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Sunday, May 15, 2011

I unkissed Facebook ..... and I liked it!



Every day ... in every way ... I'm glad I left Facebook.

I rather fancied replying to a comment someone had posted on an article from ZDNet. So, I clicked the "Reply" button ... and a dialog window appeared asking me to log on to Facebook ..... WHAT? ..... Yes, I could go no further without being forced into the Facebook experience.



It's 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' updated to 'Invasion of the Life Takers'. "Join us ... join us ... you'll like it ... everyone else is here waiting to welcome you ... come on, it doesn't hurt. All that will happen is that your life will be taken over. Think how much easier that will be ... swimming with the tide"

I do not want to belong to an organisation that wants to force me to join, as Groucho might have said.



Yes ... it's getting better every day!

8 comments:

NeilG said...

I didn't kiss the sodding thing in the first place.

pinksy said...

I've been on it since they originally opened it out beyond american universities (2006/7?), and it was a bit of fun initially. It was certainly a lot simpler back then. These days, I've had enough of it, for many reasons, not limited to:

1. The ubiquity of the damn thing across the entire web, due to Facebook Connect. Sure, OAuth is handy for single sign on (letting one central place handle your authentication, especially as OpenId hasn't really exploded), but just the fact that it's EVERYWHERE annoys me. This includes the comment plugin you mention - why *should* I comment through my FB account?? I want a range of options to be able comment, not just "assumed" to want to comment via FB. Grrr!
2. The bland, blue design. It could look and feel so much better, but they seem too rigid on a design that they came up with almost 10 years ago, that seriously needs a total refresh, but they just won't. Every page, profile, whatever, all looks the same. Before FB was so all-pervasive, brands used to exclusively push their own website (so at the bottom of a beer commercial, you'd see "visit us as fosters.com"), but now you see "search for us at facebook.com". With their own website, they have control over the whole experience, but just because "the kids" like FB means that they have to have the same, bland, blue, crappy design, the same as everyone else.
3. Lack of intuitive indexing. So like, you see on adverts, "search for us on Facebook". Whether this is because some companies just don't know how to set up a vanity URL, I don't know, but it's rubbish IMHO. At least when they say "follow us on twitter" they provide the twitter handle.
4. The walled garden. This really sucks. And it's scary.
5. The fact that they bought FriendFeed, which thankfully still exists, but they will probably shut down, even though their own in-house version is rubbish.
6. Facebook Places! Arrgh! Foursquare have it nailed, and then FB come in and completely steal the idea. And just do a rubbish version of it anyway.
7. Mark Zuckerberg. Go away.

On the plus side, they have come up with a couple of good things, namely a fast PHP interpreter called HipHop, and a high performance document database called Cassandra, which I believe are available as open source, so that's good. They're nowhere near as innovative as Google though, but I guess FB and Google have different goals.

I'll stay on it, but I never directly use it anymore. I just have my YouTube likes etc pushed to it automatically, but that's about it.

I was surprised they didn't buy Skype though. That seemed logical to me.

Jamie BigBoss said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Jamie BigBoss said...

I didn't either

Jamie BigBoss said...

Why would you kiss facebook

Jamie BigBoss said...

I think that you should put more posts on your blog, the reason not very many people look at it is because you only put 1 new post on every year. You should put one on every week or every month. On my blog I put about 40 post on every month but i depends which month it is.

Jamie BigBoss said...

Facebook is rubish.

Jamie BigBoss said...
This comment has been removed by the author.