When it came out a couple of years ago, I really liked Getglue. It was like Foursquare, only instead of posting that you were at a cafe or store, you posted what books you were reading, TV programs or films you had watched, radio programs listened to, or, if none of that quite fit, a topic that interested you at the moment.
Not only did they reward posts with virtual “badges” they even promised to mail stickers of the badges. (That last was a bit iffy, I think out of five or six promised sticker mailings, I only got two. But they were still free, so hard to complain.)
Getglue was always very America-centered, so they didn’t list things like BBC radio programs. And sometimes the book database was flakey, if I wanted to post that I was reading a brand new book, it often wasn’t there.
But in recent months the service has deteriorated significantly. Suddenly radio, topics, and even books are gone, even current best-sellers like Dan Brown’s “Inferno”. All that’s left are movies and TV. Worse yet, there is an apparent new censorship. In connection with recent events in the Middle East, I wanted to post that I was watching the very excellent Al-Jazeera English. But even though I had posted about Al-Jazeera before, and could find that post in my feed, you can’t post about Al-Jazeera any more, it is gone from the database.
Yet the far more biased Fox News is still there. This is a very troubling sign of censorship, social media should not impose their political positions on users.
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