Tag Archives: Facebook

A blog post by Steven Waddington uses the metaphor of Twitter being a kind of virtual pub where you can meet and chat with interesting people. By comparison, Facebook can be like an awkward family gathering where you have to avoid bringing up certain subjects because they’ll set off Great Uncle Kenneth…

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

That Facebook Privacy Meme

Posted on January 6, 2013 by Tim Hall

I see this cut-and-paste meme is doing the rounds on Facebook yet again.

Dear friends: I want to stay PRIVATELY connected with you. I post pictures of my family & friends that I don’t want strangers to have access to.

However, with the recent changes in fb, anyone can now see activities on ANY wall. This happens when our friends hits “like” or “comment” automatically, their friends would see our posts too. Unfortunately, I can not change this settings by myself because Facebook has configured it this way.

So as a big favor could you place your cursor over my name above (DO NOT CLICK), a window will appear, now move the cursor on “FRIENDS” (also without clicking), then down to “Settings”, click here and a list will appear. REMOVE the CHECK on “COMMENTS & LIKE” and also “PHOTOS”. By doing this, my activity among you my friends and family will no longer become public.

Yes, of course it’s a hoax, but such is Facebook’s cavalier attitude towards privacy that it’s hard to blame people for spreading it. But do try to remember that, like most of these cut-and-paste chain letter-a-likes, it’s a load of cobblers. The fact is, if you comment on any public post in Facebook, the whole world will be able to see it. That’s always been the case. And unsubscribing from photos means you no longer see that person’s photos in your feed. You do that to mute people who post too many annoying platitude-jpgs, not for the sake of privacy!

Of course, the problem with Facebook’s deliberate blurring of public and private is that it encourages people to overshare, all the better for them to sell your data to advertisers. That’s their entire business model. It’s not a “safe space” where you can share things you don’t want employers, partners or complete strangers to be able to see, as much as Facebook misleadingly makes people to think it is.

If you want to share things privately, and want control of who can and can’t see what you post, then Facebook isn’t really the venue for that sort of thing. There are plenty of photo-sharing sites that have far more robust privacy policies, so those family photos can’t been seen by anyone but family. There are also plenty of places on the net that don’t require you to use your real name, so your public postings won’t show up when some censorious busybody from Human Resources Googles on your name. And if you don’t want anybody eavesdropping in private conversations with friends, there’s always good old-fashioned email.

Posted in Social Media | Tagged | Comments Off

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

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

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

Does Blogging Still Have A Future?

Posted on September 28, 2011 by Tim Hall

Has blogging had it’s day, or does it still have a place in the world of social networking?

Yesterday was not a typical day for this blog. I posted an opinionated and provocative rant that aimed a broadside at the cynicism of the record industry and the conservatism of some so-called progressive rock fans. It got picked up by a couple of very high-profile people on Facebook and Twitter, and my hit counter went through the roof.

But normally, when I’ve spent hours writing something like a detailed album review, the sort of readership I get is a fraction the number of people who’d read a pithy one-line status update on Facebook. Given my annual hosting bill for this site, sometimes I wonder if it’s an effective use of my time and money any more.

Social networking has already killed off all but the highest traffic web forums just as web forums killed most internet mailing lists before them. Is it now killing blogging as well?

Twitter has certainly killed off link blogging. There is no point maintaining a real-time stream of topical links using a blogging platform any more; Twitter just does that so much better. But for longer opinion pieces?

One thing I’ve noticed is that I’m often getting little in the way of discussion in the comments section, although I often get a lot of intelligent and civilised discussion on my Facebook page when I link to a blog post here. That might be down to my curating of an intelligent and civilised friends list, when I only accept requests from people I know and trust, and am not shy of defriending someone who turns out to be disruptive or offensive on a regular basis. Meanwhile my blog gets a disproportionate number of drive-by trolls like the “You are a moron” guy on my Wishbone Ash review. Maybe my Facebook friends are unwilling to expose their opinions outside Facebook’s walled garden. Maybe they find the drive-by trolls make the atmosphere too unpleasant. I don’t know.

The big weakness of blog comments is a lack of identity management, which is one thing social networks do well. I’ve often heard it said that anonymity is one of the causes of bad behaviour on the internet, and trolls will go away if only you force everyone to use their real names all the time. This is only half right; what’s actually needed is some form of trusted identity, for which your public posts across multiple sites are searchable. On high-traffic sites which allow that sort of thing it’s surprising how few of someone’s posts you need to read before you get quite a good picture of where they’re coming from. You can usually tell if they’re drive-by troublemakers, or people with a passion who occasionally let their enthusiasm get the better of them. Whether you use a real name or not, a strong online reputation does take a lot of effort to built.

I wonder if it’s possible to create some sort of decentralised equivalent of social network built around the RSS feeds of existing blogs with some kind of trusted identity management for commenters? Or is the march of the social networks unstoppable, and blogs need to find a way to exist in the cracks between then?

Posted in Miscellaneous | Tagged , , | 6 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

Are Social Networking Sites Killing Web Forums?

Posted on October 20, 2009 by Tim Hall

Back in the elder days, when Men were Men, beer was one-and-six a pint, and everyone only had metered dialup internet access, internet discussions revolved around mailing lists.  (Yes, I know that before that, there was Usenet, but..) .  Then as unmetered access became the norm, people moved to web forums, and mailing list traffic slowly dwindled, and once busy lists became shadows of their former selves.

Now I wonder if web forums themselves are dying. I’m on a lot of web forums, and while a few of them still have some sporadic traffic, more and more once-busy sites seem to have been taken over by tumbleweed.  It appears that everybody’s on Facebook instead.

Only the really big forums, like RMWeb seem to be thriving. Perhaps it’s because it’s membership is large enough that it has enough of a critical mass to be able to compete with places like Facebook.  It’s noticable that the recent site redesign has made things look a little more like a social networking site than a plain web forum.  Also noticable that we seem to get more mentions on some bands on a thread in the off-topic area than some of those bands have posts on their official forums.

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