No, not Tori.
A cousin/uncle/whatever, about a niece or daughter…a little girl he feels nothing but familial love for, I’m sure, he posts a pic of her to facebook, with the intent of captioning her as ornery, as in precocious and troublesome in a cute sort of way, but instead calls her honry, which at first glance makes it look like he’s calling a tweenager ‘horny’.
Probably not his intent.
I am not a fan of the ‘new’ look for Gmail.
And it would seem I’m not alone in that distaste.
But Google did user testing, and they all said they liked the changes. Thing is, if you read their explanation of the testing, you’ll notice that “Stay the same” wasn’t ever on the table for fellow googlers, so it seems kind of dishonest to claim feedback was positive there. And any outside usability group you put together was inevitably going to be filled only with people who like to try new things. People who don’t like change aren’t going to sign up, so no matter how diverse by age, gender, etc your group was, it wasn’t a representative sample of the actual user base, and gives you no data about how the change would be received at large.
It would seem that some of the feedback is getting through, slowly.
But some of the worst offenses aren’t ever going to go away, no matter how many people complain, because they would interfere with the big Facebook-ification that is their ultimate goal. I get it, you want people to use Google+. Thing is, I’m not going to post everything twice, and everyone is already on Facebook, so that’s where that stuff goes. I have gigs of pictures and metadata on flickr, and that’s where that stuff goes.
Trying to mimic Facebook is a bad idea. Fads come and go. Instead of trying to reproduce the look of someone else’s website, Google should have been trying to build a tool that integrates all the social platforms seamlessly. I would kill for something that let me post my pictures to Flickr, and my words to my own blog, and lets me control how that gets shared with fine grained control, then automatically takes care of the minutia of which service which person is on. That would be good. Not evil.
Even on Facebook, it would seem that the truism, “If I bleeds, it leads” holds for posts as well as traditional media. At least if one judges response to my two posts this weekend. The post about possibly breaking my toe got lots of responses. The post about winning a TV got only one ‘congratulations’.
Interesting.
I don’t get why google has both buzz and plus, or at least hasn’t integrated them better. Then again, I’m still trying to figure out a way to have the autonomy of a private blog, while somehow integrating it into the whole facebook/g-plus social sphere, without simply reposting everything three or more places each time. As is, I upload hundreds of photos to my flickr account, pick the perfect shot to make a wordpress post here, plus a facebook post, and it all seems so makeshift.
There are a lot of booths at PAX this year that offer you free stuff if you like them on facebook. They have a laptop setup and ready for you to login to facebook from, so they can see you do the liking in realtime. I’m just not that into using my credentials on a machine of unknown provenance. I’m not assuming any sort of ill-intent on the part of the game devs offering this, but rather wondering how well they are protecting the machines from being used as trojans by a 3rd party.
I wonder if they would accept watching me do the like on my own device.
I got a new desktop machine at work recently, and it’s got the latest version of Office on it, including Outlook. I had noticed the little bit at the bottom of every message where it was sometimes displaying my co-workers’ pictures, or a blank space for most people.
Today I noticed there was a little clicky-bit, which when clicked prompts you to connect to your social network accounts, promising to auto-update the little pictures accordingly.
Yeah, I can’t imagine any way that linking your work life with your social life could come back to bite you. Nope, not at all.
A really poorly written and QA’d excuse for a product. If you make the mistake of letting it have access to your facebook, you’ll find that you can’t ever stop it from the AOL side. Their docs claim there’s a trashcan icon you can press to remove a service, but that seems to be a lie. Luckily, thanks to their many previous privacy snafus, Facebook lets you block them easily enough, though they have their own problems, with a ratings popup that disappears and takes your disconnect request with it. You can only remove AOL Lifestream by agreeing to not give them a rating. Kinda sleazy, IMHO.
In response to the RealID debacle, I canceled my pre-orders for Star Craft 2 and for World of Warcraft: Cataclysm. They sent me a response to an emailed question today, which of course ignored my question completely, while including this gem near the end, “Over time, we will continue to evolve Real ID on Battle.net to add new and exciting functionality within our games for players who decide to use the feature.”
Translated from PR speak, “we’ll be making it mandatory right after the christmas rush, so fuck off”.
Yeah, I’m not regretting my decision to make leaving permanent. Welcome to the post-activision-world we all knew was coming.
Last week, I show my friend the facebook episode of south park. As someone who abandoned facebook out of frustration at how much of a time-suck and drama-generator it was, I thought he’d find the parallels amusing. He did.
Then I see this morning, he broke his phone, and due to lack of contact backup, has had to restart his facebook profile to regather everyone’s contact info. LoL.
I really kind of wish facebook would let me know if someone has disappeared from my network because they unfriended just me, or if they dropped their whole account. I guess it doesn’t really matter, it just seems so strange to suddenly have someone, and all the content I posted related to their wall or comments, disappear without warning. I don’t think I stuck my dick in the mashed potatoes.
UPDATE: I finally figured out a way to figure out that he’s just not on facebook at all anymore. Interesting, I’ll have to ask him about that before we rock out thursday. It did remind me to go thru everyone I cared about’s info and grab their email and birthday info to store in my gmail contacts so it won’t disappear on me again.