I've gotten some mileage out of Facebook. I caught up with a few old friends, whom I otherwise would've never heard from. That's about it. I actually appreciate that a lot, but the rest of Facebook can really just go to Hell.
First off, there's the fact that it doesn't seem to want to play well with others. I can't use my OpenID, I can't get an RSS feed of anything, and I can't really shut off most of the obnoxious "your friend just took a quiz!" alerts.
I can't convince non-technically-minded people that no, Facebook is not email. I keep getting email from Facebook telling me I have a message from someone else who has my email address. Has Facebook become "The Internet" to some people? Ugh.
It could be worse, though. I could just be getting "pokes." Oh, or "super-pokes." This is a new kind of electronic communication whereby a friend whom you haven't heard from in years sends you an email, but without any content. Instead you get a little message bar saying, "Long Lost Friend has sent you a Beer. Click here to send one back!" Dude, you know what? Why don't you send me an email and I will buy you a real beer and we can eat some tacos. This "poke" stuff is rubbish.
Today and a few weeks ago, I logged in and saw a quiz that a friend wanted me to take. Normally I ignore these, but these two were both sort of interesting and related to my friendship with this person. Having gone throught the quiz, I was then asked to "pick 20 friends to send this to." There was a "Skip" button, but clicking it brought up the error, "You must pick 20 friends." Great.
I am not a huge fan of using Google for all my data needs, but I do have hopes for the Social Graph API as a long overdue means to show people that friendship network data need not live in these walled city ghettos like Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, or, God save us, Xanga.
Re:Facebooks is ads
pudge on 2008-02-13T17:58:16
Poke!
