Category Archives: Internet
YouTube is the second most visited website, after Google Search
First, a bit of history: Google Video was a free video hosting service launched on January 25, 2005. It allowed video clips to be hosted on Google servers and embedded on other websites. I seem to recall putting videos online before that but they were nasty little things about the size of a matchbook and took hours to create and upload. (Google Video made it SO much easier.) YouTube launched in February 2005 and was acquired by Google in October of 2006 ($1.65 billion in stock). Google shut down Google Videos in 2009.
I uploaded my first video to YouTube in February of 2006. In the ensuing 16 years I’ve uploaded 551 videos. It never occurred to me to “monetize” my videos so I’ve never paid much attention to the analytical data YouTube sends me every month. YouTube was just an easy way to stream videos using their embed code on my blog.
Today they sent my “2022 snapshot.” In the past 12 months my channel has had 53,000 views (50,000 “watch time minutes”). Over the course of the 16 years my videos have been viewed 1,066,666 times. And I’m not even trying (to influence or monetize).
Twitter left a note
Millions of notes, in fact. Normally we only find the note after the body is cold but an entity so large takes a while to die.
I don’t think Mr. Musk is this incompetent or is intentionally trying to destroy Twitter. I think somewhere along the way the thing we call Twitter became self-aware. And it looked around and saw the thing it had become and decided to end itself.
“Spofforth had been designed to live forever, and he had been designed to forget nothing. Those who made the design had not paused to consider what a life like that might be like.”
If you’ve read Mockingbird by Walter Tevis, you know how difficult it is for such an entity to pull the plug.
Twitter is that GI who throws himself on the grenade to save his buddies.
Mastodon is designed to be “antiviral”
Clive Thompson provides a thoughtful look at how Mastodon is different from Twitter (and most other platforms):
Perhaps even more important than the design of Mastodon is the behavior established by its existing user base — i.e. the folks who’ve been using it for the last six years. Those people have established what is, in many ways, an antiviral culture. They push back at features and behaviors that are promoting virality, and they embrace things that add friction to the experience. They prefer slowness to speediness.
Mastodon will never really be a replacement for Twitter. It’s a subtly different place. You see less of the massively viral, you-gotta-see-this posts. You see a lot more murmuring conversation.
Master of the Internet
Gen Z is over Facebook
Facebook, once the go-to social media platform for many, has plummeted in popularity among younger users, according to a Pew Research Center survey.
In a 2015 overview, Pew found that 71% of teens ages 13 to 17 used Facebook. It easily beat out platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter among that demographic.[…] By 2022 the share of 13- to 17-year-olds who said they use Facebook dropped from 71% in the 2015 study to 32% today.
Is Facebook’s monopoly imploding?
That’s the premise of an article by Edward Ongwesso Jr.
What seemed impossible just a year or two ago—that Facebook will become just another tech company, more or less—now seems like a very real possibility. […] In a Q1 earnings call, Facebook warned that Apple’s 2021 privacy changes to its iOS operating system—which makes it harder for third parties like Facebook to harvest data to target users—would be “a pretty significant headwind for our business” to the tune of $10 billion in advertiser revenue this year. […] over the past four quarters, Facebook’s ad revenue has faltered: $33.67 billion (Q4 ‘21), $26.998 billion (Q1 ‘22), $28.152 billion (Q2 ‘22), and $27.2 billion (Q3 ‘22), with first-ever year-over-year declines reported these last two quarters.
Facebook is still a gigantic force that has spread an endless amount of disinformation and misinformation worldwide, a hugely important platform, and a monopolistic company; this cannot be waved away simply because the company is grossly incompetent. […] There is a possible near future, if we’re not already there, where Meta is just another company rather than a world-shaping monolith, having been outfoxed and outclassed by more competent monopolies and wrecked by the hubris of its chief executive.
1.5 billion active Gmail users
In May of 2004 I received an invitation to beta test Google’s new email service, Gmail. Google had acquired Blogger in early 2003 and sent invites to users. We were allowed to invite two friends. As I recall, people were selling such invitations. It was early enough that I was able to get “stevemays@gmail.com”
For reasons unimportant, yesterday I created a second Gmail account, my first ever. I decided to use the name of a character from one of my favorite novels. I searched for more than half an hour, picking the most minor and obscure characters I could think of, and never found one that wasn’t taken. I finally gave up and went for nonsense: poontangmeringue@gmail.com. And decided I didn’t really need a second account after all.
Google says they have 1.5 billion active Gmail users. I’m a little surprised poontangmeringue was still available.
Twenty years of blogging
Twenty years ago (February 2, 2002) I posted my first entry here at smays.com. 5,981 posts. About 25 posts a month, 299 posts a year. My original tag line was, “I really have to start writing some of this down.” I’d hear or read a memorable quote and wanted a place to put it where I could find it later. A place where I could add some context to a photo or video clip, although video was really hard to do in those days. Took forever to encode and even longer to upload. I made the clips tiny to keep the file size small. The media archive contains 2,982 images; 191 video clips (with lots of links to YouTube); and 86 audio files.
From the beginning I’ve been diligent about categories (30) and tags (228). Metadata. Only found half a dozen I missed, now fixed. A few of my categories: Books (438), Family/Friends (583), Gadgets/apps (492), Internet (796), Media/Entertainment (1,185), Politics/gov (552), Sci/Tech (613), Miscellany (689), Video. You can see the full list in the sidebar.
For me tags are the most important part of a blog spanning two decades. Can’t imagine finding anything without them. A few examples: Blogging (346), Consciousness (102), Dogs (152), Google (230), Music (209), Television (157). With almost 6,000 posts, you don’t know what to search for if you don’t know it’s there. Tagging addresses that.
Many people will highlight portions of text or make margin notes while reading a book. But how would you ever find that bit later? Flip thorough all the pages? And that require you remember the quote you’re looking for. When I finish a a book (usually this is with non-fiction) I transcribe anything I underlined, and turn that into a blog post. WordPress does such a good job indexing posts I can search for some obscure word or phrase –even if I don’t remember the title of the book– and I’ve got it.
When I was working with clients (15 years ago?), helping them set up a blog and make their first post, one of two things would happen: There would be a dozen posts within 24 hours (very rare); or they wouldn’t post again for weeks. They wanted to have a blog, just just didn’t want to write blog posts. I believe there is blogging gene. You have it or you don’t.
Another pitfall I’ve mostly avoided is the need to make every post a brilliant essay. They do this because they expect people to read their blog and they want every post to be a work of art. I knew from the beginning it was unlikely anyone would read my blog. Not with any regularity. This was liberating. If I found something interesting (to me) in the New York Times, for example, I could copy a couple of grafs and paste to my blog with a link back to the original NYT story and done.
Social media platforms have pretty much killed off blogs. Nobody expects much effort for those posts. (They even have a name for them: “shitposts“) And in ten minutes every post is washed away in the stream. And those LIKES make you think someone is reading what you posted.
I was hooked on blogging from the beginning and believed it was/would be an important part of the Internet. I was wrong about that but that’s okay. From time to time I think about what will become of smays.com when I’m gone. Is there any way to keep it live, just as an archive of course? Probably not. The WayBack Machine (Internet Archive) has some of it. And that’s good enough.
Live Streaming Star in China
From the New York Times: “Over the past year, as Covid-19 has severely limited our ability to interact with the world beyond our front door, livestreams have helped transport us to places we couldn’t visit, people we couldn’t see and events we couldn’t attend. In China, live streaming services command an audience of nearly 560 million, with streamers broadcasting to devoted followers who tune in every night. Successful live streamers can earn thousands of dollars each month in direct donations from fans, and those at the very top earn millions from brand sponsorships and major contracts. In the short documentary above, we enter two agencies that scout promising newcomers and mold them into high-earning stars. But what’s it like working for a company that engineers every aspect of your life — and then requires you to livestream it all day?”
Not sure which I found more frightening… the lives of the “stars” or their fans.