Facebook is just full of announcements this week. Here's the latest, about redesigning the profiles. Some things could be very cool, like listen to the same music as your friend, which would require using the ticker and whatever music app your friend is using at the time. Likes, etc. will be in the ticker, not cluttering up the feed, but I plan to hide the annoying ticker, which I'm mostly ignoring now, anyway, so I'll miss out on all that. Still not sure how I feel about the new Timeline. I don't think of FB as a place for my life story. Really. That's not why I use FB. I use it to communicate with folks, play games, keep up with entertainment media and causes I'm interested in. I'm involved in too many other sites to want to give them up to put everything here. And I distrust using just one service for all, anyway.
The music thing, though, while cool, is irrelevant to me. I either have the TV or radio on when I'm online. Sometimes, late at night or at work, I use Pandora, which I adore. I can't see why I'd want to listen to music, or buy books, or do much else through FB. I'm not going to abandon sites I love just because FB added that functionality.
Facebook's new profiles are, in their words, going to be more visual. Big photo upfront as your "cover." More visual usually means less accessible to the visually impaired and blind users of a site. So, not a good thing in theory or in practice. It's alienating, even if there's enough text for them to access via a screen reader.
I want more functionality for Google+. I want more of my friends there and I want the causes and TV nets and the like there, too, with the equivalent of fan pages. I want the games I play on FB to be on G+, too. Then I would just need to check FB for the few folks who haven't made the move to G+.
~~~o0o~~~
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Facebook Fail
Facebook is rolling out changes to the site, starting with a redesign of the feed page, which, IMO, sucks. A cluttered page is more cluttered, with a right sidebar ticker that scrolls status updates ala Twitter, and a top news and recent updates that splits the middle section into a top and bottom arrangement, giving folks more places to check for updates. They've also added Smart Lists intended, I guess, to replace one's own lists, of friends. Smart Lists basically decide who should be in them: Friends, Family, etc. based on the same fuzzy FB logic that decides what should be a Top News item. Everyone I know on FB prefers to just see a straight list of everything from everybody and if we want to hide an app or person, we can.
Google+ is now open to the public. The timing is noteworthy. Will people make the switch? Dan Lyons on the Daily Beast has some thoughts on that.
If I could only get all my friends onto G+ and the games I love to play, I'd give up FB in a hearbeat.
~~~o0o~~~
Google+ is now open to the public. The timing is noteworthy. Will people make the switch? Dan Lyons on the Daily Beast has some thoughts on that.
If I could only get all my friends onto G+ and the games I love to play, I'd give up FB in a hearbeat.
~~~o0o~~~
Wednesday, September 07, 2011
Social Media Redux
Posted this on Google+. Thought I'd post it here, too, since I haven't posted here in a while.
There are people who will keep trying new social sites, like me! And there are people who will start with one and stick with it and not venture elsewhere. And folks who will avoid social media like the plague. And others who fall somewhere in between. Facebook has become the site most people I know use. Some had used something else prior, but most started with FB, some because I talked them into it. Many of those barely use it, except maybe to read what others have to say, or to chat privately because I never see anything posted by them other than their latest friend-adding. I do not expect to see these people join G+. I posted about my G+ invites on FB and those interested have joined. That's where it ends, I think.
So, what do I use this for? To chat with yet more new folks, the way I ended up doing on FB with people I met for game-playing. But my friends and colleagues who do use social media are on FB, not here, so my attention is split, my posting is split. Or duplicated.
LiveJournal was once a big thing. For so many people I know, it remains the only thing. If they have a FB account, they use it for family updating, or photo-sharing, or to promote their writing, art, photography, etc. LiveJournal is where they feel safe to kick back and share thoughts and ideas and experiences via friends-locked posts and the threaded comments. I loved LJ enough to pay for a permanent account, yet I hardly post there, anymore, and barely read my Friends Page, anymore. Not due to boredom or loss of interest, but lack of time. There are folks on LJ I follow who I don't follow elsewhere. But something had to give.
I wonder sometimes if, once I'm retired, I'll be spending all day online, devoting x number of hours daily to each social site I use and blogs I read. Will this be my life, or will I make time for real life activities, too, maybe catch up on my book reading. And now I'm feeling the urge to blog this. Because my blogs reach a whole different audience. And should I put it on my FB page, too?
~~~o0o~~~
There are people who will keep trying new social sites, like me! And there are people who will start with one and stick with it and not venture elsewhere. And folks who will avoid social media like the plague. And others who fall somewhere in between. Facebook has become the site most people I know use. Some had used something else prior, but most started with FB, some because I talked them into it. Many of those barely use it, except maybe to read what others have to say, or to chat privately because I never see anything posted by them other than their latest friend-adding. I do not expect to see these people join G+. I posted about my G+ invites on FB and those interested have joined. That's where it ends, I think.
So, what do I use this for? To chat with yet more new folks, the way I ended up doing on FB with people I met for game-playing. But my friends and colleagues who do use social media are on FB, not here, so my attention is split, my posting is split. Or duplicated.
LiveJournal was once a big thing. For so many people I know, it remains the only thing. If they have a FB account, they use it for family updating, or photo-sharing, or to promote their writing, art, photography, etc. LiveJournal is where they feel safe to kick back and share thoughts and ideas and experiences via friends-locked posts and the threaded comments. I loved LJ enough to pay for a permanent account, yet I hardly post there, anymore, and barely read my Friends Page, anymore. Not due to boredom or loss of interest, but lack of time. There are folks on LJ I follow who I don't follow elsewhere. But something had to give.
I wonder sometimes if, once I'm retired, I'll be spending all day online, devoting x number of hours daily to each social site I use and blogs I read. Will this be my life, or will I make time for real life activities, too, maybe catch up on my book reading. And now I'm feeling the urge to blog this. Because my blogs reach a whole different audience. And should I put it on my FB page, too?
~~~o0o~~~
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