Fairweather Cynicism

Social media algorithms are a big part of our lives, and determine a lot of what we see. Often, they do a good job — my Facebook feed has long been dominated by Star Wars memes and baby animals. Though it occasionally makes inexplicable choices. Facebook has gone through phases of trying to get me interested in Polish history, the Miami Dolphins, and radical pan-Africanism. (Not jokes, actual examples.) In times like that, I wish I could just tell it that it’s got the wrong idea, and it would be best for it, me, and the company’s bottom line, if it just realized that I’m not interested in, say, Tennessee Williams quotes, so stop showing them to me. (Again, actual example.)

Lately, the thing I’d like to tell the algorithm is that yes, I’m a left-leaning person, but I don’t lean far enough to rejoice in the deaths of billionaires, however extravagant and symbolic their deaths may be. So no, I’d rather not see memes of gleeful schadenfreude at imminent and unpleasant death of wealthy people.

Here’s the thing I don’t get about this situation: If you’re the sort of person who won’t buy coffee without personally negotiating the fair-trade contract, then fine, I’m not surprised that your hatred of the economic order is so great that you would celebrate the death of the rich. But if your idea of supporting worker rights is hitting the 18% tip button on the debit machine at Subway, then I have a hard time reconciling that with your sudden bloodlust for the elites. 

I had a similar reaction last year when the Queen died. Again, I’m not a fan of the idea of royalty, but I wasn’t about to celebrate the death of someone because they occupy a position I don’t think should exist. But I was surprised at how many people suddenly developed deep passions about the crimes of the British Empire. I mean, the United Kingdom still plays a big part in the world’s culture, so you’d think that such a deep hatred would have come out by now. I’m not demanding a boycott of all things British, I’m just saying I would think you would occasionally mention such anger. Go ahead and love The Beatles, but sometimes mention that it’s too bad their success was enabled by national wealth built on the ashes of a world-spanning empire.

In both cases, pretending to have a radical stance on the issue is just a convenient excuse for behaviour. It’s easier to temporarily adopt a radical opinion than it is to show compassion. And it’s definitely easier than wrestling with the philosophical dilemmas brought on by the death of someone you have negative feelings towards. And there’s the bonus that your radical position will win you credibility with some people, as long as they don’t notice that your commitment to the cause just intermittent.

I covered something like this a few years ago, when I noticed the weirdness of people who thought McDonald’s steals from their Ronald McDonald House charity. These people still felt safe eating at McDonald’s, seemingly proving that they had far more confidence in the Golden Arches’ morality than they claimed. To be clear, I’m not saying that you aren’t allowed to criticize a system you participate in — a point of view ridiculed in a popular meme — just don’t pretend to be the nihilistic rebel that you clearly aren’t.

Toe Beans Of The Apocalypse

Recently on Facebook, I saw a cutesy picture of a cartoon kitten carrying some flowers. It was one of those pictures that was so adorable that it transcended even its own cliched nature. So I'm sitting there thinking, aw cute widdle kitty, when something struck me as a little odd about it. The slightly soft-focus CGI looked eerily familiar...

Then I noticed it: the kitten had six toes on its paw!

What, that wasn’t a dramatic revelation for you? Oh, well, if you're not familiar with that implication, A.I.-generated art is becoming a big controversy, and - despite its leaps-and-bounds in recent years - it’s notorious for getting fingers wrong. So this picture was evidently created by one of the new graphics services that can create a picture for you based on a simple text description.

A few years ago, A.I. art programs just made weird nightmare images. But recently, they’ve been making great strides, and can now do convincing pictures of a wide variety of subjects using just about any style you can think of. But they still have their flaws, including their difficulties with hands and fingers.

That’s kind of a good thing; in the midst of the A.I.-pocalypse, this whole extra-fingers thing is kind of exciting, because it's exactly the kind of contrived plot-point they'd throw into a science-fiction story for convenience, which the fans would forever be complaining about. It's like on Star Trek, where Data couldn't use contractions. 

By the way, I used to think Data’s contractions thing was pretty unbelievable, but then I learned that the laws of contractions really are quite cryptic. They’re a lot more complex than people think they’re.

I've experimented with some of the A.I. art generators, and learned some things about them. There’s Midjourney which is quite powerful, but only free for a limited number of uses, and can only be accessed on the Discord social network. 

"Elephant playing basketball" by Midjourney

Then there’s Stable Diffusion, which is free to use, though limited in its functionality. For instance, you can’t refine pictures, you can only ask it to try again. Overall, I found its first attempts were a lot better.

"Elephant playing basketball" by Stable Diffusion

I’d seen some amazing A.I. art on social media, so I enthusiastically tried it out. But I found out that it doesn’t always work. Here’s some of my successes (done with Stable Diffusion.)

"Steampunk motorcycle"

"Chocolate hippo"

"Humanoid nerdy bunny"

"Cow playing hockey style of Pixar"

"George Clooney made of lego"

But a lot of times the results leave a lot to be desired. Here's some of what I've learned:

• They take refinement. Generally the programs work by producing several attempts. The (human) user can then choose one of those pictures to improve upon. And improving on the pictures, slowly getting closer to the desired outcome, is usually necessary. The impressive examples you see are never the first efforts. Those first attempt are usually half-formed nightmares that look like Scotty's first try working the transporter. 
• On the other hand, they're great at styles. I've seen them imitate everything from Monet to Rankin-Bass Christmas specials. Even in instances where the application flubbed the content, it usually got the style right.

"Business man driving convertible style of Roy Lichtenstein" by Midjourney. Nailed the style; content, not so much.

Anyway, the deformed kitten was an example of how A.I. art is making its way into the mainstream, and a lot of people are unhappy. For one thing, it’s taking work from artists; though many of the A.I. art programs require a subscription, it’s still pretty cheap, and it’s easy to imagine a small firm opting for that instead of paying an artist every time they need a picture. Then there's also the use of styles. No one is really upset if ol' Monet is getting ripped off, but it can also be used to copy the style of artists and cartoonists that are working for a living today.

"Elvis style of Gorillaz" by Stable Diffusion

The whole thing is reminiscent of NFT's. On the one hand, you have people who are enthusiastic either because it's an intriguing new technology, or because there's money to be made. So they jump on the new bandwagon. It was weird watching businesses make big announcements about getting into cryptocurrencies or NFT's, only to have howls of protest from customers. The business was then caught unprepared, because they’d spent decades working on the assumption that they had to get into new technologies as fast as possible or be left behind. 

And now it's happening again with A.I. art. Worse, some of the companies that are making the mistake are in the creative industries, and thus supposed to be allies of the artists who are most wary of the new tech. Companies like Adobe and book publisher Tor have had to go into quick damage-control mode.

But there is one way this might work out well: if Big Media starts to protect its intellectual property. For instance, one of the most impressive A.I. pictures I made was "Mickey Mouse in a cafe, painted by Monet." But I’m afraid to put it on this post for fear of getting sued out of existence. That’s one thing that could stop the art-pocalypse in its tracks: some decisive court case, or a strict new law, like how the DMCA was an overreaction to MP3’s. 

Interestingly, using A.I. art for memes, like that kitten, is probably the least controversial use of the technology. It’s not putting anyone out of work. And as I’ve pointed out before, Facebook memes are often hacked-together pop-culture references that completely contradict the creator’s intentions.

So for now, I find the whole thing interesting, but I'm much less enthusiastic, learning that has unpleasant imperfections and implications.

Are Friends Eclectic?

I saw this meme on Facebook a while back. That really stood out to me, since It’s become accepted wisdom among many that modern technology has left us more “connected” with people but emotionally distant. I’m sceptical of this concept, since I’d always noticed how superficial a lot of our interactions used to be even in the pre-social media world. I mean, you talk to far fewer people in the course of an average day now, but most of those lost moments of human contact were forgettable rote interactions. If you now buy things on Amazon instead of a store, you don’t really lose any emotional involvement, since the interaction with a store employee is usually just you playing a part based on expectations.

This meme takes that same concept to new heights: in the same way that you may play a part in your interactions with/as service workers, you also play a part as a high school student. In each case, you act as expected, and this prevents you from having a meaningful involvement. Yes, I know, lots of people develop really deep friendships in high school. But compared to the total number of people you go to school with, and the amount of time you spend with them, it’s amazing how little you know about them.

This comes back to a point I realized a few years ago. It’s not something that’s easy to say, and some people will be shocked by it, but The Breakfast Club lied to us. Its message was that teenagers can be pushed into different roles, but still have commonalities. There’s some truth to that, but it’s also true that high school forces a sameness on us. As I watch my friends and I age, I keep noticing personality come out that couldn’t be expressed before. In school there's so much pressure to play the roll of a teen that you suppress your unique features.

This might be a product of age: we just need a lot of time to explore the world and find ourselves. Our maybe it's due to the same modern technology that delivered that meme: The Internet has allowed us to connect with others with similar inclinations instead of having to fit in to a community of others that we have little in common with. Certainly that’s one thing I’ve envied today’s kids for: the Internet gives them a chance to pursue their interests regardless of how isolated their real-life situation.

But I suspect that my new understanding is because of the different perspective you have of your high school friends now. For adults, social media is more a respite from the world than a part of it. It's the people you choose to be around rather than those you must be around. Thus, it's safer to keep your guard down and be yourself. If people don't like what they see, you're an unfriending away from ending the problem. The irony is that the people you're now allowing to peek behind the mask are the people you used to show the mask to.

Weighty Ghost

I'm often seeing memes on Facebook reminising sarcastically about the past, saying something like, "When I was a kid, I rode a bike without a helmet and somehow I survived."

Well of course you did. If you didn't survive, you wouldn't be on Facebook to talk about it, now would you? I'd like to believe that somewhere out there is a Ghostbook, where dead people network, and they have their own memes. "When I was a kid, I rode a bike without a helmet, and I suffered a fatal brain injury."

I've since discovered that this is called Survivorship Bias. And ironically I learned that from a Facebook meme.

Any sort of protecting-our-kids-too-much issue is really frustrating. I mean even more than your average Facebook-based politico-philosophocal discussion. It's bad enough when you have an issue that has an intellectually-justified side and an emotionally-justified side and they just argue past each other. But in this case, both sides have a big emotional component. I didn't need a helmet, so today's kids shouldn't wear them, statistics be damned. My kid was in an accident, so all kids should wear a helmet, balancing of public safety and individual freedom be damned.

So whenever I see someone simplistically make one of these arguments, I wish I could steer them towards one of the people making simplistic arguments the other way. You guys just yell slogans and throw memes at each other.  We'll be over here talking it over like adults.

Filtering Facebook

Yesterday the local TV station did a story on the murderer who streamed his killing on Facebook. Or, to be specific, it was about the use of the Internet to publicise the crime. I had several problems with it. For one thing, they played a lot of the video (cutting it before the act itself, of course.) But the most objectionable aspect of the filming was the making the innocent victim a prop in his game of revenge, and showing the recording plays into that.

But that was clearly not the way they were looking at it. The reporter went through some other crimes that have been broadcast on Facebook or other social media sites. That list included the case of Philando Castile, who was shot by a police officer, which was recorded by his girlfriend, who wanted to show that the killing was unprovoked. Now most people would say there is a world of difference between a remorseless killer broadcasting his crime as a twisted revenge and a victim broadcasting a crime to prove its injustice. But in this case the journalist was more concerned with the fact that violence is being spread on the Internet, than with the causes of the violence.

And that brings up another aspect of the story that I find frustrating: the apparent surprise that a person can post something violent on the Internet. To be clear, Facebook did take the video down (although they took their time about it.) But this report (and several other media outlets I've come across.) Seem to be questioning how the video got on the site to begin with. I'm not really sure what they're envisioning; Do they expect teams of people vetting everything uploaded to Facebook, or Artificial Intelligence that can make sense of videos at the level that they can tell the difference between an actual murder and a clip from an action movie.

I can't believe that we're a quarter-century into the Internet revolution and we're still having this conversation. If we're going to have a medium where everyone is a publisher or broadcaster, there is no way we can automatically edit out what we don't want. We can act to remove it when it happens, but we can't have a world where objectionable material never appears. In other media, society came to an understanding with what was possible and what was reasonable to expect. No one expects the phone company to stop people planning crimes using their system. We've made - and accepted - the idea that the reduction in crime wouldn't be worth the expense or intrusion in privacy. But we can't seem to reach that consensus with today's technology.

Just to clarify, I'm not one of those techno-libertarians who thinks the Internet shouldn't have any rules. We do need rules, and our Internet institutions could usually benefit from more of them. We just need to be realistic about what they can do. And that's part of why I'm angry about this: there are important discussions that we need to have in this society about what's going to be acceptable on the Internet, but we can't have those discussions because so many of us still live in a fantasy world where we can get anything we want just by telling the nerds to throw technology at it.

You Quite Literally Can't Handle The Truth

Recently, I saw a graphic being passed around Facebook, about peppers. It said that you can tell the gender of sweet peppers by the number of lobes on the bottom. (plants can have genders too; you knew that, right? ) Three lobes: male, four : female. And this also has a slight effect on the taste and texture of the pepper.

This sort of claim lands in the shadow of doubt for me. Weirder things are true, but they usually aren't. So I googled "pepper gender," somewhat alarmed at what I might find.

Actually, I just got a link to the misinformation-quashing site snopes.com. They pointed out that it's not true; peppers don't really have gender. They also pointed out that this is an urban legend that's been around for a while, but it's recently received new life on social media.

So now there are going to be thousands of people around the world choosing their peppers based on incorrect information, possibly taking out their romantic frustrations on their vegetables. "Think you can go a week without calling, Mr. Three-Lobes?" That's hardly a concern, but this is of course just an innocent and less emotionally-charged example of a much bigger problem: misinformation being spread - and believed - all over the Internet.

What's troubling is the disregard for the truth. In the above example, I made an assessment of the believability given the unknown source. But I also took advantage of the fact that the Internet can be used to easily look up facts, rather than passively consume them. I also have greater credence to an authority than to an anonymous source. Snopes.com isn't exactly the word of God, but I'm going to believe them long before someone I don't know, and has shown no credentials beyond a modest ability with Photoshop.

But I seem to be the exception rather than the rule. People are quite willing to believe anything they see on the Internet, a fact symbolized by the Oxford English Dictionary giving its word of the year award to the term, "post-truth."

Post-truth will probably be a term to define our era, so it will be hilarious when future historians look back and see that it's predecessor as word of the year was the crying with laughter emoji. So any future research into how this became the post-truth era will be short and sweet.

So how did we get here? We have the greatest information sharing device ever, and it's led to a total lack of consideration for the truth. Coincidentally, that question was recently posed to Brooke Binkowski, Managing Editor of Snopes.com. She said that it was a result of the low quality of mainstream news. I find that hard to believe. I mean, I'm as critical of them as anyone; throughout the election campaign, I kept fantasizing about the eventual downfall of conventional media, picturing Don Lemon on the streets, holding a hand-written sign reading, "will repeat talking-points for food."

But the fact is, the public is abandoning established news services for even lower quality online sources. I don't think anyone is saying, "my newspaper's reporting is too superficial, I'm going to switch to this web site that says Hillary Clinton had Justice Scalia murdered.

Actually, I first saw the post-truth world coming twenty years ago when the Internet was first going mainstream. I remember seeing a political discussion, in which someone referred to how Franklin Roosevelt created the New Deal, and that triggered the Great Depression.

Of course, many have critiqued and questioned the wisdom and success of the New Deal over the years, but everyone remembers it as a response to the Great Depression. Reversing the causality is a brazen attempt to rewrite history. When called on it, the far-right folks in that old newsgroup hedged a bit, saying, yeah well it made the depression worse, and that's what they really meant.

But the incident opened my eyes to the possibilities of a media world where there are so many voices. What we know to be true is really just the consensus of experts. After all, I wasn't around for the Great Depression; my knowledge of it is based on the words of those that have studied it. It could be that I have been deceived, but I think it's unlikely that so many would be so wrong in such an organized way. But what about when the waters are muddied by many people claiming to be experts? Or what if you're just not that choosy about who's expertise you trust?

Really, I don't think there's any explanation for our entering the post-truth world other than, we can. All this time we've held together the concensus of society only because there are so few microphones. Despite all the rhetoric that The Man controls The Message to his own ends, the fact is that people who get to speak are usually more-or-less deserving of authority. Without that bottleneck on information we'll need to develop a new way of attributing authority.

Now I Wonder How Whatsername Has Been

After today was mostly over, I discovered that it was National Unfriend Day. As you can guess, it's a day in which you are encouraged to unfriend people on social media, particularly Facebook. Apparently this was started by Jimmy Kimmel.  (Though the story about it on the evening news didn't mention that part, so as a viral marketing tool, it didn't work that well.) According to the Facebook page, you should use the following criteria:

• If you wouldn’t loan someone 50 dollars, unfriend them.
• If you wouldn’t invite them to your birthday party, unfriend them.
• If you wouldn’t cry if they got hit by a bus, unfriend them.

I'm not sure about those rules: I've never had large parties, and I would cry for a number of people I wouldn't loan fifty bucks to. But maybe I'm just emotional. After all, I don't really get the concern some people have over friendship being so broadly defined on social media.

Sure, there are plenty of practical concerns about how many friends you have. You can only keep up with so many people, you don't want to share your personal information with someone you just met, and some people post way too much stuff.  Or they post things that make you angry, which is another odd thing about this day: why have Unfriend Day right after American election day?  We've just gone through months of unfriending, with no promotion needed.

Beyond those problems, I don't see why there's a problem with having too many friends.  Unfriend Day's page says it's to "protect the sacred nature of friendship," but I don't think that's a problem.  My close friendships are not harmed just because my friend is also friends with someone they met at night school eight years ago, or the woman in HR he can't remember the last name of.

I'm not just targeting Kimmel here: Others have tried to put down social media friends over the years, portraying them as meaningless things that are little more than acquaintances.  I've always thought that feeling was misguided; there's a lot to be said for those lighter friendships.  I'm not pretending that they are the equivalent of the people you share a close connection with.  But they are a big part of your life. After all, since those relationships include most of your co-workers, and many people you socialize with, you probably spend half your waking hours with them.  They have a big impact on whether you gave good days or bad, and a person who has a positive effect on you can make a big difference in your life.

And the fact is, you don't know when you may have to depend on a sort-of friend.  You don't know when misfortune may strike, and you might need to rely on your acquaintances.  You may find that when push comes to shove, they care more than you expected.  Maybe they'll even loan you fifty dollars.

So don't unfriend your less-close friends.  Instead, be glad that we have technology to maintain connections with so many people. And you could reflect on how so many people have affected your life. Or at least, wonder why anyone would look at this world and decide the problem is that there are too many friends.

I'm Walkin' Here

I saw this graphic being passed around on Facebook:

I was wondering who actually said this, so I looked it up. Most graphics attribute it to author Albert Camus. Now first of all, I invite you to think over the implication of a Camus quote being associated with Winnie The Pooh. This is a guy whose most famous novel is about an unemotional man being tried for murder. I figured that somehow this graphic was put together by someone who didn't know the origin of the quote. Certainly it was by someone who didn't know the application of modern copyright laws. Winnie The Pooh is a Disney property, and you don't want to tangle with their lawyers.

But after you've come to terms with existentialist Pooh, then you can try to come to terms with this: I found many other graphics on the web that attribute the quote to Camus, but are just as cutesy.

Of course, all these graphics have one thing in common: they are graphics of quotes on the Internet, therefore they are inaccurate. I looked it up, and although it is cannot be proven diffinitively, he probably never said it.

Please people, if you're going to pass around inspirational images of Camus quotes, at least use something he actually said:

Feedback On Facebook

Usually, when Facebook advertises or suggests something to me, and it's something out of the ordinary, I can assume it's related to my interests.  Or at least, interests that I've told Facebook about.  For instance, today I got this:

He's the president from Dr. Strangelove, and I've listed it as a favourite movie.  So it's appropriate to me, and seems relevant right now. Though sometimes the ads are a bit more distantly related.  Take that Japanese group that's being publicized in the right margin.  I have no idea how that got suggested, or what those two schoolgirls are doing. I swear the only anime movies I've liked on Facebook are Ghost in the Shell and Princess Mononoke. So I don't know how such risqué images got on my Facebook: it's unrelated to everything else, just like Brie Larson seems out of place with the other two trending topics.

But then yesterday I got this:

That's a mystery, since I don't have a religion listed, nor have I posted anything religious.  I know Facebook ads can be influenced by your friends' interests, and some friends occasionally post Christian inspirational messages.  But I'd like to believe I got that suggestion because of the following horrendous misunderstanding:

The fact that I didn't get just any Christian page, but specifically Jesus and Mary, makes me think that someone has misunderstood the Scottish band with a similar name but not-so religious basis.  Of course, if this has happened to everyone listing the Jesus and Mary Chain as a favourite band, then the Jesus and Mary Facebook page has been flooded by confused Gen-Xers, which would have been entertaining to watch.  I guess I should have clicked on it.

Judged By Dog

I'm getting kind of sick of dog owners on the Internet and their bragging about how much their dogs mean to them.  Well, it's not that their dogs mean so much - I'm glad they get enjoyment from their pets.  It's that they can't seem to testify to their dog love without putting people down.  That seems like an odd thing to do on social media, since it's built around your friendships with people.

An example is this graphic.  I have no idea if I have the rights to publish this here, but it's been around Facebook a few times so I figure no one will mind.

Et tu, Bill?  Well, as is so often the case with quote images, it turns out this actually comes from a parody account, not Murray himself.

But real or not, I've seen that same sentiment from a lot of people, and I find it kind of threatening, since I'm definitely not a dog person.  Of course, lots of people aren't dog people, since there are plenty of cat people out there.  Sure, some people may claim to be in each camp, but how many actually have both animals?  Dogs and cats, living together - mass hysteria.

I'm not a dog person, but that doesn't mean that I don't like dogs.  I like dogs in the same way that I like tigers.  I admire them, but I don't want to be confined to a closed space with them.  Of course by that definition, almost everyone likes dogs, which is why I suspect that the non-Bill Murray person who said this meant you have to love being around dogs and living with dogs to qualify.

As for dogs being such reliable arbiters of trust, have you noticed how random dog behaviour is?  They don't even have consistent opinions of their owners, never mind a reliable judgement of strangers. One of the reasons I'm so uneasy around dogs is that their reactions to me have always been unpredictable.  I don't know if they're going to bark their head off (which must mean I'm not trustworthy) slobber all over me (meaning I've passed the test) or take no notice (I guess means I'm okay but boring.)  And the fact that the enthusiastic welcome is about as sudden and violent as the complete rejection, further makes me wonder how reliable judges they are.

So please, dog owners, open yourself to the idea that your dogs are not psychic, and that non-dog people may have some merit. And celebrity quotes are nearly always fake, stop spreading them around.

Please Forward This Post To Demonstrate What Happens When People Forward Posts

It was many months ago - maybe a few years - that I saw a picture passed around on Facebook, of kids demonstrating how far things can spread online. They had a sign saying that as part of a school assignment they were asking everyone to keep forwarding the picture, to see just how many people it would reach.  That seemed like a cute idea.  By the time I saw it, it had already been shared and liked thousands of times.  The point was made, to the kids and the many who saw it.

Get that?  The point was made.  There's no need to keep repeating the same experiment.  I keep seeing more and more of them.  Frankly, I didn't think this really needed demonstrating in the first place.  To see the power of social media, you don't need to set up a photo with pleading children, you just need to watch what you are consuming online.  Just in the last 24 hours, that bad Robert Downey Jr. interview has gone viral.  So don't set up your own demonstration, just imagine he's holding a sign asking you to consider how stories spread on the Internet.

The irony is that the copycat viral media demonstrations are casting doubt on their own thesis.  If these pictures were so widely spread, people would realise just how redundant they've become.  You want to show kids how far viral stories go?  Then you must not have seen the last twelve people who did the same thing, which means they didn't really spread that far.  It's sort of like those ads you see on benches and bus shelters that say, "You Just Proved Advertising Works."  Yeah, and you just proved that you're having trouble selling ad space.

Facebook Outbreak

Today, The Guardian reported on a study suggesting that Facebook will lose most of its users over the next few years, and fade from relevance. A lot of it is based on esoteric statistical observations of social networks and their similarities to the spread of diseases. The biggest piece of evidence that's directly related to Facebook is that there's been a significant reduction in Google searches for Facebook.

So yes, a reduction in people's interest in Facebook is one explanation for that. But might I offer my own explanation, which is that EVERYONE ON THE %$@#& PLANET ALREADY KNOWS THE #@$&# URL.  Granted, lots of people Google a site, even if they know the site's name.  For instance, in looking up The Guardian, I typed "Guardian" in Google, rather type it in the URL bar and play Russian Porn Roulette. But if I read The Guardian daily, I'd know it is theguardian.com.  I memorized the URL of Facebook on about the second day I used it.  I also bookmarked it, which brings me to a second explanation for the reduced Googling of Facebook: People have figured out the "bookmark" feature on every browser in existence. I'll give the researchers credit that they did think up the third explanation I came up with, which is that more and more people are accessing Facebook through apps. 

So no, I'm not convinced that Facebook will be going the way of the Bubonic Plague.  I may have been critical of Facebook in the past, but I do admit that it does have a real purpose in allowing people to communicate and keep in touch, and that usefulness isn't going away just because the hype has died down.  So just as the people saying Facebook will take over the world were exaggerating, the predictions of its doom are just as inaccurate.

Tech History (May) Repeat Itself

Facebook made a big announcement today about their new phone initiative.  They had long been rumoured to be working on a phone, and been denying they were working on one for just as long.  So some people thought it would just be a new app.  But they recently modified their Android app to remove all the suck.

It turned out both sides were sort-of right.  They announced a new "home screen" for Android, which will let people see their Facebook stuff without going into their Facebook app.  It will come standard on some new phones.  The reports I've read haven't been clear but I'm assuming you can also download it too.  But the fact that they seem to be stressing the fact that it comes on new phones makes it seem that they'd like to be a major part of your phone purchase decision.

Will it be successful?  My first thought is, no.  The whole thing makes me think of Microsoft Bob.  For you young'uns out there, Bob was a new, easier computer interface for people who found even the then-new Windows desktop too confusing.  Instead of the metaphor of a desktop with folders and files and a garbage can, it used the metaphor of a person walking around a house.  It sounds foolish to admit this now, but at the time I assumed Bob would become a standard part of computing, much the same way we became stuck with Windows whether we liked it or not.

Of course, it didn't happen that way.  Bob was soundly rejected, and came to be the tech industry's equivalent of the Edsel.  And that contributed to the widely-held notion that Microsoft can't create any new product on their own, and need someone else - usually Apple - to create the prototype.

Anyway, that's why I'm a little afraid that the Facebook homepage or whatever it's called might be something we're all stuck with, but also why I'm reassured that we won't be.  Having said that though, there are a couple of reasons why it might yet work.

In a Wired writeup on it, they emphasize that the Facebook phone will be seen as the easy way to use the Internet, since that is essentially what Facebook itself is: a simpler, easier version of the Internet.  That in itself is not a very convincing argument.  You know who else had that "Internet, but easier" strategy?  AOL.  And it worked for them for a while, until people got comfortable with computers and the Internet and found other options.  What's more, Facebook users - while not as young and hip as stereotyped - are not exactly the elderly tech-newcomers that were AOL's bread-and-butter.

But Wired's "Facebook makes things easy" article dovetails nicely with another article of theirs that illustrates the shocking disparity between Android and iPhone users.  It turns out that although there are twice as many Android users, iPhone users do double the web surfing.  That seems to play into the perception that iPhone users are looking for a device that does lots of things, while Android users just buy a phone and don't really know or care what it does.

In that case an Android phone that does things easily and without that fuss of downloading apps and figuring out how they work, could be successful.  Add to that the phone makers need for differentiation:  they love Android because it's cheap but popular, but they hate the fact that if you make Android phones, you're competing with all the other makers of Android phones making the same product.  They wish they could mark up the price for a well known brand the way Apple can, but really they're making the equivalent of a no-name phone.  That's why Android phone and tablets have the so-called "crapware": apps and widgets supplied by the manufacturer to try to make their Android phone seem different from their competitor's Android phone.  The Facebook homepage would be a great way to make your product to stand out, so you know manufacturers are going to give it the promotion it needs to survive.

Bet My Friends Aren't Interested

Yesterday, people were speculating about what Facebook was working on.  Then today, we found out it was a search thingie: you can search for which friends have certain interests, or have been to certain places.  Or you can search for, say, which TV shows your friends tend to like.  I was pretty disappointed with that.  Ever since social networks became an important technology, there's been talk about how some company could somehow use them for searching, and kick Google's ass.  So Facebook is going to have another go at that idea.  Technologically it seems pretty sophisticated, but I still don't see people getting much use out of it.

If you're talking about searching amongst your friends, well, I already know them, I don't need a web site to do that for me.  In the introduction event, Mark Zuckerberg himself gave the example of searching for which of your friends are fans of Game of Thrones.  True, I don't know precisely which of my friends that would be, but I can take a pretty good guess.

On the other hand, if we're talking about searching amongst the huge network of people on Facebook around the world, then privacy concerns are going to put the kibosh on that.  Or if this is aimed at people who have thousands of "friends" they barely know, that searching among them is of limited use.

I wonder if this is a result of all the young people who don't understand today's technology.  No, seriously, hear me out:  I grew up without the Internet, when an almanacs were a huge repository of knowledge.  Once the Internet went mainstream, we were all shocked by just how much information there is out there that wasn't previously available.  If you're asking me whether to search the whole world, or just the part of it that my friends and I have experienced, I'm going to pick the former (no offence.)  Perhaps a deeply connected person who's grown up with deeply connected friends may not appreciate their limitations.

Poke A Fork In It, 'Cause It Is Done

That's it, I'm officially on the "Facebook is screwed" bandwagon.  People have been talking about it for a while, asserting it's only a matter of time before it's going to take its place with Friendster and MySpace.  I haven't really taken much notice of their talk, since it sounded like the usual clamouring to be the first to predict the downfall of X, where 'X' is pretty much anything that's been successful. 

But now I think there's something to it.  Why?  I got a cell phone.  As many have pointed out, Facebook has a problem with mobile computing.  By the company's own admission in their IPO filing, they don't get any income from their mobile clients, since there's no advertising or games on their mobile app.  Everything they make comes from people using full computers.  There's plenty of those people, so they're making money, it's just a weird business model if you think about it.  It would be like a fast food place that charged people in the restaurant, but gave food away for free at the drive-through.

But now I've discovered another Facebook weakness on mobile: you can play all the games outside of Facebook.  Yes, you can just download apps of many of the games and play them against your friends, without logging in to Facebook itself. 

If you've been on Facebook since it first went mainstream, you'll remember that the apps used to be a wide variety of fun and original things.  But through Facebook's many redesigns and re-imaginings, the apps have been diluted down to mainly games, and those are dominated by Zynga's formula of calculatingly addictive time wasters, which help Facebook make money selling credits, not to mention the ads shown to people who keep coming back to play.

But now I've downloaded SongPop, and I'm playing against friends without logging in to Facebook.  I'm going to do the same with Scrabble, even though it insists on my joining Electronic Arts' new network called Origin.  But that just shows how easily someone else can step in and take over social gaming.

(Yes, Stargate SG-1 fans, there is a great "accepting Origin" joke to be made here, but I can't find a way to make it without confusing everyone else.  Giggle amongst yourselves.)

So that's it, we don't need Facebook for gaming, we can put humourous and inspirational pictures on Pinterest, post statuses on Twitter, and discuss things with your friends in, I don't know, real life.  Facebook stock will just keep going down, and the only people who will have made any money out of it will be the folks who made The Social Network.

I'm Complicated

Not-So-Targeted Marketing

Hooray! Technology is Getting Weird Again!

I still can't wrap my head around Facebook's billion dollar purchase of Instagram.  It just got weirder when I found out that Instagram is given away for free and has never made a cent.  Yes, dot-com times are here again, revenue doesn't matter, it's more important to have users than income, and everyone with a half-assed idea will try to get rich with it.  I'm looking forward to the bizarre ideas we'll be seeing in the next decade.  What does it say about us that our economy is most interesting when it's behaving totally irrationally?

Certainly I'm trying to come up with my billion-dollar idea.  I'm starting with the principle that Instagram is a dumbed-down Photoshop that's connected to the Internet, so I'm trying to think what other popular desktop software can be simplified for the iPhone set.  When you put it that way, Instagram's success is a little more understandable: This particular audience consists largely of people who have been introduced to computers through smartphones, and aren't fully versed in what they're capable of.

Instagram is to Photoshop as my app is to _______.  So what desktop software goes in the blank?  I was thinking of a simplified spreadsheet, but the simplified, mobile version would be a calculator.  Even I'm not nerdy enough to want a calculator that posts it's results to Twitter.  How about a simplified, mobile blogging platform?  That would be Twitter.  Original crazy ideas are hard to make.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Facebook Memes

I recently saw a posting on Facebook pointing out that this July will have five Sundays, five Mondays and five Tuesdays, and that furthermore, this only happens every four-hundred years or something.

This reminded me of a calendar I had as a child.  It was a calendar of that year (I'm figuring it would have been 1978) but a blurb at the top of the calendar pointed out that it would also work for the then distant year of 2006.  Needless to say, this blew my preschooling mind.  But the point is, I was introduced early on to the fact that there are only a limited number of possible calendars that keep getting re-used.  If you think about it, it's only fourteen (it's either a leap-year or it isn't, and each of those two types of years can start on any one of the seven days of the week.)

My point is, the claim about this July being really exceptional is not true.  For myself and most of my friends, it isn't even the first time in our lives that we've seen a July like that (dig out your 1984 calendars, guys.)  Big deal, you say, something on the Internet wasn't true.  Well, I've long been used to the idea that there are lots of dishonest people out there.  What surprises me is what silly things they're being dishonest about.  Oooh, you fooled people about the details of the Gregorian Calendar, you must really feel superior now.

Another great example comes from the video below.  It was sent to me in an e-mail, but being loath to click on an e-mail link, I looked it up on YouTube instead, where the comments tipped me off to the inaccuracies.

It's entertaining, but like I say, those claims appearing in the video were not entirely accurate.  It turns out it wasn't made with old farm equipment, and it didn't take 13,000+ hours to set up.  And it wasn't actually build by the Robert M. Trammell Music Conservatory or the Sharon Wick School of Engineering at the University of Iowa, nor is it on display at the Matthew Gerhard Alumni Hall.  And it turns out none of those places actually exist.  And neither does the machine in the video - it was all computer animation done by a company showing off its technology.  Someone made up the story around it, added the graphics describing that made-up story, and uploaded it to YouTube, presumably starting the e-mail as well.

Why?  To fool a bunch of people who have never been to Iowa into believing that a certain fictitious pair of schools exist, or that a grainy computer animation is real?  Is there some psychological condition that makes people enjoy really mundane hoaxes?  Convincing people that Paul is dead was impressive, but if you're going to start a lie this lame, you should really find a way to get money or political power out of it.

Things the Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About the Future, #2

One of the most widely-played computer games is a farming simulation.