Doing More With Less Since 1972

Tag: facebook (Page 1 of 4)

Daily Reading List — February 21st

Facebook Phreaks and the Fight to Reclaim Time and Attention – App off the phone is huge. I’m basically down to using FB only so I can grab photos off our BJJ gym’s page to use in my blog posts. 😛

Get Creepy With Yourself Data Selfie – Spreading the word. Hopefully.

How Aligned Is Your Organization? – “Activity is mistaken for progress.”

Cisco snaps up AppDynamics for $3.7B right before its IPO – Dang…was hoping to jump in and buy this low in my stock trading simulator. AppDynamics is good stuff.

Top 10 Free Alternatives to Expensive Software

Why Does Time Seem to Move Faster as We Grow Older?

Former Announcer Mike Goldberg Was in the Crowd at UFC Phoenix. This is how the N.W.O. got started. #HeyYo

How to Talk CB Lingo – You know you’ve been looking for this information since the mid-70s. Dang I love the internet

Microsoft StaffHub – Hospitality, healthcare, restaurants…
Man, this is pretty cool.

Daily Reading List — January 17th

NCAA Welcomes Women’s Triathlon – A little bit of a different view here from me, but I can't imagine why you'd want the NCAA involved in your favorite sport. Stay away from my beer pong.

Steven Lord Blog: The Rhythm Of Life (and drafting) – I see people drafting in races all the time. And I really don't give a ladybug if they do it. Eventually, this is going to result in a really big pileup in a really big race. Besides, virtue is its own reward.

From Victim to Villain in a flash – As they are fond of hollering in East Tennessee — "Git off the rowed!"

I <3 Trainerroad.

6 Simple Habits To Keep You Consistently Happy Every Day – All very easy to do. I'd add another–Just.Slow.Down. That probably falls under disengagement.

Narcissists tweet more often and crave followers on Twitter – So younger narcissists are more likely to post to twitter, and middle aged narcissists are more likely to update Facebook.

Unanswered questions here: what about middle aged people who update twitter a lot? Was Instagram even considered in the narcissism scale, out did they run out of space to measure it there?

10 Tips for Dating a Single Mom – Hilarious. Read the comments first, then go back and read the article. The comments are pure gold. Gold Jerry!

Van Halen’s 1984 Turns 30 Today — How Does It Hold Up? – Best quote from this whole (incredibly good) post:

"Does it ['Panama'] hold up? Embarrassing question. Yes, it holds up. It might be holding this entire goddamned country up."

Happy People Count Their Current and Future Blessings – "View living a spartan lifestyle as temporary, merely a prerequisite to joining the ranks of the socioeconomic achievers in America."

This is Sparta!

Facebook Product Development Process

  1. Get on Twitter and find 10-12 things that are successful (Instagram, Snapchat, Google Reader, Vine, etc.)
  2. Write these onto slips of paper and put them in a hat
  3. Pick a slip of paper out of the hat
  4. Try to buy that thing
  5. If you can’t buy it, build something kind of like it and sloppily integrate it
  6. Go ahead and start a group people can join to complain about the change

I will give them credit for trying out some new things like Timeline and Home for Android. Maybe not the most successful features, but at least they were different and showed some creativity.

I will also admit that for creating videos, Instagram>Vine. The problem is, for consuming videos Vine>Instagram, and most of us (especially me) should stick to consuming video instead of creating it.

The Facebook UX is an absolute train wreck.

Daily Reading List — January 23rd

Actual Facebook Graph Searches – This is loaded with awsum. FB unlike avalanche in 3,2,1…

Small Expenses Add Up – When you start tracking where every penny goes, it can be a rude awakening. Adding up my Cool Beans budget changed my life. Sorry Howie.

A Recovery Program for Homeschool Split Personality Disorder – Sometimes it's less like Jeckyll and Hyde–more like Gollum and Smeagol. Must educate Precious.

Fear Not The Swim – Some good stuff here. I always dismiss fears of the swim with, "ah…that's the easy part". Probably should point them to stuff like this instead.

Daily Reading List — January 18th

Duolingo – One more foreign language resource. I like this one the best of all the ones I've tried so far.

The Predecessor To Google Books, Facebook Graph Search, And Rewind.me–In The Early 1900s – Long read, but very cool

Facebook Graph Search: Noisier And Nosier Than Ever – Now that's what I'm sayin'. Facebook's Graph search is big. But I can't help but think it's a sword without a hilt (gratuitous GOT reference). In related news, I deleted my Instagram account this week. I miss it about this much ||.

Hack Design Teaches Design To Hackers – I really need this. Like 9 years ago.

Instagram’s Loss

The best thing Google could do today to snag some market share in the photo sharing space would be to get SnapSeed updated to share directly to Twitter (and play nicely while doing it). Leave the photos of kids and puppies to Istagram/Facebook and get the really good photographers who haven’t moved to Google+ yet get their feet wet with the easy Twitter integration. They’ll inevitably share to G+ while they’re at it.

I can’t help but think Instgram has really screwed up by starting this fight with Twitter.

Facebook and G+ are such different things, and one area where G+ destroys Facebook is in photography. Production and consumption there is so far beyond what is possible on Facebook.

So Use Google Plus

From Miguel Silencio

I’m sure I’m not alone in receiving those emails with ‘FW:” in the subject line. That’s why I continue to lose interest in Facebook. It has increasingly become a place where many people post everything from the ‘net they deem neat.

I remember telling someone 4 or 5 years ago how Facebook was so great because it wasn’t all spammy like MySpace. That and, “your mom isn’t on there”. Guess where your mom is now? And feel lucky if people are posting the forwards on Facebook instead of continuing to email them. My prediction is that it’s about to get a lot worse…wait and see what Facebook’s earnings are today. Now that they’re beholden to shareholders, something’s going to have to be done to increase their revenues.

There will be ads. Lots of ads. Right along-side all that useless content.

Invest a week into really using Plus. I mean really using it. It doesn’t disappoint.

Well…unless you want them to open up the API. Tick tock.

Real quick…two articles in Mashable today that should give Facebook a clue:

Sean Parker (a FB shareholder) notes that Facebook’s power users are moving to Twitter and Google Plus

and

Users surveyed dislike Timeline.

What do these have in common? It’s the perception that users’ privacy is being chipped away too rapidly. For instance, I think Timeline is awsum! I want to look at my Timeline…what a great tool! It’s just that I want to be able to lock it down and only show it to a few people (or no one).

What if Facebook’s default position was to make all new features super-private in the beginning and give users a chance to adjust to them and open up themselves instead of forcing everything to be public and ratcheted down? They continually come at things from the wrong direction.

UPDATE

And teens will leave Facebook for Google+? I’ve said it before…they really screwed up by putting off that IPO.

I’m reading– September 27th through October 17th

Facebook Missteps and Shortcomings – Exhibit F.

Heart Rate Training Zone Calculator – Will have to do until I write one. Which will be tomorrow plus infinity.

Page Speed Online – Woot…super useful tool.

Will the New Facebook Lead to Information Overload? – What he said.

Google Financing Solar Installations – This looks interesting. If the cost is the same as your typical electric bill and you don’t have to worry about the maintenance, what’s the downside? Thinking you could also get your pool heated this way. Yeah…I’m thinking.

<3 Google+ Photo Sharing

I’ve shared plenty of photos from my phone on Google+, but in the last couple of days I’ve started uploading larger albums there. The display of photo albums within Plus is very nice (waaaaaaaay cleaner than Facebook), and if you upload through Plus instead of Picasa, your photos get auto-resized and don’t count towards your Picasa limits:

If you’ve signed up for Google+

Free storage limits

Photos up to 2048 x 2048 pixels and videos up to 15 minutes won’t count towards your free storage.

Automatic resizing

All photos uploaded in Google+ will be automatically resized to 2048 pixels (on their longest edge) and won’t count towards your free storage quota.

Well, sorta. You can only have 10,000 albums and you can only have 1,000 photos within an album. Maybe not enough for pros, but plenty for people who just want to share with the fam.

So all you have to do to back up all of your photos is upload them through Plus set to private. Then go over to Picasa, create new albums and move/copy photos into them to share.

My one complaint is that the beautiful photo album layouts we see on the Plus website haven’t made it to the Android applications yet. It would be nice to get the same broad overview when browsing photos on a tablet.

The Great Facebook Compromise

I’ve been going back and forth for a while on what should be done about Facebook in my particular case. It would be kind of nice to eliminate it completely since I don’t ever post there, but there are some work-related advantages to being there that I just can’t deny.

Oh, and I also need a FB account to use Spotify.

My first thought was to go to an extreme and un-friend every single person on there. I even started doing that (sorry if you got axed…I made it to the letter ‘C’). The logic was that I’m easy enough to find on the web in other places if you really want to find me, but the problem is that other people aren’t. The simple fact is that I do have some great friends who have a presence on Facebook and nowhere else, and I like to keep up with them and occasionally comment.

Then I remembered reading somewhere that a person can only really have 150 friends–the Dunbar number. That gave me the idea of shrinking my list down to 150 Facebook friends as a maximum. But that required some rules. So here’s my strategy…

  • If I just kinda knew you but have no funny stories about you, you’re out
  • If I only know you through other social media (blogs, Plus, Twitter), you’re out…we communicate in those places and not Facebook.
  • If I only know you because the person you are married to or dating, you’re out. Think of it this way…who would get me in the divorce?
  • If you are close family that I regularly talk to on the phone and in person instead of online, you’re out. We already have an established means of communication, and it’s not Facebook.
  • If you are other family and we don’t talk even though we’re Facebook friends, you’re out. (I post photos of the family here, and I would love to share with you!)
  • If you don’t actively participate on Facebook anyway, you’re out (and good for you!)
  • If you are married to me, you’re in. Always.
  • If we were once really close but aren’t any longer because of time and distance, and Facebook is the only way we can stay connected, you’re in. But I’m going to try to get you to move to Plus.
  • If someone who trumps you tries to add me as a friend later, you may get the boot. Sorry. 150 is the limit.
Some of these rules may seem harsh, especially the family stuff, but since I don’t share on Facebook, I figure no harm done. And it also clears up a few spots for friends. So we’re pretty much down to people who I really liked in high school and college, people who have sweated and bled with me on the rugby pitch, and chicks who are good kissers.

Homeschooling, Robot IronMen, Unstructured Play, Plus MORE!

Another link dump. I promise I’ll try to include more bloggers and less news stuff in the future.

Here’s How to Stop FB From Tracking You Online – Logging out isn’t enough.

Can We Play? – Feeling guilty because you don’t get to spend enough time on education and they are aimlessly wasting the day? Don’t.

Career Ruin: Homeschooling

I realized that public school is like Social Security. There is no money to do what we are pretending we are aiming to do. We should just grow up and admit that we cannot have effective public schools for everyone. Just like we cannot have Social Security for everyone.

Well there go her Presidential hopes.

Gamers Unlock Protein Mystery That Baffled AIDS Researchers For Years – More of this please.

Woman tries to shoot possum, shoots acquaintance instead – I wasn’t even aware @knoxvillerugby was playing in ATL this weekend.

Dubya and Me – You don’t have to be a fan of his politics (I’m not) to enjoy this great piece on W.

Three Market-Based Solutions To Pull People Out Of Poverty – More of this too!

Robot Triathlete Will Complete An Ironman? – These things don’t have the greatest form, but I’m not one to talk.

Sorry Facebook–MySpace Had It Right From The Beginning

Nothing is easier than self-deceit.

– Demosthenes

Last week I wrote a post that stated Facebook had no long-term direction. Boy was I wrong. The F8 keynote address made it obvious that they have a very clear vision…they want to know everything about everything you do.

They want to seamlessly allow you to share your entire life with your friends. No effort required on your part. Just install the right apps to your Facebook account, and you can share everything you do real time, while also automatically curating the details of your life for later in Timeline.

Technologically, that’s amazingly cool, but it potentially introduces a huge problem. Real time, seamless information about you being streamed to all of your “friends” means it’s hard to filter anything. Since Facebook is so proud of it’s integration with Spotify to share what music you are listening to, let’s use that as an example.

While Facebook is right that people love to share music with their friends, they’ve neglected to realize that people also love to listen to a lot of music that they don’t want to share with their friends. Do you really want your friends to know that you love that Milli Vanilli song and listen to it first thing every morning? Don’t we all have music that isn’t at all cool, but we love to listen to?

Now…think about that exact situation applied to all the other things Facebook wants to know about you: books, movies, websites, food, (lack of) exercise, etc. Now…think about what it will mean when all of these things are lumped together. I’ll save you the suspense and cut to the chase:

Facebook is slowly but surely taking away its users’ ability to present themselves as they wish to be seen. Instead, Facebook is going to force people to be seen exactly as they are.

Take that in for just a second. The real you is going to be out there for everyone to see. Not the version you’d like to present to people.

The real you.

Now is the time in this post when we’re all going to have to be painfully honest with ourselves. Or if we don’t want to examine ourselves, let’s just consider other people we know.

Doesn’t it seem like a lot of your “friends” who are active Facebook users really just see it as the reality show they will never be cast for?

And doesn’t it seem like many of them are crafting an online versions of themselves you know isn’t 100% accurate (just like people on reality shows)?

Don’t you sometimes wonder if these people even realize that they are misrepresenting themselves?

And when you consider the ones you know really well in real life, doesn’t it seem like the only people they are really fooling about these imaginary fabulous lives are themselves and people who don’t really know them?

What’s going to happen when these uber-active users realize they are no longer able to fool other people about their real selves and are also unable to continue to fool themselves?

What happens when Facebook becomes a reflection of real life instead of a collection of beautiful self-portraits created by master artists? What happens when that mirror of their real lives is held up to Facebook’s users’ faces?

That’s not going to be a completely scary thing for most people, but the fact that it’s being shared with everyone else and that it can’t be turned off will be. Are they going to continue to be so active on Facebook, or are they going to dramatically cut back?

Personally, I’m a big fan of the ability to present yourself as you choose online. It’s why I blog under a domain name that is my name. I control it. It’s why I seldom use curse words on Twitter. I control it. It’s why I’m thankful every person I encountered in my 20s didn’t have a digital camera and a platform to broadcast my behavior to the world.

It’s the reason I basically eliminated my participation on Facebook a while back.

I’m not being critical of people who work hard on Facebook to control their online personas. I know why they do that. I get it. I just don’t think they realize that’s exactly what they are doing; and I don’t think they (or Facebook) realize what’s going to happen when the ability to control that is completely removed.

MySpace did a lot of things wrong, but there’s one thing MySpace got right.

MySpace was about me. On MySpace, we could pretend to like only the coolest music by featuring only the coolest music on our profiles. We could pretend to be way better looking than we really are by sharing only the most flattering photos of ourselves. We could pretend to be popular by becoming friends with people we had no interest in knowing and boost our friend count.

MySpace let us all be fabulous. Or gangsta, intelligent, athletic…whatever we wish we really were.

Facebook is about to take all of that away. And the better they get at representing the real world, the more their users are going to have their images of themselves shattered.

Mark Zuckerberg may have made a very critical mistake when he failed to realize that everyone in the world isn’t a billionaire at 26 with hot chicks and cool friends clamoring to hang out with them, even if that’s what we all secretly wish our lives were like.

Plus and Facebook Both Jumping

Every day I read something about how lame Google Plus is because no one is using it. That’s not the impression I’m getting. I see it being used a lot, although mostly by people who presumably can’t stand Facebook.

But that’s not an insignificant number of people.

And yesterday Google announced that Plus is now publicly available (no invite needed) and unleashed a plethora of new features. Facebook has been launching new stuff rapidly lately too, which pretty much indicates that they’re worried about Plus. Don’t believe that? Take note of the way they’re now automatically organizing your friends into Circles lists for you. Yesterday they made some major UI changes with the change to the news feed and the ticker.

When I was a more frequent Facebook user, I was very amused by the complaints from users when Facebook made small UI changes. It’s going to be worth visiting in the next few days to read what will best described as outrage over the mess they’ve created with these changes. This week’s analogy:

Netflix is to name change as Facebook is to UI change

We’ll see, but this misstep could make Plus even more viable. Robert Scoble is betting everything on Plus. And I’m becoming more and more convinced that Google has the best shot at winning the long game. Facebook has lots of users, but it completely lacks anything resembling organization and long term direction.

Data likes to be organized, and users like simple things that don’t change much.

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