#oneaday Day 528: Thoughts on Google+

You can’t say I don’t provide you with variety here, dear readers. Just yesterday I was talking about underage boys simulating anal sex in a school library in order to avoid doing work, and today I’m telling you about what may or may not be the next big thing in social networking: Google+, Google Plus, Googlyplus, G+ or whatever the hell you want to call it.

If you haven’t got in yet, don’t ask me for an invite at the moment as they’ve switched them off for now. Keep an eye on Twitter or Facebook, though — I’ll let you know if I have any more spare.

So, to business. What is Google+? Well, the cynical would say it’s a rebranded Facebook, and indeed we’ve already seen at least one article today bemoaning the fact that Google+ has some features in common with Facebook. I’m not sure why they felt the need to draw attention to this, as the features they show are pretty commonplace in all social networks.

But are those cynics right? Well… yes and no. Google+ does indeed resemble Facebook. You have a news feed, people can comment on posts, people can Like things (or “+1” in this case) and people can share content. The key difference between Google+ and Facebook is how it handles the way you interact with people. There are no “friend requests” on Google+, simply Circles. Circles is an evolution of Facebook’s Groups system, in which you can categorise your friends, acquaintances and family members into, well, categories. Then, when you post something on the network, you can choose which individuals or Circles it’s visible to — or even make it completely public. This is a nice idea. It allows people to tailor the content they spew out to different social groups without feeling that they need to have a “work” profile and a “professional” profile. So long as, of course, you remember to keep the stories about the hooker you threw up on to your “Drinking Buddies” Circle and don’t accidentally copy in your boss.

So the way you deal with people is different. But there’s more; the photo interface is simple, elegant and much better than Facebook’s slightly clumsy lightbox. While I think that the lightbox was a good addition to Facebook’s interface, many disagreed, and the fact it’s difficult to view the image and look at the comments at the same time unless you have the highest-resolution screen in the world is not great. Google+ takes a different approach. Not only does the service allow you to upload pictures at considerably higher resolution than the artifacted messes that Facebook’s compression creates, but the interface allows for simple inline commenting while still viewing the picture. It’s a simple case of putting the comments in a sidebar rather than underneath the picture, and it works beautifully well.

Then there’s the fact that the Photos feature on Google+ integrates with Google’s Picasa service. Anything you post on Picasa will be available on Google+, and vice-versa. You can even use Picnik to edit the photo, add text and generally arse about with it, save it back to Picasa (even overwriting the original if you don’t need it any more) and the modified version will be right there in your feed without you needing to refresh the page. Clever. Since Picnik is a third-party service, though, this isn’t integrated quite as well as it could be — an “Edit with Picnik” option when viewing a photo on Google+ would be nice, for example — but it’s early days yet. And Google+ allows simple iPhoto-style edits of colours and the like to be applied to pictures without having to leave the page, which is nice, particularly for those who either don’t know a lot about photo editing or don’t have the software to do anything fancy-pants.

This isn’t even getting started on the excellent Sparks feature, where you can subscribe to topics of your choice and be fed a constant stream of relevant articles — which can, of course, then be shared with the Circles of your choice if you see fit.

As you can tell, I’m quite enamoured with the new service and genuinely hope it takes off. My only worry is that it, like Facebook, might try and do too much. Facebook was an excellent service when it felt personal, but now it’s as much a home for businesses to engage with their clientèle as a means of communication, it’s becoming increasingly irrelevant to people who just want to talk to their friends. Google+’s simple elegance that it has at the moment doesn’t have any of that noise — and none of the associated spam from social games and endless “What Length of Pubic Hair Are You?” quizzes, for that matter. I’m sure it won’t stay that way, as social game and app developers are already pricking their ears up at the buzz surrounding the service, but I hope it stays that way for at least a little while. There’s definitely a market for a clean, clear social network with minimum fuss that offers something a little more than Twitter but a lot less than Facebook. And I think Google+ has the potential to be it if the developers handle it correctly.

#oneaday Day 517: Social Peril II: The Periling

As a social network, Facebook is arguably becoming less meaningful — that is, from the perspective of encouraging meaningful interactions with one another. This, I feel, is in part due to how cluttered it is these days — cluttered with people, cluttered with businesses, cluttered with applications. I long for the simplicity of the site as it was when I first joined it, when it didn’t even have a chat system and friend requests required you to indicate how you knew the person — kind of what LinkedIn does nowadays, only with people actually talking to each other instead of using phrases like “blueskying” and “monetization”.

A fine example comes up if you look at the Facebook Page for any social game, ever. You can pick any random example and this will happen. Look at something the producers of the game say, then look at the community comments. You might have 25% meaningful discussion (a somewhat optimistic estimate — if the game is popular you can reduce that down to less than 5%) and 75% people just going “add me”. This also happens on App Store reviews for “multiplayer” (and I use the term loosely) games.

It’s not just that, though. Posts on Pages vaguely related to Xbox/PS3 will bring the fanboys for both camps out in force, ranting and raving at each other and not even addressing the point that was made in the original wall post — burying any meaningful discussion amidst the usual spray of bile, hatred and testosterone.

Beyond that, though, a lot of the trouble lies with the changing way people use Facebook nowadays. When it was a simplistic, app-free system, people used it to communicate. People would write a status, other people who knew the original person would comment. People might post a link or a photo, people would comment. Simple, effective. Now, though, with the fact that everyone and his dog has a Share to Facebook button, this simple clarity of communication has been almost completely lost. You get the occasional aberration where a topical post can bloom into an interesting discussion between friends, but soon enough it’s lost in the never-ending cycle that is your News Feed, devaluing the interaction until it’s gone, forgotten, meaningless.

The simple answer is, of course, to adapt. Realise that Facebook is not about permanence and the long-term, it’s about the here, the now, the narcissistic. “This” is happening right now, so you share it. Here’s a photo. Here’s my new Bejeweled Blitz high score. I’m playing a game with farms in it. I took a quiz to determine which colour from the Dulux range I “am”. PAY ATTENTION TO ME.

Facebook’s new Messages system doesn’t help, either. Muddling your chats in with your actual messages is a dumb idea, because the sort of thing you write in a message is typically lengthier than what you write in a chat. And then it all gets jumbled together, so if you had a message thread with some meaningful information in it followed by a chat with said person about how much you heard they like cock due to whoever just facejacked their profile, then it becomes nigh-on impossible to find anything useful.

I’m not too concerned about the whole thing, though, to be honest. Facebook does what I need it to for now, which is to allow me to share links to my articles and work to people who might be interested or might not have another means of finding out about them, and occasionally proving to be the most reliable means of contacting people. As such, I’ll likely keep my profile there, but my usage of the platform is at a bare minimum these days, as I don’t feel like it’s really for me any more. Twitter, on the other hand, still does everything I need it to and still remains pretty much as pure and clear as it was the day I started using it. Let’s hope it stays that way.

(In other news, I had a lovely weekend away, as you may have surmised from that last post. Thank you to Andie for making it happen!)

#oneaday Day 110: Private Hysteria

Earlier today, a story broke which caused a fresh round of privacy concerns, as it was revealed that the iPhone is, in fact, recording where you’ve been and storing that information in its backup file that it transfers to your computer every time you sync it. Here’s the story from the Telegraph’s “Technolgoy Consultant” (a typo which doesn’t immediately inspire me with confidence) — judge for yourself.

Here’s my take, and I understand completely you may not feel the same way: I don’t give a damn. Why should I? What possible use could that information serve? What could people find out that I haven’t already made abundantly clear via other means of social media? That I like to drive to Southampton a lot? That I tend to prefer Costa Coffee as my coffee outlet of choice? That I have been known to drive to Tesco in the dead of night for groceries and snacks?

“But, privacy,” people bleat, without really explaining what they mean. Well, what about privacy? The minute you connect a device to the Internet, you’re putting yourself on display. The minute you use your GPS-enabled phone to find out where the hell you are and where you should be going, someone knows where you are. The minute you search “oily lesbian midgets” on Google, someone knows what a complete pervert you are. If you’re that concerned about privacy, you should reconsider your decision to carry around a constantly Internet-connected device with satellite tracking in your pocket. Or at least turn the fucking thing off.

Most of the time, though, the hysteria over privacy seems to be worry for the sake of worry. Take the app Color which came out a while back, for example. Color is, in theory, a clever way for people in the same place to collect the candid mobile photos they snap of an event — and possibly meet new people. It does this through a variety of means — GPS tracking if possible, then Wi-Fi identifications, mobile phone base stations and even recording the background noise when you take the photo and comparing it to the noise print taken when other people take photos. My first reaction on hearing how it worked was “Jesus Christ, that’s clever,” followed by “but ultimately unnecessary as most people I know with iPhones will just immediately upload their photos to Facebook anyway.” My immediate reaction was not “Shit! My iPhone is recording me without telling me! Bastards!” — which was the reaction of a few people I spoke to about it.

Why, though? Why the panic? It’s just sound. Are you a secret agent? Probably not. And if you were, it’s unlikely you’d be using social media to share photos on your iPhone. Again, what possible sinister use could the recording of background noise have? Could advertisers figure out that you like hanging out in noisy places and start providing you with targeted AdSense ads for earplugs and ear drops? Perhaps. But again: so what?

The main objection seems to be that the device is doing this without the user’s knowledge. But I even can’t see the problem with this, really. If you’re going somewhere you shouldn’t be or doing something/one you shouldn’t be, then don’t take an Internet-connected GPS-enabled device with you that — shock horror — might know where you are. And for fuck’s sake, don’t check in on Foursquare while you’re at your bit on the side’s house. It’s always your choice. If you want to be part of the digital revolution, then you have to get used to the fact that your information is out there for as long as you’re connected to the Internet.

Potential spoilarz for Don’t Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story ahead.

If you’ve played Christine Love’s Don’t Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story, you’ll know that the culmination of the plot deals with this very issue — the supposed “erosion of privacy”. The young characters in the game have grown up with this attitude to data, and as such are not surprised to know that other people are looking at their theoretically “private” information — and indeed take full advantage of this fact. I’m starting to feel like I can understand their attitude somewhat. I’m not sure if I should be pleased about that, or if I should be more worried than I am that my iPhone knows how many times I’ve been to public toilets in the last year.

Ah well. Can always turn it off. At least until The Machines take over.

#oneaday, Day 52: Desperately Seeking Perfection

The modern age brings with it many benefits. The ability to communicate with anyone in the world at any time (so long as they’re not asleep). The ability to express one’s creativity in a broader range of media than ever before. The ability to acquire pornography to cater to any and all fetishes. And, of course, more ways for people you want to avoid to track you down and “see how you are”.

The downside of all this, though, is that everyone always seems to feel the need to constantly be reinventing themselves. It’s a particular problem when it comes to popular websites such as Facebook and Twitter. Someone, somewhere decides that it’s really important that sites have particular features in place, and some poor sod of a programmer out there has to implement said features. Then when said poor sod has implemented said features, everyone whinges and moans that it’s “worse than it used to be” and “shit now” and blah blah blah and conveniently forgets that said services are, in fact, free and the owners of them are perfectly within their rights to do what they want with them, however stupid some of those moves might be.

But why does this happen? It’s seen as “necessary” to constantly update and reinvent to “stay competitive”. Why? It usually ends up doing more damage than good, because as we’ve seen on many, many occasions in the past, People Hate Change and will react in somewhat inflammatory, stroppy manners.

This isn’t to say that all change is bad, of course. Not at all. Genuine changes that benefit someone’s experience are to be applauded. New ideas that are experimented with should be treated with a “well, let’s try this” attitude rather than the outright hostility we get right now. But change for change’s sake when something already works just fine? That, right there, is the reason that we get aforementioned hostility. People just want a bit of stability, and when they feel they’ve got it and the rug is pulled out from under them, it’s sort of understandable that they kick off a bit. Not always handled in the best way (in fact, usually handled in the style of a stroppy 8-year old) but at least a little bit understandable.

Combine stroppiness with the anonymity of the Internet and you get some ugly scenes indeed. It’s a fast-paced world we live in these days, and some might argue it really doesn’t need to be quite so fast-paced. It’d be nice to be able to slow down a bit, enjoy the view and only fix things when they break.

But nah, that’s never going to happen. Everyone has to be the Very Best, to strive towards the “perfect” experience, the criteria for which seem to change on an hourly basis. And striving for perfection means having the techie types constantly at work with their hammers and nails and bits of code. A permanent state of construction. The eternal beta.

One day the Internet might be finished. But I don’t see it happening just yet.

#oneaday, Day 329: Be A Dick Mode

With the increasing mechanical complexity and narrative ambitiousness of many modern games, it’s easy to forget the purity of how gaming used to be. Just a player, a joystick, and an arbitrary number representing how “good” the player was at the game. In other words, the score.

Games with scores aren’t dead, though. Far from it. And in this age of global communication thanks to the Internet, one could argue that games with scores are more relevant than they’ve ever been.

The reason for this? The hidden option that you won’t find on any game’s menu. The mode that allows you to compete against your friends and mercilessly taunt them when you prove yourself—with numbers—to be objectively better than them.

I am talking, of course, about Be A Dick Mode.

Be A Dick Mode crops up in many game, though it’s not just any game with a score and leaderboards that it works with. Shatter on PSN and Steam, for example, is not an example of a game featuring a Be A Dick Mode, despite being in possession of leaderboards and scores which frequently extend into the hundreds of millions. Geometry Wars 2, conversely, has Be A Dick Mode in spades. After Burner Climax? No dick action there. Pac-Man Championship Edition DX? Dickishness in spades.

There are few games with a more powerful, potent Be A Dick Mode than Adult Swim’s seminal two-button masterpiece Robot Unicorn Attack, however. It was bad enough when the game was first released on Adult Swim’s website. Twitter became awash with screenshots of everyone’s latest and greatest high scores.

But now, they’ve gone and embraced Be A Dick Mode with open, err, arms.

How have they done this, you may ask. Simple: put it on Facebook.

For all Facebook’s faults, privacy concerns and stupid, stupid UI redesigns, the one thing that it is magnificent at is promoting friendly (and not-so-friendly) competition between diverse friends across the globe. The ability for Facebook applications to access your name, profile picture and activity in applications you have in common with your friends was a masterstroke, privacy concerns aside. There’s nothing better than looking at a leaderboard filled with the real names and photographs (or avatars) of your friends and seeing yourself at the top of it.

And there’s nothing worse than seeing yourself in second place, with first place tantalisingly out of reach. There’s nothing worse than knowing that the next time you log onto Twitter, there will be an @mention in your direction inviting you to check out Facebook and suggesting you might want to play some Robot Unicorn Attack instead of whatever it was you were planning on doing.

And then you play Robot Unicorn Attack. And you fail to beat your friend. And then you play it again. And some more. And then you get annoyed, so you go and play Bejeweled Blitz instead, but then you realise that someone else has pipped you to the top of the scoreboard on that too, so you go back to Robot Unicorn Attack and play it until that Erasure song has burnt itself into your memory and you can’t see a field of horses without wanting to sing and fart rainbows at them.

In short, Be A Dick Mode will ruin your life and the lives of your friends. But you know you wouldn’t have it any other way.

#oneaday, Day 322: Chinese Whispers

Goodness me. Thank you to everyone who read yesterday’s post, including the unprecedented 602 of you who showed up today. Whether or not you agreed with the sentiments therein (and whether or not you were polite about it), thanks for reading.

There have been some interesting developments in the whole thing over the last 24 hours or so. On the whole, the whole thing can actually be said to have had a positive outcome, though not quite through the means the originators of the meme intended.

In fact, the originators of the meme had nothing to do with the NSPCC, as predicted. Fellow blogger, Commodore 64 enthusiast and all-round fine, upstanding gentleman Glen McNamee did a bit of research on the issue and uncovered the fact that the whole thing had actually originated in two separate places in November as a bit of fun, with no charity links whatsoever. Read Glen’s blog post about it here.

Dave Gorman also wrote an excellent post on how this sort of thing can undermine genuine fundraising attempts with honourable intentions. Also worth a read.

The interesting thing about all this, though, is the whole “Chinese Whispers” nature of it. By looking at people who had changed their avatar/status throughout the course of the day, you could see the gradual evolution of the whole thing. To start with, it was a “campaign to end child abuse”. Then it was a “campaign by the NSPCC to end child abuse”. And by the time people like me had written posts on the topic pointing out the flaws in the whole plan, people were taking great pains to explain that as well as changing their avatar, they had, in fact, donated, too. There were also a few people who were up-front about the whole thing and said they changed their avatar purely because they thought the cartoon characters were cool. Fair play to both parties; at least you’re being honest. There was also a considerable proportion of people around Facebook who tried to convince everyone that the whole thing was a scam by a bunch of paedophiles aiming to lure children in with cartoon avatars. This last part is bollocks, by the way, in case you were worried.

So on the whole, the whole thing had a positive outcome. It provoked discussion (or rather, argument) and had the net result of shaming at least a few people into tossing a few quid the NSPCC’s way, which I’m sure they’re very grateful for, though they probably wouldn’t have chosen to go about promoting it by people yelling at one another.

The thing is, though, couldn’t the whole thing have been resolved without the need for drawn-out arguments in the middle of it? Probably. It’s ironic; Web 2.0 is full of narcissism and vanity, but is also a breeding ground for sheep mentality. Some people copy and paste things or blindly follow instructions without considering the implications. Think before you post!

Let’s leave it at that. The matter’s over and done with. Resolved. Until everyone forgets about it and it happens all over again. When that does happen, just remember that famous and rather offensive comment about arguments on the Internet and the Paralympics.

Also, don’t be a dick.

#oneaday, Day 321: Charities Have No Use For Your Avatar

Are you morally-conscious? Feel like you should be doing more to help your fellow man, but feeling a bit strapped for cash at the moment? Don’t feel like putting together some sort of fund-raising event because, after all, it is a bit cold outside and it might snow.

Never fear! Web 2.0 is here to allow you to assuage your guilt without any need for financial or time outlay! All you need to do is change your profile picture and/or status to something vaguely related to the charity that you would like to support and that counts as you having Done Your Bit when it comes to Judgement Day. Me? I like the Cats Protection League, so I shall be donning a LOLcats avatar for the day.

Grumble, moan etc. I know. And I have a sneaking suspicion I may have mentioned this before.

The above piece of sarcasm is proudly sponsored by today’s Facebook and Twitter campaign to get as many people as possible to change their avatars to their favourite cartoon characters of the 80s or 90s. This, apparently, counts as you “joining the fight against child abuse”, and has been attributed to the NSPCC by several people. Go look at the NSPCC front page right now. Do you see any mention of any campaign “not to see a human face on Facebook until Monday, December 6th”?

No. I certainly don’t. Probably because it actually has nothing to do with the NSPCC whatsoever, and probably because the NSPCC would rather you got off your arse and either did something to raise money for them or just reached into your pocket and sent them a tenner.

“Donating” your Facebook status or a tweet means nothing. And the “it’s just a bit of fun” defence is bollocks, too; there are plenty of people out there who feel like changing their avatar (a task which takes, ooh, a minute at most?) and/or copy-pasting a status is absolutely “doing their bit” and absolves them of any sense of responsibility, putting them on the same level as someone who has diligently, say, organised a sponsored run, bake sale, 48 hour Desert Bus marathon, three-week charity wankathon, whatever. It doesn’t.

This isn’t a rant saying that everyone should donate to charity. I don’t—at the moment I can’t afford to. It’s up to everyone whether they would like to support a charity that deals with an issue they feel strongly about. But “supporting” that charity means just that—supporting them and the work that they do. That means giving them some money, or some of your time, or just walking into one of their shops and buying a dodgy velvet jacket for a 70s night or something.

It doesn’t mean changing your fucking avatar. How many people out there copy-pasted that status and changed their avatar and then felt all smug and self-righteous before going on to do other things, forgetting all about the fact that they hadn’t actually donated any money to the charity in question, who probably had nothing to do with the campaign in the first place?

So don’t let me stop you changing your avatars to your favourite cartoon characters. If you do, though, at least be honest about why you’re doing so—perhaps you think Superted is awesome, in which case, say so and don’t hide behind some kind of false altruism—or actually follow up what you’re doing with a donation.

Rant over.

Actually, no it’s not.

Girls, next time you feel tempted to post something that the “men won’t get” in an attempt to “promote breast cancer awareness”, realise that we all know what you’re doing and would again much rather you just donate to a worthy cause like MacMillan, rather than supposedly “raising awareness” by being deliberately obtuse. How the fuck does that even work?

Rant over. For reals, yo. Take care of yourself. And each other.

#oneaday, Day 302: Faceache

So, apparently Facebook are launching their own email service. Here’s a writeup on it from the very lovely Keri Honea. Go read it and support her work. Then come back. I’ll wait. I’ll even stay open in this tab while you go and read it.

Okay. Here’s the thing. Facebook is so prevalent in modern online life, so splattered all over pretty much everything we do on the Internet, that setting up an email service probably makes sense for them. After all, there’s a bunch of people who already spend a considerable amount of time on the site each day, and not all of them play Farmville, even. So why not incorporate their email into it, too?

Now, granted, few of us have had the chance to test out the new features yet. And there are a few neat ideas in there, like the filtering options, which are apparently pretty cool. But the thing that will give some people—particularly the more net-savvy amongst us—pause is Facebook’s rapidly-eroding reputation for personal privacy violations.

There are all sorts of responses to this. No, you shouldn’t post things on there that you’re not happy to share with the world—just like any website. But you don’t always have complete control over everything you appear in. The tagging process, while cool in principle, is open to all sorts of abuse and has been the source of many arguments I’ve heard in the street. This is something which wouldn’t have happened five years ago.

And then there’s the controversy over exactly how “personal” your personal information remains, even with all your privacy settings jacked up to the max. Sure, you may be able to lock off your wall, photos, messages and all manner of other things from prying eyes. Everyone, that is, except for advertisers. Those supposedly “targeted” ads on Facebook that get everywhere—what will happen once email, an inherently more private form of communication, enters the picture? Will we start seeing targeted ads on Facebook based on your emails?

Yeah, GMail does this already. But at least GMail’s ads are non-obtrusive, limiting themselves to simple text links that are at least relevant to the message you’re reading at the time. But imagine, just hypothetically speaking of course, that you sign yourself up to a particular kind of site that you don’t really want to talk to other people about. It could be a dating site. It could be a porn site. It could be a forum specialising in some sort of obscure fetish which only you and a gentleman from Bulgaria frequent. But the advertisers spot this, and so the ad campaigns begin.

This isn’t a problem until you decide to show someone who’s popped over for coffee this hilarious new link you posted earlier today. You click over onto your profile and BOOM! Ads for tortoise porn. Or something.

Okay, it’s a bit of a kneejerk reaction, of course, and Facebook themselves claim that they’re not intending to be a competitor to the big boys of the webmail arena. But given the huge number of Facebook subscribers, it’s not unreasonable to assume that a goodly proportion of those people will happily opt-in without checking the terms and conditions thoroughly. Which, as many people have been finding out, is becoming more and more important to do.

I remember joining Facebook a good few years back. It was a relatively small community that was kept private to your close group of specifically-allowed friends. It was a good place to post photos and private-ish messages, and a complete contrast to the other big-hitter at the time, MySpace. Nowadays, though? Facebook is something of a running joke to long-standing users of the Internet, many of whom have either switched completely to Twitter, or only use Facebook when dealing with people who don’t understand Twitter.

Trends change over time, and it’s possible that Facebook will eventually fall from grace completely when the next Greatest Thing Ever comes along. What will happen to those petabytes of data they’re storing about everyone then? Including, now, super-private emails? You can guarantee that not everyone will remember to delete their accounts and remove any incriminating “evidence” from there.

Simple solution: scale back on your Facebook use and find alternatives. I barely use Facebook these days. I’m a Twitter man primarily, and am slowly creeping around to using GMail as my email client of choice. Can’t argue with perfection.

In short: if you email me anything @facebook.com, I probably won’t be reading it, because I’ll assume anything that comes to that address will be something to do with Farmville. I am yet to hear anyone in my group of friends say something positive about the prospect of having a Facebook email address. Why not be the first? Convince me why it’s a good idea in the comments!

Or, you know, don’t. Your choice, really.

Free bonus: What Your Email Address Says About You, from The Oatmeal

#oneaday, Day 254: Be The First Of Your Friends To Like This

I remember back in primary school we were encouraged to never use the words “nice” or “said” because they were boring. There are always better words to use, we were told, so we should be creative and extend our vocabularies.

Fast forward to today and we have much the same issue with the word “like”, a word which is rapidly losing all meaning thanks to its total domination over the social networking space. Every day on Facebook, it’s a fair bet that there is at least one entry in everyone’s news feed that says “Amber likes OMG!! Where did you get you’re shoes LOL! on ♥.” or “Bob likes I hate it when your trying 2 go 2 sleep and u cant on Likebook.” Not only do these sentences make no sense, they’re a symbol of a peculiar shift in communication styles that has taken place in recent years, particularly amongst teens and tweens.

Essentially, rather than just typing “I hate it when you’re trying to go to sleep and you can’t” and sharing that particular inanity with the world (not to mention spelling it correctly), it seems that it’s now much more the done thing to go and find a website which lists hundreds of said inanities for the sole purpose of allowing people to Like them on Facebook. There’s a kind of “distancing” involved. Anyone can click “Like” on something. As soon as you write it yourself, it becomes more personal, and harder to do.

Trouble is, the word “Like” is being used so much that it stops making sense sometimes. Or its context is completely inappropriate. Take the latest “check-in” craze, GetGlue, which is actually a pretty neat idea. Users tag the things that they, yes, like as well as the things that they dislike and can then get suggestions of other things they might like based on other users’ tastes. Fair enough. However, when a site offers you the opportunity to not only “Like” ebola but also check into it, you have to question if the correct terminology is really being used in this instance.

And where’s the opportunity to dislike things? GetGlue is unusual in that it does specifically allow people to say “I don’t like this”. There’s no opportunity to do that on Facebook. If a friend posts a status update that informs everyone that, say, their leg has fallen off and their family are dead and not only that, someone posted a bag of poo through their letterbox then the only things to do are to “Like” it, which seems rather tactless and inappropriate, or to actually leave a comment which will probably start with “I wish there was a Dislike button” and end with too many exclamation marks.

Perhaps Facebook is attempting to make us all more positive. Instead of writing “I’m so sad. My family are dead, my leg has fallen off and someone posted a bag of poo through my letterbox” which, let’s face it, no-one is going to click “Like” on, perhaps you should put a positive spin on it. “My family are dead, my leg has fallen off and someone posted a bag of poo through my letterbox. But at least I found 76p in small change in my jacket pocket, Snickers later ftw!!!”

aplenty from there on, I feel.

#oneaday, Day 114: Social Peril

My good friend Mr George Kokoris had this to say about people and social media earlier. Go read it. He has some very valid concerns, especially in light of Facebook’s increasingly cavalier attitude towards personal privacy.

I used to like Facebook. I used to like it because it wasn’t like MySpace – I remember saying this to several people. I tried MySpace and didn’t really get it. It seemed to be a friend-collecting competition with some of the most hideous web design you can possibly imagine. Facebook used to be different, though. It used to limit you to people you actually know. In fact, you used to have to say how you knew the person you were adding as a friend, much like immensely boring but practical professional networking site LinkedIn still does. As a result, it became a great way for keeping in touch with family and friends. Everyone felt confident and secure in the fact that your information was yours, and that the only people you were sharing it with were people you had specifically approved. In short, it felt like a secure means of communication. I liked it for this.

As time passed, we all know the story. Groups. Applications. Pages. A dwindling sense of security. Employers using employees photographs of drunken nights out as grounds to mistreat them. Until we reach today, when a large number of people I know are seriously considering ditching their Facebook accounts altogether in favour of alternative, more secure means of communication. Or, ironically, Twitter, one of the most open and public means of communication there is.

But at least on Twitter it never claims to be anything other than public. Your profile on Twitter consists of your avatar, your username and 140 characters of “bio”. Your conversations are public (unless you specifically choose to protect your tweets, which kind of defeats one of the main objects of the service) and anyone can chip in at any time. It’s a simple, effective means of asynchronous communication which means that people speak frankly, briefly and candidly.

This gets people in trouble. Sometimes, a lot of trouble. Paul Chambers found this out the hard way.

“Robin Hood airport is closed,” he tweeted as his trip to Ireland to meet a girl he’d been talking to on Twitter looked threatened by the UK’s complete inability to deal with a bit of snow. “You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!”

A flippant, offhand remark. But a flippant, offhand remark that recently landed him with a thousand-pound fine and a criminal record on the grounds that his message was “grossly offensive, or of indecent, obscene, or menacing character”. A flippant, offhand remark that gave him the dubious honour of being the first person ever to be convicted of a “crime” (and I use the term loosely) in connection with remarks made on a social networking site.

I mean seriously. His comments weren’t in the best taste. But by successfully prosecuting this case, it sets a dangerous precedent that has made everyone rather more conscious of what they say. In effect, it’s stifling free speech, a concept the Internet is built upon – not to mention the fact that the life of Chambers, who was training to be an accountant, has now been devastated.

See also: Gizmodo’s behaviour with regard to the new iPhone that was left in a bar. Gray Powell, the engineer who misplaced the phone, lost his job, perhaps understandably, given that he left an immensely valuable trade secret just lying around. Gizmodo reported on the new iPhone. They ripped it open and looked inside it. Perhaps not the best thing to do when Apple were already pissed off. Then they ripped open Gray Powell’s life, using information from his entire Internet presence to make him a global laughingstock. Was it not enough that the guy fucked up and lost his job because of it? Apparently not.

George points out that there are people out there who hate success and will do anything to destroy the efforts of people with ambition. It makes me sad to think that in a world where our exchange of information should be free and open that incidents like the above can happen. Just because something can be done doesn’t mean it should be done. The fact that we can communicate instantaneously with anyone in the world should be a wonderful, life-affirming thing that brings the global community closer together, builds bridges and draws us closer to a peaceful sci-fi utopia. But instead, shit like this just gets people paranoid and worried, until we’re going to find ourselves even more closed off and isolated than we were before the whole social media thing started. And that’s sad.

Is it just human nature to use things that should be positive for evil, deceitful purposes?