For years I have used Sportstracker, and then Strava and Komoot and others. Whether I use one platform or another isn’t much of a concern. I can send my data everywhere. The question is whether I make that data public, private, or a hybrid compromise.
With Suunto and Sportracker I usually keep almost everything private because I can’t highlight zones that I want to keep private. With Komoot it requires cropping the start and end point to hide where you live.
For a while Whatsapp was a fantastic cross platform messaging tool for friends, families, groups and more. It was cross platform, fast and convenient. Eventually rather than rely on Facebook Messenger and Facebook, Facebook bought Whatsapp to consolidate its monopolistic grasp on the social web. As a result of this I tried to dump Whatsapp but it is hard to do so.
The reason for this is simple. Most people have not read Mindf*ck by Chris Whiley so for them it doesn’t matter that Facebook owns Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp, Oculus Quest and more.
A few days ago we saw that talks between Apple and Meta had amounted to nothing. There was talk about including Meta’s AI efforts into Apple Intelligence, unti Apple said “Forget it” or somethign to that effect. I skimmed the headlines but don’t remember the details.
This is significant. The reason for this is simple. The EU is being criticised by Apple for the Digital Markets Act and Apple is trying to give the EU a bad name by saying “We won’t make Apple Intelligence available in the EU because we’re not clear about the DMA.
England is a CCTV nation with more cameras per capita than any other nation. As a result there is great interest from people like Christian of documentally.com and Our Man Inside and John Perivolaris. Both of them are working on CCTV related pieces.
At Parliament Square Christian demonstrated his great ability to talk with anyone he meets. Two characters we met whilst at Parliament square were the London Town crier and John Bull from Birmingham.