Why do I get notifications from Facebook about 48 hours after the event occurs (invitation from a friend, etc.)? Amazingly stupid to act on an invite and then two days later, like a bad echo, get a useless email informing me that it all went down.
In general, being an antisocial kind of guy, the social networking fad is just that, a passing fad for me that hasn’t really lit me up in any meaningful way. Among the casualties:
- LinkedIn feels like being a member of the Rotary Club. Random head hunters pinging about opportunities in Kuala Lumpur. Vendors looking at me like a trussed turkey. SEO consultants, lead gen spammers.
- Facebook: okay, FunWall, Scrabulous, Flixster, and every other application that I have been invited to install? Compare my movie taste with Bill Clinton? Well, in order to do so, for some reason, Facebook and these apps think it is cool to check off the box next to each and every person in my friends list so I can “invite” them to check out the app. This is turning me into a spammer and I hate it.
- Plaxo: this is the ultimate spam engine for torturing friends. What started as a semi-useful tool to let people know about a change of address or cell phone number is now an instrument of inbox torture.
- Long-tail networks: look at the post below. Ergscores.com. Cool site, lets me file my ergometer scores and then mashes them up on a map and publishes the scores on this blog. Only problem, Concept2 has a six year head start on my data — and I can’t unlock it.
Problems aside, I think Google’s Open Social initiative is on the right track — give me some permeability between social nets and their functional value will sky rocket — wall me in with a close system and it’s back to the knuckle-dragging days of Prodigy, AOL, and CompuServe.
And we know how that turned out.
LinkedIn sucks dead baby through a straw. Plaxo is the worse. and I agree Facebook is little more than a major player in a fade.
I’n also in several Ning groups and have come to the conclusion that it really sucks.
It’s most ntoable use for me ina high school graduating class reunion site. the bottom line: I didn’t like many of those people when I was a kid, so sod them now. besides the four or five chums from my youth are still good guys and in my life. the other people are 60 year old right wing bastards! And, I really don’t want to look at electronic versions of the chick’s scrap booking projects that feature pictures of their toothless kin in rural ARizona, let alone pix of their ugly-pass pet Gila monsters. Jesus, I don’t have the time to keep up with their crap. And most of all I don’t want some ancient hag twittering me about her incontinence or some former jock turned road worker using twitter to tell me about his prostate or recent bowel movement.
That’s my two cents.
Jim Forbes
OK, I just signed up for Facebook because my employer urged me to be in communication with my marketing colleagues. I’m in communication with some of them but precious little marketing discussion is happening.
I am officially old, I guess. I just don’t see the value here. I also have a MySpace account because that’s how my husband’s adult kids like to communicate but I have to say, between the both of these “waves of the future”, I’m stumped. Can’t e-mail really just do the same thing? What am I missing???????
I am slowly finding some value in LinkedIn, connecting with new writers and sources. Have a Facebook page just in case it turns out to be important.
Now getting invitations on Spock. Don’t care. I’m maxxed out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites
Take ’em all and throw ’em off a bridge. They’re all like a bad corporate holiday party that just won’t end.