Facebook, I gotta hand it to you. You’ve done a fine job. Everybody’s on Facebook. My mom’s on Facebook. You somehow
suckered Microsoft into giving you $240M. Nightly news commentators make comments about you in their pointless banter.
By all accounts, you’re on top of the world.
So why do you seem so desperate?
I know, I know. All of Web 2.0 (you included) is driven by ad revenue. That means you need to drive people to your site
and keep you there. No problem there, it seems. Facebook junkies spend hours and days flipping through their News Feed
and profiles. And by the looks of it, your advertising strategy is to stay relatively inobtrusive, and off to the side.
No flashing banners. I might get a flyer in the sidebar sometimes, but not always. Which makes me think maybe you’re not
scrambling desperately after every single eyeball at every possible instant.
Why, then, don’t you send message text in your email message notifications? Would that be so hard? You sent me an email
message just to say “To read this message, follow the link below:”?
You know, I don’t really mind your site too terribly. But I’d probably like it more if I didn’t feel like I was being
coerced into using it.
And then there’s Facebook Applications, each one desperately trying to be more viral than the last. At least you give me
warning that you’re going to sell me out to third parties before I get suckered into installing one. I appreciate having
the opportunity to say no.
I admit, though, I like being able to get various online things that I do into my profile so that people who like your
site in and of itself can get easy access to it. That’s fantastic.
However, surely it must have occurred to you that it really needs to go both ways. I’m not going to put anything into
your site that I can’t get out again. I already feel bad that I’ve accrued as much relationship networking stuff in
there that I’ll never be able to get out again. You’re not going to be around forever. The next time I sign up for one
of these social networking sites, I’m going to have to start all over again, re-establishing all the same relationships,
presuming any of my friends have signed up. And again, the time after that. And the time after that. It makes me a bit
sad that there’s no free and open platform that let’s me say “I trust this person; they can see my stuff,” but there
isn’t. You could have been that, but you seem more preoccupied building up your walled garden.
And just because there isn’t an open platform now doesn’t mean there won’t be forever. And what do you know? It looks
like Google is out to eat your lunch.
You have so much potential, but from the outside looking in, you’re squandering it. You could be doing things that might
make your users lives easier, like better filtering to cut down on the horrible spaminess of the News Feed page, or
allowing me more control over who can see what than just assigning people to my “limited profile.” I’d like that.
Instead you’re… I’m not even sure what you’re doing. What are you doing?
Well, whatever it is, good luck with it. You’ve got me on your site, and I feel a bit dirty about it. I like being able
to keep up with old friends and acquaintances, but I feel no particular fealty to you. When they abandon you, I will to.
Rummaging through my thoughts to come up with something to write about tonight, I started to come to the conclusion that
I spend way too much time thinking about products I would like to buy.
A lot of this seems to be stemming from the laptop thing. That’s something I’d been thinking about for well over a year.
Realizing that what I’d decided I’d wanted wasn’t actually what I wanted shook the pedestal a bit, and right now my
brain, as represented by a metaphorical glass vase, is wobbling, attempting to right itself. In the process of wobbling,
I’m questioning why it is I care about this crap as much as I do.
The laptop isn’t the only thing, either. Home theatre setups, server hardware, Doctor Who merchandise, computer
monitors, furniture, blinds, gardening tools, outdoor lighting, books, video game hardware and software, kitchen
gadgets, Christmas decorations, art, music, toiletries, cat paraphernalia, clothes, MP3 players, gadgets and toys…
They all swirl around my subconscious in a maddening whirlwind of debates and comparisons, priorities and time lines.
For example, I noticed in the Radio Shack The Source flyer that they had a sale on GPSes, and that they
had some nice Garmin handhelds
for better prices than I’d seen elsewhere. I love maps and things, and GPSes are fun toys. I chickened out from buying
one at the mall today because I wasn’t sure if it could keep track of where you’ve been so you can check out your route
in Google Earth afterwards. Because, for some reason, I’d much rather just go out for a walk or a drive somewhere
without knowing where I was going and see the map afterwards than use a GPS to figure out where to go in the first
place. I checked the manual online, and apparently it can do that. Regardless, even though I could almost certainly live
a happy and fulfilling life without one, I really want one of these toys. I’m holding myself back from hitting the “add
to cart” button at this very instant.
I am a well-trained consumer, I suppose. The only way I’d be better trained is if I just went out and bought all of it
without thinking, so I suppose this obsessiveness is a form of restraint.
I beat myself up a bit for spending so much mental energy on silly, single-minded consumerism, but I get stuck when I
try to give myself things I should be thinking about.
There was, I think, a Tapestry episode, where a guy was talking about how we spend so
much time fixated on collecting stuff and not nearly enough on collecting experiences. And while I couldn’t agree more,
it’s hard (for me, anyway) to plot and plan experiences. Fretting about stuff just comes so naturally.
I probably spend way too much time thinking about computers and computer-related stuff. And with the
whole laptop thing, I’m maybe getting overly
introspective about it.
It’s NaBloPoMo, so I figure I’m allowed to indulge my nerdier tendencies.
Shamus, over at Twenty Sided posted today about
his personal experience with various versions of Windows and how
Vista is pretty much the culmination of a long history of suck. Well, he doesn’t quite say that, but that’s the gist I’m
choosing to take away. That got me thinking of a (cringe-inducing but I’m linking to it anyway) page I posted up on my
home page a good decade ago (back when it was fashionable to have home pages)
about my personal history with computers. I never liked it much, because I
thought it came off as a bit defensive.
You see, all through high school and university, I had a Commodore Amiga. My
grandfather bought me an Amiga 500 when I was 13, and I upgraded myself to
an Amiga 1200 (with 40MB hard drive!) in my last year of high school. By the
time I’d written that page in second year at UW, it was pretty clear that the Amiga was pretty much a dead platform.
There was still a community out there on the Internet, thank God, and I was still able to get ahold of a few hardware
upgrades when I had the spare cash, but the writing was on the wall.
But I loved my Amigas. Both of them. I kept using my A1200 pretty much till the end of university. Even after I
graduated, got a job and bought my first PC, I kept using it. I even bought my Amiga a network card so they could talk
to one another.
That didn’t last, though. The Amiga’s external 1GB hard drive died shortly thereafter. I was crushed. I had my whole
life on there. (And it’s not like I could do back-ups. It was an Amiga. I couldn’t afford a SCSI tape drive. And I never
got file sharing working well enough to get the data onto the PC’s hard drive. I was able to resurrect her briefly with
a SCSI hard drive I salvaged from UW surplus, but I never really went back after the drive died.
That was pretty much the end of an era. I was officially a PC user. I’d given in, finally.
I hadn’t really meant to end up running Windows, though. It just kind of happened. When I bought the PC–a
dual-processor Celeron 300 on an ABIT BP6 motherboard–I bought it fully
intending it to be a Linux machine. And I would run SuSE on it, because SuSE (at the time) shipped with
the UAE Amiga Emulator by default. But I could never get the hardware working properly, so
I mostly ended up staying in a partition that had Windows 98 on it (thus entirely negating the point of having 1337,
hacky dual-processor machine) which I’d only really installed to play games.
I just kinda gave in, and I’ve been running Windows ever since.