Twitter seems to have no plans to enforce community standards. Between Alex Jones and Donald Trump, the place is a real dump.

There is a writeup on this at Think Progress by Joe Romm.

I’ve seen, and in some cases, been part of various efforts by various on line entities to clean up fake news or, more often, anti-science news or activism. What I’ve found in every case is that there is an enormous perceived shift in the bottom line for on line entities that keep out fake news vs. those that ignore it, or even encourage it.

In fact, I suspect that people who are more likely to believe, purvey, or defend fake news are also more likely to be ripped off by unscrupulous retailers. The scruples of the business are one thing, the profit levels are another. Facebook makes its money off of retailers making profits. Facebook is going to be dragged out of the fake news business kicking and screaming, if ever.

If you are like me, you live in a Facebook bubble. I do not maintain “friend” status with purveyors of fake news. The people on my Facebook feed are generally much more interested in the truth. So, it is hard to see the fake news problem as very important.

But there are all these other people who also live in a Facebook bubble. Their bubble is full of fake news. Their friends include voters, influencers, parents, maybe even teachers, who are living in that fake news bubble as well. This is a real problem. Facebook fakeness is the proximate reason that Donald Trump is president. I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg is taking that seriously, and I assume this is because he is biased by the prospect of a huge shift in profits with vs. without the heavy spice of alt-reality in the feed.

“You are destroying freedom! I would give my life to protect the free speech of a Nazi”

Well, no, you wouldn’t. Don’t even say that.

And now fascism is starting to rise in America, and make no mistake that the two prongs of fascism are emerging, a fascist would-be dictator and friends, and a two digit percentage of the populous that want it.

Part of the rise of fascism in America comes from social networking. Social networks have become the easy place to advance the rhetoric, confused the opposition, create a movement, nurture the hate, and move a society in this direction. This is now speculation. It is what is currently happening.

Facebook and Twitter and similar venues are like abandoned homes turned into crack houses. I used to live across from one. The neighbors, in coordination with the police and city officials, shut it down using a standard procedure used across the US in many cities. Every time something happens at that house, from littering to loud noise to somebody passed out on the lawn, call 911. Don’t use your own address, only give the address of the house in question. That way the 911 calls all get logged to that address. There is generally a city ordinance that says that if a house has above a certain number or rate of 911 calls, the city or county can condemn the house. The owner has some options at that point, but since the owner is probably a slum lord properly company in Boca Raton, they won’t even know about it. So, the city or county takes the house, cleans it out, and either tears it down and sells the property to a developer, or auctions it off so a developer buy it, fix it up, and sell it.

Facebook is an example of a new sort of entity we have in society, but that serves the function of older forms such as homes or public spaces. If a social network like Facebook gets too many 911 calles (“911, what’s your emergency?” “A foreign dictator and posse of oligarchs, in coordination with a pretender to the US presidency, is trying to destroy civilization?” “OK, please give us the address so we can dispatch a car…”) and the owners of that network refuse to do anything about it, perhaps the social network should be taken down.

Think about a mall’s food court. Facebook is a little like a food court, in that it is a social venue. Imagine a food court where someone was killed about twice a year, someone was raped about once every two weeks, and someone was mugged a few times a day. (Not all the same person!) The pertinent governmental body would shut that place down. When my local school district (before our recent move) became a place where the suicide rate among mainly LGBT students was extraordinarily high, the CDC came in to shut the school district down, if nothing was done. Things were done.

Crack houses, food courts, school systems. This is how we do it in our society. But because of their newness, and possibly because of their tremendous hubris, places like Facebook are so far immune from such actions.

Until now. Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz is the law that says that the spread of fascist propaganda shall be illegal, in Germany, on social media sites. Fines can run up to $60 million dollars.

The government will identify hate speech, inform the network that it must be taken down, then the network has 24 hours to do so. The hate speech will be spotted by anyone who cares to look, who can then fill out a form of some kind. That starts the process.

I know a lot of you will immediately say that this can’t be done, that it should not be done, or that it won’t work because it will be gamed. I disagree. It should be done. It can be gamed, but that can be adapted to. And it is necessary.

Or, if I’m wrong about that, if the people can not be protected against this nefarious aspect of social networking sites, then social networking sites have to cease to exist. We’ll find some other way to socialize. Go to the food court. Sit on a neighbor’s front stoep. Maybe even pay attention to the people in your house. I think they’re around here somewhere ….

Facebook will buy renewable energy from northeast Nebraska wind development, breathing new life into dormant project

Facebook’s sprawling Papillion data center project has breathed new life into a dormant wind development project in northeast Nebraska.

The social media company on Thursday said it would procure renewable energy from the Rattlesnake Creek wind project in Dixon County, just west of South Sioux City and situated between the towns of Allen, Emerson and Wakefield.

The proposed wind development generated a buzz in 2013 when Kansas-based Tradewind Energy made its plans for the development public. But the company mothballed the project when it couldn’t find a buyer in time to take advantage of federal tax credits.

Beginning construction on the then-$300 million project without a buyer would have been too big a risk, Tradewind officials said at the time.

So, one lesson is that one major corporation, at this point, can breath life into a project that will make a big difference in the energy transition.

Another lesson is that the original investors were overcautious and wrong. People who remain overcautious about similar clean energy projects are even wronger.

The re-energized Rattlesnake Creek project at 320 megawatts is significantly larger than the original iteration of 200 megawatts.

When built, it will be the second-largest wind farm in Nebraska behind the 400-megawatt Grande Prairie project in Holt County, which was the largest wind development built anywhere in the U.S. in 2016.

Construction is expected to start by the end of this year and the project will be generating electricity in fourth-quarter 2018, said Brice Barton, vice president of development for Tradewind. That will cap a decadelong endeavor to bring Rattlesnake Creek to fruition.

Holy crap, man. If this was a one-reactor nuke plant (which would be just a bit larger in capacity than this one) they would be talking about coming on line in ten years. Not one or two years. That’s another lesson. Clean energy solutions are often very quickly deployable.

Along with declining costs to build wind energy projects — wind is now closely competitive with cheap conventional generators like coal and natural gas, even without subsidies, according to investment banking firm Lazard — Bracht said more productive developments in Nebraska are clearly capturing the attention of companies keen on powering their operations with more renewable energy.

…

Facebook will purchase 200 megawatts of the Rattlesnake Creek’s output and the remaining 120 megawatts will be sold to other buyers.

But they publicly denied that they had any of this information, and went so far as to delete information about this in a report. The report contained details about Russia that Facebook legal and marketing teams removed before the report’s release.

Then, as you may know, they eventually admitted it.

The result of this long and inexplicable delay may have set back by months our understanding of the whole Trump-Russian scandal.

Watch this for all the gory details:

I’m convinced that the people who made and run both Facebook and Twitter don’t have a clue as to what Facebook and Twitter are for. And by “for” I mean how the users use them. I know, I know, if you are not paying for the product than you are the product. I get it. But it is also true that for a service to be successful it should meet a need or two, and knowing what those needs are is ultimately linked to success or failure. It seems like on line services like Facebook and Twitter are too big to go away or fail. And that is exactly how we humans tend to view established institutions right up until the day the go away or fail.

Twitter’s CFO has said that Twitter will start to filter your twitter feed in a manner like Facebook does. This probably means that your feed will contain a subset of tweets that you normally would see depending on who you follow, or what list of tweeters you are looking at. There may be a technological way around this, but any fix provided by an updated API will not be helpful because Twitter has a reputation for changing the API (the way programmers use to interface with it) in such a way as to stifle development of applications that actually use twitter. Any larger scale or longer term investment in Twitter requires using the simplest interface, with few bells and whistled, or the rug may be pulled from underneath your project.

One of the great uses of Twitter is shared conversations (like this one) or shared not taking at conferences. Other uses include data collection and communication of ongoing processes. People have used twitter to record the catch by fisherfolk in marine conservation projects, for example. If Twitter Facebook-i-fies the Twitter feed, none of that will be possible because those projects and others like them require reliability of the flow of tweets.

Mathew Ingram of Gigaom notes:

An unfiltered stream is a core feature: This might seem like a small thing, similar to Twitter’s move to insert tweets that other people have favorited into a user’s stream if there aren’t any recent tweets to show them. But as the controversy over that feature shows, the Twitter chronological-order model is at the core of what the service offers for many users — and a number of them have specifically said it is the thing they like most about Twitter when compared to Facebook.

Unlike.

Yesterday The Aviator‘s Facebook page disappeared. When I logged in to check the page I was greeted by a message that said the page was being removed because it had been identified as carrying material related to bullying. There was a button labelled “appeal”, so I pressed it. That’s all. No contact information, no detail of the complaint. Nothing. Except that I was also prevented from posting or sharing anything on Facebook for 12 hours. The page no longer exists, and I am annoyed.

So: why did this happen?

Gareth is well known to the science denialist community, and I strongly suspect that climate change denialists are behind this. This is what they do. They bully people. There are a lot of bullies on the Internet and they know no constraint and have no sense of ethics or responsibility to the Internet community. An overlapping and similar set of bullies attacked my my book as well which was meant to be a fundraiser for the Secular Student Alliance. And, they were successful. The attacks on me and my book were not especially effective and the bullies did not accomplish anything, but the level of support I saw from my own secular community when I was under attack was anemic at best, and made me realize that being part of a community of activists who don’t know how to activate was a waste of time. (This is why I now spend most of my activist time in the climate science area, and regional progressive politics.)

Anyway, Gareth is not at all certain as to what really happened to his facebook page. He suggests it might be a matter of Facebook being bad at what it does, but leaves open the possibility that this was a coordinated (and apparently successful) attack by science deniers on a piece of literature … a sort of vigil ante book burning … using Facebook as an unwitting pawn.

If that is the case, there is a lesson here. Never give Facebook any money. If this is how a “client” (a free unpaid user) is treated, is there any guarantee that a paid user, someone who buys facebook ads, would be treated any differently? Once again, Facebook has shown itself to be ineffective at what it does. Effort spent on Facebook, and money spent on Facebook, is effort and money at risk of being tossed aside because Facebook is unable to tell the difference between a page promoting a novel and a page that bullies, when actual bullies come along and lie.

I’m not sure what can be done about this at the present time. If Gareth comes up with a strategy other than ignoring Facebook henceforth (which is what I would recommend) I’ll let you know. In the mean time, show the bullies who burned this particular book that they can’t win, and get yourself a copy of The Aviator! It really is a good book.

Also, in the mean time, I’ve got something else for you to read. I’m working on a piece of fiction that is set in a post-apocalyptic utopian world, in which everything is fine, and that’s a huge problem. It is a climate change novel, so if you are one of the denialist bullies, this will be a future target for you, piece of literature you can burn along with your precious fossil fuels. Below, I’ve got a passage from an early draft to give you a flavor and hopefully amuse you a little. The scene takes place about 150 miles north of what is now Laramie Wyoming, in the Spring, in the year 2546. Enjoy.

The group was easy to locate from some distance owing to the toddler who frequently cried or screamed, and otherwise, was very loud. If there was an animal out there that habitually ate people, all the people would be eaten, Bale thought, owing to these toddlers. Bale approached the group the long way, allowing her to put several patches of vegetation between them, and watched for a while. The toddler was being taken care of by an older brother, just a few years older but acting very responsibly and trying to keep the little one from harming himself more than necessary on sharp rocks and thorny bushes. Then there were three girls, one half way in age between the toddler an the toddler’s caretaker, one older, just coming of age, and one full grown but young woman, and that is who Bale had come for.

Bale placed one of her arrows across the bow, and pulled enough to test the string and determine that she could fire the arrow full strength. With the arrow half cocked in this manner, she moved from her hiding place behind some bushes to the next clump of vegetation, a small mound of soil with a cowlick of tall grass on top of it. In order to not be seen, Bale had to push herself into the dirt and line her body up to be invisible from the direction of the people. She watched for a full ten minutes, and again, tested her arrow against the bow.

At one unlikely moment, all five of the people she was watching were preoccupied, although each with totally different thing. The toddler was sitting on the ground screaming with his eyes closed. The boy was looking for something to amuse the toddler with, facing away form Bale. The younger girl kid was hiding her face as part of a game she was playing with the teenager who was now looking in the opposite direction, and the young woman was taking a nap half in the shade of a creosote bush. Bale took the moment to move like a snake to the next place where she had cover, and now there was one large clump of vegetation between her and the woman under the creosote bush. Again, she tested her bow and arrow. She looked at the young sleeping woman, and she looked at her arrow, and decided to change ammo. She slipped this arrow between her belt and the small of her back where it would be handy and drew a different arrow out of a quiver, and tried that one. Good. Straighter, the fletching was in better shape. She would not miss with this one.

Then, Bale aimed. She took a careful bead and drew the arrow as tightly as it could be drawn and then held perfectly steady. She waited a full minute to make sure that everything was lined up right, her body still invisible to the group, her arrow, her quarry. Then, without moving a muscle in her body she let out a very loud shout.

“Zeta!!!”

And this caused the young woman to suddenly sit up underneath the creosote bush, striking her head on the thorny branch and getting her hair stuck. Cursing, rare among Gem Deva, ensued, and she pounded the ground with her foot. Suddenly, owing to the loud raucous coming from the creosote bush, a young peccary that had been hiding in that last clump of vegetation started, and began to take flight. But just as quickly as the peccary stood to run, it was impaled by Bale’s first arrow, and just as the Peccary started to turn its direction out of fear, Bale’s second arrow had it in the throat and it went down in the dust.

Zeta, the girl in the bush, had extracted herself from the killer vegetation and sat, still somewhat stunned by hearing her name coming from a direction in which there seemed to be no person. At this point, Bale stood, and shouldered her bow. She walked briskly towards Zeta, and half way there bent down to pick up her prey by it’s hind feet, and dragged it the rest of the way to where Zeta sat. By this time the two of them were grinning from ear to ear.

“This is for your father,” Bale told the young woman. “I hope your siblings can carry it to his camp, so you and I can take a walk.”

In Gem Devan culture, “taking a walk” was a euphemism. In a society where everyone slept in a minimalistic hut within a few feet of the next hut, certain things were done not so much at home, but … well, while taking a walk.

The two boys and two girls were also grinning, and each of them came over to Bale and gave her a long and strong hug, and exchanged words of greeting. Except the toddler, he was busy eating some ants.

“I love you, brothers and sisters,” Bale told them, as they turned, sharing the job of carrying the peccary, to deliver the gift to Zeta’s father. She looked at Zeta. Like An Yon, Zeta was the same age as Bale. Unlike An Yon, she was Devan. In fact, the one time prior that Zeta accompanied Bale to West Village, she was mistaken for Bale a number of times. They were the same height, build, had the same overall looks, but really, Zeta was less muscular and had a thinner face and her hair was a shade darker. Or perhaps dirtier.

In fact, at the moment, Bale was the one that was inappropriately dressed and not properly adorned. She was wearing shorts, a skirt, a waistcoat and tunic, all made for her by Lizzie. She wore her old billed hat and googles and two belts, one low over her hips one tight on her waist. She also donned a bandoleer, a small backpack, and several utility satchels attached to these various leather straps and belts.

Zeta, on the other hand, was mostly just wearing her smile. Well, as modest as the next Devan, she wore a loin cloth. But she was covered by a layer of brown dirt and bear grease, which was mostly winter wear but these early summer days had been cool so many of the Deva were wearing the grease-dirt mixture. Underneath, her skin would be very light. Once summer got going, Deva browned nicely and never burned in the sun, and their skin was not affected by the ravages of sunlight as one might expect, considering that they were pale people who lived outdoors and wore little clothing. This could have been partly because the skies were usually cloudy in this region, and partly because of the bear grease and dirt, but was probably just because they had been living in this setting for enough generations to adjust.

Bale took Zeta’s hand and they took a walk. For real. Bale did not tell Zeta at this point what she had come for, but filled her in on the other important things in her life. Zeta did the same, enumerating which cousins were living in their camp now, and which cousins were staying elsewhere, relating who had died recently (no one Bale knew well) and listing off the new babies. The Gem Deva were thinly dispersed on the landscape and often on the move, but in fact, they used the same exact camping spots again and again, and every feature of the landscape they lived on had a name every one knew. So, as Zeta related the recent comings and goings, she referred repeatedly to places that Bale would know, and if a location was mentioned that did not seem familiar to Bale, Zeta would fill in the blank.

“Uncle’s rock? You know, that big rock sticking out of the ground where Zim, my mother’s sister’s son, left that mess after butchering the dead deer he found that nobody could eat because it was too rotten, about a half day’s walk beyond…”

“Oh, right, that rock, just south of Rattler’s Gully.”

“Right. Anyway, that’s were Cousin Zoe-Lan and her family are staying now…”

And so on and so forth for an hour until everybody was caught up with everything.

And by this time they had come to a place where they could sit and watch the sunset, and hold each other to stay warm against the chilling night air, and restore their intimacy. They had not seen each other in two years. They were not betrothed, or a couple in any way. They were just occasional lovers, and had been so since the very day they met many miles east of this spot when they ran into each other on a bounty hunt. Zeta, like Bale, was a hunter. In fact, there were many things they both liked. There were things they both liked to do, and there were things they both liked to have done. So as the red sun slid below the horizon, and the shadows lengthened and softened and finally became one with the night, they did. Those things. A few times.

The walk back to the camp was quiet and comfortable, and lit by a full moon two hours up. Their welcome by the cousins was warm and loving. The peccary was excellent, served with a half a dozen other food items brought into the camp during the day. This group had just moved to this camp, and Zeta should have built a hut for herself and her sister that afternoon, but distracted by Bale’s arrival she never did, so her sister stayed with the toddler and his mom, the toddler’s brother and his two friends who shared a young man’s hut went off to the bush to sleep under the stars, and so the cousins gave Bale and Zeta a hut to share, a fire already built at its entrance and a couple of blankets tossed inside.

“Tomorrow morning,” Bale said to Zeta before they fell asleep. “I’m going to ask you to do something you won’t want to do.”

“That’s OK, sister,” Zeta replied. This was actually a standard Devan way of saying good night, and Zeta gave the standard response. “I hope you let me touch you with my gift.”

“I hope so too,” Bale added, which was not part of the standard good night ritual. “Because I’m actually going to ask you to do something you won’t want to do.” But she said this too quietly for Zeta to hear. Really, she just said it in her own mind. But it was true.

I have about five friends, if you count people that I care a great deal for, that are very important to me, and that a) I am not married to b) am not otherwise related to and c) am not stalking. OK, maybe four. The point is, I recognize the difference between real life meatspace friends and Facebook friends.

Having said that, I have some friends on Facebook (and maybe Google+ friends?) whom I don’t know in meatspace but who I do think of as friends because we have regular, positive interactions. Just the other day, I had a long talk with Claudia about life. Gwen is always there to support a progressive idea when the arguing starts. I asked for a favor just a little while ago and Aseem immediately came to my aid. These are people I’ve never met before but I consider friends anyway. Funny how facebook works.

But since I am a facebook slut, and shamelessly use facebook to promote my political agendas and my blogs and stuff, I have ended up with a LOT of “friends” on facebook … over 4,000 … and many of them are people I don’t interact with, or people who may not even be active on facebook, or in some cases, people who are not even people but still count on the Tally of Friends. And, as I understand it, once you hit 5,000 friends, you can’t have any more. For some reason, whatever Facebook is, and whatever a Facebook friend is, you can’t have more than a certain number which happens to be a nice round number, according to the people who make up these rules at Facebook Central. Why 5,000? Because people who are in charge of made up realities tend to be utterly arbitrary in how they spec out those realities. Think playground. Making up the rules of some new game you are making up. That’s what Facebook is.

Anyway, with 4,000 plus friends, I realize that at some point I may have to tell people they can’t be my friend, but instead, they must Worship We as Public Figure. Facebook already gave me the Public Figure page. There are about five people who “like” it. The rule is, I can have 5,000 Facebook Friends but I can’t have 5,001 Facebook Friends, but I can have 5,000 Facebook Friends and 1 person who “likes” me as a public figure. I don’t understand any of this.

So, although I don’t understand it, I think I know what to do about it, and it relates to the photograph above and not just because it is all about math.

Here’s the thing. When I had 2,000 friends, if I noticed that one of my friends posted that picture, I’d confront them. I’d say “hey, do you know that although one might see that photograph as funny from certain perspectives, it actually reifies the myth that girls are bad at math, supports the idea of female inadequacies in some arbitrarily defined area as innate, and urges the objectification of young women in an inappropriate and repressive manner” or words to that effect. And we’d have a conversation, and I would spend some energy on that, and there may or may not be a good outcome.

When I had 3,000 friends, if I noticed that one of my friends posted that picture, I’d probably not approach them in the same way, but rather, I’d be a bit more aggressive. I might say something like “Hey, you dick, this picture damages women, and girls. Who do you think you are trying to meme-out your misogyny?” and then there would be a fight, and Bob, and Jaf, and Aseem and Gwen and a bunch of others would jump in and if the person who posted the picture didn’t give up right away we’d kick his ass.

But now, I have 4,000 plus friends. So when I see that picture, I unfriend you. Bye. I wanna make room for others.

And that is why when I decided to write this post, I couldn’t find a copy of this picture. I had unfreinded the three or four dickheads who had posted it. Summarily. No questions asked, statements made, or fights started. Making room for people I’d prefer to have as my friends.

Thanks, Aseem for finding that picture for me a mere 45 seconds after I asked for it!

Posts on Greg Laden’s Blog are automatically tweeted, and are automatically placed on Facebook as links, through two different services. The fact that the blog post titles are tweeted has changed the way I title them. Unable to assume that readers will see an excerpt or opening paragraph in a feed, I now do two things differently: I am somewhat more descriptive in the titles of the blog posts because on Twitter, all people are getting is the title and a link. This is, of course, foolish because fewer than one tenth of one percent of the hits on my blog posts come from twitter. The other thing I do is to more regularly use certain codewords in the title. If I write a post that is merely pointing to a blog carnival, I try to use the words to indicate that in the title. Same for “blogospheric” posts. (This second change in my titling strategy is of course a special subset of the first.) This is to avoid annoying people who may not want to come to the blog post to see a post on “How to please your man, ten easy hints revealed by ten easy experts” only to find that my post is merely pointing to a snarkily titled edition of the Carnival of the Vanities or something.

I hardly every look directly at my twitter feed. I do, however, regularly check a subset of my twitter feed, which includes the tweets of about thirty different people and no more.

I check Facebook regularly, so if I see anyone’s stuff I see it on Facebook. I have about 1,500 Facebook friends, but I only watch the feeds of a subset of maybe a couple of hundred. (See “Finding Facebook” for how Facebook has changed my life. Or not.)

I have a Friend Feed account. I don’t look at it and I don’t really know what it is.

So, the bottom line is that I watch Facebook regularly and see all this from a Facebook perspective.

One person I know twitters and each tweet becomes a facebook status update with a tinyURL link that is a link to the twitter feed. I’ve learned to not click on that person’s tinyURL no matter how interesting the status update is because all I get is the tweet, which is identical to what I already had. I’m not sure why that link is there.

One person I know writes extensive tweets (always using the maximum characters), often includes a link, and is always conversational, frequently asking for a response. Like “Tell me what you think about this old video of Carl Sagan.” (I made that up, but the person is an Astronomer). If I or anyone else responds to this conversation opener on Facebook, we are summarily ignored because this person is tweeting and the tweet is feeding over to Facebook, and I’m pretty sure she’s not reading Facebook feeds on any regular basis. So, really all I’m seeing is a replicate of a conversation going on somewhere else that I can’t participate in without changing my (above described) habits.

Another person I know produces a very large percentage of tweets that seem to be private messages or responses, and these tweets, once again, are fed over to Facebook. So I see a lot of “Oh, really? We’ll have to talk about that” and “No, I think you have to stir in the mayonnaise first or the hot tub jets will get clogged” and so on. I hardly ever have a clue what is going on. This person is also on my highly select twitter feed, and I still have no idea what is going on.

I do know one person who is a professional writer and who checks her very selected twitter feed regularly (she is not a slut like I am, with thousands of meaningless “friendships” and “followeees”) and regularly checks her Facebook account, and has her tweets become status updates automatically. I’ve not asked her but I’m pretty sure she writes her tweets cognizant of the fact that there is this mixed audience of tweet-readers and Facebook-checkers. So her tweets transmogrified into Facebook status updates are neither annoying nor ignored.

All of the above cases are females. Two guys I know seem to do something similar to what I do: Their blog posts become tweets, and that’s mostly it. One of them has his tweets also become Facebook status updates, the other does not, but does put links to his blog posts on Facebook, as I do, so the same result using two slightly different routes, is obtained. So there may be a consistent gender related pattern here where the females are being conversational in various ways, and the guys are just fucking mud, as it were, in an Internet sense.

I don’t like the disconnected conversation of my astronomer friend. I may have to stop stalking her on Facebook because she’s just taking up feed space that I can’t use. But she does have the occasional interesting link. I enjoy the tweets of the person mentioned above with the tinyURLs, and I’ve learned to ignore the tinyURLs (but I do think they should not be there to begin with since they make no sense). My writer friend who writes for the audience does not produce a lot of tweets or Facebook items, and they all seem to make sense. The two guys that I mention are redundant in that I check their blogs, get their tweets, and see the Facebook feed and it is the same thing over and over and over again. But that’s guys for you. Redundant.

The bottom line is this: Facebook, Twitter, blog posts, and other social networking sites are not the same thing as each other. If you want to use them all, either don’t automate or automate with the full knowledge of what you are doing on each feed, how it works, and how readers respond to it. I’m probably screwing up on Friend Feed. As I mentioned above, I “do” it, but I don’t look at it, don’t know how it works, and I’m not sure what it is. So there are probably people on Friend Feed who get annoyed at what I’m doing there, whatever that is. My two friends who spill twitter stuff over to facebook should probably not do that. Either write for both audiences or keep your conversation where it belongs. They sound like people talking loud on their cell phone in an airport waiting area. People who put their blog posts up on all these feeds are probably using a service, and if that is the main thing one is doing, people can understand that and decide to use that feed or ignore it.

I think maybe I’ll work on a bash script that converts a rudimentary feed-seed into appropriately developed text that reads right for various different feeds, with or without links as appropriate, and sends them out automatically to the appropriate social networking sites. I’ll make it available for other people to use. I’ll call it feed2feeds.

Check back later for that…