Month: April 2016

Life, Death and Social Media

Carl Setzer
Yesterday had one of the surrealer moments in my life. A friend from childhood has been ailing at Stevens hospital (properly, it’s now Swedish Edmonds), and was given a few days/weeks to live. So, last night he posted on Facebook that he had just hours to live and that this was his last post. With his deteriorating health, I fully believed the statement.
There’s much within this, but I’m focused on the newness of this. Since he has a phone, which can be worked pretty easily even when weak and exhausted, this contact was able to be pushed out.  Made me think of the last minute letters sent by rebels, resisters, those executed for political gain. Those letters were far more effort, and would only be readily sharable with a small group of people. Now, with a few strokes of your thumb, messages are sent to out to thousands, potentially millions. The ease of mass communication deeply changes our connection.
As shocking as such a message is, I expect this to become more commonplace. Perhaps we can eliminate the feeling of isolation. And, in the end, perhaps it’s good. Maintaining connection in the most challenging and intimate of times.

Fixing Youtube “Embedding disabled by request”

Carl Setzer

So, one of my team’s videos was showing this error: “embedding disabled by request”. I have no idea how that setting got changed, as I simply uploaded it and then tried to embed it into our website.

As you’d expect, this was obnoxious. Finding the solution was a bit annoying, too, as the most recent post I found, from 2009, Which, as you might expect, wasn’t helpful. However, I did get it figured out.

  • Go to www.YouTube.com/my_videos. This will give you the master list of all your videos.
  • Skim through to the video in question, click “Edit”. 
  • Go to “Advanced Settings” 
  • Scroll down to “Distribution Options” & Click Allow Embedding”

The Ever Changing World Of Social Media

Carl Setzer

Was just reading this piece over at Business Insider: Teens are ditching Instagram for Snapchat at a stunning rate. Well, this reinforces one of my underlying assumptions: that what we’ve currently labeled “social media” is a highly unstable sector.

So, we see that Twitter is falling in relevance; that’s been prognosticated about forever. And the same with the Facebook and it’s sidekick Instagram. But we’re seeing growth with Snapchat. Again, the focus of this article is teens, but I expect they’ll be the leading edge of social media trends.

They have two graphs that really capture things:

And this guy, which I think is more telling:

So, the world is shifting and shifting rapidly. It’ll be good to dive into Snapchat, if you’re not already there.