Twitter/Facebook
Posted by TimothyJul 31
It’s always amusing to hear the reaction when you tell people you do/don’t use Twitter/Facebook. It’s been about a year, maybe a little more since I started using Twitter. It’s an interesting thing that’s captured people. Someone at the wedding said “I don’t care if you’ve been eating a taco today!” It’s true that for general or normal people, you may not get the same degree of interest as someone in the spotlight, but if you use it among friends you’ll find interesting tidbits of info about people without having to ask.
I also find that it’s a more accessible style of RSS. If you follow the right people or even use search you can be kept up on really current events. Interesting you can lag behind quite a bit as well. I’ve been doing daily Starcraft 2 searches and I’ll find some gems but the bulk of the news in that area is people finding out there’s no LAN which is month old news. Lots of news sites are also on Twitter so like I said, you can use this as a much easier to use/understand RSS client.
I guess there’s a lot of quality control that’s difficult to filter for new users. Do you want to know when someone is pooping or do you want to be kept up to date with [insert news outlet of choice]? Another problem is what software do you use to keep up with Twitter? I suspect most people assume that you can only access it from the web site and have no idea that there are really great suites like Tweetdeck around, although personally Tweetdeck eats up too much memory for my tastes.
Twitter has this sort of raw, behind the scenes feel to it though. When you’re following someone with more than 50,000 followers you feel like you’re getting an uncensored window into the actual person that doesn’t have to be fed through some PR machine. For now I guess there’s going to be a sharp division on whether or not you find it useful, but I’d advise getting a username you want now.
Ok on to Facebook. I’ve always been against the MySpace/Facebook trend because I always considered them Geocities 2.0. I mean looking at MySpace you still get that feeling, those layouts are generally horrible. Secondly, I already had this site locked down and didn’t seen the need to have accounts there.
As for Facebook I just lumped it in there because it seemed like they went hand in hand, but I broke down and snagged an account. The user base is just stupidly large. I’m very irritated that I lost out on the facebook.com/timothyhanson page so I dunno what I’m going to do about that. I guess you can’t have it all.
Looks like another button for the Around the Web, though that does throw off the sizing of that area. I really need to find a Pandora button to use as well.
6 comments
Comment by Mike on August 6, 2009 at 2:48 PM
Now that you are using Facebook for a while, what are your impressions?
Sucks that you lost your preferred name.
Comment by Timothy on August 6, 2009 at 3:26 PM
Ok I now have almost a week of experience with Facebook and here’s what I find interesting/irritating/hilarious.
1) The people who look down on me for using Twitter but use Facebook are outrageous. Twitter is basically a universally accessible version of your wall! Interestingly you can tie Twitter into Facebook to universalize your status updates which is nice.
2) The Facebook software is kind of horrible and inconsistent. I’ve used Facebook normally through a browser, the mobile version for phones, and the iPhone app. Strangely, the iPhone app is the best way to interface with Facebook to me. It gives me a better listing of updates. The mobile version too gives slightly better info than the default website. It makes no sense!
2a) Chat is outrageous. I don’t know why it consistently kicks me out of chat or is unable to connect OR why it frequently gives wrong info about how many friends are online until I forcibly click on it and induce an update. What’s up with this? AOL manages to get this right!
2b) That whole bar down there isn’t as responsive as it should be. I’ll get a notification and it’ll take forever for it to pop up and tell me what it is, or when it finally registers that I’ve clicked it, will just take me to the notifications page. Irritating!
3) Facebook itself is a totally great portal for pulling in all your online stuff and merging it into one place that you generally know people will see. When looking at th.com and looking at my Facebook stuff, I know that people will at least see the random stuff I post there. Here it’s just a ranting place to exhale and feel better. However I did tie this site into my Facebook account so now it will be a little more visible to my friends.
3a) On the downside to that, when people post comments, it’s in separate areas. So comments here are localized to web readers whereas I also have to check Facebook’s comments. So there’s no unity there.
4) I’m too competitive by nature and when I started, I had no friends obviously. And then looking at some of my friends who have 600 friends seems completely insane to me. So part of me wanted to kick it into high gear and start inviting anyone who’s maybe ever seen me or met me even very briefly in real life as a friend. However, since I set my phone to sync with Facebook, I’d be very annoyed to see that many people in my contact list, so I’m better off just keeping it low.
5) I really want to get an RSS feed out of my Facebook home page and feed it into Google Reader. I feel like I’m 5 years in the past before I knew about RSS constantly checking Facebook. I can see how this can become addicting and tether you to the site.
6) The friends suggestion thing was pretty incredible. In fact my very first friend was someone completely unexpected and it felt automated. I gotta ask him how he set that up, it was very ninja like.
7) Inviting people to be your friends feels nerve wracking, especially old friends. It’s like “Are they just ignoring the invite or are they just not on Facebook very much or did I really piss them off and I don’t even realize it?” It’s kind of funny.
8) Old friends that are girls are hilariously fast to catch up with because all you have to do is check their last name.
9) I’m losing overall interest in it mostly because I caught up with all my friends from high school and it’s not as good a tool to keep up with people as it is to catch up with people. I mean now it’s basically twitterized and I’m just reading about people’s quips on their day to day.
10) And yes, strangely some dude in San Antonio has my preferred name, so I’ve been wracking my brain trying to think of something short and simple and not goofball to use as a username.
11) I guess you have unlimited storage for pictures and stuff? That’s pretty cool.
That’s my week long impression.
Comment by Mike on August 7, 2009 at 1:23 AM
Wow. That was quite a bit more than I expected. I agree on a ton of your points although certain ones really blow and you think facebook would be on it.
2b) Chat Software is beyond terrible. You cannot block someone by putting them in their own group and then hiding that group. It moves them back into the default listings. I hate that. It disconnects often and has people show up who probably have me blocked but lists them as disconnected when I click on their name.
4) I prefer the whole keeping it competitive. I really don’t like adding people unless i know them well. What is the point of having thousands of friends if you don’t care about them and block their feeds anyway?
5) I need to learn how to use RSS so I don’t have to check things as often (email and facebook and a few sites would be great).
6) I am amazed at the friends suggestion thing. It has done some of the most amazing things I have ever seen. Of course many of them are awkward too. My friend created an account and it started randomly suggesting people based on some arcane formula and pulled up his Ex-wife on the third suggestion or whatever. No similar friends, she is not even in the same state. Crazy. I have had it suggest friends in the same line, nothing to be seen that would represent a connection, no common friends but it is people I knew in the past.
7) Facebook friends is weird. I think once you send out an invite you cannot recall it. It is easy to see it hang indefinitely too, and I have seen some people log on and have more than 100 friend requests… and they don’t even care. Met a girl today that I like? Add her and use it as an in, or wait to get to know her better?
9) From how I observe people interacting on facebook, the catching up on people really isn’t very useful. But for some reason people really draw together around commenting on photos. It is weird I know, but for some reason it has a huge effect on life outside of facebook where the status updates don’t. and yes 11) unlimited storage as far as I can tell. They get compressed to low quality, but good enough for people to make stuff out.
Friend finder is somewhat limited. I dislike that. Trying to find people outside your networks from your past is pretty rough if you don’t have their email.
Comment by Timothy on August 7, 2009 at 1:40 AM
OH YEAH that’s the other stupid thing, you can create lists for friends and then put them into multiple lists, but on chat it duplicates them for every list. It should have a primary list for them and not show them and spam your chat display with as many times as they’re in separate lists. So stupid.
I didn’t elaborate on the friends suggest but yes, it’s crazy and mystical. It has some great suggestions. Now it’s petering out though and just doing linked connections I feel like.
There’s new levels of social akwardness introduced with friends invites. I find I look outside it and just laugh about how I overcomplicate it.
Here’s what’s funny to me also, is that before Facebook, the home page is basically all the junk people would email to me. This is the kind of stuff that you maybe won’t even open the email for and just trash it, but you don’t SPAM it because it’s from your friend. Facebook has repackaged this junk in a way that you are much more (or at least I am) interested in. Maybe it’s because you read what they think about it and can more easily separate the linked content to their thoughts on it. I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s interesting.
RSS is a whole different thing. If you want to get started just go to reader.google.com and log in with your gmail account. Then click on the add subscription box and start adding in your most favorite websites. It will find the RSS feed for you or give you a list of URLS and you should be able to pick out the right one for your web site. If you have a lot you’ll eventually want to setup folders to categorize everything. Then just setup reader as your home page like me and you basically visit all your sites from there and they’re all kept up to date.
Comment by Mike on August 7, 2009 at 10:19 AM
My google reader gets flooded with crap.
I definitely need to figure out how to sort the stuff.
Is there a way that I can have all my emails as well as sites like Kalicompton new posts and EN stuff show up in the reader?
As for facebook. The people who play all the stupid games or have apps that send out crap, I just block those people as usually it is just a few choice individuals who do that stuff. Those are the same people who get their computer infected by viruses because they install any darn thing they find.
Comment by Timothy on August 7, 2009 at 11:48 AM
You can do EN but I don’t use it for forums generally and it doesn’t do email as far as I know. I have over 90 subscriptions but they’re all categorized into folders so if I just want to check gaming news I’ll just hit that folder and ignore everything else.
Yeah I’m amazed by amount of random apps and games that can be integrated into Facebook. I’m staying away to avoid being sucked into FB addiction.