When I was in Toronto, more than one person let me know that they've been keeping up with me on Twitter. When you combine them and the people who I already knew followed me, there are more people reading my Twitter than any other of my online social mediums (except Facebook). It's kind of funny, because I barely pay attention to my Twitter. I only made it as a favour to someone else, and I've always scoffed at it, calling it an “Inferior version of Facebook's status update function”. In fact, most of my posts on there are Facebook status updates that I copy/pasted to my Twitter as an afterthought. Apparently, though, making the effort to do that copy/paste has paid off. Twitter must genuinely have some kind of appeal that I'm not getting.
While we're on the subject of networking sites, Facebook has a new layout that they invented while I was gone. It's called Timeline, and it's... It's bad. I've said before that a networking site isn't popular because it's good, it's good because it's popular. It's more about the community than the site, and the wider the audience you can branch out to, the better. But for the longest time, Facebook's been making modification after modification to their format, and for the most part, not only have they been bad, but they've been unpopular, too. I don't even understand why they'd make those changes from a management or financial standpoint.
Are they worried that people are going to get sick of Facebook? They won't. It's because people aren't relying on the Facebook staff to hold their interest. Even if Facebook doesn't change, people's lives do. Those are the changes that keep people interested. That's what makes it a social networking site. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Are they trying to find out how bad they can make the site and stay in business by virtue of their reputation and popularity earned by past accomplishments? Seems like it.
Anyway, they gave you an option if you wanted to upgrade to this new format. They're going to force the change three days from now, but you can choose if you want to change before they force it.
Lots of friends who did Katimavik had these pins that said “Save Katimavik” posted on their profile pictures. They sent me an invitation to an application that would allow me to put this badge on my image. So I went and did it. By adding the pin, it also decided to change my profile to the Timeline format. And I can't change it back. I didn't expect that to happen. If I had just made a few more days, I would have had it forced on me, but I would have been able to say I fought the good fight.
I got a message from the agricultural school representative today, saying that my letter was successfully delivered to my Mali host family. YES!
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I feel the same way as you about Twitter. I don't get it. I don't want links to things; I can get links plus comments about them on Facebook. I don't want to blast things out to random people: I'd rather write to a narrow audience. But it works for some people, good for them.
ReplyDeleteFrom what I've read, Facebook makes these changes to encourage you to list personal information about yourself so that they can share it with advertisers, who somehow think that that will justify the money they spend with Facebook. (There has been an ongoing myth that page views or clicks or whatever are valuable in and of themselves, and that myth has kept many free services alive for years. The truth is that the only thing that really matters is conversion rate: what percentage of people viewing your ad end up buying something as a direct result of it? Eventually advertisers will figure that out and things will change ...)