I’ve never really caught the programming bug. I was taught VB / .NET in college but it was all incredibly tedious and not very interesting. Drag and drop a button, double click it and enter some code, then cross your fingers and hope it runs without exploding. I’m self-taught in php & jQuery although i’m more of a ‘hacker’ than a developer. Html / css is where I’ve least trouble. Why? Because that’s the stuff I enjoy doing… i can see the results of that front end stuff immediately…
I never thought i’d say it but i’m getting a little bored of social media. Average content gets over-shared, automated ‘content’ gets shared whether we like it or not and businesses are becoming predictable in their marketing efforts online… It’s a real problem for the internet as a whole. It’s losing its value as a ‘community’.
This is something that’s been building up for quite some time. It’s not any one single Facebook change that has triggered me in to this ‘attack’ but it’s a combination of new features and ads which don’t sit well with me. I asked myself to compare the Facebook of today -v- the Facebook i first joined and the differences are huge. Some for the better, most for the worst *if* we’re measuring facebook as a ‘social network’.
Yesterday i noticed my twitter timeline was flooded with ‘RIP bebo’ tweets and lots of people throwing in their 2 cents on how & why Bebo died. I did some searches and a quick scan of all major tech sites – nothing. Within minutes, Bebo’s wikipedia page was edited stating this ‘fact’: “The website closed on 30th January 2012″…
Traditionally, a social network consisted of users and groups. A user was an a individual, a group was a collection of individuals who shared a common interests. Then Facebook happened and they introduced pages. Google+ introduced circles, Facebook retaliated with ‘lists’ and the question has to be asked now “Are Facebook groups really necessary?”…