Network effects are such a pernicious thing. They give us the internet, but they also give us an internet full of monopolistic worse-is-better players that use network effects to stifle improvements and competition.
Sometimes the best you can manage is to be a parasite.
So I'm back on facebook ... sort of.
My strategy for facebook is to be as near to a featureless datapoint as I can. I won't post anything. I entered as bad quality information as I could get away with. I turned all privacy controls off, on the theory that this way I don't have to worry about facebook eroding privacy since everything about me on facebook is aggressively public.
By never posting anything to facebook, I am trying to fight the network effect; trying to avoid increasing the value of facebook due to me being on it.
I've adblocked the text entry field on facebook just to avoid the temptation. I want to erase the Like buttons too. Technologically, I think a good approach would be a browser plugin that does these things while extracting all available content and optionally sending it to a RECAP-type system.
I only friend people who I need to keep up with and who have little or no other internet presence. This is because I am aware that each person I friend still propels facebook's network effect a little bit; even though they'll never see any useful information from me, they will know that they are able to talk to me via facebook.
I only log into facebook once a week or so (this is easy when you're not interacting with it anyway), and read whatever sample of farmville and other posts facebook selects as "important" (worse than usual probably since I never give it feedback). So people I friend can't rely on me reading everything they do, which reduces the value a little more.
I will probably delete this account occasionally, and then re-add it later. Just often enough to be really annoying.
Similarly, I no longer gate my identi.ca account to twitter, and have deleted as many tweets as I could stand to (one click and one keypress per tweet; no mass-delete; ugh!), and protected my account to avoid accidential new tweets leaking out.
Since twitter is not quite as evil as facebook I feel slightly less bad about exposing more of my social graph there. Only the folks who are too lame to get on an OpenMicroBlogging site like identi.ca.
phone
Of course there was a network effect with the telephone as well, and while it got deregulated it's still pretty bad, and also a technology that I mostly dislike using. Oddly my phone behavior is backwards to the other two networks; I only make outgoing phone calls, never answering the phone (unless real life intervenes very severely). I listen to some random fraction of my voice mail and read whatever ones manage to get machine-transcribed.
As I write this, it's the morning of June 5th, 1981. A few people scattered across the US are waking up, going in to work, sitting down at their terminal with a coffee, and reading Usenet. Usenet is only getting a trickle of posts each day -- it's still in that period where it's easy to read every message posted to it.
Many things lie in Usenet's future. It's still running A-News, which doesn't even have a real From header yet. Later this year it will switch over to B-News, and volume will begin to increase. In 1987 there will be The great renaming. And of course in 1994, the first spam will be posted to Usenet.
But that's all a long way off, here in 1981. Right now, they're talking about 500 mb disk drives that only cost $38000. And rms is inciting flames about nuclear proliferation. And Postel is publishing an RFC for the new Mail Transfer Protocol.
Good morning, Usenet. Who knows what will come next in this fledgeling electronic communications medium!
a ten year real-time historical exhibit
This morning, I'm announcing a new site: Olduse.net
It's Usenet, updated in real time as it was thirty years ago. Planned to be available for the next ten years, unless I run out of inodes (again).
If you missed it the first time around, this is your chance to follow Usenet's flowering.
made possible by
- Henry Spencer at the University of Toronto, Department of Zoology, who archived Usenet. Back when it was really uncool and really expensive. Our view onto Usenet is thus slightly centric to Canada and Zoology, but that's ok.
- David Wiseman, who hauled 141 magtapes in a pickup truck.
- Many who worked to rescue data off the tapes. Including from the deleted stuff at the ends.
- Rich Skrenta, who somehow got a copy of the archive out from under the Google borg. Although one of the tar files is truncated. Just saying.
- The creator of Telehack, who pointed me in the right direction, ending my multi-year quest to find the archive. And if you think this is neat, Telehack will blow you away.
- The developers of Haskell, which enabled me to whip up a B-News to C-News converter, a custom uucp, date parsers for every crazy date format ever used on Usenet, and suitible queue data structures in a rock solid, maintainable way, in 500 lines of code written over 12 hours. When I realized I also needed an A-News to B-News converter, I knew it was worth it to have done things right, because that took only 43 more lines, and worked 100% on the first run! My code repository for olduse.net is here.
PS: You can post to olduse.net, but it won't show up for at least 30 years. :)
I was going to blog about being on hacker news, and slashdot etc, but it doesn't seem interesting enough for my blog.
Although last showing 50 thousand logins by
"oldusenet" is noteworthy.
Happy IPv6 day BTW!
I've finished importing the usenet archive for oldusenet. The fun part was parsing the dates to put the posts in order.
No date format was really required on usenet, and so a wide variery of formats were used. Some posts didn't have a Date, but a guess could be made from their Message-ID. Some posts had absurd dates (ie, 1969, 1995), others had dates that were correct in every way.. except the year was left out (oops). One early post had a date of "_____".
Still, this excerpt of my code managed to parse the rest and so gives a fairly complete picture of how messy dates can possibly be. Read and weep.
p anyzone "%d %b %y %T" "15 Jun 88 02:27:41 GMT"
, p anyzone "%a, %d %b %y %T" "Thu, 22 Jun 89 20:02:03 GMT"
, p anyzone "%a, %d-%b-%y %T" "Thu, 15-Jun-89 18:01:56 EDT"
, p anyzone "%d %b %y %T" "8 Jan 90 14:07:27 -0400"
, p anyzone "%d %b %y %H:%M" "4 Oct 89 19:56 GMT"
, p anyzone "%a, %d %b %y %H:%M" "Thu, 23 May 91 02:13 PDT"
, p anyzone "%a, %d %b %Y %T" "Thu, 23 May 1991 07:07:00 -0400"
, p anyzone "%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M" "Sat, 18 May 1991 17:28 CDT"
, p anyzone "%d %b %Y %T" "11 Apr 1991 12:02:01 GMT"
, p anyzone "%d-%b-%y %H:%M" "24-Mar-90 14:22 CST"
, p anyzone "%d %b %y, %T" "22 May 91, 16:31:37 EST"
, p anyzone "%d %b %Y %H:%M" "30 June 1991 17:15 -0400"
, p anyzone "%a, %d %b T %T" "Fri, 8 Feb T 09:49:39 EST"
-- special cases
, p (tzconst est) "%a %b %d %T EST %Y" "Tue Jan 11 12:44:36 EST 1983"
, p (tzconst est) "%a %b %d %T EST %y" "Tue Jan 11 12:44:36 EST 83"
, p (tzconst edt) "%a %b %d %T EDT %Y" "Tue Jan 11 12:44:36 EDT 1983"
, p (tzconst edt) "%a %b %d %T EDT %y" "Tue Jan 11 12:44:36 EDT 83"
, p (tzconst utc) "%a %b %d %T GMT %Y" "Thu Nov 1 23:14:37 GMT 1990"
, p (tzconst pdt) "%d %b %y %T -7" "11 Jun 91 15:41:21 -7"
-- dates with no timezone specified are guessed
, p nozone "%d %b %y %T" "9 Jan 90 09:33:59"
, p nozone "%d %b %Y %T" "10 APR 1990 05:25:28"
, p nozone "%a %b %d %T %Y" "Fri Feb 6 00:19:47 1981"
, p nozone "%a %b %d %T %y" "Fri Feb 6 00:19:47 81"
, p nozone "%Y-%m-%d %T" "1981-11-12 18:31:01"
, p nozone "%y-%m-%d %T" "81-11-12 18:31:01"
, p nozone "%a, %d %b %y %T" "Sat, 13 Apr 91 08:37:57"
, p nozone "%a, %d %b %Y %T" "Sun, 16 Jun 1991 13:23:02"
, p nozone "%d %b, %Y %T" "1 May, 1991 00:00:00"
, p nozone "%d %b %y %H:%M" "8 Jan 88 18:03"
, p nozone "%a, %d %b %y %H:%M" "Wed, 29 May 91 17:14"
, p nozone "1 %b %d %T %Y" "1 Jan 08 20:59:08 1991"
-- this has to come near the end, as it matches greedily
, g nozone "%a %b %d %T %Y (" "Wed Oct 27 17:02:46 1982 (Tuesday)"
, g nozone "%a, %d %b %y %T +" "Tue, 21 May 91 16:46:01 +22323328"
-- extract date from message-id headers
-- (used for messages with no Date field)
, g nozone "<%Y%b%d.%H%M%S." "<1989Jul6.214048.28313@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu>"
(Parsing the often ambiguous, malformed, etc timezones was fun all its own too, of course.)
My DebConf trip will involve 7 days of travel spanning ten countries, plus the conference. I'll be part of a three car convoy, all across Europe to B&H, with a bunch of speed-loving brits. I'm sure there will be many references to Top Gear, and probably some multicar wifi. Luckily I'm prepared, since Overfiend (aka Debian's own Stig) introduced me to the show two years ago. This will be a great way to see a lot of Europe, fast, and for pretty cheap all told, even with the hotel in Luxembourg.
I'm sure DebConf 11 will spark a lot more ideas of things to do. For that matter, I still have todo items leftover from Debconf 10. I'm not planning to give any talks, but who knows?