I’m so pleased Michelle Parry-Slater is revisiting her #NoPlasters series on BlueSky. For those of you who don’t know, Michelle ran a hashtag#NoPlasters campaign on Twitter ten years ago. The campaign was about sharing a tweet a day to encourage L&D professionals to try something new.
I saw Michelle post this last week:
What immediately jumped out to me was about the platforms. The original campaign was on Twitter/X which is pretty much unusable for L&D content, connection and development now. I know opinions are divided on its effectiveness as a social network but I’ve stopped posting there and only occasionally open it to read what’s happening there before I quietly close it again.
Michelle also mentions Flickr which used to be THE photo hosting site. Cloud options have been promoted for a decade or more and the ability to host photos on Amazon and Google as part of your subscription to these services means most users will not need another photo hosting site.
Lastly, Michelle mentions G+ (Google+), the Google social networking platform. Google have tried four times to create a social networking site – Google Buzz , Google Friend Connect, Orkut, and G+ – but they seem to have given up now and finally put G+ out of its misery in 2019.
What these platforms and their obsolescence and falls from grace demonstrate is the danger of becoming too wedded to your technology. I’m on BlueSky now too and have no expectation that it will become the only place I’ll connect with people socially.
Think about this from a learning perspective and just how you’re encouraging/driving/directing people to your platforms now and where else they’re sharing things.
Lost and Desperate 