The Chronological News Feed
One complaint I read over and over again about social media sites is that they no longer have a chronological news feed. Back when Facebook introduced its news feed, it showed the latest update...
Category: Internet
Essays and thoughts on the Internet and social media in the 21st century
Engagement and User Experience
What do you think when your hear the word “engagement”? Maybe people deciding to get married? If you work in technology, marketing or design, you may instead think about how users interact with a...
Notification Saturation
Notifications are important. Without such alerts, we wouldn’t know when one of our friends or family members tries to contact us. We would miss out on important information. But in this age of information,...
The Benefits of a Social Media Diet
Last Fall, I went on a social media diet. I had found myself checking my Facebook a hundred times a day (no exaggeration), so I decided to give it up for a week. It...
Breaking My Facebook Addiction
I have a long-term Facebook addiction. I signed up for the service back in the early days, when you needed a .edu email address to register. I’ve logged in just about every day since....
The Allure of False Productivity
The Internet makes it easy to slack off. I can’t tell you how many projects I’ve had derailed by my raging Facebook addiction. But there are a lot of online distractions that are more...
AOL and Other Online Services
In my early days of computing, I logged on to Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) to download files and participate in forum discussions. The BBSes I logged into were free, but they were hard to...
The Age of Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes)
The Internet has existed since 1969, but it was only in the mid-to-late-1990s that it became commonplace in the home. Before that, computer users communicated via more low-tech methods. Many people of the era...
LinkedIn Annoyances
Looking for a job is always hard. Sometimes it seems like there are so many opportunities, but so few options. It’s a daunting task, and there’s no shortage of websites out there purporting to...
Dealing with Clickbait
Recent years have seen a rise in clickbait articles online. These clickbait articles have alluring headlines that promise to help you lose weight or regain faith in humanity. Clickbait stories tend to be “shallow”....
