technology

Thanks to @scottsmith for pointing this out and for @maximevalette who coded it!

I had been looking for a WordPress plugin which automatically posted to ADN, my Twitter/Instagram/IRC-like social networking service.

If you’re a WordPress user, you can go to Plugins, select Add New, and look up “Posts to ADN” in the description. It should come right to the top.  If you’re the hardcore plugin downloader, you can get it here.

Very cool.  The IFTTT auto-poster was a little slow for my taste.

Blame Brian Yamabe (@byamabe), but I’m hooked on App dot Net (ADN) and spending more time there than on Twitter and on my former love, Google Plus.

I became a paid member, and it’s changed my sharing habits of a little bit. I’ve asked myself, “Would you pay to share this?” and “Would you pay to see this?” I found that I don’t share every little joke and stupid “meme” out there. I’ve tried to share good pictures, plan audio and video posts, and be a little more considerate about how I advocate things to a group of people that pay to see and share. So having a paid account is not just about the reduction of spam and complete lack of ads, it actually raises the quality of what I do see.

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From the Google Reader blog:

We have just announced on the Official Google Blog that we will soon retire Google Reader (the actual date is July 1, 2013). We know Reader has a devoted following who will be very sad to see it go. We’re sad too.

As if we needed more reminders that we are the product, not the customer.

Google Reader was an awesome way to keep up with hundreds of blogs and news sites.

At least one can use Google Takeout to move subscriptions to other clients or services.

An Internet adage gaining strength goes something like this: If you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product.

This becomes apparent in how Facebook treats its viewers with interface changes that nobody seemingly asks for, adding more advertisements in one’s viewing space. Twitter prevents less third-party apps from reading from it and eventually forcing one into reading “tweets” the way it wants you to, with the occasional “sponsored tweet” from @barackobama injected into what you’re reading. If Google+ wanted other programs to be able to read and write to it, they would have done it.

I love that Google+, too. Ugh. At least they’ll let me turn off the “Hot” post from Barack Obama.

Before all this social networking stuff came out, if you wanted to put something on the Internet, you paid to do it. I still do, with this domain and website. In fact, St. Patrick’s Day is coming around, and that’s my billing date thanks to an Dreamhost offer seen by Stan Lemon (“clunk” sound as the name drops) . Being the person who pays, I get to control what I’m sharing, how it looks, and how the site operates. You, the reader, have a choice of viewing the article on my web site, or you can use Google Reader or another RSS reader to see the text. RSS readers are just that — readers — and thus don’t allow you to comment or give other feedback.

We’ve started on one side of the pendulum, pay for the site and have complete control and responsibility, and with Facebook/Twitter/Google+, we’ve sung to the other side, which is free but ultimately not having much control over what we see.

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