Daniel Ferraz

Twitter alters its terms of access to its information, thereby harming the services that built themselves on that information. Which was stupid, because Twitter gets fewer and fewer material benefits from allowing people to use its water. And why would you build a service that relies on a private company’s assets anyway? Facebook changes its terms of access regularly. It’s broken its own Pages system and steadily grows more invasive and desperate. Instagram, now owned by Facebook, just went through its first major change in terms of service. Which went as badly as anyone who’s interacted with Facebook would expect. As Twitter disconnected itself from sharing services like IFTTT, so Instagram disconnected itself from Twitter. Flickr’s experiencing what will probably be a brief renaissance due to having finally built a decent iOS app, but its owners, Yahoo!, are expert in stealing defeat from the jaws of victory. Tumblr seems to me to be spiking in popularity, which coincides neatly with their hiring an advertising sales director away from Groupon, a company described by Techcrunch last year as basically loansharking by any other name.

This may be the end of the cycle that began with Friendster and Livejournal. Not the end of social media, by any means, obviously. But it feels like this is the point at where the current systems seize up for a bit. Perhaps not even in ways that most people will notice. But social media seems now to be clearly calcifying into Big Media, with Big Media problems like cable-style carriage disputes. Frame the Twitter-Instagram spat in terms of Virginmedia not being able to carry Sky Atlantic in the UK, say (I know there are many more US examples).

Google+, of course, is not, strictly speaking, a social network. Most people can’t see what other people are doing there. Google, of course, sees it all. But everyone knows that going in.

It feels like the social web is going to get somewhat less interesting for a while. Less connected, less engaged.

Twitter’s going to be used for tv ratings in the States now. The clever thing about that it that it serves the same purpose as Facebook Likes: it documents media preferences. These are the things that keep a free service free, of course. But, god, there have to be less banal and creepy ways to do it.

I wonder if anyone’s been thinking twice about giving up their personal websites.

[Instagram: I said on that service earlier that I'll wait and see. Some hours later, they released an update to their TOS that I haven't had a good look at yet. But all my Instagram photos were backed up when Facebook bought them, and that backup auto-updates every time I post.]

Yugen

Anton Marrast’s Slow Story is a beautifully drawn surreal narrative. It reminds me of Jonas Odell’s classic, powerful short animation Revolver.

ratsandsinkingships:

Sad but true. “HAUHAUAHUA”

tive que criar um tumblr 

Something happens to both girls and dogs whenever R. Kelly is playing on the radio.

we want time travel

The new one, about blasphemy and politics, is up.