Strava - The Escape plan has the goal of getting people to move 15 minutes a day 5 times a week for four weeks. This includes all sports from Alpine Skiing to Yoga with walking, hiking, kayaking, cycling, swimming and more. In other words your walk to the shops, the café and the work commute are included.
With so many sports activities included in this challenge, it should be easy for everyone to achieve.
Facebook and Instagram both have “Stories”. Stories are temporary vertical pictures and video that are only available for a limited amount of time before they are backed up and saved for retrieval once you request your data.
In theory, they are a fantastic way of sharing life as it happens without worrying about something embarrassing being available for an extended period of time. In practise, they are a way for Facebook and Instagram to force users to be active every day if they do not want to miss out on what their friends are sharing.
This morning I uninstalled Facebook and Twitter because most of the tweets I saw were people complaining about things or posts that would fit perfectly as blog posts on a website. We have moved towards the Social Media reflex, rather than towards an open sharing habit.
Before social media, we would have conversations on web forums and within comments on websites. As social media centralised all of those conversations so the engagement between people declined.
I have had a meetup.com account since I was using yahoo as my primary e-mail provider. For years my account was dormant because activities that I were interested in were either in another country or at a time when I could not participate. Recently I have found that activities are at times when I can participate. As a result of this I am building a new network of people to climb with.
The Issue For a while Facebook was the network to keep in contact with university friends after we all graduated and then it was the network to keep in contact with colleagues. Eventually it became the network where people shared news without engaging with others. It has become a network where you scroll through dozens of irrelevant posts in the hope of finding something personal, and failing.
Instagram used to be the network where we could share images with friends and see what they were sharing.
By shutting Google plus in August 2019 Google have shut down one of my favourite social networks. From the start I have said that it reminded me of Jaiku, an excellent, european alternative to Jaiku that never reached critical mass and so was sold to Google, which then shut it down and eventually released Google+
Google+ is an excellent social network because it allows photographers and conversationalists to converse without the hype, without the cult of personality and without sensationalism.
You remember the old saying. The best camera is the one that you have with you. Today the same can be said about “edit suites” that you carry in your trousers or jacket pocket. I’m speaking of edit suites that work with your iphone or ipad. Lumafusion is one such example. It differs from other mobile editing solutions in a number of key ways. The first is that it allows you to edit on a timeline with three video sources at once This means that you have more control.
This morning rather than use the phone, check twitter, look at Facebook, or look at Instagram I took one of my two e-book readers. I have a Kobo and a Kindle device. I have both because I don’t want to lose all of my books if one company goes out of business.
Twitter and Facebook are filled with pushed content that we are not interested in. When we’re browsing our timelines it used to be to see what friends were doing or thinking about.
Chloe Gilbert - 7 Jan, 2018
I’m finding that I’m doing the same these days. Twitter has become a torrent of noise and nobody seems to be really conversing these days. I had a lot of value out of early Twitter, and made some good friends as well as getting support for things like programming and events etc. Lately as you say it’s become useless. Facebook for me was always a way of keeping in touch with close friends and family, as well as getting support and organising events.
Finding time for Long Form Writing This morning I read twenty percent of a book whilst sitting in the car waiting for shops to open. In the process I occasionally looked up to see private jets and airlines fly over me. A few years ago in the same situation I would have been staring at my phone. I would have been refreshing twitter and Facebook looking for conversations. These days social media marketers and others are using social media as if they were Really Simple Syndication feeds, RSS.