Tag: Facebook

The downside

The downside to removing myself from Facebook is that no one hears my humble brags. For example, I crushed a ride last night. First outdoor ride of the year. And while it’s all over Strava and Endomondo, no one I know hangs out there. Nor do they hang out here. So now I’m bragging into the void.

Still, yeah, I totally crushed that ride. Felt great. Even fought the wind for a bit and it didn’t knock me down.

Spam and eggs

Getting more and more convinced that there has been a disturbance in the force. Weird Facebook status update emails and now some out of the blue SMS spam. It’s not the first time ever so we’re still in the realm of coinkydinks but as the day goes on the more I feel like everyone’s favorite Sith lord right about the time Luke is slashing up Jabba’s little sandpit party.

At any rate, I found AT&T has a handy anti SMS spam FAQ. Of course, like the inept ISP they are, it’s a friggin’ PDF. Christ on a crutch.

At any rate, forward you spam SMS to 7726 (SPAM on your keypad!). They’ll reply asking for the sender’s phone number. Once you provide that, they promise to bring the wrath of several gods down on the spamming feathermuckers. At least that’s how I choose to interpret “Thank you, we appreciate your assistance.”

Kicking the habit

So it’s been a little over twelve hours since I deactivated my Facebook account. Other than a low grade itch to check on folks’ statuses, I’m doing okay. One benefit should be more frequent posting here…so I’ve got that going for me…which is nice.

It wasn’t any one thing that pushed me over the edge, but it was a large collection of little things that made me reconsider what I was getting out of Facebook. Most of the bad things had to do with reading something that I disagree with and then fighting over whether I wanted to wade in knowing full well that nothing ever changes based on an Internet conversation. I’m a bit of a know-it-all with a bad case of Male Answer Syndrome (a.k.a. Manswer Syndrome or MAS) so the inner conflict was more difficult than I imagine it might be for other folks.

In the past week or so I’ve been drawn in to a fruitless conversation with someone who insists that there are card-carrying members of the CPUSA at all levels of government and in the media. I’ve watched a neighborhood personality conflict get real close to going critical–things are certainly irreparable now. I’ve bit my tongue any number of times while reading political status updates from the fringes of my friends list. In short, I spend a good deal of time stewing over what is going on and I’d prefer to not do that.

On the side of things I’ll miss I’d definitely include some of the running bits some of my less proximal friends have been doing. I’ll miss the serendipity of finding funnies or interesting bits that other friends have posted. There are a few nascent relationships that have come about on Facebook that will probably stall without me being there. The neighborhood scuttlebutt is something I’ll be excluding myself from. Then again, I’ve got Elz on hand to be my filter there.

I’ll keep on using Jim and Oscar’s page because I have a few long-running gags going there. I’ll be more vigilant about collecting and reading email as well as texting to get around not having Facebook’s breadth of reach. I’ll post more regularly here to let folks know what I’m up to.

All in all, I think this is going to be a good thing. If it turns out otherwise, well, reactivating the account is as simple as logging on using my credentials and then we’re back where we started. Here we go ’round again.

LiveJournal rev2

It’s probably not the most brilliant observation but it just came to me today that Facebook is basically LiveJournal, only with more adults and fewer kitty animated gifs. The more they play with friends and groups, the stronger the correlation becomes.

Not sure if this is a feature or a bug.

Also, the upcoming profile thingers due to arrive on Thursday are pretty much what would happen if you put the entirety of web 2.0 hype into a blender and put it on chop for a few seconds.

Again, not a novel insight.

The good and bad at Facebook

So Facebook doesn’t want to play nice and just give you RSS feeds for a user’s status updates. Used to be you could do that, but not so much any longer. It appears you may be able to generate a status feed using the Graph API, but that’s seriously overkill for my needs. Besides, who wants to write a graph parser when RSS parsers are a dime a dozen?

At least they haven’t nuked the user notifications RSS feed. Not yet, at least. Once they do, there’s always this.