I like paying for services that I use. I like being a customer who, hopefully, is valued by a company whose product I enjoy. That is a healthy, honest relationship.

I also like using free services. I truly appreciate people putting time and effort into developing free software, into making free-to-use web sites, and all other forms of volunteering. Their actions make this world a better place.

What I hate, however, is software, services, and media that is funded by advertising. There is an unpleasantness in a company seeing the users of its products as assets to be sold to advertisers. Where I am a user, but somebody else is the customer, there is inevitably going to be a conflict of interest. And if one follows the money, the conflict will always disadvantage those who aren’t paying.

I have been happy to pay for online services; with paid accounts on (amongst others) LiveJournal, Flickr, Github, Spotify, and more recently, App.net, I am happy to deal with companies that (to one extent or another) treat me as a customer.

I am much less happy with the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and Google — companies with desirable products, but that give me no opportunity to be a customer. These companies gather vast amounts of data on their users, and develop closed systems that fail to play fairly with others, because it benefits their real customers — advertisers.

Facebook gives us a convoluted privacy system that encourages over-sharing, and introduces user-hostile features like sponsored posts and Facebook email addresses. Twitter gives us sponsored tweets and buggers about with third-party client software. Google are just evil.

These companies should offer a premium product. They should accept a few pounds a month from users who want to turn off advertising, who want decent API support for client software, who never want to see sponsored content, and who want to be treated like a valued customer.

In the mean time, I’m happy to be a customer of LiveJournal (through all its ups and downs) — that is why I keep blogging here — and am happy to be trying out App.net for microblogging. I like app.net’s attitude, and their up-front desire to take money in return for providing a service.

https://alpha.app.net/tobyaw

…and removes the Quick Bar in the iPhone app update today. The world rejoices.

LiveJournal released some new features this morning, which triggered an outpouring of reactionary unhappiness. The same sort of thing happens whenever Facebook adds new features, changes page designs, or tweaks its security model. I suppose many people react badly to change. Personally, I like the software I use to be in a state of constant development. New features must be tried: some will work, some won’t, but I’d prefer to be using a blogging platform that is trying to improve itself, rather than one that accepts a state of decay.

The crux of the objections seems to be that LJ users can choose to cross-post comments that they make to Twitter and/or Facebook. Since anything I write as an LJ post or comment is mine to do with as a wish, I see no problem with this. However, LJ’s implementation, which can reveal a link to and title of a locked post, could do with tweaking.

I’ve turned on the new cross-posting functionality to see whether it works any better than my existing solutions of twitterfeed (which worked reasonably reliably) and Facebook's Notes import (which often imported LJ posts days late). How appropriate, to try cross-posting with a post about people being cross about cross-posting.

For some time I've wanted to post a notification on Twitter whenever I update my LJ. Some other blogging systems have built-in support for Twitter, but with LJ we're stuck with using a third-party tool.

I found a service called twitterfeed.com. After creating an account using my LJ OpenID, it allows one or more RSS or Atom newsfeeds to be specified (LJ feeds are of the form username.livejournal.com/data/atom), and it then posts any updates to Twitter. It seems to work well, and was very easy to set up.

No idea how they make any money from providing the service, though.

I like my LJ posts to end up in Facebook, as a different group of my friends read there.

I’ve tried the LJ “Facebook Connect” cross-posting functionality, but that only works for posts made through LJ’s web interface (emailed posts or posts from client software don’t end up in Facebook).

I prefer to use Facebook’s note importing function; it will (or rather, should) import entries from an RSS or Atom feed. This has worked fine for me in the past, but appears not to work any more. When I add my LJ feed for importing, it pulls the latest entries into Facebook, but doesn’t then import any new posts I make in LJ. Does anyone else have any success with this?

And in a similar vein, are there any sane ways to get new LJ posts automatically twittered?