Re: [FRIAM] Facebook: OK, now what!?

[Steve Smith]

FaceBook reminds me too much of AOL when it first came onto the Internet...   I have been interested in internet/web-enabled social systems since 1979 when I first got an account on a UNIX machine and discovered UUNet Mail and News in it's somewhat early form. Unfortunately, there is something about what happens when the unwashed masses use these technologies that is offensive to me.  I'm probably just some kind of elitist.   Even (especially?) USENet News was full of prattle... but the signal/noise ratio was like .2 instead of AOL/Facebook/etc.  that seem more like .01 . I got on FaceBook because my grown daughters are there and it was a good way to keep up with what they were up to... but I quickly discovered that following their blogs (both centered on their craft-work) was in many ways better... the amount of chatter (around, not by) them on Facebook is rather distracting....  but then I'm not GenY... so maybe that is the irritant. FWIW... my elder daughter (30, Phd BioMed 2007) was just visiting and said essentially the same thing... just too much prattle of the not-so-interesting variety.. Prattle on, - Steve Thus spake Owen Densmore circa 11/22/2009 08:13 AM: update. Not sure I grok it all, but if I'm going to be tweeting, I'd like it to also be published in facebook, right? Not necessarily. I do. In fact, twitter is way more useful to me than facebook. So, I treat facebook as a kind-of ditch to catch the run-off from twitter. More importantly, twitter should be viewed as a global IRC chat room, which is what it is. [grin] So, by using tircd <http://code.google.com/p/tircd/>, I can address twitter through the proper interface. People who use the two media (facebook vs. twitter) can, I think, be divided into two types that, to me, are very similar to the two types of WWW people: flat/simple html vs. busy/dynamic applets. I _hate_ ajax style web pages with lots of little wiggly bits, pop-ups, tooltips, drop-downs, etc. I like a nice clean interface that doesn't do anything without my _explicit_ and purposeful action.... I really like my motorcycle's gear shifting mechanism... it makes a nice visceral CLUNK when I shift. I like my computers (and my guns) the same. I don't want it doing anything unless I _tell_ it to do precisely that thing. For the same reasons, I dislike touch screens and rely fundamentally on actual buttons.... There's nothing as satisfying as the force feedback of a buckling spring keyboard in comparison to these wimpy clickety-clack things so popular nowadays. Facebook is full of annoying little wiggly bits that move around regardless of what you do (or want to do). Twitter, on the other hand, is a well-behaved, simple thing... Facebook seems very Windowsy/Macsy and twitter seems very unixy. So, I think whether you want to hook your twitter feed directly and automatically into facebook depends on what type of person you are and what type of "friends" you have. Since I don't like facebook and dribble my banal, useless offerings mainly into IRC, it allows my Windowsy/Macsy friends to pretend that I'm one of them.

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