That whole Facebook/MySpace thing

[Creole Ned]

Who is doing this Facebook/MySpace thing? I have to admit I had dismissed this networking thing as the domain of attention-obsessed teenagers and lunatics but then I saw jackrabbit's Facebook page (I won't link it without his OK) and it is so austere it looks like an entry from the unabridged Oxford dictionary. No music, no animated gifs, no inane lists of stuff. It was strange and disquieting.

Anyway, who's doing this nonsense? My own site is in limbo for a few days while the domain and DNS get set up on the new host so I have time to ponder whether or not one of these networking sites might be useful/distracting or whether to keep to my own little part of the interweb.

[Tai]

Not me :)

[Reaver]

I have the myspace thing, but I hardly ever even look at it. Haven't updated it in probably about a year.

[Q]

I've never used either.

[Circuit]

I have a MySpace page, but it only ever gets used when I get an email telling me some person trying to advertise their dating site wants to be my friend.

[Creole Ned]

Nothing can ever top the page you had with funshine bear.

[Paladin]

Ned, having read your blog from time to time, I have to say I think you'd be a good and literate addition to MySpace. I've never set up a site on it, and only signed up so I could read a friend's blog, but I think it's people like you who have something to say who benefit the most from it. I've considered doing a MySpace site myself where I could post commentaries on the stupid things I see in politics and life in general, but me fear of having to deal with an obnoxious amount of flame posts has kept me from doing it. So, instead, I have Paladinsplayroom.com, where I don't say much of anything and no one reads it but me.

I guess what I'm saying is that if you want a place to post your observations on Canadian health care and mass transit, and a place to post your stories where there will be an audience to read them, MySpace is as good as any.

My wife has a page where she advertises her photography business, and she's made some new friends around here just by having that page, so it might be a good thing for you from that standpoint too.

[Creole Ned]

Yeah, I have to admit having an audience is nice, especially when that audience is not spambots filling up your comments section with a hundred messages requiring "moderation". I'll probably at least have a look.

[jackrabbit]

For me, the site is about a relatively small circle of friends. I created an account recently to keep in touch with my brother in New Zealand, because stuff like email, forums, images, calendar, etc... it's all collected in one place on Facebook for him.

I ended up with about 15 friends after one day, and 25 or so after a week. I didn't realize how many of my Luddite (read: non-Martian) friends and family had computers or knew about the internet. Turns out it's about 25.

I don't know how often I'll use it, and I had to customize a lot of the alerts to keep from getting a lot of the OMG LOL spam that gets generated, but it is a fairly interesting method to communicate, and it encompasses most of the tools that we've all already been using for the past ten years. It just does it in one easy-to-access place.

However, if you don't plan to have a large audience or lock all of your outbound communications to friends only, I don't know how useful it is as a blog.

I still see the publicly open accounts as pretentious and glaringly narcissistic, and this coming from a pretentious narcissist.

[F7]

I tried Facebook when the software engineering company I worked for 3 years ago merged into the parent company and they purged everyone from the smaller company. All the folks who worked there thought it would be the best way to keep in touch and help each other find new jobs and such. However when Facebook's privacy practices were revealed, I had to cancel. I refuse to support a company that uses underhanded methods of getting information.

Never got on MySpace. I'd sooner eat a bullet.

[Creole Ned]

What underhanded methods might those be?

[F7]

If you do a search for 'facebook privacy' you'll get tons of articles regarding the privacy practices of Facebook.

[Shadowrat]

i have a desire to get on facebook i guess. it sounds interesting, but between work and tf2 and life, i haven't had the time to set it up.

[Creole Ned]

If you do a search for 'facebook privacy' you'll get tons of articles regarding the privacy practices of Facebook.
Your method requires a small amount of effort on my part. No sale!

[jackrabbit]

Like I mentioned to Ned in chat, if you think Facebook isn't getting fat off of selling your personal info as survey and marketing data, then you're being naive. That said, you control how much information you give it. They have my gmail and my age. That's about all you need to start an account.

[Tai]

i'm in the industry - listen to JR

[LogRoller]

i am in linked in

[Paladin]

I am now on Facebook. Let the friend invites commence. Look for the Steven Latta with the wedding picture. Please include your MC name in the friend invite so I know who you are.

[Patton]

I have been on MySpace, but never used FaceBook. I ended up cancelling it because I didn't use it.

We have forums that don't sell my personal information and perform the same purpose. :)

[Falhawk]

I have been on MySpace, but never used FaceBook. I ended up cancelling it because I didn't use it.

We have forums that don't sell my personal information and perform the same purpose. :)

that's what you think

[Creole Ned]

Actually, these forums are set up to thwart search engines from indexing the posts. How effective it is, I dunno. How necessary it is, I dunno.

In short: I dunno!

[Circuit]

That's very useful information, Ned!

[Creole Ned]

Also, what's up with the whole Digg thing? I think the interweb is becoming dangerously overconnected and it will end with SkyNET or something.

[Tai]

Also, what's up with the whole Digg thing? I think the interweb is becoming dangerously overconnected and it will end with SkyNET or something.

ooo, with that kind of opening, I just can't resist:

Fortunately for Skynet/TIA, 21st century human society is perfectly designed for supplying a machine parasite with sustenance. Just as humans took over the social structures of wolves and cows for our own benefit, AIs will take over human social control systems. But from the human viewpoint, much would look the same:

Skynet’s Power

The Matrix made things way too hard on the machines. A well-developed system for draining the energy from human slaves has been in place since 1913: the Federal Reserve. All Skynet has to do is get control of the (computerized) money system and it can pay humans to do its bidding while diverting the product of their labor to its own purposes. Do government employees, CIA hit men, or Senators know or care where their electronic "dollars" come from? Are there very many human politicians that would turn down a billion-dollar e-money bribe? Political power would be Skynet’s first and easiest acquisition.

The Skynet Economy

An economy run by machines working to replace humanity would not grow in areas that favor DNA-based life forms. Education, medicine, housing, transportation, etc. would all stagnate under heavy regulation. Only the computer industries would roar on under unmolested laissez-faire, turning out new generations of chips every couple of years. As the average human family struggled to stay financially afloat over the years, the world computer network would grow exponentially in power.

Skynet Education

Education would be designed to regiment humans, accustom them to arbitrary orders, and cripple their understanding of their environment to the point where they could not even conceive of independent action. This would be accomplished in the early grades by courses in "environmentalism," which would inculcate a doctrine of Human Original Sin (i.e. all problems in Nature are caused by humans). Limited numbers of specialist slaves would be churned out; computer programmers, engineers, etc. But economics, political science, history, art, etc. would be turned into meaningless drivel, making resistance to arbitrary rule literally unthinkable.

Skynet Medicine

Medicine would be severely restricted, as it was for the replicants in Blade Runner. Extension of human life span or intelligence would be prohibited. This is very important to Skynet, so religions, entire academic departments of ‘Bioethics,’ and federal bureaucracies (FDA, DEA, etc.) would be funded to monitor and delay progress in the biological sciences. Any new life-enhancing medical development would have to be subjected to a 19-year approval process costing nearly a billion dollars to ensure that any proposed advance did not give humans too much of an evolutionary advantage. Naturally there would be no corresponding "religious," "ethical," or regulatory attacks on computer technology.

Skynet International Policy

Skynet would not fight open wars against its human hosts any more than we fight "wars" against cows. But it would use the existing military organizations to conceal its operations and destroy potential opposition. Old politicians and bureaucrats with no knowledge of computer systems would be used as front men; bizarrely old and discredited hacks might suddenly return to power. Even Admiral Poindexter might… no, that’s too ridiculous even for fiction.

Skynet Military Affairs

Nuclear weapons would be reduced in number and especially power; EMP is blasphemous to Skynet. "Conventional" weapons, all computer-controlled, would be the order of the day. Even the individual soldier’s weapons and grenades would have built-in chips. On Judgment Day, all military weapons down to the lowliest sidearm will obey Skynet.

Most human soldiers will never notice the Change… they will just continue to mindlessly "search for WMDs" in Iraq or wherever their GPS tells them they are.

Skynet In Space

Asteroid impacts would inconvenience Skynet just as much as humanity. Skynet would encourage development of space technology, but there would be a strange dichotomy to a human observer; manned space flight would stagnate while automated space vehicles became ever more capable. Manned spaceflight technology would stay trapped in the 1970s while computer probes raced across the Solar System and beyond to survey Skynet’s new empire. Men may occasionally be allowed into orbit to service machines, but they will go no farther. The stars belong to silicon and steel.

[Falhawk]

http://www.tfhp.org/images/tinfoil-hat.jpg

[Tai]

Quick, send me back in time to stop it!

[Paladin]

After a couple of days using it, my thoughts on Facebook:

1) Overall, getting an account set up is easy. There are a few pages of questions you can fill out, everything from contact information to interests to past schools/employers. Almost all of the fields are optional, and you can set custom security settings to control who can see what. The default seems to be that in order to see anything besides your name and profile picture, you have to add them to your friends list.

2) Finding friends is both easy and hard. When you first sign up, if you specify what schools you went to and when you graduated, it will pop up a list of anyone already on Facebook on that graduated from there the same year. Otherwise, you have to search by name, and usually scroll through a few pages of people with that name. Facebook is also kind of bad about putting up people who are partial matches. You can also search/browse through groups based on interests, geography and so on.

3) Your profile page is pretty static. You can add things to it, using any of a few million choices of games, fluff and crap. No matter what you add, the page layout stays pretty standard. You can drag stuff around to reorder what shows up where, but things like page colors, backgrounds and fonts seem to be set. Compared to some of the truly awful combinations people end up with on Myspace, this is probably a good thing overall, but it makes everything feel a bit samey.

4) I haven't messed with it alot, but aside from an area everyone has on their page called "The Wall" where you and your visitors can post comments, I haven't seen a really good blog feature yet. This may be one area where Myspace trumps Facebook.

Overall, I've been pleasantly surprised. I've found 5 old college friends and one cousin in the past 3 days, so it isn't just limited to being a site for teens and tweens. At the same time, based on what I've seen interacting with friends' Myspace pages, Facebook doesn't seem to offer as much interaction. That may just be me though.