Why Is This Person Following Me on Google+?: A Suggestion
If you’re like me and on Google+ odds are you have people who have added you to their circles that you don’t know. I actually don’t mind if people I don’t know add me to their circles (Twitter has desensitized me to this) but I don’t want to share certain personal information with them.
One of the nice things about Google+ is that I can very easily not share any of my updates with such people. With two clicks I can add or remove which circles see my updates. This gives me better control than Twitter where you cannot make this decision on a per post basis. It also allows me to not share with anyone who adds me to their circles (equivalent to the Twitter follow) but I don’t add to mine (follow back) or who I do add to a circle but choose not to share that update with their circle.
To me Google+’s model for adding ‘friends’ cuts a median between the Twitter and Facebook models. Friending someone does not require their approval, as Facebook does, and sharing with people is not 100% public (with the exception of private accounts) as Twitter does.
But there’s still a gap that isn’t covered when someone you don’t know follows you. These people are total strangers whose names (required in Google+) you don’t recognize.
What I’d like to see when someone I don’t know adds me to a circle is a reason why I should follow them. I don’t want to go to their profile, read whatever they have public and make a decision based on that. That takes actual work on my part. What would be better is something similar to LinkedIn‘s approach of asking the follower to specify how they know the person they’re following. Just add a second column of checkboxes (next to the circle column of checkboxes) that says things like “following your twitter/blog”, “current/former colleague” and similar choices that are just specific enough to let the person being followed know how the follower knows them but general enough to not clutter the interface. With this information I can add such people to specific Circles (or not, as I choose) and share only the updates that I feel are pertinent to our relationship.
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Building a TwitPic Replacement with WordPress
A couple of months back the Twitter world was aghast at changes made to the terms of service of TwitPic, a third party service that stores photos for easy sharing with your Twitter followers, that would allow it to sell any photos posted to it royalty free and the subsequent deal it signed to, in fact, sell the photos. If my twitter feed and news reports are to be believed there was a mass exodus of TwitPic users to other services such as yfrog.
Though I don’t share photos that are very personal on Twitter I too sought a different means of sharing them. The motivation was not so much the TwitPic TOS issue but my philosophy of relying less on the cloud and more on myself. The solution I came up with is actually quite simple for anyone who has set up a self hosted WordPress blog and only slightly more difficult for those who haven’t. (Setting up your own WordPress blog is not very difficult as long as you have a web host that supports it.)
I started with a clean WordPress install and added the Tweet Images plugin to it. Tweet Images is a WordPress install that allows you to roll your own TwitPic (or similar service) replacement. It can be used with any Twitter client that allows customizable third party services for photo sharing so it works that same way TwitPic (and others) do on the client side. Each tweet with a shared photo results in a new blog post. Hashtags result in new WordPress tags. It even includes bit.ly support for short URLs. This is really all you need to have your own TwitPic replacement but I added a few bells and whistles.
However great Tweet Images is it’s not without it’s issues. In my case I had two issues with the URLs it creates. First is that it creates URLs with random strings at the end. I’d rather have my links be of the year/month/day/title format (not year/month/day/random). Thankfully I’m not the only one with this pet peeve. A plugin called Clean URLs for Tweet Images replaces the random string with the post title.
The second issue I had was that I wanted to use my own URL shortener, a YOURLS installation I host on my own domain, instead of bit.ly. (Another project born from my philosophy of relying less on the cloud.) The URL Shortener plugin saved me this time. URL Shortener replaces WordPress’s default URL shortener, wp.me, with any one of the 22 services it supports including custom YOURLs installs. Using this plugin all the URLs on the blog are given short URLs from my preffered source.
One last plugin I installed is WPtouch. This plugin automatically detects when your WordPress blog is being viewed in a mobile browser and displays a suitable theme. This is similar to what Posterous does when someone tries to access it through a mobile browser.
The last peice of the puzzle was the theme for the blog. After a little searching I chose AutoFocus. I liked the clean look and ease of navigation. The choice of theme is purely personal and by no means is this one required for the purposes of a TwitPic replacement. I’d be curious to see what themes others use for their WordPress TwitPic replacements.
There you have it. An easy to build TwitPic replacement. A clean install of WordPress with just 1 required plugin, three optional plugins and a theme.
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Paint the Town Purple
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Poor Luigi
To paraphrase former United States Vice President Dan Quayle “What a shame it is to lose one’s head”.
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Share on Facebook Updated to 1.7
Yesterday morning I released version 1.7 of Share on Facebook. The new version addresses an issue that some users were experiencing when saving options. The redirect that is triggered to bring the user back to the page with the “Options saved.” message was causing this issue. This issue has been fixed.
See the Share on Facebook page for general information on the plugin and download links.
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