Posts Tagged ‘facebook’

While I’m busy with my new venture, I’m also working on a project to add a further arm to the prolific Worfolk Online empire, in the form of Worfolk Games. It’s going to be publishing it’s first game in the next few months with a focus on the social gaming (Facebook) arena. Stayed tuned.

This month at the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire, Simon Duncan presented a talk on social media – what it is and whether it is a good thing or not. Of course, the answer is yes.

Social media brings us huge benefits, at relatively little cost – and indeed almost no monetary cost, as sites like Facebook are all free. Unfortunately, it tends to take a bad wrap because of people not really thinking their arguments through. You can blame the media a little for this, but I don’t think they shoulder that much responsibility.

Take cyber bullying for example. It’s ace. Kids are going to bully other kids anyway, that is just part of society, at least at the moment. But with cyber bullying – you have a full paper trail of everything that has gone on! If social media has made the bullying situation worse for anyone, it’s the bullies! You can now just take your text messages straight to the school, or even the police. None of this complicated business of having to prove what they said with witnesses.

According to Simon, studies have also shown that using social media actually increases real world interaction. That’s certainly true of me – the main reason I use Facebook is to organise real world events with my friends. As well as plenty of other uses of course, such as keeping in touch with friends I otherwise couldn’t keep in touch with affectively because they’re in a different timezone in a different part of the world.

Other fears include issues like privacy and targetted advertising. Perhaps this has been a problem in the past, but with increased awareness of the situation, companies are now putting in place the tools to effectively manage your privacy and you can quickly and instantly lock down your profile, most of which is restricted to approved friends only anyway. This is arguably far more secure than the records the government has for example, which will probably end up on a USB stick left on a public train.

Targeting advertising is actually a massive benefit to us – because more effective advertising means less advertising. If companies can reach their target audience more effectively, they need to reach less people, so they spend less on blanket advertising. This is evident from the reduction of advertising – remember all the big flashing banners and pop-ups that plagued the internet – most of those have now given way to these small text links on Google and Facebook, and the web is much the better for it.

I always knew that one day I would be able to prove it! While trawling through my old websites, I came across a website that is essentially FaceMash. Now, where do I write off to, to get my money?

Since joining Facebook in 2006 (that’s over five years ago now – I genuinely don’t think I remember a time before Facebook), I’ve always had a policy of not accepting family members as friends.

There is good reason for this. Thanks to the innovative tagging features Facebook keeps introducing, your Facebook profile is full of photos, notes and status updates about just how drunk you where when you threw up in what you thought was a bathroom but later turned out to be something completely different. Nobody wants their family to see that side of their lives.

However, in the spirit of being more open, I’ve decided to rescind this policy. For better or for worse – I guess we’ll find out soon!

For the time being I have decided to host the foundation’s blog within my own personal blog, at least until it merits its own blog. As such this is the first of what will hopefully be many posts about the foundation!

For those who are interested you can also keep up to date with the activities of the foundation on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.

Having an affair with someone who is engaged is one thing but would you then post on their wall knowing full well their other half is on Facebook? Am I just getting old? Is this the socially acceptable thing to do these days?

According to one of SitePoint’s year reviews, 2008 was the year of Twitter and 2008 having come and gone I decided it was probably overdue that I gave it a go. I have never been an avid use of my Facebook status but the more flexible nature of Twitter looked far more promising.

Perhaps more importantly, though, Twitter has not really spread outside the geek community yet and on the off chance it does, I need to be able to tell people “yeah, I’ve been on Twitter for ages.” Echoes of recent conversations along the lines of “yeah, I’ve been on Facebook for three years now” no doubt.

I am quite impressed with how easy it was to set my phone up and begin using it too. I’m a little disappointed I don’t seem to be able to add multiple phones but the idea of being able to update my Twitter while I’m awkwardly sat in a pub by myself waiting for whoever I’m meeting there to turn up is very appealing if only to give me something to do.

In any case, if you’re already Twittering (is it a verb yet?) then point me in the direction of your page. Mine can be found here.

The New Year’s Eve party having got a little bigger than the Facebook guest list would suggest, I suggested to Si and Kieran that we go for a bit more of a relaxed drink on Friday at our favourite local watering hole, the Deer Park.

It almost snowballed out of control again, having invited my housemates and then Kate having text me to see what was going on, though in the end it was just five of us which is a perfectly managable number. I also had somewhat of a challenge with the organisation given I was still at a wedding when it started and so was organisating from the other side of town.

Still it turned into quite a pleasant night with us staying till well after time had been called.

Last night saw the first A-Soc social of the holidays, regular meetings having been suspended until everyone gets back to Leeds in January. Given it was holidays, and indeed the 23rd of December, we did alright for attendance, I think we had a total of eight of us in the end.

I was a good night as I got to chat to Paul about some of my suggestions regarding the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire and we also battled with Facebook to try and sort it out as his new phone is geared towards Facebook but won’t actually let you register or anything.

In a highly amusing situation also, Norm got ID’d. Clearly the big beard is taking years of his look 😀 .

Facebook have really been dropping the ball recently.

I don’t know what they have done to their photos uploader, but whatever they have done has broken it. I can’t say I’ve ever really had a problem with in until about a month ago when I started having a few problems, which have just started getting worse and worse.

For one thing it started crashing when I tried to upload large numbers of images. This has really annoyed me when uploading images for AHS Conference and London were I would be uploading 60 images at a time (into seperate album because for some, no doubt pointless reason, Facebook only allows 60 images per album) it would send them all which as you can imagine takes a long time and then crashes when it finishes.

The uploads are constantly failing too. Which again seems to wait until it has completed and all the images have been sent to bring up the normally “upload successful” dialog which comes up saying the upload has failed and you should try again. Which you possibly should, but not right away as the dialog would seem to indicate because it will just go on failing.

And to top it all off now, the “simple uploader” to use if their main uploader isn’t working, now rather than letting you upload the photos just sends you back to the main uploader without saving the photos, which, once again of course, sends all the data first which keeps you waiting for ages, before disgarding it all. Brilliant.