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Tag: g+

A Walk Down Memory Lane

For Google Plussers Only

Once in a great while, I have a good idea at the right time. (Happens about once every ten years.) Thank goodness I had this one on April 1st, before Google+ started shutting down on April 2, 2019. I took some screenshots so I could remember what G+ looked like — what it looked like, exactly.  Several times already, I have patted myself on the back for thinking of this and realized how angry I’d be if it had occurred to me after it was too late.

I did this with myself in mind, so in the future I can look at them and remember what was. Then I realized, if these are so important to me, I should publish them.

The work of the Archive Team rescued 98 percent of G+ profiles, which is fantastic. All this will be on the Wayback Machine in a few months. However, my experience is that material on the Wayback Machine doesn’t look exactly like the original. Everything is there, but for various reasons, the appearance is slightly “off”. I don’t mean this as a criticism. It is what it is and it’s wonderful. These screen captures below are not slightly off. They are exact.

For each thumbnail that you wish to view, click the thumbnail. It should open the image. Then click again on the image to increase it to original size.

Trigger warning: Google Plussers may find these images disturbing. They may make you cry and collapse in a quivering heap. Proceed at your own risk.

My Profile Page
Profile Page 2
Profile Page 3
Notifications 1
Notifications 2
Contacts 1
Contacts 2
Contacts 3
Circles
Collections 1
Collections 2
Collections 3
Collections 4
Browser Icon
#SignalFlare 1 on Android Mobile
#SignalFlare 2 on Android Mobile
Android Mobile Notifications
Android Mobile Contacts

And then…
“I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.”
— Obi-Wan Kenobi

The End

My Recent Absence

I apologize for my recent absence. Most of you can probably guess the reason. The death of Google+ has weighed heavily on me since October, both dealing with the horror of losing G+ but then desperately, relentlessly, trying platforms, chasing friends and followers, and connecting with as many as possible. People I deal with in person here probably don’t even know that they were only dealing with my “autopilot personality”. I wasn’t even there, as my mind was on other things.

The past three weeks have been consumed by the Archive Team project to capture all of G+ for the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Google+ is the biggest project the team has ever undertaken and it was on a tight deadline. Early on, things were obviously going too slowly. Fortunately, many people volunteered to help in the final few days and we nearly completed the project. We got 98% of all G+ profiles and over 90% of communities.

During the final two days, Google was throttling our access, else we would have gotten 100%. It would be a lie to say that it wasn’t exciting. We were driven like madmen, 24/7. A lot of brains and money donations were put together, and the Archive Team repeatedly, many times, pulled off heroic exploits to get it all done despite the obstacles and with limited funding. 1.43 petabytes (1.43 million gigabytes) is A LOT of data to find storage for on fast machines with fast 10G connections, and do it with almost no money. At times, the data rate reached 50 gigabits per second, which is also a tribute to Google’s impressive infrastructure.

The final few days were pretty much hell, combined with the grief of losing G+. I completely lost my appetite for food. I normally listen to a wide range of music, especially classical. The past few days, the only music I could tolerate was mindless Chill Wave. Hah.

Some efforts to save remaining communities is underway but the window is rapidly closing. Google is deleting everything very quickly. One of the major communities that was missed was NASA. A short while ago, just as the URL list was ready and it was about to be rescued, Google deleted the community. Gone.

My G+ account was shut down about ten hours ago, and I’m finally coming back to life. Appetite for food has returned. Now begins, for me, a new form of social networking, without G+.

If you didn’t catch it on the once great G+, I can be found here:

Friendica (Federated): shuttersparks@social.isurf.ca

MeWe: mewe.com/i/phillandmeier

Twitter: @KW2P

Welcome to the New Shuttersparks Blog

This blog has been active for years on Google’s Blogger/Blogspot. It was time to move to a more reliable platform, and here it is.

The old blog’s RSS feed has been redirected here, but it would be best to re-subscribe to this blog’s feed using the feed links at top and bottom of each page, and delete the old subscription.

All content and comments have been ported here. Activity on this blog will pick up considerably due to the closing of Google Plus.

A warm thank you and welcome to all my readers!

As always, please feel free to comment below.

On Google Plus Closing Down

The announcement that Google was going shut down the public access part of Google Plus came as a major shock to me. I had used it since the beginning. Google Plus is my only “normal” social networking platform. I also use Twitter, but I don’t consider it the same kind of tool as Google Plus. I immediately began searching for an alternative. There are a few out there. For the time being, I settled on MeWe.

Google has a habit of creating platforms, running them for a few years, then shutting them down. If you’re a big fan of Google, like I am, or was, it’s easy to overlook all these apps and services that Google has ditched over the years. But if you look at the list at killedbygoogle.com, it’s shocking. I realized that my Google fandom blinded me to this willy-nilly unstable behavior of Google that has wasted billions of man-hours of people’s time. Over the years I had also been a user of Google Wave, Google Reader, Google Talk, and Google Buzz. I still miss Google Reader. And, now I’m worried and uncomfortable with depending on Google products.

While searching for an alternative, I began to wonder if it was such a good idea to invest your whole world in a single social networking platform like G+. What I wanted was something more permanent. If I’m going to invest time and effort writing posts, I’d like to know that they’ll be around and not simply disappear because some corporation decides to pull the plug. Of course, no platform is forever, but some platforms are more stable and they allow relatively easy export and transfer of your content to a different platform. Google Plus doesn’t provide this, nor does MeWe. Blogging does. I have several blogs but my activity there has slowed over the years. Blogger is also run by Google and could be shut down, but the content is easily exported.

I had the idea to post on a blog and to put links to the article on whatever social media, like G+, MeWe, etc. This is not a new idea on my part, nor original. There are several people I follow who do this, and I began to realize that this may be the best way to post things to the Internet. Blogs can be archived, transferred to other platforms, or hosted on your own server. Of course, I’d like for things to stick around even after I’m dead, so my kids or anyone else can search and read the nonsense I’ve written, but that’s probably too much to ask for.

This blog post is to announce that I will commence posting in this way, starting with this post.

Note, however, that I will only blog things that I write myself. I will continued to post links to news stories directly to social media, unless there’s something meaty that I have to say about it.

Here we go. We’ll see how this works out.

Note also that I will be very busy over the next few days, so nothing much will show up here until next week. I should have time to write something over the Christmas holiday break.

Please comment below.

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