Better than Myspace: No Emo Bands inviting you all the time.
Better than facebook: Simpler, more useful and not full of shit applications and useless groups which people join to let others know their own political or social beliefs.
Most of this is directed towards facebook as i quit having a personal myspace account a long time ago.
I have been getting pretty annoyed with facebook since its popularity boost recently. At first i didn't want to join it, but when i did it was simple easy, very private and allowed me to keep in contact with each of my friends in a simplistic way.
But when it becomes popular it seeks a new audience and a new technique of making itself go shit. It added the application ability, a good idea in theory but there are only like 2 or 3 at most good applications on there. Most of the others are quiz programs or things about xmas or something shit like that. For reference, the two applications i found useful was the twitter plugin and the blog plugin where i can join my blogs onto facebook.
But the one thing that annoyed me most was the kind of myspace attitude to things. The attempt to prove how popular by adding random people so that you get a high number of friends.
I do not aim to achieve that, i recently joined facebook again in an attempt to actually join with people who are actually going to be using the communication ability of it. But most people have very little to say and most conversation becomes exhausted easily. So the main scheme of communicating now is down and people fail to talk on it. So what do i discover?
Twitter: All hail it!
For twitter is the simplest tool ever. It's basis is that people answer the question "What are you doing?" in 140 characters or less. People have no direct obligation to talk to anyone now but they just answer that question. There are no invites to "Who secretly loves you" application. There are no people being the fan of sliced bread or groups about how they hate the smoking bill.
Now when i joined twitter and up until this morning i thought that twitter was brilliant but it lacked photo support. That's the one thing that facebook did well was the photo system. It was complete and allowed people to easily find photos on each other. Well i recently came across twitpic and found that it now has that.
And for another thing instead of friends you have people you follow and people who you follow. And thus the whole idea of being friends is removed in a way. Instead of someone adding you to never really talk to you after the first initial addition, and mostly to get the friend count up you have people who will follow you. Which is great! Someone sees your feed but you do not see theirs until you follow them. Meaning that your not forced to see how people who add you are doing even though you don't honestly care. You add those who want to follow and everyone else can act at their own discretion and you can even block them.
So now we have a select friend system that in some way counts the whole adding friends for numbers, a photo system that's not perfect but pretty well implemented and a simple website what else is there?
Well we also have numerous applications unto which you can add to where-ever and update your stuff. I have twitterfox for firefox, which sits nicely in the bottom corner and lets me know when someone posts something new. This is what i use to follow my podcast twitter account. The other application is Spaz unto which i use my personal account. This is a nice little program that's nice to use very simple and keeps itself up to date. It doesn't drain a lot of power and sits quietly on your start bar.
Spaz uses less energy than iTunes, firefox, steam, msn and its even close to mysql database. Therefore its cheaper to run spaz on twitter than facebook on firefox!What else? Well you can text twitter and it will update your twitter feed (costs depend on your phone providers attitude towards international texts for non-US users), and the twitpic website can be logged into using your twitter details and allows you to email photos to them from your phone to which they upload.
And so thus all these points allow me to truly consider the realities of facebook, which from what i heard is planning to sell your personal data to advertising companies and such. Read here.
This is all well and good but what about points FOR facebook/myspace?
Well this post is mostly anti-them but i wouldn't consider myself logical if i didn't argue the alternate point of view. Yes perhaps facebook is a nice little system which allows people to keep in contact with each other when used properly. It has its nice little things which people like and I'm not arguing with that, people can do what they want and enjoy what they want. The main point of this is really to show how facebook and myspace sold out.
Another point would be that twitter does not making communication easier really, if you don't want to chat someone it doesn't matter what social networker your on, they still won't say anything.
The groups, applications and stuff add extra things for people to do via the website, allowing them to spend more hours on it rather than doing any homework or dissertations that are due. People can get involved in things... oh and the event thing is quite clever to.
Things I've used in the past year are ticked, others are crossed. If twitter had something similar it'd be perfect.And the counter-argument to those points?
Well counter-arguments include the fact that perhaps facebook does have a lot more to it than twitter but with twitter you can log on and see whats been happening and then do something else. Something constructive, i know of people who waste hours reading peoples twitter posts (Stephen fry may be one of them) but come on, there's even a group for wasting time on facebook. Twitter is simpler, less in your face, and much more friendly than the cold dry and mostly boring style of facebook.
Twitter may also be nothing more than one of those social networking websites that plague the internet, but it does it so brilliantly and differently.
Most of this is about twitter and facebook... what about myspace?
I have been mostly addressing facebook. I do have a myspace account for my website, SupaComix but i hardly log in any more mainly because:
A: I have lost the log-in details
B: It's become so commercial and over the top with emos and their shite bands that that's all its really good for. Finding some amateur bands and listening to their music, but you don't need to be a member to do it. So its pretty much pointless unless you consider yourself deep and meaningful...
Plus most of myspace is just a direct rip-off of facebook anyway.
Why should i care?
Logically your caring is based upon your own reaction. I see way to many people going on about facebook and stuff and how they look down on your if you don't have facebook. Like your an outsider, and it's like that's not needed. Twitter is superior, it fills my demands more accurately and I'm not plagued by other peoples attempts to draw attention to themselves. It's time that people started making points against them and for gods sake if you are one of those people join twitter and add me, because your gonna be one of those awesome people to twitter with.
So what now?
I for see the removal of my facebook account at the end of the week. This time i am not returning to it. If you want to add me to your twitter feed please follow the link on the right of the page.
Also there is an application, as i mentioned above which allows your twitter feed to update your facebook feed... so if you wanna keep em both then try searching for that.
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