cross-posted to Jack & Jill Politics
I so hope we are not too late. I honestly feel that we, all people alive in this country at this time in our history, are lucky to even have the choice of Barack Obama. I feel that our answer to this opportunity represents a test. Are we worthy? Are we ready? Are we willing to stand?
I have worked hard to use my words, my voice, my comedy to find my own truth in this election and share it as far and as wide as possible with those who have ears to hear.
And yet, I fear it's never enough.
I'm sharing a video made by one of the most impressive thinkers of our time who got behind Obama early and helped craft what is hands down the most innovative technology platform proposed by any presidential candidate.
His name is Lawrence Lessig. He's huge in the world of innovation and copyright and has made his new issue that of government corruption. He is worth listening to, for he is so down with the struggle, and the readers of this blog know something about struggle.
Lessig is not out marching in the streets for prison reform, but he is trying to free all of us from the shackles of institutions which have so effectively choked off our access to our own democracy. The fact that he is so down for Obama is immense.
This video is 20 minutes, and I want you to watch it all. Then I want you to send it (and digg it) to someone you know who says there is no difference of substance between Obama and Clinton or that they will "both bring about change."
Viewing entries in
Technological
ok. I just finished watching all the keynote video and the product walkthroughs. pretty stream of consciousness thoughts on stuff
I'm impressed, yes I am.
extended assessment
AppleTV2 is looking hot.
Movie Rentals
ok, this is better than Amazon Unbox.
i didn't realize you could transfer movies to your iDevices or watch on computer OR watch on TV. That's pretty big
plus
- the interface is a massive improvement. flickr integration is hot. search looks very good. YouTube on TV during the writer's strike. plus i can find youtube and podcast video of election-themed content. bye bye C-Span. oh yeah, and I haven't had cable VOD in years, but the ability to order movies from the couch is hotness.
- My DVD ripping activities must now be intensified. Will go head and put the goodies in my iTunes library. just wish i could preserve chapters
- What keeps me from ATV is all my "non-standard" video, but I might just have to go on a mass re-encoding spree with Visual Hub
- I'm sure I'll have more money in my pocket if I sell the powerbook i'm using with Remote Buddy + Wiimote as a media center and purchase the $229 apple tv
- yep, just checked ebay. Should be able to get at LEAST $500 for the pbook
- love the green aspects of the computer
- love the remote optical drive concept
- LOVE the multi-touch trackpad gestures.
- still hate the small HD
- i like it whenever companies make backup easy
- don't like the fixed nature of the storage. need expandability
- i'm wary of wireless solutions. SOMETHING in my home is causing wifi to drop semi-regularly. thought it was my old aiport base station (now owned by a friend) but it's happening with the linksys too. possible culprits include TiVo and Wii
- drobo is more robust and expandable
- didn't realize it used wifi for fake gps location
- multiparty SMS is great. finally.
- they still need to fix: multiple icalendar support, MMS, contact search, bigger HD, 3G wireless
- but overall gives me confidence that jailbreaking these devices is not necessary as apple will solve 95 percent of problems (you'll never be able to download torrents with them :))
Another dispatch from the Web Community Forum conference on Facebook. I was added, last-minute, to a panel on using Facebook for outreach and marketing. I shared the stage with Jason Preston, who marketed this very conference almost exclusively on Facebook. Doing a great job with the moderation was Mr. Todd Sawicki.
Highlight for me was getting to show the Facebook video where I drowned a puppy because no one was using my group's discussion board.
Here are my slides. Steal these ideas. Just gimme credit if they get you rich. (keep quiet if they drive you into poverty).
Update 7 December. slide 3 says I have 11,238 friends. Drop the first "1" and it's accurate. Fast typing on stage. Sorry.
| View | Upload your own
(Update: I've added notes on the panel below the deck).
Today I presented at the Web Community Forum conference on Facebook along with Tris Hussy, Jeremy Pepper and moderated by Dave McClure. It was the final panel of the day and felt like a group therapy session. After a full day talking about the cool things you can do in Facebook, the three of us brought it back down to the stuff that sucks: bass ackwards email, application spam, insufficient privacy controls, confusing groups vs. pages and more.
My thoughts/slides were mostly based on these blog posts (number 1 and number 2).
Here are some slides I prepared for the panel. Feel free to use and enjoy:
UPDATE 6 December 10:33am (PT)
The Web Community Forum twitter feed is doing a good job note-taking (note-tweeting?) on all the panels. Here is a manual cut and paste (yuck) of our curmudgeon panel.
* Facebook curmudgeons panel. Fill in the blank "Facebook sucks the most because..."
* Tris: Facebook sucsk the most because the groups are absolutely useless
* Baratunde: Facebook sucks the most because it destroyed his ability to communicate with his fans
* @trishussey says that Facebook sucks because the groups are "useless"
* @baratunde says that Facebook sucks because he can't message his groups
* Jeremy: Facebook sucks the most because there is a misperceived sense of privacy
* @jspepper is complaining about the "mis-perceived sense of privacy"
* @jspepper says that people get put in jeopardy when they have public conversations on Facebook
* "kids, they just don't get it" - @jspepper
* Facebook treats you like a spammer when you're not, says attendee Ellen
* if you complain, sometimes things happen unilaterally says another attendee
* lack of discussion board notifications is lame Eric Weaver
* Facebook the company is "amateur hour" says an attendee who says that they are disorganized when they plan their events for developers
* we're all having a really good time here, people are laughing and having a great time
* other people can't choose how they want to be contacted, that's a problem
* the wall is not a substitute for controlling how people can contact you
* "God's green Internet earth" says Tris. LOL!
* "search is completely broken" says another attendee in the audience
* McClure is going around the room asking people what sucks about facebook. Lots of functionality issues.
* to try to find something in the history of posted items - there's no way to hold onto a piece of useful information
* a lot of people are harping on search as a problem
* everyone hates messaging
* @jowyang - let's make some suggestions, I TOTALLY agree with that. Bitching and moaning is all well and good, let's do something positive.
* Dave McClure just said, "Facebook sucks, but you're all regular users." @baratunde says, "America sucks, but I'm a regular user of that."
* @jspepper says that original college users have a misconception of the privacy and the walled garden - they post everything
* @jspepper knows someone who posts all this stuff and by posting their schedule, it led to someone getting raped
* @jspepper, "if you don't want to be in a walled garden, don't join."
* The biggest problem is the privacy issue and the lack of corporate responsibility for it. - @jspepper
* "I don't think Facebook gives a shit about their community at all. They think they're just numbers for advertising." - @jspepper
* Dave McClure says that monetization and CTR are really a huge problem.
* @baratunde says that e-mail and the telephone are substitutes for Facebook
* Facebook messaging is a deprecated version of e-mail
* "Never abandon basic features that work." @baratunde
* @trishussey wants a POP connection to download his FB e-mail
* Facebook has taken us back 40 years of messaging, sayeth @baratunde
* @trishussey, "I would rather use Lotus Notes than Facebook messaging and Lotus Notes is the worst e-mail system in the world."
* Dave McClure asks how can they improve
* @jspepper - FB doesn't care until people rise up and actively abandon
* @jspepper, "I'm not writing them off as malicious."
* @trishussey - Facebook is a "faux monopoly" because if any one thing blows up, people will leave.
* Tris: what percentage of your friends on FB would have to leave for you to go "eh, I guess I don't need to go there as much"?
* That's how fragile FB's appearance of monopoly is (tris)
* @baratunde - Facebook has a monopoly on my audience. They are good AND evil. They are not "benevolent."
* @jspepper, "it's SO not a monopoly." I don't see my parents on FB. There's a diversity of social networks out there that target niches.
* Kara Swisher is right when she says that Zuckerberg is showing his youth as a CEO sayeth @trishussey.
* @trishussey admits to having been an asshole when he was 25
* @jspepper, you can tell a Harvard man, you just can't tell him much
* Dave brings up Beacon - @trishussey says that Beacon belongs in the 4th circle of Hell, but there are things they can do to improve it.
* @baratunde - Beacon was the 7th circle of Hell before they changed things
* There needs to be a privacy czar that you talk to before you launch something like this (Beacon) - @baratunde
* opting out completely should be my choice - @baratunde
* @jspepper puts Beacon at 6.5 circle of hell eeven after the opt out because he wants people to see what he's doing in some cases
* @jspepper - I do like Facebook, there are amazing things that you can do with it. What they're doing gives them an "evil tinge."
* @trishussey - where are the people around Zuckerberg slapping him upside the head?
* @davemc500hats is having a lot of fun up there moderating. I can tell by the grin on his face.
* @rumford is asking @jspepper, don't you think that FB is a company, they don't need to seek approval or permission at all
* @rumford says that pissing off the FB community is a "calculated business risk."
* @davemc500hats asks @trishussey, "your daughter is a Web narc?!?!?!"
* @davemc500hats asks, "are apps useful? or not useful?"
* @trishussey - useful apps die, points out that @rumford said the same thing
* @baratunde says that a small subset of apps are engaging, but he's downsizing
* @baratunde, "the app process has so biased me against all apps, because they're spam."
* @baratunde - don't e-mail me. "you have a walled garden, stay inside."
* @jspepper says that he doesn't have a favorite app yet
* @davemc500hats asks, "is FB a great development environment?"
* @jspepper says that you have no choice but to go to Facebook if you're an app developer
* @davemc500hats, $15 billion, "more, less, or no fucking way?"
* @trishussey says, "no fucking way."
* @trishussey - I would put it into the billions, but 15 is just way too high
* @baratunde says, "valuation is tricky and weird. If we all believe it's worth it, it is worth it."
* @baratunde says, "it's not going to become the Internet."
* @jspepper says that he doesn't understand all the frenzy around the valuation. "They're not making money on advertising yet.
* @davemc500hats "poke, superpoke or get your hands off me?"
* @trishussey, "i could live without poking."
* @baratunde, "I have been known on occasion to poke people."
* @jspepper "when men poke me on Facebook, it creeps me out." "This woman keeps on poking me, and I don't know her. It creeps me out."
* attendee: what do you not like from a marketing point of view? @baratunde says, "I was using this as a marketer without the proper tools."
* @baratunde says, "make how do you know this person? an actionable tool for marketers. also vulnerability of losing all contacts."
* @baratunde says, "I want grages!" (groups + pages)
* @baratunde says, "Ning has wonderful stuff, but there's no meaning to life without the people. You can't tell people where they should go."
* @baratunde, "to just leave would have hurt me a lot more than it would have hurt Facebook."I got my Hulu account activated and really like this custom clip feature. These song scenes with Darryl are fun. I just wished Hulu let you type in the timecode rather than trying to match it with your mouse
Scene A
Scene B
I am trying to set up a special section on my website that will show the most recent five entries i make into twitter. I am willing to pay money to have someone do this. I have wasted too much time on it and am exceedingly frustrated. Offer is $50 or something negotiable. Someone can do this in five minutes. I'm not that person.
Needs
- I would like this section to sit above the chronological blog entries and fit into the theme of my site. It should auto-refresh every minute so folks don't have to reload the page
There is a tightness in my chest, and I am crying right now. I have just suffered a catastrophic data loss for the second time in my life. Fool me once, shame on, shame on, fool me can't get fooled again, or something like that.
In college, a freak transformer explosion and subsequent power surge killed my hard drive. From that point on, I swore to always back up my data, and mostly I did just that. As of mid this summer, I had a ridiculous mirrored RAID drive setup with external SATA drives and all sorts of doohickies. I had about 1 terabyte of data backed up locally and had started to upload it offsite to a service called Mozy. But then I started selling off my desktop in preparation for my move from Boston to NYC. I purchased a LaCie 1TB Big Disk and put all my media files and documents from my "Atlas" drive on it. That drive literally held my world on its shoulders.
I reasoned that after the move, I would re-establish my redundant data setup. I was not given the time. Two days after moving in, the drive started clicking. I knew that sound from my college crash, and raced to B&H Photo Video in Midtown. I purchased a Drobo storage device (a redundant storage array), hoping to save my Atlas drive. I was too late. I took the drive to Tekserve on 23rd St. It would cost $2,000, but can you put a price tag on your memories and thousands of hours of media production? They couldn't recover it. They sent it on to DriveSavers who said it may cost up to $6,000.
I had recently closed out my Discover Card, but decided it was worth going back into nasty credit card debt. Then today, I got the phone call. "We have some bad news."
They could recover nothing. They will just charge $400 for the attempt. It's funny, I struggled with the decision to send them the drive considering the cost but it is so clear now that I would rather have paid $10,000 to get my data back. On the technical side, here is what happened. That LaCie big disk is actually two 500GB drives "striped" together in an array. One of those drives failed and because the data is stretched across both, you can get nothing even from the good drive.
Fortunately, I managed to get some of my data uploaded to Mozy as of late May 2007. So I've managed to recover all my digital photos as well as my "Documenz" folder which includes my books, jokes, financial filings, scripts and everything else a digital paper version of a file cabinet would have. Over the past year, I have been using Google Docs for most of my day to day creative documents with columns, joke ideas, etc, so that's all good. Unfortunately, I have lost much, much, much more, so much that I cannot even be sure how much.
Update: September 11, 2007 @ 1:05pm
Another update. I've been reading the comments further and want to point people to a few more resources
- My iTunes music and video library. (~300GB) I estimate I had about $1500 worth of purchased music and videos in there plus hundreds of gigs of ripped CDs. The good news is I saved all the original CDs and can re-rip them. I had also "acquired" a massive music collection from a friend which ended up creating more problems than it solved. There was a lot of music I never really wanted to own permanently. I can repurchase the iTunes music at far less than the cost of the data recovery, though I'll see about begging Apple for a restoration. I've head that happens sometimes.
- My video projects (~500GB). This includes imported MiniDV footage and many edited and rendered Final Cut and iMovie projects made since January 2005. The good news is I have all the original MiniDVs and I can download the most valuable rendered projects back from YouTube (I hope) and blip.tv which hosts a bunch. The bad news is video is the most time intensive, high learning curve activity I have ever engaged in. Much of my knowledge in those project files has to be relearned.
- My audio projects (??GB). This includes raw audio for my podcast, including dozens of unedited, unreleased interviews. I've often felt bad that I never got to many of these. Now I have a pretty good excuse.
- My old computer files. About two months ago, I extracted data from my old college computer hard drives and put them on the Atlas drive. This had emails, papers, mp3s, etc. I was so excited to have found this time capsule, but now it's gone.
- My mother. At the end of it all, I am pained by the loss of the above items, but nothing can represent the sense of anguish I feel at having lost audio of my mother who passed away two years ago. We had taken a cross-country drive together, and I recorded hours of conversation. I only got to podcast a little bit of it (which can be redownloaded from my webhost) but the unedited stuff is beyond valuation. It's like losing her all over again.
- I have the Drobo with 1.3 terabytes of capacity to be the home of New_Atlas. This drive will also be mirrored on a 1TB external Glyph and online via Mozy or a similar service. Any recommendations?
- My MacBook Pro internal drive will be mirrored on the Drobo/Glyph/Mozy setup as well
- I'll keep a smaller subset of high priority files for more frequent offsite backup
- The more technical side of the failure is that the "master" drive is fine but the "slave" drive suffered a series of head crashes. Basically, a major mechanical failure happened, and the platters inside the drive collapsed. It does not appear to be due to physical impact but just a mechanical malfunction
- I appreciate just about all the comments except for those telling me I'm an idiot. I know that. This single-point-of-failure system was temporary during my move. The odds of the drive failing in such a short period of time are low, but it happened. Remind me to drop in on your house and mock you when you suffer your own tragedy
- I wrote this post to 1) provide an emotional outlet for me 2) see how others might be handling their own data backups in this era of digital memories but mostly 3) to scare people into backing up their stuff as soon as possible in one way or another. I really don't want this to happen to others. It costs too much in time and emotional energy.
- Facebook Follies (or the Dangers of Investing in Someone Else’s Platform)
- gcc 004: I Hate the Smugness of Apple (VIDEO)
- Iraq is to Vietnam as Dubya is to WTF!?!? (Huffington Post)
- Jesse Jackson Really Needs to Read a Book… explaining what satire is
- Me. Public Radio. Monday Apr 24. Racism In America.
- and my standup set on YouTube
- Apple's iTunes folks restored almost all my purchased items, 83GB worth in over 900 tracks.
- A 1TB Glyph drive has arrived which I will use to back up the drobo in a "spanning" setup. It's two drives, but in this case the Glyph will fill up one drive then the other, sequentially. I'll store this in a fire-proof box in my home. I'm also gonna store this all on Mozy, so that's three places (two on-site and one remote) with ALL my data. I'll make smaller backup sets of really important stuff
- Today is my birthday, and getting Dugg is the best web gift ever... way better than a $1 Facebook "gift" :) And yes, it really is my birthday. Check the vid...
- The Infrant ReadyNAS is a tool many have mentioned for hard drive backup. I studied it vs. the Drobo and chose Drobo, but that may not be right for everyone or even for me.
- An eBook recommended by Macworld called Take Control of Mac OS X Backups, 2nd Edition. Here is a free article in two parts which goes through a lot of the same material. There is some great content here even if you don't have a Mac
Technorati Tags: backup, data, hard drive failure
I've made a habit of hating on MySpace and that other social network that shall not be named in this post. Yesterday, MySpace upped the ante on its suckiness by making it that much harder for me to reply to emails there. I received a message. I pressed reply, and this is what I got:
What does that even say? I failed the image verification three times.Is this really the problem, people replying to their friends with SPAM? So, a friend writes me a message about collaborating on some comedy project, and I use that opportunity to be like, "Hey, Baron Vaughn, you want some Vi0gra and Cial1s!??!"
I don't think so. WTF people?
A few weeks ago, I wrote a comprehensive, sometime scathing critique of Facebook and its shortcomings (it's worth a read, though long, and builds the basis for this current post). Despite that review, I was still positive on Facebook vs. MySpace and could live with its deficiencies while they sorted things out. I have now changed my mind. Facebook just cost me access to 639 fans/leads/potential customers, and I am partly to blame for trusting someone else to manage my business.
Photo via Flickr by B I R D
As I pointed out in my previous post, I use Facebook in the same way I use MySpace: a bit of personal communication but mostly artist-to-audience communication in the form of announcements, videos, calendar, etc. Because Facebook does not let you send messages to all or groups of your friends (I have 944 of them) and because I wanted to give people an explicit choice to receive such messages, I created a Facebook Group. I called it "GLOBAL Fans of Comedian, Author & Vigilante Pundit, Baratunde Thurston." The "GLOBAL" was because the first fbook group I created was limited to the Harvard network, and Facebook's staff said they could not change it once set that way. It's also because I will be taking over the world shortly.
Over time, this group grew in size to nearly match the size of my email list. In fact, with the growth of these social networks, I noticed fewer and fewer people signing up for the email list at all. I used the group mostly to send my NewsPhlash email messages to group members, three or four times per month at most. It helped get people out to shows, announce cool accomplishments and get feedback from people on ideas. The Facebook group complemented my other "channels" if you will, which include
- My regular email list
- MySpace friends
- Blog/Podcast and associated RSS feeds
- Upcoming calendar and Twitter
Friendsterdecommissioned summer 1996 due to lameness
We are aware of the problem that you described and hope to resolve it as soon as possible. Sorry for any inconvenience. Let me know if you have any further questions.Between then and today, I had tried repeatedly testing the message feature. Nothing. So today I got ahold of a an anonymous source at Facebook. This person was kind enough to talk to me about some of what's going on. Out of respect for this person, I'm gonna keep the exchange anonymous and merely summarize many of the points we discussed
Point 1. Facebook is nervous about groups using the messaging system for SPAM and has some "limits" set up.SPAM? That's why I created the group in the first place -- to give people an explicit opt-in to my messages. Unlike actual SPAM, people can leave my group at any time. The message source is transparent. If people feel they are being spammed by their groups, they should leave. I wrote back explaining my frustration and thanking the person for taking the time to be in touch with me. Always thank people for their time yall, even if they disappoint you! I basically said I had been building up my group over months only to have it broken. The response was quite revealing. Again, summarizing some points.
Point 2. People sign up for Facebook assuming we're like MySpace, and we're not. We're a very different kind of service.Ok, tell that to your investors and the media and your users and the public and Microsoft and Yahoo who thought they were trying to buy something a lot like MySpace for $1 billion or more. If people sign up for your service expecting something, either provide it or make it clear to those people that they won't find what they're looking for. Don't get folks all invested then pull the rug out and say, "we don't support that." As for being a "very different" kind of service, I'm not so sure. Different, yes. "Very" different? Meh. More summary:
Point 3. Facebook is focused on "connecting real people with the people they know." Groups were designed for this, but users re-purposed them for things like promotion. We don't want to do the MySpace thing in the area of promotion. We think we can do it better.I can partially respect that. Facebook does get that users will build whatever they want and can with your tools but is not comfortable with that. Again, there is this point of not being MySpace, and I don't fully get it. Maybe they want less noise than the MySpace system which overwhelms me with event invites and grotesque HTML comments all over my profile. Man, it's good that Facebook's pleasant environment doesn't overwhelm me with meaningless communication like zombie bites or friend comparisons. Again, I gotta give it up to this person for a very professional and empathetic tone. I actually got screamed on by another Facebook engineer who was upset at how I tagged a video and, rather than discuss it with me, bitched about me behind my back to a friend. Good to know there are mature, thoughtful people at the company. Sad to know that the company is being so rigid about how people use a tool. Through continued correspondence I discovered that Facebook says it sets a limit for group messaging. Based on my experience, this limit must be around 500 or 600 people, but perhaps it's a bit different for different users. This, of course, doesn't apply to sponsored groups like "Apple Students" with 400,000+ members, but Apple is paying for the privilege. Me? I'm not spending any money except on silly $1 gifts. All I'm doing is being an active node in the network and increasing its value by providing valuable, ad-monetizeable metadata about myself and my friends. All I'm doing is being Facebook, but what do I know? This is all very troubling. I invested a lot into Facebook, but I've discovered, painfully, that Facebook doesn't value me nearly as much as I'd hoped. I took one of my most important assets, my relationship with my fans, and allowed Facebook to mediate a large portion of it. Sure, I still have my email list and blog subscribers and my pedophiliac MySpace friends, but the loss of access to my Facebook group will be felt. Facebook users are still largely college folks, and that's one of the few groups that will actually pay me to perform. Meanwhile, I have to come up with a way to patch this hole. Unlike an email list, I cannot simply load my Facebook friends into another system as I would if I moved from Topica to Constant Contact. There is no Internet standard for a "Facebook user" like there is for an email address, and that's one fatal flaw in the system for anyone who plans to outlive Facebook. At least Facebook and MySpace have not been my end-all, be-all web presence like some folks I know. This has served as a wake-up call for me and hopefully others. Build and own your online presence. I knew this when I registered baratunde.com way back in 1998 and began managing my own email. I got a bit lazier in recent years, but I'm glad I still have my Baratunde-controlled universe to fall back on. Too bad I can't message my Facebook group and tell them about it. Epilogue - My Plan of Action I cannot afford to wait for Facebook to fix my group messaging, and even if they fixed it sooner, I no longer trust the service with such valuable information. I will keep my Facebook account, but I have closed my Facebook group to new members (what's the point if I can't communicate with them?) and will be sending them individual Facebook messages asking them to follow me in some other, more open, portable, non-hostage-taking way. I'll be adding forums to my own site and encouraging people to follow me with RSS. This will take a lot of time, but it's worth it. Contracting out major parts of your business has a huge long term cost, though on paper it looks more economical. I think we've all learned this lesson. It's sad, I had fun making people random officers in my group with such titles as "Dirty South Regional Enforcer of the Family Name" and "Awkward Turtle Whisperer." I had hoped to eventually make 50 people officers, but Facebook has an officer limit. Nice. More artificial limits on my creativity. I wish it were as simple as saying, "see Baratunde, that's what you get for believing in Facebook," but it is not that simple. I didn't just "believe" in Facebook. This was not a faith-based decision. I used it because that's where the people are. I stopped using Friendster because the people left. The "Internet" has all sorts of more open tools I could use to do what I was doing with Facebook, but millions of people have chosen Facebook instead. It seemed foolish to ignore that. Will people show up just to see me without having their friends, photos and Zombie bites one glance away? Facebook has become to the Internet what RSS readers are to the blogosphere. As I mentioned in a comment on my previous Facebook post:
...no matter how open a system I build/take advantage of, it is worthless if no one is there to use it. I don’t use facebook for fun. I do it because the people I want to communicate with are there, and they are not willing to work with me right now to cobble together the equivalent of an open social network / event manager / messaging platform / internet application storefront / discussion board. Yes it is true that I could individually manage all those pieces, but I guarantee you, only a handful of the people I’m trying to reach would follow me.I suppose it is time to find out. You can follow Baratunde's musings, show schedule, videos and more at www.baratunde.com, and he promises not to hold you hostage.
I started using Facebook years ago, back when I was a regular person. I was in early. Everyone was launching a college-friends-based social network. Friendster was becoming unusably slow. Others like yub.com entered to fill a void as well. I got a desperate plea from a schoolmate. Something like "Hey please try out this Facebook thing my friend made." Back then it was just for Harvard cats, and it was THEfacebook.com. I remembered the paper facebook we got every year for our dorms and this unauthorized electronic version was obviously a good idea.
Years later, Facebook is a whole nother beast. Now I'm not just a person but a growing presence (I hope!) through my comedy, writing and political activities. I have almost 900 Facebook friends attached to my profile. All the web traffic I used to get from MySpace has moved over. My personal use of Facebook has become professional. They wanted this. They wanted to beat MySpace, and from my perspective, they have in many ways. Most notably, their site does not crash my computer. That is high on my list of must-haves from a social network or a website or a friend.
But, like all things worth using, there are some big problems. Here they are, my beefs with Facebook. (note, several others have blogged about Facebook-ness including Robert Scoble, Anne Zelenka, and too many others to count).
Regular People vs. Public Figures - The Problem
For students, Facebook is still great. For most other regular people, it probably gets the job done, but for those of us using Facebook to create or augment our presence, Facebook is lacking. If you are a singer, writer, comedian, politician or other such public figure, you are forced to navigate some choppy waters. That's because Facebook defaults to a "personal" use.
Where MySpace still wins is in designating an account type. MySpace has "comedian" and "musician" accounts which provide tools and an interface specific to those types of people. MySpace does not treat everyone like a college student. Facebook needs to take a lesson here and consider special account types for more public people.
What I'd like to see
- Fix the distinction between what's available to profiles and groups. I've created a group on Facebook for fans. I post select photos and videos, news updates and gigs there, but I cannot install apps to my group.
- I'd love to put a SplashCast player in my group or a blip.tv channel of my podcasts.
- My profile has the wall, but so does my fan group along with a bulletin board. So messages are spread all over my Facebook experience
- allow me to create custom groups and give me the choice of these groups when I add a friend. For me, I'd choose groups based on conferences/events and real world friends vs fans. Example groups: high school friends, track team, SXSW black bloggers, comedians, BookExpo crew, Iowa State gig, people denied habeas corpus by the Bush administration, etc.
- allow me to use the information about my friends. Most important is for me to message them all at once whether based on their user info (like geography) or my user tagging mentioned above. For example, I'd like to send a note to all SXSW friends in advance of the festival next year to see who is returning.
- Highly relevant to me, I'd like to send out performance announcements to people in a particular city. Right now, there is no group messaging capability short of creating a Facebook group for every subsegment. When I announce a show using my fan group (the only way to send bulk messages) I have to send it to everyone. A show in New York reaches people in Hong Kong. It's a waste. You know what I do today? I open two Facebook windows: one to write the message and another where I search for friends in the city of interest. Then I manually type in addresses up to the 20-recipient limit, and I do this until I'm finished. This is so weak. This may have something to do with preventing SPAM, but I would pay for a workaround.
- I would also like to do interesting mashups and cross-tabs on my contacts. I'm a data analysis junkie. It's what years of consulting has done to me. What apps are popular among my SXSW friends? What books are my high school friends reading? You have the data, Facebook. Let me at it!
- save messages into folders
- search my messages
- send messages groups of people, defined by "how do I know this person" or geography or whatever
- flag messages for followup
- block receipt of messages by certain people
- basically, facebook needs a gmail-like email client built in, not this cheap "messaging" crap. That's great for Red Bull-infused college kids with no real responsibilities, but in the real world, I need to keep track of my messages and actually follow up with people
- a an apps dashboard which ranks apps by the total number of users and the total number of my friends using it
- a way to view apps by type. There are several apps that do exactly the same thing. Bundle them so I can compare more easily
- app ratings should be built right into the platform
- I want to screen app notifications based on ratings and the app type. I could tell Facebook not to notify me of any game apps with a rating less than 3 of 4 stars. This would cut back on a lot of the crap out there. MS Windows is a platform that I use on a regular basis, but I don't get notified every time a developer launches a new windows application or every time my friends install a new version of Word.
- There should be a category for "Stupid" apps as well so I can block those. If I get another Zombie "bite" I'm going to have to dig up a dead person, inject them with the Rage virus, and set them loose on the developers of Facebook.
- allow me to join multiple geographic networks.
- consider a "primary" network with multiple secondary networks
- total photo views, video play counts and profile views
- especially for video, a way to see where the viewers came from: my profile page, a pass-along, a friend's profile page
- just give me something like "Facebook Analytics" and call it a day
Jeremiah, I have over 900 facebook friends, and I'm telling them to avoid your application and all Slide.com apps due to the massively irresponsible way in which you built the program. My Questions spammed my friends with a question about "Las Vegas vs. South Beach." I was not asked if I wanted to send this question. I only knew because I started getting responses back. If you do provide an opt-out, it is horribly unclear. In addition, your program emails me on my personal email account anytime someone asks or answers a question. I can find no way to change this setting. I am severely disappointed in your implementation of this app and will do all in my power to prevent my friends from using it. I am looking for three things from your company. 1) an apology for the irresponsible manner in which you built the app and the valuable time you have wasted in people's lives 2) a revision of your app to prevent such massive spamming, and yes, it is spamming since I did not authorize it in a clear way 3) better controls on how the application notifies users, specifically a CLEAR way to opt out of emails.