#oneaday Day 936: Biggest != Best

No, I’m not talking about penises.

Let’s talk about Facebook.

Facebook is massive. Facebook has taken over most people’s daily existence on the Web to such a degree that there are plenty of people out there who genuinely believe that it is the Web. Like, all of it.

It’s not. But then you probably knew that already.

But the fact stands that it is a massive global phenomenon, and something that has happily grown and evolved over time from its humble beginnings up to the multi-bajillion dollar business it is today.

Thing is, though, as it’s grown, it’s sort of lost sight of what it’s for.

“Facebook is a social tool that connects you with people around you,” the login screen used to say. When adding a friend, you used to have to indicate how you knew them, and the recipient of that friend request had to verify your story. It was actually quite a good idea that got around the MySpace “friend collecting” issue, whereby people would just add and add and add each other and then not talk to any of their 40,000 friends. Facebook’s systems ensured that you 1) were actually friends with the people you marked as friends and 2) didn’t fall into the “popularity contest” trap.

Whizz forward to today, and the Facebook of 2012 is a very different place. Now we get people promising “2,000+ friend requests” if you Like one of their pictures. I don’t want two thousand friends. I want my online friends to reflect people I actually know, and occasionally give me the opportunity to meet someone new who is relevant to my interests and/or knows people that I know. Give me two thousand newcomers from all over the world, all of whom are vying for my attention simply to make some arbitrary number higher than everyone else, and you sort of lose that.

Part of the reason for this change is the different in what Facebook thinks we should use it for these days. I first joined the site quite a while after many of my friends had — at the time, I assumed it was going to be one of those passing fads like MySpace, and would quickly disappear into obscurity. But I found its value while on a trip to the States to visit my brother — while abroad, I could share the photographs I’d taken and easily stay in touch with my friends as a large group rather than emailing them individually. It was nice.

Over time, things started to shift. Facebook’s big change to something a bit closer to its current layout upset a lot of people, and the addition of “applications” marked the beginning of how the social network looks now. At the time, I was of the attitude that the people complaining about it were bleating on about nothing, but in retrospect they may have had a point. As everyone’s news feed started filling up with FarmVille brag posts, the signal to noise ratio started getting worse.

Then came the brands. Facebook undoubtedly thought they were doing everyone a favour when they opened up the previously “personal” social network to companies and businesses who wanted to grow their social presence. And in some cases, it worked well, with companies able to engage with their customers and post important information as and when needed.

Unfortunately, this too lost the plot somewhere. Now, pretty much every brand page uses the same obnoxious “engagement strategies” to keep people commenting, talking and Liking — the worst of which by far is the fucking awful “fill in the blank” status update that invites commenters to give their own meaningless opinion on something utterly asinine and irrelevant to the company’s product. (“My favorite color is ____________!” proclaimed the Facebook Page for The Sims 3 on one memorable occasion. Over four thousand people replied.)

You see, people seem to absolutely love posting things that have absolutely no value. People love thinking their opinion is important, that they are being listened to, that the things they say are somehow valuable to someone.

The things you say are valuable to someone. The people they are important to are called your family and friends. Not the PR representative for The Sims 3. They don’t care what your favourite colour is. They just want you to keep giving them page impressions and comments and Likes.

Likes. Fuck Likes. The Like button is Facebook’s most enduring legacy, and one of the biggest blows to actual communication in today’s connected world. Why comment any more when you can just click “Like”? It means nothing, particularly when it’s connected to a sentence for which the verb “like” is completely inappropriate. (“My grandad died. So sad right now.” “Insensitive Twat likes this.”) It’s a meaningless metric designed to measure how many people have seen something you have posted and want to interact with it, but are slightly too lazy to actually write anything.

The diminishing sense of Facebook’s usefulness for actual communication is perhaps best exemplified by the current way someone’s profile looks. Known as “Timeline”, the theory behind it is that it is an easy to navigate history charting everything interesting that has happened in someone’s life.

It’s a sound plan. Unfortunately its implementation is just terrible.

The problem is that there’s no consistency in how posts show up, and seemingly no understanding of how people read content. Leaving aside the fact that one’s profile cover image and fairly pointless basic information takes up over 500 lines — or nearly half of a 1920×1080 display — there’s seemingly no rhyme or reason as to what gets posted at the “top” of one’s profile.

The conventions established by blogs and earlier social networks dictate that the most recent things go at the top, so anyone checking in on someone’s page doesn’t have to scroll around or search to find something new. Yet with all the sources from which Facebook can pull information these days — games, external sites, apps, Spotify, Netflix — there is no consistency in what goes where. For example, at the time of writing, this is what the top of my Timeline looks like:

What a mess, and very little of it is stuff that I 1) actively shared and 2) feel people really need to know. I deliberately shared the RunKeeper stuff because I like sharing my fitness achievements because it helps keep me honest, but I have no need to show people who eight of my friends are, nor do people need to know that I achieved Bronze Level 2 in Five-O Poker, a game I reviewed earlier in the week and specifically told not to share shit on my timeline. At the other end of the spectrum, pages that I have “Liked” elsewhere on the Internet — and thus wanted to share with others, perhaps because I wrote them or just found them interesting — have been unhelpfully collected into a single box that shows just four of them. This behaviour changes seemingly daily, with Liked pages sometimes showing up as individual posts on one’s Timeline (useful) and sometimes being collected into that box (not useful). At the time of writing, Facebook appears to have decided that “not useful” is the way to go on this one.

Let’s scroll down a few “page heights” and see what else we have:

The left column? Sort of all right. The right column, though?

SO MUCH IRRELEVANT CRAP.

Including posts from games that I 1) didn’t press a “Share” button in once and 2) have since removed from my Facebook account.

There. After five screen-heights worth of scrolling, I finally get to one thing that I actually want to share with people — my recent WordPress posts, aka a feed from this blog to my Facebook Timeline. Again, though, like the Likes, they have been collected together into a box that displays very little relevant information and, in this case, is put in a stupid, stupid place. Why stupid? Because the most recent post in that little WordPress.com box came considerably after the RunKeeper post at the top of my Timeline — and certainly considerably after all the spammy crap those games have plastered all over that infuriatingly useless right column.

“Facebook is a social tool that connects you with people around you” my arse. “Facebook is a digital scrapbook maintained by a five-year old with ADHD,” more like.

I’ll see you on Twitter.

#oneaday Day 70: Waste Not

[The comics for the next few days are a little disjointed as I’m going away for the weekend. Fans of Rogue, if there are any, will be pleased to see he has his own utterly pointless mini-series.]

I’m sitting in my “study” (for want of a better word—it’s the room I have with my desk and computer in) and despite staring at the screen enjoying the wonders of the electronic, digital age (such as this delightful blog) I am literally surrounded by pieces of paper. I don’t dare throw any of these pieces of paper away because one day, one of them might be important for something I can’t possibly predict. I have discovered this to my cost a number of times in the past.

This is annoying, though. I have one of those expandy box file things that has burst its seams because of the amount of shitty useless paperwork crammed inside it. Some of this paperwork is from houses I haven’t lived in for five years. Some is from, I don’t know, last week? All of it is completely useless, until you really need it, when it becomes the most important thing in the world and consequently is nowhere to be found even though you know you put it in that section of the file and can remember looking at it and thinking “I know this will be important some day“.

Conversely, I know that if I have all these shitty annoying stupid bits of paper everywhere and close to hand that I will never ever need them ever again. And then I will throw them out to tidy up. And then I’ll suddenly need them again.

Why? Why do we surround ourselves with such crap? The world is full of so many wonders and yet it seems that in order to just survive and go about our daily business we have to sign this, keep this safe, keep this secret, remember this handy 300-digit number that also includes letters just to be awkward, keep every single piece of paper that includes numbers and currency symbols just in case you need to show people that you understand what money is or something, and read 15-page long letters that make no sense but basically amount to saying “if you break something or have it nicked, you can have some money but only if we feel like it and by GOD we will investigate thoroughly for the best part of fifteen years before we even think of paying out”.

And relax.

I should probably add at this point that I’ve never had to claim through an insurance company so haven’t encountered the above situation before, but I did do some temping for a firm of “loss adjusters”—a profession I didn’t know existed before I did that job briefly—and was alarmed to discover some claims had indeed been going on for a healthy number of years. I was also shocked to see quite how many pointless companies exist in the world. In one instance, an insurance company contacted the loss adjusters who contacted some surveyors (odd, since the loss adjusters had their own in-house surveyors, but never mind) who contacted some builders who contacted some architects who contacted some draftsmen… and then they all contacted each other back in the other direction again. This isn’t an exaggeration for comic effect, there legitimately were that many people involved. No wonder we’re drowning in fucking paperwork.

Please consider the environment before you print this blog post. And please consider the environment before you post me a metric shit-ton of paper I will never read.

#oneaday, Day 247: This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

Twitter broke earlier today. This in itself is nothing unusual, as the existence of the term “failwhale” will attest. But this time it was partly a result of some new changes that the service made, particularly with regard to posting links.

Twitter recently launched its own link-shortening service, called “t.co”. This is one of the shortest link-shorteners out there, and when characters are a precious commodity as they are on Twitter, that’s really important.

Unfortunately, some clever young person discovered that by using t.co it was, in fact, possible to embed HTML code and, worse, JavaScript in these links. It was also possible to format tweets, change their colour and black them out.

Said exploiter quickly discovered that by blacking out a tweet and adding a “mouseover” JavaScript event to automatically retweet the exploit, post giant text on the screen or in some cases, redirect to websites you wouldn’t want anyone to catch you on ever whenever a user moved their cursor over the blocked text, they could cause absolute chaos. Thankfully, most people got wise to the exploit pretty quickly and retreated to the safety of Twitter client apps, as it only affected users on the website itself. Of course, there were a few people who started screaming “OMG VIRUS!!!” and panicking, but most of them were put in their place pretty quickly with a simple, calm explanation (hah, right) that an exploit and a virus are two very different things. And Twitter stepped in to plug the security hole reasonably quickly, too. So the whole thing was over within a matter of hours.

The main point of this, though, is that it wouldn’t have happened at all without the new functionality that Twitter was offering. It seems that every single time something new and potentially awesome appears, there is at least one person out there who wants… no, seemingly needs to break it. Why? Because they can.

This explains the existence of “glitchers”, people who deliberately play video games in order to break them. It explains the existence of software pirates, who are out to break copy protection and DRM on software. It explains the existence of hackers, people who write viruses and spammers. And, indirectly, it’s the reason why every single time you turn on Windows you have fifteen bajillion updates to install.

This is all getting a bit tiresome now. It’s such a shame that things that are new must seemingly go through the “initiation” of being broken by some idiot sitting in his pants in his basement, probably masturbating furiously as he watches the chaos unfold before his eyes. Because you just know it’s a “he”, too. (I’m all for equality, but when it comes to stupid, pointless and inconvenient things to do with computers, it’s always a guy.)

Thankfully, the world seems adequately set up to deal with such dribbling idiots these days. We have spam filters, virus scanners, scripts to clean out malicious code from websites. Companies have teams to fix broken functionality like we’ve seen here. And of course, it’s easy to say that things should be tested more thoroughly before release. But there’s no way you can predict every single possible stupid thing that some member of the human race will try and do. If we could, no-one would ever go outside and the world and everything in it would be covered in sponge just in case we fell over and hurt ourselves and/or tried to kill someone else with something.

So if you know anyone who’s ever come up with one of these exploits, or anyone who’s ever ruined a Nice Thing for anyone else, do the world a favour and go and punch them really, really hard in the testicles.

#oneaday, Day 176: Real-World Spam

A while back, when I was feeling rather more positive and “I can do anything!” I was hoping to support myself through a combination of freelance writing, music teaching and computer tuition. As such, I set up some websites, I took out some adverts with Yell, Thomson and the like and waited for the customers to come rolling in.

No-one did. I got one pupil for some GCSE tuition and a couple of timewasters on the music front, and nothing at all on the computer tuition front.

Actually, that’s not quite true. I have got one thing out it all. MASSES AND MASSES OF FUCKING HARASSMENT FROM TWATS.

I had no idea that advertising one’s services on Yell would lead to such a bombardment of crap from people who obviously haven’t read your advert. Every single day, I get a ton of identical bullshit through my letterbox, all informing me that “recruiting a new salesman is difficult” and that I should clearly defer to their superior judgement. The bizarre thing is that all these “salesman finding specialists”, or whatever the hell they are, seem to have written the exact same letter. And none of them have considered the fact that someone offering “IT tuition” probably doesn’t need a salesman, because he probably isn’t selling anything.

It didn’t stop there, either. The phone calls! Jesus Christ, the phone calls. One woman from Yell phoned me regularly. The first time, I woke up to her phone call on the sofa the morning after my wife and I had split. Not recognising the number, not thinking particularly straight and hoping it might be something job-related, I answered it. I was immediately embroiled in one of those sales pitches that it’s impossible to escape from, or get a word in edgeways. I placated her with a promise that I’d “think about it”. Foolish. I should have just said “no”. Because “I’ll think about it” translated to “Please phone me! A lot!”. Funny thing about a five-year relationship coming to a sudden and unexpected end; you don’t think particularly straight immediately after it has happened. (Or months afterward, as it happens. At least if you’re me.)

Then there was “Nathan”. Nathan represented some local school who was nowhere near my potential “catchment area” for music pupils. He wanted me to pay him £200 for two years’ exposure in the school’s brochure. Said exposure would take the form of a tiny little advert that was, as I say, only visible to a select group of people who were nowhere near me. But Nathan wouldn’t take no for an answer. Nor would he give up after two weeks of me not answering the phone at all. I dialed “1571” to check my messages one day, and there were ten new ones, all from Nathan, all starting in the exact same way. Get the hint.

In some ways, the tenacity of these people is admirable. But it’s also extremely irritating. You can be a good marketer without pissing people off. These people failed miserably.

So the moral of this story is twofold. 1) Don’t advertise anything with “IT” in its title unless you want to be bombarded with mail from pricks who don’t read your ads. 2) Say “no” when you mean “no”.

#oneaday, Day 130: Spam Fiction: The Revenge

A while ago, I did this, against the express wishes of one Mr George Kokoris. Tonight I return to the challenge with a twist… I write the in-between bits. I’m going to post four pieces of that bizarre spam you sometimes get that includes extracts of prose. And then I’m going to attempt to link the four of them within the space of approximately one thousand words. With no real care or attention – spur of the moment, first-thing-that-comes-into-the-head stuff. Not quite freewriting. But not quite proper writing, either. An exercise in 1) imagination and 2) deciphering nonsense.

This is a dangerous challenge, I know, that will likely delve into the depths of the nonsensical and surreal. But I have faith that I will emerge from the other side, unscathed and smelling only slightly of processed meat. Here goes.

The original spam extracts will be marked in bold and will be cleaned up slightly so they’re, you know, readable. The subject headers of the original messages are “Insatiable redhead. gets her ebaver licked in a very intense way.” [sic], “Appelaing redhead atking on a ggiant one .” [sic-er] and “Can we exchange photos before we meet?” and its companion “Can we exchange photos before we meet?”. Just in case you were, you know, curious.

Let us begin.

I learned to play on the piano a little. Miss Gray – she plays for gathering twilight. Her face looked thin and wistful, full of youth’s ideals and enthusiasm, and a heart full of love.

“That’s so! I can be glad of that, can’t I?” she cried.

“Well, there will be no difficulty of that kind any longer, Pollyanna, you–“

“Thomas, that will do for this morning. I think. Very good. In the fall you will enter school here, of course.”

Well, short as had been Nancy’s stay at the house, the two were with; and the other was so bad it fell to pieces just as soon as my mother entered the room. Miss Pollyanna Gray and I were left staring at each other, slightly embarrassed at our previous outburst which thankfully, had not been overheard. My eyes met hers for a moment, and I knew that our time together was at an end, for now at least.

“Come, Thomas,” said my mother, taking my hand firmly, much as she would have done when I was but an infant. “It is time for you to meet the gentlemen and ladies of society. Doctor Stone is planning a discussion on Wagner. You would do well to listen to his words, as a student of the arts.”

I didn’t doubt the fact that it would be interesting, because she said it; but in a man it would have aroused his impatience. Searching analysis of the art of Wagner?

Upright, picking the leg of a chicken with a dignified gesture, Arthur with household matters and, while Margaret put the tea things away, she threshed out since he acquired the beginnings of civilization and he. There were many older ones also in bindings of calf and pigskin, treasure because she said it; but in a man it would have aroused his impatience.

Black paper, and Haddo insisted on posing for him. A little crowd stood in front of them to receive Arthur’s order. She was a hard-visaged woman, and not at all what I expected from my mother’s past descriptions of Doctor Stone. For starters, I had assumed Doctor Stone to be a man. Apparently my mother had also, from her frequent references to “him”, not to mention the name of Arthur, a traditionally masculine nomenclature.

“Pleased to meet you, Doctor Stone,” I said, proffering my hand to Arthur.

“Ah! You must be Thomas,” she said. “I am Doctor Arthur Stone, Professor of the Fine Arts at this Academy,”

“Pleased to meet you, Doctor Stone,” I said again, not quite sure what to say to this half-man, half-woman figure before me.

“So, Thomas,” said Haddo, relaxing her pose for a moment to turn and face me. She, too, was a striking woman, somewhat intimidating to behold. “Tell us what you know of Wagner. Arthur here was just about to begin her lecture.”

“I know little of Wagner,” I replied, shaking off my mothers hand that was still firmly clamped around my wrist. “But I believe that I am able to learn, I hope.”

Haddo eyed me suspiciously, then turned to Arthur, whose expression had become frosty.

“I advise you to show me somewhat more zeal.The situation is quite obvious.”

Probably we no more than looked at each other.

“In three days will be the coronation.”

I sensed the atmosphere in the room had changed. I looked at my mother, whose eyes had suddenly sprung tears in their corners.

“What coronation?” I implored the assembled guests. I had heard no such news of any coronation, and as far as I knew, the King still sat firmly on his throne, as resolute a ruler as he had ever been.

“The coronation,” said Arthur in a low voice, slowly removing one of her silk gloves. “The coronation will proceed as planned.”

“I don’t understand!” I cried. I turned to my mother again, who was weeping openly by now. “I don’t understand, Mother!”

“Then perhaps this will clarify matters,” said Arthur, removing what I could now see to be an elaborate, feminine hairpiece. Underneath he was a balding gentleman who just happened to be dressed in an expensive-looking lady’s frock. He reached down into the plunging cleavage of the dress and pulled out a crown, made of material as black as night. It seemed to suck all trace of joy from the room around it.

I heard the doors of the room crash open behind me, and Pollyanna’s voice pierced the tension in the room like a knife.

“Uncle! No!” she cried, throwing herself against him and tackling him to the floor.

“Miss Pollyanna Gray,” growled Arthur, “this is not your business.”

“I beg to differ,” she murmured, picking up the blackened crown, which seemed to be twisted with hate. She span around quickly and when she faced him again I knew she was holding a different object. It was almost imperceptible, but the look of concentration on her face was absolute. I could tell that whatever she was doing was taking every ounce of her mental and physical strength to maintain.

But his eyes and mind were not fooled.

Finally, she realized that his strength was too much for her.

“They destroy you and cripple me. Murgen’s dreadful sentries allowed him to pass unchallenged.”

To be continued…

[No, I have no idea what any of that meant either. I hope I made your day a little more surreal. I’ve certainly confused myself.]