Facebook Is Not All That

So just because facebook is one of my pet peeves, here are a couple of posts about social networking and the likes. Bear in mind before reading them I have a particular aversion towards the ways in which users actually employ all the tools that random social networking platforms make available:

• “Social Networking: Is It Making You Anti-Social?”
• “Does Social Networking Bring Us Together…Or Ultimately Separate Us?“

Since the MySpace age is a bit over and so passé when it comes to advertising on it or investing large sums of money, some could say that facebook is facing a decline in users BUT there are still people that seem to dig even deeper into the bowels of facebook’s great unknown. I might sound like an uptight cunt about that but when it comes to advertising no big clients are interested in doing it any more and the point that small businesses could benefit from it is still valid, up and running.

As far as my own facebook is concerned, I only bother checking the main page from time to time, out of curiosity. I don’t have the time and patience to change my profile details and status as soon as things happen. I know people are watching mine as I’m reminded every day but some change their status as often as others use twitter and it makes me ask myself “why“. Not “why would you let the whole world know what you’re doing as soon as you’re doing it” but “why waste the time doing it“. They’re not always the people with most friends (some have 54 and update it more times a day than they have visits to their profile nor the ones with over 1,600 friends.

I think it was a couple of weeks ago in a business environment lecture that we watched a video on how facebook plans on delivering advertising to its target audience and the shock and horror on the faces of those that think “nothing can happen” if they add information about themselves on the Internet and someone suddenly uses it for a different purpose. I think most of the people that think it’ll stay the “good ol’ networking platform” are a bit naive and in for a big surprise. Have you seen Aliens vs. Predator Requiem*? “The government wouldn’t lie to people…would they?”

I am sincerely fucked off by stupid predictions and estimations that facebook is going to be bigger than Google. Bollocks. It took the internet twenty years since its discovery to reach 80% of the population, calculating how long it will take facebook to become the ‘next big thing‘ after Google is daft. Daft, daft, daft. How much money it’ll be worth is something you can enthusiastically debate with anyone who cares and is directly involved.

So it comes as no surprise… that I’ve stopped reading TIME a couple of years ago because I thought it was rubbish. For a while there, loads of people kept telling me I’m like, missing out on things! Do I not care? No, not when TIME still publishes stuff like “Is Facebook The Future of Search?” jumping on the same bandwagon named “Looky here how useful“. What the article says is something like “We’re too busy to get on the Internet and use Google, instead we go on facebook where we don’t have to look for info, it will just come to us by itself.”. In internet terms…LOL, really? We do? Who’s ‘we’?

“But, now, when we have idle time, we don’t go to Google anymore; we go to Facebook. And on Facebook, we don’t have to seek information. Instead, information just comes to us.”

No, facebook shouldn’t be the future of internet search. Some friends and I took the piss out of a local pizza delivery service when we ordered through their website and by accident the data was made public and if people googled my name they could see I had bought 3 pizzas and some random drinks. Not like anyone would stalk my taste in pizza with Google but AdSense had already come up with ads for vegetarian pizza recipes, a local booze delivery service and holidays in Ibiza while my 2nd junk email account started being filled up with spam from second 2. Most people don’t employ a second email account just for junk email and registering on websites that keep sending you newsletters so they’re at loss. Isn’t it exciting though? Just what a student needs. No?

The author doesn’t really say facebook is the future of search but his example is somewhat exaggerated and it’s another exaggeration to assume it will be. They could learn something from it but that’s where it all ends.

What the author forgot to add to his article:

• That he has 900 friends, as he stated himself;
• That he’s writing for TIME magazine and a lot of people that added him as a result of a previous article he had written have some amount of respect for him because at a certain point in his life he had to work hard and be nice to people to end up writing for TIME. This changes things a lot considering you’re supposed to have a particular dose of interestingness for people to watch your facebook profile more often. A bit like having a party piece. How likely is it that if I contribute to The Guardian and ask people to add me to their facebook they’ll react a lot faster than they would if I’m not? Yeah, that’s right, this is how you don’t write a column for TIME magazine.
• Friendships are like plants and that’s not just me vouching for social relationships and acquaintances but it’s a simple analogy. You don’t water them, they die. You lose touch, facebook won’t help you a lot and that person will just increase your friend count but nothing more.
• That you have to meet a few terms and conditions in order for “information to come to you” like Jesus answering your prayers:
  • Your friends have to be online when you’re looking for it (very unlikely considering the vast majority of the population still lives in real life and not on facebook or the internet and we all have our schedules)
  • They need to have the knowledge or be very lucky (“Oh look, in less than a minute Jim said I should look for this book because I’ll find a better recipe for the cake I’m baking, he also gave me the page number!”). In the author’s example he was going to make some tarts and 1/900 new friends knew the exotic recipe he was attempting.
  • And last but not least, people have to be motivated to help you, right? In his case, trying to woo a person who works or writes for TIME, getting an answer and looking smart – how awesome is that? They could just choose to ignore the info even if they do satisfy the other two conditions above.

Why?

1. Well the first condition “being on facebook when you’re looking for answers” is a bit complicated. Max Zuckerman’s post says something among the lines of: “I know so much about them such as the basics like where they live, what they look like wearing a toga, and what they are doing RIGHT THIS MINUTE! “It means to have an equally interesting life outside facebook in order to get that many friends so that when you’re doing something (or searching for something) somewhere, someone will be able to help you. That one person to be online at the very same time (And here’s the 1,000 bonus points question: Have they not got anything else better to do?). If you don’t have enough friends chances are no one will help you or someone will eventually help you but not when you need it.
2. Having the actual knowledge to help is actually crucial. If one person has a clue, it’s a known fact that the wisdom of crowds is sometimes far superior to individual knowledge but depending on what your problem is. Maybe I know how to bake a tart (by accident) if I bump on someone in need of help on facebook (see #1) but then there’s #3…
3. Being motivated enough to help: Not all people in my facebook are my “friends”. Some are acquaintances and it’s become something of a social ritual to ask for one’s facebook like you’d ask for their phone number. When it comes to people from uni it’s a measure of how popular or smart you are. Always wonder why someone has the amount of friends they do – is it because he has people that know they can turn to him as an opinion leader or source of information or just because he’s a nice, outgoing person that has loads of friends? Most are acquaintances and that’s just it. People I’ve only met once, maybe twice. We’ve added each other to facebook because “you never know” but to actually spend time cultivating online friendships is a huge waste of time. To think about how long it takes to just leave a message or a poke and get involved in it so I actually get some answers from them in my time of need means sacrificing time for other things. As their number increases, the time I need to say something nice whenever they post something new increases as well. It might just be my skeptical point of view but “a friend of everyone is a friend of none” and unless you want something from them, sacrificing your time for people that will never be able to physically help you (assuming that’s the kind of help you’d need the most, for anything else there’s the Internet). Not everyone is motivated to do good. Y’know, “we hate it when our friends become successful” as the song says so why would we help them? Maybe they don’t want the information if they’ve not told you they’re looking for it and they think highly of themselves and don’t need you to give them advice. It always depends on what the person is like, how complicate the problem is and how you put things. That’s why knowing whom you’re addressing is important before.

My point is, people who aren’t doing pretentious searches might benefit from collective wisdom sort of searches (“See what people are saying right now”) but your intention says everything about it really. If you’re stood in front of your computer with an internet browser open with the intention of searching for something and not letting the whole world know you’re baking a cake or don’t know what role the lottery performs in a labour market economy. It’s not rocket science but why is that in TIME magazine?

Even if I have 1,600 friends and want to go on holiday in Rio de Janeiro, perhaps one in 1,600 has been there and might (at most) recommend me a place, a drink, a bar, a hotel, something to see but chances are his piece of advice is out of date. Double or triple the amount of people (or times whatever you want) maybe I’ll get a more accurate answer to my concern. But in the time I’ve spent asking for it could have well been used on googling a more focused community, separate from facebook that knows more about the place than my friends do (assuming something is better than nothing). And it’s only when I already own some piece of information I can filter it with the use of something like facebook.

But for everything else, there’s Google.

(wow that’s a lot of text)

* Don’t then!

Books so Far

Almost three months into the year, a list of books that are worth a read (and that I’ve been meaning to post for ages now)

• Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce and Culture by Taylor Clark
• Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
• The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
• The Trial by Franz Kafka
• The Outsider by Albert Camus
• The Book of Happiness by Nina Berberova
  

Earthquake in the UK, Log Date 27 February, 1AM

Exciting being evacuated at 1 in the morning on the first night I actually went to bed early.

I can’t tell how bad it was but people in Leicester and London felt it too, no one around the Midlands though (they were mostly sleeping). It wasn’t too long here in Manchester, I’d say about 10 seconds and around 5 on a Richter scale. No aftershock that we know of since we were all standing by that time.

If I fall asleep and New York has been hit by a tsunami, it wasn’t us!

! Update: Epicentre is 15 miles NE of Lincoln 4.7 on the scale. My geography is poor – is that South Humberside?

US Geographical Institute details:

Magnitude	4.7
Date-Time	Wednesday, February 27, 2008 at 00:56:45 UTC Wednesday, February 27, 2008 at 12:56:45 AM
Location	53.321°N, 0.314°W
Depth	10 km (6.2 miles) set by location program
Region	ENGLAND, UNITED KINGDOM
Distances	50 km (30 miles) S of Kingston upon Hull, England, UK 70 km (45 miles) NE of Nottingham, England, UK 80 km (50 miles) E of Sheffield, England, UK 205 km (125 miles) N of LONDON, United Kingdom

Update #2: Sky News just said we were shook by an earthquake but nothing else. Was felt down in Bristol, up in York from other people’s reports. Up in York ” the bed was rocking back and forth” (I would have burst their bubble saying it was something else though…but some other time). News said people have felt it in Norwich, Birmingham and Dudley. I reckon by now the whole country felt it, we’ve pretty much covered most of it.

Update #3: BBC picked up the news: “Tremor felt across the UK“. Don’t break it!

Later edit #1: This blog here that keeps constant predictions had one for the 27th of about 2.3 (WESTERN ENGLAND 51.92 -2.56 -Probable 2.3)

Observations #1 – Important Events

After pondering a bit, this ‘observations’ category doesn’t seem like a bad idea. They’re not exactly random thoughts even though they might seem that sometimes. And naturally they’re purely subjective.

To start off, observations about the days after last Sunday when my mum passed away:

• Loads of people start sending you emails and text messages. They all sound pretty much the same but at this point you don’t care what’s in them but more about the fact that they bothered to write you a few lines, showing they care. And that makes you feel better.
• Surprised at how fast my mobile phone number got around in less than three hours though.
• Everyone else starts treating you as if you’re a box about to break or a piece of china. While it is nice to be ‘taken easily’ and not burdened with other random problems for a few days it’s not nice to be handled with too much care as if you’re on the verge of collapsing or just bursting into tears randomly. Unless you have a record of doing that.
• You suddenly love everyone close to you a bit more because you realise how fragile life is and you don’t want to lose them.
• You try to remember all the good things and bad things and depending on how you felt about the person, your brain tries to push one of them out only to realise shortly “it’s wrong” to think like that and the others are still there and you can’t be biased.
• There’s a slight disruption in your usual schedule or pastime activities, i.e. faffing around on the internet for a while when you get home. You stare at your screen for a bit and think “eh, fuck it” and go do something else. Whatever it is on the Internet, it’s not as interesting as lying down in bed and doing nothing for a couple of days.
• Also, personal note: while it used to be a pleasurable activity a couple of years ago or even a few months ago, I find it awkward that one of my presences on a networking site (which is not facebook as I barely use it) is stalked by the very same person, repeatedly, several times a day over the weekend (at least from what I’ve gathered). While I sort of got an explanation for this strange behaviour, it baffles me that some people have distorted ways of thinking or can be more paranoid than I am. It also surprises me that some people always look for hidden intentions and meanings when they’ve nothing interesting to do with their lives and sit at home brooding ideas and coming up with scenarios in their head. I’m sitting in front of my screen sort of blank, thinking about my mum (since it’s still fresh in my mind it’s just like “mum”/”my brother”/”mum”/”mum”/…) and I open random tabs in my browser to stare at them but don’t know why really, only to realise that some people are badly out of touch with reality and it feels sad.
• You lose interest in doing anything that involves your pc after 5 o’clock and you just feel like you’re 40, came home from work, want to have a nice meal and a drink, watch a film, sleep, rinse, repeat. The less you can think about, the better.
• When you talk to people and they nicely ask you “how are you?” you just say “so and so” because you really are “so and so”, it’s not just our British politeness (when talking to someone from outside the UK) and it’s annoying that you have to explain -“Oh, you, that’s a very polite thing to say but what are you really thinking about?” – “Well, naturally I’m sad but it won’t help me so I’m just watching YouTube videos to cheer me up”. Shock and horror on their faces as if I’m not allowed to and I’ve committed humanity’s biggest crime. What am I allowed to do in the end and how will feeling miserable help me 1500 miles away from everything?
• My family started calling me about three times a day now as opposed to three times a week and I even got told to see a doctor which wouldn’t be a bad idea but I’ve not suffered from a panic attack in over three or four years now. From the “things no one knew about my life but have only recently found out” series, it’s not like they describe it and it definitely sounds more dramatic if you read about it. It’s a bit like riding the roller  coaster instead of the merry-go-round. And I don’t want Kava tea either.

I’ve Been Better

I felt down. I feel like describing what it was that made me so upset but I’ll spare everyone the details now. For those that have emailed me to ask about things, it was very much appreciated but there was absolutely no time to reply to any lately.

This morning my brother called me only to say “We’re not doing so well. Mum died a couple of hours ago.” and ever since I’ve been somewhat dazed and confused. My phone kept buzzing with texts and calls all day and I’ve already cried my heart out – you’re probably thinking “why the bloody hell are you writing about it then” – I’m not looking for anything from anyone reading this (as I’m aware that even some of my lecturers read this blog) and have no choice really. I can’t fly back in time for the funeral and the distance makes any whine or frustration somewhat pointless. Just numb to the point where I’m not even angry or can’t be angry at cancer, the fact that no one found a cure yet, that it just pops out of nowhere, anyone else I might be angry at or ever have been. Having already lost two relatives to it, this makes me feel so useless.

I’ve had a pretty bad week. Despite writing a lot about what I feel, I don’t talk about it as much (or at all). It felt depressing to hear “We hope she’ll still be alive by the time you come see her” a couple of weeks ago but only a few people knew about it while to others my ignorance of anything unrelated to the matter came across as “Do you really not care about how I feel?”. Frankly, no. I don’t give a crap and I only cared about myself for a while there, I’ve worked two years caring about other people’s lives, it’s about time I started paying more attention to mine. Things are never as good as they are bad.

…but at the end of the day it has released me of so many worries. I’ve never felt more loved before in my life. And my day suddenly wasn’t that bad any more.

Stop, Drop, Roll

I feel so sad and down any activity going on around here will currently be on hold just so I don’t have to bother going through my entries and deleting them after I’ve written them and read them in a more optimistic state.

If only life was about getting what you give in return and no holding your hand on the door handle so you can get out as quickly as possible when the pressure gets too unbearable.

Pitch Perfect

So today, courtesy of the CIM I went to a workshop on how to deliver the perfect pitch – not the “sell creative work” pitch, more like the PR/Communication one. Apart from having a very tasty chocolate muffin and a glass of wine, meeting Julian Jordan from Jordan Comms and being scared by a second year advertising & brand management student that the year is really busy and there are shitloads of assignments, I did get a sort of confirmation to what I was thinking – that it’s more about teaching rather than convincing sometimes, that it’s a lengthy process that needs your full-fledged attention and you have to treat your clients as if you were pitching to them for the very first time, almost every time. At this point I won’t bother going into details as to what that means because I’m too tired fucking knackered.

It just came as a highlight that the whole process (theirs, at least) is very different from what we used to do in Leo Burnett – starting from the creative brief, we’d…

1. Eliminate false expectations;
2. Focus on consistencies between the brief and the creative work;
3. Rationalise inconsistencies between the two above;
4. Explaining our consumer understanding;
5. Bring in the argument for the advertising idea;
6. Explain the advertising idea itself;
7. Eliminate nasty surprises that the client might have upon seeing the creative work (this step would depend a lot on what we actually did);
8. Tease them a bit before showcasing the actual work.

Whereas here everything sort of happens the other way around. Hard to explain, I don’t yet have the slides for the presentation but I might just get my hands on them soon.

Thou Shalt Not…

• Get a third person to ask why someone has decided to stop talking to you. Do it yourself or you’ll be quite sad.
• Decide to pseudo-protect your precious self by not accepting critique and the cruel truth.
• Suddenly start doing things you normally wouldn’t just to woo someone into talking to you or noticing you.
• Be close to your thirties sobbing over missed opportunities and ‘what ifs’, life is what you make of it.
• Put musicians and recording artists on ridiculous pedestals no matter how great they are or were. (Le Sac vs. Pip)
• Cry your heart out when you had it coming.
• Be surprised no one’s on your side when you do something they never approved of. (+1 bonus if you’re in a pitch)
• Lie and forget to cover your tracks. Watch more Dexter.
• Lie to someone that can read you like an open book, it’s like pissing in an ocean of piss.
• Forget that the truth eventually surfaces when you don’t want it to no matter how hard you try to avoid it.
• Faff around on the internet all day and wonder why you have no friends that want to go out with you in real life.
• Lie and convince yourself what you did was right. +1 to men doing this, stop being such women.
• Throw logic into something stupid you’ve done just to make sense of it – you won’t and it’ll only make sense to you.
• Play the victim for longer than two weeks, it gets boring and you suck.
• Make use of your brain more often and discover that strange thing called ‘perspective’.
• Worship pop idols or follow lost prophets. (Le Sac vs. Pip)
• Promise strangers on the internet you’ll marry them and quit your day job and move to some place that won’t offer you jack shit. (if > 18 then twice as bad)
• Throw yourself onto the fire and be surprised that you get burnt. (prude)
• Worship people and places you have never been to or have never met, chances are you’ll be disappointed.
• Adopt a foreign or new lifestyle that doesn’t fit you and then wonder why you have no friends.
• Be a psycho chick.
• Misuse words you’ve heard others say just to try to fit in with them. Personality, hooooooo. Gutted you can’t grab a dictionary! +1 bonus for idiots doing cockney accents. +1 more for pretentious words grabbed from the gmail web clips.

One Second Ad

Apart from being the only insane person to ever read the Manchester Evening News, The Metro and ShortList from beginning till the end whenever they’re handed to me, a few weeks ago this interesting idea came to my attention:

Eels wanted to broadcast a one-second ad to play during the Super Bowl. The advert would have been E (or Mark Everett) pronouncing the first letter from the title of their latest album – obviously ‘E’! Why one second? Because they didn’t have enough money to afford a full 30-second ad.

Naturally, that never happened but the explanation (for people like me who were still wondering) came with the latest issue:

“The answer is quite brilliant. Eels had their money ($100,000 for one second) turned down because the NFL would have had to find 29 other advertisers to buy one-second spots to fill a standard 30 second advertising slot, as it does not sell advertising time by the second. The NFL also noted – and this is true – that a rapid-fire 30-second segment of 30 one-second commercials could cause people with certain medical conditions to have seizures. So even if Eels had risen to the NFL’s challenge, they couldn’t have aired it. Brilliant stuff, eh?”

Now I feel somewhat more entitled to post a song of theirs that I’ve been really fond of lately:

“Do you know what it’s like to fall on the floor
And cry your guts out ’til you got no more
Hey man now you’re really living

Now you’re really giving everything
And you’re really getting all you gave
Now you’re really living what
This life is all about

Have you ever sat down in the fresh cut grass
And thought about the moment and when it will pass
Hey man now you’re really living”

Shut Up And Let Me Enjoy, You Bastards

I’ve not posted any of these random frustration entries for quite a while now but I’m afraid I can’t keep my New Year’s resolution, namely trying to stop being angry. I’m not sure if it was ‘try’ or actually stop being angry but the circumstances are attenuating.

I’m angry when people take the fun out of things that were meant to be entertainment. This time it’s about films and film critics – not sure how common it is for many of you to go look up a film on IMDb before watching it at the cinema but I know I usually do: to check the cast, a short synopsis maybe and when I buy a DVD I’ve not heard of before to check the user rating for it. IMDb is decent when it comes to wisdom of crowds: the votes get evened out after a while so the system is pretty fair.

But Rotten Tomatoes on the other hand…Rotten Tomatoes is centred around critic reviews. I wonder when websites like Yahoo and Rotten Tomatoes will get it: the vast majority of people have stopped giving a shit about reviews that take the piss out of films that are meant to entertain them and have no intention of becoming the next masterpiece in film making.

It goes like this: you decide to watch a film without really caring what these websites say, you enjoy it, you come home and you find that the reviews have given it amazing 2/10 marks or something like that and literally shovelled shit on it when it wasn’t bad. When it wasn’t depressingly boring. When it was OK and you think it didn’t deserve that treatment. When it’s entertaining but not amazing. Tight but not touching. And think ‘fuck you!’, you didn’t really want to know what critics had to say and take comfort in the fact that there’s a huge gap between what critics say and what the public says about the film. Then you think ’serves you right, bastards’.

I’m afraid of what they’ll say about Indiana Jones, about The Dark Knight and other films that are sequels to a lot of others I grew up with (no, Rambo doesn’t count). I’m afraid but I couldn’t care less as well because I just know they’ll love a bit of a moan on how Harrison Ford is a wee bit old, how Stallone is this and that, Bale is not that etc. but honestly…the bottom line is: who cares about critics reviews any more? They’re a bit obsolete by now what with blogging and opinion leaders as they’re none the wiser than any other reviewer out there who’s seen his fair share of films in a lifetime.

So shut up and let me enjoy my films, you bastards!