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The real anti-Facebook is good old email

wired.com

41–50 of 165 posts

Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email

#41
post #22
post #8

The real anti-Facebook is Sublevel. But I can forgive Wired for not knowing about it.

Just read their About page, can't see how it's significantly different to Facebook or Twitter. It's still a proprietary network with all the Balkanization and opportunities for abuse that implies, isn't it?

[deleted]

Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email

#42
Now, only a year later, Ello is nearly forgotten, filed away with other would-be Facebook killers like the open source Diaspora and the near-dead Google+

The problem with this statement is that there is a vast difference in number of users between Ello and Google+. The latter is far from "forgotten" or "near dead." Every time I hit G+, it's teeming with activity. I can't say that about Ello, which seems to be populated by mustachioed German font designers who love custom bicycles and the music of Kraftwerk.

Now, Google+ has had its issues. It might even be going away or abandonware. And it's a blip on the radar compared to Facebook. But that's different from comparing it to Ello! The "Google+ is dead" meme is just lazy tech reportage.

Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email

#43
post #28

Facebook is flexible enough to provide this. You can post updates visible only to a group of people. Problem with Facebook is how people use it. Users tend to have > 500 friends on an average including ones to whom you have never spoken or never want to speak. This would make your timeline pretty irrelevant and uninteresting to you. Why would I care if a colleague in your first job (10 yr ago) went on a trip with his…

I didn't know that Facebook can send status updates via email to people who are not on Facebook.

[deleted]

Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email

#44
post #13
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not both? I would prefer to have my emails and feeds in one place, just no status updates.

What's stopping you? No reason a mail client can't do RSS as well, is there? (I'm pretty sure some do, or at least did.)

Every good mail client does RSS, including T-bird and Outlook - but they don't sync subscriptions and read/unread posts to the cloud, so most power users prefer a Google Reader clone.

Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email

#46
post #41
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just read their About page, can't see how it's significantly different to Facebook or Twitter. It's still a proprietary network with all the Balkanization and opportunities for abuse that implies, isn't it?

[deleted]

I tried Sublevel when it started, but wasn't getting much out of it. I posted a lot, followed a bunch of strangers and tried to have conversations with them.

Eventually I stopped checking it at all and forgot about it.

I think the people on it appreciate the qualities that you mention, but unfortunately those features don't add up to a burgeoning and intriguing social network.

Perhaps Facebook and Twitter are the last massive timeline-oriented social networks and there just isn't anything else innovative to do.

Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email

#48
post #28

Facebook is flexible enough to provide this. You can post updates visible only to a group of people. Problem with Facebook is how people use it. Users tend to have > 500 friends on an average including ones to whom you have never spoken or never want to speak. This would make your timeline pretty irrelevant and uninteresting to you. Why would I care if a colleague in your first job (10 yr ago) went on a trip with his…

Actually, I find that Facebook does a pretty darn good job of showing me content from the friends I actually care about (In case you want to give it hints, it has nice features like "close friends" (which will pin their posts to the top of your timeline) and unfollowing (for those people you don't want to unfriend but also don't want to see in your timeline).

Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email

#49
post #29
post #10

This is a great advert for TinyLetter, would love to know if they approached Wired to get this published and how that process went down.

That's got to be a "sponsored story". At the bottom of the page, there are links to more "Sponsored Stories - Powered by Outbrain". What is happening, and happened years ago, is that many people stopped using Facebook messaging and went back to email. It's easier to get messages via email on smartphones than to run Facebook's app.

Maybe in your social circles that's true, but everyone I know has started to rely on Messenger for almost all their non-professional communication. It's simultaneously killing both email and SMS.
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