Sorry about the title. I have trouble restraining myself at times when it comes to abusing the English language.
Yes, it's Tuesday, which means I'm here to type at you about technology.
As you may have recently been informed, it is 2012, and many of us are using Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Oh, and my glorious Windows Phone also dumps out to LinkedIn and Windows Live, which I'd no idea also pretended to be a social site, but there it is (remember that time we all had hotmail addresses? Yeah, 200+ pieces of junkmail per day was hilarious.)
Oh, and I'm told there are still people on MySpace. Remind me, and I'll send someone to check on them. I was never a member there. My wife, I think, was. I think she's the one who showed me a friend's page, and it was all blinking and animated and shit, and all around, visually murderous.
In short, MySpace managed to displace tentacle porn as the worst thing on the internet.
Point being, there's a flood of 'social sites' out there, and I'm on all of them except for MySpace.
But why?
What's amazing is that I've seen many people turn Facebook into an incredible time sink. It becomes an 'activity,' something that you actively sit down and 'do.' I've had people tell me that they are 'facebooking,' and keep a straight face (with glazed eyes and Everquest-ish 'click-click-click' sound emanating in the background.) What's amazing is that this verb has penetrated the American lexicon, and is something commonly understood by most.
Now, I'm a terrible 'Facebooker.' I don't check on anybody. I just make sure they know about me. I've had people growl at me for not being aware of events they'd posted on Facebook, or even direct me to Facebook to find out what's new with them, in place of having a conversation with me. I don't normally regard myself as one who's slow to change (even if I did take a while to recover from Battlestar Galactica no longer being on the air), but I was surprised by these changes to the conversational dynamic.
When I look at my Facebook page, I have 200-something friends, which is probably too many. I then look at some of my teenage second-cousins, and they have 400-500. It is then, I believe, that you need to hire a Facebook Analyst to parse your news feed, and distill key elements into readable tales for later consumption.
At what point does Facebook stop streamlining your life and become a part-time job?
That's one of the reasons I've always preferred Twitter for this kind of stuff.
I believe I did it backwards, and had a Twitter account before I had a Facebook account. I think.
To me, Twitter has always been Facebook without all the baggage. I don't have to worry about you spamming me with another data-farming Zynga application. I know that you're pooping, and now you're eating at Chipotle, and now you're bitching about something on TV. I'm good with that.
Even Twitter's membership is streamlined. Most of the mouth-breathers just don't get it, and again, I'm good with that. There's a technological divide between Facebook and Twitter that I find fascinating. It's as if the more tech-savvy openly embrace Twitter's simplicity, while the more generic folks recoil in horror at not being able to spam Farmville updates onto an unwilling public (that crap is super-easy to block, by the way.)
And then there's Google+. Um. I like it, but it's still yet another social site. I vastly prefer its interface to Facebook, but everyone is on Facebook.
Facebook's stranglehold on the social scene is akin to Apple's on the 'cool appliance' scene.
Two words: rich ecosystem.
I mean, it's not like Facebook has a reasonably good interface, or isn't harvesting personal data and trying to fool you into making it available to all of its partners. It's a terrible interface that is intentionally confusing when it comes to toggling settings that relate to your personal data, and it's slowly but surely approaching a critical mass in terms of how much stuff shows up on your news feed. It's a cluttered mess, there's a lot of reasons not to like it, but everyone's on there and that's the most important part of a social site.
In closing, I suffer Facebook for you, my friends. That's my how much love I have for you in my blackest of hearts. I will tolerate bad interface (not quite Sony bad) and the auctioning of my personal data because I want you to know that it's important to me to know when you're pooping or when your kid hit a homerun in a little league game.
What about you? What's your take on social sites? What do you like and not like? Why? How do you think it's changed the way we interact with each other?
-Blaine
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