[colug-432] Facebook

[Rick Troth]

On 06/23/2015 01:27 PM, Steve VanSlyck wrote:
> Wouldn't help me much. I'm not Facebooked, Linked-in, or Twittered.

And that's okay ... even *recommended*. (see below) Just that, those of
us who *are* on LI should take advantage of it. (And I suspect, but
cannot prove, that using it will drive reduction of spam in that space.)
But I would keep most conversational interactions here in this forum.

About Facebook, LI, Twitter, G+, especially FB:
If you haven't signed up for Facebook, don't! It's a terrible lock-in.
One could fairly describe it as an internet black hole.

It's not like FB is some inherently evil thing. It's just that once you
get involved it becomes difficult to extract yourself from it. The
culture on FB is broad, which would be a good thing except that FB does
not provide the means for normalizing interaction. Example: Sally and
Sara both know Susan, but haven't been in touch for years. Susan posts a
status, Sara comments, and then in the resulting thread Sally says "Hi
Sara! Where have you been and how are you? I miss you so much!".

This doesn't even mention the mis-directed drama.

Technically, Facebook re-invents common internet services in its own
image. (Presumably so it can reap ad revenue.) Some examples ...

  * IM:
    We had plenty of IM services, and FB could have joined in. Instead
    they chose to implement their own "chat" which cannot (reliably) be
    accessed outside of their engine. Sure, there's a Pidgin plug-in. It
    sucks.
  * EMail:
    It's the 21st century. One can reasonably send "correspondence"
    to/from thousands (millions) of autonomous installations. But not
    FB. They chose to implement their own messaging service which must
    run in their user experience engine.
  * Calendar:
    It's really handy, especially when you think of *social* media, to
    share and organize events. As with email, one could very reliably
    send and receive invitations and related notices. But FB chose to
    handle "events" internally.


Back to the drama thing, one close relative grew tired of the noise and
emotional roller-coaster. She "unfriended" many and almost closed her
account. But she stopped just short of that. Too many others are in that
space. I'm feeling the same way, would love to turn down the volume, but
it's really really difficult to take the step of shutting it completely
off.

Don't get FB.

This probably puts me *out* of the race for a job with Facebook.
Possibly not so great for me at this juncture, but I gotta be honest.

Also, FB is doing some *good* things with PHP and related tech. (a coin
always has two sides)

-- R; <><



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