Facebook, my pet peeves.

Along with the rest of the world, I am on Facebook. I first joined Facebook because a family member asked me to. At first it seemed okay. Another way to keep in touch with family and friends. Some of my family began asking me to join them in using certain applications on there. The first time I accepted  I was puzzled as to why the application needed not only all  of my details in order to work, but also requested that I  include a certain amount of my family/friends details as well. Why? Why does an application, whether it be a game or anything else on Facebook NEED all of your details and those of your friends before it will work?

If I download a game to my computer to play, it doesn’t need to know my life history before it allows me to download and play it? And more importantly, what do these applications do with all of the supplied data that they insist that they need?

You could of course argue that they need all that data in order to spread themselves around Facebook (sounds like a virus doesn’t it?) thereby ending up being used by more people. I would argue that if your application or game is good enough, then your users would tell their family and friends about it anyway. What’s wrong with simply relying on ‘word of mouth’ to increase your usage?

Then following the build up on Facebook of these applications such as games and the like, we are all now inundated with  the downright annoying ‘nags’ about them in our feeds.  Despite posting to my feed countless times that I am NOT interested in joining ‘Farmhouse Families’ or ‘Mafia shoot up’ or anything else for that matter, I still get pestered to join this or that. So I block that particular application. Problem solved? NO! Because no sooner do you block one application than along comes another one in its wake! Grrr! There must be one new application born every few minutes on Facebook, or that’s how it seems to me!  I can’t keep up with the blocking and hiding!

 There are other niggles I have with Facebook. How you can’t use your nickname for example or the fact that it doesn’t use RSS feeds so that I can check any updates in my desktop email program.

I would close my account on there in a jiffy but most of my family also use Facebook  regularly and I also have some long term friends from Live Journal on there as well. Hmm. Think I might have to do some serious culling of contacts on there especially those who are always nagging me to join this or join that.

TG

Social Networking overload.

Are you like me suffering from Social Networking overload? Lately I seem to be subscribing to more and  more social networking sites that profess to be the latest ‘must have’ to enable you to keep tabs on all of your online friends and contacts.  it’s got so bad that I now find myself subscribing to sites that  promise to amalgamate all of my social networking sites into one place and keep them all organized for me so that I can keep on top of it all!

I’ve completely lost track to be honest of just how many sites I am currently subscribed to and despite being retired and therefore able to spend a great deal of my available time online I just haven’t the time to contribute to them all.  Of course the answer is to stop joining any more but as soon as I tell myself not to join or sign up to any new sites I will often find that I’ll read someone’s tweet about a fantastic new site they have found  that is the next big thing or I’ll read someone’s blog about a new ‘social networking’ service that’s the latest must have and next thing you know I’ve signed up and joined another one! 

For my blogs I am now busy trying to find gadgets and plug-ins that  let my readers know just exactly which sites I use so that they can find me, although its highly unlikely they will come across me on any of them as I just don’t have the time, and lets be honest here, if a retired Granny hasn’t the time to contribute to lot’s of social networking sites  then who has?  I really will have to refrain from joining any more. It rather reminds me of those Sky users who pay out a huge amount every month so that they can have hundreds and hundreds of channels and then spend most of their time just watching the same old four or five they could get for free.  Besides which I have badly been neglecting my blogs of late, usually because I am too busy tweeting or else I am reading all the updates from my vast collection of  social networking sites!

Let’s face it, we can only be in one place at a time when we are online, no one can  be everywhere at once,  and I have realised this recently  having become aware of  just how many new services are becoming available just to help us keep on top of all that Social Networking we are all doing. The other downside of having all of these different Social Networking sites occurred recently  when I needed to upload  some photographs so that my family and friends  could  see them.  Instead of just uploading  them once  to one particular site, I found  myself having to upload them to my Windows Live SkyDrive, my flickr account and my Facebook account which meant that because I had  quite a few photos to upload the computer was  busy for up to an hour or more. (Is there a photo uploading service that you can upload your pictures to once and then it distributes your pics to all of your photo sites for you, and if not why not?)

I know that I am not alone in experiencing ‘Social Networking overload.’ When the Windows Live teams introduced Web Activities to Windows Live, quite a few users on there turned most of the updates from their friends off after finding them to be ‘too noisy’. As a matter of fact, I was personally informed by someone in my Network on Windows Live that  my twitter updates  were  ‘too much’ and so I ended up disabling most of my updates on there so I didn’t annoy others in my Network.

We might all feel that we need to be constantly  broadcasting every move we make whilst we are online, every picture we take, every news article we read, every new ‘social networking’ must have we have stumbled upon, but do remember everyone,  it doesn’t necessarily mean that your online friends want to be constantly reminded of your online presence or what you are doing from one minute to the next,  and they just might go and turn you right off!

TG