one of the interesting, overlooked, facts about G+ is that it showed that significant numbers of people are still willing to experiment with alternatives. As long as you can get a critical mass of around 20 people you care about to use it, G+ is as valuable as anything else. You don’t need 1 billion users. You aren’t trying to take over the world at this point, just to have a syndication / discussion architecture which isn’t owned by THEM.
– PhilJones 2012-12-26 14:03 UTC
take it serious
– MattisManzel 2012-12-26 20:52 UTC
The state of MeatBall is indeed sad. Since it seems inevitable that groups disperse, I am inclined to agree with Phil’s statements favoring SFW. At least that way, ones’ content persists. DaveWiner seems to be doing some interesting stuff with what he calls Rivers. I haven’t decided to try to set that up yet because I personally just don’t have the need and so I would rather allocate my time to the Tiddly* way.
– HansWobbe 2012-12-26 22:37 UTC
SamRose I started a new wiki this year: http://lansingwiki.org/
– SamRose 2012-12-27 01:23 UTC
SamRose Social media is indeed the place where people are discussing social media. Maybe a small subset using some version of etherpad. Google docs (drive) have taken over where wiki once was strong. People have heard the siren song of services hosted and payed for by someone other than themselves.
I’ve gotten more into RDF/SPARQL myself, and thinking about how to incorporate that into online activity.
– SamRose 2012-12-27 01:27 UTC
I did not know LocalWiki, with interesting minimalist look and interesting features (special about maps?).
Lately, people made good wikis with python (HattaWiki)
– JuanmaMP 2012-12-28 14:46 UTC
AlexSchroeder Some of the discussion happened on the Facebook group, and I copied extracts to Community:SocialMedia and related pages.
– AlexSchroeder 2012-12-29 23:04 UTC
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