slamboard

I don’t like Facebook very much and my participation in it is minimal. One app that I did add to my page was a music player. I uploaded an MP3 of my own singing and guitar playing. Yesterday I tried to play the thing and I found out that it is disabled because of a demand made by the RIAA.

I suppose a lot of people were using this application to illegally share copyrighted music. This is not what I was doing. I’m a little bit disappointed.

This question probably has as many answers as there are users for both social websites combined. The thing that I keep coming back to is this… While I dislike both of them, I feel conflicted about abandoning Facebook because it is populated by so many family and friends from the tertiary wave of internet users. I had a telephone conversation with one of my Facebook friends this month and we talked about our mutual underwhelmedness of Facebook. I just don’t care about MySpace, I added all the puppets as friends and then abandoned it. The fact that it is full of viruses is just that much more reason to stay away.

While I was writing this post slagging Facebook, I went there and sent a video to everybody… and I looked at an old school friend’s photo album.

I have to apologize to all the old friends, dear relatives and tangential acquaintances that are on my list of friends on Facebook. I do not participate to any appreciable amount in this social website. I actually kinda HATE it. My hatred of Facebook is actually a profound enough reaction that I am looking for a way to channel it into something useful.

This blog is not my Facebook. I am thinking of formally proclaiming another blog as MyFacebook.

I am not going to try to come to a complete understanding of what the new Google OpenSocial APIs represent. I am just going to let it happen.

The story that interests me is the supposed competition between Facebook and Google on this technology front. There is a booming business of App development for Facebook, but they are only used with that network. This is by design, the developers are stuck using a proprietary interface language.

The new google stuff is going to allow for the creation of applications that can be put virtually anywhere.

I just relented today and added a Facebook widget that I had been invited to add repeatedly. I actually want someone to make a widget for asocial people like me to put on their Facebook that very politely informs their relatives and acquaintances that they don’t want to be a vampire or a zombie and that they do not want to be given any virtual cocktails. It’s not that I don’t like these people, I just don’t participate. I am actually proud to say that I have not added any ‘friends’ that I do not like. I don’t approve of the way that online social networks have rendered the word friends even more meaningless than ever, but I haven’t strategically added anyone that I actively dislike. I haven’t confirmed anyone that I dislike either.

It is mind boggling to see the dollar amounts that are attached to social media sites. I have expressed my lack of appreciation for Facebook in the past. I have to admit that I am a unique individual who has never been much of a joiner. I am not a target audience. I am not a key demographic. I personally think that Facebook was overvalued in much the same way that YouTube was overvalued and MySpace was overvalued. I am very much a YouTube enthusiast, but I have been noticing a deterioration in content there as of late. Here is a video from Puppet Tom, a soft and conversive version of Tom from MySpace. He was congratulating YouTube on being bought by Google way back when, for about 1/10th of the value that Microsoft just applied to Facebook when it bought a small share for $240 million.

MySpace was bought outright by News Corp. who paid $580 million back in 2005.

Facebook seems to have joined the list of social websites that I join and then eventually abandon. I am sure that a large portion of the people who joined are very enthusiastic and check in multiple times daily. I go for weeks without thinking about it.

The simple explanation would be ‘Martin is an introvert.’

I don’t think it is that simple. I am generally an active member of one forum or another and I have been for a few years. I saw one board through from start to finish and mourned its passing. I think I just do not value social activity for its own sake. Maybe I am selfish.

Just so people don’t think I am bashing Facebook, I think MySpace is boring too.

I had a very brief Honeymoon Period with Facebook. It was interesting to make contact with old school friends and distant relatives in a superficial way that doesn’t have the anxiety associated with making contact for a reason.

Now there is a weird hodge podge of applications that just rub me the wrong way for some reason. I don’t want to be a zombie. I don’t want to join your TV trivia team. I am very afraid that once there are enough options, people of a certain age group will choose to pimp their Facebooks up to look like MySpace pages.

Mark Zuckerberg is facing a court battle related to Facebook, the social site that he created. Three men who attended Harvard with Mark contend that he stole the idea from them. They originally filed a suit in 2004. That was dismissed and they immediately refiled. They have just had one of life’s little victories as a judge has granted them some more time to make their case.

The plaintiffs want, well, they want Facebook.

They have a similar site that has 70,000 users. Facebook has 31 million users and counting.

I have a very unbalanced group of friends on Facebook. It’s not that they are unbalanced as individuals, it’s just that they are a random sampling of old acquaintances that I found at random. They are all great people. I am an introverted person that is not well suited to social sites.

Source: BBC