social media

Is There An App For You?

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You want to stay in touch with someone?  You can use Facebook.  Or Twitter.  Or email.  Or Plaxo.  Or LinkedIn.  Or . . . well you get the idea.

Sure there's applications like Flipboard and RSS feeds to try and tie things together.  There's plenty of ways to try and arrange your time to keep up on social media.  But it seems keeping track of people is awful complicated in this age of technology to make things simpler.

Now for people who want to be known, or who have a lot to say in various media, or who have people who follow them intimately (from friends do just family), this is even more complicated.  Some people, for a million or just ten people want to keep in touch.

So I've wondered, in an age where there's many ways to turn simple feeds and data into Apps for Smartphones, iPads etc., are some people going to basically create "Me Apps"? 

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Why FaceBook and Company Aren’t Really Web Pages

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Facebook has been in the news with it's recent announcements, changes, and of course, new features.  Over and over again I hear the same arguments about Facebook – lack of privacy, settings too obscure or complex, everything changes so much.  Facebook is this giant morphing ball of "stuff" that everyone likes and no one is happy with.

I'd like to focus on the complexity issues with Facebook, the arguments that its too hard to change settings and that when you dig into it, Facebook can actually be quite complex.

The complexity isn't a surprise to me, but I think it surprises many people.  The reason it surprises them is that they're treating Facebook like a web page or web tool, like a Google search or a Twitter feed.  Facebook is not a simple web page/tool.

Facebook is a web-delivered application (bordering in some cases on being an operating system as well).

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Social Media Points of Failure

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Facebook has just added a lot of new features to its offering, buttons and graphs and likes and widgets galore.  Of course among the various discussions about Facebook, one issue keeps  coming up is that Facebook, as it gets bigger, is a single point of failure in people's online lives and identities.

If you think back, there have been a lot of "single points of failure" in peoples online lives.  I remember when ICQ was the big chat program, when LinkedIn had no competitors, when everyone worried about Twitter owning people's lives (remember that?).  There's always a worry that some provider or web service will dominate everything – and then bad things will happen with hackers, TOS changes, etc.

So we've had a lot of worry about points of failure in our internet lives.  Though I have yet to see a Great Online Life Destruction Debacle, it is a possibility of course.  However,  I've watched many a gloom and doom story about the internet and have yet to see Netageddon happen.

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