I wasn't going to do this. I'm not inclined to rant and rave about something that is dying anyway. And if there was a chance of saving Xanga, I figured they deserved a chance to do their best without me making it any harder for them. It was no skin off my back to just shut up and let it turn out however it turned out. 

But then I read this quote on a certain blog that seems to be the spokesperson for the new Xanga movement:

"TheXangaTeam understands blogging trends I think more than anyone else on Xanga."

ROFLMAO!!!!

After I pulled myself off the floor from the spurt of uncontrollable convulsing laughter... I started to get angry.

Really?!? You think THEY know more than ANYONE on Xanga? These people whose site everyone has known has been on downward trajectory for years, whose site is on the brink of collapse, who can barely manage to even communicate with their users during is last days, whose brilliant amazing plan to save Xanga is to have a $48 pay-to-blog site that gives people what they used to get for free and can still get free almost anywhere else with very little added value and no plan for how to attract new users. These people who expect us to pay that kind of money site unseen without a clue as to what we are buying. Yeah, they're the experts.  

This kind of unthinking appeal to authority really enrages me. It reminds me of the obamabots and the bush fanatics of days old. What reason do you have to believe the Xanga team is so much smarter than their users? What reason do any of us have to trust them with our money as they invest in a future website? The obvious question comes to mind, if they ran Xanga so brilliantly, if they had such a mastery of blogging trends beyond the comprehension of our puny blogging minds, why are they closing? Why isn't some company like Yahoo jumping at the chance to buy Xanga?

There's such a thing as throwing good money after bad.

I hope that this quote represents just the beliefs of one particularly ardent fan and not the attitude or belief of the Xanga Team itself. But I fear it might be indicative of a larger cancer within the organization. And if it is, I know why Xanga failed.

This kind of arrogant self serving BS is what got them killed. A leadership that gives lip service to how important their "users" are while talking down to them, ignoring them, treating them like children, this doesn't exactly build the kind of loyalty and respect that lasts. If you can't interact with your community in a way that doesn't treat them like ignoramuses, how do you expect your community to give back the level of enthusiasm you need for a site to thrive? How do you expect to attract the constant influx of new users you need to survive if your existing users leave the site and talk about how they were disrespected and ignored by a silent management who can't keep up with the times? No wonder Xanga has become known as a place where people are largely embarrassed that they once blogged on. 

Users are not incidental. They aren't just annoyances to be withstood, nor subjects to be controlled, nor cattle to be herded.  The users define the site. Twitter was not a success because a few smart guys came up with the oh so original idea of stringing together 140 characters. Twitter was a success because the users MADE it a success. Countless brilliant ideas were generated IN twitter, by users. A similar story can be told about youtube, about tumblr, about facebook, about any successful platform. The users were respected and catered to and treated like they were worthwhile and important and given what they needed to grow. And more users heard about it. More people came and saw they were joining something special that was worth being a part of. So they stayed. So they told others. So the sites grew.

A real community isn't made up of a group of elites looking down from on high upon their puny subjects and pitying them. A true community is one where people listen and respect one another's ideas and doesn't assume immediately that they have all the good ideas and everyone else is just a complainer or an unproductive hater. 

I'm not saying every Xangan was brilliant and knew exactly what they were talking about when they made suggestions as to what Xanga needed or what Xanga team should be doing. I know that. I'm just saying that there is wisdom in the community and it should be given due consideration. I'm saying if a ton of people are saying "this sounds like a bad idea to me" you should take a minute to pause and think about that. Listen first. Truly hear what they are saying. And then try to formulate a response. Try honestly to answer their criticisms. Explain why you think it is a really good idea and do it in a way that doesn't sound like you are talking down to them. We aren't stupid. Maybe we have experiences to bring to bear on the problem that you don't. Maybe just maybe we understand these social blogging platforms that we care deeply about and spend years and years of our life on a little better than you think we do.  Even if you privately think you know better than any of us, anyone with a little bit of common business sense knows that nobody wants to be told that. Nobody likes to be talked down to. Nobody likes the insufferable prick that just keeps saying over and over and over again "just trust me, little one, I know what's truly best for you". 

In the case of Xanga 2.0, if you listen to the critics, I think what you are hearing from a lot of people is quite clear: "I don't see anything in what you've said that is worth it to me to pay $48 a year for."  That's a pretty damning complaint when your master plan is to keep your community alive on $48 payments. You're either going to have to find other people for whom it IS worth $48 a year to pay for what you are offering or you're going to have to show those people that they really ARE getting value. And vague statements about "the PLUGINS, THE WONDERFUL PLUGINS!", don't mean crap to real people who are trying to decide what to do with their blogging right NOW.  Nor is threatening them with the so called future demise of other free blogging platforms going to cut it. That's the future. The far future. Right NOW tumblr, and wordpress, and blogger still EXIST and seem to be offering people more of what they want than current dying Xanga offers and probably more of what they want then theoretical future pay-to-blog Xanga that we haven't even seen so much as an image of offers. For free. You're asking people to go into this sight unseen based on their nostalgic loving feelings of the past Xanga and then getting angry that they aren't gratefully pulling out their wallets and throwing money your way and going out there evangelizing the hell out of Xanga.  It's almost like you're treating Xanga as your own personal cult rather than a blogging community.

Honestly, what it sounds like to me is that the vast majority of Xangans would rather buy their monthly cup of starbucks than pay for your crappy theoretical blogging platform (I despise that analogy btw, it's got such an arrogant silicon valley hipster feel. FYI, not all of us buy Starbucks's crappy expensive coffee).  That your theoretical future Xanga isn't even worth that much to people is truly a shame.  It means either you've done a piss poor job of convincing people of your vision or your vision is simply a load of crap. Pure and simple. 

But the good news is there's still hope. People are generous and willing to give people a chance and many people really do have positive memories of Xanga and nobody likes to see a site merely vanish and go away.  Most people are basically charitable. And you aren't asking for that much money so you don't really have to convince that many people.

So get serious about it.

Treat us like adults. Talk to us. I know you're busy, but you need to make it clear to the community that you care what happens to Xanga. That you aren't just sick of it and secretly hoping on the inside that you don't even make the money so you can let this heartache fade away and never have to deal with this annoying community of stupid internet pricks again. Because that's what it looks like to us on the outside. We see a leadership that doesn't give a shit and hasn't cared and would rather we all just go far far away as soon as possible. So... we're going away. And very few of us are sticking around to see what happens next.

Maybe you'll sucker 700 odd more people into paying $48 to keep your site open. Heck maybe you'll continue to sucker 1250 people into contributing every year for a while. But even then, that's not exactly a gargantuan community, and I don't see it growing much. Not like this. And it won't be anything like the old Xanga even if it does survive. And if you keep doing what you've always been doing, you'll likely run into financial straits again when there's another unexpected market shock and have a repeat of this a few years down the road anyway.  Why should we bother? Why should we care?  You don't seem to.

I'm not speaking as a representative Xangan. To be honest, I'd given up on Xanga long ago and so did most of the people I know and care about. It just wasn't much fun anymore and even we could see the writing on the wall. But having been away for so long I can't pretend to speak for people who have stuck with it all the way through.

But this is what I'm hearing and reading all over the site these days. It's not hard to see. Everyone I've talked to about Xanga is saying some variation of this. Even the people who have paid seem extremely skeptical. The best I hear generally is "well if they don't make it, and it probably won't, at least I'm not losing any money". Not exactly a ringing endorsement.  I haven't heard anyone talking about how awesome it's going to be. I haven't heard anyone talking about how they can't wait to get a blog on the new Xanga, how they've been looking forward to this transition, or how Xanga 2.0 looks so cool. None of that. If it's out there, I've totally missed it. I see attitudes ranging from for the love of God just let Xanga die, to it's hopeless, to eh, why not contribute? That's not what you want.  You want a product so good that people are lining up to pay you money. That they can't wait for. And if you have such a project you sure as heck haven't communicated that well to people.

If you don't. If you continue to think "well gosh we know we're making great decisions but the people just don't get it. Oh well what can we do? We were too smart for our community I guess." Well then the end result is inevitable. We all know how this story ends.

Xanga is doomed.

If I'd have had to imagine how Xanga was going to pass away from this world a year ago I would have said they'll probably slowly dwindle, hemorrhaging active users until for whatever reason it was no longer monetarily viable to run the site. Then they'd announce on some random day that the site was going to close in like a month or so and most people wouldn't even notice or care. Then poof it'd be gone.

But I didn't expect and didn't even imagine was that Xanga would announce both that it was closing AND that it would be changing into something totally different... maybe... only if they can only get enough money to do it. 

Now I don't pass judgment on whether that itself is a good idea. I don't know. Maybe they'll totally fail to raise anywhere near the money they want, maybe they'll easily surpass their threshold with ease. Maybe the new Xanga will be a roaring success, maybe it'll be a dismal failure. I don't know. I can't see the future. Of course, I have my own opinions about whether they should be doing this, its chances at success, what the new Xanga should look like if it exists and whether I think Xanga or Xanga's community is worth saving anyway. But they are just my opinions. Maybe I'll share them later, maybe I won't. 

But here's the thing. Not only do I have my plethora of opinions, so does EVERYBODY else. And that's why I think, perhaps inadvertently, Xanga has done a very good thing for the Xanga community with it's dying  (or changing) breathe.  Because whether or not Xanga survives or cacoons up to begin its WordPress metamorphoses, Xanga has gone out with a bang and not a whimper.  It's gone out doing what it did best.

Getting its community worked up.

You see Xanga has created a controversy. And what more do Xangans want really? An opportunity to argue and fight and struggle and rage. An opportunity to metablog like CRAZY. An opportunity to try and convince people that their way of seeing things is the one and only true way and why on earth isn't everyone else of the exact same opinion? 

And it's basically this aspect that is bringing Xangans back together. People are reconnecting like crazy, Through Google Docs, On Twitter, on Blogger, on Redditt, on Xanga itself, through Blog Talk Radio, and mostly on Facebook.  People are waxing nostalogic like nobody's business and numerous people myself included have come back to Xanga and posting again having been gone for ages. Sure other people are closing up shop and heading for the hills while the going looks good, but that's normal for when a site announces it's impending demise or that it'll . What is unusual I think is how many  people are out thinking about and talking about Xanga during its last days. 

Whether or not Xanga makes the transition to their new fancy wordpress site, I think this is a great way for Xanga to spend it's last days as the site it once was. It's a good way for people excise their unresolved feelings about Xanga and to come to grips with the coming change. Generally it's keeping people occupied and distracted and in the end I think people will feel better about how things turned out because they had a say in it. They were able to fight to save Xanga or fight to see it end and so either way they feel they were a part of the transition. It's much better this way then for the site to simply announce it's death leaving people feeling powerless and helpless against the flow of time.  

Maybe it won't work or maybe it will. But at least it's something I haven't seen before and it seems to me to be shaping up to be a mostly good thing, so far anyway. I wonder if things would have turned out the same if Xanga had simply announced its closing with nothing more to it?

So I hear that Xanga is on death's doorstep. Can't say I'm surprised. It'll die unless it gets enough donations to their tip jar that they are calling a new pay-to-blog site. Well I wish them the best of luck with that. 

Regardless of whether they succeed or fail, what I find fascinating is watching the death throws of Xanga. It's amazing to watch how many people, myself included, have come out of the wood works to start blogging or commenting on the demise of their most beloved and hated blogging platform.  And it's even more fascinating to watch their reactions evolve over time. You've got hundreds of people going over to Facebook to wax nostalgic about their old Xanga experiences, most of which seems to involve talking about this or that person they didn't like or this or that troll or controversy or scandal.  You've got countless posts here on Xanga from the amusing, to the thoughtful, to the depressed, to the belligerent. And now we've even got people excusing their old blogging behavior as a "social experiment". Ha. Can't wait to see what comes next. "My blog was hacked. I can't believe the stuff that guy posted pretending to be me", "Everything I said was a lie. Deal with it.", "I'm sorry if I YOU were offended by anything I wrote", "I was just trolling, I didn't mean anything by it", "I'm secretly a super villain from another dimension, whose goal was to see Xanga destroyed and now I'm finally on the verge of  succeeding MWAHAHAHA!" 

One thing we're almost certainly going to see is the community travel through the five stages of grief.

"No way Xanga will NEVER die."

"DAMMIT PEOPLE DONATE YOU A-HOLES!"

"I promise I'll never troll again if you just please please save Xanga! "

"It's all over. Xanga will die. We're all going to die. Even if it lives it won't be the same. There will never be a place like Xanga. Blogging, no the internet itself, no joy itself is over forever."

"Ah well, life moves on. Follow me on TWITTER!"

I fully expect to see people breaking down and running around with their hair on fire before this is through. It's like a tragedy unfolding before us. 

IT'S GREAT!

Sit back and enjoy the show people. Just because Xanga might be going away or at least will definitely be transforming, doesn't mean we can't have a good time with it.

- Nephyo

There are only two kinds of threats in stories. Just two. A threat is either a Zombie threat or a Vampire threat. Period.

Zombie threats are those where the monsters are numerous but CAN be defeated. The heroes are not powerless against zombies, just overwhelmed. The threat lies in the sheer numbers, the destruction of social norms people rely on, and the sense of endless draining struggle.

On the other hand a Vampire, in the classic sense represents the big bad. It is a force so powerful the protagonists have little power against it. In order to defeat it you have to go through some ginormous quest or employ very obscure tools and special weapons and even then your chances of victory are slim to non-existent. The vampire is just sooo POWERFUL. The conflict comes from a sense of hopelessness, powerlessness, and despair. 

The zombie style threats tend to be everywhere bugging the heroes, destroying society, unavoidable. Whereas the vampire threats honestly tend to be minding their own business except when they find someone they want to kill, or someone messes up their usual life. The vampire threats tend to represent a personal demon for the hero, haunting him in particular, whereas the zombie threat represents generic life suckitude.

Of course there are rampaging vampires like in Buffy the Vampire slayer who are more of a zombie threat than a vampire threat. And there are super dangerous unbeatable zombies in some stories that are more vampiristic. But for the most part it holds.  

The alien invasion trope is a Zombie threat because the humans fight back and kick their zombie/alien-ass ala Star Gate. But the Alien Terraforming or Alien-as-God stories tend to be flat out Vampiric. Basically the aliens are so far beyond humans it’s not really a fight.  Think something like Q from Star Trek. 

Serial killers tend to be Vampires. Whereas mobster types tend to Zombie. And so on and so forth.

You can also think of this a Dragon threats versus Goblin/Orc threats if you like. But I’m pretty sure that’s all that there is.

We have a big problem in the United States. People have been socialized into thinking that all cases of unemployment are indictments on the unemployed’s character. The result is reactions to unemployment and poverty ranging from dismissiveness to disdain to out and out abusive treatments. What’s more in the unemployed themselves, there is a sense of unworthiness and inadequacy and pervasive depression. All of which is a natural consequence to both being treated that way and buying into the myth that people are unemployed because they personally aren’t good enough and not due to societal and economic factors far beyond their control.

And the thing is, it’s an obvious falsehood. Yet people all across the country believe it. Indeed we’re going to hear a lot more of it as the Presidential election rolls around as the Republican party is going to make this their platform. The reason unemployment is high they will argue, is that people have become too weak and stupid and dependent and they just need to be pull themselves up by their boot straps and get used to hard work and then everything will be fine.

What’s incredible about these kinds of indictments is that they don’t take into account basic Mathematics. The simple fact is the jobs don’t exist. There’s 14 million unemployed people in the country and another 14 million without full time jobs. That’s just the people that we count. A lot of these people without full time jobs might as well be unemployed really. For example I have a friend who has two part time jobs but can’t get more than 8 hours of work a week, nowhere near enough to survive and no unemployment. That’s what a lot of companies are doing though, hiring lots of people at miniscule hours at pittance pay. They can do this because there are so many people out there desperate for work that they’ll take anything and have zero bargaining power. There are 6 unemployed job seekers for every single job opening, and they are competing not just with each other but also with everyone who hates their job and wants to switch or has a job but wants more hours or greater pay. Not to mention the millions of new people entering the work force every year and the competition from potential employees abroad.

Do you see the basic fallacy?

Even if you took everybody and made them all the hardest working people imaginable, turned them all into geniuses, made them all perfectly healthy, trained them up to be experts in every possible job, gave them the knowledge and credentials of people with multiple PhDs, made them all perfectly personable and skilled people persons, made them all get along with everyone, made them all impeccably dressed and well mannered, ensured they were all incredibly creative and innovative and capable and heck even beautiful.  Even if you did all of that to every single person in this country today…. guess how many unemployed we’d have tomorrow or a month or two from now?

14 million.

The jobs DON’T EXIST.

They won’t appear by magic. Improving humanity will only shuffle up who has the jobs. It won’t create new jobs. Certainly not in the short to moderate term anyway. Maybe in the long term some of those geniuses will create new businesses that hire people who otherwise would not have had jobs. Maybe. I have my skepticism about how many real new jobs that aren’t just replacements of old jobs these entrepreneurs create. Very often improvements in technology that create new jobs also cause people who were working old jobs with old technology to lose their jobs.

But even if it does work, it won’t happen overnight. We’re talking decades. And over the course of decades our employment situation is already on course to radically improve even if we do nothing at all, provided we don’t screw up and induce more recessions.

It’s totally irrational to assume we can just make people better and everything will be ok. And it’s equally irrational to assume that all or even a majority of people are unemployed because of personal failing in them.  Anyone who has ever interacted with our employment process on the hiring, firing, or seeking side has seen how very much imperfect the system is. So much of what causes people to hire one person and not another has to do with ineffable things and emotions like whim, instinct, a sense of camaraderie or similarity, emotional connections, desire to help out friends and family, desire for revenge. It isn’t a hard science. It’s quite frankly a lot of luck. Even getting your resume looked at for a good job is often a matter of someone chancing upon a needle in the haystack.

We need to start understanding that unemployment exists because of social problems not because of character. It’s system failure not individual failure. The simple fact is when you have a huge economic collapse leading to a prolonged depression a ton of perfectly capable ambitious well meaning intelligent high quality potential employees won’t be able to get jobs. And the longer they are out of work the harder it will be for them to get work.  And the more society will judge them and treat them like shit because of it which in turn reduces their self esteem and makes it even harder for them to find jobs. So the end up opting out of society altogether, giving up, contemplating suicide, or considering a life of crime. And is that any surprise? If society writes off people why should we not expect people to write off society? People’s lives are ruined by being unemployed. Their entire futures lost. They suffer emotional and psychological damage that can last a life time and a reduction in future earnings that puts them often permanently on track for less prospects for their children, worse health, and constant struggle no matter how hard they try to change their future. And we don’t seem to care at all. We just treat them like it’s all their fault, these genetically inferior refuse, and they’re just getting what’s coming to them. We act like we should just avoid associating with the icky unemployed or low salaried so we don’t get their cooties.

But it’s not really their fault. It never was. They didn’t ask to be unemployed and so many of their work their asses off trying to become not unemployed anymore. In reality, it’s all of our faults for not doing what we need to do to make an economic system that actually works and gives everyone the opportunities they need and deserve. Instead of solving that problem we’ve decides to be cruel and vicious to anyone suffering so as to blind ourselves to our own culpability. That’s how we roll.

Anonymous has changed a LOT.

Blink and you'll miss it. You might just wake up in a different world.

We Are the 99%

OccupyTogether

#OccupyWallStreet

I read this article about the changes being made to Facebook to make it more like Google+ and Diaspora and this line in it made me realize something that has been bothering me for months.

"To me, this confirms what I’ve been feeling for some time: the big social networking experiment many of us have been taking part in is now entering a new phase. It’s been fun making new friends online or at least pretending to, but now it’s time to return to reality and the people who really matter in our lives. One can hope, anyway."

For months now, apart from my few personal connections online that I cherish, I've felt completely isolated from the Internet at large. And it's a feeling that had been building for years prior to that. I still use it. It's still a tool I wouldn't do without. But there's much less joy in it for me personally. I feel more disjointed, more distant from people generally. The idea of meeting someone new online seems a long shot to a near impossibility in most of the communities in which I hang out. And I find myself more and more uncomfortable with what I do online. I find myself more guarded. I watch what I say. I watch who I say it to. I'm careful about where I go. I'm careful about who I connect with. And it's been getting WORSE not better. With each new cool tool that the tech world foists on us the more isolated I feel the experience of the internet becomes. Twitter seems awesome at first, until you realize all it is is a news stream and there's no meaningful interaction except between pre-existing peer groups. Facebook seems awesome at first until you realize you're bound by these "real life" connections online as much as you were in the real world. They are all like that. They are getting MORE like that.

And I HATE it.

I don't want to get to an internet where"making new friends online or at least pretending to" is a thing of the past. I LIKE making new friends online. Heck, I like PRETENDING to make new friends online. Seems to me that every real friendship starts as a "pretend" friendship in some way. I don't want an internet where you are afraid to interact with anyone for fear of the consequences to your "real life" experiences. I don't want an internet where every interaction is in a sense informed by things that are built into the system from the get go that you have no or only partial control over. What you look like. Who your friends are. Who your family members are. Your socio-economic status. Your age. Your gender. Your race. Your education level. Your credit rating. Your career. Your job. Even your name. Each of these feels like another set of chains around you restricting what you should say to who and when you should say it.  

To me the anonymity of the internet and the lack of obvious connections between people was not a bug that needed to be stamped out. I think it was the internet's greatest feature. I think blogging was great BECAUSE it was semi-anonymous. It was just you and the person's writing. Forums were great because you were interacting on an equal anonymous playing field. Yeah the result was sometimes rudeness and trolling. But to me that was a small price to pay for the chance to learn about someone in an environment that is casual and comfortable and devoid of all the baggage that comes with most IRL interactions. People felt free to share things about their lives with strangers they wouldn't otherwise have ever shared and because of that we were able to build real meaningful relationships from scratch and find acceptance and develop mutual understandings with like minded people we had little or no chance of ever finding or meeting or getting to know in the real world. That's the stuff from which real friendships are formed. The old internet made that easy. 

I am an extreme introvert. The more complex interactions get the more exhausting I find them and the more I withdraw to simplify my life. I think in the old days the internet was a place that just made perfect natural sense for introverts. It was a place we felt at home in. It was a place that made sense to us. And it was a place where we could relate with one another and grow and make lasting friendships.

This new social web is something different entirely. This is the internet created and designed for extroverts. It's an internet for people who thrive on their social connections IRL and WANT to map them over into their online lives in a 1-to-1 correspondence so that there are no lines between them. Then they can share and share and share with those people through ten million services, broadcast their likes, their activities, their LOCATION even. So the whole internet becomes like a big social party that everybody's invited to. And that's just great for advertisers, because once they know where the party's at it's trivial for them to hang an unobtrusive budweiser poster in the background or better yet, give away budweiser t-shirts so you can do the advertising for them. 

But I was never comfortable at parties and I got no interest in the new digital ones. If the internet isn't a place to make real lasting connections with new people I don't know or to strengthen and make more meaningful connections between people that I do know, then I got no interest in this internet. If their internet isn't a place where I feel more comfortable interacting than I do in the real world then why should I bother with it? I'll still use it, but it'll be the way I use a textbook or music CD or a television. It's this dry dead thing I go to to absorb information. Read-Only. But it's not a place I want to hang out in and it's less and less a place I want to contribute to. I don't feel comfortable getting up in front of a crowd giving a speech in the physical world. Why would I feel comfortable broadcasting myself online?

This new social web we are building isn't social at all for me. It's less social. It's boring and uneventful. It's just a lot of background noise about nothing. I'd rather go in a corner and read a book. But maybe that just means that I'm just too anti-social for the social internet? That could be, but it wasn't always that way and I don't think it was me that changed. The internet did. And sadly I don't think it's going to change back any time soon.

Guess all I can do now is go and join Anonymous or something.

Meebo just had some pretty crazy radical changes to its service... and I find myself actually liking them. It's a pretty good change. I'm a bit annoyed that I can't find some features of the old service like games and chat logs, but checking in and sharing websites you visit is a powerful tool, basically its what google+ and facebook allow you to do only for those sites it takes many more clicks.

I'm not sure about this VIP and Quests stuff. Not sure about that at all.

That said... this has the potential to beat Google+ an Facebook at their own game. They just need to make a few fixes to their interface, add a feature here or there, somehow get millions of people to know about their service and sign up, and they're set. None of that crap requirement to be known as your real name and automatic integration with not one but ALL your chat clients, and integration with your Xanga as well and your web browser. That's pretty sweet. Maybe integrating with Meebo will turn out to be the best move Xanga ever made. I just hope Meebo keeps a focus on making things open and easy for people to integrate and use. That's the key to the future. Closed services are never going to survive.

Other interesting services in the social networking scene I've got my eye on are things like SubJot and the recently improved GetGlue program. Both are fascinating and offer things the big giants lack.  They are more specialized though. In fact put these services together, add some encryption and anonymity features, and blog integration and you'd kinda have what I want in a social network. I also find the prolifera of new Alternate Reality Games and Story based internet gaming that integrate narrative online elements, fandom, and real world interactions to have enormous potential.

Too bad Google has such a massive reach that they can quickly drown out other competition. It's not that Google+ is bad (excluding their dumb real name policy), it's actually quite good. But I don't think it is nearly so good that it deserves its exponential growth. Much of that is based on the strength of the Google brand more than anything about the service itself. Though I do admit putting Circles front and center was a smart idea. I've been saying the way twitter and facebook handled lists/groups was idiotic for a long time now. I'm glad SOMEONE is trying to do it right. I don't think circles are perfect though and not nearly as intuitive as it could be, but it's a big step in the right direction.

But still. As much as I find it fascinating to see what services win this social networking game everybody is competing on, my personal belief is we need a new game. I don't think social networking is the future, it's at best a bridge to something better, and pretty annoying rickety unstable crumbling bridge at that.

Some features I'd like to see in Meebo.  Downloading chat logs. Off The Record communication integration. Easy TOR integration. Some better spam controls.  Lists/Topics/Circles. Make your privacy policy more clear (Does signing up require you to expose your web browsing history to meebo? If so that's dumb and should stop. If not they need to make that clear to users.). Make it possible to post short messages that aren't check-ins and aren't status changes. Change the UI to make entering such messages as easy as Twitter. Make the following list more front and center. Make it easy to search for users who are in your chat clients to see if they are on the new meebo. Make a really open API so lots of developers can make improvements to the service.

And if I can't figure out how to access my chat logs now that they've made me switch over then I may well take back all the nice things I said about this service and quit.

Anyway that's just a random web tech thoughts update.

The Accent Challenge:

Your name and username.
Where you’re from.

Pronounce the following words: Aunt, Roof, Route, Theater, Iron, Salmon, Caramel, Fire, Water, New Orleans, Pecan, Both, Again, Probably, Alabama, Lawyer, Coupon, Mayonnaise, Pajamas, Caught, Naturally, Aluminium, GIF, Tumblr, Crackerjack, Doorknob, Envelope, GPOY.

What is it called when you throw toilet paper on a house?
What is a bubbly carbonated drink called?
What do you call gym shoes?
What do you call your grandparents?
What do you call the wheeled contraption in which you carry groceries at the supermarket?
What is the thing you change the TV channel with?
Choose a book and read a passage from it.
Do you think you have an accent?
Be a wizard or a vampire?
Do you know anyone on Tumblr Xanga in real life?
 
End audio post by saying any THREE words you want.

Sorry it took so long. I suck at doing things in a timely fashion.  Hope you enjoyed though.

Transcript:

OK, here we go, as promised.

There once was a WIZARD named NEPHYO. He was raised in a land called DELAWARE but now resides as you know in the lands of XANGA and TUMBLR which are as real as any other world. There he had many friends who like him travereled betwix these lands and others you might know. Realms with strange names like Delaware and Indiana and the magical kingdom of California of course. And together they kept the realms safe and all was tranquil and good.
 
Then one day, his AUNT code named the IRON SALMON raced across the ROOF tops in ALABAMA following the ROUTE to the CARAMEL THEATER. When she arrived she wielded FIRE and WATER against BOTH PECAN LAWYERS from NEW ORLEANS. CAUGHT in their PAJAMAS, PROBABLY terrified, they offered up COUPONs for MAYONNAISE, and ALUMINUM cans of SODA (not pop, not coke, and definitely NOT soda pop) as a peace offering. 

NATURALLY a GIF of this extraordinary event made its way on to that TUMBLR in the sky where Nephyo's NANA, GRANDADDY, and GRANDMA shook their heads in disgust when they saw. They wanted those coupons!!! So in retaliation, they sent forth Master CRACKERJACK armed with SHOPPING CARTS full of REMOTE CONTROLS, TENNIS SHOES... and toilet paper so he and his minions might TP every house in the planet whilst hanging ENVELOPES on peoples DOORKNOBS. What did these envelopes contain you wonder? Well if you happened to find one you'll find those GPOY (you know the ones) and you'd know then the devilish nature of this blackmail scheme.

Nephyo had to act to resolve this conflict before it escalated out of control! It was a good thing there was NO SUCH THING AS ACCENTS or his mission would have been that much more difficult. He grabbed his cat and began his spell:

<Passage from Tolkien>

And all was well AGAIN.

That's it.

I think differently.

Me:

Them:

But Keep in Mind:

Say what you will about how I'm an extreme Left wing Loon but I'll choose the quadrant with Nelson Mandela, The Dalai Lama, and Gandhi over the quadrant with Hitler and George W. Bush any day.

You can take the test here.