not facebook

For the first time ever, I heard someone say "Lets not use Facebook, its too complicated" I wonder if the whole platform play is starting to backfire for some people? Facebook used to be a very elegant way to communicate with people you know. Its starting to get as "messy" as the rest of the internet. And thats probably a bad thing, since that recent Time article positioned Facebook as "The internet, but better" I find I'm using Facebook less too - as I am now seeing spam in Facebook too.

Which Way People?

71% of people, across all boundaries, feel that surveillance cameras are a Good Thing(tm). Sure, but not if its government lackies watching me break the law. I'd much prefer other people watch me break the law. Less chance they would flag me as a lawbreaker?

Which is it people? Are we really willing to give up our freedoms for a little more security? Eventually we will need to stay indoors all the time in order to keep our lives private. Since the govt is tapping our phone lines anyways, is privacy an illusion today? Was McNealy right when he said privacy is already gone, deal with it?

Freedom is already lost. Guess I'll just spend my time in Second Life.

now we need an uberupdater

OK so now I have to update Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, and every other stinking new social network site which comes along? Has anyone built an uber-updater which updates all this stuff at once? No, but if you think about it, thats not the crux of the problem. We all have statuses that we want to report to different people. No one has really figured how to do this correctly and most importantly, automatically. Pluggd has a little add-on that updates your twitter status with what you are listening to on Pluggd. We need more of that - Outlook updating Twitter, Pownce etc etc etc. We need one of these services to morph into the core status tool, and my gut says thats twitter. I update my twitter status and BAM, everything flows from there.

i'm on pownce now but so what?

My enjoyment of discovering new social networking products is highly inhibited by having to add all of my contacts over and over and over again. So tiresome. Why can't they have a tool to pull them all in, ala Facebook, Spoke etc etc etc. Sigh.

My recommendation to all new social networking sites: don't bother launching without a contact builder. Please.

Enough With The Private Invites, Already...

OK, I am now officially tired of those services which attempt to create buzz by giving out invites to a select few and hardly doling out any more. If the service wants good blog press, then let everyone in. Oh, but that would reveal the secret that "this revolutionary new thing" is just not that. The last "revolutionary new thing" I saw was twitter, and that was not such a big idea after all. People have wanted some kinda way to let people know what they are up to in a light way for ages. No one just ever did it. Pownce, Jaiku etc are just better, more featured, twitters. More features usually means bad. Look at how Palm hit the skids once it got more complex. We need simple devices which do one thing or a few things well.

MySpace vs Facebook

Interesting Post.

http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html

Too bad I disagree. Crappy interface is not related to culture. Bad web design is bad web design. Good web design is good web design. It crosses races and cultures and ages. Facebook looks better because the owners keep a tight rein on style. MySpace lets you run wild. It's a user empowerment decision from the creators of the site. Both sites let you express yourself. Of course the more artsy folks are going to do to MySpace - duh - gives people more control.

Whats Wrong With Steroids?

I've talked about this on my show at great length but I thought I'd mention it here so you can see that this blog IS broader than just the social networking stuff. You see, I firmly believe that the next stage of our physical and mental evolution can be accelerated by using our minds to come up with ways to augment ourselves to the task we wish to perform. If you think about it, steroids and other drugs which enhance your physical body are just the next step beyond training and should be part of any training regimen to increase your physical capabilities.

People proclaim, well thats cheating, or thats not natural. First of all, as the production methods for this stuff gets more and more advanced, the ability to detect it will diminish to zero - its kinda like trying to fight viruses, its a constant battle and sometimes you lose. Considering the money thats at stake, why not continue to engineer more effective drugs which are less and less detectable. So if you can't accurately detect, I say just let everyone do what they want.

And the not natural rebuttal? I believe that man-made is natural, as we everything we have created was fashioned from things that exist in nature - we did not create anything new - we just molded nature to do our bidding. And whats is more natural for a human than using his or her brain to think. Anything we can think of doing to augment ourselves, we should.