Get off my lawn!

So almost 5 years ago, I wrote a blog post about not understanding twitter. Well, I get it now. I also get why Google killed Google Reader.

Writing a long, informative blog post is a lot of work and something I obviously haven’t done in a while. There was a golden age where people shared information on platforms with great interoperability and open standards. You could easily aggregate information via RSS/Atom and it was very easy to export, migrate, and generally own your blog data.

But controlling and managing your own data is also a lot of work mostly because of the ever increasing onslaught of spam. So it’s easier to give all our data to facebook and google for free while they try to sell us to advertisers. You can’t consolidate anything from facebook, google, or twitter because of course they’re competitors and would never share their (ie your) data with each other. You can even’t retrieve all your tweets and instagram tries to block you from downloading YOUR OWN PICTURES albeit with some cheap and simple filter effects.

And now I’m considering shutting down the forum. Yes, I’m part of the problem. Apparently, I need to get off my own lawn.

7 thoughts on “Get off my lawn!

  1. Oh, About Google Reader, Google’s mission statement may say that they want to organize the world’s information, but it’s really they want to make money organizing the world’s information. There’s nothing wrong with that but it means that they aren’t going to provide a service just because it is helpful to some people if they can’t make any money on what they invest in it.

  2. so I realized that when you posted about the anime melancholy of haruhi suzumiya you weren’t watching it effortlessly raw. for some reason since you wrote that you were fluent in japanese (after 2 years or something… don’t remember that entry was LONG) I just assumed that. plus everyone’s dream is to understand anime without subs effortlessly like watching something in their native language. I reached a level that’s definitely beyond what your level was when you were watching haruhi suzumiya and i wouldn’t say it’s effortless… maybe with japanese subs beause it’s hard to catch everything and sometimes the vocabulary is just “specialized” ( If i have j-subs no problem but if there’s no subs and the characters keep talking it’s a difficult battle). so i’m going to ascertain you watched it with english subs and understanding what you could catch. let me know if i’m wrong lol… 僻んでいるだけかもしれません。 

    • Not sure what post you’re referring to but I don’t have any trouble watching anime without subtitles though it took longer than 2 years to get to that level. I watched Haruhi a LONG time ago when it came out so I don’t really remember what “level” I was at back then but it’s not really my “dream” to understand anime without subs. In fact, I didn’t watch anime at all when I lived in Japan. Here in the states, there’s nothing else to do BUT watch anime since it seems like the only thing to be brought over here.

      • wow you respond fast. speaking of haruhi i’m going to finally watch the movie. I knew about the movie since it came out but I never got around to watching it and yahoo movie reviews all said only fans will find it interesting. even some fans were saying this movie is too long and boring. somebody else it was like watching 8 episodes continuously with slowbad pacing. i know this movie has j-subs available so i will happily watch…

        • Yes, the movie has bad pacing. They really should have spread it out in a series like the first season but I think they were trying to make more money this way.

  3. “You can even’t retrieve all your tweets”

    Not true, actually. If you want an archive of all of your tweets, simply click on the cog/gear icon in the top right of your twitter account, select “settings” from the drop-down menu, and where it says “your Twitter archive,” click on “Request your archive.” They’ll go through the process of creating the archive files and they’ll send you an email when it’s done and you can download it from there. Unzip it, open the “index.html” file, and voilà, every tweet you’ve ever made, easily searchable by month and year. It’s very convenient, actually.

    Just wanted to clear up that misunderstanding. 🙂

    — HealyHQ

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