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.

SocialNumber.com

If you really identify with that old Bob Seger song, or if all your life you’ve been saying “You just wait and see! Someday, I’m gonna BE NOBODY”, then SocialNumber.com may be for you. It bills itself as the “First ever anonymous social network”. Which immediately begs the question: if networking is all about meeting people, why would you want to do it ANONYMOUSLY? Or, to reverse the question: if you want to be ANONYMOUS, why would you join a SOCIAL NETWORK?!? Their rationale is to “avoid the fear of negative implications when using other social networks”. Negative implications? Like what? Wasting all day arguing about politics with people you only know through FarmVille? I signed up anyway. More on that below.

Signing up for this site made me feel all cloak-and-daggery. So I figured that I should create a throwaway email for it, and after doing some quick research on webmail that helps you remain anonymous, I gave up. If you sign up for a service like RiseUp, they offer all sorts of assurances about protecting your identity, but if I were a government spook looking for sneaky people, I’d just train one of my recently arrested Anonymous hackers to exploit the servers. So I ended up just using plain old Hushmail. When I finally logged in, I was a little disappointed at the hot topics and numbers of users. Click for a larger image:

Yup, Anonymous, Atheism, and Sex. Unless I’m mistaken, I think you can find this all on Reddit. And if you really want to be an Anon, do you use a commercial website, or IRC channels and other mysterious and high-tech protocols? By the way, if you’re an Anon who DOES use SocialNumber and I’m wrong, please don’t get pissed and take my server down. I mean no offense. Anyway, this site also kept making me think of what Dr. Strangelove said about the Doomsday Device, i.e.: “Of course, zee whole point of a Doomsday Machine eeze lost, if you keep eet a SECRET! Why didn’t you tell zee world, EH?” So, moving on….

Diaspora

I was excited about Diaspora when I first heard about it, because it seemed like it had hopes of becoming everything that Facebook WAS and then abandoned in order to attempt to improve its stock valuation. Unfortunately, every time I log in, I feel even lonelier than I did BEFORE I logged in. The sparse interface is nice, but the users seem sparse too! And many of the posts seem to be about what you CAN’T do, like sharing content the way you’d like. This site got its press last year; I personally think it’s doomed. I hope they prove me wrong. But the last post in my stream yesterday was 20 days old:

Identi.ca

This is a network driven by posts that are no longer than 140 characters. Wait. Isn’t that just Twitter? Well, not really. One thing that makes this one interesting is the fact that it’s powered with open source software that you download. Which is exactly why I DIDN’T try it; I might try later, but I think most users would delay trying it for the same reason. But when Twitter inevitably goes for an IPO, this might be one of the sites to look at. They claim they’re dedicated to remaining open source, and that, in the end, is what is missing in social media at this point.

You can talk all you want about what makes social media tick, but in the end, it’s US, not all the ways someone can exploit it to market things.

Identi.ca at least has a nice clean interface:

Is social networking….

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? And the kids, are they taking field trips in your area each day? Or do they actually live here? Well finally, there’s a way to find out. Thanks to the marvels of the internet and this innovative human relationship building tool called “social networking”, those people surrounding you on all sides no longer need to be a mystery. If you thought Facebook was cool, with its amazing tools for connecting you with people you already know so you can tell them all about what you ate for lunch today, you’ll LOVE NextDoor.com, where you can get to know the people next door, without ever having to go through the drudgery of actually TALKING to them. Probably one of the most amazing things about NextDoor.com – aside from the fact that it’s real, and not an Onion.com parody – is the fact that is its existence probably IS in fact the only way some people will ever meet those possible hostiles next door. I’m sometimes perceived as a bit of a sociopath, because I say “hi” to strangers and make a point of meeting the neighbor, but the last time I recall people actually talking to neighbors on a large scale was during the Northeast Blackout of 2003. Don’t be surprised if NextDoor.com takes Groupon’s title as the next multibillion-dollar overvalueddotcom within the year. The idea is just ironic enough to work, in the same way Instagram lets you take perfectly good digital photos and make them look crappy, like you shot them twenty years ago on a Kodak Brownie.  Learn more in the introductory video below.

You ever wonder where those 3D vector graphic hypothetical people in venture capital presentations live?

Why, in the 3D vector graphic hypothetical neighborhoods of NextDoor.com, of course!

NextDoor.com – Meta-irony so profound that if it didn’t exist, the Onion would certainly have invented it.

In August of last year, we pondered whether the mysterious Rockmelt was a new web browser or a planet vaporizing death ray. Well, the answer has been revealed, and frankly, we would have been a little more excited with the death ray option. So why is someone creating yet another browser? Don’t Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, et al give us enough to choose from and argue about? Well, on the “social web”, apparently not. Rockmelt is designed specifically to pull all your social doodads into one place, in a handy tabbed fashion. This is probably why no-one is calling it a “Firefox Killer”; if anything it’s a “Flock Killer”. And that’s not very sexy, ’cause who the heck has heard about Flock, aside from the guys in the IT department and when I mentioned it just now? I for one won’t be rushing to download and install the recently announced beta version of Rockmelt; if they’re trying to build trust and user engagement, they’ve already scored a few negative points with me. I gave them my e-mail over a year ago to stay informed, and heard nothing of them until they popped back into the tech media buzz the other day, asking for you to connect with your Facebook account if you want to try their beta release. No thanks, Rockmelt. They’re obviously on the right track in some ways though; as this Wired piece points out, the web we knew is dead, and apps and social networking define the road ahead. But to define your launch with a Facebook log in seems a little less than forward thinking. Most of the tech savvy and social people I know have been turned off by the MySpace-ization of Facebook, and are using it less, and with less enthusiasm every day. So if you’re an active Twitter/Facebook/FourSquare type, Rockmelt may be just the ticket. Personally, I’m a little connection weary, and LIKE the fact that I have to access different devices, apps, or websites to stay connected. So Rockmelt, drop me a line when you come out with the death ray version. If you can find that e-mail I already gave you. Launch promo video below.

The folksy incidental music in this introductory video almost makes you want to toss a log on your Fireplace app and Skype grampaw:

Yup. There’s an app for that:

Yeah. Sure you will.

If I log into Facebook.

And what’s up with the “Dot Mac Deathstar” motif, anyway?

Whoever wins the new Norton Antivirus/Snoop Dogg anti-cybercrime rap contest over at HackIsWack.com is destined to be at least as famous as M. E. Hart. Oh. Sorry. You probably didn’t know he was the “rapper” in the 1994 Don’t Copy That Floppy campaign (video below). You know, the one you don’t remember. This marketing campaign by Norton is so full of fail in so many ways that I don’t know where to start. First, I’ll acknowledge that yes, I’m talking about Norton Antivirus, which is part of their goal. In fact, here. Go buy some if you want. I’ll make something like $1.37 if you use that link. But otherwise, this is full of fail. You can almost hear the aging executive at the board meeting that got this in motion: “We need one of those VIRAL things. Make sure we have one of those Facebooks, and that, whatchacallit? One of those TWITTER things. Oh, and a MySquare or whatever it’s called too“. Well, they’ve got their Facebook and Twitter thing set up (although I’m more impressed with Crack Is Wack, a joke FB page by a couple of youngsters), and they’ve got that “hip” domain HackIsWack.com. And then what? You can view all the hilariously bad whiteboy “nerd up to your motherboard” raps here, but guess what. You can’t SHARE them, so we can only link to our current pick, called Hairetsu Entry. We admire it mostly for the fact that the guy seems so gangsta for shizzlin’ on company time by recording his performance on the security cam in the stock room at his shoe store job. If the decision makers at a company like Norton had half a brain, they’d hire Snoop as a consultant, not a celebrity endorsement. Like so many marketing campaigns involving Snoop, while he brings some attention to the brand that he’s hired to endorse, the REAL brand remains Snoop, and I’d bet he sees more revenue than whoever hires him. Go Snoop. You’re a genius. And in the end, the main reason this campaign fails is that anybody who will talk enough about Snoop and computer security in the same conversation to lead to a conversion are technophiles like me who will say “That’s so funny! But don’t use Norton, use Kaspersky or AVG, or Malwarebytes, really just about anything BUT Norton! Fo’ rizzle. By the way, apologies for my less-than-Snooptastic Slanguistics, but gizoogle.com was down.

Here’s the hip and edgy 1994 “Don’t Copy That Floppy” video, starring M.E. Hart. I just have one question. What’s a “floppy”?

Don’t bother trying to play the video below. Part of the built in fail of Norton’s “social networking” campaign is that it isn’t very “social”. The videos barely stream on their site, it’s not surprising they didn’t mess with that crazy “embedding” thing all the kids are doing these days.

This clip of Kevin Smith making fun of Prince’s alleged eccentrities was making the rounds today, but highlights the fact that maybe Silent Bob should’ve stayed that way. Does anyone really believe the “camel at 3am” story? Transcript here if you don’t feel like watching the Not So Silent Bob playing with his nose every 90 seconds or so.

One of the things that made the While My Guitar Gently Weeps video so pervasively shared was one simple thing that Prince did at the very end of the solo…

The first trailer for The Social Network appropriately comes across like a horror movie trailer:

The only thing more horrifyingly dull than watching a movie about two annoying nerds who literally changed the face of modern life with their nerdy obsessions…

….would be watching a movie about one annoying nerd who didn’t:

SocialSafe is a cheap and easy to use back up tool that’s still in development:

Here’s the awkward – but apparently effective – video pitch for Diaspora: