Tag: facebook

UGC Subway Advisories

The Subway Status application, which was not developed by the MTA, is a user generated subway alert system. Now you can forget about those wet mornings when you don’t know if your train will get you to work. Theoretically all of the other users on Facebook who ride your Subway line will have already tipped you off to any service disruptions before you leave your house. Pretty cool, although it is only useful if a large number of people use it, so sign up!

using facebook to convey MTA status

Facebook is opening up

According to convention wisdom, Facebook was, until today, considered a sandbox, a walled garden, a silo. Now that we know that the feeds are being implemented (many are still needed to make it really open) it’s possible for Facebook-generated data to percolate into other Internet applications.

woo. this is good news. i wonder how they balance privacy and serendipity / discoverability.

Facebook PHP Mess

From just this single page of source code a lot can be said and extrapolated about the rest of the Facebook application and platform. For instance, the structure doesn’t follow any object oriented development practices, and it seems that the application is one large PHP file with a large number of custom functions living in the same namespace (they also seem to be using the Smarty templating engine).

where we learn that its a mess of PHP. that will cause pain as they expand.

I’m not a witch! I’m not a witch!

I remember a time, it must have been the early 1980s, when it was common to ban phones with direct dial facilities. Why? Because people might talk to their friends and family during work time. It took a while for firms to figure out that this was a stupid thing to do, but most carried on with a limited ban, usually on international direct dialling. That lasted a little longer. Then, by the early 1990s, when internet e-mail emerged, it too was banned. In fact there are stories about the banning of corporate e-mail as well, continuing into this century. Soon it was the turn of Instant Messaging to bear the wrath of Corporate Policy. Then came blogs and wikis and social software in general. Now it’s about social networking.

only companies with already low productivity would think about banning social networks. how about working on the real problem: people running around looking busy and doing nothing?

Scoble Spam

Why do you want to be connected to people you don’t know and alert them to stuff you’re doing? And then it hit me! He’s building his own broadcast network.

2007-08-10:

I can only guess at why FB has decided to ignore my wishes and fill my news feed with content I’ve explicitly rejected. Perhaps their algorithms think he is my most important “friend” because he has 1000s of people in his network? Perhaps they think his content will generate the most click throughs since they are usually videos? Either way, this is one instance where Facebook has failed to put the user in control.

Facebook ended a marriage

A misguided attempt to increase our privacy backfired horribly a few days ago, just weeks ahead of our wedding. My fiance and I unchecked the personal relationship box in Facebook to make our personal lives a little more private. Unwittingly, however, that action sent out a message to our entire social network and news feed saying we were no longer engaged. (Complete with a forlorn broken heart.)

who gets engaged these days, anyway?

Social Media Class

The look and feel of MySpace resonates far better with subaltern communities than it does with the upwardly mobile hegemonic teens. This is even clear in the blogosphere where people talk about how gauche MySpace is while commending Facebook on its aesthetics. I’m sure that a visual analyst would be able to explain how classed aesthetics are, but it is pretty clear to me that aesthetics are more than simply the “eye of the beholder” – they are culturally narrated and replicated. That “clean” or “modern” look of Facebook is akin to West Elm or Pottery Barn or any poshy Scandinavian design house (that I admit I’m drawn to) while the more flashy look of MySpace resembles the Las Vegas imagery that attracts millions every year. I suspect that lifestyles have aesthetic values and that these are being reproduced on MySpace and Facebook.

ha! i knew i didn’t like facebook for some reason. it’s the damn jocks being their vapid selves. god i hate sports and the atomic waste it produces.

Frankly, i’m uber disappointed with comScore but even more disappointed with all of the press and bloggers who ran with the story that MySpace is gray without really looking at the data. This encourages inaccurate data and affects the entire tech industry as well as policy makers, advertisers, and users. I’m horrified that AP, Slashdot, Wall Street Journal, and numerous respectable bloggers are just reporting this as truth and speaking about it as though this is about users instead of visitors. C’mon now. If we’re going to fetishize quantitative data, let’s at least use a properly critical eye.

Network effects getting weaker?

It’s easier than ever to move from one service to another. Blog reader? No problem. Photo site? I have accounts on all of them anyway. Social networks? Yeah I’m signed up on all of them. I use the ones everyone else is using, at the moment. Just like we all do. The rest have a stub profile for me, but don’t see much activity. I started wondering if there was less lock-in than I thought on other services supposedly protected by strong network effects. Like eBay, for instance. They’ve got all the buyers, and all the sellers. But what fraction of their transactions are “Buy it now” from their 700k merchants? Is there an 80/20 rule to those merchants? Could a core be drawn to a new service?

only because people apparently don’t place value in data portability, and like re-entering the same thing. which leads me to believe that most people either prefer things ephemeral or ascribe no value to the implied data.