Facebook, networks, feeds and friends

[matgb]

Right then. First of all, I've been playing around with Facebook, and am actually fairly impressed. It's sort of taken the basic idea of MySpace, and done it properly. I'm especially impressed by the photo sharing and hosting options, integrates incredibly well into your profile, and you can note friends are in pictures, and it shows up in their profile. Rather nice actually. Plus, it gives you things to do while there, and the events feed is very impressive - I've imported my journal as a series of notes from the RSS feed, that was cool. Anyway, as I've not really uploaded them properly before, I've made an album of photos from the the days out last year that I actually took my camera for. It includes raksaksa's barbeque in Dawlish(with, weirdly, many pics of big_blue_bear cooking, and also the trip jantshira, faeriecween and I took up to Dartmoor near the end of the summer.

On the tangential subject of RSS feed, doctorvee/dr_vee_feed has, in another case of being in my head, written an interesting take on the problems with RSS and other feeds:

I have had an up and down relationship with RSS. When I first started using it I thought it was a great way to just surf the web more quickly. No more visiting blogs to find that they hadn’t updated. No more visiting news sites to find that there is no news.

The problem is, once you have subscribed to more than a few dozen RSS feeds, it simply doesn’t work like that.

I (still) prefer LJ for feeds, if I miss stuff because I'm away, I don't feel like I've a massive backlog, and can just look at a much more filtered view, without having to mark all unread. I keep thinking of experimenting with some proper feedreading software, but I do everything else via web based services these days, seems a bit of a backwards step TBH.

And via the lovely SB, a possibly daft but worth signing anyway petition to recognise the contribution of 2000AD:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to award knighthoods to John Wagner, Pat Mills and Alan Grant, in recognition of the 30th anniversary of the great British comic, 2000AD

Go sign. Now.

Last up, jonnynexus has an idea for a more inclusive version of Talk Like a Pirate day:

13 November: International Swear Like a Fucking Trooper Day!

How cool would that be? Anyone want to knock up a logo?

Sounds like it might be a plan...

Comments

[foxfirefey]

Hehe, except when they get it wrong.

Also, GREGARIUS.

[matgb]

Re Gragarius, I know, I need to get around to trying it. I need to get around to trying many things, haven't even upgraded WP yet on any of my sites.

Re Facebook, I refer the lady to a different article by doctorvee that I linked to when he wrote it, I'm not hrefing it, because the url says it all:
http://doctorvee.co.uk/2006/09/09/the-utter-cretins-guide-to-privacy-on-facebook/
This one isn't bad either:
http://doctorvee.co.uk/2006/09/06/facebook-fuss-has-an-easy-solution/

I'll admit that they made a 6A style mess up of the announcement, but the feature itself? Having only just signed up, it's what makes the site useful, Jo uploads a picture, Christy comments on it, I know both things easily so can go join in the conversation, all through the feeds. I like. But then, I'm weird.

[foxfirefey]

Nope, it was done plain out wrong. Anything that causes that much of your userbase to outright revolt is just plain and simply done wrong, whether it was a lack of communication or a lack of understanding about their needs.

It didn't help that it was (and still is sometimes) buggy: one of my friends had a breakup announcement appear from her, so she started getting all kinds of WTF TELL ME messages. But, well, she hadn't broken up, nor changed her profile.

From a watcher's perspective, I'm pretty sure there wasn't any filtering when it first debuted, either. Meaning that there was no way to filter out the boring stuff from the stuff you actually wanted to see. That reduced the utility of the feature to the people who might have otherwise liked it.

And, just like on LJ, not all "friends" are equal.

[matgb]

Oh, no doubt at all they handled it badly, but as one of your articles said, a lot of the success of the fuss and anti-complaints was because of the feed itself.

On LJ, when there's a serious issue of complaint, the fen need to get riled up and it needs to actually be posted. Which made the success of the group set up almost a given, people don't like change, especially change they weren't expecting. Imagine what would have happened if every time someone joined no_lj_ads or even scienceofsuck, their entire friends list new.

We'd have been swamped automatically, regardless. I shudder to think really, doubt we'd have had as much staff feedback in the way we did if we'd had thousands of members all screaming about every minor slight.

Like I said, I signed up a month ago, started using it three weeks ago, and picked it up again when a colleague added me. From a new user perspective now, it's damn good, and the usability scores highly as well; I do get lost on occasions, but nowhere near as often as I still do on LJ.

On the equal thing, it would be nice to have better filter groups though, a few people are on 'limited profile' for me, but I'm not really sure what that means, I may need to set up a second account just to figure out some of the privacy stuff.

[foxfirefey]

If you remember to poke me this weekend, I'll might be able to write an OPML importer for Gregarius that will import all your feeds (and possibly LJ friends). Now that I'm thinking about it, I might even be able to sort it by friend groups.