Dear Sid Meier,
Where did it all go so wrong?!
Figure 1. EVERYTHING THAT IS WRONG WITH FACEBOOK
Yours sincerely,
Ian
Gaming is Over
Reply
Tag Archives: Facebook
Whither the Facebook Purge?
The other day, a bout of online drama made me wonder if it wouldn’t be a good idea to make my online activities a little more private — hide my Twitter feed, for example, and maybe un-friend some people on Facebook to restrict it to just my “core” friends.
Do I actually want to know what 281 people are doing?
But in doing so, I thought for probably the first time about the direction Facebook has taken with regards to friendships and viewing friends’ updates.
Firstly, unlike Twitter, when someone you know “friends” you on Facebook, the socially acceptable thing to do is to accept. Rather than saying “it’s great that you’re interested in me, but I’m not as interested in you, so I won’t ‘follow’ you back,” Facebook mandates a two-way interest. So if someone “friends” you, you either have to ignore them (and feel slightly guilty about it) or commit yourself to seeing their updates.
Secondly, Facebook is becoming less of a place to catch up with friends, and more of an identity service (which has been accelerated with the new Timeline profiles). Your Facebook profile defines you; tells others who you are and who you know. This adds to the impetus to “friend” people you don’t really care about that much — you’re not so much expressing an interest in another person as defining who you are. And that, of course, also lumbers you with looking at their updates all the time.
It’s obvious that this is a common issue, and rather than backpedal or restrict the way Facebook wants to take its service, their response has been to add complex filtering options that let you block specific users and apps, view only updates from various groups, and recently, adding an automated filter that tries to guess which updates you’ll want to see.
Personally, I prefer using Facebook via the API (using SuccessWhale) which avoids the automated filter, but I must still block the updates of people I don’t care much about manually. I’d quite like to cull my Facebook friends list down to just those whose updates I actually care about. But is doing so a reasonable way of reducing my information overload — or willingly damaging an identity that I spent the last four years trying to curate?
Announcing: SuccessWhale version 2.0!
Ladies and Gentlemen of the Internet, I am pleased to announce that SuccessWhale version 2.0 has just been released and is now live on SuccessWhale.com.
SuccessWhale is a web-based client for Twitter and Facebook, written in PHP, JavaScript and MySQL. It offers a multi-column view that allows users to merge together information from all their connected accounts and view it at a glance from any web browser.
The big changes between version 1.1.2 and 2.0 are:
- Facebook support
- Support for multiple Twitter (and Facebook) accounts
- As many columns as you want
- Columns that combine multiple feeds
- Lightboxed images from Twitpic and yFrog
- New themes
- Numerous bug fixes!
You can see a screenshot of it in action below:
I would particularly like to thank Alex Hutter, Hugo Day, Erica Renton and Rg Enzon, whose help in finding bugs and suggesting new features has been instrumental in bringing SuccessWhale up to version 2.0 today.
SuccessWhale is an open source project, and the source code is licenced under the GPL v3.
Could I Live Without…?
A couple of months ago, I was particularly scathing about the crop of Facebook games that I was playing, particularly ones that had no end. The result? I no longer play any games on Facebook whatsoever. As I bemoaned at length, not one of them was adding to my life in any appreciable way.
I wonder if it is now a good time to apply the same logic to various online services — to be extremely critical of them, to discover whether or not they actually add any value to my life. In short, could I live without…
1. A Google Account
As a search engine, Google is almost essential to life on the internet today. Like a lot of you, I have signed up to many Google services over the years, each one simply on the merit that it was better than the competition (if there even was competition). I go through phases of being alarmed at the amount of data Google collates about us all — their “do no evil” policy is wearing thin in the eyes of their customers. But could I manage without mail, calendars and contacts synchronised between my phone and the web? Without the near-endless entertainment of Google Reader? Without the Android Market?
Although I resent Google’s dominion over my online existence, its offerings are just better than others’. And having an Android phone seals the deal.
Verdict: No.
2. GMail
If I can’t live without a Google account, maybe I should just dump the GMail part of it? I’ve actually done this once before; moved my e-mail wholesale to my own server. But I went back — it’s a nice feeling to be in charge, to have your own mail server, but everything was so much harder. ”Archiving” and “tagging” become a multi-click ‘move’ operation, IMAP has a host of strange issues, and no webmail client is a patch on Google’s.
Ditching GMail appeals, but two months down the line I’d probably spend another evening moving everything back again.
Verdict: Probably not.
3. Twitter
I suspect I’m in the minority, in that I follow no celebrities and don’t use Twitter for anything to do with “brand awareness” or “customer interaction”. I use it for talking to my friends. There are simply too many of us, online too irregularly, to use instant messaging — or god forbid, phone calls — any more. (Whether that says something about the quality of our interaction, I’m not sure.) But without Twitter I’d be largely unaware of what’s going on in the lives of the dozen or so people I care about the most. Though my posts may be trivial and of interest to few, losing Twitter would be close to losing friends.
Verdict: No.
4. Facebook
The social network we love to hate, there are a whole host of reasons people would want to quit — disregard for privacy, endless Farmville spam, lack of transparency / import & export functions — but yet, so few do. I don’t play games on Facebook, I rarely post photos, I don’t “like” pages or take quizzes. I have around 300 “friends”, many of whom I haven’t seen since school and wouldn’t recognise in the street.
But there’s a few close friends and family that don’t use Twitter, and closing my Facebook account would mean cutting them off. And besides, there’s always that nagging thought: “you’re 26 years old, every 26-year-old is on Facebook!”
Verdict: It’s tempting to try.
5. Google+
Like many geeks, I am an “early adopter” of Google+, a social network that’s still in beta. Now and again I load the page or run the mobile app, to see what people have posted — and they’ve posted exactly the same as they posted on Twitter. Plus, without an API, I never bother to manually copy my own Twitter and Facebook posts to G+ too.
It’s nice to be in there in case it picks up and becomes the next Social Network to Rule them All. But right now, it’s taking up brain power and space on my bookmarks toolbar, and I’m gaining nothing from it.
Verdict: Yes.
6. LiveJournal
All my LiveJournal posts are already syndicated from my blog, and I go through phases of disabling comments on my LJ posts to drag people to comment on the blog itself. It rarely works, but I have so little interaction with people through LiveJournal these days that it barely matters. LiveJournal is dying, at least from my perspective, and I have already declared it time to quit. Perhaps now is the time.
Verdict: Yes.
7. DeviantArt
Once upon a time, I posted stories here with regularity. Now, it’s a place I visit daily on the off-chance that one of the couple of artists whose pictures I enjoy has posted something. Usually, they havent. This is what RSS was made for.
Verdict: Yes.
8. Flickr
Though firmly an amateur, I’m proud of my photos and Flickr is where I choose to show them off. It’s also where family members abroad go to see what we’re up to, and it’s my insurance against a hard disk crash erasing the bits and bytes of our memories. Just as with GMail, there’s a strong temptation to move my pictures to my own server, and run my own image gallery — but Flickr just does it better.
Verdict: No.
9. Last.fm
I’ve been a keen scrobbler since the days when people knew what “scrobble” meant, and it’s so easy to set up that I’ve always set it up on any new computer, operating system or media player. But why? I know what my taste in music is, and I have little interest in my own listening history. My friends surely have even less. The only reason I can see for continuing is that I’m proud of the amount of data I’ve generated already — and that’s no reason at all for carrying on.
Verdict: Yes.
10. Foursquare
In using Foursquare, I may be just as much a victim of the sunk cost fallacy as I was in all those Facebook games. I’ve now been “playing” for so long that I’ve stopped caring about beating my friends; stopped caring how far away the next wall-chart sticker might be. Checking in is just something I do when I arrive at a place. I’m now essentially getting nothing out of Foursquare, even though I’m still reliably giving the company and its affiliates a complete history of where I go and where I shop.
Verdict: Hell yes, ditch this yesterday.
What are your thoughts on my reasoning? Which services are you tied to, and which are you considering leaving for good? I’d be interested to know.
Geo-IP Security: Option Three
Facebook, and many other online services, have an almost-clever security measure that tries to protect users against account theft. It uses your IP address to do a “Geo-IP” lookup — that is, to figure out roughly where in the world you normally access the site from. If an access attempt happens from elsewhere, the user will have to supply extra information to log in — often an “identify this person from their tagged photos” quiz.
Even if you pass this test of your identity, however, strange things sometimes happen — after a recent trip to France I found myself having to re-authenticate all my apps, and after a few days in Germany, my friend Pete could only restore normal service by changing his password.
I can see how this feature could be useful for some people — perhaps even the majority — but for some it has the potential to be a major irritation. Not only is there no way to disable it in Facebook’s case, there’s also no way of venting your frustration when it goes horribly wrong.
For this reason, I suggest that Facebook’s settings page needs the following options:
A Place for Google Plus?
“Google+”, Google’s new stab at social networking, is doing the rounds of tech news sites today. So what’s it like — if you scored an invite, should you be using it, and if you haven’t yet, are you missing out?
If you’ve used Facebook — and let’s face it, you have — Google+’s interface will be immediately intuitive. A long feed of statuses and shared links, the ability to comment, re-share and “+1″ (i.e. like). It does photos and videos, integrating with Picasa. It does check-ins, integrating with Latitude. It does text and video chat, integrating with Google Talk. You’re probably not surprised by any of this.
It’s most un-Facebook-like feature is its “Circles” — groups of people that you can share with easily. This is possible with Facebook groups, but there it’s the exception rather than the rule. Google clearly intends for your Circles to define the way you share, chat, and use Google+.
Google+ Circles Manager
If this is sounding a lot like Diaspora to you, well… it is. Aside from the distributed nature of Diaspora, it’s virtually identical — including the slow invite procedure that causes it to be a virtual ghost town at the moment. Only time will tell if it suffers from the same problem, the root cause of which being that it is not the world’s first social network.
It has some great ideas, and if nobody were members of Twitter or Facebook already, it would be easy to say “yeah, this is great, let’s all use this”. But Google+ requires effort — time taken to invite friends, curate your groups, set up sharing preferences. It’s a reasonable amount of effort to invest for people that aren’t sure if their friends are going to use it too.
But the biggest, most important issue is that it doesn’t, at present, integrate. With anything. Now it is still under heavy development; I’m sure integrating with other services will come soon. But right now, it doesn’t talk to Twitter. It doesn’t talk to Facebook. It doesn’t have a public API to talk to third-party apps. I, and many other users, are so heavily invested in Twitter and Facebook that the transition to Google+ has to be seamless — it has to work alongside the other networks, without any extra effort, otherwise it’s just not worth the bother.
To make the point, this is how the networks and apps that I currently use interact: (yes, I was that bored)
Graph of my interaction with Social Networks
There’s not space on there for something that accepts status updates, unless it’s supported by SuccessWhale or TweetDeck. There’s no space for something that accepts check-ins, unless it syncs with Foursquare. No space for anything to use my pictures unless it can get them itself from Flickr. No space for another chat system unless I can use it from Pidgin or Skype.
I don’t mean to be negative to Google+ — it’s a good service which I’m sure, given time, will become great. One day it may be the new Facebook, a social networking behemoth that all others aim for and compare themselves to. And it actually cares somewhat about privacy (for now), which would in my opinion make it a preferable king of the social networks. Its UI is great; combining Google’s characteristic minimalism with some actual great design rather than just utilitarian blocks of colour.
But for $deity’s sake, Google, give this thing a public API. As Twitter realised five years ago, the API is as important as — if not more important than — the service itself. Let us mix it up in weird and wonderful ways with the services we’re already using, and Google+ will instantly lose most of its barrier to entry.
Twitter, Facebook and the Expectation of Privacy
I’ve been asked a couple of times why it is that my status posts on Facebook are locked down, visible only to friends or sometimes friends-of-friends:
…but yet with the same button-click that I post to Facebook, I post exactly the same thing, publicly, on Twitter:
Surely that’s undoing all the good of my Facebook privacy settings?
The reason is because I’m not doing it for reasons of my privacy — I’m doing it for yours, and what your expectations of privacy might be.
On Twitter, a reply to me is a first-class citizen — a tweet in its own right. It has a ‘reply ID’ field to help thread conversations, and it mentions my handle using the ‘@’ convention, but otherwise it is a tweet like any other. You, the replier, have one simple privacy setting — is your account public or private? Can the world see your tweets (including that reply) or just the people you allow?
By contrast, on Facebook, a comment is a second-class citizen — a child of the original post. Implicit in this is that it inherits the original post’s privacy settings. As the commenter, you do not have control over who sees what you write. Assuming — as most have — that the original poster has accepted the default privacy options, the commenter has only one choice: either allow their reply to be public and searchable for the entire internet, or don’t reply.
On Facebook there’s no way I can let you set who can see your comments, so I do the best thing I can: make your comments visible only to the 300 or so people who I am reasonably sure are not evil. If you like, you can check the list and see if you object to anybody on it.
It’s not ideal, but it’s the best I can do to respect commenters’ privacy on a service that itself respects privacy only grudgingly.
On Game Design: Time to Quit
Not long after my post about the game DJ Rivals, I finished the main part of the game and hit a metaphorical wall. There was no more story; I’d bought every item in the store and mastered the game’s hardest moves. The game tries to offer replay value via progressively harder missions based on those earlier in the game, and via battles against human players of comparable level. The latter offers nothing to play for apart from in-game money, which I already had in abundance, while the former offers only the elusive carrot of 100% completion, which dangled too far distant for me to want it much.
So I stopped playing — which is probably fair enough. I’d played it, enjoyed it, finished it and stopped. But it got me thinking about the number of games I’ve played that don’t end.
Zynga’s Farmville is perhaps the most well-known example I could give. At the beginning, the game is about designing a nice farm, planting the most efficient crops, coming back to harvest them and planting some more. This is fun. Then it’s just something you do. Then it’s annoying. Then you start contemplating spending real money on in-game items to automate the process. At this point it’s clear that planting and harvesting crops is not the game — the game is having a bigger and better farm than your friends. And the only way to achieve this, assuming you weren’t lucky enough to start first, is to be more devoted to the game or spend more real money than your friends do. (It shouldn’t surprise you that these are both things that make money for Zynga.)
A case of escalation of commitment (or commitment bias) can kick in, whereby the player has invested enough effort in the game that even though they are no longer enjoying it, they can’t bear to quit. And this only gets worse over time, because unlike most non-social games, Farmville and its kin don’t have an ‘end’. There’s no story to finish, and because the makers of the game can easily add more, higher-level items to acquire or quests to fulfill, there is no 100% completion to aim for. You quit, or you play forever.
I am no better than the rest as regards being sucked into these games. Tactics in Battle Stations only extend as far as clicking a button and upgrading your airship within one of a few effective builds, yet my character made it to level 85 before I quit, realising that the rate at which new shiny equipment was added to the game outstripped the rate at which I could acquire it. Starfleet Commander is a good strategy game in its own right, but after having reached the end of the tech tree, I found nothing worthwhile to aim for. The same flaw has turned me off Backyard Monsters at level 36, too.
Moreover, all of these games suffer from a time delay mechanic that increasingly is enough to put me off a game (Dungeon Overlord, for example) all by itself. Now, part of the aim of all these games (from the creators’ perspective) is to get users returning regularly to play — and view ads. To achieve this, every game I have mentioned — and countless thousands of others — have in-game activities that take time of the order of hours or days. This, I think, is my main problem with them.
In the vast majority of traditional computer and console games, there is a concept of a gaming “session”. The player sits down to play the game, plays continuously, and stops when he or she is done. But the majority of the new breed of social games aren’t like that.
They begin with a rush of activity, much like other games. You put the first few buildings down in your base, plant the first few crops, start and finish researching technologies within a few minutes. At some point, you choose to stop. But the game hangs its carrots just out of reach. “Sure,” it says, “you can stop. But your building is only half an hour from being finished. And once it’s finished, you’ll be able to do this and this, and build this, which only takes a few hours…”
In the early stages, it grabs you back when you might prefer not to be playing. Later on, by contrast, it switches around to perhaps the more annoying mode. More advanced things tend to take longer to build, research, grow, or whatever — possibly many days. So you’ll sit down for your gaming session, you’ll do your five minutes of formulaic clicking, harvesting your crops, planting new ones, then… then you stop. You can’t do any more; you have to wait two days before you can play again. In two days, you spend five more minutes clicking the same things, then stop again.
Once upon a time, I enjoyed these Facebook games, and I thought I still did. But yesterday, I logged in to do my five minutes of clicking, and realised all of a sudden that it was exactly the same five minutes of clicking I had done the day before and the day before that. I was grinding towards a non-existent goal, performing mindless tasks in search of a sense of completion that I knew would never come.
I thought, “why am I doing this?”, and it dawned on me that I didn’t have an answer to that.
I love playing games, and presumably always will. But I think I, and possibly others, need to get better at judging the enjoyability of games in this casual, social age. Certain kinds of game and certain games companies are now remarkably good at exploiting sunk cost and commitment bias, and in order to only play games that we enjoy, we should evaluate the game better, and decide earlier when it may be time to quit.
SuccessWhale: Considering the Reply UI
What was once my simple Twitter client, SuccessWhale, is undergoing a lot of changes in the build-up to version 2. One of the biggest changes is the support for multiple services, of which Facebook is the first to be integrated. This, combined with the Twitter website’s new design, brings into question SuccessWhale’s “reply” UI.
There’s no question that there should be a big “type your status update here” box at the top. Both incarnations of Twitter do this, Facebook does this, every non-mobile client (and a few mobile ones too) does it. It’s what users expect, and I see no reason not to stick with it.
About a thousand years of internet time ago (2010), replying to a tweet from Twitter’s website re-used that top status box for the reply. The user clicked the “reply” button, and the status box got pre-filled with “@” plus the username of the person they were replying to. It looked like this:
SuccessWhale, then solely a Twitter client, copied this behavior. Its reply UI involved clicking a “reply” button and having its main “publish status update” box update with the replied-to user’s name, like this:
Now SuccessWhale is attempting to be a Facebook client, too. On Twitter, replies to a status update are given virtually the same prominence as the original status. On Facebook however, posts are more thread-based, with comments on a status update clearly being daughter objects of the original update. Status updates themselves use “newest at the top” order, just like Twitter, but comments on an update are “newest at the bottom“. So on Facebook, it makes sense for the “reply” field to be inline, like this:
In playing around with the UI for SuccessWhale version 2, I introduced an inline reply box, which works something like this:
A third reply UI was introduced with the new Twitter website – a floating “lightbox”-style reply area which appears when the “reply” button is clicked. Like this:
So, between the two sites that SuccessWhale currently talks to, we have three UI paradigms for replying to a status update. I feel it is very important for SuccessWhale to have a consistent UI for replying, particularly when we introduce columns that mix updates from Twitter, Facebook and potentially other sources.
So, my question to SuccessWhale users is: which one do you like best? I have no particular attachment to any of them, so let’s get our democracy on. Your choice is between:
- Using the main status update box (like SuccessWhale version 1 and old Twitter)
- Using an inline box (like Facebook)
- Using a pop-up ‘lightbox’ (like new Twitter)
The comments are yours, vote away!
Adventures in the Diaspora Ghost Town
Diaspora*, for those unaware, is a distributed and privacy-conscious social network currently in development by students at New York University. It raised $200,000 of funding via Kickstarter back in June, and is currently in alpha testing state. By virtue of my pseudowife’s donation, we have been sent both the developer preview software itself, and invites for the Disapora “pod” at joindiaspora.com.
For my first impressions, read on!
Settling Spores: The Developer Preview
One of Diaspora’s strengths is that unlike centralised social networks such as Facebook, where all your content is stored on their server, Diaspora is distributed. While you can have an account on joindiaspora.com, you can equally set up your own “pod” on your own domain, or even on a home PC, and it will link up and join the network. Users that do so are not second-class citizens, and there is nothing innately special about joindiaspora.com.
Except, of course, that it’s set up and working already.
While I don’t doubt that I am technically capable of setting up a Diaspora pod, the installation instructions alone were enough to put me off. Take a look — it’s not for the faint of heart.
The ‘official way’ doesn’t look too complicated — except that I fall at the first hurdle, “get yourself an IP and root password to a CentOS machine”. Well, I don’t have one, so that’s out. And even if I did, there’s the slightly ominous “you will need to edit config files, etc.”, with no further explanation.
The rest of that document is the ‘non-official’ way. It merely requires that you set up and configure a compiler, libxml, libxslt, Ruby, MongoDB, OpenSSL, ImageMagick, git, Redis, RubyGems, and Bundler. And once you’re done with that, all you need to do is install the required gems, start MongoDB, edit Diaspora’s config file, run the server, run the app server, run the websocket and Redis servers, run the Resque worker, add user information to the database, run the test framework, set the permissions on certain directories, then point your browser at your pod and log in. Simples!
It was 10pm when I started the procedure, and about 10:03 when I decided I couldn’t be bothered.
It may have taken me until gone midnight to set up, and given that an invite to joindiaspora.com was imminent, all I would get out of it would be being able to say I’d done it. Bragging rights aren’t much of an incentive.
With all those dependencies, Diaspora is also not going to be supported by shared hosting providers any time soon, so piggybacking off onlydreaming.net wasn’t an option either.
Unless the installation process is drastically simplified — made foolproof, almost — and the dependencies are reduced, very few people are going to be able to run their own pod. And that means there’s still the question of trust — just like we now have to trust Facebook not to be evil (whoops), with Diaspora we also have to trust whoever runs the pod we use.
Granted, this is a developer preview, and true to form they have provided something that only developers will be able to use. I’m not objecting to that, I’m just hoping that somewhere along the line they do have plans for making it something that just about anybody can install for themselves.
Life in the Pod: Using Diaspora
Invite in hand, I dismissed setting up my own pod and joined the main one at joindiaspora.com.
My first impression? I can’t access it at all. Due to my browser.
Now I develop for the web; I understand what a pain in the arse Internet Explorer can be. It would be a great day for web designers if it just stopped existing tomorrow. But the appropriate response to that is not to outright bar it from your site.
I run six websites. None are quite as polished as Diaspora, but they have one thing in common: they work in IE. Even IE6. Sometimes a few things don’t look quite the same as in other browsers, but I’ve tried to work around those, and even in the worst case things fail gracefully. And it’s only ever the appearance that feels a little different; the functionality is unaffected.
Sure, I hate IE. But for me at the office, and for countless other users, IE is not a choice we made. Outright blocking us from a website isn’t going to make us change our browsers and suddenly see the light of standards-compliance. It’s just going to make us more bitter that we’re forced to use IE and more bitter that your site doesn’t have the decency to accept that.
Onwards. Back at home, running a decent browser, I tried again. My second impression:
Diaspora looks very polished, with nice gradients on buttons, drag-and-drop JavaScript and a nice walkthrough to set up your account. A lot of thought has clearly gone into the interface, and it’s truly pleasant to use.
Groups, or “Aspects” in Diaspora parlance, are part of the core experience rather than something bolted on the side as they are on Facebook. You can not only flick between them to see status updates only from people in those aspects — much like Twitter’s lists — but you can also post only to certain aspects, too. This feels a little friendlier than Twitter or Facebook, particularly if a friendship group have each set up an aspect containing roughly the same people. ‘See everything’ / ‘post to everybody’ options are still available, of course. Each friend can only be assigned to a single aspect — hopefully this will change before Diaspora is released, as at the moment there is no way for your social graph to represent a friend who you know in two contexts.
Of course, this aspect structure is all pretty meaningless for now, because Diaspora is a ghost town.
Public registration is disabled, and each user has 5 invites to dish out, so joindiaspora.com is growing very slowly — by design, of course. But privacy-conscious Diaspora offers no way of finding out if any of your existing friends, on say Twitter or Facebook, have Diaspora accounts. The only way to friend someone is to know their Diaspora username and pod address.
And while you can syndicate posts from Diaspora to Twitter and Facebook, there’s no way to pull data back in.
For it to be an enjoyable experience rather than a minimalist virtual ghost town, you need lots of friends posting lots of stuff. It’s the old ‘critical mass’ problem. If lots of people were using it heavily, other people would want to join. But while there’s only a few users who don’t post much, other potential users are put off. Only by overcoming that gap, reaching critical mass, can Diaspora take off. And for that it needs an advantage, something to pull people across to it.
It needs Twitter’s myriad of clients, mobile interfaces, the recognisability of “@username”. It needs Facebook’s groups, events, apps. I hate to say it, but it needs its Farmville.
Without that, I can’t see it taking off on any major scale — it won’t be the much-desired “next Facebook”.
Maybe it doesn’t want to be? As always in the Open Source world, choice is good. Diaspora’s developers saw a niche for something, they got coding and now they’re starting to fill it. Great! But I wonder how big that niche really is.
Diaspora started with a focus on privacy — a social network ‘done right’, where users’ data is private by default and is never served up to marketing companies. It’s a laudable goal, but even for people like me who understand the implications of Facebook and Diaspora’s differing privacy settings and business model, it’s not enough.
I know this article has been somewhat of a downer, and I wish it wasn’t. I wish the developers all the best, and I do hope that Diaspora is the Next Big Thing. I’ll continue to test it, and if I can, to help it get better. Once there’s an app API, who knows, maybe it’ll be me that writes Diaspora’s Farmville.
But the sad state of online privacy is this: Privacy is not a feature.
To beat Facebook, you have to be more fun than Facebook, not just better-designed and more ethical.
I and millions of other users understand how Facebook treats our data, and wish apps weren’t allowed to auction off the list of our sexual preferences to the highest bidder. But Facebook is so far beyond critical mass that it can afford to keep us at a level where we hate it, but we don’t hate it enough to leave.