If we didn't have Facebook, how would I find out what people are tweeting?
Wait, heebie-geebie is Ogged? Explains a lot...
Happy birthday. You still don't know what it's like to blog with Ogged, since I'm using his name, but going out of my way not to stir shit up.
Ogged would never have posted this, Heebs.
Happy Birthday Heebie! Mine is Wednesday! Wooo!
Those with the least to say speak the most on fb. Insurmountable problem for them in the long term, I think.
The proposed change will obscure the distinction between 1) paid content, 2) the actual remarks of current and former friends, and 3) the remarks or links of people I do not know. This may help fb hide just how many ads are being pushed. It will also make the user information they gather less focused and so less valuable. Are there business owners happy with fb as an advertiser? The small businesses that I know who I know use fb by basically posting flyers. I don't know if they're making money from selling user info to larger businesses-- I read online that business users must pay to post to all followers, so I son't think that the information is cheap.
More broadly, dominant interfaces on the internet don't last long. The way people compose their thoughts or listen to music on the internet changes every few years.
I realize that I am, in internet terms, a grumpy old man, but:
The thing I don't get about the atomization of social media* is that I don't want to have to constantly recreate social networks. I've got, I dunno, 100 or so FB friends. My sense of the business is that they're going to fragment - some will (do the next version of) Twitter, some will (do the next version of) Instagram, etc. So now I'm supposed to follow 3 or 5 services, each with 30 or 50 friends? The obvious alternative is that I more or less bail out of social media, because keeping up on multiple platforms is tiresome, and no one platform does anything like what FB does (which, for me, is to make me aware of what these friends are doing/feeling, and also to keep me in the general internet loop).
It's just not clear to me how any of these other microservices are delivering that function better than FB. I could see FB being replaced by a basically similar service, but that doesn't seem to be what the techies are predicting.
*or whatever
7: The solution is a meta-social network that agreggates the crap from all the other social networks, filters it according to some sophisticated (or not) algorithm, and presents it in a simple, easy to follow format. As new social media come into dominance they can be added, preserving the familiar and comfortable interface. I would totally pay for such a service.
All these studies look at what teens are doing and extrapolate, but after its initial rise--when Facebook was new and everyone including your mother wasn't on it--of course teens were going to find other places to congregate. The question is whether those teens will come to Facebook when they're old and boring and don't hate their parents. Seems like it's too soon to know that, although Facebook will probably be making a mistake if they try to "stay relevant" to teens: the problem for teens isn't the service, it's precisely that everyone is on it.
meta-social network that agreggates the crap from all the other social networks
None of the other social networks are going to let such a service plug into their data, and if someone figures out a way to scrape the data, they'll be sued into oblivion approximately six minutes after they go live.
10.last: Pretty much. Look at how Twitter has treated the myriad apps that have sprung up to present its feeds (or whatever): those apps were critical to Twitter's growth (for years Twitter's app was the worst way to interact with it), but once they got established, they started clawing back access.
That said, I could see some sort of merger. General Social, or maybe Standard Media.
The solution is a meta-social network that agreggates the crap from all the other social networks, filters it according to some sophisticated (or not) algorithm, and presents it in a simple, easy to follow format.
Pretty much every flagship Android phone has a feature/app/widget that claims to do just that (eg HTC's Blink Feed). Not being a social media vulture I don't know how effective they are.
10.last: True. It would be a nice thing to have though. I'm fully on board with JRoth's grumpiness about social media. I've drawn the line at Twitter. Maybe I'll skip a generation or three and wait for whatever the magic social app is for our 3D iPads or whatever goggly thing comes after Google Glass.
So is Paper "Facebook as Pinterest" or "Facebook as Instagram"? Not using either one of those networkds, I have no idea.
Aren't all of us here marked as old simply by the fact that still read blogs, rather than relying exclusively on "feeds", or whatever it is that the kids do these days?
And happy birthday to HG.
There do exist meta-social networks, but they are primarily geared towards people who have to monitor social media for a living.
I think at some point there will need to be some kind of collective action regarding social media, maybe nationalizing the infrastructure all services operate on. (Regardless of NSA and &c.)
It is a public good, close to a natural monopoly (network effects) for as long as any given service lasts, and commercial constraints keep fucking it up in non-productive ways.
16: I don't know how they're pitching it within the industry, but having watched the video, I think it's supposed to be more like "FB as Tumblr", but with prettier publishing tools. Or maybe there's a journal-style platform I don't know about? But basically they seem to be trying to help people publish things to their feeds that are as pleasing as the most pleasing blogs are.
Honestly, I'm relatively optimistic about it, because I see it as having the potential that, say, iMovie did to bring relatively polished publishing tools to hoi polloi, and to do it in a place where hoi polloi actually is. I don't know if it will work, but it doesn't strike me as a desperate move, because I don't think it's really copycatting.
Could be wrong, of course, and who knows if the execution will match the pretty video. Obviously most people don't really have the wherewithal to produce really attractive/compelling bits of journal for semi-public consumption, but I could see this as having the ability to boost the numbers a bit.
14: I'm sure they're better than nothing, but they can't do what I really want, which is to keep me from having to re-follow people on every damn platform. "Here are my online friends: show me everything they post on FB, Twitter, and Instagram, until I tell you otherwise." A phone-based thing is just telling me about people I've manually followed (I suspect they're also kind of shitty to browse, but I don't know).
HB, HG!
HB, TG!
I continue to loathe FB with all the disdain that a person reared on Prodigy can muster. It is UNPOSSIBLE that anyone could design such a horrible interface and not do it deliberately.
Thankfully I only have to use it to update my work page, and of my three friends two of them are similarly fake profiles of coworkers.
Twitter, on the other hand...Twitter is my native language. Works perfectly for what I need.
That's how I feel about my personal blog. I am just silly for the format. Growing up, I only wanted to be a novelist because I didn't yet know the word blog.
That epidemiology of Facebook paper is horseshit. I'll dig up a link in a bit.
I have a hard time seeing twitter's interface (on the web) as much better than Facebook's. I seem to feel less negatively towards twitter than I do towards Facebook, but I can't say I like either as interfaces.
Finally following the Paper link,
...sorting content into Millennial-attuned topics like "Headlines," "Creators," and "Planet."
and
Paper seems like a prototypical attempt at self-disruption
really make me feel like an out-of-touch curmudgeon.
My favorite social network is the laughter of children.
I find twitter incomprehensible and unusable and basically have an old grandpa reaction to it, yet if anything it seems to be the medium most popular among actual old grandpas.
I still kind of like Google Plus although I only log in every month or so now and find that very little is happening there.
Twitter (via Tweetdeck) is now my interface to the internet pretty much.
No one wants to hear about your days at the fern bar, grandpa.
Just fulfilling your stereotype. 99.9% of it is reading.
Not sure why the crying? There's no porn on twitter, right?
In the aggregated Twi-book-pin-bler-plus system, I sort of understand how to *consume* content---some piece of software that treats it all like so many RSS feeds. I don't understand how to *share* content anything less than publicly. It sounds like either (a) all of your posts are public, or (b) everyone has to have an identity and a friends-list on every service.
If you live in Savannah, GA, Halford, why not just say so?
Don't worry, I'm sure once you're ensconced in central Pennsylvania you'll have plenty of time to read all the threads.
No disrespect to Ogged (he's the OG) but I like you better, Heebie.
Commenter pool on when Ogged starts stirring the sh**! 2 months, with 50/50 on quitting again after 3? (I keed, I keed. And hopefully not...)
Happy birthday Heebs!
I thought the Facebook Paper ad was very amusing. It was so achingly hipster. Manual typewriters and Polaroids -- oh come on! But the hipsters were the people actually living life, while the people using Paper were just passively consuming. I know what side I'd rather be on. Then there was a nod to Mumsbook at the end, which is the part of Facebook where I see the most adoption.
I'm using his name, but going out of my way not to stir shit up.
Ah. I'd put it down to old age or parenthood or something.
[I wished HB a happy birthday at the other place yesterday. QED.]
Happy birthday Heebie!
I remember when we met many years ago. There was some discussion of why the blog was called "Unfogged". You said that they thought it was a better name than "Oggedunf", and I laughed.
I'd put it down to old age or parenthood or something.
Cancer.
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Where Mexican-Americans Live ...Loomis at LGM
Because I was reminded when Spivak pointed me to Jack D Forbes and a reconfiguration of geography that ignores political borders and looks at the entire Caribbean-GoM basins as a historical ethno-cultural entity, giving a new meaning to "African-American"
(American repositioned as "Native American")
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Going to Wiki, Colombia has a significant African-descended population, 10%, but Yucatan, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Venezuela do not ~1%
Forbes AFAIK divides the areas in Eastern African-American (along the GoM and Caribbean coasts and inland) and Western African-American (Pacific Coast down to ?)
American again defined as excluding European
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Belated happy birthday, heebie!
Early happy birthday, togolosh!
And may I be the first to welcome Ogged back to his blog!
I remember when we met many years ago. There was some discussion of why the blog was called "Unfogged". You said that they thought it was a better name than "Oggedunf", and I laughed.
I too remember this! (I also remember stringing you along with how to play that Q&A game that people love, and getting you to explain it in increasingly basic terms until I had you pretending to be a radish, or something. But not in a mean way.)
Happy birthday heebie! Many happy returns!
39: Not sure why the crying? There's no porn on twitter, right?
When correctly viewed, everything is lewd.