Social Media Blog

Thoughts and rants on social networking.

Sunset on Instagram

Posted on December 18, 2012 by Tim Hall

With the news that Instagram’s new terms-of-service appears to allow them to sell users’ photos to any third party without restrictions, I do have to wonder if there’s a viable business model for social networking other than free access in return for selling your personal data to advertisers.

Paid subscription websites have never really got off the ground. It seems people are quite happy to shell out significant amounts of money on laptops, tablets and mobile devices, yet the market is resistant to paying for online services, which can’t compete with “free” (even though you end up paying far more than you realise in other ways).

It will be interesting to see what happens to app.net, which is an ad-free, subscription-based social network. Will it break out beyond a small niche of technophiles, or will it only ever be used by small numbers of enthusiasts?

I can see a “freemium” model working; a basic “free” model supported by advertising, with a paid subscription option for power users that banishes the ads and adds both more features and gives users more control over their personal data. As far as I know, nobody does this.

We shall have to see what sort of backlash Instagram’s announcement generates. If they end up losing a significant proportion of their user base, maybe the next generation of social media startups will explore other models?

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Is Twitter Pivoting?

Posted on November 17, 2012 by Tim Hall

Dalton Caldwell thinks Twitter is pivoting. This is what Twitter is now, at least to me:

The core user experience of Twitter is the sending and receiving of messages with other people. It’s a communications tool.

But that model is less effective at selling eyeballs to advertisers. So it may be turning into this:

the future of Twitter: a media company writing software that is optimized for mostly passive users interested in a media and entertainment filter.

Now, I love Twitter in it’s current form. It’s a great place for conversations and connecting with cool new people. Unlike some, I’m far less interested in following celebrities, especially those who aren’t interested in interacting with those who follow them. It may be premature to announce the death of Twitter, but it is a reminder that nothing last forever on the net.

Social networks come and go. When was the last time you logged on to MySpace? Or sent a message in last.fm?

I’ve been on the net long enough to remember when AOL killed off CompuServe. But I’m still in contact with some of the friends I made through that network. Never forget that the relationships with actual people are far more important that whatever social networks you communicate on.

And there is a reason I’m now posting more on this blog rather than on social networks.

Posted in Social Media | Tagged | 4 Comments

Why I Hate Facebook (again)

Posted on November 16, 2012 by Tim Hall

If you’ve got more than a handful of “friends” on Facebook, sooner or later you’ll start seeing a lot of this sort of fluff.

It’s typically shared pictures that aren’t actually photos your friends have taken, but graphics containing Hallmark card platitudes and passive-aggressive emotional blackmail, and sometimes a tide of this rubbush threatens to overwhelm the feed. I think it’s a consequence of Facebook’s edge-rank algorithm favouring pictures over text. I’m muting them on an industrial scale, with anything from Someecards, source of the example above getting shot on sight.

Now there is a blog on tumblr dedicated to this nauseating “inspirational” drivel. Got to love the sarcastic comments against each one.

As for where this stuff comes from, it’s worth quoting this comment left on an earlier post on this blog:

You ready to really hate them? Most of them come from like-farm accounts. You make a Page, you autopost platitudes, Cheezburger pics, someecards, patriotic tripe, whatever. Then you auction off the page to spammers. Yep, you want a Facebook page with 20,000 fans? Who are pre-selected for naïveté? You can buy one.

Quite.

Posted in Social Media | Tagged , | 11 Comments

One thing I’d really like Facebook and other social networks to do is give me that ability to block all .gif files containing Hallmark-card platitudes…

Posted on November 11, 2012 by Tim Hall | 3 Comments

Facebook – The Wal-Mart of the internet

Posted on November 4, 2012 by Tim Hall

Facebook’s recent behaviour with the pay-to-play “promote” is screwing over small businesses, and I know for a fact that a lot of bands are up in arms about this.

By sucking the life out of the artists’ own forums and websites, they’ve encouraged bands to use Facebook as their primary means of communicating with fans. Now they’re changed the rules, played a bait-and-switch, and are demanding money for continued access to their own fanbases.

There are a lot of parallels with the way big supermarket chains have used predatory pricing to force their smaller independent competitors out of business, and then hike their prices once they’ve established a near monopoly.

Facebook is the Wal-Mart of the internet.

Posted in Music, Social Media | Tagged | 4 Comments

Would you classify this as a bug?

Posted on September 27, 2012 by Tim Hall

Mashable have found a bug in Facebook that means you can create wall posts that can’t be deleted.

You can reproduce this by posting something, quite possibly something rude and offensive, on a friends wall, then defriending and blocking them. Blocking them means neither of you can see each other’s posts and walls, and neither of you can see the post. But it remains visible to anyone else who can see the former friends’s wall. Because neither of you can see it, neither of you can delete it either.

Is this a bug?

I would say that it is, and would log it as a defect were I working as a tester for Facebook. Techically it’s a missed requirement rather than simple coding error, but the potential unexpected consequence could be quite serious. There’s quite a lot of potential for malicious misuse of this.

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

Twitter turning into a walled garden?

Posted on September 21, 2012 by Tim Hall

Following on from Tumblr and Instrgram, IFTTT is the latest victim of Twitter’s API changes, which forbid syndication of Tweets to other cloud services. Twitter, rather than being a glue that held other parts of people’s online presence together is trying to become more of a walled garden, like Facebook. This is not a good thing.

The relationships we build and maintain through social networks are far more valuable to us than the networks themselves.

Twitter ignores this at their peril.

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Time to log out of Facebook?

Posted on April 29, 2012 by Tim Hall

I’ve recently taken an extended break from Facebook. I’d got fed up with the drama, vapidity, over-sharing and passive-aggressiveness. I’m know I’m probably guilty of some of those things myself; that and the fact can easily become a huge time-sink are reasons I felt I needed a time-out from the place. But it’s made me wonder if there is a better way.

I really detest Facebook’s walled-garden approach. The most valuable thing about any internet-based community site isn’t the site itself, it’s the relationships you build and maintain through it. I don’t want those relationships wholly owned and controlled by an increasingly creepy corporation that’s only interested in monetising our mutual personal data so they can sell it to advertisers. Facebook has sucked the life out of far too many forums and blogs, and while many forums have their own problems, that can’t be a good thing. With more and more external websites morphing into detestable Facebook ‘apps’, they’re now actively trying to eat the rest of the web.

The only reason I’ve got a Facebook account at all is because there are people who have no significant online presence outside it, and I don’t want to lose all contact with them. I’d much rather a few more people who want to contact me follow me on Twitter, or comment on my blog. Or just use old-fashioned email.

It’s been said that Facebook was created by people with Aspergers syndrome. Whether this is true or not, it does appear to have belief in the geek social fallacies written all over it, especially #4 in that list. That does seem to be a root cause of a lot of the site’s problems.

In an ideal world, a combination of Twitter and blogging does everything I want out social networking. But blogging in particular is quite hard work if you want to build an audience. Facebook’s greatest strength is that it provides a ready-made audience for those who don’t have an awful lot to say. Unfortunately that’s also it’s greatest weakness, hence the vapidity and over-sharing. I always feel bad when I have to mute, unfollow or in the worse cases block people because they’re friends-of-friends in real life. Just because we like the same music doesn’t necessarily mean we have anything else in common.

So what to do? Should I hold my nose and use Facebook sparingly, just to keep in touch with those who are active nowhere else? Or should I try to encourage more people who actively want to interact with me online to follow me on Twitter or read my blog? Should I be spending more of my online time on existing communities like RMWeb and Dreamlyrics? Or should I put my faith in alternatives such as Google+ or even Diaspora?

You should be asking yourselves the same questions.

Posted in Social Media | Tagged , , | 10 Comments

Facebook’s New Look – A Tester’s Perspective

Posted on September 23, 2011 by Tim Hall

If you’re on any social network you’ll know that Facebook rolled out some major changes to their system over the last couple of days. To say it’s gone down like a lead balloon would be an understatement, Facebook users have always been a bit small-c conservative, and don’t like change. But the rage I’m seeing this time round is a lot more intense.

Having a background in software testing gives me some insight into how and why they’ve annoyed so many people so badly this time.

What appears to have happened is they’ve lauched some potentially powerful new features without really bothering to explain to anyone how they work or how they should be used.. Smart Lists are a good example; They’re similar to the circles in Google+, and almost certainly implemented as a response to that. But again, they haven’t made the implications of adding people to certain types of list clear. This probably explains why we’ve seen more than one rock band adding all their fans as employees. Once could be a mistake, twice looks like careless UI design.

As we’ve come to expect from Facebook by now, they’ve set the defaults for most things to values that aren’t the ones you’d have chosen. And it goes without saying that every new data-sharing is opt-out with the relevent option hidden in a rusty filing cabinet marked “Beware of the leopard”. Likewise, I don’t think they’ve bothered to test it properly before they rolled the changes out. Although in this case it’s not so much that the actual software is buggy, but the the design is not as intuitive to ordinary people as their designers seem to think it is.

Facebook’s problem is that a large proportion of its user base isn’t made up of tech-savvy computer nerds, but people like your mum. They’re not the least bit interested in performing unpaid exploratory testing of new and occasionally half-baked software products. They just want to share pictures of grandchildren.

Posted in Social Media, Testing & Software | Tagged | 2 Comments