667

25 January 2023

A collection of communication cables strung between power poles in an early evening sky which includes a crescent moon and a small dot on light that is the planet Venus.

Net working.

Tonight’s post is going to be a bit of housecleaning. A few nuts and bolts, some additional context on a couple of notions, and what I’m thinking for its future. Well, barring the unpredictable, of course. So let’s get to the ’splainin’.

I’ve been trying to complete one of these every weeknight. As you probably know by now, the impetus was to keep me from Tweeting, but still give me an outlet — albeit different — to put ideas out in the world. Since I started at the beginning of November, this is my 62nd edition of Not Tweets, by my count. While I still miss the immediacy of Tweeting, Twitter has changed so much, as has the usage of the audience I was Tweeting for, posting my ideas there just isn’t the same. So, here we are.

Now, for those keeping very close track, you may have noticed a common theme in the posts’ titles. Each and every one of them is a repurposed Soundgarden song title, which does a couple of things for me:

1) Saves me from having to think up a bold headline that was SEO-worthy.
2) Puts a finite number on how many of these posts I’ve tasked myself with.

By my count (with this Wikipedia page as my source), Soundgarden released 120 songs during their existence (1984 – 2017). But since I’m not using the tiles of covers they released (nine of them), that adds up to, hopefully, 111 posts here, eventually. Which means we’re more than halfway through. 

[ Inhales deeply. ] 

Now, for one last thing: Since the Google layoffs, I’ve been much more active on LinkedIn. As I texted a friend the other day, LinkedIn is the GenX TikTok. And since I’ve been there so much, I’ve been posting links to the last few of these posts there, too. Now, even though I know that their recommendation algorithm is over-indexing on posts which include #GoogleLayoffs, these links are getting much more traction than when I cross-publish on my blog, Medium, and on Post. I know not every one of these is appropriate for inclusion on LinkedIn, but if I can find a justification for including some of them there, the readership has been surprisingly large. Thanks to any and all of you who are reading this because of a link from LinkedIn.

See you tomorrow?

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Author  Stephen Fox

Nothing to Say

28 November 2022

Screen shot of an error message on Twitter saying, “Tweet not sent. We’re sorry, we weren’t able to send your Tweet. Would you like to retry or save this Tweet in drafts?”

Un-sented

Over the Thanksgiving break, I wanted to try an experiment. While I know I was refraining from Tweeting, that didn’t mean that I couldn’t pretend I was Tweeting. So, on Thursday — between meal prep and World Cup matches — any time I felt like sending a Tweet, I started typing as if I were actually sending, but added it to an ongoing note on my phone instead of sending it. This is what my day looked like, as seen through Tweets not sent:


9:22 a.m. 
Christiano Ronaldo goes down more easily than DogeCoin. I dislike both. 
#WorldCup 
#POR
#GHA 


9:30 a.m. 
Yes! 
#WorldCup 
#POR
#GHA 


9:37 a.m. 
Well, poop.
#WorldCup 
#POR
#GHA 


9:46 a.m. 
Hope!
#WorldCup 
#POR
#GHA 


9:58 a.m. 
That could have been an epic finish! Quite a match. 
#WorldCup 
#POR
#GHA 


10:00 a.m. 
There’s something very disconcerting about spending the time between #WorldCup matches putting together the ingredients for stuffing. 
[ GIF of Open wide for some soccer ]


12:32 p.m.
Well, I hate it, but that was a gorgeous strike from Richarlison. 
#WorldCup 
#BRA 
#SRB 


4:24 p.m. 
This is our best in show. 
[ picture of Baker trying to eat off our Thanksgiving plates ]


11:28 p.m. 
We’ve reached that point in the evening of Thick Thursday where I’m regretting my decisions around pie. Mainly that I only had two pieces. 
[ GIF of Homer Simpson thinking about pie ] 


See you tomorrow?

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Author  Stephen Fox

Been Away Too Long

21 November 2022

A replica of the World Cup trophy sits on a table on stage at the Twitter HQ.

The Cup runneth over.

Tonight, let’s start with some facts:

  1. I’m writing these posts in an effort to collect some of my thoughts instead of posting them to Twitter.

  2. For better or worse, most of my thoughts lately have been about Twitter.

  3. I love watching the World Cup.

  4. Supporting the World Cup this year (and in 2018, to be honest) is more than problematic.

  5. Watching the World Cup without Tweeting about it eliminates a ton of the enjoyment I get out of the tournament.

  6. I’m having a very hard time enjoying the things that I love while they are simultaneously being destroyed by ego and greed.

In 2018, I spent hours in The Lodge on the fifth floor of Twitter’s HQ watching match after match of the last World Cup. I was taking pictures and encouraging people to wear their favorite jerseys to work and help create a community around one of my favorite events. All of it was to help illustrate that you could be yourself when you came to work for Twitter. Your passions and personality matter, and we wanted it to show up every day. Since I just so happened to be the Design And Research blog’s editor-in-chief at the time, I also assigned myself a blog post about it, in part to justify all my screen time down there.

I’ve written about the World Cup many times before. In fact, the first item I ever posted on Medium was about going to my first match in 1994. Since that inaugural outing, I’ve traveled to France 98, Korea Japan 2002, Germany 2006, South Africa 2010, and the 2014 edition in Brazil. But with each passing tournament, being a fan of the World Cup became more and more problematic because it also meant you had to be a customer of FIFA. And the level of corruption and misdeeds there just kept getting bigger and bigger. Between the bribery in awarding Russia the 2018 event, and the fact that neither the U.S. nor my beloved Italians qualified for it, I was more than deterred from going to see any matches that year. Watching them at work, and turning those viewing sessions into something positive, just felt like the right antidote.

Putting aside the fact that Italy again failed to qualify this year, the corruption, human rights record, and abuses of the workers hired to build all the needed infrastructure kept me from getting on a plane to Qatar this year. Surely, though, I could find a World Cup community at my new job, especially with the help of my Twitter feed, right? Well, as we now know, Twitter is far from the tool it used to be for following the Cup this year. And I’m left with a very similar question: How can I continue to enjoy something when I disagree so vociferously with the people who control it?

Like many things I enjoy in my life, the enjoyment includes introducing and sharing them with others. Most of the time, that sharing came through Twitter. Without that outlet this year, I’m finding the already subdued reaction I’m having to this year’s World Cup — it’s in November for chrissakes! — even more muted as I watch without a large part of my community.  There’s no immediacy. No online joy. No memes! I hope that this post, and the ones which will probably follow, will help me find a new tribe. Maybe even on Post. But if you’re watching, too, and have complicated feelings about enjoying the matches or Tweeting your reactions, or both, please know that I’m here for you. Even if the Azzurri are not.

See you tomorrow?

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Author  Stephen Fox

I Awake

11 November 2022

A postcard dated Jun 8, 2009, from the Twitter on Paper project, reading, “OK people no kidding — when you get your ToP, do not blog about it. Do not spread the word in any way. This thing is already out of hand.”

Hand writing.

I typed these words without any idea the direction they’ll end up. I’m not going to edit them much after I get done putting them down, either. I just want to see what happens when I don’t have an agenda, but I do have a point. And tonight, that point is just to think out loud. 

See, when I started these posts, I wanted to use them as a way to keep me from Tweeting, a Twalternative, if you will (you can take the guy out of Twitter Marketing, but apparently …). But what I’ve found is that I really miss Tweeting. Even though I’m really enjoying doing these. It’s almost as if, yes, writing is writing, but writing is different, depending on where it’s going to and up. And I think that’s an important distinction people rarely appreciate. 

Let’s say you need to make a sign for a block party. Right off the bat, you know your constraints. There’s the dimension of the paper which restricts the size and number of words you’ll get to use. You also need to take the location of where your sign is going to go into account, so that you can plan for who your audience will be, and when, in relation to the event, they’s see it. And how ’bout the actual content? You know you’ll need some basics like location, date, and time, but if you want people to come, especially if there’s a cost, you might to need to let people know why they’d want to be there in the first place. 

But for a forum like this, with few constraints and an almost unlimited word count, the sky’s the limit. But not really, right? One consideration has to be, “who is going to read this?” Most likely, the audience is just me. That’s fine, but it needs to be noted. If I’m just posting these for practice or as snapshots, there’s still value there. But the value is almost entirely with me. Occasionally, like yesterday, I’ll do something with a purpose and audience in mind. But on days like today, it’s like staying late after soccer practice by yourself because you know there are drills you want to do so that you build muscles and skills you want to improve. And if you only get better at writing by writing, then welcome to this practice session.

I know this is a lot of navel-gazing, especially for a Friday night, but it was a better use of my brain power than trying to follow the continuous, minute-by-minute, seemingly imminent implosion of The Bird App. I don’t know if we’ll actually see it when it happens — there probably won’t be a huge crater and plume of smoke — but as more and more people stop Tweeting, in all likely hood it won’t burn out, but just fade away. However it ends, in a few months or a few hours, I will mourn it. I miss what it was. I’ll miss what it is. But most of all, I will miss what it could have been.

See you tomorrow?

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Author  Stephen Fox