Wednesday, March 25, 2009

No There There

People have started bugging me to join Facebook. I'm not going to do it. Here's why:

There is nothing I want to do on Facebook that I can't already do with other long-established, very available familiar programs. I have email, and although I don't instant message (for several reasons, which are similar to why I don't join Facebook) I could hook that up in a heartbeat. I can send emails and include funny pictures or links to other interesting stuff as fast as I can write them and click on attachments. Likewise my friends can send me emails with stuff in them as fast as they can write them. It's just a few clicks, and the messages themselves. Even if they only want to grunt at me like a caveman, they can put those grunts on handy MP3 files, and attach them to emails. God help us all if they actually start doing this, however. But it is easy to do.

I have a website, and my friends can put it on their favorites list if they want to. It's just a click away. They can, in fact, open many internet windows at once, and keep a bunch of their friends' blogs open all the time. I do a bit of this myself. I have a couple of websites open right now in other windows. I click to look at what's happening on them. Easy.

Not only that, I could download music directly to my friends without using a website. I can do all sorts of things that appear to be "magic" to many people.

I have a series of specially programmed "radio" stations on Pandora I could share with people if they were interested. I could listen to my friends' special programmed radio stations. But they won't do it. God knows why. I guess because it's not on Facebook.

I can link my friends in an instant to cool Youtube videos. Everyone does this. I don't need Facebook to do this.

There are about 5 million interesting puzzles, quizzes and such things on the internet already. There have been for years. Not to mention articles. To read. There is a lot of stuff out there that is damn interesting.

What I think is weird is people who join Facebook - or MySpace - and then disappear from the rest of the wired world. It's like a cult, worse than Scientology, worse even than AOL. AOL people quit writing altogether, they just send monstrously recursive emails with attached emails with attached emails with attached emails and 12 to 15 layers down you find a LOLcat or some misinformation disproved five years ago on Snopes.


Someone once talked me into joining MySpace. (And yes, I understand that MySpace is no longer considered cool.) Every time I clicked on their page, their music started blaring at me. It didn't ask if I was already listening to music, which I usually am. But it was a dead zone. A lot of hookers wanted to be my friend...

I opted out of MySpace. They used to send me a lot of spam. Just what I needed.

"What I'm trying to explain, is that it's useless crap," Jumper explained. And then he was gone.

UpdateFriday 27
I decided to renew the war on the word "blog." It is time. It's going to be an uphill struggle. This is, after all, hosted by Blogger. The software itself refers to "the blog."

This is a website. See here or here

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sorry. Didn't mean to give you a hard time. Just, I don't think I necessarily get to lay down the law.

- Yoki -

little shiva said...

Sure you can do all that here, but being on facebook is like being on a nice busy street in a big city. Location, location, location – I'm there!

Anonymous said...

Agreed. Location. When I upload photos on flikr, add to my last.fm library, recommend a book on goodreads, update my blog, Digg a news article, have a charity to suggest...that information is automatically or very easily broadcast to my friends---and not in an obnoxious way ala myspace with the music already playing. Used to be they had to click ten places to get to all that. Or I had to send out ten emails and construct various mailing lists.

yellojkt said...

Hear, hear. I see more and more people disappearing into Facebook but the signal to noise ratio is just abysmal. And Twitter is worse.

Jumper said...

Some of my best friends are on Facebook. What can I say?

I'd go on there and play for a while before cancelling, but I have a strong suspicion I would regret it after the MySpace fiasco.

Some of my links in the above essay are meant to be amusing, BTW.

Re. some of this other stuff, I don't obsess over photographs. (although I'm glad some do, I can steal 'em off the net - but in general other people's photos are awfully boring - I feel another rant coming on!) I rarely recommend books except on an intimate one-to-one basis. I don't Digg stuff or Twitter. I am friendly enough to have attempted the "I follow..." thing on this blog but it's actually pretty useless.

This blog functions as an open door and a "welcome" mat into my head. I do recommend it to those who ask me what's on my mind, what I'm into lately, etc.

I made my own lox for the first time, BTW. I'm now going to have a couple of bagels. (It's almost too easy to deserve an entire blog article - the author [me] assumes basic Google skills of the reader)