Social Media Blog

Thoughts and rants on social networking.

Is Facebook approaching the tipping point?

Posted on January 22, 2014 by Tim Hall

Vocativ thinks it is, using disease epidemics as a parallel.

Like the bubonic plague, Facebook will eventually come to an end.

According to new research from Princeton, which compared the ”adoption and abandonment dynamics” of social networks by “drawing analogy to the dynamics that govern the spread of infectious disease,” Facebook is beginning to die out.

Specifically, the researchers concluded that “Facebook will undergo a rapid decline in the coming years, losing 80 percent of its peak user base between 2015 and 2017.”

As I’ve said before, Facebook’s big problem is that its “All your friends gathered together in one place” model is broken for anyone who has anything more to say than banal platitudes or sharing baby photos. It’s become the online equivalent of the awkward family dinner where there are subjects you can’t mention because they set off racist Uncle George.

I’ve getting more convinced that serious discussions on culture or politics should be taking place on forums with like-minded people where you’re not obliged to walk on eggshells because of the aforementioned Uncle Georges.

I know a lot of people who hate Facebook but are only on there because everyone else is. It’s been alienating users of late with increasingly intrusive advertising, ever-changing rules determing who does and doesn’t see content you post, and a perpetually cavalier approach to privacy. I’ve oten thought that Facebook was doomed the moment anything better came along, but now I’m thinking we don’t need somebody to go and build a better Facebook, we need to create smaller overlapping communities of like-minded people. Like we used to have, in fact, before Facebook came along.

As an aside, if you read the rest of the above link, it’s a poster child for DON’T READ THE COMMENTS. More evidence that media websites should only allow comments if the site owner is willing to invest time and effort into moderation.

Posted in Social Media | Tagged | 2 Comments

We Get Mail

Posted on January 15, 2014 by Tim Hall

From a Mr Richard Uba in Nigeria

Dear Friend

My name is Mr.Richard Uba, I am a director of fact finding and special duties, I am newly appointed to head the department in this Apex Bank (CBN). In pursuit, I and my two staffs of my department found out some irregularities going on, your payment with Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). And we found out that you had met all the statutory requirement needed to effect transfer of your funds into your bank account. I am not happy with the way people have been extorting money from you on pretext to help you receive your Million Dollars with this bank.

I will advice you from this moment to desist from communicating with these unscrupulous elements that paraded themselves to be good innocent people, I want to let you know that if you did not desist from this bad elements, that you will continue paying your hard earned money to them and with their endless stories, requesting one certificate to another. I can assure you that since last years this their fraudulent character had started and none of them can pay you the supposed money. Note that all the money you had paid to them were used for their personal interest/ benefits, I reiterated that you should stop any further correspondence with this unbelievers.

It is a pity that this people had extorted much money from you, but I had personally introduced a device that can be possibly use to pay you all this money without any further documentation, but it must be keep secret because I want to use the method the foreign currencies do come into he country. It will be arranged through diplomatic preference carriage scheme. I will first dispatch two boxes that will contained $20million of $100 bills to your private address and after receipt of the boxes and you confirm the contents from your bankers.

Then, I will send to you another batch, but I will advice that you let nobody know about this method to avoid people eyebrow. I had arranged with the courier company, the company had agreed to dispatch the boxes, but I did not tell them the original contents because the courier companies do not carry physical cash for dispatch, what will declare to them as the contents of the boxes is sensitive films and film materials, so that the company will not request for physical inspections because the films material does not require sunrays or contact with air.

I will finally conclude with the courier company, when I receive your go ahead order, please kindly stop any further discussion with these people and do not pay any more money to them or to those called themselves bank officials. I will furnish you with more information’s as soon as I receive your go ahead order, that you will compensate me and my colleague’s with the sum of $2,000,000.00 dollars. For your information, the courier will charge us for delivery and we have to pay them before the delivery.

I wait to hearing from you

Best regards
Mr.Richard Uba

Because whatever you do, you must always avoid people eyebrow. Sign this guy up as the next chairman of The Royal Bank of Scotland immediately.

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For those of you who haven’t noticed, I’m taking an extended break from Facebook. At the moment I have yet to decide whether or not this will become permanent, though one Large Halibut is claiming Facebook is boring without me. One thing I’m trying to discover is how well I can maintain contact with FB acquaintances via blogging, other social networks, or plain old email.

Posted on January 7, 2014 by Tim Hall | 1 Comment

Geek Social Fallacies

Posted on December 29, 2013 by Tim Hall

Whenever there is drama online, it’s always worth paying attention to the Geek Social Fallacies.  In this case, #4: Friendship Is Transitive

Every carrier of GSF4 has, at some point, said:

“Wouldn’t it be great to get all my groups of friends into one place for one big happy party?!”

If you groaned at that last paragraph, you may be a recovering GSF4 carrier.

GSF4 is the belief that any two of your friends ought to be friends with each other, and if they’re not, something is Very Wrong.

Hands up who else groaned at that, and immediately thought “That’s exactly what’s wrong with Facebook”?

Posted in Social Media | Tagged | 3 Comments

I am beginning to think it’s time for all of us to dump Facebook and go back to forums, blogs and email. Facebook tries to be all of those things mashed into one, and succeeds only in doing them all badly. Its only success has been in killing off everything that did those things better than Facebook does.

Posted on December 17, 2013 by Tim Hall | 4 Comments

The Twitter Block Fail Whale

Posted on December 14, 2013 by Tim Hall

FailWhaleIf you’ve been on Twitter the last couple of days you’ll have noticed a major shitstorm over Twitter’s ill-considered change to the way blocking worked.

Previously the block function not only prevented you from seeing the posts from people you’d blocked, but it also prevented them from following you or seeing your own tweets. The change reduced this to a mere “mute” functions; all it did was to mute them from your own timeline and interactions tabs, without preventing them from following or even from retweeting you.

All credit to Twitter for rolling back the change within the space of a few hours in response to the storm of anger from users, but you have to wonder what they were thinking when they implemented it in the first place. Something tells me that nobody involved in the decision ever consulted anyone with first-hand experience of online harassment or stalking.

Yes, I am aware that blocking was never 100% effective, since your public posts are still visible to a logged-out user if they go to your profile. But there’s a big difference between @Dickhead being able to see your profile by logging out, and @Dickhead being able to follow you and retweet your posts to his dickhead friends. It’s akin to saying there’s no point locking your door because a burglar can always break the window.

And I’m also aware that Twitter has a serious problem with abusers and trolls, and there isn’t any optimal solution that doesn’t have potential downsides; successful moderation strategies that work on community-based sites just don’t scale to something the size of Twitter, especially it’s part of a wider ecosystem that includes other sites over which Twitter has no control. But that’s no excuse to roll out a change that actually enables the bad actors.

Posted in Social Media, Testing & Software | Tagged , | Comments Off

When did the word “meme” come to mean “Self-righteous or passive-aggressive platitude superimposed upon a stock image to be shared on social media by attention-seeking individuals who are too lazy to post anything original of their own”?

Posted on December 5, 2013 by Tim Hall | 1 Comment

Do the people who always use “lol” in place of full stops on the Internet also end every sentence in real-life conversations with an intensely annoying high-pitched laugh? Because that’s what I hear in my head when I read their posts…

Posted on November 16, 2013 by Tim Hall | 1 Comment

You know you’re too deep in the YouTube rabbit-hole when you come to an episode of The Teletubbies dubbed into German. I’m blaming Mertesacker for this…

Posted on October 31, 2013 by Tim Hall | Comments Off

The day Twitter.com died

Posted on October 30, 2013 by Tim Hall

Twitter have done what they’ve been threatening to do for a while, and started displaying “rich content” (i.e. pictures and videos) in timelines. It means Twitter now looks like this:

The Day That Twitter Died

It is just as bad if not worse than I feared it would be, with what had been a clean text-focussed User Experience utterly clogged-up with low-value images that dramatically lowered the signal-to-noise ratio.

The grinning backpfeifengesicht above is from one of the dreaded “Promoted Tweets”, and probably gives away the real reason for the change; it’s a backdoor implementation of huge intrusive banner ads.

The Twitter blog makes this claim:

So many of the great moments you share on Twitter are made even better with photos or with videos from Vine. These rich Tweets can bring your followers closer to what’s happening, and make them feel like they are right there with you.

We want to make it easier for everyone to experience those moments on Twitter. That’s why starting today, timelines on Twitter will be more visual and more engaging: previews of Twitter photos and videos from Vine will be front and center in Tweets. To see more of the photo or play the video, just tap.

I’ve left with the impression that Twitter’s intended audience for this is semi-literate teens and annoying marketing types who want the ability to shout louder than everyone else. As others have said, Twitter now resembles what many of us don’t like about Facebook.

Fortunately the iOS and Android Twitter clients give the ability to switch this new feature off, but no such setting exists in Twitter.com. For us grownups who want to use Twitter to express ourselves in words, it’s time to stick a fork in Twitter.com and use alternative web-based or desktop clients.

Posted in Social Media | Tagged | 1 Comment