In case of confusion, the nose-picking etc. is mine, all mine.
Also: FIRST POST!!1!1!1!11!!!!!1!
Yeah, I saw that somewhere else and drew the same conclusions as you. No surprises, but interesting that he could do it.
Tangentially, who needs this? (And whatever became of Wave?)
Odd that Google are hitting the "social networking" thing from so many angles. They also have Orkut, which is apparently big in South America but didn't really take off in the English speaking countries.
I can see Wave being useful for distributed companies. I don't think it has been marketed correctly.
The big issue with all these social networks is making money. No one has really cracked this in a satisfactory way. Some sites (mostly Asian, I believe) make good money selling crap (gifts, decorations, etc.) to their users but that model only really works for the teenage market. Perhaps adults will do this when the current crop of teenagers are older but I doubt it. Mobile services make money, as users are used to paying for text messages. That doesn't translate to the Internet, however. A reasonable argument can be made that mobile is way forward (billions of phones vs millions of computers) so perhaps that is the future.
This post title could easily stomach a diæresis.
Holy shit, that's a lot of data to scrape and process. His "analysis" is a bit impressionistic, and sometimes weird. E.g.,
For example, Boise, ID, Bend, OR and Phoenix, AZ all have much wider connections than you'd expect for towns their size
Phoenix is the fifth largest city in the United States!
Didn't someone refer to this yesterday in the comments?
Similarly, I found it bizarre that he was surprised that Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri were connected more tightly to Texas than Georgia. Why in the hell would you expect that? Or that he couldn't figure out the Mormon-Twilight connection. Even if you don't know that off the top of your head, googling "mormon twilight" would clear it up pretty quickly. And surely there must be a better characterisation of the northeast than, "they stay home a lot."
As interesting as I found the link, the guy doing this stuff seems somehow...dim? I'd like to see what someone really sharp and on top of things could do with it.
And surely there must be a better characterisation of the northeast than, "they stay home a lot."
I don't think this is what he means. He means they stay near home when they grow up.
Yeah, I did get that. The point still stands, though. I mean, that seems to be true of every other region too except the Nomadic West, as far as I can tell.
I thought the idea was that in, say, Greater Texas, there is some transfer of relationships across that whole area. SAHistan is unique in that everyone in that area maintains relationships with people not far away from themselves. So it's not that Minnesotans and people from Maine are often friends, but that they're both usually only friends with people from their own areas. The lines are shorter throughout the region.
[quote]He means they stay near home when they grow up.
[/quote]
It's pretty poor data to draw even that conclusion from. I mean, leaving aside the implied claim that having a Facebook friend from a given city means you've lived in or even visited that city, there's the obvious fact that there are lots of large cities in the North East Even given an entirely random distribution of friends, a person living in the North East is going to have more friends from other cities in the North East than someone in the sparsely populated West is going to have friends from other cities in the West.
It might have been more accurate in that sense to break up SAHistan into micro-stans, like that NYer cover, but I'm glad he didn't.
It's pretty poor data to draw even that conclusion from.
We don't actually know this, do we? Perhaps he accounted for those variables.
3. Clearly Mormons are right to be stockpiling food and ammo.
And now that I'm snowed-in again, it's too late to buy guns or food.
a person living in the North East is going to have more friends from other cities in the North East than someone in the sparsely populated West is going to have friends from other cities in the West.
Isn't this precisely the opposite of what he claims the data show?
I hear the snow plow. Should I go to the grocery store or the gun store first?
If you go to the gun store first, no one will give you any trouble at the grocery store.
18: I went to the liquor store before the snow. I have priorities.
But why did you go to the snow store?
I wonder if he scraped all the data or if he had some kind of sampling methodology? This seems like a good application for MCMC kinda stuff. Also the grouping looks very much like the diffusion algorithms mentioned in the OKCupid thread.
21: I went to the snow store to freeze the spider. I swallowed the spider to catch the fly. I don't know why I swallowed the fly.
22: I think he scraped it. Another page on his blog talks about how to get data off Facebook without logging in (some details obscured while Facebook fix the security hole).
The title of this post reminds me of how some of my former students write their FB status updates. It's like the opposite of txt-speak, extra letters everywhere. "wworrrrkkkingggg tillll ellevvvvvennn thhhenn paaaarrrttyy wwwiiithh thheee grrrrrrrllllliiieeess."
I have noticed the extra letter thing. Is that supposed to communicate something specific?
When I saw the post title, I thought it was more of Heebie's"But what aboooouuut meeeee/ kids and famileeee" song. (Something like that, can't find it in the archives to link--Heebie will remember.)
Hi Heebie! We don't mean to be parochial. It just happens when you're completely self-involved and the weather is, like, awesome.
Besides, there are mountains in the way.
I thought, in this case, HG was just demonstrating how many double letters are involved in typing "Facebookkeeping."
The FB friend I have who does the extra-letter thing is in high school and often ends status updates with "txxxxxxxt?" which I gather is an invitation to text message. Strange people, these kids on my lawn.
But, to 26, I have no idea what it's supposed to communicate. It makes me think the writer is on ludes.
Besides, there's so much inner work to do, inner child, chakras, all of it. Between that and the tanning, I don't see how anyone can maintain friendships with far away people.
"Bookkeeping" and "bookkeeper" are semi-famous word oddities for the three consecutive pairs of letters. I think "sweet tooth" is correctly two words, but if combined, it too has the property.
Facebook just keeps getting more and more broken. And I get to read all these excited status updates from FB friends who work at Facebook. "All-night-hackathon was a success! New Facebook will be awesome!" Then I see that the homepage has been slightly rearranged, and has such wonderful features as two different lists of which of my friends are logged on. Two different lists that do not agree. Way to go, all-night hacking dudes!
From my favorite comment to the linked post:
Facebook is a giant front for CIA, DARPA, ARPANET and theTip to terror-makers: instead of updating your status to stay "we attack tomorrow", use code words such as "...is bored" or "Mmmm. Coffee", or become a fan of the ShamWow guy.
TOTAL INFORMATION AWARENESS
THAT IS
watching every single little thing you do all day on facebook.
I like having the message notifications and the notification notifications in the same place, and having the difference between the mystifyingly similar "News feed" and "Live feed" finally revealed.
The only other difference I can see in the new Facebook is that about 25% of the time the feed is completely empty. As someone who never uses the chat or messenger or whatever they call it I have not yet benefitted from the new inaccurate roster of logged-on people.
Orkut is pretty big in India as well.
Mainly I use the list of logged on people to look at and think, shouldn't you have something better to be doing at 9 on a Friday night? and then the obvious corollary hits and I feel bad.
I'm sure I'm just revealing my ignorance of how things work in business-land (or software-land or something), but I can't imagine how Facebook can gainfully employ 1000 people. It would be one thing if they were all managing hardware or getting advertising deals or something. But I get the impression they have a large number of people working on the interface, which, um, why?
Even more mystifying is that Translation Party is apparently hiring. Translation Party makes money? There is further work to be done on Translation Party? I thought it was just an amusing one-trick novelty website.
Or maybe "Translation Party is hiring" is just a joke. That would make more sense.
Translation Party is apparently hiring
It's hard to find anglophones/nippophones* whose command of the other language is at just the right level of sub-fluency.
*that's the French, at least, also "nipponophone". I don't know if the equivalent exists in English, and I'm not getting out of this chair to consult my OED.
Also, I basically only do FB on my phone, so I'm continually bemused by the monthly waves of "Why did FB screw up the interface!?". I think their iPhone app is great, and the one time that they updated it, it was slightly better, so.
Speaking of Facebook, while looking up a relative the other day, I came across a link to another young male relative's Facebook page. He "is a fan of" Athleteswives.com. Can anyone who has actually visited that site let me know if I should be bored/mildly amused or actively disturbed by this? I'd like to think my younger relatives are not so stupid as to be publicly proclaiming their love for websites built on contempt. Please tell me I'm jumping to conclusions.
(Snow update: It's coming down like crazy; we've had some serious rumbles of thunder; I lost a tree branch; and I just got back inside from a snowball fight with the neighbors.)
45: No idea about the site, but I wouldn't be actively disturbed by a young (teenage?) guy identifying himself as a FB fan of anything short of snuff porn. It just seems unlikely to mean more than "I saw something there that struck me funny."
45: From a quick look, it appears to be no more contemptual than any other "look at these hot chicks" website. And 46 is about right.
Also, per the Stinky Boys thread, teen boys these days are being exposed to/raised in a more pornulated culture than anything we could have imagined in our youths - your young male relative may never in his life have heard that oogling hott chixxx is in any way problematic.
41: OED tells me Japanophile, cited in 1905.
your young male relative may never in his life have heard that oogling hott chixxx is in any way problematic.
Do keep in mind that he's related to me. He hasn't heard anything about ogling being problematic, but he's heard about contempt.
I hadn't previously thought of staying off Facebook as a friendship-preservation strategy, but it makes sense. If I knew what people I know and love are willing to publicly endorse, I'd probably have fewer loved ones.*
*This remark brought to you by a recent round of racism.
49.1: Well, I did think of that, but there's probably a disconnect in his mind between "contempt" and "oogling chicks who obviously want to be oogled, otherwise why would they be modeling in skimpy clothes?" Just send him to some of the old gender threads, that'll set him right.
49.2: Tell me about it - not the racism, but the general politics of it. Must cocoon more tightly....
I hadn't previously thought of staying off Facebook as a friendship-preservation strategy, but it makes sense.
Yes, this. There's a dissertation in it, at least. I'm fascinated by the question of the public and the private.*
Meanwhile, snow: nobody here is yet in the mood for a snowball fight. It's pretty grim. Trees are cracking ominously, the accumulated snow is now up to the bottom of the window sills (call it 4 feet, though some of that is drift), the wind is making its presence quite known. My housemate has decided to go out and rescue a holly bush that he holds dear.
* I can barely say this with a straight face.
Facebook is sort of reminding me why I don't live where I grew up. It's neat to have updates on the lives of old friends I wouldn't keep up with otherwise, but I'd like to be able to drop a few old acquaintances who post a lot without being hostile about it.
Yuck, that was a sorry excuse for a sentence.
rescue a holly bush
From what? I mean, I suppose he could dig it a little air hole so it wouldn't suffocate if he wanted to, but I'm pretty sure it'd be okay without that.
As the news has picked up "snowmageddon" and "snowpocalypse" has long been overplayed, it's time to move on to new phrases to describe heavy snow. How come the word "blizzard" doesn't seem to show up as much as it used to? Is it Al Gore's fault?
52 - hide them! It's the perfect compromise. In theory you are friends, but you never have to see any of the shite they spout.
54: Two feet of snow on top of a youngish holly tree crushes it to the ground. It's a question of weight.
We are having a blizzard. Blizzard #2. It's not Al Gore's fault.
My roommate has been gone for over 45 minutes. There's practically zero visibility outside. It would be best if he showed up again.
not the racism, but the general politics of it
Some of the things I saw posted in the wake of the Haiti earthquake by people I went to high school with absolutely made my jaw drop. I mean, of course everybody's got a right to be racist and ignorant and I had no illusions about a lot of them, but I'd kind of assumed that people knew better than to say it out loud.
it's time to move on to new phrases to describe heavy snow.
How come the word "blizzard" doesn't seem to show up as much as it used to?
At least in Pittsburgh, we don't really have a proper blizzard except rarely*. You need wind with snow and just a ton of snow doesn't a blizzard make.
*As seen on the open range.
56: The only problem with that approach is that I'd have to dig around FB to figure out how to do it, and I'm lazy. But I'll get to it eventually, I suppose.
Ok, so what words were being used in previous years for non-blizzards?
Also, I hate the "[something] a [something] make" construction. I assume it's an irrational response, like my hatred of the "smacks of" construction.
Blizzard implies wind that whips everything up. That hasn't happened this year.
As the news has picked up "snowmageddon" and "snowpocalypse" has long been overplayed, it's time to move on to new phrases to describe heavy snow.
Snowtaclysm
Catasnophe
SNOMG
I hate the construction "[X] happened every day, and today was no exception."
I know from blizzards, and this is a blizzard! Heavy gusting winds!
My roommate has returned, coated in snow, and has poured himself a drink, saying mildly, "I was only gone an hour; you could have come out to see if you were worried. I was right out there up the street a ways. There are two more inches on the path since I left."
Heh.
I'd have to dig around FB to figure out how to do it
Mouse over any entry in your news/live feed and a little "Hide" button pops up. Hit it and you'll be given the option to hide the person posting it.
Apparently, there are always differences in weather across the country, and today is no exception.
what words were being used in previous years for non-blizzards?
Heavy snowfall.
56: The only problem with that approach is that I'd have to dig around FB to figure out how to do it, and I'm lazy. But I'll get to it eventually, I suppose.
No, you have to dig around to change your own privacy settings. Hiding people is incredibly simple. For everything posted on your wall, if you mouseover the farthest right section of the center column, the word "Hide" appears. Click "Hide" and it gives you the options "Hide Walter", "Hide Mafia Wars", and "Cancel". Then just tell it to Hide Walter.
It's all or nothing, you either hide everything he posts, or nothing. You can't hide one single post.
67: Thanks. That sounds easy enough even for after-dinner me.
Wow, it's really snowing hard now. I went outside a while ago and cleared most of the snow away from my car, thinking "as long as it doesn't get much worse, at least I won't have any trouble driving to work tomorrow". Oh well. There are talks scheduled for tomorrow that I don't want to miss, but I guess the odds of the speakers arriving in town are low.
Meanwhile, in Boston, we were promised 4-8" of snow starting at noon, and while there have been a couple of flurries and state employees have been sent home, there's still nothing on the ground.
73: I love getting to work by subway. Of course, now that I've said that, I'm going to find out that the A-train isn't running due to snowdrifts in Queens, and I'm trapped downtown.
Heavy snowfall.
A crazy phrase like that, I'm surprised it caught on.
The WaPo website had something about the "snowmongous" winter, which got me thinking that the practice of hooking up with whichever friend or neighbor you happen to get snowed in with should be dubbed snownogamy.
||
No more masturbating to Charlie Wilson.
|>
63, 65: Have you guys seen the BBC on how to create an news video? It loses steam a bit toward the end, but it still made me laugh.
OT:
I'm having trouble with the impersonal possessive pronoun. In the sentence "A new car dealer whose license had been revoked", can I say "whose" where I'm talking about a corporation rather than a person? That sounds terribly wrong to me, but I'm not coming up with an alternative.
can I say "whose" where I'm talking about a corporation
In the wake of the Citizens United decision, of course!
Why not?
Haven't you ever heard something like "The box whose contents..."
84: Maybe that's right -- the fact that I can't come up with an alternative suggests that "The box whose contents..." would be okay. I just got hit with a wave of disbelief that I could use "whose" for anything but people.
At my last job I got corrected by several people for forming a possessive of an inanimate noun by adding 's. These people were totally convinced it was wrong wrong wrong, and I thought (and still think) they were terribly misinformed.
81: I'll have to watch that when I'm not in a library struggling to stay awake between classes by posting comments on a blog.
Like, "the car's tires"? Anyone objecting to that is indeed terribly misinformed.
I love the weather service's terror-mongering, and how the all-caps and ellipses suggest they are shouting but then kind of trailing off into nothing, then shouting again....
NEAR-BLIZZARD OR BLIZZARD CONDITIONS ARE RARE FOR OUR AREA... SO IT IS LIKELY THAT PEOPLE WILL NOT REALIZE THE PERIL THAT EXISTS IN VENTURING OUT IN SUCH STORMS. LIFE-THREATENING CONDITIONS ARE POSSIBLE...
"The box whose contents..."
If I got a document with that, I would change it to "the box contained". LB, I can't say for sure without seeing the full sentence, but "a new car dealer with a revoked license" might work.
87: "This year's winners include..." Your former cow-orkers are indeed misinformed.
"A new car dealer whose license had been revoked"
Completely correct. The alternative would be a horridly awkward construction.
79: the practice of hooking up with whichever friend or neighbor you happen to get snowed in with should be dubbed snownogamy.
I had a dream about this a couple of nights ago.
I'd also try to write around having to use that construction, but I'm not sure that there's any reason to.
It's snowing steadily but no blizzard. The storm we had two or three years ago was fun - heavy winds, twenty seven inches accumulation and huge snow drifts. A walk down to Prospect park took forever as you kept falling in up to your waist. I want real blizzard. Or maybe not, I'm always afraid that my rotten windows will finally go whenever there are high winds.
76 Any uptown train will get you within reasonable walking distance, and if that's out you can always go to a sports store, rent a pair of x country skis and have a fun commute home.
The car, whose tires exploded after it drove over a box, whose contents included a substance, whose chemical properties matched those of a highly dangerous explosive, crashed.
94: I'm becoming persuaded that "whose" is okay. Writing around it is brutally confusing in context.
Mosnowgamy - not to be confused with mosmogamy, as found in the valleys of Los Angeles.
90: See, to me it always reads as delightfully old fashioned. It's like a telegram meets Walter Winchell or something.
Or moosemogamy. What happens in Alaska, stays in ?Alaska.
"Peril" is a good word. I think I'll start trying to work it into everything I write.
97: I mean, if you really want to avoid it, you'd need to say that the dealership's license had been revoked. As opposed to the dealer's. Expand to an additional sentence, and say, "The dealership's license had been revoked," but basically it is not remotely awkward to use the original formulation.
'Baby it's cold outside'ogamy.
Just send him to some of the old gender threads, that'll set him right.
There's also this brand new thread at acephalous.
'Baby it's cold outside'ogamy.
"Say, what's in this drink?"
Status update that just came across my FB feed from a high school acquaintance who is now a lawyer: "Telling the Judge that your primary pain control method is Pabst Blue Ribbon is probably not going to help your Social Security Disability case." He later commented: "Just so you know, I did prepare this person. Pabst Blue Ribbon came out of left field."
People should make freer use of the possibilities in these scenarios than they do.
Witnesses. Litigation would be so much easier without them.
110: Also clients. And judges. Opposing counsel.
Court reporters are OK.
If you're in pain and the best analgesic you can obtain/afford is PBR, doesn't that strengthen the case that you need disability? C'mon, judge, we've all been there.
OT Huh?: A TWO-BEDROOM APARTMENT IN LODZ'S CITY CENTER 910,000 POLISH ZLOTYS ($306,000) We're talking Lodz here, a depressed post industrial city with no tourism. How does this happen? During the boom years, Lodz drew many international buyers, especially from Britain, Ireland and Spain, Damn, any way we can get these suckers investors to help out Detroit?
110, 111: Lawyers. Love 'em. Beautiful people.
106: I would not have guessed you were a Taylor Swift fan.
DC breaks all time snowfall record! Add some whiskey to your hot chocolate to celebrate.
90: This was my favorite weather warning, it's like a particularly grim short story:
IF YOU GET STRANDED IN YOUR VEHICLE...DO NOT LEAVE YOUR CAR TO TRY TO WALK FOR ASSISTANCE...YOU CAN QUICKLY BECOME DISORIENTED IN WIND DRIVEN SNOW AND COLD. THIS STORM WILL SUBSIDE EARLY THIS EVENING...SO WAIT IN YOUR CAR FOR EMERGENCY HELP TO ARRIVE. PERIODICALLY RUN YOUR ENGINE FOR ABOUT 10 MINUTES EACH HOUR FOR HEAT. ENSURE YOUR EXHAUST PIPE IS CLEARED OF SNOW AND ICE. CRACK YOUR WINDOWS TO AVOID CARBON MONOXIDE POISONING. TIE A COLORED CLOTH TO YOUR CARS ANTENNA TO BE VISIBLE TO RESCUERS. FROM TIME- TO-TIME...MOVE YOUR ARMS...LEGS...FINGERS...AND TOES TO KEEP BLOOD CIRCULATING.
Should I join Facebook? Pluses are finding all kinds of people from my past, minuses is I eventually post something google-able and work-incriminating. Do the privacy settings really work?
112: Both Old Milwaukee and Busch are about 5 cents a beer cheaper and taste the same. The judge is going to think he's wasting the people's money with fancy beers.
Should I join Facebook?
No.
120: My bad. I first heard the song "Baby it's cold outside" this holiday season as sung by Taylor Swift. It is, on a glance at Wiki, much older than I had figured.
I see there's a gap ad that does a gender reversed "Baby it's cold outside." Doesn't work too well, though, mostly because of the male vocalist. Too bad. It seems like there is a lot of potential there.
Apparently, Frank Loesser wrote a shitload of songs that I know of.
That is, I was aware of the song, but not his authorship.
Apparently, Frank Loesser wrote a shitload of songs that I know of.
Trivia question: Does anybody know who Irving Burgie is?
And now I do. I'll think of him every time I hear the Barbados national anthem.
Your former cow-orkers are indeed misinformed.
It's unfortunate but simply inevitable that most cow-orkers suffer from ignorance, but one hopes that a former cow-orker -- who had managed somehow to give up the delectable practice -- would have a chance to receive a proper education.
This was my favorite weather warning, it's like a particularly grim short story
It sure is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Kim#The_Kims_become_snowbound_in_the_wilderness
PGD at 117: Should I join Facebook?
Really? Overall, no.
It's of passing interest to find old-time friends, but unless you've maintained a fairly consistent lifestyle and personality, it winds up being a burden.
The only exception would be if it really is of use professionally -- and I wouldn't say you're having any trouble there.
Or you could join with the knowledge that you may well not participate much at all. You're there, and people can find you, but they should not expect that you will be offering up much of anything.
That's me! I spent my first month on FB rattling on about my bike commute, but haven't said anything in months, and hardly look at it.
PGD at 117: Should I join Facebook?
I've created a Facebook poll called "Should PGD join Facebook?", and it's received all "Yes!" votes.
Am I lying? Maybe. But PGD would have to join Facebook to find that out for sure.
I think FB takes a lot of work to make it rewarding: setting up networks (that is, recommending that your friends befriend others, which could be a little pushy, don't you think?), setting up or joining groups and then recommending that others join those groups, and so on. That would be the only way to keep a conversation going, but the friend-recommending business is a tricky business. There's a weird peer-pressure thing that goes on with it that some of us resist.
I could see it working in the way it's presumably intended, but the interface is so damned clunky and annoying. There are other, currently existing, ways to accomplish the same things. Except for the part about being visible to long-gone friends and acquaintances.
But then you have that guy you broke up 10 years ago and really don't want to have anything to do with asking to friend you.
The only real reason to join Facebook is to play Scrabble or Lexulous with old friends spread out around the globe. All the other community stuff I just sort of glance at on my way to my current games.
But then you have that guy you broke up 10 years ago and really don't want to have anything to do with asking to friend you.
This time I swear it's going to be different.
The only exception would be if it really is of use professionally
If I'm ever in a profession where Facebook is useful, somebody remind me to quit and rob banks or something else relatively beneficial to society.
Speaking of ex-boyfriends from ten years ago, I just found out that mine - technically 7 years ago - is fast becoming a hardcore alcoholic. As in, the better part of a handle of whiskey in an evening, with a recycling bin full of empty handles.
To carry on a bit more -- and shout me down if appropriate -- FB seems to be part of a changing model in how we should engage in social interaction. Duh; but really: we did not, once, tell everybody we knew when we were, say, starting up a bike commuting regime, or having our wisdom teeth out, or that our mom had died or has cancer; or that we'd shaved our legs preparatory to a swim meet.
I alluded once before to DS's remark that unfogged was like a collective Live Journal. Facebook seems to me to be a very, very wide Live Journal. But it comes with pressure, to be actually interested in what someone I knew 20 years ago thinks about a recent movie [substitute any other thing]. It can be quite charming at times, but the incoming news is accompanied by a certain pressure to shift to a general mode of interaction that is just not the mode I particularly prefer to have with every person I ever knew.
Privacy. Privacy. The fact that FB is gradually becoming the preferred mode of social interaction and connection -- over email -- is something that leaves me cold. If you want to talk to me, talk to me.
I got tired of writing that thing, so I just posted it.
PT: Die Antwoord made the front page of the Le Monde site.
handle of whiskey
That's a phrase I don't hear much.
But it comes with pressure, to be actually interested in what someone I knew 20 years ago thinks about a recent movie [substitute any other thing].
But it really doesn't. If you're not interested in what that person has to say, you can, as mentioned, hide them.
or having our wisdom teeth out,
I'm doing my best to tell everyone I know about this. Including my Facebook friends.
We're talking Lodz here, a depressed post industrial city with no tourism.
Without any clue what the town is like, I did find that apartment to be quite attractive, especially for the price. The windows! The ceilings! And the kitchen is charming.
144: But then why are you friends with them anyway?
Sure, you can experimentally check someone out, and then hide them if desired.
I really don't see where there is any pressure to interact with people inherent in using Facebook. Maybe it's different for older people who are obliged to be"friend" lots of people they don't like.
I've been flirting with the idea of deleting my Facebook account for a while now. Even more so, now that my mom has a Facebook account.
I'm friends with my mom on Facebook. It makes the "your mom" jokes a little uncomfortable, but other than that, it's just amusing.
J-mo also puts up stunning photographs of herself.
My 139 was kind of incoherent. I'm sorry.
147: I think there probably is a difference for older people. I've lived two or three lives so far, have friends from each of those lives, those friends don't know each other at all, etc. Those of you in your 20s obviously don't have friends you knew in adulthood 20 years ago. It gets a little weird.
I wouldn't mind being friends with my mom on Facebook, except that then it would be impossible to respond to my cousins and aunts and uncles who've been asking me for the last two years "why haven't you accepted my Facebook friend request?" with the "oh, I never sign on to Facebook anymore" excuse I've been giving them.
It's a little sad how many of our comment threads become consumed with the concept of Facebook, though.
152: Yeah, I hate it when things get complex like that. No other older members of my family are on Facebook - it is just my mom, and I have a solid friendship in addition to child/parent bond with her.
I guess in the man that I've decided that I'm not going to hide who I am from various groups of people and everyone just gets me as I am on Facebook, and if they don't like it they can hide me.
I've lived two or three lives so far, have friends from each of those lives, those friends don't know each other at all,
This could describe me as well. Again, I've decided to stop worrying how a friend from one corner of my life is going to react to something that say, an Unfogged friend says. (Of course, this only goes so far. Don't antagonize my mom, people.) Turns out it works out fairly well, and that in the main the conversations segregate themselves.
I guess in the man that I've decided
Uh, I'm still not fully with it yet.
I'll think of him every time I hear the Barbados national anthem.
Just to follow up on this, before it's completely buried (and hoping that I don't break the blog a second time).
Irving Burgie was a songwriter who is best known for having written eight of the eleven tracks on the Harry Belafonte album Calypso (the first solo album to sell over a million copies in the US).
The interesting thing is that the songs are presented as traditional songs (see, for example, Jamaca Fairwell which Belafonte introduces as a song that he remembers from his time in the West Indies as a young boy hanging out at the docks).
I guess in the man that I've decided that I'm not going to hide who I am from various groups of people and everyone just gets me as I am on Facebook, and if they don't like it they can hide me.
Things like this make me feel like a very sneaky person. I don't have a lot of actual secrets, but I do think of most information about myself as something I don't want to hand out willy-nilly. The kind of chatter about myself I engage in here, while I'm still not spilling any real secrets, is largely stuff I wouldn't say under my real name other than one on one. (Of course, lots of you know my real name, but the pseudonymity is still freeing because there's not much contact between Unfogged people and the people I know IRL.)
Nattering on the way I do here on Facebook would leave me feeling uncomfortable and exposed.
"fairwell" s/b "farewell" of course. Sometimes I sympathize with Yglesias.
157: I remember reading somewhere that Alan Arkin, the actor, has a writing credit on the Banana Boat Song.
144: But then why are you friends with them anyway?
I don't know. If it's someone whose photos you'd be interested in checking out once a year, then there's that. If it's someone that you're not interested in at all, then you're right: there's no need to be friends with them, but there's equally no pressure to be friends with them in the first place.
To me, the main utility of Facebook is in link-sharing and getting updates from groups/pages I'm interested in. I like that there is only one place I need to go to find out about a new release on my friend's record label, the time and location of a Climate Change rally in my area, or early notice that a bunch of college friends are planning a trip to the World BBQ Cooking Contest and wondering if anyone wants to join them.
157 gets it exactly right. Except that I don't feel sneaky about it.
150.--Hey, when my fifth-grade boyfriend finds me on Facebook, I want to look good---even if I use the site almost solely for Scrabble.
My fifth-grade boyfriend has become a total hottie, btw.
I don't think that makes you sneaky at all, LB. I think it gets to what Parsimon was saying earlier, about issues of privacy and what we think other people should know about us.
I've a bad habit of over-sharing personal details; Facebook certainly allows me to tell more people about them but this was always my basic tendency. The filter on my interior monologue is very porous.
I'm even a little leery of becoming a "fan" or a "friend" of abstract causes under my real name at Facebook. It just seems so public, despite the privacy settings I've toggled so assiduously.
157: Things like this make me feel like a very sneaky person.
It's not sneaky. It's an interest in privacy, which one does not have to defend in any way.
Well, I'm at least conflicted about it -- for one thing, I like nattering on the way I do here, and I'm not sure what I think the ill effects of being less guarded in person would be. It just makes me uncomfortable.
157: I remember reading somewhere that Alan Arkin, the actor, has a writing credit on the Banana Boat Song.
Apparently that is the case. According to wikipedia Burgie and William Attaway wrote the Belafonte version, which was later recorded in a different version by The Tarriers, a band which included Alan Arkin, having been taught to them by Bob Gibson.
The Tarriers, or some subset of the three members of the group (Erik Darling, Bob Carey and Alan Arkin) are sometimes credited as the writers of the song, perhaps because their version of the song, which mixed in another song, was an original creation.
Nattering on the way I do here on Facebook would leave me feeling uncomfortable and exposed.
Me too. Under heebie-geebie, I've been forthright and largely unconcerned with putting others at ease.
With real life acquaintances, I unconsciously filter nearly everything through the filter "Does it set them at ease?" The rules of what that entails are slightly different for all the different arenas of real life. So if I have all the audiences from different spheres in one big facebook, I get major writers block. Also I like to post longer posts than FB permits.
I like FB, and don't feel any pressure at all.
Now, though, I going to get drunk 1,000 yards from a large tent city with 0 Haitians.
I'm about the same on facebook. Fuck 'em.
It's a little sad how many of our comment threads become consumed with the concept of Facebook, though.
I don't think it's sad. It's a new way of communicating, or at least, part of a new way people are communicating. So it's not surprising that people are having reactions to it, including ones they want to tease out.
It feels sort of dorky to be talking about it—hell, I've been on the dang thing for close to ten years at this point—but it's a topic people generally want to talk about.
Plus, almost everyone's staying on the topic of the main post. WTF?
close to ten years
Considering it's been around for about six, that's remarkable.
What's also remarkable is the amount of snow outside. Approximately one metric fuckton of it seems to have fallen in the course of just a few hours.
173: Hm, I've been a member since 2002.
Are you sure you're not thinking of Friendster?
Never mind, that's clearly impossible. But I was invited on the basis of a school I attended in 2002. That's where I got confused.
Holy Toledo is there a lot of snow out there. I just went out to shovel again, never mind the dude I have actually paid to do it (I'll let him do the sidewalk).
From time to time there is an ominous snap-crackle-pop from the trees, but other than that it's quiet and magical. The glow softens everything and the snow muffles everything and the air is just barely cold enough for snow, with little bite to it.
The Christmas lights I was fool enough to leave up look quite nice, and I've had more chats with my neighbors in the past two days than in months.
The only thing nicer would be having someone to get snowed in with.
Oh well. I am feeling tremendously productive, at least.
I have never even seen Friendster!
I don't think it's sad. It's a new way of communicating, or at least, part of a new way people are communicating. So it's not surprising that people are having reactions to it, including ones they want to tease out.
But we rehash the same ground a lot. Why would you want to be on there? Each person says that they sensibly limit the amount of time they spend there. Doesn't the bad outweigh the good? Doesn't the good outweigh the bad? It just feels like we're discussing whether or not cell phones will take over our lives and that's why we're determined not to get one, or why we love ours, or whatever.
Maybe I'm just feeling cranky though. It was the post topic, after all.
173: Huh. I must be misremembering. I thought I had it first or second year in college, but it would have had to have been 2003 or 2004 when it showed up at U.Va. I request permission to revise and extend my remarks to "something like six years at this point", so it still feels dorky to talk about. So the main point stands. Therefore, I win a puppy!
I'm not sure I've ever seen this much snow fall in such a short time before. I guess this is what people in Baltimore and DC have been saying repeatedly.
I'm trying to find a timeline of when Facebook opened up to different universities. The whole process must have been a lot faster than I remember, because I was thinking that someone I knew at Yale was telling me about it for months before it opened up to Chicago and she insisted that I join, but I know I joined in April or May of 2004, and it didn't even launch until February 2004.
Yes, that's where I am confused too - I'm pretty sure that the university-affiliated email address that got me in expired by May 2004. Of course I joined and then promptly didn't use it for several years.
I've had more chats with my neighbors in the past two days than in months.
This was a really great part of our recent 20" snowfall. Three generations of us, out there helping each other clear off each other's driveway and sidewalk, laughing, and chatting. (And I'm not kidding about three generations. My 80yo neighbor, who has colon cancer, was out shoveling despite our urging him to let us do it for him.)
It was the post topic, after all.
New direction! Given Facebook, how do we feel about the ability of random strangers to search by e-mail address to find information about us?
(I'll tell you how I feel: Grateful not to be on Facebook, that's how.)
In March 2004, Facebook expanded to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale.
I never heard anything about Facebook until something like June of 2004. I was advised to go to "thefacebook.com" at that point.
I think I got an LJ account in 2001, Friendster in 2002, Orkut in 2003... no, that must have been 2004 also.
Is it really true that there hasn't been a big new social-networking site fad since Facebook came along in 2004?
Whatever, guys. I was on Prodigy in 1991.
(c'mon, Usenet people, help me out.)
183-4: Same confusion here. I definitely remember there being a feature through which I could list what courses I was taking and see other people on Facebook at my university who were in the same courses. The last possible time I could have had that be useful was Spring semester 2004, and I have a feeling I used it for more than one semester, but I could be wrong.
No, Friendster was 2003. And Myspace started the same year? Somehow I thought it was older. But I never had a Myspace account.
I remember getting sucked into a contest to try to accumulate the most friends while at the APS April Meeting, which apparently was in May 2004.
I think FB takes a lot of work to make it rewarding: setting up networks (that is, recommending that your friends befriend others, which could be a little pushy, don't you think?), setting up or joining groups and then recommending that others join those groups, and so on. That would be the only way to keep a conversation going, but the friend-recommending business is a tricky business. There's a weird peer-pressure thing that goes on with it that some of us resist.
Interesting. I suppose the effort to reward ratio depends pretty heavily on your circle of (FB) friends and what you look for from FB. I don't feel like I'm putting in much effort, but it brightens my day quite a bit. Possibly because I have an unusually high percentage of witty and clever friends who post updates or comments that brighten my day. I don't really recommend friends to anyone. I was a little disconcerted at first when two of my friends from totally separate (yet totally compatible) spheres suddenly became FB friends. But I find it pleasing to enjoy the interaction of their respective clevernesses.
setting up networks (that is, recommending that your friends befriend others, which could be a little pushy, don't you think?), setting up or joining groups and then recommending that others join those groups, and so on.
I missed this in the first read through. I do none of these things and yet enjoy Facebook quite a bit.
Whatever happened to Orkut, anyway? It never really took off, I guess. I wonder if Google Wave will get similarly forgotten.
Yeah, I think that whole paragraph that Di quoted is misguided. "That would be the only way to keep a conversation going, " is way off. You keep conversation going because someone posts a status that tickles you, you comment on it, etc. It's almost just like something that's escaping me at the moment...
But it comes with pressure, to be actually interested in what someone I knew 20 years ago thinks about a recent movie
I don't see this, either. I don't care what someone I knew 20 years ago thinks about a movie; I don't care about someone I haven't seen in 20 years at all (except in the "goodwill toward men" sort of way). This is why I don't befriend old high school or college classmates on Facebook or let them befriend me. Facebook is useful as a local social calendar/newsletter, but it would cease to be useful if I didn't filter out all the crap.
There's also this brand new thread at acephalous.
SEK's current feud/spat/whatever with Donald Douglas has already provided me with hours of wholesome entertainment.
It really was phenom, over 1 million users by the end of 2004. I forgot it expanded that quickly.
[Me in 187--breaking in a replacement laptop disk drive. Amused that I got two boxes from Dell today (FedEx for the snowstorm delivery win); the entire contents of the second box was a small bag with one (1) screw and a note on the packing slip that I was NOT required to return the defective part (I do need to return the bad disk drive) with a link to information on how to properly dispose of the defective part.]
But we rehash the same ground a lot.
Thank God that only happens with the FB topics. Imagine if we rehashed just about everything.
196: Per comments 4 & 38, Orkut is very big in Brazil and India (and apparently Estonia).
200: Actually I rather like reading for the umpteenth time how driving with a stick shift is a morally and aesthetically superior activity repetitive jokes.
202: You like repetitive jokes, Stormcrow?
I have a case that came to me though an unlikely combination of Unfogged and Facebook relationships. More accurately, a RL relationship that would never have been strong enough to produce the referral taken over the finish line by the U/FB combo. As a Boomer, I know that no experience I ever have is unique: if it's happening to me, it's happening all around me.
That's the present. A good bit of my FB cohort is about the past. This doesn't bother me: I liked the past, and can't think of anyone I was friendly with that I wouldn't want to hear from (even if I am going to hide their game updates!)
202: Go Saints!
Things I like: This Twitter feed.
Snow Thrower has side mounted rotating brushes, can throw 200 ft, remove 3,000 tons of snow an hour. #SubwaySnow
Things I don't like: Independent analysts who take it upon themselves to rewrite municipal history. No, it is not true that the most important budget decision of 2009 was to increase the sales tax. The most important decision was to vote for a city budget that required state approval and then go on vacation for months knowing it was headed for meltdown.
190: If it helps, my first e-mail address was a PSUVM account.
204.1: I sort of do, too, now -- a good one. God-willing it will parlay into not completely hating my job. At least for a few months until I can figure out something else to do with my life.
On the veldt, repetitive jokes by males coded as stability markers.
At least for a few months until I can figure out something else to do with my life.
Drifting towards non-lawfirm work? I have to say that I don't regret it -- there are annoying things about working for the government, and the money does suck, but I'm several million times happier and a much better lawyer since I left.
190: I nearly got kicked out of school for aggressive cross-posting between rec.humor and alt.tasteless in 1993, and used to spoof the school VAX/VMS system to send anonymous love sonnets.
On the veldt, repetitive jokes by males coded as stability markers…laydeez.
I gotta say, I love FB, but am looking forward to gleefully fleeing up the adoption curve to Google Buzz as soon as I can get enough of you fuckers to make the jump, leaving my family and high school acquaintances far, far behind.
On the veldt, repetitive jokes by males coded as stability markers...laydeez.
ATM.
211: I touched base with a friend today to feel out current appellate clerkship salaries. I'd love a legal writing spot at one of the law schools. It'll probably be a few months before those openings (if any) get posted. I need to sit down and crunch my numbers hard to figure out how deep of a cut I can afford.
The pitfalls of various tools for online discourse have been rehashed quite a bit here, but I am a bit sensitized to it at the moment with regard to Facebook as I am in the middle of trying to undo some minor complications caused by my unwitting acceptance of someone who had basically Facebook-stalked a relative of mine. (Long complicated story, but since they were a "friend" of the relative's now, and I knew they had been a RL friend thirty years previously, I stupidly assumed an ongoing friendship in the intervening years. Wrong.)
214: I'm with you. Or I would be, but your RL name gets too many hits when I ask to follow you on Google Buzz.
I'm happy with Facebook and how I use it, which is to say not a lot. There are a handful of friends I don't see much of that I get curious about now and then (mostly ex-girlfriends with whom I'm on good terms), and when I get curious, I'll look them up. Two different friends have suggested I start playing Farmville, but I haven't been interested. Call me antisocial, but if I'm choosing between antisocial online games, I was on WoW first.
Barring all that, I check it every few days to make sure no one is specifically waiting for a reply on something and that's it. It's useful for that, and I don't feel pressure to be on it more.
My sister lists her political views as "liberal" on Facebook, which is generally a good sign, but is hard to square with her listed favorite book (the only one): Atlas Shrugged.
It really was phenom, over 1 million users by the end of 2004. I forgot it expanded that quickly.
Napster was quicker. 1 million users in something like 3 months, if I'm remembering right. Stealing: the universal bond.
I should probably presidentialize this, but what the hell: I learned about the death of a very close family member of a very old friend over facebook the other day. That was pretty weird. Offering my condolences via facebook seemed like a bridge too far, so I offered them over google chat. Also pretty weird. Tonight I learned that he learned about the death of the family member over the internet. Mega-weird.
Google Buzz launched the same day that I read about their meetings with the NSA to surveille us all, so I said "No, thanks!" pretty quickly.
I gotta say, I love FB, but am looking forward to gleefully fleeing up the adoption curve to Google Buzz
Seriously? My minimal experience with google buzz has been extremely annoying thus far.
190: I was on alt.possessive.its.has.no.apostrophe in, uh, 1999.
The only people I know who appear to be using Google Buzz so far are the PhD students at my school.
One of my old friends in computer security got appointed to some kind of important job at DARPA the same day Google Buzz was announced. Coincidence? I, uh... well, yeah, obviously. Why wouldn't it be?
Oh, good, I was hoping this was where I could go to complain about google buzz. I really don't like how they just took my contact list, which I barely participated in forming in the first place,* and turned me into a follower of everyone on it. Fuck you google. Also, your search results get shittier everyday. Stop highly ranking pages that don't contain each and every one of my search terms. It's not helpful to know that one or more of the terms appears only on pages linking to the useless page you gave me.
*Among my contacts are people I e-mailed once for some administrative stuff about applications or that sort of thing. I never added them. I guess I shouldn't have been too lazy to go in and edit the contact list.
Whatever, guys. I was on Prodigy in 1991.
By the time my 300 baud modem had loaded up some BBS, I'd lost interest. I would sometimes log on to my dad's work network and play an ascii version of Go.
And then when it became possible to telnet to library resources that included full text of some magazine and journal articles - this was about 1994/5 - I spent a lot of time doing that. Although if it was really interesting, I'd e-mail the whole article to myself rather than end up hitting the space bar 35 times to read through to the end.
222: Yeah, seriously. I mean, look, they've got weird-ass algorithms that potentially reveal private shit, but I'm already fairly cut-a-bitch ruthless with my privacy settings, so I'm not exposed.
Google Reader is my RSS reader of choice, and hitting Share is a lot easier than sharing a link in FB, and there seems to be a general concensus that sharing is cool in a way in my Buzz cohort that doesn't exist on FB, in part because the subset of my FB friends that are on Buzz are all the early-adopter social-media lefty types that Buzz seems designed for.
I dunno, actual blogging seems like too much effort for me to actually pull off (see, e.g., my most recent failed blog linked at my name), but dropping a snarky comment on something and clicking "share" is right up my alley. The thing I'm trying to figure out at the moment is if I want too try to maintain a separate "Chopper" persona within the Buzz environment for saying shit I want to circulate outside a whitelist. We'll see.
I just found this link via Google Buzz.
The first modem I used involved putting an old school phone into these rubber holes. There was no screen, the computer would print responses when I played 'Adventure'. Yes my parents were IT folks, why do you ask?
Amusing that the very next time I logged into GMail after posting the post link to HG I'm asked to join Buzz. I like it. The interface is clean, and I can post and read stuff very conveniently.
Like many people here I maintain a few different personas (work / non-work / Unfogged troll etc.) and the oh my gosh alarming thing about Buzz is that these different personas all come together in my inbox (except for the Wanton Breeze, which has its own account). Suddenly people can find about the different aspects of my life! Panickz!
I'm considering getting over it. I can't see the harm.
In the 90s, I probably wasted almost as much time with a green screen version of Hammurabi as I now do with blogs.
In the 90s, I probably wasted almost as much time with a green screen version of Hammurabi as I now do with blogs.
The first ever social networking site was, of course, Friends Reunited, which launched in July, 2000. Possibly the only end-user hit of the .com boom in the UK.
The founders burned through a ton of VC funding and eventually sold it to ITV, the national commercial TV network, whose executives were running around in a panic after spending an insane amount of money on second-tier football rights and realising too late that the number of people who want to watch Crewe Alexandra vs Rochdale on a Wednesday night is fairly limited. They decided to Do Something to demonstrate that they were all trendy like, and spent another silly sum - £120 million! - of the shareholders' funds buying Friends Reunited.
They then did absolutely no product development until 2009, when they sold the spam-haunted shell of the business for a fraction of what they paid for it.
The founders, presumably, are enjoying their money.
|| Huh. I think I just decisively won my first professional pissing contest. My most recent demands have all been met. All! |>
235: The secret is to drink really watery light beer.
