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Side-By-Side: Timeline and +Me

April 20, 2012 in Reviews

 

Embedded within my (rather scattered)  web routine are the inevitable, all-too-frequent checks on Facebook and Google+. I visit the former far more frequently than the latter: partly because notifications are built in to a number of other Google products; mostly because the people I’m connected to on Google+ tend to share articles rather than thoughts. It’s only today that I thought to compare the two networks’ profile pages, though.

Google launched its current layout just this month, with many improvements to its UI and a profile layout which bears much more of a resemblance to Facebook’s Timeline. I commend both ‘sites for introducing a banner space, which really helps to personalise a profile where custom themes are never allowed. I’ve also publicly decried Facebook’s approach to Timeline, which forced me to delete my account and start a new one, for personal reasons. Despite the fact I still have to tidy my re-booted Timeline every other night, I am generally a fan, though. I only tidy as I prefer to keep timely stories on there, since I believe that Facebook’s layout does not lend itself well to my occasional, rambling thoughts and linked media.

Of the two social networks, I do find that I prefer Google+’s approach, and I’m now beginning to look upon Timeline as a missed opportunity. Certainly neither is a perfect service, but I begin to wonder why Facebook devotes so much on-screen space to the cover image (the horizontal banner), when very few people seem to have photographs worthy of putting in here. I have had to rely upon a raygun gothic-themed image, choosing to carry my business card branding through, because unlike a couple of my friends and most of the celebrities I follow, I do not have any professional portraits. Compare this with Google+, and it’s clear that the user’s square-format portrait takes precedent. It is as though Facebook expects each user to treat their Timeline as a page rather than a profile, and I wonder now if that was a good move.

My criticisms achieve very little, of course – I use these services at no financial cost, and my fellow users learn to work around anything which they too might consider to be a shortfall. With that having been said, I’m somehow confident that Google+ represents me better, particularly for not displaying my connections so prominently. Google profiles do include a small panel, just below the user’s portrait, which will show any mutual connections you (as the viewer) may have, but that is something I consider very relevant and reassuring to social networking. The fact I have gone to the effort of manually tagging 243 photos with locations (because Facebook still stubbornly refuses to read meta-data, even for dates) is considerably less relevant, to my eyes. I also mourn the photo bar of yore, in which Facebook would allow you to hide those photos in which you were tagged in, but might not want shown on your profile. Now, if I want to be tagged in photos of a fun night out, I have no choice but to allow them on to the top of the pile, under that ‘photos’ thumbnail. Google+ seem to have responded to this, and it offers an alternative to the horizontal ‘cover art’ bar, which comprises a series of photos of your choice, as below:

At the end of the day, it seems to me that Google+ has found a worthy niche, breaking away from Facebook by actually sticking to what its elder competitor used to do. Where Facebook channels its users into making profiles which look like corporate pages, Google+ have offered a design which puts the user themselves further forward, also giving them a little more control over how they appear. It may lack the vibrant activity which Facebook still enjoys, and I experience this in the fact I’ve never physically met any of the people who appear in my stream, but in many ways I feel it is now a more appropriate home for me as a person.

If only some social networking APIs - and more importantly, other people – would actually use the thing…

Incidentally, you’re welcome to follow me on Facebook and Google+, though the latter is a bit light on anything but posts from Google Reader.

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The Price of Research

July 6, 2010 in Culture, Methods

"Mafia Wars" asks for access to my name, gender, university, friends list and email address.

Though I am now working on a couple of ‘social web’ game designs, I’m not an especially well-practised player of the genre; this is one reason why. It’s a much-touted complaint, but it does seem faintly ridiculous for a game to require so much information. I can see that profile pictures allow me to appear inside the game, and that my name will help personalise its greetings. Gender too might help the game address me coherently, but I even keep that information from Facebook, so it does Mafia Wars little good to ask for it here.

‘Accepting’ these applications always comes down to trust. I’ve trusted a game as large as FarmVille not to abuse my information, and likewise had few qualms about enabling Sony and Metaplace’s Facebook games. I don’t know the first thing about Mafia Wars however, other than the fact my friend and colleague plays it.

  • To whom am I sending this information?
  • Is it really only there to help personalise my gaming experience, or is it put towards market research and other such ventures to help the company make money?
  • Does doing this help to fund the games industry directly?
  • Is my personal information now some form of currency to help pay for a game which does not ask for other means of payment, such as cash?

These are the privacy concerns I would like to see dealt with in future; whether or not my photographs appear on other websites is of a lesser concern to me. My relationship with a game and its developer through the Facebook medium are so enigmatic as to leave my imagination filling the gaps in, and I simply do not have these worries when considering a console title. I’m only asked to pay for those with money.

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Likes Facebook

June 29, 2010 in Culture

I am a Facebook user, and have been for a few years. I’ve weathered a number of changes to the UI and its policies, as far back as remembering the day I had to provide my university email address in order to be allowed an account. In those days it was strictly for colleges and universities. The news feed has always been there though, so I’m not that old!

I consider myself to be a conservative Facebook user. I share some status updates between Facebook and Twitter, I share articles of interest with my friends and I ‘like’ my top 5 books, films and artists. I don’t seek out strangers in order to boost my friend count, and the few dozen that I have befriended are carefully arranged in groups in order to hide nonsense from those I’ve networked with, and to keep private information only for those who I trust.

I would wager that every Facebook user knows somebody else who is not so restrained; in fact, it may be you. Time was, these people would forever send me invitations to use Generic ‘Poking/Lifestyle Quiz/Hyped-up Monster Game’ Application. Their friends count would shoot past 300, and any messages left on their wall were smothered by “ALRITE M8″ and other application notices due to sheer bulk.

Through a gradual shift in Facebook’s platform, and some careful culling on my part, I don’t see these sorts of messages any more. Instead, Facebook itself does the spamming, in a small box to the right of my news feed. I am informed, by this entirely unintelligent script, that because a friend of mine likes Wayne Rooney or Glee, I might too. I’m occasionally shown ‘popular pages’ in this slot too, such as links to the Peter Andre fan page or an American pop icon I’ve never come across in my life.

Pages devoted to people and projects are tolerable. My ultimate bugbear, topping even the application invites of old, is the dreaded activity page.

This used to be a phenomenon which manifested as groups, however the rulings on creating communities changed around a year ago and an update to the Facebook profile now generate pages based on what users type into fields like ‘hobbies’ and ‘general’. Coherent phrases like “Tom Smith joined We are the ones your parents warned you about” became “Tom Smith liked We are the ones…”.

It seems that I’m not alone, as this remarkable story attests. I recommend reading it in full, but if you crave a summary, it’s an article by the author of Shut Up, I’m Talking!, Gregory Levey:

Very quickly, I had passed celebrities like Brad Pitt (55 000 fans) and Spike Lee (67 000 fans), as well as entire countries (Spain: 25 000 fans). And as time went on, my book’s page overtook ridiculously famous authors like J.K. Rowling (95 000 fans) and even Dan Brown (499 000 fans). Soon, my book had more fans than New York City (510 000 fans). It was mind-boggling, bizarre, and unnerving, especially since it was unclear what was driving this. Only when I noticed that some of these fans had been posting messages on my page’s “Wall” did I realize what was going on. Their quotes were along the lines of:

“Yeah, I was saying something and my mom broke in, and I was like, ‘Shut Up, I’m Talking!’ LOL!”

Or:

“Cool page! I hate it when people talk over me!”

Perhaps you can see what had been happening. Even though the fan page shows the book’s cover and its synopsis, and informs visitors that it was published by Simon & Schuster, the vast majority of these supposed “fans” were somehow totally unaware that it was referring to a book at all. They had simply joined because they were fans of the phrase “Shut Up, I’m Talking.”

Baffling, no? It’s quite easily done, though: the ‘like’ button, which adds your name to the roster of fans, can be ticked without ever having visited the page. Although a thumbnail is often shown within this box, you can join this page from the comfort of your own news feed. Another variant also places your friends’ ‘like’ updates directly within the news feed as a one-line item. This is all they see:

Ordinarily I write this blog in order to justify my choices and opinion on where games and online media should change. I struggle with Facebook’s ‘like’ culture, because while it may be inane by my standards, it is, nevertheless, a fun feature. Levey has seen his book’s online presence become utterly smothered, and there seems no doubt that he resents this given the effort which went into the project. Tens of thousands of people are now made quite aware of its title, however. While it’s by no means a cultural phenomenon, the exposure may just earn him a few more readers regardless.

While I’m on phenomena, I feel a need to raise the point that this Facebook activity is unique in its roots and actual impact. These sorts of messages play out as cultural memes, as large numbers of people spread a single message. The phrase “Shut Up, I’m Talking!” will not, however, register in the same way as non-Facebook memes. Probably the biggest ‘word on the street’ right now is “vuvuzela”; it is a foreign word which is easy and fun to say, and it is associated with a uniquely annoying phenomenon upon which most people have an opinion. It stands for something. The same could be said of “bow ties are cool”, though it’s narrowed down to fans of Doctor Who, or of other internet phrases like “fail”. I can’t recall Facebook memes ever reaching this level of use.

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