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Doctorow: How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook

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Re: Doctorow: How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook

#2
This is the best anti-social-networking article I've read yet. Choice quote:

You'd think that Facebook would be the perfect tool for handling all this. It's not. For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there's a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I'd cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, "Am I your friend?" yes or no, this instant, please.

Re: Doctorow: How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook

#3
I've never understood how Facebook got to be so big in the first place with their policy of requiring to sign up to do anything. I've never needed to see a Facebook page that badly that I'd want to spend the time signing up for yet another website that I never use. (And why is Facebook banned from BugMeNot?)

Facebook is the new AOL... hadn't thought of it that way, but it does seem like an appropriate analogy.

Re: Doctorow: How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook

#4
post #2

This is the best anti-social-networking article I've read yet. Choice quote: You'd think that Facebook would be the perfect tool for handling all this. It's not. For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there's a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-wo…

I admit I have a lot of pending friends' requests... I was hoping they were going to expire but it looks like Facebook haven't implemented this very useful feature.

Re: Doctorow: How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook

#5
post #2

This is the best anti-social-networking article I've read yet. Choice quote: You'd think that Facebook would be the perfect tool for handling all this. It's not. For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there's a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-wo…

May be you should just not friend them? It's as easy as friending them.

Re: Doctorow: How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook

#7

This Facebook backlash trend is interesting.

i think the trend is only with the tech-crowd, we'll see if this spreads to non-techy people, but i think the myspace crowd enjoys where facebook is at right now - self expression, maximum friend count etc...

you can get value out of facebook, just add the friends who are truly in your inner-circle, or those that were and moved away.

you can also prevent yourself from being searched for, so when someone else says i can't find you on facebook, you can say a) oh, i'm not on facebook, or b) oh i have the privacy settings on, i'll send an invite to you

Re: Doctorow: How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook

#8
post #7

This Facebook backlash trend is interesting.

i think the trend is only with the tech-crowd, we'll see if this spreads to non-techy people, but i think the myspace crowd enjoys where facebook is at right now - self expression, maximum friend count etc... you can get value out of facebook, just add the friends who are truly in your inner-circle, or those that were and moved away. you can also prevent yourself from being searched for, so when someone else says i c…

Hmm... Facebook is full of techie crowd. All those college people are quite competent when it comes to using the Web. All you need is one: "X purchased [porn dvd] from Y" in your feed and all your 'friends' are gonna laugh at you and ridicule you and it will leave you with sour feeling in your mouth. Or they'll criticize your tastes and judge you by the crap you buy.

Exodus from FB has already begun.

Re: Doctorow: How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook

#9
post #2

This is the best anti-social-networking article I've read yet. Choice quote: You'd think that Facebook would be the perfect tool for handling all this. It's not. For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there's a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-wo…

Simple solution: change your privacy settings.

Re: Doctorow: How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook

#10
It's funny how quickly moods vary between "facebook is unstoppable" to "facebook is in a nosedive for disaster"... They seem to be good at listening to users and fixing mistakes, but they don't seem to have much foresight in their strategies -

Integrating my Amazon purchases onto my feed? Kind of neat, but I already do that with anything I want to share via a bookshare application...

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