We finally succeeded as a culture at breaking down communication and human attention into fragmented gibberish. The product of billions of bite sized messages is a grand sucking sound of our cognitive ability swirling down the drain. Quiet contemplation has been ousted by mass consumption, gossip mongering, and trivial conjecture1.
Like polishing up an old wooden rocking chair, over the past several evenings I’ve been migrating an old Rails application. I was able to get the 3.1beta Rails app (sweet updates) working locally without much trouble. But it’s the first Heroku app I’ve migrated from the 1.8.7 stack to 1.9.2 Badious Bamboo, and it’s not quite ready for prime time.
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This morning I couldn’t resist the urge to air out my issue with relevance as an overloaded word.
Echo Chamber
I followed one too many people and got to the point where browsing twitter became unmanageable. I prefer to familiarize myself with a few sources and tune into their messages regularly, but what I’d done over time was accumulate more subscriptions than I could handle.
Planning a daytrip
A talented web slinging friend of mine (not Spiderman) is developing a slick social interest filtering platform. I met with founder Kevin Marshall a couple of weeks back to get the inside scoop on KnowAbout.it, a young project he and Will Cole have been working tirelessly on refining into a must have social utility. After an hour of walking and freezing, we finally found a spot in a bookstore in lower Manhattan.
The background
UberTwitter was cut off from Twitter’s information pipeline yesterday and it impacted many users. There were three key violations of Twitter’s terms of service by UberMedia, all of which have now been corrected. But the disconnect was a clear message to partner companies and end users alike, Twitter will enforce the rules it setup to protect the quality of it’s user experience on or off site. According to Loic Le Meur, who’s intimately familiar with the social web landscape, UberMedia is responsible for the interface to 20% of all tweets sent daily so it’s a competitor to social news distribution, albeit a dependent one.
