Social networking sites
Friday, December 14th, 2007
This may be a bit of a rant, but please forgive me.
These things annoy me, I may be generalizing a little much here, but it’s true.
mysp*ce is the worst of them all (and no it doesn’t deserve a capital letter despite being at the start of a paragraph) having a degree in computing, focusing mainly on how to design software, I know that they have broken pretty much every cardinal rule there is in software engineering. generally software engineers arn’t stupid, and nothing becomes a role of that nature unless it’s really important, and there are consequences to breaking it. It’s one of only 2 websites that actually raises my blood pressure during use. I’m not going to start on the details because i have managed to purge most of them from my mind.
Be*o and Faceb*ok are not as bad but are pretty poor. The trouble with the situation is that they are based around profit, and so do the following:
They force people to look at a carefully calculated amount of adverts that balances viewing volumes with people that get fed up and leave permanently;
Maintain total incompatibility with every other system available so that you have to spend dedicated time on their site. They only interoperability that any of the sites support is email notifications, this is a universal constant, and the emails are along the following lines: “funnylookingmonkeywithawig1982thesecond has sent you a new message, click here so that you can view 5 adverts while you wait to view it”
They carefully balance cost and benefit of development/repairs. When a company (especially in software) does this, they generally ignore bugs that frustrate 10% in favour of feature requests that 15% of people want. now I generally find that I only use the very basic functionality of systems like this, I rarely want animated smilies, cellphone posting (yes cellphone posting, it only ever works in America) or the ability to draw pictures of my genitalia at people.
What’s the difference between a blog post and a bulletin? I’ll tell you what: sod all, they are fundamentally identical, text posted to friends to pass a message. The only reason for separation is so that people spend more time on the site looking at adverts.
I have found one site that does vaguely work, LJ, it’s very much more cut down, although it does have some very advanced functionality, it supports a great deal of interoperability, and actually supports all 3 of the above examples of undesirables, (if you are willing to draw your genitals in paint) only they are were implemented without leaving too many bugs, and didn’t break anything them selves, If it stays out of my way it can do anything it wants, I don’t care. It’s just a little more technical and is designed as a blogging site, which to frank is all I want from a social networking site.
With only moderate expertise, LJ can be wired up to an email account such that you rarely if ever have to look at the site, and even then, it’s one page that you can save a bookmark to.
Now after reading the above one would ask (and rightly so) why I would have any interest in going near any of the above… the answer is that if you don’t play the game and sign up to them like a mug, you lose touch with people, and find it problematic to keep certain types of friends.
It’s funny that every group of people I find seem to use one of the 3, there seems to be no pattern, but if 5 people sit down in the pub, they invariably start speaking about one of the 3 and never mention the others.
The conclusion is that if I specifically (and remember that I have difficulties integrating into sacial groups as it is) want to try to make new friends I have to sign up for all 3, and spend endless amounts of time arsing around with it trying to get it to work, sifting through shitty memes and the such or I instantly get socially shunned. I don’t blame the individuals, but society for letting corps do this.
The one final gripe I have, and this is a far wider issue, passwords, If I could use the same password for all of them it would be ok, but oh no, at least one of them has odd requirements for their passwords, so because I can’t remember one site from another, I technically can’t remember my password for any of them
The only site that makes my blood boil more than mysp*ce may get mentioned later, but i’m starting to get stressed, and it’s really good for that.