Tag Archives: social

Why cats (paint) create social networks

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Wellington author Burton Silver‘s successful book Why Cats Paint was a sharp dig at the world of art critics. The premise being that cats can’t paint meaningfully, but that their art is often indistinguishable from some critically acclaimed art.

And so it is my contention that Facebook was created by cats. Clearly it wasn’t created by sensible humans or it wouldn’t exhibit the scatter-gun approach to user interface design. No, it wasn’t carefully modelled after established patterns or carefully designed and tested by the industry’s leading minds. I reckon someone taught a cat or two, probably two or more as it is also apparently not of one mind, how to use a GUI interface designer and let them loose.

The latest incarnation of “Home” on Facebook consists of a stream of inanity updates from my friends contacts, surrounded by no less than five types of controls for taking you to other, mostly less intuitive parts of the experience. The clever part is that, depending on whether you use the web site proper, the mobile version of the site, or a mobile application, some parts of these controls are simply not available. This suggests to me they should be absent from all versions of the experience.

The other day I was checking to see if anyone had anything interesting to say and noted an interesting “notification” from one contact that referred to a private item. As I actually like this person, I tapped my iPhone screen where it said “click here” to see it. Nothing happened. It wasn’t a live link. Sigh!

So I fired up the Facebook site on my iPhone’s browser and it gave me a custom iPhone experience. Nice. Except “Notifications” was nowhere to be found. Sigh!

So I forced it to use the full site on the iPhone and for the life of me I could not figure out where to get notifications from. I finally visited the site on my Mac tonight and discovered you get notifications from area number three, the toolbar at the bottom of the screen which cleverly remains static as you scroll so that your brain overlooks it all the way to the bottom of the page. I’d probably not have spotted this had there not been a red “1″ badged on the otherwise agnostic icon.

So having found the notification, I clicked the link.

And got an error. Sigh!!

Another attempt after a few minutes seems to have got past the error, and given me instead one of those “Allow access?” pages which is asking me to sign all my data over to something called “Online Friends”.

What??

I need another ‘application’ to view this thing? And if my Facebook contacts aren’t “Online Friends”, then what are they? I click on a link which should show me what “Online Friends” actually does.

View which of your friends are online whether they are logged in or out of chat.

Riiiight! I need a special application to do instant messaging and presence. So this is what everyone has been talking about. Well, what a waste of time. Only one of my contacts, apparently, has this installed. Hardly useful now, is it? I’ve visited numerous web sites where I have an identity and online presence is an option you simply turn on or off. I’m already logged in. Why isn’t that enough?

Once again it falls into stark clarity for me. The only reason I am using Facebook is because some people I know are using it. Well, some people I care to associate with, anyway. It is the Microsoft Windows of the social networking world. People only use it because other people use it. I certainly didn’t sign up until I had several friends suggest it.

Given the way many people, including myself, use the “What’s on your mind?” status updates, and the way the site design is heading, it’s a bloated Twitter. An overly complex, annoying, scatter-brained, bloated Twitter. The one thing Twitter is, is simple.

So – if you know me and want to be a part of my online life, here’s how you do it.

If you want to know what I’m thinking, saying, doing – follow me on Twitter.

If you want to see my photos, check out my Flickr page.

If you want to know what else I do online, check out my various web sites.

It’s your choice which parts of my online presence you participate in, and I promise you they’re all simpler than Facebook.

Disclaimer: This post is not intended to offend anybody except those responsible for Facebook.

Media beat-ups and first impressions

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It has to be said. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Yes, you! I mean it!

Fact is, I don’t either. We need to understand this fact!

I have been using Twitter for a while now and am finding it quite rewarding. I’ve spoken about it on my podcast, in online forums and in general to people around me. Almost without exception, those who don’t use it are scathing of it. The only comparison I can draw is that it is as ‘unfashionable’ (to non-users) as Abba was when they were at the height of their fame.

Bruce Simpson had a go in his Daily Aardvark column recently and I had a few words to say there. Yesterday, my own mother asked me if I used it and when I said yes, the look on her face was “why do you get caught up in this crazy stuff?” Her view of it has been formed by hearing about it in mainstream media. Therein lies the problem.

Back to you, dear reader. If you actually know about Twitter from personal experience or by objective and substantive study, you can sit back and agree with me (I bet you do!) while I chastise the others.

I bet your view of Twitter is that it is filled with celebrities and nobodys and that everyone is saying what they’re eating for lunch, right? Why would anyone want to know what I’m having for lunch, or that I’m standing in a queue at the supermarket? Who cares what Britney Spears is saying today? Right?

Well, that’s like not buying the daily newspaper because you’re not a sports fan. Or not going into supermarkets because you hate packaged and processed foods. Or not eating at KFC because it’s greasy. Or, not eating at KFC because someone told you they don’t treat the chickens well.

What do you know? I mean what do you know? The answer, admit it, is very, very little. Have you actually seen all of KFC’s source chicken farms yourself? Have you seen their menu lately? (Hint, it’s not all greasy, deep fired chicken.) Have you seen fresh produce in the supermarket? You have? Really? With your own eyes?  Of course you have, so my statement above about supermarkets is silly, right?

The fact is that you know so little about Twitter that you’re prepared to take whatever anyone tells you as the complete and total truth, but you’re not prepared to put any time in finding out the real story. Now I’m sure you know not to trust everyone who tells you stuff, but you trust the 6 o’clock news, right? It’s the source of authoritative information, right? You trust them, don’t you?

I’m telling you now. DON’T! The mainstream media economises with the truth, sensationalises and sometimes just lies.

Now, a quick lesson for you. Do you believe everything I just said about the mainstream media? You shouldn’t. There’s no reason to take my word any more than another’s.  Find out for yourself. Find multiple, credible sources for your information and make up your mind based on a reasonable amount of information. The ‘net is at your finger tips. If you want, leave a comment and I can point you to examples of shockingly poor journalism that misleads the public.

Oh, and Twitter? It’s a great tool for some people. I’m happy to accept it’s not for everyone. But in your research, look for objective discussion. Hint: Anyone who says it’s going to take over the world, or who uses insulting language is probably not objective.

There. I said it!

Facebook is annoying me again

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So I keep hearing about all these complainers who don’t like the ‘new’ Facebook.  Well, for the record, I don’t see much difference. The web interface still pretty much sucks big time.

I follow an RSS feed from my Facebook account as an alert mechanism.  Usually I will pick up goings on via my iPhone’s Facebook application which, although still buggy, is a lot simpler than the web interface.

Today, I had quite a lot of ‘stuff’ to wade through because I’ve been a bit more active on there myself.  Well, not really.  I’ve been posting a lot to Twitter while I was on holiday in Auckland, and that automatically updates my Facebook status.

So I chose to attempt to deal with it on my Mac.  Bad, bad, choice!  First of all, I had an RSS item that one of my friends wanted to add my birthday to their calendar.  Fair enough, I thought.  So I clicked “here” as directed and it took me to a page of “Notifications” (whatever that means).  From there I clicked through on the birthday request, but also noted another item of interest on the way through.

Now, do you think I could easily find how to get back to the Notifications screen again?  Hell, no!  I ended up using the browser’s back button to get there.  That’s bad!  I should be able to find such a screen easily, but I can’t.  It’s not intuitive.

Anyway, I eventually get back to the Notifications screen to find another friend has “answered a question about me” and offers me a link to see what they said.  Of course my interest was piqued.

So I clicked the link and am confronted with:

Allowing Friend FAQ access will let it pull your profile information, photos, your friends’ info, and other content that it requires to work.

WTF??? Why do I have to allow an application access to all my info just to see what my friend said?  That’s insane in this day of malware and identity theft.

I shall be asking my friend what they said in person.  Well, through a direct communications channel such as email or IM anyway.

What on earth do people see in this system?

The ‘cynisphere’

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As I often do on a weekend morning, shortly after waking up this morning, I grabbed my iPhone from the bedside table, gave it a pipe to the world (i.e. took it out of ‘airplane mode’) and began to cast my eye over my Twitter stream.

It wasn’t long before I came across multiple tweets that mentioned issues with Google’s flagship web search.  For a period of slightly less than one hour, every search result was tagged with “This site may harm your computer”.  I’ve seen the occasional search result with this under it before, but word is that every single result from every single search in that period was being marked thus.

So, a bit of a stuff up on Google’s part, right?  Yep.  Turns out it was simple human error.  Now don’t get me wrong, the error was pretty silly on someone’s part.  Quite why you’d put “/” in as a dodgy web address is beyond me, but hey, sometimes these things happen.  Maybe someone was trying to delete a line and missed one stray, but important, character.

So why am I writing this post?  Well I am writing it because I was stunned at some of the responses to the problem I was seeing on Twitter.

» Anyone else seeing “This site may harm your computer” on EVERY site in search results when googling something?

» Something seriously wrong with Google – http://tinyurl.com/cdld36

» Live on Ustream now regarding the Google breakdown: http://tinyurl.com/cdld36

» Google explains it was human error – http://tinyurl.com/cdld36

- Cali Lewis


» Something is seriously wrong with Google.

» I guess I know what the number one topic will be on the radio show today.

» This is the equivalent of an Internet blackout. I never asked Google to “protect me.” I bet Carol Bartz did this.

» TechCrunch broke the Google story first: http://bit.ly/igUF Note to self: This is why it pays to have a Belgium bureau.

» OK true. Twitter broke the Google story first – as with pretty everything. Twitter is the new place to go when you need to know.

- Leo Laporte

My goodness!  I’ve worked in IT for over 20 years and something as simple as the issue that afflicted Google does not warrant the amount of attention shown by Cali, nor the vitriol given by Leo.  Leo, you sure didn’t ask Google to protect you, but neither did they ask you to use their search engine!  This is exactly the same as complaining about the police shooting the wrong person.  Maybe they should just go away and you can protect yourself.

I consume significant amounts of content from both of these people, and that won’t change.  But I must say I now have a lesser opinion of both of them.  It seems that Google can do no right these days.  It’s called “tall poppy syndrome“.

Facebook in my world

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Most regular readers of this blog would know I am a tinkerer, especially when it comes to the internet. I have a good many sites that I have built (and rebuilt in most cases) and I try out lots of things. It took me a while to jump into the whole social networking scene, so it is only very recently that I have really tried out the likes of Facebook and Linked In.

I’ve posted about Facebook several times before and none of it was very flattering.  I think everything I said in those posts, early in 2008, still holds true for me.  Since then I’ve picked up and begun using the Facebook iPhone application.  It’s better than the web site because it massively reduces the clutter but it cleverly introduces a new layer of irritation in that the programmers clearly had no experience with date handling.  In short, it’s an embarrasment to Facebook.  Entries on the screen will change date over time and you never know exactly when anything happened unless you check via the web site.

But that’s not why I am writing this post today.  No, what spurred this post is something I read on The Apple Blog, where Weldon Dodd wrote the most illuminating ‘aside’ about Facebook that I have seen in a while.

iPhoto also adds new sharing capabilities that integrate directly with two popular photo sites — Flickr for your good photos and Facebook for all the crappy snapshots of your friends.

This statement really tickled my fancy. You see I do continually check Facebook from my iPhone and, wading through the clutter of “so and so scored 1 million points on the latest fad” messages and the ever-elusive dates, what I see is this.  None of my contacts spend much time keeping Facebook up to date. It is clearly treated as a poor cousin to other aspects of their lives, online or otherwise.

Take a look at the photos you can find on Facebook.  They are largely of the “my friends”, “me” or “we went/were here” snapshot variety.  Then look at Flickr, where you will find some of the most amazing artistry you have ever seen.  Weldon was spot on.

Taking it further, I would summarise Facebook as somewhere people go to be on a social network.  It’s not an extension of themselves but something extra they (try to) do.  For this reason, at least in my circle of friends, it fails to be a true social network.

But…

It is a vehicle for keeping tabs on what people are up to.  Or at least it would be if people devoted enough time to it.  Certainly I have re-connected with one person entirely because of Facebook and for that I am grateful.  But that person has posted maybe half a dozen “updates” in the year or so since we “found” each other again.  (To be fair, I’ve posted less!)

So this most valuable facet of Facebook is underused, obviously, by the type of person I know and care to keep in touch with.  This stands to reason if you work with my social factor calculation.  Is there a better solution to this desire to keeping tabs on your friends lives?

I think there is.  The trouble is it is a bit of a Catch 22. You see, most people don’t get Twitter until they start using it and see what happens.  I know I didn’t, but I know I live with it every day now and I love it.  I’m not going to try and explain it here, as I have seen many other people fail.  Rather I will send you to this video which is really very well done.

And I’ll make a plea.  Those people who know me, who use Facebook, but rarely to let friends know what’s going on in their lives, and who are not already on Twitter – give it a try.  Please.  For me.  Watch the video, then come visit me.  Those of you who are on Twitter, but aren’t using it (you know who you are), please take a little time to get into it.  I should add that Twitter really took on a new dimension for me when I enabled myself to post updates when away from my computer, using my iPhone in my case – it definitely makes it easier to post and more topical.  There are many ways to do this if you have a reasonably modern mobile device.

P.S. I’ll still be checking Facebook regularly.