How To Archive Or Back Up Your Facebook Account
[ Comments Off ]Posted on June 19, 2010 by admin in Technology
Saturday, June 19th, 2010There’s no single simple way, but there are some free and cheap tools that will do the job.
Been looking for convenient and easy way to archive your Facebook account? Well, tough patooties. There’s no convenient and easy way to do it, but we’ll outline a few methods you can try below. Like many users, I’ve been pondering how Facebook fits into my life, and how I feel about Mark Zuckerberg’s longstanding arrogant disregard for our privacy. I’m not alone; although Quit Facebook Day was a bust, according to a recent Soros poll 60% of users are thinking about quitting, and 16% already have. And although “How Do I Delete My Facebook Account” spiked as a search term in May, there are no numbers to indicate a mass exodus from Facebook yet. I personally won’t be quitting, but Facebook is no longer the more closed, verified network it was when I joined, and that was what I actually valued most about it. As a result, I’ve decided to change how I use Facebook a little bit until something better comes along, and part of that meant archiving and deleting my wall. I might have just deleted it all, but my friends are just too darn witty, and their comments just too precious and ginormously highlarious to click into oblivion. So how do you archive these sentimental treasures? Unfortunately, you can’t just go to “File > Save As” with your Facebook wall. Because of the fact that the site makes such extensive use of proprietary AJAX-like code, you can save a page, but rarely with the comment threads and older posts expanded. Even if you could do it this way, you’d end up with one massive, browser-crashing web page. So I put several tools to use, because each had its own shortcoming. The first thing I tried was the Firefox plug-in ArchiveFB. It’s based on another plug-in called Scrapbook, and allows you to fairly easily Read the rest of this entry »
Sure. FarmVille’s All Fun And Games. Until Somebody Makes A Billion Dollars.
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on June 8, 2010 by admin in Popular Media
Tuesday, June 8th, 2010Game sales have been outstripping music and movie sales for some time, but the real money may be in imaginary money.
If the entertainment industry is still wondering where that billion dollars in lost sales went last year, I think I have an answer for them. FarmVille. Yes, laugh at your Facebook friends as their lonely cows meander through the pasture of your Facebook feed, but Zynga, the developers of the game, banked a cool $270 million last year, and are looking forward to topping ONE BILLION DOLLARS this year. All because your do-nothing crackhead friends couldn’t find anything better to do than plant imaginary corn. But there’s the rub. It wasn’t slacker crackheads that were playing. It was Midwestern housewives. At least that’s how David Laux, global executive for games and interactive entertainment at IBM was quoted in that article. While the real demographic for the boom in this kind of game isn’t literally “Midwestern housewives”, it certainly is a new kind of user, and a new kind of development process. Not surprisingly, the same “traditional” game developers who enjoyed the kind of growth that has led to game sales outstripping movie sales in many countries are a little upset that a company like Zynga is creating the kind of revenue streams that it is, especially with the kinds of games (Farmville, Mafia Wars, etc) and user engagement strategies they utilize. Some developers resort to a bit of hyperbole to express their concern for the “purity” of the industry by saying things like “metrics-driven design and extrinsic rewards for in-game actions could lead to a future of designing shitty games that you have to pay people to play“, when what they may really mean is “dang, I wish I’d thought of that“. There’s no question that this new game market is going to be a big thing for a while, but what I find almost more interesting (and which I touched on earlier this year) is that there’s a second billion dollar industry spinning off of this all, one involving transferring your imaginary money between these booming games and social networks. I personally have never understood the “hook” with games like FarmVille; frankly Facebook itself is like a game to me. But what will catch my attention is an opportunity to get in early on a growing economy, even a virtual one. See you in ProfitsVille!
Life After Facebook – The Open Source Project “Diaspora”?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on May 13, 2010 by admin in Technology
Thursday, May 13th, 2010Yes, Facebook is beginning to show the signs of a dying culture. But does a brand that evokes images of translocated, beleaguered refugees stand a chance as a replacement?
If you’re at all in touch with the evolution of web trends, you can probably sense change in the air. One of the really great things about the web is that when something is really cool, people gravitate to it, and when it develops a high “suck quotient”, people just walk away and find the next cool thing. Google, for instance, has repeatedly done a masterful job of keeping the cool quotient just slightly ahead of the suck curve. Facebook? Not so much. The “information highway” is strewn with the debris of discarded innovation. Like the term “information highway”, for instance. And I’m confident that Facebook will soon be joining MySpace and Napster and IM and mp3.com and e-cards and a million other once-popular web doodads in that great wasteland on the web. So what’s next? Personally, I think it will still be a form of networked sharing, but someone’s going to figure out a way to make it work without constantly tinkering with it to try to monetize every user interaction. The browser you’re using to read this was free. Wikipedia is free. Your email program is probably free. So why not social networking? And by “free” I mean free of advertising. Or fees. Or freakish privacy issues. A project that’s generated considerable buzz in the tech press the last few weeks is Diaspora, an “open source Facebook”. These young developers are definitely on to something, but in spite of exposure that has reached even the New York Times and raising over 120 grand (and growing) in startup capital in just a couple of weeks, they may be missing it on a few beats. First of all, their idea requires the user to download software to connect. Maybe they can sell the idea that being a “seed” is somehow desirable, but this is the kind of territory that’s usually only broached by fairly tech-savvy users. Another biggy is the name. Do you really want a brand that references a permanently displaced and relocated collective? Who knows. Maybe it could work. One more significant hurdle is actually operating within the terms of use of all the sites (Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) that they plan to integrate into their idea. Whether this particular bunch of youngsters pulls it off or not, I wish them well, because they’re at least tapping us all on the shoulder and reminding us that there were fun times before Facebook, and there will be fun times after as well. Read the rest of this entry »
You Will Soon Be Dead To Me, Facebook
[ Comments Off ]Posted on May 8, 2010 by admin in Technology
Saturday, May 8th, 2010I’m in a relationship with Facebook, and it’s complicated.
 Rest In Peace, My Love |
We asked recently if Facebook was “over”. Well, the results are in. And the answer is no. I think “dead” would be more accurate. Sure, hundreds of millions of people will continue to use it, but hundreds of millions of people still use Hotmail. And toilet paper. And other things that they don’t necessarily enjoy using, but kind of have to. So why am I suddenly going so harsh on Facebook? Well, partly it’s my own whiny techno-ennui. It just became boring to me some time last year, after doing the one thing I valued it for, which was reconnecting with some valued old friends, and meeting a few new ones. But mainly because of two other things. First of all, the fact that the people behind Facebook have no interest in the user other than as a data mining resource, as evident in their constantly eroding privacy policies and repeated interface changes that do nothing but bury content and confound users about what their privacy settings are doing. Bet you didn’t know Facebook even censors your Inbox messages, did you. The other main reason is that while they do all of these things that are geared toward user data collection to increase their market value, they’ve managed to position themselves as a “utility”, but one that falls short in dozens of ways while distracting many people from more flexible and purposeful forms of communication. Although different users experience the phenomena in different ways, the illusion of being “in touch” with people on Facebook is a compelling one, but in my and many of my friends experience, an illusion that profoundly detracts from real communication, and occasionally actually impedes work when someone is dumb enough to use it as a primary communication channel. But what finally got me in terms of all these interface and privacy changes was the recent rollout of Community Pages. Try some of the paranoia-inducing things listed on this page, and you’ll see what I mean. I’m gearing up to archive my content and contacts, and delete my posts (which FB makes rather difficult), and completely backburner my account as a real tool. How about you? Are you over it? I’m not being melodramatic, by way, just check out Gizmodo’s Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook. Read the rest of this entry »
Is Facebook Over?
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on April 18, 2010 by admin in Technology
Sunday, April 18th, 2010There are still no animated sparkly unicorns saying “THANKS FOR THE ADD”, but it IS “gettin’ all MySpacy up in that biach”
I was a little surprised – especially given the recent launch of Buzz – that Google didn’t seem to think so. Doing some quick googling, I found a lot of two and three year old pouty blog posts like this and this that seemed to reflect the writer’s ennui or desire to be ahead of the curve more than anything else. Or articles from the Washington Post or New York Times that likewise seem more a reflection of a narrow demographic’s hip intellectual consumer restlessness, always wanting the next big thing before the current one has run it’s course. Personally, I think the fact that the 35-54 crowd on Facebook grew 276% in 2009 is a resoundingly loud answer to the question “is Facebook over?”, at least in terms of being hip. The first person who friended grandma should get a special award as the vanguard of the paradigm shift. But is Facebook “over”? I hardly think so. It managed to pull off something we don’t see too often in the tech world: it became a utility. If your network of friends is anything like mine, Facebook managed to dislodge e-mail, texting, and casual phone calls for informal communication in pretty short order. What I have seen in terms of user exodus though, is a certain type of person (myself included) that exhausted the “classmates.com” aspect of Facebook that helped us re-connect with old friends, and then grew tired of the “fun” sort of communication that Facebook engenders. We’ve found most of our old friends, we figured out which ones are worth reconnecting with, and now we’d like a better platform for staying in touch. As anecdotal evidence I’d offer the several dozen LinkedIn requests I and my friends have received over the last couple of months. I secretly hope that the Facebook crew will recognize this, and figure out how to retain users like us. Because although there are still no animated sparkly unicorns saying “THANKS FOR THE ADD” it IS “gettin’ all MySpacy up in that biach”, as a friend joked recently. Mostly thanks to all the late adopters who only recently figured out why no-one had friended them on MySpace for a year. Facebook isn’t going away any time soon, but I’m looking for a change if it doesn’t evolve in the ways I need. What about you? Read the rest of this entry »