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FaceBook’s Primitive Content Management System

Byrichard 18 June 2020

Facebook’s Primitive Content Management System, because aside from being a social media platform, it is a CMS, makes it very hard to delete posts, images, and more in bulk. Facebook should be seen as a CMS because it allows us to share images, posts, events, and more.

As a CMS we should have more control over how we handle our data on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. Privacy settings that are not bulk editable retro-actively, are not of much use because no one will spend days or weeks tidying up their timelines.

With a CMS like Wordpress you can go to See all posts, choose “show two hundred posts” and you can delete 200 posts at a time. This means that, if for any reason you decide to tidy up old content, you can do so within a short period of time.

With Facebook, you have three choices. Choice one is to go and manually delete thousands of posts and spend several days doing so. The second option is simply to delete your old Facebook account and start from scratch and the third option is simply to dump Facebook entirely.

Facebook should offer users the option to curate their content quickly and efficiently. It currently has a monopoly because it is the primary social network that people use to share events, participate in group discussions and more.

As with real life we have good days and we have bad days. It should be possible to delete multiple posts at once. With spam comments we can “Empty spam” both in e-mail applications and WordPress comment sections.

Every e-mail client allows us to delete multiple messages at once. Inbox Zero and other concepts rely on this.

With MySQL we can drop the post table in less than a second. We should have such functionality on Facebook, Instagram and other social networks. Without this functionality we are limited in who we can accept as friends. We can only accept people whom we know and trust not to form prejudiced opinions based on what we wrote on a bad day.

If the only way to set the clock back to zero on Facebook and Twitter is to delete our accounts then we are encouraged to dump social networks altogether.

In the age of GDPR and other privacy-protecting measures these options should be available to users. We should also have an option to say “If user=”new” show “only posts from the day we became friends on Facebook””.

social media

Cutting down on Facebook, Instagram and Youtube

Byrichard 15 January 201915 January 2019

The Issue

For a while Facebook was the network to keep in contact with university friends after we all graduated and then it was the network to keep in contact with colleagues. Eventually it became the network where people shared news without engaging with others. It has become a network where you scroll through dozens of irrelevant posts in the hope of finding something personal, and failing.

Instagram used to be the network where we could share images with friends and see what they were sharing. After Facebook bought Instagram it grew out of favour with people sharing between friends. Now when I use facebook I need to scroll by an advert from the second post onwards. They have flooded Instagram with so many adverts that it has become unusable.

When youtube was young we were able to look through 30-60 videos and find some that were of interest. We would need to wait for videos to buffer and then watch the desired content. Today we no longer need to wait for videos to buffer, we need to wait for adverts to pre-roll the obligatory five seconds before clicking to content we want to watch.

The Solution

It’s 2019 and I have reduced the amount of time I spend on Facebook favouring news websites, Twitter and other web portals. When Yahoo and other companies were still young we called them web portals. Facebook has shifted from being a social network to being a web portal. It has undermined person to person communication. It has undermined its unique selling point. If I want to browse through news or information websites I can use newsreader apps, web portals or visit worpdress.com

In its hayday Instagram was unique because it downscaled and uploaded images in the time it took for us to prepare the text that went with an image and we could share it despite little bandwidth. Today it has become yet another multimedia sharing option with the drawback of having to flick through adverts. They have degraded the experience so much that I have uninstalled the app from at least one of my phones. I decided that I would pay, at least for now, to preserve the thirty six thousand images on Flickr. I also paid because I want to move away from the Facebook monopoly. On Flickr I am the client, rather than advertisers.

On multiple occasions I have binge-watched content by youtube creators, sometimes for hours at a time. The issue that I have with youtube now is that they have made it challenging to find new and interesting content. This is because they have reduced the amount and diversity of videos that we can see on the home screen. It is also due to the amount of pre-roll that we have to sit through before the video starts. I often give up before the pre-roll videos have ended. The reason I gave up on YouTube content watching is the request for us to pay 20 CHF per month in Switzerland to watch content without adverts. That is more expensive than Netflix, Curiosity Stream and the same price as I would pay for a telecom provider’s various content packages. I wouldn’t mind if this content was paid for and produced by youtube and if youtube creators such as myself could monetise content, but we have been demonetised.

That’s why I stopped using Youtube. For Video On demand, I have Netflix for general interest content. I have CuriosityStream for documentaries and I have Swisscom TV for random content that is “broadcast” when I am watching television.

Conclusion

By blogging I am developing my creativity and writing skills. By sharing images on Flickr and other services I am contributing to communities where people are sharing images because they love photography rather than to become web celebrities. Finally I want to cut down on YouTube because browsing is no longer straight-forward.

Uncategorized

The Facebook Monopoly

Byrichard 29 June 2017

I am tired of the Facebook monopoly. While Google gets fined for helping people shop websites like Facebook do the opposite. Instead of increasing the diversity of content on the web and the sharing of ideas it has helped create silos of like minded people. Likeminded people is a polite way of saying brainwashed in the case where opinions are based on opinions rather than facts.

Low value posts

Shorts on Facebook are usually very short. You skim through dozens, even hundreds of posts but none of them have much value. Compare this to blogging. When you blog you need to develop ideas that you can expand to at least three hundred words. With those three hundred words you can include images, video, tables and more. You can tell a complete story. On Facebook you post some text and people might read it.

Conversational monopoly

People use twitter both privately and publicly. People I follow have their accounts set to private so I am careful not to answer to certain comments to preserve their private sphere. Other people see no value in having a public chat. They don’t remember the chatrooms on the late 1990s in the same way that I don’t remember party lines. Whatsapp and Messenger are used instead. Both of them allow private group chats from the comfort of a computer or with the mobility of a mobile phone. Ingress, Pokemon Go and others are happy to experiment with other platforms but mid to late adopters are stuck in the Facebook universe. They have a monopoly.

Picture sharing

Instagram is a great image sharing app but it’s owned by Facebook.

Events

Almost every event you go to these days has a Facebook events page. Many events only have a Facebook page. Unless you are a Facebook user you miss out on a lot of events.

The World Wide Web offers such a breadth of opportunities for creativity that it’s a shame that people are spending time on Facebook rather than on more malleable social networks. I’m thinking of Wordpress as one example. We will see whether people go back to blog friendly social networks.

D-Day Film archives on Facebook

Byrichard 7 June 2017

Yesterday D-Day Film Archives were shared on Facebook. These film archives were of landing crafts landing troops on the beaches, of battleships firing rocket salvos at the coast, of gliders being pulled by planes, of paratroopers getting and more.

Over the years films have been preserved by transferring the footage from one film stock to another and then transferred from film to tapes. The problem with film and tape is that they are stored in a physical location that only archivists have access to. This means that if we’re curious about seeing the footage, like the footage included in this post we would have to go to the film archive and ask for permission to see this footage. Within a few hours, days or weeks we might get an answer. We would have transport costs, access costs and more.

The advantage of digital video archives accessible online is that everything is accessible within a few seconds with the right keywords. This means that a child hearing about the Second World War for the first time can do a quick search and see this footage. History, rather than being words on a page, is brought to life. It stops being an abstract subject for the mind. In this footage, we see our grandparents and our nephews and nieces see their great-grandparents.

An effort, by the international community, should be made to preserve, digitise and then make available as much of this film material as possible. The technology exists today so that, at the very least, we can have digital backups of all of this material and in the best case scenario for this material to be available for future generations to watch and study.

I have already spent 15 months as a video archivist and media asset manager and I would like to continue this line of work. I find it to be a fascinating and interesting way to learn about history. It inspires to find books that contextualise the material that I am seeing on screen. This material makes us more informed citizens of the society in which we live.

social media | Social Media Deontology | social networking

Facebook Disengagement

Byrichard 9 June 2016

Facebook disengagement by those I know has become so serious that I have decided to take a break from the social network myself. For many years this was a network of people I knew and spent time with in person. It has school friends, uni friends, activity friends and social media friends. For many years it was a place to socialise, share events and images. From the moment Zynga polluted Facebook with Farmville the conversational aspect of the social network degraded. As the conversation declined the sentiment that Facebook was a waste of time became a reality.

Facebook users no longer use the network to share their lives and converse. They use it to share sensationalist rubbish. Aside from Social media marketers Facebook has become a ghost town. As normal people no longer use the social network you are saturated with sensationalist rubbish. Facebook has become the preserve of the lowest common denominator. It has become a tabloid news distribution network and those who enjoy intellectual stimulation have moved on to other networks.

The content has declined in value to such a degree that I felt myself turning in to a troll. Every second or third article that people share is sensationalist rubbish and I feel the urge to call it rubbish. I don’t want to offend individuals so rather than do this I will take a break.

Social networks are about people connecting and conversing. It is about sharing what inspires us both through the adventures we have and through the links we share. Every article and headline should inspire us. For as long as social media practitioners focus on telling us how to feel rather than provide a description of the content of articles I will stay away.

Conversations are personal and current affairs articles should be factual. When a network like Facebook no longer has conversations and when articles are emotional the world is upside down and the model is broken. It is time for social networks and social media to become personal once again.

It amuses me that I write this about facebook. I wrote the same about twitter a few months and years ago. Social networks and their strategists keep making the same mistakes.

Threaded conversations and community

Byrichard 7 December 2014

From the 1970s to 2007 we had threaded conversations through bulletin boards, forums, groups and other centralising discussion points. For a brief window of about two years conversations became so captivating that people wanted to meet in person as strong friendships were established. By 2009-2010 the threaded and personal conversations between web users was hijacked by “social media” marketers and so the speed of conversation and quality of interactions collapsed. In it’s place hashtags would replace user engagement with quick metrics.

The golden age of conversation has been replaced by the dark ages of indifference. Every day that we spend online we see how disengaged people have become. Look at twitter. Do you still see user to user conversations. Look at Facebook. Do you still see engaging content and passionate conversations? I see a waste of time. The conversations which were taking place have been replaced by dumbed down headlines and sensationalist content.

For several years we have heard about how corporations should not have access to our data because of what they will do with it. From where I am surfing the web and interacting with the online community I see a more serious problem. I see that as the chance of individual to individual conversations has decreased so the quality of shared articles, videos and other content has been dumbed down. This is evident on Facebook and Twitter. These networks are becoming ghost towns. They have millions of user profiles that are slowly going dormant.

That social media networks are going dormant is excellent. Instead of wasting time with Ello, Diaspora and other solutions I believe that going back to the blogging habit will benefit everyone. It is decentralised, it is interest based and it is long form. Through Worpdress.org tools, through Disqus and other solutions so our ability to connect and communicate is improved. It forces us to be positive and to be accountable. Everything that you share can contribute to your reputation and help share your passions. We should not be hidden behind silos and we should not be anonymous. We need to break the twitter and Facebook duopoly.

facebook | friendfeed | Real Time Web

The Facebook and Friendfeed lifestye

Byrichard 17 March 2009

Facebook and friendfeed are now the same thing. They both provide exactly the same thing but for different audiences. Facebook is a network of real friends, where you share everything with those that count on you as a friend. That’s where you get party pictures, relationship statuses and more. Friendfeed is where you go to get world news, current affairs and industry information from people you have yet to meet.

Both of them now allow you to filter your information by groups or lists. I for one have two twitter lists in Facebook, twitter friends I’ve already met and had a good time with, and a second twitter stream where it’s twitter friends I have yet to meet. That’s where I can follow those of you whom I have unfollowed on the real twitter, for lack of proper interaction.

On friendfeed I have a twitter stream as well, but this is raw, I can still react to your twitter stream by selecting to comment straight into the twitter stream or by proxy through comments in friendfeed. In part this evolves according to how willing you are to adopt the friendfeed lifestyle.

I’ve been thinking of friendfeed and how friends in news could use it. I spent four hours at work, off the clock, chatting with someone that works in news, but doesn’t use google reader and speaking about how we, as individuals filter our news. Everyone does it, but most people are happy jumping from one site to another to get the information. The website that person looked at does have RSS feeds which could be aggregated into google reader and feedly.

That’s an important advantage. It means that when you’re off work, in between shifts you can still get all the news coming to you, but without using the professional systems. It means that you shape the information flow, as well as it’s speed. The more sources you add to your reader, the faster information comes in and overwhelms you, if the right filters are not in place.

Look at the social media landscape now and it’s not that busy if you’re looking for hard news but that will change as people grow more accustomed to the way the current social media types use it.

We need to shift away from the social media types to the lifestylers. I use this term to describe everyone that uses the social media, not as a promotional tool for their activities and their blog posts, but instead for the content created by others with society at large as a source of information gatherers and sharers.

How would friendfeed look if the film and television industry used it. How much more conversational would the WEF Davos room on friendfeed have been if those participating in the conference conversed here, as much as at the events. A lot of conversation is invisible because those who talk about it do so with those in the industry. What if part of that discourse came online?

Look at the BBC website for example, and how it provides three top stories today, Madagascar and the new president, Russia and it’s rearmement plan and Fritzl. If the news editors for the News agencies met on friendfeed and discussed the top three international stories how much richer would the dialogue be? How many more related stories would we find?

We can get a taste for this from Google’s news page, according to country. You can see which stories are the most written about and see how the dialogue is advancing but that’s an algorithm. It requires little time or involvement to exist. As a result recommendations may not be that interesting, or that well selected.

Imagine a top three international stories room on Friendfeed and how that would progress, as news agencies provide items for national news bulletins. You could have sub sets to that room according to regions according to treaty alliances. There could be a room where NATO encourage Europt to work closer, making Europe as an entity more powerful. You see that with recent discussions from various recent Nato events.

I watched and listened to plenary sessions taking place in Africa during the changes-challenges.org when live streams were being made available by the event organisers for greater transparency. Some sessions were on the front page of the website. As a result even if you were not invited to the event there was a certain degree of transparency, the same was true of the World Economic Forum. As part of my work I have been streaming such events and I have tried listening in, to see what people were saying.
What is a shame is that at the moment there is no diversity in these online communities. Only the earliest of the technologically adopters are participating. the conversation, as a result is boring for anyone but those hyper-engaged within these communities. I use the term hyper-engaged because in reality there is a lot of information coming in. All of that information takes time to ingest. The best way to absorb all of that information is for us to watch it in real time.

Facebook have that option now, the real time view, if I remember the term correctly, and that will help to introduce a large portion of people to what is called the “Real time web”. The real time web is best demonstrated by the real-time view on friendfeed. People are finding new sites, commenting on links and more n real time. As soon as something is added to the stream you see it. If you’ve got two or more screens then you can monitor all of this in real time. There are apps to help with the assimilation of all this information.

Of course we’re not there yet, at the moment the geekiest of the geeks are playing with it, and some have more time than others to be invested in this. It’s just that it’s so well adapted to all professions that it will be interesting to see how Friendfeed and Facebook revolutionise the way we get our information and how we react to it. What I love most is that because facebook brings that to over three hundred of my university, school and work friends we, social media types have an easier job of driving adoption to the masses.

team work | twitter

The twitter colour wars and sheep mentality

Byrichard 23 March 200823 March 2008

As if zombie slaying, vampire biting and sheep throwing weren’t enough the facebook lunacy has reached Twitter via Zefrank and the stupid colour wars. As if the conversation was not interesting and fulfilling enough for twitter users there is now a movement to create a colour war encouraging people to split into groups.

I dislike this movement for a number of reasons. For a start it’s a complete waste of time because it does not require people to do anything in the physical world. Just change your avatar and you’ve participated. That’s similar to the zombie wars.

As a second point it’s encouraging people to break into smaller clusters and groups, which although fun in certain situations where groups are too big is pointless on twitter. In particular I saw that for one colour the point was not to tweet but rather be tweeted at. Now why would you ask for people to remain silent when the whole reason behind twitter is status updates, firstly and conversations as a side effect of the first.

When few people used hotmail it was clean and e-mails were worth reading but as chain letters arrived so the usability went down. When geocities became popular so pages became flooded with junk, same with myspace and later facebook. I really don’t want to see this junk making its way into the twitter stream. I spend too much time there to appreciate it.

That’s why I won’t participate.