facebook fail

I don't know how many of you have been experiencing problems with facebook today, but I have not been able to login at all, whatsoever. I know I may be acting a little overdramatic, but this is not good when I conduct some of my business over facebook.
(Ok, so I don't conduct all my business over facebook, actually most of it is over email, but the principle I'm about to discuss still applies)

It's crazy how much we (and when I say we I'm more speaking to myself, but I know it applies to others as well) depend on the internet today. And not just the internet but specific services on the internet...facebook, email (gmail my personal preference), twitter, blackboard, etc.

You don't really realize how much you depend on it until one of those services goes down, or your network as a whole goes down. Just imagine if your email client (gmail, yahoo, hotmail, or your own personal server) were to cease to exist. And by cease to exist I mean that all of your emails were gone, you had no way of sending or receiving emails at all. Just imagine what it would be like.

Ok, so we would be fine as far as communication goes, we would still have our phones, and texting, etc. but sending files or attachments would be difficult, sending a link to that portfolio or video would be difficult.

And the same principle applies to facebook or twitter. Although I don't think they are as essential as email might be, but they are essential for bloggers. For me at least, facebook and twitter are my two biggest ways to generate traffic to my blog. So of course when one of those services is down it kind of throws a wrench in my traffic. Thankfully I don't monetize my blog. If I did then facebook and twitter certainly wouldn't be my main sources of traffic. LOL.

So I'm not offering a certain solution to this idea, all I have to say is that we need to always be careful how much we depend on the internet. Have your emails backed up, and maybe have multiple email addresses registered with different services. Don't put too much stock in different social media such as facebook or twitter because they are not flawless unfortunately, and they will be down periodically.

Just a simple reminder from your friendly neighborhood blogger Josh Burns.

Have a Happy Monday!

facebook status mentions

As you all know, and as it says in my profile, I am a social media enthusiast. Therefore I enjoy using social media and analyzing different social media strategies and what social media organizations are doing.

You may or may not have noticed that this past week facebook released a new feature within their status update. You can now "mention" a friend within your status and it will turn that friend's name into a link to their profile.

For those of you paying attention, they took this idea directly from twitter, which has included this functionality since it's inception 3 years ago in 2006. So for those of you who are on twitter this may look extremely familiar. And believe it or not you implement the functionality in the exact same way as well. Just as on twitter, on facebook you can now "@" a friend and it will mention that friend in your status. So it is pretty obvious that facebook has taken this idea directly from twitter.

Just for the record, about a year ago when facebook began to do a major overhaul of their design and user interface, it was me who said that they were going directly after twitter. I said this because they changed the home page from the old newsfeed to a single feed that contains everything, and again it looked extremely similar to the UI of twitter. And now they have gone and done something like this.

So let me just ask this question...who the heck cares that facebook has now implemented the "mention" functionality into their status updates? I'll be the first to say that I don't care, and I'm sure there are many others who couldn't care less. In fact let me beg a second question...who the heck even knows about this new "mention" feature?
For many of you this may be your first time hearing about the feature. Let's face it, facebook didn't exactly do a great job of publicizing this new feature, and chances are that when people found out about this feature they probably asked the question, so what?

That brings me to my third question...so what?
So what if I can now mention a friend in my status update? If someone is not already friends with that person then it is not like twitter where you can just follow someone without going through an approval process. Whereas facebook is much more private. Becoming someone's "friend" on facebook means alot more than it does to "follow" someone on twitter. So if I see someone mentioned in my friend's status but I don't know them, the chances of me clicking on that their name and "friending" them is not good.

Let's be honest, since this new feature has been released I have literally seen one status that has "mentioned" someone else. Again, I think there are two reasons for this, 1. people have no clue that the feature exists, and 2. people don't see any purpose in this feature.

The truth is, facebook and twitter are two completely different things, and I hate to come out and say it publicly but facebook needs to stop trying to be like twitter. You don't see twitter stealing ideas from facebook and implementing them, in fact the two most recent revisions to facebook's UI have been ideas that have been taken from twitter.

It has been said that twitter is the future of social networking. While, yes, that may be true, at the same time I think facebook is also the future of social networking, but not if they continue to take ideas from twitter.

Regardless, I will still continue to use facebook and twitter for distinctly different purposes, and yes, I will probably use the new "mention" feature on facebook every once and a while, just because it is available, but I honestly don't see this as a revolutionary feature for facebook. They need to stick to what they know and that is private social networking.

Do you use this new "mention" facebook feature?

Why or why not?

Facebook Will Not Die

Recently a friend of mine, John Underdown, wrote a facebook note titled "The Death of Facebook" in which he basically says that facebook is on its death-bed, and that soon it will die. He then outlines some reasons for this happening. Actually to save you some time, just go read the note and then come back and read the rest of this post.

As soon as I read this note I immediately disagreed with it. I held myself back from commenting on it on facebook because I knew my comment would be way too long. I knew that what I had to say would be most appropriate in the form of a blog post. So I waited a few days and then I read a blog post from my friend Joseph Dickens in which he agreed with John in some ways.

So let me just take this time to disagree with both of you. LOL. (Don't worry, I'm friends with both of them so they shouldn't take offense to that). And let me just preface this post by saying that I am very biased towards facebook, as you will see soon enough.

One of the big reasons that they both gave for the near death of facebook is all of the annoying fan pages that people have created, and dumb surveys that you can take. Consequently all of this stuff shows up in your newsfeed. I agree, this is annoying, but its not near enough to kill facebook. O, and by the way, if one of those dumb surveys shows up in your newsfeed all you have to do is click that little hide button, and it won't show that certain survey anymore. That is the nice thing about facebook, is that it has filters, so you don't have to see things that you don't want to see.

Also, it is not like anyone is forcing you to become a fan of "sleeping in" or any of those other ridiculous fan pages that have been created. If you don't want to become a fan, then don't. Its as simple as that.

Another reason that was mentioned was that facebook is always changing their "look" or UI (User Interface) or "design" to put it in laymen terms. And I'll agree that people have complained, and actually facebook has listened to some of those complaints and given the users what they want. And people might turn away from facebook for a couple days, or a week, or maybe even a month, but facebook has over 200 million users. Let me just say that again, 200 million users. Or maybe if I actually put in the real number form 200,000,000 users. I mean, maybe if a couple million stopped using facebook completely for good, that might put a dent in their user base, but even still, they're not too worried about it. They know that there is nothing else out there that can even come close to competing with them in the social networking world, so they know that those people will eventually come back to facebook. Why?
Because everyone they know is on facebook, and again, nothing can compete.

So I hardly think that the change of the design will contribute to facebook's death. After all, as the internet evolves people want information faster and faster, and they are just adapting to that change. And let's not forget about friendfeed that probably has the most real-time interface of all social networks right now. For those of you who don't know, it is a twitter-like service that actually updates real-time in your browser. Somewhat like the new real-time update in facebook except you don't have to click the "show 3 more posts" button, it just does it automatically. So that is the way that the internet world is headed and facebook is just adapting to that.

John also gives the reason of facebook having a constitution, or more properly a "Terms of Service" and people getting upset over the changing of those, therefore leading to people leaving facebook. And my response to that is basically what I just said about people leaving facebook. They will leave, but they will come back. And facebook has to have those Terms of Service, and people were rightly getting upset over the changing of those because I don't want facebook to have the right to do whatever they want with my photos or information...do you? I think that might be something worth getting upset about.

So those are the reasons that John gives that facebook is dying. He says, "We are killing facebook." And John, we most definitely have the ability to kill facebook, but to say that we are, I believe is false, and to say that we are going to is probably even false.

Why?

Because there is nothing out there that can compete with facebook. Myspace has its place in social networking but it will not kill facebook, Twitter has its place, but I believe even that will not kill facebook. Until something comes along that is...(I'm sitting here trying to think of a word that could describe a facebook killer)...amazingly awesome, facebook will not die, after all, there is too much investment in facebook as a company for Mark Zuckerberg (founder of facebook) to just let it die.

Joseph also wrote some other good points on his blog post about texting and twitter and such, but I won't address those right now. If you all have made it this far in the post then I should probably be paying you to read this because the length was enormous, but here's something just as good, whoever goes through and tells me how many times I mentioned the word "facebook" in this post will win a special prize, but you must follow me on twitter @jburno and then @reply me the answer. And if this wasn't the most biased post that you've ever read than I don't what is, because I'm very biased towards facebook, but only because there is nothing else out there that can compete.

So with that, hey, if you want to delete your facebook account for any sort of reason, go right ahead, I could care less, but don't give yourself enough credit to think that you are gonna "kill" the social networking giant we know as facebook.

To those who I have referenced in this post, I love you deeply even if I disagree with you.

What do you think?
I really do want to know. And I'm glad that John wrote that note because it initiates great discussion.

My Real-Life Twitter Story

This is my real-life twitter story for the week.

So me being the procrastinator that I am, put off this big final presentation until the night before it was due. I started working on this presentation at about 9pm that night. I was working on it on-and-off while being distracted every couple minutes. Then I took a 2 hour break to have a massive dance party (that is another story for later). I came back to my presentation at about 1:15am. I did not complete it until 5:30am.

At this time I proceeded to update my twitter saying, "I'm finally going to bed. Hopefully I can get 2 hours of sleep." (I actually ended up oversleeping and getting about 4, but I cut it real close to presentation time)

So I go to class and my professor asks me if I got much sleep, and he said that he saw my twitter at 5:30am that morning. I completely forgot that he was following me on twitter. I told him that I actually got about 4 hours because I overslept. This actually resulted in him having sympathy for me.

I just thought it was funny that the very professor I was presenting to that morning was the one who was following me on twitter and saw that I was up all night doing the presentation for his class. I don't know my grade yet, but hopefully I did well.

Do you have any real-life twitter stories? I wanna know about them.

Should I Change My Twitter Name?

I'm debating on whether or not to change my twitter name to my real name, instead of burno159. burno159 has been my screen name for everything pretty much since middle school. It started out as my AIM screen name, and ever since then I've just used it for every online service that I sign up for.

Right now I have 230 followers on twitter, which I am satisfied with, but I'm wondering if it could be more if I changed my screen name to my real name. The reason I started thinking about this is because I read a blog post "10 Reasons To Use Your Real Name As Your Twitter @Name" and it raised some good points. For example, it is alot easier for people search for you or retweet you if you use your real name. This is definitely true. It is hard for me to remember someone's name if there are numbers following the name. And there are some other great reasons.

So I throw these questions out to you...

Should I change my twitter name to my real name?

Do you use your real name, or another screen name?

my roommate twitters!!!

I would like to apologize to those readers who have no interest in media whatsoever, my last several posts have been all about media and for me it has been great, because it is a great way for me to get my ideas out there, and get your feedback. But for those who are not interested in that type of thing, it has probably been boring you to death. So this might be the last media related post for a bit. But I've just had media on the mind constantly lately, and there has been lots of stuff going on.


One of these things is that my roommate is now on twitter, and has his own blog. Now I haven't figured out yet whether he's actually realized the value in these things or if he just started doing them because I am huge on both of them. I think its a bit of both.
So his twitter is NateNearpass and his blog is "This is for my people".

He said the thing that drew him to twitter was that he read somewhere that Lupe Fiasco had a twitter, and he had heard me explain the purpose and benefit of having an account, so he decided to go for it, and I'm glad he did. I've been preaching about twitter ever since I realized the purpose and benefit of it, but people just don't get it, and they don't take the time to get it either.

But now that someone who is not a geek is on twitter, I'm hoping that it will catch on among my other friends. I think it will eventually, it just takes a long time. I mean, Nate is already getting discouraged by the fact that one day he had 12 followers and now he only has 9. I told him that is the way twitter is, people come and go. And I told him, it is not as easy as adding friends on facebook. I feel like there's alot more commitment with twitter. I mean it took me 2 years to get to 200 followers. But then again, its not just about your followers, its also about the people that you follow.

Also, to talk about Nate's blog a bit more, he loves to write, and he does it almost constantly, so I think this blog will be good for him. He has posted every day since he created it, and the good thing is, they're not long posts, alot of them are poems.
He was telling me last night that he had a problem that he has written so much, that he could do multiple posts per day if he wanted to. Now that's a good problem to have. LOL.

I told him that its ok if he posts multiple times per day, or he could spread them out over each day, so he always has a post for each day. But I think he's definitely understanding the purpose of social media more and more. And its good. I wish more people would take the time to try and understand it.

Now for those of you who are on twitter, lets show my roommate some love and give him a follow. Let's show him the power of twitter...All together now

Do you twitter?
Do you blog?
Do you have friends who don't see the purpose in either of them?

Let's spread the word, there is purpose in these things, and they can be profitable.

What's on your mind?

Over the next week or couple of weeks I will be writing some posts concerning the facebook redesign and some thoughts that I have on it. So just a warning, but I know alot of people have things to say about the "new" facebook so if you have feedback give it to me.

So I just want to point out a couple things that I immediately noticed upon the redesign of facebook's home page. And most of these have to do with facebook's blatant move towards a twitter-like concept and interface.

The first is the change of the status update box at the top of the home page. In the previous version it said, "Josh Burns is..." and then there was a box for me to update my status. One of the first things I noticed was the change to this feature. Now, instead of asking me what I am doing, now facebook asks me "What's on your mind?" And then it gives me a box to type, and then a "Share" button to post it to all of my friend's newsfeeds.

This is definitely going for twitter, because twitter started with asking "What are you doing?" And it still does, but it has evolved into a news aggregator as well as sometimes even a chat. So with this change facebook is trying move in this direction as well, they want to move to content posting, rather than just simply status posting.

Another big interface change is in the user profiles. And I just noticed this today, but when you go to write on someone's wall now instead of posting on their wall, you are now "sharing" something on their wall, and whatever you share on someone's wall is automatically shared on all of your friend's "streams" on facebook's homepage. So that is a big change.

Honestly, I could write for hours about facebook's new design, and its obvious steps toward the evolution of social networking, but this is neither the time nor the place. I enjoy discussing it though, so if you have any feedback leave a comment or shoot me an email or @reply me on twitter, and any other way that you can get in touch with me.

So in the conclusion of this post I'd like to mention the new facebook desktop client that was just released by seesmic(the developers of the popular twitter client Twhirl). It is in it's VERY early stages and there is alot of improvement to be made but I am glad that is where facebook is headed. In fact Tweetdeck has now integrated the facebook client into their twitter client, so that is nice. But just wanted to throw that out there, you can download the standalone facebook client here.

Let me know what you think about all of this stuff.

literally microblogging

The other day an opportunity presented itself for me to promote twitter to one of my friends. I seized this opportunity considering that hardly any of my friends see the purpose in, or even know what twitter is.

My friend, Jon Looy has a blog that he updates somewhat regularly and it is mostly just different events and happenings in his life, something that probably wouldn't interest someone who doesn't personalize know him, but I enjoy keeping updated on what he's doing.

The other day he made a post and this is what it said in it's entirety,
"I vacuumed the house today. I feel like a woman."

I read that and I just laughed. Just because I know him, and I can see him saying that. But I used this opportunity to comment on this post and tell him how funny it was to read that, but I told him that is the purpose of twitter, a "microblog." And that is all I said about it.

Ya know, its just nice sometimes to give a little plug to twitter, especially since its becoming more and more mainstream, and more people are tweeting.

Therefore I will end this post by using this opportunity to plug twitter and my personal twitter http://twitter.com/burno159

Are you on twitter? If so, what is your twitter handle? If you aren't on twitter, you should check it out.