Reports of the death of social media are greatly exaggerated maybe

Showing all posts tagged: Facebook

Reports of the death of social media are greatly exaggerated maybe

14 November 2022

It’s over. Facebook is in decline, Twitter in chaos. Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has lost hundreds of billions of dollars in value and laid off 11,000 people, with its ad business in peril and its metaverse fantasy in irons. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has caused advertisers to pull spending and power users to shun the platform (or at least to tweet a lot about doing so). It’s never felt more plausible that the age of social media might end — and soon.

The question is, what do we do next, if we don’t have social media? Go back to meaningful face-to-face interactions? What do content producers, who enjoy self-publishing do? Print a zine? I’m not sure that social media is about to disappear, even if some of the bigger players are having some trouble. Still, Bogost makes some salient points.

As I’ve written before on this subject, people just aren’t meant to talk to one another this much. They shouldn’t have that much to say, they shouldn’t expect to receive such a large audience for that expression, and they shouldn’t suppose a right to comment or rejoinder for every thought or notion either.

People have been over-talking since people could first talk. Ditto expecting a large audience for their rants. Social media only amplified the voice of these over-talkers. On the upside, anyone we don’t want to listen to can easily be ignored, blocked. Try doing that to an over-talker you don’t want to listen to at a family gathering.

Social media might not be about to roll over and die, but it is at a turning point. Yet as Twitter’s implosion shows, people are not quite ready to walk away from connecting online. Membership of Twitter alternative, Mastodon, has spiked in recent weeks. Billing itself as a social network, rather than a social media service, it has become a sanctuary for people seeking a place where they can hear themselves think.

Presently there are few brands, and — better still — influencers, and possibly over-talkers, on Mastodon. That some servers, or instances, forbid commercial accounts, helps in this regard. Instances are either owner funded, or member supported, meaning they don’t need advertising revenue to survive. Perhaps this means there’ll be more signal and less noise, but only time will tell.

If social media is about content creation and publishing to the widest possible audience, then social networking is about forging more meaningful connections with those in your network. No doubt some will welcome the demise of certain social media channels, but if the migration to Mastodon is any indication, people are still looking to connect online with others, both known and unknown. Or maybe a whole lot of us simply want to be part of the next (sort of) big thing. Only time will tell.

It’s time to think twice about Facebook, right?

6 October 2021

Tim Biggs, writing for the Sydney Morning Herald, on yesterday’s Facebook outage:

The fact that the impact was so wide may cause you to ponder what we all already know, that Facebook has inserted itself into as many facets of our online lives as possible, for the purposes of the collection and cross-referencing of our data, to drive its experimental advertising machine. And though outages like this are rare and the hyper-connectedness of Facebook services is unlikely to become an ongoing problem in the sense that they’re falling over all the time, it is timely that we’ve been forced to reckon with just how ubiquitous the company is, if only for a few hours.

I don’t use Facebook too much, but was alarmed I couldn’t access Instagram for several hours yesterday. But am I going to look for alternatives? Yeah, right…

Twit Face route your Facebook status updates to Twitter

18 August 2008

Dylan Davis published a method of routing the Facebook update statuses of both you and your friends to Twitter a few days ago as a Facebook note. I thought this was something people might be interested in trying out, and Dylan was happy to let me republish his update status routing recipe. Enjoy!

Here’s a recipe for routing all your and your friend’s Status updates from Facebook to Twitter. See also my post about doing the same with Ecademy and other services.

Things you’ll need:-

An Open ID
An RSS feed for just your Facebook status updates. Go to your profile, click on minifeed, see All. Click on Status Stories. There’s a Subscription link bottom right.
An RSS feed for your friends’ Facebook status updates. Friends – Status updates from the drop down at the top of the page. There’s a Subscription link bottom right.
A dummy Twitter account. Create a new Twitter account and follow it from your main account.

Route your Facebook updates so when you post it also posts to Twitter.

Login with your OpenID into Twitterfeed.
Create a new entry. Put in your main Twitter account ID and Password and the RSS for your status updates.
Update 30 minutes, Include title only, Include Item link, Prefix each Tweet with FB.

Now each time you post a status update on Facebook, within 30 minutes it will create a Tweet from you on Twitter with a link back to your profile on Facebook.

Route your Friends’ Facebook updates so when they set their status on Facebook, you can read it in Twitter.

Login with your OpenID into Twitterfeed.
Create a new entry. Put in your dummy Twitter account ID and Password and the RSS for your friends’ status updates.
Update 30 minutes, Include title only, Include Item link, Prefix each Tweet with FB.

Now each time any of your friend’s post a status update on Facebook, within 30 minutes it will appear in your Twitter Friend’s timeline with a link back to their profile on Facebook.

You can use the same basic technique for any service that has one or both RSS feeds. It works better with services that include the name of the poster in the title. So Facebook, Plazes, Jaiku but not Pownce. AFAIK, Twitter is the only service with an API for updating a status externally and a 3rd party RSS to post service. Which means Twitter ends up as the best aggregator for all your services.

So the next question is which service you should use as your main update. I’m finding myself doing most of my updates on Twitter with occasional updates on Facebook and Ecademy to keep my profile on those services fresh.

Thanks again, Dylan.

Originally published Monday 18 August 2008.