Comments on: Monday, old, and insufficiently paranoid

By: Steven Kaye

Steven Kaye — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 04:06:57 +0000

I think any online community would (and many have) seen similar drama – certainly I remember drama over the potential for BBSes to shut down.
I’m toying with setting up a website, porting media of various sorts into it and allowing for comments at the paragraph level with digress.it, honestly. Sort of a roll-your-own aggregator. I play with various services, and none of them really meet my needs 100% (LiveJournal comes the closest).

By: Walt Crawford

Walt Crawford — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 19:01:05 +0000

Oscar: I guess the key response is that maybe FB and FF aren’t right for you.
More specifically, though, FF’s term is precisely correct: Followers are those who have chosen to follow your items. You only follow people if you choose to, and you can always get a list of who they are. The porosity gained through people you *do* follow liking or commenting on stuff from people you *don’t* follow is, to me, a virtue of FF–but it’s always pretty clear what’s going on.
Yes, “friends” is a simplistic term, but you do get to choose who you regard as “friends” in FB; you only deal with strangers if you choose to. I know people, much more active on FB than I am, who reject most “friends” suggestions. If I used it more, I might as well.
But, again, if it doesn’t work for you, don’t use it–at least that would be my practice.

By: oscar zoalaster

oscar zoalaster — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 08:28:37 +0000

I think much of my confusion about the sites is that they largely involve interacting with strangers, but there is no acknowledgment of this. Instead the people one is interacting with are referred to as ‘friends’ and as ‘followers’…which strikes me as deeply inaccurate.
I’m fine with emailing my real-life friends, and often do so. I also write a couple of blogs that various of my friends and acquaintances know about and sometimes read. But both ‘Friendfeed’ and ‘Facebook’ with its emphasis on ‘Friends’ are more than a bit off-putting because of how they gloss over the fact that one is interacting with people that one does not know.
I am far more comfortable posting a note here where it is acknowledged that this is a group of strangers interacting with each other for reasons unrelated to their possible relationships with each other than I would be posting a note on ‘Friendfeed’ or ‘Facebook’ where the relationship is supposedly so very important….but the interaction is actually with strangers whom I have very little to absolutely no relationship with.
It is just really creepy to have strangers referred to as ‘friends’, it makes me worried about what I am being conned into……or if I am committing some horrible social blunder because I have no comprehension of how/why ‘strangers’ are ‘friends’….and if I am supposed to be treating strangers as friends (which I know from experience is a very very foolish thing to do), that raises the question of how much I can trust the people whom I really do think are my friends….maybe they are really strangers too….

By: Walt Crawford

Walt Crawford — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 18:42:57 +0000

If others wish to tell Oscar what they find more valuable from FF or FB, please do. For me, FF offers threaded conversations that appear to flow more naturally than via either blogs or email–but for me, FF doesn’t replace either one. (Actually, FF and other tools have probably replaced many short-form blogs, ones where posts were mostly links. I think that’s a good thing, overall.) I don’t find the FF user interface either clumsy or confusing, but that’s me.
I’m not a “lifestreamer” so some of those supposed wonders of FF don’t apply to me. As for FB–well, I wanted to see what it’s like, I’m only an occasional dropin, and it seems to work very well for friends & family to stay in touch on an offhand basis (and for lots of other things).
I certainly agree that, for example, having 40,000 “followers” or 100,000 “friends” seems, well, silly.
For both–and, I think, more for FB–”useful” may not be the key for a lot of people. And I’ll stop there.

By: oscar zoalaster

oscar zoalaster — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 04:30:07 +0000

I’m pretty apathetic about this because I still have not figured out what either FriendFeed or Facebook is good for.
They both partially replicate email and blogs, but I don’t see anything about either of them that is an improvement over either email or a blog. The interface in both cases seems rather clumsy and confusing, with lots of unclear terms. (For example, what is a ‘friend’ on Facebook? The numbers of ‘Friends’ that some folks claim to have pretty clearly demonstrates that the usage of the word on Facebook and the usage in real life are not at all the same.)
So, what are FriendFeed, Facebook, and the other ‘social networking tools’ actually for, and why do they seem to be so popular? What value do people get out of them? (And how can people manage to spend ‘hours’ on them?) People apparently think these things are useful, but I have no clue why, or what value they get out of them? What am I missing?