New Facebook app, please
I would like someone to create a new Facebook app, based on the myriads of Likeness quizzes. But instead of likenesses based on fruits, movies, books, cars, friends, or anything else, it would be based on the degree to which you dislike likeness quizzes.
Bah. Humbug.
Flog blog update ping post
The entire purpose of this post is to publish a post while having set up Wordpress (the software that runs this blog) to ping (notify) flog blog (the software application that updates Facebook with my new posts when I post them here) every time I publish a post.
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Err, jargon often sucks, but I think we can all agree it can have a wonderful brevity to it.
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Bleh, flog blog often sucks. It very rarely picks up my new posts, which is annoying. And it still has not picked up my ping, which was sent 15 minutes ago.
Hate facebook hate facebook hate facebook
I am so over Facebook.
Essentially, I’ve put my Facebook profile on autopilot using applications that suck in all my data from around the web. But I hardly ever go there myself.
Why?
Well, first of all, my employer blocks Facebook. While I certainly wouldn’t spend a long time there anyways during the work day, it’s annoying to get little email notifications during the day about something a friend did on Facebook, and then having to think about that later if I want to check it out.
Secondly, and much more importantly, while the application infrastructure of Facebook is amazing, it’s also fingernails-on-blackboard perky-happy-chirpy-people-on-Monday-mornings annoying.
Let me say that again: ANNOYING.
Everytime anyone does anything, Facebook feels like it needs to notify me. So-and-so is playing Scrabulous, someone else took a picture of a cup of coffee, someone else is super-poking me, and his dog is joining some stupid corporate fan club because they happen to like Tim Hortons coffee.
I love to know when someone has posted a new blog entry.
But I don’t need the minutiae of their every footstep on Facebook. There’s a massive annoyance factor in being sent some kind of message that actually isn’t a message. It’s not a real message … not a note, or email, or IM, or actual communication … but a piece of digital flotsam, tossed off randomly from some interaction with a Facebook application, sent easily and spammishly and automatably to tens or hundreds of “friends.”
But that’s not the worst part.
The worst part is that half the time, when you get this piece of digital flotsam, if you actually care to see the picture of the cup of coffee, you have to install the application that the “friend” used when adding it to Facebook. And then you have to sell your soul to the devil and allow the application to know the most intimate details of your online life.
Enough!
The social utility doesn’t have any.
Facebook ennui
Friends are great. Invites to events from friends are fine. Notifications that friends have updated photos or blogs are wonderful.
But, with apologies, since I turned 15 some time ago, I really don’t need invites to a million “likeness” quizzes based on movies I like or don’t like, personality tests based on chocolate flavors I prefer, fan clubs, “presents” that aren’t really presents and certainly can’t be unwrapped, and invites to be “best friends” with someone that I’m already “friends” with on Facebook.
Arrgghhh!
Are we not satisfied with robbing children of childishness by incessantly driving adult tastes in everything to younger and younger ages, so that we must now also perform the inverse and infantalize ourselves with giggly fluffy pink nothings and superpokes and other such nonsense?
Social networking is cool and wonderful. It’s helped me reconnect with friends I’ve lost track of years ago.
But that doesn’t mean I want to act like a pubescent Japanese schoolgirl.
PS:
Since I’m already up in high dudgeon, here’s one more thing that bugs me. I’m not going to add 50 Facebook apps to my account every day, giving them and their creators access to any and all information about me.
So there. Bah. Humbug.
Slightly less negative on Facebook
What with the insane euphoria of the web 2.0 crowd having found something slightly less web 1.0ish than MySpace in the social networking space and the insane euphoria of the VC crowd having found a new poster child for massively inflated valuations, I’ve been trying to maintain sort of a cool distance from Facebook.
(While, naturally, having a profile that I hardly touch.)
But this morning an old buddy from school sent me a message. By old buddy from school, I don’t mean university or even high school. I’m talking elementary school.
Wow. I hadn’t even remembered his last name, but I had remembered Jaimie.
Reconnecting with someone you haven’t seen in maybe 20 years is pretty cool.
I hated MySpace; now I hate Facebook
So I got an account on Facebook a couple of weeks ago.
It’s protection - in the personal SEO era, you need to lock up accounts on popular services with your actual name. Amazingly enough, I’m John Koetsier on Facebook.
After being on the service for all of about 25 days, I’ve already formed some conclusions:
- Facebook is the anti-MySpace
- MySpace is gaudy and busy; Facebook is boring
- MySpace is full of ads; haven’t seen many on Facebook
- MySpace is web 1.0; Facebook is web 1.0 too. Only difference: it’s designers weren’t on LSD
(I know, I know Facebook is doing all kinds of API deals, I know, I know, it’s a platform now … blah, blah, blah. I’m talking about the visual feel, the scent you get from using it. It’s all been done so, so, so many times, and it’s all very 1.0) - MySpace was programmed by Hammy, the hyperactive squirrel in Over the Hedge, and few things work as advertised; Facebook actually works, which is good, but still does stupid stuff.
Case in point: check out this screenshot from the homepage of Facebook …
Facebook wants me to give it access to my online email so that it can check if any people that I sent messages to and from are also on Facebook … it’s an auto-friend feature.
Cool? Uncool.
I don’t have a Hotmail address. Or a Yahoo, MSN, AOL address. I don’t know too many self-respecting technically-proficient over-20 people do. (I have a Gmail account, but that’s mostly for subscriptions and possibly spammy stuff.)
So the feature is useless to me. But can I get rid of it? Can I edit it? Can I dismiss it? No, no, no.
So every visit to the boring uninspired homepage of Facebook is punctuated by the uselessness to me of the largest element on the page.
And that’s just annoying.
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About
Sparkplug 9 is John Koetsier's blog on life, the universe, and everything,
but mostly the stuff you see big in the tags to the left.
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