Blog Assignment – First Prompt continued . . .
I see there are others who feel the same about Facebook.
SADIA: Funny you should mention controlling people. I believe that Facebook is taking advantage of the fact that (1) there is no other social site available with as much activity as Facebook and (2) that nobody wants to move to another site and refriend all of those people. So, they are making money off of our accounts by offering data mining and focused advertising to companies. Though it is true that they provide a service for free (I forgot to mention that I have an account on a Russian social site called Odnoklassniki which charges for everything from creating an account to posting pictures), what Facebook is doing is very unethical.
PROFESSOR: Facebook just had better functionality and games. The old Facebook made doing everything easy. Though Myspace was customizable, Facebook had more class than Myspace (which mostly teens used). I didn’t “need” to move over but the games was a big attraction factor, like being able to challenge your friends at games and compare high scores. The downfall of some websites is fixing what’s not broken. There was an interview with Craig Newmark in Wired magazine where Newmark despised change for only aesthetic appeal. Craigslist is similar in the ease of use of the old delicious site, it hasn’t changed and doesn’t need to change. The morons of this world try to attain aesthetics over functionality (hence the overwhelming amount of dumb, beautiful people).
KAMILAH: All the new updates to Facebook have been bothersome but it has not fully changed the site itself (as delicious was). Deleting your account won’t neccesarily change anything though. The second you post something, it automatically is saved somewhere on Facebook’s servers and can theoretically be retrieved at any time in the future. It bothers me when people feel an overstated sense of paranoia over opening a Facebook account. You control what you post, they don’t immediately suck the information from you via the monitor. Post nothing sensitive or embarrassing and you have no privacy or security concerns to deal with.
I agree about delicious though I am giving it a chance now that the YouTube guys saved it from oblivion. I do miss the very simple, no-frills interface and functionality of the old del.icio.us
