Myspace was a combination of music promotion and primitive social networking - it was the music side that made it so popular, as at the time there wasn't anything else around that did anything like it for free (like Youtube). Facebook started with college students in the US, and went public probably around the time Myspace was at its peak. There was a definite year or two where FB started picking up users more and more rapidly before Myspace started losing users - a combination of increased exposure of FB, Myspace's primitive features, horrific UI and regular errors and outages. After then yeah, most people dropped Myspace for Facebook - network effects again.
Facebook was cleaner looking, responsive (due to pervasive use of AJAX), had photo tagging, privacy features and probably most important, the news feed on the homepage showing you things your friends were doing without ever having to leave that page. Myspace never really grew beyond the idea of customisable band pages really.
You're right their accounts aren't open, but every indication is that they're moderately profitable. Certainly given their slice of the online ad business and huge user base I'd be surprised if they weren't...
Facebook was clearly a better social network than Myspace from the start; the flaws of Myspace meant that someone was always going to come along and do the social part better, and Myspace hadn't captured a large or demographically-varied enough set of users for lock-in via network effects. The growing sentiment of distrust of FB is still just minute fraction of those 500 million users, and there aren't (right now) any other major issues that would encourage people to think about moving elsewhere (if there was anywhere).
Yes, because everyone on Facebook has 4,372 friends and are in some kind of popularity contest. Nice strawman. My Facebook homepage is full of stuff from my real-life friends, who I see in real life. Amazing!
Myspace as haemorrhaging users long before they started updating the site, and those changes were either minor tweaks to try and mimic existing FB functionality, fixes for glaring usability issues, and then the revamp which changed the site into something unrecognisable and, well, shit. But Myspace was barely a social network in the sense FB is - you could add friends, post a comment on their page or photo, and that's about it. Oh wait, crappy blogs, and really terrible events.
Facebook already makes a profit, not a huge one, but relatively impressive given the infrastructure they must need to service 500 million users, each of which gets a totally unique homepage and view of almost every other page. Given network effects, what is this "next best thing" going to have that will draw the majority of users away from FB?
3-4 short paragraphs is awfully long? Heh. Not much of a reader, then?
Straight in with the ad hominem, nice.
And it's not because of Facebook. Facebook is supplying what a market is demanding. I refer to the origin of that demand. In that sense you are right, it's nothing to do (directly) with Facebook. Facebook is the effect of a cause. It is not the cause. I'm not sure how you could have interpreted me in any other way, since all the other ways to interpret me are trivially shown to be invalid (course, instead of assuming I am a thinking being, you might need me to be wrong...).
You're correct I got the cause and effect relationship in your post the wrong way round, but that doesn't invalidate my argument at all. Facebook is an enabling tool for social interaction, the latest in a history of technological advances that facilitate such - the postal service, the telegraph, the phone, the mobile phone, email, IM, forums etc.
In my case, I already have real human interaction with my friends and relatives. Actual face-to-face quality time.
The only use I'd have for Facebook would be to have superficial contact with people I don't spend actual quality time with. I don't find that desirable in the slightest. It would be like taking one of the finer things in life, making a standardized package for it, and trivializing the hell out of it. But then, I'm not really a member of this culture; I just happen to be in it. I have long overcome its fears of actual contact by realizing they are not in my interests.
Good for you. How many people do you interact with on a regular basis, and how geographically dispersed are they? Do you have multiple social groups you are part of, with different interests and demographics?
You're supposed to be able to maintain a social group of no more than 150 or so people, but unless they're all doing pretty much the same thing all the time it's nigh-on impossible to be constantly up to date with everyone's news and doings. Facebook facilitates this in a way no other individual tool manages - status updates, photos, simple event management etc., all pervasively interactive. It's nice to be able to keep in touch with friends who live far enough away I don't see very often, or who are travelling, and to get informed of all kinds of events I might fancy. And best of all, what I choose to see is what I want to see.
If you really cannot understand the psychological impact a culture of divorce and bastard children and media manipulation and alienation has had on the last few generations, the way they have few or no models for healthy relationships and how this is spilling over even into friendships and business relationships, how being superficial is now considered cool, and why that might create an environment conducive to things like Facebook, just tell me you don't know what I am talking about and leave it at that.
It is, after all, hard to have a discussion about electrons with people who strongly believe electrons don't exist because they have never seen them.
*shrug* Your experience with society/Facebook seems to have coloured your ability to realise that other people have different social lives and use Facebook in different ways. I have an abundence of wonderful friends I've known for years, Facebook is a handy tool that allows my immediate social circle to be larger than it would be.
How is IRC even remotely comparable in function to Facebook? Yeah, if I wanted to chat to a random bunch of anonymous people about a particular topic I'd hang out on IRC, but that's nothing like what I use Facebook for.
You mean like groups, which Facebook has had for years? Pretty much anything you put on FB can have individual settings as to who can view it - friends of friends, friends, include/exclude by group/user or just me.
Again though, that's because you've got those people in your friends list, or you've liked their pages. It's not Facebook's fault if a) you've kept these people and b) your friends don't post much.
That's an awful long screed about the breakdown of human interaction because of Facebook, which ignores the fact that I (and everyone I know), use Facebook in addition to having real life personal and/or intimate relationships with their friends. Just because my closest friends post status updates doesn't mean I don't see them on a regular basis in real life.
Facebook is a useful tool for keeping in touch and maintaining pre-existing social groups. If your view of social interaction is as bleak as your post suggests, then you won't get anything out of Facebook... but that's nothing to do with Facebook.
Actually, company names are plural in British English, singular in American English. I would say "Microsoft are doing...", an American would say "Microsoft is doing..." Without knowing his nationality, you can't say he's wrong.
Company names are plural in British English, singular in American English. I would say "Microsoft are doing...", an American would say "Microsoft is doing..."
The 5% figure is just a starting point - adjust it to the point where you're missing every small fluctuation, but getting out before losing too much. You're not getting out in the middle of a drop, but hopefully at the start before panic selling and shorting has kicked in. As I said, technically this is a method for avoiding loss rather than making money, but all it takes is picking stocks that rise by more than 5% (or whatever) then you will make money.
The way to make money (or more accurately, not lose money) is to have a strict rule of selling as soon as a stock drops a certain amount in value, say 5%. Sure, you may miss out on a subsequent rally and doubling in price, but you can never lose more than 5% of your initial stake, and over the long term you should come out ahead. This level of rationality is beyond most people though, they get emotionally invested in their position and/or subscribe to magical thinking (stock chart analysis etc).
When you consider also that the US pays twice as much as other Western countries for health care (split about 50-50 between public and private spending), yet fails to cover 40% of the population it makes you start to wonder what's going on and why isn't all this cash helping...
Indeed, I work for the BMJ, and we're all about evidence-based medicine - it's quite alarming to realise just how much medicine is only a step up from received wisdom and folklore.
Just from looking at the screenshots on the site I can say
a) tons of wasted vertical whitespace in lists (both left column and track lists b) wildly inconsistent borders between screen elements - the borders between menu bar, left column, right area and bottom panel are all different. c) weird striped effect on the bottom panel instead of a gradient at least d) alert box options are inconsistent with other Windows programs e) left sidebar headings are harder to see than the items under them - lighter font, no indentation
Unfortunately, I'm sure some of that is down to using GTK, which produces horrible-looking apps on Windows.
The problem with iTunes is that is doesn't allow organisation by directory; to delineate an album you need to set the Album Artist field in the ID3 tag (not present in any MP3s in my library at the time I first installed iTunes), or use a special iTunes ID3 tag that marks it as a compilation (again, not present). Oh, and there's another special ID3 tag required for gapless playback as well.
From your link it does seem like that's where he's starting from, especially with the whole "life is a journey" and other metaphors linking concepts to space; he then shows how this gives rise to various linguistic concepts that seem to be illogical or different across various languages, but when viewed in terms of the underlying metaphor can be linked. Or at least, that's my recall of it, it's been a while since I read it. Ta for the link:)
Slashdot Mirror
The guarantee card system expires in just over a week's time, and cheques are supposed to be abolished in 2018.
Myspace was a combination of music promotion and primitive social networking - it was the music side that made it so popular, as at the time there wasn't anything else around that did anything like it for free (like Youtube). Facebook started with college students in the US, and went public probably around the time Myspace was at its peak. There was a definite year or two where FB started picking up users more and more rapidly before Myspace started losing users - a combination of increased exposure of FB, Myspace's primitive features, horrific UI and regular errors and outages. After then yeah, most people dropped Myspace for Facebook - network effects again.
Facebook was cleaner looking, responsive (due to pervasive use of AJAX), had photo tagging, privacy features and probably most important, the news feed on the homepage showing you things your friends were doing without ever having to leave that page. Myspace never really grew beyond the idea of customisable band pages really.
You're right their accounts aren't open, but every indication is that they're moderately profitable. Certainly given their slice of the online ad business and huge user base I'd be surprised if they weren't...
Facebook was clearly a better social network than Myspace from the start; the flaws of Myspace meant that someone was always going to come along and do the social part better, and Myspace hadn't captured a large or demographically-varied enough set of users for lock-in via network effects. The growing sentiment of distrust of FB is still just minute fraction of those 500 million users, and there aren't (right now) any other major issues that would encourage people to think about moving elsewhere (if there was anywhere).
Yes, because everyone on Facebook has 4,372 friends and are in some kind of popularity contest. Nice strawman. My Facebook homepage is full of stuff from my real-life friends, who I see in real life. Amazing!
Myspace as haemorrhaging users long before they started updating the site, and those changes were either minor tweaks to try and mimic existing FB functionality, fixes for glaring usability issues, and then the revamp which changed the site into something unrecognisable and, well, shit. But Myspace was barely a social network in the sense FB is - you could add friends, post a comment on their page or photo, and that's about it. Oh wait, crappy blogs, and really terrible events.
Facebook already makes a profit, not a huge one, but relatively impressive given the infrastructure they must need to service 500 million users, each of which gets a totally unique homepage and view of almost every other page. Given network effects, what is this "next best thing" going to have that will draw the majority of users away from FB?
None of which network effects apply to.
3-4 short paragraphs is awfully long? Heh. Not much of a reader, then?
Straight in with the ad hominem, nice.
And it's not because of Facebook. Facebook is supplying what a market is demanding. I refer to the origin of that demand. In that sense you are right, it's nothing to do (directly) with Facebook. Facebook is the effect of a cause. It is not the cause. I'm not sure how you could have interpreted me in any other way, since all the other ways to interpret me are trivially shown to be invalid (course, instead of assuming I am a thinking being, you might need me to be wrong...).
You're correct I got the cause and effect relationship in your post the wrong way round, but that doesn't invalidate my argument at all. Facebook is an enabling tool for social interaction, the latest in a history of technological advances that facilitate such - the postal service, the telegraph, the phone, the mobile phone, email, IM, forums etc.
In my case, I already have real human interaction with my friends and relatives. Actual face-to-face quality time.
The only use I'd have for Facebook would be to have superficial contact with people I don't spend actual quality time with. I don't find that desirable in the slightest. It would be like taking one of the finer things in life, making a standardized package for it, and trivializing the hell out of it. But then, I'm not really a member of this culture; I just happen to be in it. I have long overcome its fears of actual contact by realizing they are not in my interests.
Good for you. How many people do you interact with on a regular basis, and how geographically dispersed are they? Do you have multiple social groups you are part of, with different interests and demographics?
You're supposed to be able to maintain a social group of no more than 150 or so people, but unless they're all doing pretty much the same thing all the time it's nigh-on impossible to be constantly up to date with everyone's news and doings. Facebook facilitates this in a way no other individual tool manages - status updates, photos, simple event management etc., all pervasively interactive. It's nice to be able to keep in touch with friends who live far enough away I don't see very often, or who are travelling, and to get informed of all kinds of events I might fancy. And best of all, what I choose to see is what I want to see.
If you really cannot understand the psychological impact a culture of divorce and bastard children and media manipulation and alienation has had on the last few generations, the way they have few or no models for healthy relationships and how this is spilling over even into friendships and business relationships, how being superficial is now considered cool, and why that might create an environment conducive to things like Facebook, just tell me you don't know what I am talking about and leave it at that.
It is, after all, hard to have a discussion about electrons with people who strongly believe electrons don't exist because they have never seen them.
*shrug* Your experience with society/Facebook seems to have coloured your ability to realise that other people have different social lives and use Facebook in different ways. I have an abundence of wonderful friends I've known for years, Facebook is a handy tool that allows my immediate social circle to be larger than it would be.
How is IRC even remotely comparable in function to Facebook? Yeah, if I wanted to chat to a random bunch of anonymous people about a particular topic I'd hang out on IRC, but that's nothing like what I use Facebook for.
You mean like groups, which Facebook has had for years? Pretty much anything you put on FB can have individual settings as to who can view it - friends of friends, friends, include/exclude by group/user or just me.
Again though, that's because you've got those people in your friends list, or you've liked their pages. It's not Facebook's fault if a) you've kept these people and b) your friends don't post much.
That's an awful long screed about the breakdown of human interaction because of Facebook, which ignores the fact that I (and everyone I know), use Facebook in addition to having real life personal and/or intimate relationships with their friends. Just because my closest friends post status updates doesn't mean I don't see them on a regular basis in real life.
Facebook is a useful tool for keeping in touch and maintaining pre-existing social groups. If your view of social interaction is as bleak as your post suggests, then you won't get anything out of Facebook... but that's nothing to do with Facebook.
Actually, company names are plural in British English, singular in American English. I would say "Microsoft are doing ...", an American would say "Microsoft is doing..." Without knowing his nationality, you can't say he's wrong.
Company names are plural in British English, singular in American English. I would say "Microsoft are doing ...", an American would say "Microsoft is doing..."
The Washington Post has an entire section about the drug war in Mexico - Mexico at War. As does the New York Times. The BBC has plenty of coverage as well. Perhaps you're just not looking hard enough, or you're more attached to your biases than facts?
The 5% figure is just a starting point - adjust it to the point where you're missing every small fluctuation, but getting out before losing too much. You're not getting out in the middle of a drop, but hopefully at the start before panic selling and shorting has kicked in. As I said, technically this is a method for avoiding loss rather than making money, but all it takes is picking stocks that rise by more than 5% (or whatever) then you will make money.
The way to make money (or more accurately, not lose money) is to have a strict rule of selling as soon as a stock drops a certain amount in value, say 5%. Sure, you may miss out on a subsequent rally and doubling in price, but you can never lose more than 5% of your initial stake, and over the long term you should come out ahead. This level of rationality is beyond most people though, they get emotionally invested in their position and/or subscribe to magical thinking (stock chart analysis etc).
Cheers for the link, that was much easier to understand than anything else I've read on monads.
When you consider also that the US pays twice as much as other Western countries for health care (split about 50-50 between public and private spending), yet fails to cover 40% of the population it makes you start to wonder what's going on and why isn't all this cash helping...
Indeed, I work for the BMJ, and we're all about evidence-based medicine - it's quite alarming to realise just how much medicine is only a step up from received wisdom and folklore.
Ssh, don't tell the libertarians that! ;)
Thanks for the post, it's been far too long since I did my degree lol.
Just from looking at the screenshots on the site I can say
a) tons of wasted vertical whitespace in lists (both left column and track lists
b) wildly inconsistent borders between screen elements - the borders between menu bar, left column, right area and bottom panel are all different.
c) weird striped effect on the bottom panel instead of a gradient at least
d) alert box options are inconsistent with other Windows programs
e) left sidebar headings are harder to see than the items under them - lighter font, no indentation
Unfortunately, I'm sure some of that is down to using GTK, which produces horrible-looking apps on Windows.
The problem with iTunes is that is doesn't allow organisation by directory; to delineate an album you need to set the Album Artist field in the ID3 tag (not present in any MP3s in my library at the time I first installed iTunes), or use a special iTunes ID3 tag that marks it as a compilation (again, not present). Oh, and there's another special ID3 tag required for gapless playback as well.
From your link it does seem like that's where he's starting from, especially with the whole "life is a journey" and other metaphors linking concepts to space; he then shows how this gives rise to various linguistic concepts that seem to be illogical or different across various languages, but when viewed in terms of the underlying metaphor can be linked. Or at least, that's my recall of it, it's been a while since I read it. Ta for the link :)
Is this the same as what Stephen Pinker is talking about in The Stuff of Thought?
There is, search for the superinjunction blog and have a look at their spreadsheet :)