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< Archive / 2023

July, 2023

More on the ActivityPub API project

A few days ago I shared around an idea for an ActivityPub API product. The response was enormous! Here's the link again. If you're potentially interested in building on the fediverse using this tool, I'd love to know a little bit more. If you have 3 minutes, could you please give ...
July 27, 2023

How to disable the web's most annoying feature

Website notifications are a blight. I never want a website to be able to notify me about updates; these messages are interruptive, and like the vast majority of app notifications, they tend to be part of some marketing team’s growth strategy rather than a conduit to actually useful information. (Product ...
July 25, 2023

just pouring one out for my twittr

When I was fifteen, I ran a little “e-zine” called Spire that was distributed on the cover CDs of various real, paper magazines. I thought it was pretty cool, and that nobody could possibly have known that it was run by a fifteen-year-old. (In retrospect, it was pretty obvious.) I ...
July 24, 2023

Hannah

Four decades ago, I was introduced to my sister. She remains the person I most look up to; although she’s technically younger than me, she’s who I want to be when I grow up. A remarkable human being who is a real point of light, not just in my universe, ...
July 14, 2023

Making it easier to build on the fediverse

I’ve been thinking about how to make it easier to build on the fediverse. Here’s a pitch for an idea I’ve been thinking a lot about: This API service allows anyone to spin up a fediverse back-end with its own custom domain, accessible via a RESTful API with easy-to-use libraries in ...
July 14, 2023

How I think about technology leadership

Avoiding the trap of prioritizing metrics over motivation ...
July 13, 2023

Events I'll be at this year

Ever so tentatively, I’m beginning to show my head at in-person events this year. I haven’t been to any kind of industry conference or regular event since at least 2019. The small matter of a global, deadly pandemic kept me away, but I’ve decided that I’ll return to events that ...
July 11, 2023

Porter's Five Forces and the social web

Cam Pegg writes: I’m re-reading Michael Porter’s seminal article, The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy, and just had an OMFG-I-need-to-get-this-tattooed-on-my-forehead-so-that-everyone-I-talk-to-gets-the-message moment: A narrow focus on growth is one of the major causes of bad strategy decisions. The thing about growth is that it leads to bad strategy decisions if you care about ...
July 9, 2023

Second thoughts about Threads

The other day I posted a surprisingly glowing first impression of Meta’s new Threads app. This is the counterpart to that. The site is brands, man. All of it. It’s like the glossy fashion magazine of social networks. And I get it. I really do. This is going to succeed beyond anyone’s ...
July 7, 2023

First thoughts about Threads

Meta’s new social network is interesting: an obvious strategic shot at Twitter just as that network is running into trouble, as well as a way to iterate on its aging Facebook property. To that end, it makes sense that Meta would piggyback on the fediverse of independent social networks that ...
July 6, 2023

Dogs

Our baby loves dogs. His eyes light up as soon as he sees one. His arms extend outwards, his lips turn up, and it’s a matter of seconds before he’s unable to constrain his joy any longer and something between a delighted squeal and an unhinged canine howl is let loose ...
July 5, 2023

Getting AI to build you up and break you down

Christian Heilmann writes: One thing I am not good at is write in superlatives about myself. That’s a good thing, I think? But often you are asked to big yourself up for some official publication or marketing materials. So I thought I give ChatGPT a go to turn a list of ...
July 4, 2023

Some website redesigns

I mildly redesigned my homepage today, in order to do a better job of what this site is and what you might read on it. I’d hoped to use the Internet Archive to go back and look at all my blogs — I started my first personal website in 1994 and ...
July 4, 2023

Licensing site content using a text file

A proposal for licensing content on any website ...
July 3, 2023

Why I post links without context

I’ve worked alongside news and journalism for a long time - since helping the team at Latakoo to define and build their first products that helped journalists with networks like NBC News send video back to their newsrooms using commodity internet connections. But the last few years have marked the ...
July 3, 2023

The notable list: July 2023

Interesting websites, articles, books, and media from the last month. ...
July 1, 2023