As Mastodon starts to mainstream, welcome to the end of social

My Mastodon feed is full of US politics and American football. I could use lists or mute keywords, but neither seems to be an ideal solution. I thought it had been agreed by most users when the influx happened that political posts would have content warnings, because there was a desire not to re-create OnlyKlans. […]

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Cory Doctorow might be predicting the end of the web as we know it

Two great pieces by Cory Doctorow came my way today on Mastodon. The first is an incredibly well argued piece about why people leave social networks. Facebook and Twitter won’t be immune, just as MySpace and Bebo weren’t. One highlight: As people and businesses started to switch away from the social media giants, inverse network […]

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In the ‘I told you so’ file: Google Plus could be stripped for parts, says Quartz

Quartz reckons Google Plus is going to be stripped for parts: it’s going the way of Google Wave and Google Buzz.    I was consistent from the start about Google Plus, unlike a good part of the tech press, which drank the Google Kool-Aid and talked about how it would be a Facebook-killer.    The […]

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Monica Z now out on DVD and Blu-ray

Monica Z, the bio-pic about the late Swedish jazz singer starring Edda Magnason, is now out on Blu-ray and DVD, as of earlier this week.    I learned about the movie not through my Swedish contacts—they were messaging me only when the film was in the cinemas—but when Edda appeared at Allsång på Skansen in […]

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Instaspam: has Instagram jumped the shark?

The tipping-point has been reached: on some of my photos, fake Instagram account likers outnumber human beings. In terms of comments, spam outnumbers real ones. Of my last ten likers, nine were fake accounts. And we know that when some sites get to this point, they begin dying.    Yet it’s frightfully easy to spot […]

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This is not your Granddad’s Myspace

The new Myspace from Myspace on Vimeo Justin Timberlake may have played Sean Parker in The Social Network, but he’s had a real-life social networking role to play as an investor as Myspace (sans intercapitalized S) showed off its new look yesterday.    And I like it.    After being frustrated with another attempt at […]

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Rupert Murdoch has it in for Google more than I ever could

Monika Flückiger/Creative Commons And people thought I was de-Googling my life or being mean to Google. What about Mr Murdoch and his entire firm?    We all know his comments about how he wanted to block Google News’s bot and had spoken out against that. While little happened on that front with the exception of […]

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