Exodus from Tumblr

"No Thanks"

As of today (Jan,28 2014) you log into your tumblr dashboard and you are welcome with a "new Terms and conditions (ToC)" popup with a long list of legal updates - and also it was expected since Yahoo acquisition, this might be a bad omen for tumblr users.

Although most tumblr audience first reaction are positive, while they're having fun reading the new TOC because it seems hilarious in many ways - it's not the point - many users already have noticed image removal in their old posts with a laconic message : "This image has been removed for violating one or more of Tumblr’s Community Guidelines."

And while we can understand tumblr.com is expanding and trying to keep his viewer safe of seeing NSFW material "accidentally"- this is ironically coming at the period of time where freedom of speech and internet neutrality are endangered.

So what is the alternative, if you don't want to click "agree"?

Alternative

A nice alternative to closing your tumblr account and stop tumbling, is to jump ship and start on another platform - which looks like tumblr 2 or 3 years ago (even with the occasional crashes).

Introducing soup.io a tumblelog very similar to tumblr - but still young and fresh and with a Term and services in German only and on one page only!

To open a soup.io account is really easy (made in matter of minutes) - the very good and nice feature is that you can IMPORT your tumblr account very easily -

Simply  go into "option" and "Automatic imports" (see below) you select tumblr and put your tumblr name and press "add" - and this will just transfer the content of your tumblr.

You will find a more in depth review of soup.io on that blog
http://ratryoshka.blog.com/2012/10/17/comparing-soupio-and-tumblr/

Basically soup.io design are a lot simpler - and his active community is currently around 40,000 (*) users (compared to estimated 30-50 millions active users for tumblr).

(*) Although the number of registered accounts on soup.io is a little above 2 millions (with around 5000 groups) 

But that might actually be a bonus - to stay off the mainstream ...

New Business models for the 21st century

Employees are doomed

We all heard about the end of the "Employee paradigm" - the mythical guy who has been working for the same company all his career is a very endangered specie. Today working 3 or 4 years for a company is already a big achievement.

Work as we know it today, is still a concept inherited from the industrial age, but this concept is obsolete and that's why we are confronted with a massive unemployment on one hand or many jobs that are either "artificial" or counter-productive and employers that are reluctant to hire freshly certified student or prefer to invest in abroad facilities or outsourcing on the other hand. Because one side is trying to enter the workforce place to access the consumerism model (buying a house, a car and starting a family) and the other is trying to lower his price and maximize his profits.

Until society accept that there is no shame to be unemployed - and address the people's need to find their own true purpose - society will be in dire straights.

The rise of the self employed

Because many people are unemployed - or are trying to find or add a new income - self employment or freelancing and self empowerment, have emerged and are giving the economy a boost in self-help, coaching, mentoring, sales training, etc...
But still being "self employed" is usually a synonymous of "being a loser at home" society's perception is still in preference of the old paradigm of the three piece suits employee working 9 to 5 in a modern office - and for the "Freelancer" the challenges are even more difficult, because now the former "frustrated employee" is still the employee, but he also has to be his own boss ...

Metal Basic

Back in the days

It appears "Metal Basic" has been abandoned. My path had lead me to create a few programs, back in 2002 and 2003 ; when Apple was transitioning most of his users from OS 9 to the shiny OS X.

What was great about Metal Basic ? it is very light (less than 10MB when uncompressed and with all the documentation and source code examples) and worked on both environments : OS X native (no need to have OS 9 installed) requiring less than 64MB of RAM - and you could create some standalone program.

Meanwhile the closest development language available at the time was codewarrior - so for little tasks and programs ... Metal Basic was free and did the job pretty well!

A nice little Gem

http://www.freymanart.com/Metal/
http://www.idevgames.com/forums/thread-10105.html