Monthly Archives: September 2011

Why Facebook Might Win The Social Media Wars

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It’s really kinda sad.

I like Google+. I don;t really use Google+ to it’s fullest and I know it’s coming out with lots of nice features and it hasn’t started serving up ads…yet.  But, I like it.

I’ve often heard that Google+ is like Facebook for Grownups.  And there’s the rub.

Facebook is catering to the much sought after demographic that doesn’t use their smartphone for (gasp!) phone calls.  They text, they watch videos, they play games. They use social media to do all kinds of fun stuff and they’ve been on Facebook for God only knows how long.

Facebook says is has 700,000,000 users but I know for a stone cold fact that a lot of those users are either:

  • multiple accounts for the same person
  • dogs
  • fictional characters
  • or people that signed up and did nothing else but, well, sign up

Still, they have a lot of users and a lot of people who just do not want to move and start over, again. They may have moved from MySpace or some place else already.

The Facebook Paradox

Yeah. They’l bitch and moan and complain about everything from privacy settings to the changes to the user experience that seems to happen on a monthly basis.  No matter, though.  I call it the Facebook Paradox.  People complain about it but they don’t move away from it even through there is now a very good alternative.

People love having 2,000 “friends” or a Group Page that has lots and lots of Likes. Farmville is the bomb.  Isn’t it? You know people’s birthday’s and now there’s this obnoxious ticker that lets you know what your friends are doing with their friends even if their friends aren’t your friends. (say that three times fast).

Hope Spring Eternal for Google+

Google+ has a chance, though.  They are developing business pages. They have some games. The hangouts are cool. It has a ton of potential. But the very thing that makes Google+ attractive to me is what will probably keep the 20-somethings and even the 30 and 40-somethings on Facebook.

Google+ is just too darn sedate.  Nice, clean interface. Not a lot of clutter.  Easy formatting. Simple to navigate. Nice privacy and notification controls.  All good stuff.

It’s just not bursting with lots of bright colors (unless you count all the graphics people post) and moving objects (unless you count all the animated .gifs people post) and stuff on the right and stuff on the left.

Still, my heart is with Google+.  I hope it wins or, at least, gets a big slice of the pie.  Maybe the Grownups. Unfortunately, it’s the Grownups that hate to move and start over. They hate change…which is why they’ll bitch and moan about the Facebook changes but stay there anyway.

The “New” Facebook or Google+

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Facebook rolled out a new look today.  It looks like a combination of, well, Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

The same old news feed is there but it has all this new fangled ordering scheme. It has a new way to view your Facebook friends in lists that include things like “Close Friends” and “[Your geographic area] Friends”.  It also has a scrolling feed on the right side that looks a lot like Twitter except it’s people in your friend list commenting on other people’s status updates.

I guess Facebook is trying to become the one stop shop of social media.

Too bad.

I was just getting used to the way Facebook was and was able to navigate around with something resembling familiarity. No more.

The Cluttered Look

Do you remember when Yahoo! was the big boy in the room? The 800 pound gorilla? The elephant?  Then Yahoo! started cluttering up their home page.  It became a “portal” to lots of other stuff. The only problem is that the Average Joe or Josephine couldn’t figure out how to get around.

Enter Google.  Lots of clean, unadorned white space with a search bar in the middle of the illustration of an extremely cluttered roompage.  You type in what you’re looking for and it takes you to a page with the most likely solutions for your search.  The “ads” were still relevant to your search.  You didn’t see results for pantyhose when you were looking for hotels in Atlanta.

The search results page was orderly.  By contrast, Yahoo! was a freakin’ mess.  So, what happened?  Yahoo! fell my the wayside and Google took the helm.

I see the same thing happening with Facebook.  The ads are like the ads on TV or radio or other parts of the Web.  They’re just something that someone thinks I might be interested in because of my perceived demographic group.  It’s not really what I would want.

Now with all the status update feeds (faux Twitter) and the “Close Friends” etc. (faux Google+), and bizarre news feed ordering and blue corner relevance markers (faux Google searh), Facebook has turned into a Frankenstein monster.

That’s why I like Google+.  At least for right now.  It’s clean.  It’s easy to express your thoughts and share.  You can format a lot like your would normally type. The Circles are easy to understand, easy to customize, easy to navigate.

Sure.  Google + has some downside.  A lot of people like to share graphics including animated .gifs which drive me crazy but I can”mute” a post without necessarily “blocking” the person.  If someone really annoys me I can pull him out of my Circle toot suite.

Someone called Google+ the Facebook for Grownups.  I think I like that description.

But It’s Free

Yeah, Facebook is free.

Commercial TV is free. Top 40 radio is free. They also suck.

And, it’s really not free.  We get the ads thrown at us all the time and Facebook makes gazillions from those ads.  Just because we don’t pay a yearly or monthly fee or something doesn’t mean it’s really, truly free.

Speaking with Conviction

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As aI fool around, waste time really, on the web, I sometimes come across some pretty interesting stuff. Maybe I should say interesting, to me. Awhile back I came across a short video called Typography. At first I thought it would be a viewing of different types of fonts or, perhaps a history of typography or the importance of typography in communication.

It was none of that. Well, it did exhibit a lot of different fonts that were configured in many different ways. Art. It was combined with a poem that really doesn’t sound like a poem. Doesn’t read like a poem. Maybe it was because of the way it was read. Maybe it was because of the visuals in the background.

All I know is that what started off as a lark, just something to do while I was bouncing around turned out to touch me. The video is by Ronnie Bruce. The poem was written and spoken by the author, Taylor Mali.

It’s 2 minutes and 45 seconds and worth every bit of it.

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

Self Delusion

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I’m really interested in how people think and how they make the decisions they do.  Heck, I’m interested in how I think and how I come to the decisions I make.

That’s why I was captivated by a recent book trailer I found while cruising around Google+. It’s amazing to me that books need visual trailers just like movies but I guess that’s a sign of the times.  It works for me.

It also let me to a blog my the same name of the book – You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself – that is interesting in and of it self.

So, I pre-ordered it.  What the heck.  The blog posts are well written and entertaining as well as informative.  Definitely worth a look.

Morning Person

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It is sadi that there are two type of people in the world:

  • morning people and
  • evening people

I am a morning person.  It seems that unless I stay up very, very late which would be highly unusual, my eyes pop open sometime between 5:00 and 5:30….in the morning.

It used to be a little later.

Normally, I don’t mind getting up that early.  It gives me time to sit and have a cup of coffee while I read the morning paper assuming it gets delivered early enough.  And, yes, I still like to get the physical paper paper so I can leaf through it at the dining table.

The morning also gives me a little time to read through some e-mail and maybe do a little social media. You know, read all the stuff on Facebook that my Facebook friends who are the evening people put up there.

The downside, of course, is that there isn’t a whole lot of stuff that isn’t online related that I can get done early in the morning.  Most business aren’t open yet. So the people I may need to contact or interact with are still snug in their beds.  About all I can do is dash off an e-mail and wait for a few hours for their reply, if any.

Most of my clients are asleep, too.  Not that we could do much anyway.  The real estate world may be a weekend and evening type business.  It, for sure, is not an early morning business.

Regardless of what you might read in those self help, make a million dollar books about getting to work earlier than everybody else and staying later than everybody else, there are just some things that don’t happen in the morning.

So, I try to relax and ramp up for the day without getting too ramped up. I know there’s still lots of hours until people start responding to e-mail or answering phone calls.

Binging

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Binge
noun
1. a period or bout, usually brief, of excessive indulgence, as in eating, drinking alcoholic beverages, etc.; spree.

verb (used without object) binged, bing·ing or binge·ing.
2. to have a binge: to binge on junk food.

binging. (n.d.). Dictionary.com Unabridged. Retrieved September 08, 2011, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/binging

 

Sound familiar?

College students do it with booze during their college years.  Supposedly it’s a big problem.

Dieters do it with food.  It’s no accident that the definition came with an example of “to binge with junk food”.

Such it is with me.Try hard. Count calories. Log food intake. Head out to the gym for some time on the treadmill. Lose a few pounds. Plateau. Keep trying. Gain. Keep trying. Gain. Keep trying. Lose a little bit.

Finally, it’s fuck it. It takes forever to lose the weight half pound by half pound. Then it’s dinner with friends, a birthday cake, a craving for ice cream, a work reception.  All of a sudden, I’m up three pounds in a day when it took me two weeks to get it off.

Two weeks of counting calories, two weeks of hitting the treadmill, two weeks of logging in all my food intake making sure I don’t eat anything with too many calories that would fully negate any exercise I’ve done.

So, I say fuck it. I start binging.

Ice cream, steak, potatoes, toast with jam, rice, muffins, cookies. Morning, noon and night.

I get on the scale and I’m disgusted but I don’t do anything. It’s raining cats and dogs so I don’t go out, I have appointments to keep most of the day so I don’t make it to the gym, I don’t feel like it, plain and simple because I know if I start it’ll take me forever to work off what I’ve put on by binging.

Binging on food is not like binging on booze.  With booze you wake up with a hangover, you throw up, take a couple of aspirin and you’re good as new. With food, you’re not good as new the next day. You’re 5 pounds heavier and the clothes that were feeling a little loose have tightened up, again.

Binging sucks.

Volunteering

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The flip side to giving, of course, is volunteering.  This is either when, in my opinion, you don’t have the money to give or you have too much time on your hands.

Just kidding.

Volunteering is almost always the easy way out to provide some kind of community service or help in some worthy cause.  Sometimes, as in the case of interning, volunteering can help get your a real, money-paying j-o-b.

In my case, I do some volunteering with my local Rotary club.  One of the things they do is provide parking logistics for the US Naval Academy home games.  Yeah.  That’s right. We get dressed up in bright, neon yellow vests with equally bright orange flags.

It’s really not as easy as it looks and it’s an all day affair.  College football fans don’t just come to watch the game.  They come to tailgate and have fun in the parking lot. That means they come early.  So, me and about 70 other people are out getting people to park in the right spaces and keep the driving aisles open for cars.

I do other stuff, too, but what bought this to mind is that today is the Navy home opener against the University of Delaware.  Newark, DE is really not that far from Annapolis, MD so there will be a ton of fans for both teams descending upon theNavy-Marine Corp Stadium.

The fun never stops.