Facebook: no change, business as usual

I would have loved to have seen this go to trial, but Facebook and the plaintiffs—a group of advertising agencies alleging they had been swindled by the social network—settled.    Excerpted from The Hollywood Reporter, ‘The suit accused Facebook of acknowledging miscalculations in metrics upon press reports, but still not taking responsibility for the breadth […]

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Today’s thoughts on Twitter

Momentmal/Pixabay Random thoughts in the last few minutes, blogging as a means of bookmarking: Prediction: sick of all the tracking, advertising and endless bugs, people begin using the telephone feature on their cellphones nearly exclusively. — Jack Yan 甄爵恩 (@jackyan) May 25, 2019    You never know, we may see a rise in the demand […]

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The descent of Instagram

The descent of software seems to be a common theme among some companies. You get good ones, like Adobe and Fontlab, where (generally) successive versions tend to improve on those gone before. Then you get bad ones, like Facebook, which make things worse with each iteration.    Facebook Timeline launched to much fanfare at the […]

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Tumblr is now where Verizon’s corporate agenda rule

How quickly an opinion can change.    I have been on Tumblr for 12 years, signing up in 2007, with my first post in January 2008.    For most of that time I have sung its praises, saying it was one of the good guys in amongst all the Big Tech platforms (Google, Facebook) that […]

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Facebook: Kiwi lives don’t matter

As someone who read Confucius as a young man, and was largely raised on his ideas, free speech with self-regulation is my default position—though when it becomes apparent that people simply aren’t civilized enough to use it, then you have to consider other solutions.    We have Facebook making statements saying they are ‘Standing Against […]

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Why Twitter’s stock went down in my book in 2018

Pixabay Of my friends, about eight or nine voted for President Trump. Two voted for Brexit. These are my friends, who I vouch for, who I like. Other than a difference of opinion on these topics, we remain friends. I still think incredibly highly of them.    Since I know them well, I know a […]

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Americans like big numbers

Scott Milne and I had a little fun over ‘American English’ recently on Twitter (and hopefully US friends will see this in the humour in which it was intended). He wrote: It's the 23rd of November. Black Friday's are the 13th. Unless I am missing some imported America bullshit, I call bullshit. — Scott Milne […]

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Don’t group Chinese New Zealanders into one faceless bunch

Some visiting Australian friends have said that they are finding New Zealand politics as interesting as their own, although I don’t think this was meant as a compliment. Those of us in New Zealand had a few days of House of Cards-lite intrigue, in that it was stirred up by a conservative whip, in an […]

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Google censors at every level—it’s just what they do

As my final post on Google Plus, I posted the Murdoch Press article on how the company exposed user data between 2015 and 2018, choosing not to disclose it publicly for fear of regulatory scrutiny and damage to its reputation.    How interesting to note that it has now been removed twice by the powers […]

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Social media mean less and less

Above: I must report and block dozens of Instagram accounts a day, not unlike getting over the 200-a-day mark on Facebook in 2014.   For the last few days, I made my Twitter private. It was the only time in 11 years of being on the service where I felt I needed that level of […]

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