Posts Tagged With: Facebook

Social Networks

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Christopher Beam has an article on Slate about how Facebook may end up becoming far more popular than other big Internet sites, because it has the social network already built in. He also talks about how corporations fail miserably at attracting their own social networks.
Every major corporation, it seems, is trying to add social networking to their core services. Netflix, for example, allows you to keep tabs on what your "friends" are watching. But it makes much more sense to peddle your services on a huge, prebuilt network—no wonder Netflix users can now check their buddies' queues on Facebook. And we're not only talking about businesses: Just look at Barack Obama's campaign. Thousands of users have downloaded the Obama Facebook application since late May, and hundreds of thousands more have joined Obama-themed groups. Compare that to the relatively paltry 70,000 registered users on the candidate's custom-made social network, My.BarackObama.com. Using the Facebook network as a delivery system, it seems, is easier and more productive than creating the system yourself.
In a way, duh. It's much smarter to work through the established network than try to set up your own. Social networks are a lot more valuable if all your friends are already on them. Penn has its own social network called "Pennster." This probably took someone a lot of time to set up, and it will never work, because everyone and their parents (but not mine, yet) have a Facebook. The first thing everyone does when they get their college email is get their Facebook account. Also, social networks organized around corporations are limited in scope. It would feel weird to discuss the ending of the Sopranos, or celebrities, or dating, or anything else on the Barack Obama social network. Although his ringtones are pretty cool.

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Fake Your Space – Digital Candygrams

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Need some good-looking, fake friends? They're available for 99 cents at FakeYourSpace.com I've finally found a good use for my Wall - get some attractive male models to post cool things to it. Or, better yet, a good use for my friends' walls!! Want to make your friend appear like he's into men? Confuse the hell out of him? This website is perfect. This reminds me of those Candygrams you could send anonymously for a dollar back in middle school.

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I Canceled My Facebook Account…

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I canceled my Facebook account and you can, too. Wean yourself of technology before it owns you. At least, show that you can stay away from it if you need to. We'll see how long I can go without re-activating my account. That said, here I am blogging about weaning myself from technology.

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Facebook Screws Up Again (Otherwise Known As, Your Parents Can Now See Your Random Hookups & Drunk Pictures)

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Fresh off the heels of its News Feed & Mini Feed fiasco, Facebook.com is making another boneheaded move by opening up the site to anyone with an email address. Ostensibly, this is a good move because it increases the number of users on the site, but with it, Facebook throws away the ability to match a specific name to a specific email address, which you can do now by requiring everyone to have an address ending in .edu. Furthermore, the site is now open to stalkers, and worse yet, your parents or job interviewers. By opening the site to everyone, Facebook is losing any claim to exclusivity it could have had, and is only going to enrage its college population further. However, said population may be too entrenched in the network, and starved for alternatives, to punish the site for its misgivings.

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Kill your Facebook Mini-Feed

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If you're like everyone else I've talked to today, you think that the Facebook mini-feed is an invasion of privacy and a great tool for stalkers. Plus, you probably don't want people seeing what you do on Facebook 24/7. Facebook makes the argument that the info was all public anyway, but it would take a really dedicated stalker to dig it all out. This makes it much simpler for people to see what you're up to on the site. If someone followed around the CEO of Facebook and posted all their happenings to one place on the internet (left home without a kiss, bought a certain kind of coffee for $3.29, talked to certain people, or whatever), we'd see if they still agreed with the idea of the Mini-Feed. Facebook's arguing that all the information there in your Mini-Feed is public, which is true, but they greatly lowered the cost of retrieving that information by displaying it prominently on the profile page. Here's how to erase all your Mini-Feed data: 1) Download Greasemonkey for Mozilla Firefox. Greasemonkey allows you to run scripts on web pages and customize them however you feel like. Once you install the extension it will show up as a little monkey in the bottom right corner of the browser. 2)Userscripts.org has a list of scripts, and many of them are useful, such as the ones that take ads out of Myspace and add other search results to Google. Once you're at the website, search for and install Facebook Mini-Feed Killer. Then go to your Facebook profile, and observe the wonderful results! Once you're done, the only difference you'll notice is that a little monkey shows up in the bottom corner of your Firefox browser, and none of your mini-feed stories show up. Just remember to visit your profile page when you're done browsing Facebook and it will automatically delete every action you've taken from your feed.

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