On Social Media

Has anyone thought about what to do about existing collections? Google has said they are going away, but I have not seen anything about what that means. Question we need answered: will the posts in collections revert to public posts? I’ve been thinking about taking my most popular collection and making a community out of it.

One of the few bright spots of this whole change: no more spammers. I've always said that all I needed was a couple of dozen interesting people to converse with. We have more than that here, but have not quite accumulated enough active users to have a couple of dozen.

Here's another Survival Tip for post-consumer Google+: Be sure that every non-domain-restricted community has owners from multiple G suite domains to keep them from going away, should something happen to the account of the community owner. I tried to plus-mention Cade Roux (owner of this community), but for some reason it keeps showing me a different profile.

Why migrate your content? Some folks have asked, “Why should I bother migrating my Google+ content at all?” Here are some reasons. Not all will apply to everybody. 1. “It is amazing content.” Some people have created essays, analysis, photographs, discussions, or other content that makes the world a better place. Why not preserve it for future generations? 2. “But I never made anything fancy, I just reshared links or memes.” Don’t forget that even reshared links and memes may have served as a watering hole for others to comment on or discuss. Some of the most worthwhile content on Google+ is hidden in comments on these posts. Make sure you use a solution like Google+ exporter that preserves all the comments too. 3. “No, really, nobody ever commented on my stuff much.” Even if there is no great discussion in the comments, even simple reshare links are often things you may want to refer back to in the future. Imagine yourself next year thinking, “Darn. I remember that I shared a link on ...

Another casualty. Just got this in email to the admin address of one of my G Suite domains: Google logo Hello Administrator, We are reaching out to people who may have customized their Google Voice incoming call rules based on Google+ Circles. In light of the upcoming changes to Google+ and in the interests of our adopters, we will be removing call routing rules based on Google+ Circles on March 4 2019. From our analysis it appears that users in your domain have created custom call routing rules based on Google+ Circles. What does this mean for my organization? After March 2019, incoming calls to Google Voice phone numbers used by members of your organization will not follow any settings they may have had for callers in Google+ Circles. All other call routing rules, such as those based on members’ Google Contacts, will remain intact. What actions do I need to take? We recommend reaching out to the affected users and informing them of this update. Google Voice is not currently included ...

In other news, the G Suite Page has become quite active on Google+, posting regular announcements of all sorts of updates. It seems odd that they would be ramping up this was if there wasn’t going to be a way for G Suite users to continue to get these updates post-April. This gives me added hope that there will be cross-enterprise Google+ sharing for G Suite users.

After trying numerous other sites, I’ve figured out one of the things I like so much about Google+ that is missing from so many others: asymmetrical following. Here on Google, if I follow someone because In interested in what they post (or add them to one of my circles), there is no assumption about whether or not they would have any interest in what I say. Facebook (and now MeWe) support something similar with “Pages”, but for people and their profiles, the only option is symmetrical “friends” or “contacts”. [Update: Apparently Facebook now allows following people as well, without adding them as friends. If only Facebook hadn’t proven itself to be an untrustworthy host... ] [Update2: I can’t find the feature to follow someone without doing a friend request on Facebook.]

My top nine I have decided to create accounts everywhere and see which ones I end up using the most. I have downloaded apps where available or saved links to mobile web versions where not. So, how to track which are my favorites? I turned off all device notifications, including count badges, so as to not conflate frequent notices with my organic interest. Before I open an app, I drag it to the top left of the first page of icons. So, the order of icons ends up being an indicator of how recently I last checked in. Here’s my current top nine. To give you a feeling for this, I don’t think I have checked Twitter even once in the past week. Facebook I checked exactly once. Tootdon is slowly slipping down the list, as I get less and less enamored of its Twitter-like feeling. Meanwhile, MeWe has inched its way up to the number 2 position.

Thoughts on APIs One of the best parts about G+ has been the API that allows services like FriendsPlusMe to exist. I asked them whether they were going to support MeWe, Mastodon, or Diaspora. Their response: ”Almost no reasonable G+ alternative offer an API, MeWe and Diaspora are no exception. We’ll have to wait for these two but we should be able to come up with Mastodon support in upcoming months. Stay tuned!” Given the current existence of a decent iOS Mastodon app (Tootdon), that platform Is looking better and better.

Back before twitter introduced the concept of micro-blogging, we had actual blogs (web-logs). One of the most powerful parts of blogs was near-universal syndication using a few standards such as RSS. Then, along came walled gardens like Twitter and Google+, and suddenly you needed a separate app or web site for each. Google+ was compelling enough for me that I basically stopped reading blogs, except those linked to from Google+. Now that Google+ is going away, I am rethinking that decision. I’ve installed Feedly and I’m slowly adding all the blogs of people whom I used to just follow on Google+. Some of these are standalone Wordpress blogs. Some are journals on Dreamwidth. I’m sure I will find others. But however many people are moving to MeWe or pluspora or whatever, if it doesn’t support RSS syndication, I probably won’t be interacting with them much. I’ve downloaded apps for all those that have it, but I can’t see myself making the mistake of investing in any one self-enclosed site ...

Bliss Morgan has an excellent description of Dreamwidth over on https://plus.google.com/+BlissMorgan/posts/BDyjCMvvAFs I’ll be checking out that one too. It appears to be a clone (or branch) off of livejournal. Since livejournal is now owned by Russian Putinistas, dreamwidth is a better option. You can even import your old livejournal content. Their principles doc is pretty good too. https://www.dreamwidth.org/legal/principles

The Google blog post says they will keep it for enterprise use. I wonder if that includes all G Suite accounts (including those of us using legacy free accounts). I further wonder if they will keep the ability for G Suite accounts to post publicly (for cross-enterprise communications). If both of those are the case, I’ll still be here, and anyone who is willing to pay $5/month/user or $50/year/license for G Suite can be stay here too. If they drop G+ support for the legacy free G Suite accounts but keep the ability to post publicly, I may have to bite the bullet and start paying the $200/year to upgrade to G Suite. It comes with all sorts of added benefits, but haven’t felt the need for them on my personal G Suite accounts yet. So, I’m waiting to hear more info and waiting to see how quickly people bail. In any case, I will have loads more time on my hands!