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.

memories

Do you ever think about 30 years from now when we are floating around in our electric powered cars, and doing whatever futuristic thing you can think of, do you ever think about when we get on facebook how many tangible memories we are going to have. Or maybe they are less tangible than I think, but at least viewable memories.

At least for me, I'll be able to look back on all my pictures, and videos and just laugh and at the things that we are doing now. Specifically I was thinking about me and my roommate's video blog. I just know that I'm going to watch those videos and just laugh hysterically. Not only videos, but also pictures. Just think about the amount of pictures that we are going to as memories compared to our parents. I know for my parents they didn't take a large amount of pictures in their teen and college years. I've seen some, but not near as many as we are going to have at their age.

I mean, just think about the ridiculous amount of pictures that one can take on a single SD card. It is absolutely astounding. And in this post I've been talking about facebook specifically, but who's to say that facebook will still be around in 30 years. In fact I'll almost bet that it won't, at least in the same form that it is today. And who's to say that we will be surfing the net on these "klunky" computers that we have now. I bet in 30 years there will be ways to buy computers that can be implanted into your head, forget the device, just surf the net with your eyes.

Ok, enough futuristic technology talk. But I write all this to say, make memories now, whether it be pictures, videos, journals, and whatever else you can think of. Cause when you're 50 years old you are sure as heck gonna enjoy lookin back on these times.

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.

ignorance

I am a strong advocate of facebook. I love learning about how facebook has been developed over the past couple years, their business plan, and I just love watching the changes that they have made to the site. It is just something that really interests me. I actually wrote a blog post when they released the new chat feature on facebook because I just thought it was brilliantly done. So just as a preface to this post, I am a very big supporter of facebook, and I believe that they have done some things with the online social networking world that is amazing. But I just want to write about some things that just annoy me to death when it comes to facebook, and it doesn't really have anything to do with facebook, persay, but more to do with how ignorant the people are that use it.

Here's the scenario...I log onto facebook tonight and just doing the usual checkup, checking messages, notifications, etc. Then I notice in my news feed that there is a "story" saying that this guy and girl, two of my friends had ended their relationship. I had already known about this, so I was just like, "ok, thats legit." And I go about my business, I go and write a blog post, then a couple minutes I go back to facebook and notice that two people had commented on this "news story." For those of you who do not know, facebook just added this new feature that allows you to comment on any news story directly from your news feed on your home page. I think it is a pretty nice feature. It allows you to comment on someone's status, and just makes the social networking better I think. So this is what two people had done, they had commented on this news story of these two people ending their relationship. These people commenting on the story were asking "did you really?" "what happened?" And in my in-the-moment fit of annoyance I commented back saying that it was ridiculous, like were they really expecting the people to comment back and tell you what happened? Actually as I'm writing this post more people are commenting on the story, saying that the person posted that they ended their relationship, so it was their own fault. But they did not post it at all. Unfortunately, one of the downsides of facebook I think is that their user preferences aren't the easiest to navigate through. So unless you spend about 15 minutes digging around in the preferences so that these things aren't automatically put in your news feed, unless you do that all that stuff is going to automatically be shown to the world in all of your friend's newsfeeds.

As I said, I am a strong supporter of facebook and I think it has done alot of good things. I think one of the most annoying things about facebook for me though is the whole "relationship" aspect of it. Like if you are dating someone then you can list yourself as in a relationship with this other person. Which, sure is great, until maybe you break up, then it sucks because the whole world knows about it, and we've come accustomed to this phrase, "its not official until its on facebook." So I would suggest that unless you really know the in's and out's of all the preferences and everything and you have total control of what you want publicized and what you don't want publicized, then I would just put minimal information on your profile. I actually just came out of a relationship and I had this on my profile, so of course I had to end it on facebook when we broke up, but thankfully I knew what I was doing with the preferences since I didn't want this all over everyone's newsfeed, so thankfully I didn't have to put up with any of this trash, but I know what its like to have to put up with it.

So I guess the question could be raised, "well if you don't like people commenting about the story in the newsfeed then, Josh, why are you blogging about it?" Why am I blogging about it? Hmmm, ok, well because I'm blogging about it so that people aren't ignorant and think that facebook is the end all be all of communication these days. I mean if you still wanted to talk to them about it on facebook, if you really cared then you could message them about it maybe, and by messaging them I mean sending them a private message that no one else can see. But then again, if you really like actually cared then I guess you would actually verbally talk to this person about it and find out what happened. This is why I'm blogging about it, because people are ignorant and I'm just trying to make it so there are less ignorant people in the world of facebook.

Then again, more and more adults are coming into the world of facebook. I just got a friend request from my aunt tonight, it is starting to be a family reunion on facebook. lol. Which I'm completely fine with, but that is another post for another time. I've done all my ranting for the night.

comments please...