Facebook was the biggest internet sensation, since well, nothing really. It was and continues to be the biggest thing to hit the internet that is legal for all, if you catch my drift. Facebook was launched by a group of college aged students, and geared toward college aged people, but it grew to so much more than that and quickly expanded its horizons to include people of any and all ages. For better or worse that made the site have more than 500 million worldwide users and made Mark Zuckerberg the youngest self made billionaire in the world. That's all fine and dandy, but today they've went to far.
Today Facebook rolled out some pretty massive changes, changes that I, and seemingly everyone of the 2500+ (well at least those that have managed to figure out how to post their hatred of the changes that is) people on my contacts list don't like. The old design was superior in ease of use; that's pretty much all that matters in today's world. It was easy to use, so everyone used it. end of story.
Also today, in a completely related note, Google Plus emerged from it's closed beta and can now be used by the masses. Personally, I'm a big fan of just about anything Google does. I find its search engine to be the best for diverse uses, I've had a Gmail account since high school, and Google Chrome is the only browser I use when I have a chance. They also have many, many other services that I use, just not quite as often.
I was invited to Google Plus the end of June or early July, sometime in that week anyway. I was soon to head off on a vacation so I didn't even activate it at that time. When I returned from North Carolina, after an average to below average trip (That is a story for another day though...) I finally hooked into Google Plus, and found that it was a bit foreign in concept to me. Being honest, I didn't spend a lot of time on it then, and have rarely logged back in since. That was however during the closed beta test when most of my friends didn't have accounts either.
Now that the beta is open to the general public, I honestly feel that Google will knock this out of the park as well. With the negative changes Facebook has made it's only a matter of time before people jump ship. So mark my words, Google Plus will take over the web world, and eventually it too will fall. Facebook is not the be all end all of social networking sites, it's just the best one around today. That could change tomorrow though, I mean just look to the past, does anyone even remember what a Myspace account is?
Quote from a Facebook friend about the 'new' Facebook options.
ReplyDeleteFacebook, you're not near as smart as you think you are. Your algorithms for deciding what I want to see, who I want to talk to or what I think is important are 99.999% of the time the exact polar opposite of what I want. Everything you do to try to simplify things only complicates things more. Every attempt you make to improve things inevitably ends up in a HUGE step backwards. Take for example the new way Facebook displays pictures when clicked on that now appear initially as a compressed blurry mess reminiscent of the internet circa 1990. Something as simple as a Friend Request is now just a headache of options. The chat, instead of just showing everybody that's online now is broken up into segments that YOU GUESS I want to talk to, more often than not displaying many that I rarely want to chat with and many that aren't even online. Do I have the option to just display everyone that IS online? Nope, because as history has taught us Facebook isn't about viewing or doing things that I want, it's about Facebook coming up with some ludicrous idea of how things "should" be and than ramming it down it's users throats. I echo the sentiments of others that have cited that it is this kind of mentality that killed MySpace, a reminder that Facebook should never consider themselves "too big to fail." You're not...
So, how long till you predict we create Skynet or a close-off counterpart?
ReplyDelete6 months tops.
ReplyDeleteNo I'm kidding, but I could see it happening within my lifetime. Not Skynet per se, but a computer smart enough to think for itself I could see.