02/08/2017

The archive contains older posts which may no longer reflect my current views.

# I used Apple Pay on the Watch for the first time last night. It felt a little weird, almost like the supermarket staff were watching me - they probably weren't and it was just me being paranoid.

Still, it probably felt just as weird the first time I paid using my phone.

People are getting used to paying with your phone but, where I live at least, smart watches are very uncommon.

I've seen a steady increase in Fitbits and other smart bands buts that's it. I'll see the occasional watch (mostly Apple) on my commute but the numbers aren't high. Although I did notice the waitress wearing one in the Chinese restaurant we went to while on holiday. ?

There seems to be no consistency to who has or wears one.

Wearables are still in their "cultural" infancy even though they've been around for a while now. Smart bands, with their more targeted functionality, are better understood and it's easy to see why Apple had to change their approach.

Most, however, don't have a need for an additional piece of technology; the cultural positioning of the smartphone (and its capabilities) is such that a major shift, and a significant technological advance, will be required for wearable use to explode in the same way smartphones did.

# I'm sat on the train looking at a woman wearing an analogue watch and a Fitbit. Next to each other. On the same wrist. A perfect candidate for a smart watch, but I wonder what would cause her to consolidate. The tech? Cost? Appearance? Awareness?

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# Liked: Humanizing the Web...

"The final goal of the algorithms is to increase shareholder value for each network, to squeeze as many dollars as they can out of my eyeballs. As a user, I am a means to that end. I am not the end."

Rethinking the feeds

Colin Devroe made a good point.

He is subscribed to my main feed and wondered why he didn't see my Watch follow-up post about the woman on the train.

The answer was that it was a microblog post and, therefore, in the /feed/microblog feed instead.

Emailing back and forth about it made realise that this is a bit pointless.

I was originally going to keep the microblog separate from the longer posts and, because micro.blog doesn't want post titles for micro posts, set up a custom feed with no item title element.

It was my intention to not include the shorter posts in the main feed as it had always been for more essay-type posts but, ever since I decided not to separate micro posts on the site, I have been using standard and status posts interchangeably - the only difference is whether they have a title or not.

So, for common sense to prevail (and for related posts not to be ignored based on length) I am going to remove the exclusion for micro posts from the main feed.

The microblog feed will still exist, as will the separate podcast feed, but everything will now be in the main feed.

It has been quite a moot point anyway. A status post of 281 characters without a title would have already been included in the feed being not be added to the microblog category.

Arguing the toss over character count is stupid.

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# The only question now is whether to leave status "titles" in the RSS feed or not. Technically they shouldn't be there (statuses don't have titles after all, I add the date for admin purposes) and micro.blog prefers them without.

Either way will work (micro.blog recognises certain date formats and ignores them) it's just many RSS readers don't support titleless posts properly and the date gives them something to use.

#

Liked: Snapchat is a party, LinkedIn is a business lunch – Colin Devroe...

"If we view each site on the web as a real physical place then we begin to realize that some places are museums, some libraries, others local pubs, and still others are rowdy nightclubs. Each have their place to make up the human existence but not all need to be saved or syndicated or shared."

This is perfect!