Burning Bridges

Based on the lack of a response, I think I've burnt my bridges at Facebook.  Honestly, it's a bit sad because I like to think both my management and GraphQL skills are pretty good and they create some amazing tech - but I didn't mince words after the second exchange:

<name>, I would love to work for you as a company that has such cool tech. But I have to say....as someone who understands you have an audience of three billion and can't get your %^%% together when it comes to being a responsible entity in the world....I'm concerned.  I really don't think I can be part of that....I can barely stand to talk to friends on FB knowing the implications for the world politically. simply because we're sharing memes and humor and that supports your visibility for antisocial upvoting.  Let me know when your ML is cleaned up and doesn't cause global stress. I fully understand I could help fix your problems ethically, but I haven't seen a commitment to resolving the problem/s.

As someone who works in ML, I get it's a challenge and there are hard problems, but it's a challenge a company has to step into, not talk away.  I truly hope FB finds an ethical sweet spot

8 years - World Domination: Total War

According to Facebook, my wife and I have been friends on the app for 8 years.  So that must be about my tenure on the platform.  I think the very first game I played was World Domination: Total War.  Followed closely by Mafia Wars.  Every time Total War reminds me, I buy additional weapons.  8 years in and I still don't have them all, although I have all the countries under my control including China and the US.  If I believed in magical thinking, the day I buy my last battleship is the day I'll cease to use Facebook.

 

Poke Poke

What's that?  Ming seems to be wearing out while poking me in Facebook?  He just doesn't have the same gumption he once had?  Is it like I'm the terminator?  Merciless in my ability to poke back?  It's like I'm just sitting there waiting for him to poke me?  I wonder if that turing test/stopwatch joke makes sense now.

For My Sister-in-law's Next "What Celebrity Do You Look Like?" on Facebook

The next time there's one of those "Post a Picture of Someone Famous You Look Like" events on Facebook, I would suggest my sister go with this picture of Charisma Carpenter.  Damn close.

Pigman?

I'm at a loss. This was in my context ads in Facebook. What does the pigchild have to do with debt relief? Are they telling me if I have all the medical bills associated with having a pig baby they can help me with my problems? Wouldn't I make enough money to help with raising my pig baby just by taking him/her on Oprah and the like?

I suspect this is just to catch my eye. I guess it worked.

Facebook Reflections

I've been reading this article by Time.com, "Does Facebook Replace Face Time, Or Enhance It?" It's an intriguing question (there are a bunch of related articles at the bottom around Facebook as well). In the spirit of my recent discussion about Wordle and Technorati, the article seemed a motivator to talk about other services I use. Over the last few months I've seen some of my blogger friends move to Facebook (with a decrease in activity or cessation of their blog, or a bit of cross posting), or take up a semblance of online communication again via Facebook since their blog lapsed into disuse (at Code Freeze last week, Neal Ford made a point of pruning those dead feeds in order to eliminate a source of distraction). Other friends and family, who would never have blogged, have found a home on Facebook, poking, updating their status, and posting the odd set of photos. I update my Facebook status once in a while, or throw a link at a friend who might appreciate it, but I find myself using the service as more of what the article refers to as a "self-updating address book", one that ties together people I know from my past (high school) and people I know now (work). Usually it's not something along the lines of this quote:

"Jenny and I, along with three of our childhood pals from Saratoga Springs, N.Y., learned that a dear old friend had ended her seven-year relationship through a Facebook status change. We expressed dismay, albeit through Facebook's IM feature, that we had to learn such potent information in this impersonal way."

I'm not saying that they're right and the friend should have let them know in person. Quite the opposite. If you can't come to terms with remote communication as a norm, or at least the norm as a catalyst for most communication, you're not making the leap to the digital culture and it's too bad your children will one day have to listen to your diatribes about how in the good old days you saw everyone face to face and now everything is bad and, by the way, what should you do with the sea shells? I did learn about a friend's divorce via Facebook when she changed her status. And I'm guilty of letting people know I was in the hospital with an infection via Facebook, although primarily because of the immediacy of Facebook over blogging and because the interface to Facebook via my PDA is much cleaner and easier to access when you're falling asleep too fast to type anything substantial. I imagine Twitter would have sufficed just as well if my friends were Twitterites. The full story of something as personal as surgery, or divorce (only if Pooteewheet never throws away the Discovery Channel defective rock polisher she's hidden in the house, which I prefer to call by the appropriate title "trash"), generally follows on my blog, which sees 1/30th of the "friends" I have on Facebook.

I think the difference for me between the two is that my blog has been for me, while Facebook is not. If I'm updating my status on Facebook, it's an announcement to the effect, "Hey, I'm alive and you can find me if you're looking for me." If I update my blog, it's because I'm thinking about something, want to work out something I haven't quite formulated in my head, want to record something for my future use, or want to record something for Eryn to read some day. Only secondly is it a place to share information with others, although I make the effort to record details around processes and experiences I think are helpful in a wider context, like packing on RAGBRAI, doing a Biztalk install or n-depth updategram, and fixing the green screen if streaming Netflix. Because I record so much out there, it is a good update for what me and my family are up to and how I'm feeling, something I can't capture in a Facebook status blurb. I rationalize away the need for a Christmas letter because of my blog. If you're a Facebook friend, you don't need a Christmas update because you and I probably don't see each other facetime wise at all. If you read my blog, you don't need one because you know what I've been up to for the last six years, no doubt in more detail than you're comfortable with when bumping into me.

Because of that, I don't run into this issue, "but stays logged on to Facebook all day at work, and then spends an hour or two, or lately three, at night checking in with old acquaintances, swapping photos with close friends, instant messaging those who fall somewhere in between." I devote a little bit of time to my blog and trust that the next time I have facetime with whoever reads it, we'll have a good place to start a conversation. Facebook feels more like sending thank you notes, and if I post something non-flippant I have to individually IM and comment to everyone who thinks it's interesting. The idea of doing that at work, where the context switching interrupts trying to think about mainframe migrations, is enough to keep me from ever being a Facebook regular.

Over the years, I've been asked several times, "Where do you get the time to blog? I could never find enought time to write something almost every day." Blogging is easy. Thirty minutes max for most posts, it's focused, and I can practice some writing skills I need to bring to other efforts. If you add up Facebook time, status updates, poking, VW bug and jail escapes, and hopping between IM-ing and responding to a few comments, it can easily chew up considerably more time for less mental gain, although it may seem like less if you can coordinate it on your PDA in the minutes on the bus, at the doctor, or walking between meetings.

I should finish with an answer to the initial question. Facebook doesn't replace face time. It enhances it. It's a way to keep in touch and now and then generate enough of a poke to give people an insight into when they should be contacting you in person to see how you're doing, or to catch up with you when you're in the neighborhood despite time having moved you far apart, or as a gentle reminder that you should be getting together because their kids seem older than the last time you saw them. If it reduces face time at all, it's with your family when you're busy facebooking instead of spending time together, and then it's just one of a number of equivalent distractions, not a sole culprit.

Interesting Things

Freewheeling Spirit links to an article about one of my favorite beers, Dogfish. When I was visiting She Says in D.C. this summer, it was what I drank, although I can just cross the border into Wisconsin to find some. I wish by age 39 my achievements had included building a giant beer barrel out of palo santo wood at a cost that might have gotten me fired. That's much more interesting than any of my resume bullet points.

Speaking of She Says, she has a post up that identifies the gender of the blogger. I'm identified as 69% male. All that's left to question is that if it's 69% am I toe to head, or head to toe. Fortunately, you can spend a lot of time just screwing around with your blog "statistics" (quotes definitely intended. I suspect it's as much real science as astrology). Library Bytes links to a number of them. Typelyzer says I'm an ESFP Performer especially attuned to pleasure and beauty and sweet smells. Which begs the question, why am I then seen with Mean Mr. Mustard so much? Unfortunately, I also have, "qualities that can make it hard for them in management positions." Doh. The Blog Readability Test pegs me as writing like a high schooler. This can be attributed no doubt to my bad language and recommendations as to how Erik can keep his face warm. Wait...that was on Facebook, so it doesn't count. But I did check She Say's blog, and now I don't feel so bad about not being college level. Website Grader gives me all sorts of information, such as a grade of 75 (B- or C+?), my Google findable pages, and an interesting statistic that my Technorati rank of 368,739 puts me in the top 0.53% of blogs tracked by Technorati. That sounds much more impressive than just the number, which is what Technorati gives me, or the Alexa rank I get of just over four million (specifically 4,003,621 which is still in the top 13.03 % of all websites). It looks like I was once up to almost 2.5 millionth. Damn the bad economy and it's impact on my website. Finally, I can even examine individual posts at PostRank, although it seems to be about a month behind the curve. New cats seem to get the best ranking, at least on NodToNothing.

Adventure Cycling is on Facebook.

This bit was also in my Adventure Cycling e-newsletter. I protest. Scotts should not be saying things like this in case others who read Adventure Cycling mistake them for the rest of us and think we have PMS.
PTS SUFFERERS UNITE: A fellow named Scott weighed in earlier this month at the Adventure Cycling forums, where he coined a phrase for the state of mind he found himself in after riding cross-country last summer: Post Tour Syndrome, or PTS. As Scott infers, there could be worse maladies to have. Check it out here: http://tinyurl.com/6m4bn9

Boing Boing links to a Media Shift article interviewing John Scalzi about pulps, SF and the web.

Eyeteeth links to a story about MIT studying the impact of modern media on storytelling. Not what's told, but the very structure of the story. The focus is on Hollywood, but David Foster Wallace was questioning (and expanding upon) the structure of the story in The Atlantic (magazine) and Infinite Jest (book) before his death, so the impact is media-wide.

Per Cookie Queen, Gulf War Illness is official. Like anyone who knows a vet couldn't have guessed that.