Facebook Is Down

Byrichard

Social networking websites should never be down because their success comes from three factors; ease of use, accessibility, and reliability. With a good layout and good interaction, the website attracts the novice as well as the weather-beaten web surfer that’s seen it all. Accessibility is about it being easy to use on all browsers, whether mobile phones, laptops, or desktops. The third one is the key.


Facebook down


source 


One of the reasons I’ve moved away from Hotmail and yahoo is that they became slow and clogged up in spam. What this meant is you’d waste a huge amount of time waiting for pages to load and even more time deleting all the junk. That’s why I moved. Myspace is another case in point. Whilst it’s an interesting website there are several flaws such as page load time, too much freedom in layout, and more.


Facebook is currently the flagship of the social networking community worldwide because it’s simple, fast loading, and reliable. Today that has not been the case and I hope that they are not going to take too long with their upgrades. It was working fine therefore taking the website offline with no visible change in layout is just inconvenient and will see me looking for another solution… in fact, I have one. My website. This has been a constant since 1997 and has seen me through my IB, my HND, my BA, and now career building.


We’re living in a different age. Anyone can follow me on Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr, and one or two other websites but my flagship is my part of main-vision.com because this is where I have full control of the website. Facebook has become a very useful tool thanks to the number of people joining the website but recently they’re going through a bad period. I’m not talking about a bad period where they’re struggling to keep users or make money but rather bad in that it’s a hormonal teenager trying everything at once before gaining the stability of a mature website like Flickr after it was bought by yahoo or last.fm after CBS purchased it.


Whenever a website goes down I wonder about my future use of websites. One of the greatest things about RSS feeds is I can operate facebook remotely due to all the apps they’ve added. I add a few RSS feeds, take a few website API and it gives the impression that I’m on Facebook more than I really am.


The worst thing about social networking websites is that when they start offering a crap service you have no choice but to keep using them in order to keep in touch with what friends are doing. Last night for example I went to an event which was advertised both on Facebook and on myspace. There were not that many people but it was a practical way to keep in touch. That’s why I went to a silent disco, a silent rave, and know what others are telling us they’re doing.


I hope that this is nothing more than Facebook sneezing and that the quality of service we have grown to expect from the website resumes once more.

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Monday Night Picadilly Line People

Byrichard

Last night’s fourty minute trip meant I got to see a lot of faces as I headed from one side to another. Some of these people would be forgotten within a few seconds whilst others would be remembered slightly longer. One girl had a disarming stare, as I headed to my first destination of the night. She got off within a few stops and my journey continued.

On the way back I was in good spirits after filming a few people perform their songs. I left so that I would have plenty of time to make my way home. It’s on this tube that I noticed all the people on the tube. Two guys, each with a drum stick were tapping to a beat no one else could hear. Another person was leaning to the right, onto the glass that prevents you from falling in front of the door should you sleep whilst commuting. A food guide was being read by another person, either after a good dinner or because he was still hungry. Two or three more people were half asleep.

One individual had bloodshot eyes, possibly from excessive drinking. He had to stand since no seats were available. The London light was entertaining another. Hair could be seen playing with the draught you get from the open window at the back of the carriage as she traveled along the tunnel to her destination listening to her iPod. To my left was a woman reading the media guardian.

In the back pocket of one individual was a booklet for The Phantom of the Opera as he waited to get off as his tube stop was coming up. To his right, a woman gesture to her companion indicating the booklet. They looked happy with the thought of going to the event.

In front of me were two women around my age. One had a breadcrumb on her lip but didn’t realise it. To her right the opposite, an attractive girl with sandals, a golden coat and a silver iPod nano to keep her entertained on the journey home. Hearing was taken care of by the headphones but the eyes were darting around the carriage. One way, then another, without settling anywhere specific.

Everyone must have done this, sat in a tube train, and looked at everyone around them, noticing little details, noticing where people had been and where they were going. It was the Monday night tube taking many of these people home.

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Map Your Friends – Facebook Api

Byrichard

As I was looking through the applications I found an application that helps to map your friends according to the geolocation details they added to their profile. As your social network is more global so you will find that your friends are more spread around the world. As you’ll see for me there’s a lot of clustering around London where most of the people I know on Facebook are living.


There is a nice spread in other parts of the world. Some of them are in Australia, various parts of Asia, Africa, and the US. As you zoom in you can see a nice amount of detail as to where they live. With high-resolution satellite images you can see the street they live on. They can see the street where I live as well.


This is one of the Facebook applications which I feel is not there to fill your profile with junk but rather to provide an interesting insight as to the global spread of friends you’ve met over the years.


For further info

Looking out of a window at traffic

Byrichard

I’m on the second floor of a home which looks out onto a busy road which means there’s a lot of traffic passing by but wait there’s more. Road works are taking place. Traffic must stop. Stopped traffic means hours of entertainment from the comfort of your room.


So far I saw one van back into the car that was sticking to the back. The guy got out and started to yell whilst another was less annoyed. In a second case I saw one-car crash into the back of the second and this was amusing. The guy who crashed was relaxed, almost joking whilst the over was really angry, as most people would be. Two cars were behind this crash and they grew impatient, started beeping, and more. The guy who was crashed into started yelling abuse at them as they drove away.


In other cases you see the large trucks trying to negotiate the bend and that’s impressive. You see some people struggling to park a fiat 500. They find it easy to move their truck although it takes wide turns and some back and forth.


Today I watched out of the window as one of these large trucks was waiting for the road to be clear so that it could negotiate this bend yet no one was courteous enough to wait. They could have and the road would be easier to negotiate for all to use.


There is one thing that annoys me more than anything else with traffic outside a window. People beeping. If you’ve ever lived roadside you know the sound. One person forgets to pay attention to the light and someone behind decides to beep. As a result everyone in the area hears this. It’s annoying because simply flashing your headlights at the person in front is enough to get them to continue on their absent-minded way. This is not a value judgment. They weren’t paying attention to the light therefore my remark is justified ;).


Now the last element, loud music s sometimes nice and other times not quite. I’ve never heard someone drive through a city with the BBC world service blaring out of their speakers. I’d find that interesting and intriguing at the same time. Most of the time its hip hop, R&B, and such. That’s just part of life.


Skidding tires are another amusing feature. You know how it goes. You’re in your car and you’ve been driving it so much your clutch control is fast, almost perfect. Sometimes though your foot presses on the accelerator just a little too hard and your tires lose traction causing a nice little screech and the sound of slipping tires as you attempt to move off. I watched as someone in a delivery truck did that. What surprised me is that he just let the tires screech until they got traction rather than let go of the throttle and move off normally.


All this to say that aside from wanting to throw water balloons through the car window at the idiot beeping traffic doesn’t bother me.

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The Digital Lifestyle

Byrichard

A journalism student at the University of Westminster worked on an item about addiction to technology and this is quite an old item. In 1998 (if I remember correctly) I was speaking to a security guard in Martinique about the internet and he talked about it as if it was a disease as if it was bad.

Back in my high school days would argue with my teachers trying to get permission to draw the graphs by computer rather than doing them by hand. This happened both in geography and chemistry. One teacher commented: “What about when you’re on the field?” going on to explain that technology would not always be at my reach.

Since then things have changed and technology has progressed to such an extent that I could now create that graph on my XDA Mini S and e-mail it to whomever I’m working for. Of course, the batteries might die but the potential is there and innovation is changing society as a whole.

In my bedroom, I have a MacBook pro, an iBook, one Nokia, one Sony Erricson, one xda, one 500 gig drive, one terabyte drive, and one 200 gig drive. I’ve got a lot of technology but my work is based around this technology. One phone is a spare, another is for Switzerland and the third is for England. This is so that I don’t need to pay international fees when making phone calls in countries I visit often.

As I’m writing this post I’m listening to music from someone’s playlist on last.fm and that’s American music streamed from a London based company bought by CBS fairly recently. The blogging software I’m using is open source and the image in the banner was taken in Les Diablerets Switzerland.

Topically last night there was a power cut in the street where I live and it took them several hours to fix. As a result of this, the wired life I am used to was put on hold for a number of hours. I didn’t go to sleep any earlier. I watched one of the blue planet documentaries instead, as you do.

As a side note, I did once believe in internet and technological addiction. I went to Tanzania for 21 days to help build schools and for a 7-day safari. During this time I decided that I would not touch a computer, I would have nothing to do with technology aside from the camera.

I walked down the muddy roads from one school to another. I saw a much simpler way of life. I saw a different way of life which I appreciated far more. In fact, I wanted to stay there so I’d avoid coming home to the stress of the IB. It’s during this trip that I saw that the addiction some people talk about does not exist.

Either you get with the times or you’re left behind. I’m comfortable with technology so use it constantly.

Finally, I’d like to address a comment at the end of the item about texting. Twitter and Jaiku should have been mentioned as extreme examples of technological addiction.

No power

Byrichard

Something you hardly ever think of when you’re in economically more developed countries is electricity because it’s always there for you to use. This was not the case yesterday afternoon when coming back from an interview. Due to some roadworks or the rain (not much but apparently poor maintenance makes things worse) the power down the whole street was shorted for at least six hours, which is a long time.

A machine was digging up the road and a second worker was digging. At moments he pulled on a cable, then pulled on another. Occasionaly they beeped at some people in a van before getting back to work, then they’d come back. The whole time they were seeing this as a little bit of fun.

Whilst this was going on outside many homes had no power, no refrigeration, no television, no safety alarms and more. It’s somethng we’ve grown unused to since power cuts are usually so rare.

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There Are Two Parts To The World Wide Web

Byrichard

the future of the web

the search engine was the king, now it’s social networking.

People had their own home page, now it’s grown to their own website. The blog was grown and grown, replacing webrings

to be developed

For several years the search engine was king. This was the place where everyone went to find content because all the information was so disorganised. Recently though this has changed. The way people use the world wide web has evolved. Whereas people in the past would create just one webpage with a little content people are now creating entire websites.

These websites are not websites  in the sense that they were back in the late nineties, rather they are profiles. It used to be that you’d create a static HTML page that would need to be updated manually through the hot metal code. With CGI-bin and later technologies, the nature of the homepage has changed.

Remember Geocities? It’s been replaced by myspace. Remember the discussion about web portals and yahoo and google were trying to corner the market to get the highest audience. That has changed. Look at Digg, Facebook, Bebo, twitter, Jaiku and Pownce. All of these websites are about one thing. Community. They are only interesting as long as your friends are members; no friends means no way of using it. I was a member of myspace for months before anyone I knew joined and by the time had joined I re-created a profile having forgotten the other profile.

It’s the same with Facebook. I joined it a few months before anyone from my environment started using it but recently everyone has started using Facebook to communicate. Not just this, they’re also uploading their lives to the web. So am I. There are two issues that are interesting to look at. For anyone wanting to do a dissertation why not look at the changing nature of privacy with the rise of the social networking website. When I was studying for my HND privacy was key and release forms were essential. Now it’s as though everyone is a publisher and the nature of privacy has changed. It goes along the lines of “Don’t upload anything too compromising or embarrassing”. Your network of friends can see everything. Friends from your high school days can see all your university friends and vice versa.

This promotes the expansion of social circles. Whereas in the past networks of friends were mutually exclusive due to location they are joined online. Take some videos of when you’re at a party in Switzerland and those in England can see it, and so can their friends if you so choose. It’s a shame you can’t select for only one network to see videos rather than others, for example, only London friends can see the London videos and Switzerland friends can see those. It would make uploading certain videos possible.

Anyway, the web has become personal. Within the last 6 months or so I’ve seen the web go from being about avatars and nicknames to being about real names and real networks. It’s about bringing the offline world online and vice versa. This is where I believe for there to have been a shift in perception of what the web is for. Almost everyone I know and see regularly is now on Facebook. It’s amusing to see how it’s become mainstream.

It’s as though Facebook has become a portal although not in the 1998 sense of the word. There is a new part of the internet. If you imagine the web to be like drupal then imagine that Yahoo and Geocities are the old gateways to the World Wide Web whilst various social networking websites are a new ad important portal with one major difference. These portals aggregate and distribute your content to your friends around the world. You’re no longer going online for research. You’re going online because you’re socialising. It’s replaced, at least partially, socialising in the real world whilst nonetheless providing a great way of sharing content. Both “user-generated” and “interactive” have become keywords in describing what the web is today.

In summary, whereas two or three years ago the Web was somewhere people came to find information for future use the web has evolved into an interactive user-generated medium. As a result of this, I think the world wide web has added another node to what purposes it serves.

Web 1.0: static and hard to interact anonymously vs web 2.0: highly interactive user-generated content where real names are now used, especially in places like Facebook.

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Overcast And Rainy

Byrichard

The problem with living in two countries is that the climate between the two homes may be very different. Whilst the weather in Switzerland is warm and sunny in England it’s cold and dreary. It’s gray. I was hoping that the weather in Switzerland would break the day I flew back to London so that the transition would not feel as bad but it backfired. What I had wanted is a cooler rainy day that would be enough to make me indifferent to the trip. This backfired as severe storms delayed quite a few of the flights.

As a result of these two or three flights were delayed and waiting in the terminal and everyone was sitting where they could. I found a comfortable place against a wall. At first, I saw that 6 out of 12 flights were delayed due to météo/weather and then 5 of 12. Finally, my flight was delayed by 40 minutes which is not that bad when you’re as used to travel as I am.

It’s amusing to watch people as they wait to travel. Young children are tired, falling asleep whilst others are complaining about the delay. Yet more got up and stood for over fourty minutes queuing for a plane that had not even arrived in the gate yet. I was living in luxury though. Two mobile phones, a charged iPhone, and my MacBook pro with over 4hrs of battery life. I twittered jokingly that it’s a 40-minute delay with four hours of entertainment.

It was an opportunity to work on the showreel. One of the beauties of the machine I use is the battery life. I’ve been doing some testing whilst at home and I’m quite happy with the results. I’ll go into more detail in another section of the website.

Having the level of familiarity I have with Geneva airport I’m more observant, knowing the procedures from months spent there. As I felt that people could start boarding I got up and was by the second cashier. Whilst everyone queued at one deck I saw the second one so of course, I took advantage of this, being the first one to go through although I had been one of the people who had not been standing anxiously. That’s an advantage of frequent flying.

Aboard the plane, I started to wonder something. Is it worse to be stuck with children who can talk or babies that cry? I think that talking children are worse. Some of them are not very articulate and others play with words and songs. It wasn’t that bad luckily.

Stewardesses are amusing because sometimes you see them get anxious. One of them saw some gormless passengers blocking the aisle and sounded stressed as she asked them to move in so that others could board the plane due to the short flight slot the aircraft had been allocated. In the end, we took off without much delay and the rest of the flight went well.

Had to take the Stansted express to seven sisters and from there caught a bus to get home due to the tube lines closing, no problem though.

Now it’s back to London life and getting on with my career.