In general I stay away from social networks now. I have an identi.ca account, mirrored (but locked) on Twitter because I support the open source ideas behind Status.net. Other than that after being burned by the decline of Friendster, Myspace, and whatever else this shit is played out and a fucking travesty in general. It has turned an entire planet of educated people into marketers and publicists. People stopped talking, instead everyone now publishes sound bites, most trying to “sell” you something, with the bonus of feeding their habits into mass media trending engines; basically Bill Hicks nightmare. Everything you type is now screen real estate for product placement? When the first tribes, villages, and civilizations formed centuries ago they weren’t businesses driven by advertising dollars. I think my last social network is, in fact, this forum. But I digress…
Yesterday I got some sort of automatic spam invite from Byte-Smasher (do you even post on here anymore, yo?) to join him on Google+ Promptly deleted, but now I see it all over the news. What the hell is this?
it could be interesting to use this strictly for internet friends/geek interests.
the problem with fb is that since you have such a mixed group of people as (co-workers, friends, relatives, internet people etc.) it becomes kind of tame. only the safest and most boring status updates are posted… it’s kind of just digital small talk and quite different from what i, as a “forum fan”, is used to.
what’s nice about group discussions on the inet is after all the harsh and direct feedback from anonymous users with the same interests. the non-bs tone
edit: read up a bit. this sounds quite promising: The fundamental value proposition is around privacy: it’s the opposite of Facebook and Twitter’s universal broadcast paradigm. Google Plus is based on the Google Circles feature, which lets you share and view content to and from explicitly identified groups of your contacts, and no one else.
Privacy from my mom is one thing, privacy in general is something else.
I use several Google services. I’m pretty sure I’m one click away from landing into a social network that already knows everything about me. I’m not joining Google+ any time soon but I suspect that’s just one of many interfaces to what I already use.
I am a product, Google is the creator, it sells me back to myself? It’s like living in a Skinner box.
advertising is something we are more or less obliged to live with. This said, I personally prefer targeted advertising over untargeted one: if for example I write a note about Renoise on Facebook, I prefer to read advertisings about a new VST plugin rather than advertising about that new incredibile highliner for your emo needs
To be fair, I have a original copies of this 1971 book along side “About Behaviourism” and “Walden Two” on my bookshelf since 1995. I am certainly not unfamiliar with the concept of “a technology of behaviour” so when I say “Skinner box” I’m not just shit talking.
Anyways, I read on some tec blogs that getting an invite was hard? I logged into my gmail and clicked accept.
Facebook allows you to do exactly that to, with every Status Update you can click the little lock symbol next to it before posting, can set up per photo album, can set privacy for what any group can see of your profile generally.
It’s just people are too lazy to make use of these functions!
Seen a fair few of my geek friends saying they want a G+ invite over the past couple of days though…
that, and they just don’t look around. when i told a friend of how i manage my facebook account, he thought it was awesome and did it my way as well. my method is simple:
make a Friend Group called ‘Friends for Sharing’
go somewhere into your settings (yeah, i know) and there’s an option to set the default Friend Group for your posts. set it to ‘Friends for Sharing’
now go through all your Facebook friends and add the ones you care about to your ‘Friends for Sharing’ group.
each time you do a status update, the only ones who will see it are those in your select group.
you will still see useless drivel from people who you don’t care about (or even friends who are not in any way interesting online). hide them.
i only use Facebook because it is an easy way to share a cool video or something like that with a lot of my friends, basically to have a laugh now and again, and sometimes even an interesting conversation with a friend of a friend (it happens!)
that said, i agree with Conner. it is absurd to think about the way you are being used for marketing purposes when you are on a social network. but the same is true for 9 out of 10 services you can use online (Google searches, Gmail, etc). as It-Alien said, it is a necessary evil. IMO, it is born from people’s misguided idea that everything on the internet should be free. nothing in this world is free, they just figured out a way to not have you notice exactly how you pay for it.
i am wondering though: take Linux as an example. how can that be free? surely they must make some money from something? or is it truly just a big bunch of enthusiasts who make this possible? and could this continue forever? loads of software that used to be free now comes with optional Ask Toolbars and so on, simply because they cannot afford to keep it going without generating some real money (take Piriform as an example).
I like how my +1’s are separated from my messages. Also how the photos from circles look, scrolling through pictures is awesome as well.
Misses a few features such as pages (for artists etc.), events and applications. But I’m sure that’ll come in a few months or so.
Good stuff, I enjoy it more than Facebook. I think it’s more user-friendly, cleaner and faster.
I’ll be honest, I jumped into this thread hoping people would be giving out their full names and sending invites around. It sure it lonely only having 5 people on my Google+
We received an invite tonight, but it’s running so slow we couldn’t do much of anything. clicking on anything says “loading” for about 10 minutes. so far I’m not very impressed.
i think there was an important point in the op post…
for me internet has kill the underground. underground was based on secret. there was particular techniques (musical but also distribution and news) around each particular scene. you’ve got to be introduced to understand a scene (be it hardcore punk, hackers, trackers, true street hiphop, extreme metal and so on…)
nowadays everything is fast and easy. there is no more secret. you want to be introduced to turbofolk just google,wikipedia, find some rapidshare and here we go in about 2 hours you’ve got 5 EP of turbofolk, mooobhaton you name it…
i don’t know if it’s a good or a bad thing… subcultural elitism has always make me nervous because seeing all this people on their high horses because they know something underground is always kinda funny…
but on the other hand internet has turned every underground musicians into a ad machine spamming every social network possible (with most of time shit music). the true spirit of doing something just for the music is kinda lost
while i agree with you on the availability of formerly ‘secret’ information through the internet, i disagree on there being ‘no more secret’. people can watch 300 youtube video tutorials and songs, spend hours on google and wikipedia figuring out how to do a turbofolk song (your example, i’ll have to google it to know what it is , but that does not mean they will be able to also understand what it is about. the fact that people have access to more information does not make them smarter, and pure information cannot substitute real life experience and actual talk with actual people.
, but that does not mean they will be able to also understand what it is about. the fact that people have access to more information does not make them smarter, and pure information cannot substitute real life experience and actual talk with actual people.