Tag: Facebook

Wikipeding on Facebook Chat

I’m sure many of you where taken aback by Facebook’s newest feature, Chat. It will be interesting to see how successful this is. I for one think the way Facebook releases new features is a bit curious. They release the new feature and then a few days later put a post in the mini-feed about. I think they would have less backlash against change if they gave more of a warning about their features before they released them.

But regardless I thought Wikipedia should know about this new feature. So I did this and this. It will be interesting to see how the community takes my changes. I might add footnotes later, but I couldn’t find any news articles on Facebook chat yet.

I also made a change on the blogger, Andrew Sullivan’s page.

Facebook is invading your mental/emotional space.

I spotted this while I was doing a brief morning browse through Facebook and I had to stop and laugh… even though I hadn’t yet had a needed dose of caffeine. I haven’t followed the link because I want to be able to continue pretending that the site you come to tries to sell you discount pharmaceuticals from El Salvador, and possibly strange, illegal aphrodisiacs poached from the wilds of Southeast Asia. Even the possibility of some kind of “love doctor” making money through snail-mail kits and tips is amusing, I suppose.

Anyway, it goes to show the breadth of small-time con artists trying to make a buck who are discovering the relatively cheap and presumably very effective form ad advertising available on everyone’s favorite social networking tool. Watch where you click.
Facebook Fixes Your Break-Up

Three Reasons Why People Who Hate Facebook Should GET OVER IT

Okay, so I read the article posted on the site, Three Reasons to Hate Facebookand I gotta say, I’m just tired of people whining about Facebook. I’ll agree that the addition of new vocabulary to our everyday speech because of Facebook (“Dude, I poked your girlfriend last night.””That’s a profile pic!””Did you see what I wrote on your graffiti wall?”) is slightly worrisome, but I mean really, it’s just a fad.

Remember back in the day when everyone had a LiveJournal? And your friends would get into fights over something one said about the other in a public entry? And now nobody cares at all? I feel like Facebook is heading in that same direction, especially with the addition of the applications deal. That is probably the one thing that Miss Annalee Newitz and I agree on. But even though applications are annoying, it probably takes about three seconds for me to delete all my requests. Plus, you can hide all those requests anyway.

The fact that one of Newitz’s arguments against Facebook was hinged on her own laziness ASTOUNDS me. She said herself that there are indeed plenty of privacy options that can be used on Facebook to keep all the people she’s slept with from seeing each other, but she’s just too lazy to figure them all out. And then the whole “social conformity” thing? PLEASE! Are we in middle school? Is putting your name in a phone book “conformist”? No. Facebook is practically the same thing. Newitz was upset because her employer was evidently using Facebook as a means of connecting all of their employees in a clean, clear, easy-to-use manner. Oh no! My life has been made easier because of Facebook! Give me a break.

So here’s the three reasons why people who hate Facebook should get over it:

1. It’s a voluntary site; if you hate it, then DON’T USE IT.

2. Privacy options are there for the people who are smart enough to use them. If you’ve got stuff you don’t want other people to see, then get off your lazy butt and hide it.

3. The “conformity” of the site actually makes it a lot easier to use; MySpace’s biggest problem is people covering their pages with useless graphics and crap that slow down your browsing speed. Conformity is not necessarily a bad thing.

And that’s all I have to say about that.