Mix played in Los Angeles 7-21-12
Check it out: Vin Diesel wrote/directed/produced for the high-pulse series inspired by his time in the brotherhood of NYC bouncers
Check it out: Vin Diesel wrote/directed/produced for the high-pulse series inspired by his time in the brotherhood of NYC bouncers
I just flipped the switch on Facebook’s new timeline. When I first heard about this timeline feature I thought it sounded pretty cool. I joined Facebook back in 2005 and a chance to look back and see how everything fell together sounded fun. Where did I pick up that friend? What words did I coo on her wall when we were in the honeymoon phase? How did those words change when we were breaking up? Now that timeline is on and setup (got to always double, triple, and quadruple check privacy settings when it comes to Facebook) I am not really impressed.
Sure looking back through the timeline was fun for a couple minutes. However, I think Facebook, like Google and Yahoo and so many internet companies before, has forgotten the basic premise of all websites: Keep it simple, stupid.
In 2005, Tila Tequila had just jumped from MySpace (remember that little site?)to stardom. I like everyone else had a MySpace page and struggled constantly with the code to impress people who saw my site. Great customization but like Spidey’s Uncle Ben says, “with great power, comes great responsibility.” All that customization weighed down the load times and made cruising through people’s pages as much fun as walking trudging through a knee high muddy swamp. On MySpace I had to wade through tons of spam emails and comments each day. I mean who knew there were so many ways to increase my penis length or so many African royalty looking for my help. Then came along Facebook.
Facebook was a clean and simple layout. Every page would load quickly and the visual layout made checking someone out as easy as given the once over to the girl in the red dress. I know that The Social Network claims that Facebook has become such a behemoth because of the .edu exclusivity that it began with. Yet, it isn’t exclusive anymore and still people are signing up and logging on everyday. My personal opinion is that Facebook grew because it was simple. The same reason why Google search blew Yahoo, Altavista, and Ask search out of the water.
For those of you who don’t remember the beauty of the clean white Google search page that even on a 56k modem could load in a snap. Oppose that to the jumble of colors, links, and pictures that Google’s competitors tried to load every time. Google’s simplicity, quick load, and single minded simplicity was a thing of beauty. It made searching for things on the internet fun. Just like Facebook’s early incarnation made searching through people fun. Want to make a new friend send them a fun poke, write a quick note on their wall, or just ‘friend’ them and BOOM you were connected.
Early Facebookers were more engaged with each other. People responded to a new unknown friend request with a email. A poke was funny not annoying. Someone writing on your wall made you feel special much like a new voice mail message makes you feel - you are just that much cooler because someone out there was interested in you. Compare that with today’s Facebook.
I admit a couple years ago I decided Facebook was a popularity game with the number of friends you have the score and I was determined to win. With that in mind I quickly maxed out the number of friends I could have (don’t do this at home) and gave myself a pat on the back. Some may blame this inordinate amount of friends as the real problem I have with Facebook but I don’t think so. I don’t think the number of friends makes the problems I have unique, I just think it throws the real problems with present day Facebook in my face more.
Spam, unwanted friends, un-engaged community, privacy problems, and more complicated pages. These are the problems, in my opinion, that make Facebook kind of suck these days.
Spam: we are used to spam in our emails but Facebook now gives us spam on our walls, through friends trolling to induct you into a game, event invites, and yes still in our email.
Unwanted friends: Creepsters, creepsters, creepsters.
Un-engaged community: I bet you could post I am committing suicide right now and you would get a couple likes and a few sarcastic comments. As a person who sits on both sides of the social media fence (as a user and a marketer) I can see how it is getting harder and harder to connect with people as well as why. I mean do I really give a shit about what Kraft Mac & Cheese posts on its’ wall? And, as a user because I learn to tune out posts I stop listening and quickly my entire news feed begins to turn into white noise. (yes, I am diligent about hide irrelevant posts)
Privacy problems: With the number of times Facebook has changed its’ privacy controls and rules I could be sending all my posts directly to Homeland Security right now and might not know it. Not to mention Zuckerberg constantly saying in the news that he believes I (and all the users) want my life to be shared and in the open (transparent) when in fact I kind of like my privacy and anonymity at times.
Now bringing it all back to what started this post is the timeline and complicated pages. The Facebook timeline is about the most complicated of pages I have seen. I give kudos to the UX designers, coders, and everyone involved in making timeline happen. I think they have done an excellent job in making the site navigable. Yet, when I turn on my timeline it is long and overwhelming. I look at all the posts and pictures lying there and wonder “what the hell did I just do?”
Do I really want to republish those dumb ass posts and stupid pictures from 2005? Do I want those things searchable? And, the though that someone can go through my timeline or that I can go through theirs is a bit unnerving. But, privacy aside this timeline is a cool idea but not really a good idea for me. It has taken my very simple profile page of picture, posts, and likes and turned it into an ungodly long diatribe about my life. In my opinion, it’s too much information.
Maybe this will make me sound old and idiotic but I truly prefer simple minded simplicity on the internet. Give me the simple Google search page over Yahoo’s topic pages. Give me Facebook’s old profile pages over MySpace’s clusterfuck of customization. And, to me, this timeline Facebook has launched is sadly one more step towards needless complication of the website. I want to log on to Facebook to engage and connect with a group of people. I want to communicate ideas, memories, feelings, and the whole gambit of the human experience. Yet, Facebook is nothing more than a crowd of people in a room all yelling at the top of their lungs and hoping someone is interested in them. The Facebook timeline is just adding everyone’s life resume to every yell they make. Seriously do I really need this information? Not really.
I am curious what you all think. Do you like the Facebook timeline? What are your thoughts?
Income inequality, by many measures, is now greater than it has been since the 1920s.
The causes of income inequality are hotly debated and tend to fall into two broad categories. There are market forces — like increased trade and technological advances — which have made highly skilled and well-educated workers more productive, thus increasing their pay. And there are institutional forces, like deregulation, the decline of unions and stagnation in the minimum wage.
In 1947, the median family — the one making more than half of all other families and less than half of all other families — made $23,400, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Over the next three decades, median-income more than doubled, to $47,400 in 1977. In 2005, the median family made $58,400. (All these numbers are adjusted for inflation.)
Meanwhile, the incomes of earners at the 99.99th percentile of the income distribution — those making more than 9,999 out of every 10,000 other earners — have soared over the last three decades, from less than $2 million in the late 1970s to about $10 million in 2009.
So pay has risen for most families in the last 30 years, but not as quickly as it did in the decades after World War II and not nearly as quickly as it has for the affluent.
MEN IN BLACK 3 Trailer
Along the road to one of China’s most famous tourist landmarks – the Great Wall of China – sits what could potentially have been another such tourist destination, but now stands as an example of modern-day China and the problems facing it.
Braun BATTLE OF THE YEAR 2011 1on1 Official Recap
Kaskade feat. Mindy Gledhill - Eyes HQ (Lyrics on Screen)
It may seem that times are tough right now, but there is a generation of Americans who had things were worse.
“They’ve been through war, poverty, some the Resistance, some the Holocaust,” says Karl Pillemer, a professor of gerontology at Cornell University. “Many of them grew up in extreme poverty.”
Pillemer noticed that older people have higher life satisfaction, a perceived better quality of life, and are better able to regulate their emotions than younger people. He decided to talk to this group about what they had learnt in life. “If we’re living through economic hard times,” he said, “why wouldn’t we want to learn from people who lived through the Great Depression?”
He published the results in “30 Lessons for Living: Tried and True Advice from the Wisest Americans,” which came out last month. Twelve hundred people were included in the study, adding up to about 50,000 years of career experience. These are people who remember a time of cleaner air, cleaner water supplies, and closely knit communities, as well as systematic sexism and racism and economic collapse. I spoke to Pillemer on the phone last week, and here are some lessons that emerged from our conversation, about life and work.
