The recession caught them by surprise I guess.
by schwim on Jun.16, 2009, under Miscellaneous
If they hadn’t been too busy networking with pedophiles and 15 year old emos, Myspace Inc. might have noticed that we were in the midst of a recession and acted accordingly. Instead, they canned one third of their employees. Their stated reason? They wanted to get back to their roots”. It’s well known that Facebook was kicking their ass for some time. In reality, their resource stretching in an attempt to get back some real estate bit them in the ass.
I can see why Facebook took the lead in social networking, with incredibly hot promotional gimmicks like the “name grab” they had recently that went over like a lead balloon with anchors tied to it.
Well, at least we still have Twitter, although we almost lost it. Hehe, not really. But they did get some free advertising out of it, which is good.
It’s not these networks in particular that I have a problem with. It’s the users. Although I don’t have an account on any of them, you can’t help but to have been led to user pages in the past and it seems of my acquaintances, I’m the only person who doesn’t have accounts on all three of these sites.
In the Facebook article, they quoted a person’s Twitter post that was opining that the Facebook name grab was a failure. He used one social networking failure to make a statement about another social networking failure. These people have so few real goals in their life, they have time to hop from network to network, discussing the previous network.
Therein lies the problem. These networks cater to people who, outside of social networking, don’t seem to have a purpose. They’re the human equivalent of widgets. They’ve got iPhones with Twitter apps, Facebook addons, MySpace active desktop applets and numerous aggregators and notification services all to find out what’s going on in these networks, what people think of what they’ve said in their last post and who’s linking to them. As you wade through the shit, you realize that there are too few gems of wisdom lying around to make navigating the huge piles of refuse more trouble than it’s worth. Real content is so rare that it’s become the exception that proves the rule. If you want to know why we’re in the midst of a recession, just look to the social networks.
Not for information, dumbass. Just look at the users.
June 17th, 2009 on 12:49 am
I’ll begin with the assumption that humans interacting via online applications possess some worthwhile wisdom or knowledge – the “signal”.
If you spread the available signal power over a wide spectrum, the signal-to-noise ration drops in each spectrum segment. Since we mere humans only have the ability to observe one segment at a time, and the signal has spread very wide indeed, it looks, at first glance, like it’s just noise. If the spectrum-spreading algorithm is known and reversible (e.g. a chipping code) it can be recovered, but in the case of human social networking it appears to be nearly random, or so incredibly complex that signal reconstruction is impossible. More specifically, the amount of effort required to isolate and process the whole signal to regain any useful information becomes prohibitive.
Some people refer to all of these networking applications as being equivalent to a “hive mind”. But such a view makes the mistake of assuming that the signal can be reconstructed sufficiently well by its recipients to be recognisable and integrated into one’s own thoughts. As miraculous as the human mind is, our processing and comprehensive abilities fall far short of what is required for a “hive mind” to exist with the limits of current (and reasonably foreseeable) technology. About all we can do is recognise a few simple themes, providing they are expressed clearly enough, e.g. “swine flu = dangerous / coming to you soon / be afraid”. Such themes are as likely to be wrong as right and thus our perception of the reconstructed signal, like its counterpart in transmission, remains random on average and whatever the original pieces of real wisdom and knowledge are usually lost.
Of course, we can each apply a filter that discriminates signal from noise regardless of the spectrum segment in which it is in, but it only works one way – to isolate each signal input source by its unique signature, i.e. an identity or a page. Even filtering more broadly to a portion of one site rapidly becomes too resource-intensive to manage. Only in the most rare cases does a person or small group apply sufficient processing power to extract from the “noise” something more useful than an individual contribution.
And so, despite claims by their proponents that social networking services extend and improve our lives, in reality, they just create a lot of mental noise.
June 17th, 2009 on 12:53 am
Hey schwim, do you think I ought to cut back on the caffeine?
June 17th, 2009 on 1:42 am
Either that Bert, or take over my blog. That brought a tear to my eye.
I myself would find the coffee hard to give up.
June 17th, 2009 on 6:31 pm
Caffeine rules. And, in my case, cigarettes.
Good write, Bert. I get it and I think you’re right.
But I think the “signal” in social networking may not exist except for specific issues (i.e., Iran uprising). The significant issue is perhaps simply that it is happening among (younger) people in a quest to understand and make use of the virtual world.
Maybe it will just go away like the hula-hoop or disco or platform shoes or Vanilla Ice as people just get bored with it or (hopefully) choose to “get a life.”
June 17th, 2009 on 8:49 pm
what OS are you on, Rick?
June 17th, 2009 on 10:22 pm
Harrrr!!! Since last we spoke…..
>DL borked… would not load…. liked the single window install but “Installation complete. Have fun!” didn’t work for me… several attempts… no luck.
>That was on Thursday afternoon. Yard sale to get ready for on Saturday so, having no time to screw around, I ran Puppy 4.2 for a couple of days Sweet but IMHO not for everyday use. Downloaded F11 Gnome & KDE4.
>Tried F11 (both) but neither liked my hard drive: wanted to wipe and reinitialize. Had keeper data in another partition so screw that.
>Installed Debian(KDE) on same drive no problem. Said, “Hmmmmm…”
>Tried DL and F11 again on same drive. No way. Again: “Hmmmm…”
>Checked drive with PMagic LiveCD and fixed errors.
>Still no install DL and F11. “What?”
>Pulled drive and dropped in a 20GB. Installed F11 Gnome with ext4. Ok.
>Ran F11 for a couple of days. Updated completely and fully configured. Buggy and bloated.
>Pulled the 20GB and put back original. Installed Debian XFCE no problem.
>Fully configured it and love it. Very quick
>LXDE is on same Debian CD as XFCE so installed that to 20GB drive for giggles.. Like that too. Very lean and mean.
Looks like I’ll park with Deb/XFCE for awhile. Runs great on this box with no V/C and just a 1.4GH Athlon XP. Not much horsepower but it’s got 1GB Ram.
Adventures in LinuxLand but I’m stable again now.
June 17th, 2009 on 10:24 pm
I don’t know what we were worried about, Bert.
June 17th, 2009 on 11:45 pm
Well, I found this CNet article, titled Fedora 11, so easy you’ll forget it’s linux in the gen chat forum of linuxforums.com. I got a kick out of the fact that the thread pointing people to an article touting the ease of use became the forum’s most active support topic.
If it had come earlier, I’d be on it like white on rice, but as it stands it’s going to have to wait for me to get unhappy with one of my computers.
June 18th, 2009 on 9:08 am
The Cnet guy must work undercover for Ballmer: “Hey there WinPeople. You want to try Linux? Try Fedora. You’ll be back.”
June 18th, 2009 on 10:33 am
I think if you dig deep enough, you’ll find a single CD-R company behind all of the linux distros.
It’s the only explanation that makes sense.
June 18th, 2009 on 11:05 am
Uh…. okay…..I suppose…..