Facebook vs. The Society Trash

Facebook is the victim of an “information overload” attack of daily society trash. The trash of non-useful information is normally stored on the wall section in your profile where others can write messages to you. The wall is a public writing space so other who view your profile can see what has been written on your wall. The problem is that real friends and family get lost amongst your Mafia Wars and Farmville friends wall postings. Personally, I don’t understand why this information is useful and why it is necessary to post every single step via a separate message in your profile. Also, I don’t understand why Facebook is not improving their implementation by a better filter function or a second “more spam tolerated” wall. To get rid of all this society trash I am almost blocking every application which has spam potential. In the following you can find my list of blocked applications. What is your list?

• Age of Castles
• Astrology
• Badisch-alemannische Leckerli
• Barn Buddy
• Barney’s advice
• Bejeweled Blitz
• Biotronic
• Birthday Cards
• Birthdays!
• Brain Buddies
• Café World
• Castle Age
• Chug It!
• Click Challenge! 3.0
• Concorde Filmverleih
• Daily Friends
• Daily Horoscope
• Date of the Day
• DDR Getränke
• Dolci
• Drinkrunde
• Farm Ville Gift Sender
• FishVille
• Fortune Teller Genius
• Fragen Sie Stromberg!
• Frases Diarias
• Friend Apps
• Friend Statistics
• Funny Famous
• Gift Creator
• Give Hearts
• Glückskekse
• Glücksnuß!
• Glühwein ausgeben
• Hallmark Social Calendar
• Happy Aquarium
• Happy Farm
• Happy Pets
• Hug Me
• Kennst du mich gut?
• Let’s Collect Smiles
• Mafia Wars
• Magic Fortune Cookie
• Melek & Seytan
• Mit wem bist Du Seelenverwandt
• Music Challenge
• My Magic Mirror
• MyCalendar
• Nicest Person Contest
• Paf le Chien
• Parla con…
• Pass a Drink
• Photo of the Day
• Phrases
• Phrases (new)
• Pillow Fight
• Quiz Creator
• Quiz Monster
• Quiz Planet!
• Reign of Vampires
• Roller Coaster Kingdom
• Santa Claus
• Schneeballschlacht
• Schwäbische Gschenkle
• Tagesfeind
• Tagesfreund
• Texas HoldEm Poker
• Treasure Madness
• Was hält 2010 für dich bereit?
• Welcher Barbapapa bist du?
• What does your name mean?
• What’s in a Name
• Who lives under your bed?
• Wie heißt dein Bett?
• You are Beautiful!
• Your Luck [daily]
• Your Next Love
• YoVille
• Zeig Schleife
• Zoo World

Facebook vs. Dislike

Facebook gives users the possibility to comment on wall or newsfeed items  as well as to “like” them. But where is the “dislike” option? There are several fan pages trying to get a “dislike” button, but again, where is it? The official main reason why Facebook will likely not add such a feature is that it will not promote negativity. In my opinion, this is typical for our society!

You are allowed to like status updates of friends. You are allowed to like posts of fan pages. You are also allowed to like links and videos that somebody posted on his wall. You are only allowed to say negative things via a comments to describe yourself to the rest of of the well-behaved world. Nevertheless, you are not allowed to just don’t like anything. You are not allowed to like a “dislike” button, and even more, you are not allowed to press the “dislike” button. In my optinion, the applied method is to cover-up through openness in order to hold two-facedness in honors.

But there is some hope! You can install one of the following two Firefox plugins to get the “dislike” Facebook functionality back and you are allowed press it as often you want. :)

• Facebook Dislike
• FaceMod – Facbook Dislike Button

Facebook vs. Privacy

Facebook changed his privacy settings in combination with a privacy transition tool that is supposed to help users to update their profiles. The ugly true is that Facebook only made this change on pressure from the Canadian privacy commissioner. Or in the words of Facebook: “New tools to control your experience.” Nevertheless, the new privacy setting page is nice and gives you more freedom to control your privacy, which is not bad! On the other hand, Facebook doesn’t say that the default setting of the privacy transition tool is more open has it was before. Also, they made it possible to hide one’s friend list via a laughably ham-handed way. It is not integrated in the normal privacy setting and you can only enable and disable it, which I don’t like. Because of this and the fact that Google will integrate Facebook and Twitter in its real-time search functionality it is recommended to verify its privacy settings. The New York Times made a very nice how-to about the new Facebook privacy settings.

And the Oscar goes to… #1

Perhaps you already recognized it. I outsourced some of my homepage functionality to third party web services. Because of this I thought its now the right time to write a blog entry about one of my favorite addictions—bits and bytes (I’m not going to talk about the other ones today).

So let’s present my entire Internet and web services like an Academy Award.

• And the Oscar for the best business social networking platform goes to Xing, because Heiko thinks that the design of LinkedIn looks like a chewing gum bubble, which he don’t like.

• And the Oscar for the best private social networking platform goes to Facebook, because StudiVZ is just a knock-off, get hacked several times and the red GUI design is driving Heiko nuts.

• And the Oscar for the best photo sharing website goes to Flickr, because it helps Heiko to be a much better lazy bastard.

• And the Oscar for the best blog publishing system goes to WordPress, because it gives Heiko the option to put his insane intentions online without having the same pain as he had with Live Blog application which is available via Facebook.

• And the Oscar for the best communication tool goes to nobody, because to Heiko it looks like that everybody of his friend is using a different instant massaging program. Now he has to use ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, Google Talk, IRC and Skype which means that he has more accounts and passwords as the emperor of China. ;-)

• And the Oscar for the best interactive web radio goes to Musicovery, because Heiko already had a lot of fun with this little web-tool and can hear right now the music which he wants to hear.

• And the Oscar for the best social bookmarking platform goes to del.icio.us, because it helps Heiko to keep everything in mind and forget basically nothing. Now he is like an elephant. ;-)

The next Oscar Awards I will make for my most favorite Mac OS X applications.