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

[springhazsprung.livejournal.com]

Facebook = ♥

But be warned. It's ridiculously addictive.

[matgb]

Yeah, I'm beginning to get that. I spent a good two hours today running random searches. Admittedly, that's partially because I told some people I'd work on figuring out the features we could use for campaigning, but still.

You have 220 photos of you on there? Wow. I think that's more than most of the rest of my friends there combined. You camwhore you ;-)

[springhazsprung.livejournal.com]

208 actually :P Only 74 of those are mine though, the rest are from other people's cameras. Everyone is snap-happy at Uni...208 isn't even very many in comparison to other people's profiles ^__^

So you've worked out the whole groups/events thing for campaigning then, yes?

[matgb]

Getting there, groups are obviously good, and some of the articles foxfirefey linked above give me more ideas; that the feed tells people you'v ejoined groups automatically is very cool, it means the groups self promote.

I'll likely be contacting the admins to ask for networks of voluntary organisations, because while a group is good, there are a whole lot of Lib Dems on there, and using it to heard them about will be awesome if I can figure out how.

And yeah, I suspect more photos get taken than in my day, my four year old digital camera that was good at the time is now no better than my mobile phone, so it's just easier; we never bothered to carry cameras around because they were huge, expensive and annoying, now I've got one in my pocket all the time.

You know they're calling it "the MySpace generation"? Not really worried about personal privacy, very open about aspects of life that even I find it weird sharing, very networked, very aware, but mostly having fun? Lot's of sociologists are going insane over it. Silly fools.