Slashdot Mirror
The Era of Facebook Is an Anomaly
An anonymous reader writes "Speaking to The Verge, author and Microsoft Researcher Danah Boyd put words to a feeling I've had about Facebook and other social networking sites for a while, now: 'The era of Facebook is an anomaly.' She continues, 'The idea of everybody going to one site is just weird. Give me one other part of history where everybody shows up to the same social space. Fragmentation is a more natural state of being. Is your social dynamic interest-driven or is it friendship-driven? Are you going there because there's this place where other folks are really into anime, or is this the place you're going because it's where your pals from school are hanging out? That first [question] is a driving function.' Personally, I hope this idea continues to propagate — it's always seemed odd that our social network identities are locked into certain websites. Imagine being a Comcast customer and being unable to email somebody using Time Warner, or a T-Mobile subscriber who can't call somebody who's on Verizon. Why do we allow this with our social networks?"
"None ever used this thing that wasn't available before, therefore (loads of rationalizations)"
Lack of options. And no, G+ doesn't cut it.
but we're all supposed to have the same OS though right?
God damn internet is anomaly. Facebook won't last long anyways.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Phone system?
-Dave
In this argument, the phone system is analogous to the Internet, as a whole. When you're connected to the phone system, you can contact anyone else who's on the phone system, regardless of their local provider. Granted, you may have to may some sort of toll, if they don't use the same provider, or are geographically distant (depending on your provider). However, they're still accessible.
Why can't there be an API for social networks? Kind of like email, where everyone follows the same set of rules? In the future, each household would 'rent' a social network server access (analogous to buying email access), and then others can connect to their profile page and view pics, request permission to view pics, etc. There'd have to be a bunch of security designed into the protocol, of course. It will be different from diaspora, because its just a public protocol, not a specific implementation.
No, the phone system is a network of compatible and standardized endpoints. No one really cares how they are connected, just like no one would care if Facebook didn't use the internet. I think the phone system is a pretty good example.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I was one of the early adopters back when facebook just came out and it was only for select university students. Back then, people made fun of me for using facebook and it was considered a very nerdy thing to do. I was an engineering major and it was commonly used to find other students in the same class as you and collaborate on homework and studying. It was a corner of the internet just for geeks. If so many people thought it was uncool back then, then things can easily turn around again.
Facebook is much more than a place to share your status. It's the de-facto way to verify your identity -- log into websites, etc.
Right or wrong, the reason a large site like Facebook stays large as most people dont want to have to go different places to do what amounts to the same thing.
Would you rather go to 10 friends house each week for 30 minutes each, or everyone hang out at one for the afternoon? Most people would not choose all the running around.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Why do you think they buy up all the new sites that come along just to kill them? They know its a limited time deal. Think Netscape, remember them?
It appears that MS disapproves of monopolies and lock-in in proprietary systems when there not the ones doing it. Worlds tiniest violin etc. etc.
don't confuse the connection with who you connect, and how you connect.
Facebook is overwhelming, annoying, all consuming. And people let it
The same thing was said about myspace. whatever happened to them. the good news for facebook is they're almost too big fail. Too many people use them, though they could.
Google, Apple, even Microsoft, too big to fail. The downside is difficult. Facebook wants to get there.
y'know, it's good for the shareholders.
one of my regrets is not spending everything I had on Google's IPO
Srsly. Don't get all exercised about it. It'll pass.
I'm actually kinda surprised FB aren't blanketing the nation with CD-ROMs.
No, actually, its like AT&T has 98% of the market share, and someone is whining, "why doesn't everyone start up their own independent telephone network space". Like I want to use the yellow phone to talk to people about baking, and the green phone for talking about movies. Not gonna happen.
don't worry, as long as a "phone" is involved no obstruction may be made by the carrier.
Failing to follow that rule will bankrupt Verison, Comcast, or AT&T in a day.
Society naturally gravitates towards monopolies.
Why: A default answer is easy, because it requires no decision making.
Fragmentation has never been the natural state of anything just like "nature abhors a vacuum".
This is why your electric company, gas company, phone company, cable company are one monopolies.
Also think of E-Bay (what is alternative?), Amazon.com (what is alternative?), or how companies standardize on Microsoft Office and Windows and how schools standardize around iPads.
I am more offended by the idea of someone working at Microsoft trying to have a cultural thought --- from a place devoid of the concept of higher cultural thought and beauty.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Imagine being a subscriber of AOL, PC-Link, Compuserve, Prodigy, Delphi, or GEnie, and not being able to send messages to customers of other services.
It has already happened once, and we are repeating it.
Agreed. Many people follow news sites from facebook. Facebook has become their portal to the rest of the internet.
It wasn't all that long ago when the only way people were able to "come together" was to actually meet face to face. Before the likes to Facebook and Myspace... the only way to have any contact with lost former acquaintances was to do a lot or research or travel "back home" to find them. With services such as Facebook what would have been long lost acquaintances now bombard our news feeds with useless information 24-7. Fragmentation may have been the norm in the past, and Facebook may be a fad today, but social networking is here to stay. And I am over 45 years old. Now get off my lawn.
Yeah, just what we all want..an online identity tied to our real info that can track us as we move across domains.. I'll pass..
Facebook is the same anomaly as AOL was -- critical mass and everyone was there that most people wanted to talk to / find. And MySpace was the same animal for a while.
... Microsoft Researcher Danah Boyd put words to a feeling
"The idea of everybody going to one site is just weird. Give me one other part of history where everybody shows up to the same social space. Fragmentation is a more natural state of being....
I wonder if she believes that the same should hold true for operating systems.
Facebook is not a place that everyone goes to. It is merely a hosting platform where people create zillions (of partially overlapping) "places" that they go to. Those millions of people are not on your Friends list. Facebook is millions of "places", not one. (However, George Takei's page is indeed the one single place in the world where everyone goes. But just for his stuff; nobody reads the comments.) As for Facebook "bombarding your news feed with useless information 24x7", ummm, that doesn't happen to me. Get a life?
> Is your social dynamic interest-driven or is it friendship-driven? Are you going there because there's this place where other folks are really into anime, or is this the place you're going because it's where your pals from school are hanging out?
I believe those different groups are called "social circles", and Facebook started supporting the concept in 2011, after Google+ made it central to their interface. Facebook is the MEDIUM for different grugroups to communicate. Facebook is not the group.
Yes, it would be weird if every group gathered at the same physical location. It would not be weird if they all drove in cars to get there. Facebook isn't a physical space that crams everyone together. It's a method of getting to different groups a person belongs to.
Just logged in to FB for the first time in a month or two.
It hasn't been chronological in a while. FB chooses whose posts I see at the top. Do they know me better than I do?
FB has been over for quite a while. Teenagers do not want to be "FB friends" with their grandma.
Last week, I received an invite to an event through email! Think of it. Email is just the same as FB, without inviting FB to be the middle-man (and NSA toady).
Bless this week. My friends are finally realizing that FB is just a mirror that records your every movement, and are finally returning to normal communication methods. Finally!
A better example is the phone book.
Facebook is simply the modern version of the phone book, with additional information, and more control for the end user. There will always need to be a directory by which one registers to interact with other people.\
Most of my friends have no more interaction with FB other than to be registered so that they can be found. FB may lose people for other reasons, and may not be the way of interacting in the way some people use it today, but that assumes that that is the key function ...
I was hooked on some crappy FB games for a while and it has taught me a valuable lesson. It's a lot easier to accept friend request than removing them once you quit a game. Superhero City and the need for gifts landed me 5000 people very fast, but once I started trying to remove them it proved extremely tedious, I got the blocked add/remove friend messages for 3-7 days each time and now I have 4600, but only because I gave up on it lol.
F, FBook in the F'ing Face for not letting me fix my space. :(
There are still towns in mexico where EVERYBODY goes to the town square because that is where everything happens.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
And why would I want to verify my identity? Last time I checked I was pretty sure that I was myself, no need to verify anything.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The MALL.
terrible analogy. facebook is so much more destructive to social interaction than a paper book that's basically a large rolodex.
Facebook is overwhelming, annoying, all consuming. And people let it
I could say the same about programming. or life itself.
>"author and Microsoft Researcher Danah Boyd [...] Imagine being a Comcast customer and being unable to email somebody using Time Warner, or a T-Mobile subscriber who can't call somebody who's on Verizon. Why do we allow this with our social networks?"
That's a good question, Ms. "Microsoft researcher". Perhaps you can imagine a world where people can exchange documents freely and accurately without proprietary software like MS-Word. Or a world where consumers can put any OS they want on any computer without MS working with vendors to try and block them at the BIOS level. Or imagine people sharing calendar events easily without using MS's Exchange/Outlook formats. MS tried to hijack the web with IE (and did so successfully for years), and lied about their competitors to prevent diversity, locked out vendors from including Linux or other FOSS on machines, corrupted exported filters to make sure files to/from competitors would be partially broken. And the list goes on and on. Microsoft has been responsible for more lock-in and anti-compatibility than any other tech company, so perhaps I find it ironic that someone from Microsoft would ask us to imagine any kind of world of incompatibility.
lockin/networkeffect is so much easier a business model than competing based on excellence.
it's an interesting question to ponder: at what level of clue do customers begin to care? does the mass market ever reach that level? implicitly, sure - a service won't succeed which can't interoperate at least well enough. but how many customers really understand the concept of protocol or API - understand it well enough to realize that it permits vendor-independent services?
Geeks don't understand the popularity of FB, they don't exactly socialise like other people.
It's called the network effect: the benefits of all going to one single place outweigh the costs. Same as for going to the supermarket, using MS Office, speaking the same language... Facebook is mainly a blank slate, you put on it what you want (subdivided between audiences if you want) and link with whomever you want. Plus I'm not sure what the cost of going to FB is ? I don't do social networking, but if I did, I'd go to Facebook. Why bother with anything else when it's free, everybody's there, and there doesn't seem to be anything better around (G+ is a disgrace, the last few times I checked my "home" was mostly hangouts logs, which you can't turn off ?)
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
"'The era of Facebook is an anomaly .. The idea of everybody going to one site is just weird .. Why do we allow this with our social networks?"
..
This was not always the case, this is a more recent phenomenon and it's because companies such as Microsoft engage in customer lock-in. Like you can't make a phone call to a Skype user if you're on a different network
Facebook isn't a social meeting place, it's a communications platform that also happens to let you hang a sign on the door that everyone can see.
That's why they bought whatsapp, that's why they have all of the various tools to send and archive messages and to let you carve up the 'social space' of who you talk to.
There are lots of shady things they are up to as well,
>Why do we allow this with our social networks?"
Whey do we let countries control their TLD's and phone exchanges and physical mail system? You don't have to use facebook to talk to anybody, there are other forms of communication. But if you want to use the facebook communication system then you have to use Facebook. If it becomes big enough, important enough and persistent enough then the government will step in to regulate it. But it's also possible facebook will go the way of the dodo bird in a couple of years when people get sick of all the stuff facebook ends up doing to try and make money.
And why would I want to verify my identity?
To gain access to forums and comment sections whose operator requires a verified identity as a measure against griefing. Posting a comment to an article on The Huffington Post requires a Facebook account that has been "verified" (associated to a globally unique mobile phone number). Posting to Answers.com requires a Facebook account (or a legacy account which it is no longer possible to create).
To post a comment to an article on The Huffington Post, you need to create a Facebook account, "verify" the account by receiving a code in a text message sent to a unique mobile phone number on a supported carrier, and link your Facebook account to your account on The Huffington Post.
"The idea of one service tying all your friends together is an anomaly" is followed by the example of email?
What the actual fuck?
Email is exactly an example of something that "ties everybody together" - it can be provided in a decentralized fashion, but email's ENTIRE relevance and utility is tied to the fact that "everybody's there."
What Facebook has done is simply provide enough functionality easily to be able to entice "everybody" to join up and participate, making their social offering a strong "network effect" than G+, Myspace, etc. Is it replaceable? Sure. Will it be replaced? Sure, as soon as somebody offers a compelling alternative that causes enough people to stop using it.
Email is just the same as FB, without inviting FB to be the middle-man
And that's the problem. Internet mail became less useful to people when spammers learned how to defeat Bayesian filters. Facebook has the resources to filter spam centrally and apply an effective death penalty to repeat offenders because making and verifying a new Facebook account means getting a new cell phone number.
I'd like to see some icons that proudly state 'I'm NOT on fb or tw. I have no icons and nothing for you to follow me on'.
A big orange RSS icon should work well for that. "If you want to follow me, go ahead and follow me using your browser."
Plus I'm not sure what the cost of going to FB is ?
To verify your account, you need a mobile phone that can receive SMS.
Facebook has had an APi for a long time. You get info into and off Facebook from your own website. You just have to get past the terms and conditions screen. So it is like a phone. You can call it from other websites without a problem.
"The idea of everybody going to one site is just weird. Give me one other part of history where everybody shows up to the same social space." ...you still only "hang out" with the people you like (and not FB "like"), right? Cast aside the marketing ("liking" product X") and if you're using it to keep in touch with folks, then [PRESUMABLY] you care what they have to say.
FB and other social networks are just generic spaces you turn into whatever you want...
disclaimer - the only FB acct I have is fake, I use it for o-auth. Nothing on that profile has anything to do with me - I don't even use the same gender. I have no idea how FB actually works.
"Give me one other part of history where everybody shows up to the same social space."
Ok, late 80s, to mid 90s: usenet.
"Fragmentation is a more natural state of being."
Bears are natural. Also, botulotoxin and cyanide. Just because it's natural doesn't mean it's beneficial to you or good for you.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Imagine being a Comcast customer and being unable to email somebody using Time Warner, or a T-Mobile subscriber who can't call somebody who's on Verizon. Why do we allow this with our social networks?"
Because with a telco you are the customer and are paying, they want you to pay more to call more people. With facebook you are the product to be sold and they dont want to lose their stock to a competitor.
"Give me one other part of history where everybody shows up to the same social space."
TV
Radio
Newspaper
There's one mega site "everybody" uses, just like how there used to be one mega network "everybody" watched (NBC) and one mega network "everybody" listened to (NBC again under RCA), etc.
The only thing different with social media is that since people are providing their own shit as content, they end up more closely tied to a particular site because of its content than they were with TV, radio, newspapers, bards, etc. That said, Facebook may be a behemoth but it's certainly not the only behemoth - there's Twitter and Youtube, for example. "everybody" is on Twitter, and "everybody" watches videos on Youtube.
> by leaving your comfort zone.
How is socializing with other members of your faith leaving your comfort zone? Church IS your comfort zone. So is the marketplace where you gather with FRIENDS.
>The real anomaly is in the walls that keep us from knowing each other.
Like the one that surrounds facebook, and the walls within facebook that prevent certain interactions between its members.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Yes, Facebook is the hosting platform, just as email once existed within computers and didn't travel between them. We don't yet have a Social Media Transport Protocol that allows peering between providers, but one day we will, and Facebook will follow AOL & CompuServe to the big walled garden in the sky. But, IMHO, that day is not in the near future.
I don't go there, neither do some of my friends. A lot of people I know do, from all age ranges, but about half of the people I know also don't go there, again from all age ranges.
Twinstiq, game news
It's simple. Since Facebook sort of hit the social networking nail on the head, everyone who does social networking by default goes to Facebook. Sure, there are alternatives, but the majority use the one platform. It's the same with the telephone. Sure, you can send someone a letter (if you have their address, find it in the phone book (ironically)) but the de-facto means of long-distance communication is the telephone nowadays. Same with Facebook. If you want to stalk that girl you saw at a party or want to snoop through photos of your boss when he's drunk, then Facebook is the place to go. People need to stop treating Facebook like a virtual pub and treat it for what it is, an online phone book where you can nose through everyone's personal life.
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
I know, right? I just went to Google to find another example, but nothing came up.
I must admit to not having read the article, however, I assume that the author is not claiming that humans don't come together in shared social spaces. Sure, humans get together at marketplaces and churches. But they are different marketplaces and churches. When a social space gets to big, it tends to fragment, this has been a pattern throughout history, look at how religions split and schism. Also, I don't think your claim about people on pilgrimages being respected by people of other religions is true. In fact, I'm pretty sure pilgrims often hired people with weapon to protect them from inter-religious violence.
Nobody asked me whether I'd prefer BluRay or HD-DVD.
Some media giants decided to which platform to jump, and platform with most weight won.
Social media simply haven't matured to the point where it makes sense to standardize interfaces and infrastructure. Since all of them are allowed to use proprietary interfaces, there is no chance of integration and people are forced to move to the same network to find each other. As soon as I'd be able to read your Facebook post on my Google+ and you'd be able to read and respond to my tweets from your Linkein account, that need goes away. Stuff like RSS was a nice try, but that only carries the content, not the entire service.
But I don't think it will happen anytime soon, at least not without government interfering and I don't think the times are very conductive to that. The reason I say that is the battle for the app space. Suppliers need their proprietary protocols, so they can force you to use their apps and that's one of the ways to control what services and advertisements reach you. Ask yourself: why do we have protocols like XMPP, but do we still need Whatsapp, MSN, ICQ, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Google Hangouts, etc. etc.? Again, the protocol doesn't effectively carry the service, but that doesn't mean the services shouldn't support the standard. The companies providing these services have too strong an incentive not to standardize, that outshines any and all incentives that might cause them to.
"or a T-Mobile subscriber who can't call somebody who's on Verizon. Why do we allow this with our social networks?"
Yeah, or say, instant messenger systems not interacting because they are from different software vendors? Or not agreeing on document format standards so different office suites can't interchange files properly? Or trying to force non-W3C standards for a browser, ensuring that only IE can render sites properly? Or having your video software encode in a way that software from other parties cannot decode due to patents? Maybe the worst case is the way hardware is locked down to specific operating systems, ensuring that the customer has no choice in how they want to use the hardware they just bought, like installing a competitors OS. Remember that to reach your social media, you need hardware, an OS and a browser.
Controlling what hw, OS and browser a customer uses has been the driving force of the business for over three decades and it hampers innovation. I'm not a Facebook user, but it seems to me that it works with non-MS OS' and browsers. While most customers are too stupid to understand why this is a good thing, I'm happy knowing that MS is not in control of everything. Yet.
The idea of everybody going to one site is just weird. Give me one other part of history where everybody shows up to the same social space."
Apparently Dr. Boyd has never heard of the local pub in villages.
Or the Thing in Scandinavian communities.
I could grant that no social space in history has ever been on the scale of Facebook. But then, Facebook is not exactly a social space. It's like a convention, an aggregate of millions of tiny little local social spaces. An past research has shown that these social spaces are in fact , the same scale as those seen in real life - the the monkeysphere
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
What a load. Does this person get paid to think and write this stuff? Because wow.
In many places local phone service was provided by small providers, and AT&T primarily linked them together. All these small providers used the same protocols and standards so anyone could make a phone call to anyone else.
Counterexamples...
Of course, if you aren't one of "The Beautiful People", you need not show up, as you're not getting in.
Studio 54: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
The Factory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Studio One : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Berghain: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
Club Space: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
The Roxy Theatre: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
The Womb: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
Zouk: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z...
The Blue Note: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
Club Pacha: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Ministry of Sound: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
And that's the problem. Internet mail became less useful to people when spammers learned how to defeat Bayesian filters.
I get more spam on Facebook than I ever had in email. Spam or not emails are also much easier to sort, organise and archive.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
Maybe you should tune down the arrogance if you fail to understand the basic premise, which is not that it is an anomaly to come together into a common social space, but almost all to a single place.
Actually, the article is making the counterpoint: why can't you use whatever color phone you want, and call people with other colored phones. Or, to remove the analogy, why can't you use whichever social network to connect to people on other social networks, like you can with a telephone.
What the article is basically saying is where is the SS7 and peering arrangements for social networks. There was a time when telephones could only call one network, then that was solved through government regulation and international treaties. There was a time when everyone used incompatible and unconnected networks to connect their computers, then came Fidonet and IP. There was a time when IP telephones didn't interoperate, then came SIP, and they did, and then came Skype, and they didn't again.
The problem is that none of the existing social networks want a system of peering, because it would be disasterous to their business model, just as telephone peering was to incumbent telephone companies (though that was a long time coming). I'm not a fan of government regulation here, but I can see the writing on the wall. Governments are going to step in and say "you must interop", I just hope that they figure out the technical standards for social network federation BEFORE they introduce poorly crafted legislation.
Actually it's not a very difficult technical problem, there's at most 10 types of things you can share on a social network, and I'm being generous. Off the top of my head: contacts, photos, words, videos, sounds, map-pins, appointments. All you need is a set of primitives for communicating trust (friendship), and transmitting shareables to those trustees (friends, servers of friends). Microsoft could have put all of this in Exchange and Outlook if they had been more forward-thinking. A more forward-thinking approach would be to encrypt all the shareables to the trustee with private shared key crypto, and encrypt those PSKs with public key crypto to each trustee in the trust group, so that the network aggregation devices (the social network servers) don't see any data, only graphs.
Why do we allow this with our social networks?
Why not? We have allowed one site/one vendor to capture our choice of search engine and our choice of word processing and spreadsheet software so why not this, too?
Pre-cable TV, anyone?
>Give me one other part of history where everybody shows up to the same social space.
How about Usenet? It was the social space of the Internet through the 90s.
I really miss Usenet and the ability to go to one social space for all my hobbies. Now I have to hop on dozens of different forums. Rather than just fire up my Usenet client and go to rec.collecting.stamps, I end up going to 3 different web sites.
It has become a 'forever class reunion' for people with no real friends.
No, FB is over for you. Most people like mirrors and chronicling their lives. Perhaps you need to work on your perception because FB is still chronological, it's just by time of last response not time of original posting (which just logically makes sense)!
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
wtf it's no longer chronological! haha, dumbass.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
And it means that you can't move to a new network unless you can move everybody you know to that network with you.
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson
The false assumption that people use a single method to communicate. G+, (myspace), FB, and even LinkedIn are social networking services that are used by many to communicate for various reasons. Not to mention that people communicate outside of social networking services. Much in the same way that people communicate to each other outside of physical social gatherings.
Two words: Network effects.
Facebook succeeds not because it's anything special, but because a critical mass of the population uses it, and each person can independently decide the shape of their "community". If I meet someone new in the real world, and want to keep up with what's going on in their life, odds are we're both on Facebook. Nobody else offers that. A new competitor could start that was 100x better than Facebook in every technological way, but until they reached a critical mass of users nobody would care.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Indeed. And like the phone company before it, it's value is derived primarily from network effects, rather than the technology itself. If a competitor that were a million times better showed up, nobody would care except to wish that there were actually some people using it to justify switching. If the advantage were dramatic enough maybe people would start to expand/switch, into the new "space", but it's not just the advertisers that consider the product to be the users, all the other users feel the same way as well - if they take a moment to think about it.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Huh? Log in to what websites? I see the icon all over the place, but I've never used it. It's not de-facto, but rather your own personal choice.
> by leaving your comfort zone.
How is socializing with other members of your faith leaving your comfort zone? Church IS your comfort zone. So is the marketplace where you gather with FRIENDS.
>The real anomaly is in the walls that keep us from knowing each other.
Like the one that surrounds facebook, and the walls within facebook that prevent certain interactions between its members.
Socializing outside your family with others that may have a different interpretation of how the world works is going outside of a 'comfort zone'. It's not as simple as you see it.
Microsoft guy whines about Facebook "ruling" and of lack of diversity, while the entire history of Microsoft is that there is only one way, the Microsoft way. Odd...
Hmm let me think of a time in history where the vast majority of people did something stupid that was harmful and dangerous and they knew it but they were too lazy and had poor self control so they didn't bother refraining from it. Then there's smart people like me and a lot of slashdotters that do not use Facebook because we're smart enough to avoid it. I could probably think of about a thousand examples from history where something like this happened in society.
First of all, there is an obvious value in everyone converging on the same social space. The value of the space to any user is a function of the number of other people who use it.
But it's already not true that everyone uses Facebook. Other social networks are popular outside the US. For that matter, other social networks are popular inside the US. I'm told that many teenagers already regard Facebook as yesterday's social network.
The era of Facebook is an anomaly.
Well, no shit. Facebook wasn't around for 99.99999% of humanity's time on the planet.
The idea of everybody going to one site is just weird.
It's also false.
Give me one other part of history where everybody shows up to the same social space.
Give me one other part of history when it was even possible. Also note that it's not actually happening.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Fragmentation is natural, she just doesn't see it. Not everyone is on Facebook. About a billion people are, but 1 billion != 6.5 billion. And I understand that not everyone has a PC or phone, and this stops many from being on FB. But there are more than a billion PC/smartphone users in the world. And I count myself and my friends among those who aren't on FB, I wrote my own social media site and we do our busines there.
FB seems to appeal to a particular type of person with an interest in things like pop-culture and popular opinion. Most people just like a lot of noise, but not everyone. The author's opinion is just plain wrong, there's no simpler way to put it.
This face book that you speak of?
Everyone knows there's very little socializing going on on Facebook. Facebook is just there so you can pretend to be friends with people you don't really like. You can't be yourself on there because everybody's parents and bosses and neighbors are on there watching everything you do. It's the Potemkin villiage of friendship.
Who cares about it, let it die. Why help the NSA by giving all that info?
Stupid people...
What is faecebook?
Who invented the term 'social network'? I fail to see social if I can only like the keystrokes of that other keyboard.
From Wikipedia: The Agora (Ancient Greek: , Agorá) was a central spot in ancient Greek city-states. The literal meaning of the word is "gathering place" or "assembly". The agora was the center of athletic, artistic, spiritual and political life of the city.[1] The Ancient Agora of Athens was the best-known example.
I refuse to use facebook msging. and forget about SMS.
The Huffington Post requires pairing a verified Facebook account. It displays at least the first name and last initial unless the applies for and is granted the privilege of a pseudonym, which I assume would be granted only in cases comparable to whistleblowing.
If you think of facebook as more of the open space then it is perfectly in tune with how humans socialize. In the US for example we have a multitude of different cultures. We all live within the boundaries of the US, but our social lives narrow down to the closest connections we have. Some may be more expansive and general. Some may be extremely insular like the Amish. All of this is happening in the US. Making all of us connected but separate groups tribes. Think the Kevin Bacon game. Facebook is the same way. If I look at my feed, it is dramatically different from my uncle's and even more different from a younger relative. All part of the same whole but distinctly different. The mistake in this idea of facebook as an anomaly is the view that it is one social space. It's one space with an infinite range of social possibilities.
Facebook stays large because I can't be bothered to delete my account. I'm sure there are hundreds of million of people just like me. I won't erite anything there, simply because you never know who sees it, or who will see it in future. I've also noticed my friends give up on facebook. Yeah, everyone is "online", but nobody is writing anything. IRC on the other hand, is still going strong. Facebook also sucks balls because not everyone sees everything you write. So some people might see your updates and some might not. If I follow some artist there, I'd really like to get ALL the updates, not just some. Yes, the artist can pay to get everything through. How fucked up is that? I'd rather readt 20 different webpages with 100% of the content shown than 1 page with 40% of the content shown.
The era of Facebook is not completely unlike the heyday of big network TV, when people got most of their entertainment from three big sources. Or the age of newspapers and news magazines, when they got their news from one or two sources. Concentration has existed before.
The question is whether the network effects of social networking will be strong enough to keep Facebook dominant. There are realms where being big is an advantage because people will tend to come to whatever place is big, like eBay and online auctions. eBay has more buyers so sellers come there, which means there is more to buy and so more buyers come... you get the idea. Publishing and broadcasting have weaker network effects than social networking sites do; a newspaper may be slightly more interesting to you because your neighbor also reads it (which gives the two of you something to talk about together) but it's not as big a deal. What kept those businesses on top in their day was the capital cost of entering the business and economies of scale in content production.
My personal guess is that Facebook will survive as a big network for loose social connections but people will start spending more time in other, more exclusive spaces as well. That is, you will go to Facebook for the broad social overlook and to whatever affinity site appeals to you to communicate with your closer tribe. The inherent problem that Facebook is up against in that niche is that it's a niche where there is inherently only one winner. If people get dissatisfied with it and start going elsewhere, the tipping point could come as quickly as it did for MySpace.
Facebook is not a site or social space but a service.
Except that you are not being served -
you are being served up.
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You're almost as happy as you think you are.
It's not only facebook
It is known that google uses JS to similar links for every search result you click on.
The Google News and Weather app seems is useful, but if you have a slow connection you will soon realize that for every news item you click on, there is a man-in-the-middle URL tying your Google account to that visit.
Unless you're willing to open the (non-google-provided, hopefully) browser to the news site in the label for the headline... and dig for a specific link, there's no way to steal the link and open it unwatched. And while you try that workaround, you're exposed to the risk of distraction from other news there that aren't the original target.
It's not only facebook
It is known that google uses JS to similar links for every search result you click on.
The Google News and Weather app seems is useful, but if you have a slow connection you will soon realize that for every news item you click on, there is a man-in-the-middle URL tying your Google account to that visit.
Unless you're willing to open the (non-google-provided, hopefully) browser to the news site in the label for the headline... and dig for a specific link, there's no way to steal the link and open it unwatched. And while you try that workaround, you're exposed to the risk of distraction from other news there that aren't the original target.
I meant to rewrite the JS line after I moved it up to before the Google news item that it's supposed to reference