In the age of ray tracing, virtual reality, augmented reality, quantum computing and incredible, beautiful images of the universe, some of the finest minds at work in some of the biggest companies in the world seem to struggle with simple concepts such as the need to backup and restore the content of our own social media accounts.
I have recently decided to create this website and my own social profiles (Twitter and Facebook) because I wanted a place where to both express my own ideas and thoughts and an outlet for all my other side projects without “polluting” 16bap.
And vent my everyday frustration working with technology.
The first thing I wanted to do and really cared about was transferring the list of the people I follow from the 16bap Twitter account to the new one.
I thought “well, that can’t be hard, right?”.
Oh boy.
Looks like there are third party services/tools which will be able to dump your follower list to a CSV or Excel spreadsheet but… with no way to import them back to your new account.
Really.
After spending way too much time looking into this (ie: more than 10 minutes), it seemed to me like there was no way out: I had to manually follow all those people again with the new Twitter account.
It was not fun.
Meanwhile, I’ve discovered something interesting: while Twitter lets you manage multiple accounts, you can’t have them both open on different windows otherwise it will give you an error saying that the current session is already open and will boot you out.
This meant that, if I had to follow the rules, I needed to constantly switch back and forth from the old account to the new one to add all the people I was following.
This would have taken a week. At least.
What I did instead, is: I logged onto my 16bap account on another browser, opened the list of the people I was following and prayed the lord that the fine gentlemen at Twitter (who have decided not to give us one of the simplest tool a user could ask for) didn’t put a session check on each AJAX call made while you scroll the list of the people you follow (those are lazy loaded).
Thankfully that was not the case.
Hooray.
After an hour I finally had all the people I was following on my new account.
Did I already say that it was not a fun or pleasant experience?
Or, in other words, the water is wet, the sky is blue, more news at eleven.
P.S.: I have done a cool thing with the Yamaha XG system which I’m going to share in the following days, when I’ve felt that I’ve rambled enough about how messed up most services on the internet we use everyday are.
Now that I have my own blog you’ll realize how grumpy I really am.