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Dan Kennedy is pleased to meet the Facebook version of you.
The wit in your status updates is delightful. The real life version of you always seemed intent on cornering me into a night of drinking wine after work so I could listen to you go on rather humorlessly about money problems and the usual rash of petty resentments against family and colleagues. But the Facebook version of you is one languid little paragraph of blurted bon mots after another.
Facebook is starting to display who views what, leading to the inevitable question: If people you followed on Facebook knew every time you viewed their profile, would you have any need or desire to keep using Facebook? [via]
Starting yesterday, when you visit group pages on Facebook, you can see which group members have viewed each post. That means if you’re curious about what stupid jerks your ex best friend invited to his lame-o birthday gathering and you just happen to meander over to a group page organized around the fart party moron collective he’s assembled to celebrate his terrible birth, and you click on the dumb overly friendly notes that his horrible new friends who say YOLO left, if he invited you to his party, people will know you’ve been there. You Only Die of Embarrassment Once. YODEO.
Andy Baio doesn’t think the $1-billion price tag on Instagram is so crazy when you put it into context.
If we look strictly at the acquisition cost per user, Facebook got a relative deal with the Instagram purchase, paying roughly $28 for each of Instagram’s 35 million users. (The median cost across all the acquisitions is about $92 per user.)
(Side note: In the table of acquisition prices, he italicizes “rumoured” amounts. Among those is Upcoming.org, which is “rumoured” at $1 million. It’s just funny because he’s the guy who sold it.)
Instagram and digital classism.
The Web sites that you load every day are just as important as the clothes you wear, the technology you own, the television shows you watch, and the car you drive. Basically the same ‘material things’ that allow us to actively or inactively participate in modern classist behaviors are equally as embedded in our digital behavior.
[…]
Every day, we get to see a bunch of mediocre images captured by mediocre cameras on our overpriced phones, uploaded via our overpriced data plans. But for the digital upper class, it is worth paying to be a participant of this instant cycle of sharing. Instagram has placed itself as a necessary tool in this process, an easy-to-use mobile app that Facebook bets will serve as the definitive photo-editing and -sharing tool of the current digital era.
Facebook is buying Instagram for $1 billion in cash and stock. That’s one dollar for every crazy scenario we can now consider, including what all this will mean for Flickr given the recent (ongoing?) troubles at Yahoo and whether or not this is a sign that Facebook has finally won the internet (or at least, that they would have won the internet if they avoided that whole going public thing, which I think is going to be bad news for them in the long term).
HardlyWork.in turns your Facebook feed into a spreadsheet.
Spotify is coming to Facebook… which kind of changes things just a bit.
Facebook adds same-sex relationship statusii. (See what I did there?)
Facebook is a Ponzi scheme. [via]
Have you ever bought a Facebook ad? I have. I have talked to many, many people who have. We have spent hundreds, many have spent thousands or even more, experimenting with Facebook ads. They are worthless. Nobody ever looks at them, and nobody ever clicks on them. I just talked to someone who was trying to promote a book. He found it cost him over $100 in ads to sell one book. Moreover, as you increase your ad spending, people get used to the ads and just ignore them. So, your already low click-through rate plummets even further.
Just last night a friend who is not on Facebook said he’d sign up for whatever replaced Facebook. My response was that I didn’t think anything would replace Facebook. And I think I meant it. Barring any serious missteps, Facebook might actually be too big to fail. If privacy didn’t bring them down (or even slow them down), what will? That being said, I’ve seen how bad those advertising numbers are first hand. Ouch.
An argument for unfriending your kids on Facebook.
Jordan, our oldest, was at university in the United States at the time. We still recall him telling us in 2004 about this new social networking site he and his friends used called The Facebook. A few years later, my wife was among the millions of boomers who began logging in too. Soon, we could witness for ourselves the carnage of the many “keggers” our son was attending. There he was in some photo, shirt off, eyes half-closed, a delightful young woman pretending to lick his chest.
I was envious.
How much is Flickr worth to Yahoo! and should we be worried about it’s future?
Should Flickr users be worried about their photos? In the short term, maybe not – but in the long term, something’s going to need to change. Either we all start storing our media in easy-to-use cloud systems, or we bend our knee to the mighty Facebook, or we come up with systems that make transfer of our digital assets between institutions as easy in the future as it is to move our financial assets between financial institutions today.
New York draws a comparison between Mark Zuckerberg, Julian Assange and their battles over privacy. [via]
But in the eyes of Zuckerberg’s critics, what WikiLeaks threatens to do to secrecy, Facebook is doing, or wants to do, to privacy. In its six-year run, the company has changed its privacy policies many times, almost always trying to “help itself—and its advertising and business partners—to more and more of its users’ information, while limiting users’ options to control their own information,” as an analysis by the Electronic Frontier Foundation puts it. Those efforts have often caused a commotion, notably this past spring, when complaints became so loud that government officials in several countries got into the act, and Facebook eventually climbed down. Though Zuckerberg occasionally mouths pro-privacy bromides, his deeper attitude is more relaxed. “We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are,” he has said.
100 people Dave Pell hates on Facebook.
21. People you who regularly tag you in their photo albums when it’s clearly a good photo of them and a bad photo of you.
You know who you are.
Facebook is expected to announce a new email service on Monday, marking the beginning of phase four in their plan for total global domination.
Posted by Tyler in Daily Links
Saw this posted pretty much everywhere this morning. I avoided it assuming it would kind of suck. I was wrong.
Drop.io — a file sharing site I used a lot — has been acquired by Facebook and is shutting down. Hopefully this means Facebook will add private file sharing, but probably not.
Facebook and Skype are working on something together. [via]
The move by the pair–which have tested small contact importer integrations before–is a natural one for the social networking giant, which is aiming to be the central communications and messaging platform for its users, across a range of media. Facebook’s goal, according to sources: To mesh communications and community more tightly together and add more tools to allow users to do so.
The New Yorker’s profile on Mark Zuckerberg.
I told Sorkin that his TV series was one of Zuckerberg’s favorites. He paused. “I wish you hadn’t told me that,” he said finally. When I asked Sorkin to guess the episode that Zuckerberg liked best, he said, “The Lemon-Lyman episode”—the one in Season Three where Josh Lyman, the deputy chief of staff, played by Bradley Whitford, discovers that he has a following on an online message board and unwisely interacts with its members.
The Facebook guy was Al Pacino.
In the chapter chronicling the early days of the social network, Kirkpatrick writes, “Zuckerberg’s friend and classmate Andew McCollum designed a logo using an image of Al Pacino he’d found online that he covered with a fog of ones and zeros—the elementary components of digital media.”
Posted by Tyler in Daily Links
Movie poster for The Social Network.
