The Antisocial Network: Facebook Takes a Holiday

Location: Facebook...no. Not Facebook

Well, for me, Facebook is an experiment that has...failed.

I had to create an account to moderate our Writing Center's FB presence, but inexorably my little site drew family members, friends, and status-updates from me.

And I don't like it one bit. So while I can't leave Facebook, I'm not going to update my status for a while, at least until after the November election. I find that at log-in, I'm assaulted with political spam from said "friends" and family, and often it's of the Right-Wing variety that makes my eyes cross.

Or perhaps it's the revelation--hold the friggin' presses--that some dunce who friended me "likes" Wal-Mart, a place I'd as soon crush with Cat D-9 bulldozers as enter for shopping.

Facebook can be useful to maintain distance contacts with old friends, but this year I've made the vow to see friends in person more and even mend a few old fences. In person. Not with pixels or cat videos or posts about some ill-conceived article that I simply must read.

Luckily, I can log in through our Writing Center portal to FB and not even see the wall of status updates. With a click, if I so choose, I can visit my own wall. I can post updates to the Virtual Worlds Roundtable Group. I can certainly access content such as Cloud Party without directly logging in to FB .

And that way I can bloody well avoid all the spam normally seen at login.  What did Bilbo Baggins say at his final birthday party in the Shire? "I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."

Meanwhile, I'm going to be doing more of what I've increasingly done all this curmudgeonly year: reading (and learning about e-book technology for my upcoming first-year seminar that will only use e-texts), smoking my pipe, sipping a cold beer in the cool of the evening, and, as has been the case with my explorations of Second Life, not going online as often as I once did.

I never spent a great deal of time at Facebook, no more than an hour each week. But somehow that hour felt like it had been through time dilation.  Having an hour back seems sweet, indeed.

Facebook's UI and Second Life

Location: Facebook Account

The user interface is laggy at peak times, even on a fast connection. The ability to customize it is so limited that several Facebook users have recommended third-party products to improve my social networking experience.

This all sounds very familiar, doesn't it?

A couple of months in with Facebook, I can only say that I like it because it let me re-introduce myself to a few old friends with whom I've lost touch. I'm going to have a beer with one of them as soon as we can agree on a day and time.

On the other hand, I get a lot of spam from folks who know me and think I actually care about the little happenings of their daily lives. So other than the "stay in touch with old friends" business, what is the appeal?

Now that Google has launched Google+, its latest attempt at a social networking tool, one wonders how much traction it will get. Facebook enjoys the sort of reputation that Second Life had...in 2006. That can, of course, change quickly, as the former owners of MySpace discovered.

We'll see how Google does...ah, yes. Just blocked the FB apps "smiles" and "causes." I can smile in person and am involved in several environmental causes already.

Digital Story: Stop Cyberbullying

Maddie's story was the people's choice in last week's competition.

I'd not followed this story and, despite a lifetime of being jaded, am amazed at human cruelty. There's some cold comfort that the perpetrators could get prison time for doing what they did, though even there the penalty may be less if a proposed settlement of the case becomes reality.

Whatever happens, on a day when some very different justice was done in Pakistan, I'm reminded that most of the time, evil gets its comeuppance.

Digital Story: "I Facebook, Therefore I Am"

I want to congratulate my student Tyler, one of the runners-up in my digital-story competition.

As a reluctant and recent Facebooker, I found myself drawn into a narrative by a student who really enjoys her social networking with friends and, notably, family.

Small irony: for a guy who really does not bother much with social networking, I'll note this post at not only Twitter but on my Facebook Wall.

But for Tyler and many of my other students, social networking is like breathing, and her story provides eloquent testimony to the power of those connections. And now...roll the film!

Hamlet, AOL, Facebook, and SL

Location: New World Notes

It must be a slow news-day for fake worlds, or I'd have something fresh to say. Yet I was caught by the change in tone in Hamlet Au's reporting at New World Notes. He's long been viewed as an SL advocate, even after his gig reporting on the Blue Mars virtual world (now in the process of withering into something like IMVU for mobile devices). Now Hamlet is claiming that SL must change fast or fade away.

For a few years, my colleague at VWER, AJ Kelton, has been calling SL the virtual-worlds equivalent of AOL , in its older incarnation as a wall-garden network. AOL remade itself into a starting point for viewing the rest of the Internet, something Linden Lab began with some early interoperability experiments but gave up.

Hamlet is correct, in a reply to a comment, that the comparison is fair:

"The comparison isn't in the services each company provides. The comparison is with their main revenue streams -- both of them are out of date and cannot be replenished."

I've written this at NWN and I'll say it here; if Linden Lab wants a new revenue stream, they need to renew work on interoperability...and more than teleporting to or from the Hypergrid as "Ruth." LL could use its clout to devise licensing for IP so it can deliver Marketplace content to other grids and make the Linden Dollar the default intergrid currency.

That would bring in some revenue from the OpenSim universe. I've a hundred bucks worth of shopping I'd have done for my simulation in Jokaydia Grid, and I bet others would spend that much and more, all with revenues going to LL from commissions.

It's sad to see the best known virtual world miss this opportunity. I'm seeing it clearly in SL for my own use. I will soon pay my annual fee for Premium, but as for tier, I'm happy with my free 512 square-meter sandbox. Now my serious work goes on in OpenSim, where costs are far lower.  Anything I want to import from that side I can build there and import to SL for a measly 10L fee. But some content will be beyond my ability or the time I'd allot to learn more. So I'd just as soon pay some Linden Dollars to the Marketplace to have the content delivered to Jokaydia Grid.

As for other ways to bring in more money? New accounts would help, but I disagree with Hamlet's push for Facebook integration. I recently was dragged, kicking and screaming, to Facebook by my student employees, and I've set up a modest profile so I can manage one of our campus' corporate FB accounts.  I just don't see what the fuss is over, by the way. FB is clunky in its interface (no support I could find for HTML tags, for instance) and the page layout is boring.  I'm sure that templates exist, or that I'm missing some bigger point.

Facebook does a great job of connecting real people. Second Life enables immersion in something one cannot do in real life or even immersion as someone else. 

SL and FB are oil and water. So whatever direction the Lindens choose for their product to escape AOL's irrelevant role in the modern Internet, Facebook is not what I'd choose.

Update 2/22/11:

Nice reply to Hamlet's post by Ananda: c'mon, LL, this could be your goldmine!

I still hope for the day when SL is not such a walled garden, where LL is a central certification and clearinghouse for avatars that can roam (with their stuff!) from place to place in the 3D version of the Web. Perhaps getting a "certified hypergrid identity" or "certified hypergrid host" could provide a new revenue source? LL's biggest asset is not so much the land, but the community network effect and, frankly, the built-up inventories. If LL can find a way to certify alternate land hosts as trustworthy (i.e. you can trust them to host content and assets with privacy and not immediately turn around and resell them) and to provide a content or avatar registry service, so copybot items are automatically flagged, and avatars are free to use duly purchased and licensed content on other grids, something like that might be a better way to go than to depend on continuing to host land in what seems like the most inefficient, inflexible manner possible.