Status-Q

If you want to understand the basics of how encrypted communication works on computers, and why it should be easy to secure all your emails but often isn’t, it’s hard to find a better introduction than Bart Busschot’s on this episode of the Nosillacast. It starts at about 47 minutes.

I’ve just noticed that Twitter allows you to export your tweets, under your account settings. They come in both human and machine-readable form. Not sure how long ago they added this, but it partially addresses one of my chief concerns about the service: that users stick many years of their lives into it without necessarily knowing that they’ll ever be able to extract the information in future.

This is not easy to automate, though, so I’m still going to keep using Archive My Tweets for my own archive.

As I hope everybody knows, Google Reader will close down on Monday.

This means that something like half of you lovely Status-Q readers have just a few days in which to make alternative arrangements, or you’ll find your supply of Status-Q posts, and indeed those from any other blog or similar feed, will suddenly go very quiet next week.

So, assuming you’d like to keep having sensational new content delivered to you regularly without having to keep visiting all those web sites by hand, what can you do?

RSS

Well, one option is to find another RSS reader. (RSS is a machine-readable format that websites can make available, saying which articles have been published recently and when.) There are lots of good RSS-reading programs out there, for every platform – things like Reeder, Flipboard, NetNewsWire… to name just three – and all you need to do is open your favourite one and tell it that you’d like to subscribe directly to:

 http://www.statusq.org/feed/

and you’re away. If it’s a clever app, you may just be able to say ‘statusq.org’ and it’ll work the rest out for itself.

This is great if you have just one or two places in which you read all of your news. But the reason Google Reader was popular was that you could access it on multiple devices and from various apps, and it would remember which feeds you had subscribed to and which articles you had read, and keep them all in sync so you didn’t need to duplicate things everywhere. If you want that functionality now, you need to pick one of the alternative services that are springing up to take Reader’s place.

There’s an episode of the Mac Power Users podcast which looks into some of the alternatives (and will be relevant for non-Mac-users too). A quick summary is that the ones they liked most were probably Feed Wrangler and Feedbin but there are alternatives like Feedly discussed too. Which one works best for you will depend largely on whether you have a favourite feed-reading app which needs to support it, or whether you prefer to use a web interface. Many of these services have a direct ‘Import my feeds from Google Reader’ button to make life easy for you.

Here’s the bad news – most of them cost money. But it’s generally a very small amount, and by having lots of good stuff to read, you’ll probably save that much on iPhone apps you might otherwise be tempted to buy and then forget. And remember, you won’t be giving all that data about your personal interests to Google any more…

Social networks

I don’t tend to post here very frequently, so I automatically send out a message on the social networks with each new post. If you don’t already, why not follow me on Twitter, on App.net or on Facebook? That’s a good way to track other authors as well, but you’ll only see posts as they whizz past in the stream – it’s harder to find quality material to enjoy in a more contemplative fashion over coffee on a Sunday morning… so you may want to do the RSS thing as well.

Or perhaps you prefer such material in your email inbox…?

IFTTT

If you don’t know If This Then That, it’s a service where you can set up rules (‘recipes’) to do all sorts of clever things like “If I’m tagged in an image on Facebook, save it to my Dropbox folder”.

You can also connect to RSS feeds like this one and have it take action when there’s something new posted. If you have an IFTTT account, it’s really easy: here’s a recipe that will email you any new Status-Q posts.

Anyway, that’s a few ideas to get you started. Feel free to post other ideas for post-Reader alternatives in the comments.

But the important thing is to take action now…

It’s almost impossible now to start a new social network and have it taken seriously.

This is partly because of Metcalfe’s Law. In the early 80s, Bob Metcalfe proposed that the value of a communications network was proportional not to the number of devices attached to it, but to the number of possible connections that could be made between those devices – which is (approximately) the square of the number of connected devices. So, he proposed, the value of your fax machine increases every time someone else buys a fax machine. And when a network becomes ten times as big, it becomes 100 times as useful.

Now, you could have all sorts of interesting discussions about the degree to which this is really applicable to social networks, but it’s clear that there’s an enormous challenge for anyone proposing an alternative to Skype’s 30M users, Twitter’s 140M, or Facebook’s billion or so. I think it’s arguable that these three can happily coexist only because they are so different.

Facebook may be horrible, but even the mighty Google has had difficulties making a significant impact with Google Plus because, I suspect, it’s not different enough. It needs a niche of its own.

So what hope is there for App.net? This new kid on the block is still in the very early stages of growth, but there’s some reason to believe it may have found such a niche, and this has been carved out a little more clearly by the recent changes at Twitter.

Twitter, in case you missed it, have realised that the things that helped them grow big – lots of cool iPhone applications, open APIs, ease of getting your tweets in and out – are not the things that are going to help them make money, and they now need to focus on making money more than on getting big. But some of the changes come at the expense of many of their existing users.

Here’s a simple example. The network service IFTTT allows you to set up all sorts of rules – to send a tweet automatically when you post up a new blog entry, for example, or to receive a copy of your tweets by email, or archive them to Dropbox. Very handy. At least, that’s what it used to do. But with the changes to Twitter’s terms, IFTTT have had to drop the facilities that depend on taking stuff out of Twitter. You can still use it to post tweets, but you can no longer use it to archive them.

App.net, on the other hand, is gambling on the idea that there are a significant number of users who would like an open and predictable long-term relationship with their social network. Their offering is based on a few basic principles:

• They won’t include advertising
• They won’t sell your data to others.
• You own your data, not them
• They support their APIs so developers can build stuff that will continue to work

Of course, they point out that they do still need to make money, so joining up costs $50 a year – about the price of a Starbucks latte per month.

I signed up early, just out of curiosity, but I’ve recently started using it more seriously, and it’s because of the issue that IFTTT have so nicely clarified for me on Thursday. If you spend significant amounts of time putting stuff into anything, whether it be a blogging platform, a word processor document format, or a social network, how sure are you that you can get it out again in future?

For many of us, these data streams are not just the equivalent of phone calls that disappear on the wind as soon as you hang up. They are more like diaries, to which we may one day wish to refer again. The search box on this blog becomes a more valuable resource to me with every passing year – perhaps that’s something to do with memory loss in middle age! – but I’m struck sometimes about how many of the links I’ve posted in the past to other services no longer work, because the URLs have changed, or the services have gone away.

With App.net, assuming it is successful, I can be reasonably confident that I will be able to access and manipulate my content in the future, and extract it if I want to move it somewhere else or stop paying the $50. I can use IFTTT, for example, to cross-post anything I put there to Twitter and Facebook automatically, so my friends still know about it. Many of you may be reading this post as a result of that facility. (Apologies to those who see it more than once as a result!)

Now, a network that charges $50 is never going to be as big as one that is free. At the moment, posts on App.net are readable by everyone, so the number of readers, at least, may be affected less by this. Here are my posts so far. But only time will tell whether the combination of being in control of your own stuff, and the ‘Don’t be evil’ policy of the founders, is enough to offset Metcalfe’s law.