New Facebook - A Step Too Far?

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Ever since Facebook launched its new design, there have been a number of complaints from its users. Of course, these are the same people that complain every time a change is made, yet they still stick with it.

However, is their anger and frustration justified this time? After all, these weren't just minor tweaks to the layout, or a new look to the chat feature. Facebook has undergone a big makeover. A makeover that has once again made the experience feel too 'intimate'.

I'll start with the 'live feed' or 'ticker' that sits on the top right-hand side. It allows users to see exactly what their friends are doing every single moment, whether that’s commenting on a picture, on their status, becoming friends with someone else. Put simply, it’s a dream world for stalkers. You don't even have to click onto somebody’s profile to see exactly what they're doing. The only way to avoid this is to alter the settings for every single friend that you have. Now for some of us, that won't take too long, but for some people, we'd be talking about thousands of friends, who must have a 'ticker' updating at enormous speeds to keep up with the updates. I suppose it might teach them a lesson.

But maybe this is a good thing; maybe it will make people now question whether they really should add someone as a friend, maybe Facebook should in fact become a more personal experience, so that you can feel more comfortable in sharing your personal interactions in front of all your 'friends'.

Now onto the new layout. We know longer have two feeds to choose from, it's just one big feed that we can gradually 'perfect' by informing Facebook of who want to know about. This seems like a pointless addition, especially now that we have to scroll down just to see what the latest relevant updates are. This seems like a pointless change, simply placed there to give the design a slightly cleaner, sleeker look. Perhaps in the long run it will prove a success, but right now it just looks a bit messy. Which I’m guessing isn't the intention.

Also, if facebook knows we have preferences to who we want to read about, then why have a live feed where we can see what everybody’s doing? It should be obvious to them that we simply don't care.

I understand Facebook's desire to evolve as a social network, especially with competition such as Twitter. Also, Google+ is now slowly starting to grow. However, some of these changes feel like they are trying to compete by taking ideas from Twitter and Google+ but slightly tweaking them. Now this could easily not be true, but on the surface, I feel like I can get a much better service on somewhere like Twitter. A place that isn't too complex, and gives me exactly what I want from it. I get simple updates from the people I want to get updates from. If I don't want to see them on my feed, I can simply unfollow. But if I still want updates, I can alternatively put them into a 'list' and just see they're tweets when I want. And if you only want certain people to see your tweets, you can simply set your profile to private. It's very basic, simple and does what you want from it. Something that Facebook has gradually distanced itself from, with more and more features being added, and complicated privacy settings (which are now even more complicated if that was ever possible).

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The Power of Twitter - Part 1

I recently made a post regarding Facebook, and a comment made that if it was a country, it would be the third biggest one in the world. And it got me thinking as too how it might work out if Facebook really did become a country.
Well in this post i'm going to take a look at Twitter and question what sort of country it would form.

Before I go into Twitter as a country, i'd just like to give you an idea into it's current popularity.
Thier are around 2-300 Million twitter accounts, which isn't quite as much as Facebooks 500 Million active accounts, but it's still a pretty large number and almost reaches the same amount as America's population of around 311 Million.
Twitter’s lead on Application Services - Raffi Krikorian mde a presentation in March of this year and raised a number of interesting statistics (courtesy of 'Fresh Networks' Hamrid Sirhan).

- The current rate of tweeting is 1,200 Tweets per second (tps)
- There are currently 110 million tweets per day

These two statistics alone highlight the now huge popularity and activity that Twitter has. It has become very trendy amongst celebrities and athletes to promote themselves and anyting hey're invovled in. It has also broken down barriers that were once in place between celebrities and 'regular people'. It's introduced a new level of fan interaction. It has also become a way for businesses to promote thier products, and even for 'twitter celebrities' to emerge, becoming popular simply through thier 140 character tweets.

Trending topics has also become popular, and has enabled tweeters to view other opinions in a matter of seconds regarding big world events and announcements. It has become a perfect example of 'citizen journalism'.

Making 'The United Nations of Twitter'
Much like Facebook, the flag would surely be the logo. But this time maybe not of the word 'Twitter', but of the bird or maybe the 'failwhale' that we see so often.

In terms of the type of government, I think a democracy would work quite well. It would enable everyone to have a voice (nobody can exeed 140 characters in twitter - nobody!). With this Democracy could also come 'Popular Sovereignty', which is based on the idea that a state is 'created by the will and consent of its people'. This is also similairly linked with The Social Contract which comes from philosophers such as Locke, Rousseau and Hobbes. This is the idea that the population would agree to obide common rules and protect each other from harm etc...

This would very much be a united nation. Generally the people i have encountered have been friendly and just happy to express thier views to those that will read them. It is also filled with a diverse mixture of nationalities, age groups, and careers. Thier are doctors, actors, singers, plumbers, presidents, journalists, sales assistants, I'm sure every profession is covered somewhere on twitter.

In part two I will be analysing exactl what would make Twitter a dominant and powerful country.
In my Facebook post,  I included a world map which highlighted the popularity of the social networking site. Well here is Twitters own version -

Twitter usage across the world

You can read 'The Power of Facebook - Part 1' by clicking here.

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Twitter - Changes in Values

I'll admit it took me a little while to fully adjust to Twitter and truly understand what it was and how it should be used.

However, now that Twitter has gone 'mainstream' with loads of media hungry celebrities and companies jumping on the bandwagon, I can't help but feel that some of the soul of Twitter has been snatched away.

Twitter used to be about following people (usually complete strangers) that you find interesting. And through this you would form bonds and friendships that you otherwise never would. It was a chance to let out your emotions and opinions(both good and bad) to complete strangers. It meant that when someone 'followed you', they were genuinly interested in your life and what you were writing with your 140 characters.
Also a retweet would show real appreciation for a witty, or truthful observation by somebody. Now it's become a cheap way to gain promotion, and try to nab followers. Such as 'retweet if you think this too'.
I'm not going to write this and say that I'm not taking advantage of twitter, because i do. I've started to use it to help promote my blogs, and sometimes I do feel like it's not the best thing to do.
But I do try to keep the number of people I'm following below the 200 mark, and this sometimes means unfollowing people that i didn't connect with or that i don't find as interesting as i had hoped.
Twitter can be harsh, your views aren't always agreed with, you can be criticised, but you can also be critical yourself.

I feel like people are now just aiming to get large numbers of followers either to feel loved and popular, or to just promote all of thier projects and ideas.
Even some 'twitter celebrities' are emerging with hundreds of thousands of followers.
What was once a place to share your ideas and becoming closer to a few people has evolved into a place where it has become almost impossible to be noticed. But you can't blame twitter itself, it's something that happens to many new websites(partiuclarly social networks), they eventually outgrow thier original purpose simply because of thier popularity.

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It's Friday! - We So Excited...?

I don't want you to base your judgement on what i've said in this blog. So if you haven't seen it yet, try and watch this music video. Friday by Rebecca Black. I'm sorry.
WARNING - The following music video is both annoying and addictive!

Surely everybody has now heard the horrific song by Rebecca Black. Now i'm not going to dedicate this whole blog to insulting her and critisizing her song. Now, dont get me wrong, i'd love to do that. But I can't help but feel that would be a pretty harsh thing to do. Particularly as the song has continued to grow on me over the last two days, and (to my shame) i've been finding it more and more addictive, and hate myself for it!

Rebecca Black has become famous practically over night with the official video alone already reaching over 12 Million views within the last week(despite the video being online for over a month now). She's suddenly getting a lot of attention, particularly in the online community, trending on Twitter, spreading on Facebook, and generally gaining a lot of attention. Although, i doubt anybody would agree that it's good attention.

Rebecca is not too different to a lot of the musical 'talent' that is recieving a lot of praise(and money) for songs that just don't reach the standard that we should be expecting and demanding.

Now, before i start defending her, i just want to get out of my system how awfully bad I consider 'Friday' to be. The lyrics are dreadful, boring and repetitive. Her voice has clearly been altered quite a bit, yet it still has a slight odd noise to it that it seems they just couldn't take out.

Why did they have lyrics such as 'We so excited'?! Is this what they see as targetting at a young audience? I mean the odd changes to grammer and pronunciation is fine, but 'We so excited' is just so bad, i don't even understand why the decision was made to say it like that? It's so much easier to add 'are' into the middle of that sentence.

I think it's important to note that Rebecca is simply a young girl trying to live her dream. Whether she should be trying to live the dream aged 13 is another subject for another blog. But I think the issue is that the intention is for all of us to take this song seriously and view it as an attempt to get good recognition and praise for a job well done.
If this was simply a girl putting in a lot of effort to try and produce something for fun and to share with people then i think it would not have exploded into anything near as big as it is right now.
The idea that this was made with the vision of projecting Rebecca into stardom much like Justin Bieber or Miley Cyrus is what we find laughable. The rushed style of the song and the video makes it seem as though they are mocking the music industry and try to take in some easy money. Obviously this isn't the work of Rebecca, this is the people behind the music that are trying to target a very easy, gullible market of young teenagers.

In some ways i agree with a comment made on Yahoo! when they covered the recent products of 'Ark Music Factory' who are behind Rebecca Blacks songs. It stated that the company(based in LA) 'is a favourite of super-rich kids with pop star dreams, and, more importantly, plenty of parents' cash. The results are often music videos with high enough  production value but a deficit of talent and individuality'.

So before we start to be critical of her, i think we should turn out attention to the label and the people that have pushed ahead her song and made it the laughing stock that it has become. Because it seems that they've done her chances of a music career more harm than good. If they stopped trying to churn out as many 'young stars' as possible, and start giving each one more attention and focus, then maybe we wouldget some better quality products. And maybe, just maybe the music industry can get back some respect.

[You can read the yahoo article and see more horrific videos here - http://new.uk.music.yahoo.com/blogs/behind_the_music/47870/web-turns-on-13-year-old-singer/]

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