Goodbye, Facebook, and Thank God For Tumblr. Now I Can Quit the Internet
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on February 20, 2013 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Wednesday, February 20th, 2013Okay, maybe I’m rushing things, but it’s my nature.
When I asked friends a couple of years ago “Is Facebook getting a little tired? Is it over now?”, most of them would suggest that I was just being a big sourpuss. I’m used to this. Because of the people in my immediate circle of business associates and friends, I’ve developed a sort of Cassandra Complex. No-one ever believes me when I tell them something new is about to boom, and no-one believes me when I tell them it’s peaking. Until it’s on the cover of Newsweek or something, anyway. Which it can’t be any more. But that’s okay, my only real regret is that I didn’t try to directly capitalize on any of these cycles of disruptive innovation, and instead sold consulting services related to them. That means that back in 2008 I was one of the thousands of folks that annoyingly referred to themselves as a “social media consultant”. Don’t get me wrong, this was a valuable service for a while. No one seems to enjoy adhering to the RTFM Protocol, and consulting – in many instances – is a perfectly legitimate service that basically involves “reading the manual” when someone else doesn’t want to. In any case, here’s the big news. Facebook is in fact toast. It’ll still be around, I mean crikey, AOL and MySpace are “still around”. But a big shift is happening, and here are my latest prophecies that you can ignore, partly summarized by more “experty” experts. Read the rest of this entry »
Will the Last Person Leaving Facebook Please Turn Off the Lights?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 24, 2013 by admin in Technology
Thursday, January 24th, 2013Is social networking dead? Of course not. It just doesn’t feel good. And the latest Facebook alternatives like Diaspora, SocialNumber, and Identi.ca aren’t exactly thriving. Theorize all you want about social media, but in the end it’s all about US, not the platform.
 If you’re a nobody who wants to meet nobody, SocialNumber may be just what you’re looking for. |
People have been asking for some time now (myself included) if Facebook is dead. A couple of years ago, an article with that title was usually a whiny piece by a socially inept nerd who probably felt just as peeved at every party they attended as they did on Facebook. But the answer to the question “is Facebook dead?” has evolved quite a bit. Some say social media is healthier than ever. But that piece was published as SEO linkbait by a marketing consultancy. Of course social media is alive, if your income is derived from telling people to use it. But the argument used in that article – that Nielsen data indicates that “more people than ever are using social media” – is one of the best arguments that it IS dying. AOL, MySpace, and just about any other previous “big thing” you can name had the largest number of users at exactly the moment they sucked the most and began their decline. If you ask people who are more interested in accurately understanding how social media actually functions rather than how to exploit it, you’ll get a different kind of answer. Like Social Media is Dead and marketers probably killed it. Or it’s not quite dead, it just needs CPR. And if you ask people who look at the money, you get an equally unenthusiastic response, with observations about Zynga, Facebook, and Groupon’s stock performance. Remember when Groupon was valued at SIX. BILLION. DOLLARS? And while a lot has been written about Google+, that’s about the extent of it. Except for rabid Googlephiles, the place has tumbleweeds blowing through it. So what about other conduits in the social media realm? Twitter and Pinterest are noisy as hell, and provide little in the way of meaningful connection for people who speak in more than 140 characters or don’t like communicating with thumbnailed images. And Instagram, Spotify, and others? They’re fun, they’re shareable, but they’re really just part of the “entertainment system of social”. So what’s next? Who knows. That’s the whole idea behind the concept of disruption in tech or media realms. And are there alternatives to Facebook? Well, the last few options to get any buzz remain a little less-than-populated. We checked out two of them – Diaspora and SocialNumber – and have shared screen shots below to make some points. And a third called Identi.ca actually looks pretty intriguing, but you have to install software to actually participate. We may do a followup piece on it, but you can rest assured you won’t be hearing about it on cable news in the next year. So below are some quick thoughts on Diaspora and SocialNumber, but now I have to get moving and share this piece on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, like a good little social media murderer. Because our boredom isn’t killing Facebook; our marketing, spamming, and “self as brand” behaviors are. Read the rest of this entry »
Post-Election Facebook Boredom? Here are Seven Great Topics for Irrational Debate
[ Comments Off ]Posted on November 16, 2012 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Friday, November 16th, 2012Face it. Since election day, Facebook has been pretty dull. Here are seven topics guaranteed to put some ignorance and hyperbole back in your feed.
Climate Change? What Climate Change?
Hear that sound? Me neither. It’s the sound of tumbleweeds slowly rolling through your Facebook feed since election day. If you’re a Facebook user, you have no doubt noticed how damn boring it is lately. All the early adopters were tired of it two years ago, but it had become kind of like one’s “daily elimination”. Not something you especially look forward to, but you do it every day anyway. After the late adopters tired of Farmville, all that was really left was a constant stream of kitten, baby, and “look what I’m eating!” photos, and those weird motivational quotes as graphics. That’s why we all welcomed a presidential election. Suddenly, things were exciting again! Ten thousand word irrational rants about how Obama was an Islamic Socialist Illuminati out to destroy capitalism and create a global currency while making sure all our soldiers were in harms way, and Romney was a magic-underpants-wearing robber baron who was going to sell Chrysler to India and rape grandma’s social security fund to finance a holy war against Iran to save the economy. Or something like that, I forget the details. But then Obama won, and all the sane, intelligent Republicans and Democrats just kind of got quiet, and all the idiots on either side just got angrier and louder. The Republican ones exploding in rage disorders and planning their state’s secession from the Union, and the Democrats gloating obnoxiously, not realizing that in essence, they had just re-elected Ronald Reagan. The threads would fizzle quickly, presumably because aside from the fact that “who won” was a moot point, the flames of the “torches and pitchforks” crowd exhausted all the oxygen needed to generate so much hot air on these threads. But fear not! We’re here to help put the “FU” (Facebook Unfriending) back in Facebook. Here are seven topics guaranteed to put some fight back in your feed, and unmitigated gall back on your wall. Read the rest of this entry »
How Your Political Rants on Facebook Killed Our Bumper Sticker Sales
[ Comments Off ]Posted on October 13, 2012 by admin in Politics
Saturday, October 13th, 2012If everyone is spending all their time expressing their quadrennial political expertise on Facebook, they hardly have time to DRIVE their cars, let alone buy bumper stickers for them. These are the early ideas for our abandoned novelty products for the 2012 election cycle.
 What better symbol for America than a pilot-less war machine? |
This has been a depressing election year. No, not because my side is losing. I’m not on one. It’s too hard to tell which side of any line these clowns are standing on. Mr. Rope-a-Hope sold out to the insurance industry to force health care on all of us, and his presidency is ironically well-represented by one of the things he gets the most flak about from his own base. What better symbol for our country right now than a pilot-less machine of war? And in the end – if he wins – Moderate Mitt will probably be more like that moniker than you think. Clearly, they scraped cells off Reagan’s body back in the 80′s, and have grafted them onto Romney to create the next meat puppet president. The transmogrification was nearly complete by the first debate. If you closed your eyes whenever Mitt spoke during that debate, you would SWEAR it was Ronny up there on the podium. Romney has even perfected that weird, breathy, Reagan vocal mannerism; if he just adds that odd head bobble of Reagan’s, the effect will be complete.
But that will only endear him SLIGHTLY to a “real” Republican, and Obama has the same problem. Democrats have one of the worst collective cases of buyer remorse since Carter first donned a cardigan for a fireside chat while his redneck brother crawled from the woodwork to market Billy Beer. And that creates a problem for people like me; it’s hard to work up some decent antagonistic campaign parodies when both sides hate their OWN candidate. The most positive responses I’ve gotten when lambasting Obama have come from bleeding heart liberals, and any protest from my conservative friends when I poke fun at Romney have been like the final punches of a fighter that knows that even if there’s no way they’ll take the title, there’s NO WAY they’ll stop punching ’til they actually go down, even if their punches ARE more like the open-handed sissy slaps I got when fighting my sister in third grade. In this cannibalistic environment, where partisans are eating their own, the best we could come up with in the last couple of years were things like the Donner Party and the Punk Party.
But you know what makes matters even worse? YOU. In case you haven’t noticed, your political posts on Facebook are the REAL joke. The level of Read the rest of this entry »
NextDoor.com – Finally a Way to Meet Those Strange People on the Other Side of the Driveway
[ Comments Off ]Posted on July 11, 2012 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Wednesday, July 11th, 2012Through the magic of the internet, you can finally meet those people who live all around you, without ever actually having to TALK to them.
 Sadly, these seniors don’t use the internet, so will never meet and get to know each other |
You know those strange people living in that building next to yours? And those nameless children riding bikes up and down your street each day, the ones who sometimes arrive or depart on a bright yellow bus? You’ve probably wondered: who ARE these people? Do they speak English? Are they paid extras in a big movie you’re in, like Jim Carrey in The Truman Show