Metawatch. (Formerly known as Facebookwatch.)

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Now that’s funny!

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I would die if “we accidentally deleted our service’s connection to the internet, simultaneously locking all of our employees out of the building where the problem is happening, and nobody cares enough to break a window to get back inside” was the ultimate reason for the death of Facebook.

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just curious if anyone has thought about this and if its not possible for some reason. rather than relying on a single social media platform what about another app that aggregates social media. like in an imaginary world where google+ and myspace still existed alongside facebook, a single app to let you view and reply to friends wherever they are? basically the way we use email. like you can reply and communicate with someone on yahoo or gmail or whatever random private server from a single mail application. Im not tech savvy in the least so maybe theres a million reasons that couldn’t work. I just wish there were a way to break the monopoly of facebook without losing touch with people who use it.

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Unfortunately, the 2.0 social media companies like FB and Twitter quickly realized that if they just gave their data out to whoever asked for it, they’d lose out on all of the ads they could be showing to those people if they forced them to stay siloed on their own platform with an interface that they had complete control over. (Twitter has been especially egregious about this, removing open data formats like RSS feeds and practically destroying the 3rd party app ecosystem by deprecating half of the APIs they used while standing up new APIs that they couldn’t, and building whole new feature sets that never got API access to begin with, like polls.)

Chat services have figured this out too, which is why apps like Adium or Trillium or Pidgin have basically died out (and even a lot of the old interoperability that those apps were built on was essentially a cold war-esque stalemate). Basically, without any sort of stable official endpoints to poll, companies these days are capable of “breaking” their apps by making a constant stream of protocol changes faster than third parties can keep up by reverse-engineering the data that comes across the wire. I can’t imagine wanting to work on an app like Tweetbot if every day I had to reverse-engineer Twitter’s data formats to see how they were deciding to eff things up for me.

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Wasn’t that called the internet?

Way back in the before-times.

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Even a fool can have a moment of awareness, broken clocks and all that.

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As Matt Levine says, everything is securities fraud

You know the basic idea. A company does something bad, or something bad happens to it. Its stock price goes down, because of the bad thing. Shareholders sue: Doing the bad thing and not immediately telling shareholders about it, the shareholders say, is securities fraud. Even if the company does immediately tell shareholders about the bad thing, which is not particularly common, the shareholders might sue, claiming that the company failed to disclose the conditions and vulnerabilities that allowed the bad thing to happen.

And so contributing to global warming is securities fraud, and sexual harassment by executives is securities fraud, and customer data breaches are securities fraud, and mistreating killer whales is securities fraud, and whatever else you’ve got. Securities fraud is a universal regulatory regime; anything bad that is done by or happens to a public company is also securities fraud, and it is often easier to punish the bad thing as securities fraud than it is to regulate it directly.

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Yes, bring back the Old Web, please!

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Glad to see Julia Reda still making trouble post EU parliament

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