Tag Archive for: facebook

The ’90s Tech Industry is Back

The Verge has an interesting article, Facebook is the new AOL, that discusses how the tech industry of the 1990s is back.

The 90s were a decade of excess and mistakes and excessive mistakes. The rollicking good times of the 90s ended with the dot-com collapse of the early 2000s, the memories of which continue to shape the industry today.

So it’s worth noting that the broad outlines of tech in 2015 look surprisingly like the late 90s. The major players are set up the same, the fights are the same, and the mistakes will almost certainly be the same…

2015 will be defined by the Revenge of 90s Internet: media and tech giants flirting with each other, dominant players throwing their weight around, and portals, portals everywhere.

The article does a good job of comparing the major tech giants today with the ones of yesteryear. Facebook as AOL. Apple as Sony, Qualcomm as Intel and Google as Microsoft. The two that really hit the nail on the head for me are Apple as Sony and Google as Microsoft. That being said, some of these comparisons may just be skin deep. I think companies like Apple and Facebook are in much better positions than there predecessors. Perhaps that’s the point of the article. The companies of the ’90s could do no wrong and no one saw the downfall that would be not far off.

Facebook and Privacy

I remember when Facebook was a small startup targeted to students on college campuses. It was called The Facebook then, making reference to the freshmen facebook that many universities put out. It was a great and useful tool to keep in touch with your classmates, share lecture notes, and plan study groups. Then it began to grow and the creators saw opportunity. Next they opened it up to high school kids. Everyone knows once something is in the hands of high school kids it is forever ruined (slightly kidding). Then they opened it up to everyone. Not only that, they opened it up to businesses and application developers and that began the era of myspace-ification; making Facebook ugly and annoying. That hasn’t stopped their growth though. No, in fact, they are still growing by leaps and bounds and doing so they have made some really questionable decisions regarding your privacy. The latest round of decisions sold out the average user to big companies in order to make a quick buck. Not only that, but they’ve decided that once private information is now public.

Say you’re like me and have been a Facebook member for a long time. There were certain parts of your profile that you could keep private. It seems that the company no longer thinks those things should remain private, even though they explicitly said they would in the past.

“In yet another backtrack from their privacy policy, Facebook has decided to retroactively move more information into the public, indexable part of profiles. The new profile parts made public are: a list of things users have become ‘fans’ of (now renamed to ‘likes’), their education and work histories, and what they list under ‘interests.’ Apparently there is neither any opt-out nor even notice to users, despite the fact that some of this information was entered by users at a time when Facebook’s privacy policy explicitly promised that it wouldn’t be part of the public profile.” Source

That’s pretty troubling if you ask me, especially the part about them not even notifying users. How would you like to do a Google search of yourself and find information that was only available to your friends be made public without any sort of notification? I wouldn’t like it, that’s for sure. Not only is some information public now, but applications can now access your personal information. Read more

Why Facebook Has Lost Me

Okay, so I really don’t use Facebook that often. In fact, I really haven’t used it all that much since college, when it was only open to college students. I would use it off and on to keep in touch with old college friends but FB did something that made me use it even less: they opened it to high school students. As if this wasn’t bad enough they decided the general public should jump aboard and that is why Facebook sucks today. Here are my top annoyances with Facebook that caused me to give up on it.

1. Game status updates/requests
mafia

I really really don’t want to help you out in your Mafia war.  Nor do I want to help you find your sheep or feed your chickens.  This type of crap clutters my feed and makes FB look and feel like *shudder* MySpace.

2. Profile pictures showing your pregnant belly

pregnant-woman

Do you really think people want to see that as your profile picture?  They don’t. Don’t show us. You’re having a baby, fantastic! Congrats! You’re not all that special though.  Hundreds of thousands of people have babies every singe day.  If it’s something a 14 year old girl can do after making a bad decision, it’s not a miracle and we don’t really want to see it.

3. Quizzes

quiz

Let me tell you a secret,  mo one cares what comic book villain, member of The Facts of Life, character in literature, etc you would be.  Yeah, it’s cool, you want to take a quiz to find that stuff out.  I’m guilty of the same thing, here’s the difference: I do not publish that if I were a Saved by the Bell character I’d be Zack Morris to my profile.

4. Posting your Daily Horoscope

horoscope

By posting your horoscope on a daily basis you are telling me that you are a complete moron. Who believes in this crap anymore? This is 2009, not 1309. We do not use Astrology to predict anything about how your life will turn out. Your schooling has failed you. Now, go call Ms. Cleo and leave that shit off my feed.

5. Updating your status every 5 minutes. If I really wanted to know your status every 5 minutes I’d subscribe to your feed on the site that was designed for such mundane information, Twitter.

6. Flair, badges, superpokes, and gifts

flair

Why are you sending me this crap? Do I look like I want a button that says “You’re a Peach!”?  Do you think that I’m going to think that you SuperPoking me is cute? Do you like getting poked in real life? Of course not, so what makes you think everyone wants to get poked on Facebook?

I know what you might be thinking, if I hate seeing all this stuff so much, why not use Facebook Lite? That really isn’t the point. Facebook should have never gone this far with applications and the amount of crap people can post and I think they will eventually pay for it, just like how MySpace is now paying for its clutter and crap with lack of users. Facebook has tried so hard to stay relevant (and don’t get me wrong, they still are) with applications, site redesigns, idea stealing, that it just keeps makingthe site more and more cluttered.  People will get tired and move on to the next big thing eventually and Facebook will have no one to blame but themselves.