Some of you might remember me posting about an annoying “bug” or feature where the search box didn’t clear its pre-entered text properly when the user started typing their search term.
Well, sometime in the last fortnight it’s been fixed – much better! Almost wonder if someone in the iPlayer team has been reading this blog – I can’t think that many other people will have consciously noticed it, let alone bothered to post about it!
The BBC ran an interesting article asking (and seeking to explain) why young people like to broadcast their (often poor) music tastes to everyone in shouting distance on crummy, tinny mobile phones, from equally crummy tinny MP3/MP4 files. The Urban Dictionary refers to this as “sodcasting“.
I think the article is wrong, and here’s why: Based on my experience with call centres recently, every time I get put on hold I get to hear some new canned music. My usual response is to put the phone into “speakerphone” mode so I can get on with other things at my desk, thus broadcasting the mess to the rest of the office. This has two effects:
Just got another SPAM message from +44 7591 260388 saying that I’ve still not claimed for that accident I never had, as I wrote about here earlier this year.
Again, I’ve ignored it and would continue to advise others to do the same. Replying with the word ”STOP” as suggested in the text is thought to confirm your mobile number as being valid and active, opening the gates to yet more spam.
If you’re on O2, then you can flag it up wit them forward such suspicious unsolicited text messages to 7726, as per the advice on their website. Thing is, my phone doesn’t have a “forward” function that I’m aware of for SMS, so I’m hoping they have the sense to block the number I quoted, not the number I sent it from! Time will tell.
So I pulled the plug on Facebook earlier today, which might seem a rather random action to those who follow me here and on Twitter. I gave no warning, I just went ahead and did it. Part of me feels a bit sad, and I’ll miss the ability to keep in touch with particular friends and family in the way that Facebook enabled. There are some things I won’t miss, as I’ll briefly explain.
So far as I can tell, WordPress currently only displays information about me that I choose to be there, when I choose for it to be there. I can delete and edit anything I like, when I like. I can move away from it to another site or system how and when I choose.
Twitter is perhaps a less-known quantity, even if it is currently my primary online social-networking tool. I can seek information when I choose, and it only displays on my profile what I choose to be there. Sure, people can mention me and I’ll appear on timelines in a different light than I might like. But in general I feel much more in control of the content I put there, and feel more able to trust what happens to that information.
Facebook has turned on many sharing features recently that have “leaked” things like contact information and relationships over the last few years, and each time has required me to jump through hoops to turn information feeds off to those to whom I’d rather remain just another face in the crowd. The news in recent days of facial recognition functionality being switched on without notice on the site itself was the final nail in the coffin. Yes, it’s only suggesting to people I know that I might be a person in their photo, but I’d rather have that functionality built into a computer operating system or web browser, based on information I’ve fed it, rather than have it as part of a bigger machine that can only make the functionality invisible to me.
On a more emotive level, there’s something more than a little creepy about a business that makes its money sharing and advertising to those who live their lives within reach of it.
Various factors have come together recently that have conspired to help me learn to organise and use my time more effectively. Facebook was a time-sink for me, yet in the bigger scheme of things didn’t offer anything valuable in return.
Twitter has been a valuable resource for looking up realtime information about things happening around me, and has helped me engage with the local community in quite unexpected ways, especially when used in combination with blogs like this one.
WordPress has enabled some interesting conversations and interactions, and it seems that some posts have been informative to others facing similar situations to those I’ve described. I don’t claim to be a fount of all, or any knowledge – but my mistakes and lessons learned can help others in a way that status updates on Facebook just don’t hit.
Add to this that the Facebook interface had become generally feature-bloated and unreliable, especially on my phone, while things like email, blogs and Twitter carry on with their given functions with much greater efficiency and more tangible results.
If I’m really set on keeping in touch with friends and family, then shouldn’t I be writing letters, picking up the phone, sending emails, sending photos or even arranging meets? Facebook is useful for all of these things in its way, but I don’t want such communications being owned by any company or entity other than myself and those I’m communicating with. When I send a letter, it doesn’t become the property of Royal Mail. They don’t sell copies of all or parts of the letters to advertisers. They don’t tell Amazon that they recently delivered an box of fluff to my door, so that Amazon can try to sell me books about that fluff.
And yes, it’s nice to be able to feel smug or angry about something and to share that with a select group of individuals, as I did so willingly on Facebook and will likely continue to do on Twitter. But I feel my relationships have suffered because Facebook was becoming the fount of knowledge about what I and those around me were getting up to, and I was willingly letting it stifle the very reason for those friendships and relationships to exist in the first place.
No, my personal relationships probably won’t get any better as a result of today’s decision, but at least I don’t have the ongoing Facebook conversations as the smug excuse for not spending time with or taking time for people.
So that’s the real killer issue for me – WordPress and Twitter have created real relationships with tangible output. Not always benefits, but experiences and genuine connections at some level. And that surely is what social media tools should enable?
Had a quiet moment in the office this lunchtime and wanted to fill the silence with some backgorund radio. So I fired up iTunes 10.3 and thought to check whether any BBC radio stations were available in the Radio listings – a curious omission for the last five years or so that I’ve been using iTunes. Turns out they are there, but it’s not always obvious as to where they appear in the listings, not helped by the lack of search functionality, which is a shame.
