Here is my guestpost at socialmediatoday
Category: Opinions
Sep 27
Drop The Word “Platform”
Countless times I’ve heard people refer to their website as a “platform”. But it rarely is. Does it provide the ability for others to deploy or create new applications? Do you expose your data or functionality through a public API? If yes, only then you may call your website a platform. Facebook used to be …
Sep 19
The Distributed Social Network Paradox
When a few weeks ago twitter announced that they are effectively closing their platform, I put a lot of thought on possible alternative to twitter. The obvious choice is distributed social networks, where there is no single owner of the service, and so nobody can decide to enforce rules and cut API access. The two …
Sep 05
I Just Paid For a Promotional Video And Twitter Effectively Killed My Service
Less than a month ago I had a video in production, that was going to boost my service. The video is ready, but now I wish I didn’t pay for it. Not because it’s bad (it’s great), but because the new rules introduced by twitter are effectively killing my service. Welshare is providing a unified …
Aug 27
The New Twitter Rules Are Useless Because Of Browser Add-Ons
Recently twitter announced their new rules for using the API. Tons of angry and unhappy developers and journalists wrote that these limitations may kill businesses, and will certainly make the twitter platform less open. I won’t repeat all these articles. It is obvious why this is a bad move, and how it will kill legitimate …
Aug 09
The Film Industry Doesn’t Want My Money
I watch movies. And, as any sane tech-savvy person, I get them via bittorrent. Here in Bulgaria it is still OK to do that without the risk of special forces breaking into your home, although intellectual property laws still apply. And since I appreciate the work of creative people, I decided to pay for movies …
Jul 26
CTRL+Enter
CTRL+Enter is the natural shortcut for “Send” in case of multiline input fields. Stackoverflow, for example, supports that shortcut for publishing comments and answers. Some messengers do. But social networks don’t. Not a single one – Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn – all of them require you to go and press the “post” / “tweet” / …
Jul 24
Is Twitter Obsoleting Businesses Based Around Proprietary APIs?
Twitter has taken course to limiting 3rd party apps that use its API. Their decision is their alone, so we can’t blame them, although it looks rather selfish and one-sided – you want more to happen inside your platform, which is yet another “closed” system. And we all love open systems, which twitter used to …
Jul 15
Portmanteau Domain Names For Startups
You have a startup and you are thinking of a cool name. You think of a couple, check if their domains are free, and guess what – they are not. And if you want them, you need thousands of dollars, which you probably don’t have or don’t want to invest in a domain name. So …
Jun 28
1 Year Google+
Google+ was released 1 year ago. I don’t know their internal stats, but my experience is just as it was one year ago: strangers adding me to their circles, a few actual friends using it initially, then most of them stopped and currently no interesting content in the news feed. Google people claim some increasing …