Facebook: The ‘Social’ Network

It’s passed it’s use by date, it’s finished, no longer associated with the purpose that it was created for, now a depressing wasteland of ‘wannabes’ and dreams. Facebook is the network that use to be a cool little place where you and your friends could catch up, talk, post photos and excite each other with the comment notifications. But now Facebook isn’t like that anymore, this was 2 years ago, before the user-base suddenly jolted into the 500 millions and every school-kid left MySpace to clog up Facebook’s arteries.

Now there is so many people on Facebook, that there’s no longer anything social going on, the social sponges that live their life in their little huddle of popularity, get along just fine with their gang of 20, 25, despite the fact their friend count reads 1000+. But for those that want that easy going friend-hangout… Well you’re time has come and gone, now Facebook grants you access to more people than you want to acknowledge. It doesn’t matter if you don’t add heaps of people, if your friends have heaps of people on their list then you’ll be lucky to hear anything from them at all. With the news feed clogged up with statuses and quiz games from constant-Facebook-accomodants you no longer get to see anything from you’re actual friends. Because we’re all adding people we know these days, but not the people who we actually KNOW.

I used to be rather happy when I got a notification telling me  that someone has posted to my wall, now I just delete the email and forget about it, because the only rubbish that’s ever posted on my wall is, “John answered a question about Ben! Click here to find out what he said!” how ridiculous, if you were to click on that stupid box then you’d open up the app, allow it to access your personal info and then answer questions about each of your friends 10 times before being able to read what the ruddy question was. It’s a stupid luring trick designed to get more people using their app, and people are that stupid to use it that we’re all getting, ‘…answered a question about you!…’ posts on our wall. I haven’t had an actual person post anything on my wall at all, probably for the past 4-5 months, just ‘question about you’ apps, viruses designed to trick ignorant monkeys and the occasional: “Jeff sent you s@#& in farmville!”

Hmmm, why do I keep using names that begin with a ‘J’ for all my examples?

To say the least, it ‘sucks.’

I don’t go on Facebook as often anymore, because if anything it just makes me sad. Just saying that line sounds like a Play School host asking kids questions about their emotions, but then again, Play School never insists on answering hundreds of questions about friends in order to get one answer about you in return, which turns out to be: “What is Ben’s favourite colour?”,”dunno.

Yeah, yeah, okay, so I tried it once, but now I ignore just about anything on facebook that ‘offers’ me something, because they’re all the same.

Where was I? Oh yes, Facebook makes me depressed is depressing, it’s just bland, nothing ever happens on there that actually makes me feel happy anymore. I feel better when I’m not on Facebook, or when I don’t bother looking at it. My friends hardly post anymore, it’s just a constant clatter from all those people that just sit on Facebook their entire life, just posting whatever comes to their mind, in a short space of time…[No, I’m not changing this post into a Dr Seus book] and I said in my post Activities of the Lively, these people then tell me that I don’t have a life, simply because ‘I do nothing’ and I’m ‘not social.’

Here me now, Facebook is no longer social, I’ve been more social on Nation Of Design than I have on Facebook, ever since Nation Of Design has it’s own mini-social-network, but it’s not clogged up like Facebook, it has a nice home-styled community of really great people, no stupid questions to answer, no farmville to chip-in, just doing what we love, graphics and art.

Facebook is just a big long list of people saying: “backstabbing slut”, “feeling prime for the weekend” and “like for a like”. It’s all boring useless rubbish.

And I’m sick of it.

 

Yours Ever So Truly,

Ben

iOS 5

Hello!

Now I was a bit late to post this the other day, but I’m going to post it NOW.

Basically Apple announced the release of iOS 5, Mac OS X Lion and their new iCloud service sometime during September. Now If you know me, you’ll know that I’m a bit of an Apple Fanboy but stop there! You can’t bag me out for being an Apple fanboy if you have an iPhone, iPod, iPad or iMac . . . because unless you have android . . . uh . . . nevermind, I’m going crazy.

Anyways.

What I’m most looking forward to this September is iOS 5, which adds a better notification system (yes, I know, Android’s had a notification system since forever . . . sigh), it makes the iOS completely independent, meaning it won’t need a computer to sync with anymore, it brings some new built in apps and the iCloud service which means you can download all the stuff you’ve already purchased FREE for no extra charge. Which is great.

The other things that are new are only minor, (in my opinion) like built in Twitter, crop and image controls in the photos app, better Safari, WiFi sync . . . wait, I quite LOVE THE IDEA OF WIFI SYNC . . . *cough* sorry about that, heh . . . just burst out all of a sudden. My apologies. No seriously though, I was using the WiFi sync when my iPod was jailbroken not too long ago, it takes longer, but if you just have your iPod lying on your bedside table during the day it will sync all your songs and stuff right over to iTunes, which is really handy, and automatic.

Apple’s iCloud service, at this stage, only shines a few benefits for me, being able to download purchases for free. That’s probably the only thing I’ll use that for, because I don’t like the idea of syncing all of my personal data up to some hard drive in the sky, especially with all the hacking that’s been going on with the websites like Sony, Code Masters, phones and  government websites.

 

This has been a short post, but the reason is, there’s really no point in me repeating everything that’s on the Apple website. If you go to any news website everything that they have about iOS 5, Lion and iCloud is all the same stuff that’s on the website, it’s pretty stupid.

So go check out the Apple website here, and find out more about iOS 5 if you’re interested.

Thanks,

 

Ben