social media

Celebrity Presence And The Failed Die-Out

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Awhile ago a variety of celebrities declared themselves dead, not Tweeting and such until enough donations to fight AIDS came in.  Despite this being for a good cause, it was a failure at the time as noted.  The site now appears to have donations up to par, but it sort of looks like  . . . well judge for yourself (http://buylife.org/).

So why didn't this death-on-social-media have an immediate influx of donations?  I think part of it was the odd, kind of self-centered method of raising funds and the tastelessness of it.  The other part was that the celebrities stopped being celebrities.

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Is There An App For You?

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You want to stay in touch with someone?  You can use Facebook.  Or Twitter.  Or email.  Or Plaxo.  Or LinkedIn.  Or . . . well you get the idea.

Sure there's applications like Flipboard and RSS feeds to try and tie things together.  There's plenty of ways to try and arrange your time to keep up on social media.  But it seems keeping track of people is awful complicated in this age of technology to make things simpler.

Now for people who want to be known, or who have a lot to say in various media, or who have people who follow them intimately (from friends do just family), this is even more complicated.  Some people, for a million or just ten people want to keep in touch.

So I've wondered, in an age where there's many ways to turn simple feeds and data into Apps for Smartphones, iPads etc., are some people going to basically create "Me Apps"? 

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Why FaceBook and Company Aren’t Really Web Pages

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Facebook has been in the news with it's recent announcements, changes, and of course, new features.  Over and over again I hear the same arguments about Facebook – lack of privacy, settings too obscure or complex, everything changes so much.  Facebook is this giant morphing ball of "stuff" that everyone likes and no one is happy with.

I'd like to focus on the complexity issues with Facebook, the arguments that its too hard to change settings and that when you dig into it, Facebook can actually be quite complex.

The complexity isn't a surprise to me, but I think it surprises many people.  The reason it surprises them is that they're treating Facebook like a web page or web tool, like a Google search or a Twitter feed.  Facebook is not a simple web page/tool.

Facebook is a web-delivered application (bordering in some cases on being an operating system as well).

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