LEXA data is not an accurate measure of site popularity (see my views from 2005 and from 2006), but trends as judged by Alexa can sometimes — especially for large sites — indicate if a site is going mainstream or going away. With statistically-meaningful deviations from the baselines it is now fair to say that Twitter has jumped the shark. The amount of communication I get in that site is definitely not increasing and it seems to be turning more and more into a hub for celebrities, perhaps because 140 characters are enough for them or their PR agents to communicate with. Many former Twitterers seem to be logging in less (some never at all), or reading less, certainly communicating less in the comments — something which is also a growing issue in Facebook and Google Plus, less so in JoinDiaspora, which is my favourite social network these days.

OMETIMES I get asked how much traffic my Web sites are getting. The only honest answer I can offer is that I don’t know. It depends a lot on how it’s measured, what measures it (if anything), when it is measured (peaks taken into account), and how spiders or spam traffic get culled out. Bot traffic is increasingly made more sophisticated, so it is hard to classify one thing as a bot viewer and another as a human viewer. In any event, by far the biggest site that I run is Techrights. It has almost 20,000 pages that I wrote over the past 6.5 years. Schestowitz.com, this one particular site, predates Techrights and has more pages in it than Techrights, but some of the content is not of high quality, e.g. my USENET posts. Then there is the site of my relative Harvey, who lives in Florida. I set up that site for him and have helped him maintain it since 2004. Recently, my friend Mark and I set up Medivasc.com, which also attracts a vast amount of traffic. Those are just 4 of my sites; there are about a dozen in total (an almost complete list of domains is here, but it is not complete). Techrights is believed to be dealing with millions of hits per week, based on Varnish logs. It is hard, however, to dissect those logs because they’re all routed through a cache proxy and therefore have the same IP address for almost all traffic. My second most-accessed site is Schestowitz.com and this month (so far) it is looking as follows:

Tobkes.othellomaster.com (subsite alone)

Medivasc.com looks like this

OR ALMOST a month now BT has been throttling speeds on its exchange, thus crippling/impeding connections, breaking what was previously working without issues. Interlacing and full capacity, they appear to have decided, can just arbitrary be disabled, disconnecting people with all their lives sessions at any time. When phoning BT — as I have done for about 3 hours over the past month (in total) — they acknowledge the issue, although their technical staff seems unable to even recognise the problem or communicate it properly (among peers), which leaves them having to issue pathetic compensation (also requires hours on the line) while continuing to throttle the connections. This is a technical issue at their end — one that they can address and resolve remotely, but why do they knowingly break their systems in the first place? They make a lot of verbal promises — hence not legally binding — only to break those promises and leave people like me wasting a dozen or so hours, incapable of doing proper work or even keep good temper.

BT are failing because their own traffic management systems are defective by design. Calling this inevitable error is like saying that accidents are OK because you feel like committing traffic violations. This was not the case in prior years. Why is BT crippling its own infrastructure at cost to the clients? Why are they abusing their monopoly on landlines? Maybe it’s time to really break this monopoly rather than hide it behind the fake impression of “choice”. They know that people cannot cease reliance on landline (bar mobile networks), so they continue to throttle connections to the point where people get none of what they paid for. They just get a sporadic connection and a headache.

8 years after I last updated the front page of this site I finally got around to modernising it a little. It’s more business-friendly now.

YING is a crude term, I admit, but when something circles around the toilet’s spiral, then you know it’s inevitably dead. Based on some Web statistics I prefer not to name, while Twitter boasts expansion in the number of registered users (this number can hardly even decrease), it sure seems like fewer registered users log in or are being actively followed. This can be also felt by many existing (and sometimes long-lasting) users in the form of communication, participation, and “engagement” as marketing people like to call it. Before I joined Twitter I had posted a fair deal in Identi.ca, but ever since they moved to a new version of their software a lot of people jumped over to Google+ and other platforms. Having a lot of technical issues, including downtimes, contributed a lot to this. I am now the most prolific poster in Identi.ca, but how important is this platform anyway?

Now, some might say that Twitter et al. are the next MySpace. I would concur. And moreover, the likes of Facebook and Google+ are queued to follow. Facebook staff — not just outside investors — are reportedly dumping their stock this month. They would know. Yes, they see what’s going on inside Facebook.

My hope is that the next generation of social network will be self-hosted and communally-federated. The Diaspora project gives me hope that we already have the necessary code and some deployed platforms (pods) with reasonably good adoption.

lmost one decade ago I shifted all of my E-mail to a domain that I control. Well, to be accurate, my host and I control it, and that host is based in Ireland/UK. But over time it became apparent that this was usually useless for privacy. If the recipient uses an E-mail address in one of the big providers of ‘free’ E-mail services (e.g. Yahoo, Google, Microsoft), then my messages (incoming, outgoing) will be visible to corporations and governments whose business should not be other people’s personal lives. So among those who were close to me I was pushing to move to a private domain as well, often the same as mine. This goes back to around 2004. Alas, this wasn’t enough. People routinely use SMTP servers provided by their ISP (‘free’ traffic, free to engage in surveillance), and some use Web-based clients that spying-happy browsers are accessing. Those browsers got worse in that regard over time. Ubuntu now uses search to turn users into products. Besides all of this, the ISP has access to packets, and here in the UK we have Phorm, which helps ISPs do DPI (deep packet inspection) under the guise of “marketing” surveillance.

The bottom line is, encryption for E-mail is needed, but the problem is that few mail clients actually support PGP. Some make it cumbersome to use. Perhaps it’s fair to say that privacy in E-mail is almost an impossibility in practice (even among two willing parries). I no longer use E-mail all that much. face-to-face conversations remain one of the most private options for those who value privacy.

or many years I had abstained from joining Reddit, which I subconsciously viewed as a competitor to Digg, where I was already quite prominent and sometimes called “omnipresent”. But several months ago I reconciled all this nonsense and joined the site — a site that I had been sometimes criticising over at Techrights. During the weekend Techrights reached Reddit’s front page with this submission and the comments were surprisingly decent (in the past there were Novell employees attacking messengers in the comments, as means of misdirection). Things apparently do change over time, and sometimes in a positive way.

Separately, I have set up a page for me and my fiancée before our wedding (less than half a year away) and she loves it. Finally, a friend (and fellow professor) took dozens of videos and hundreds of photos with me over the weekend because we prepare a site and product called FXI (no public details on it just yet, but here is a a clue). There are some FXI logo ideas (the product is not yet up on the Web). This was made with the GIMP of course and it is far from final, only concepts.

Next weekend I hope to finally upload a lot of code I wrote in 2011-2012, accompanied by whitepapers and documentation. Busy week ahead…