Regardless of what Andy says, your comments about Facebook are somewhat revealing. You're clearly looking at the most negative side of the service that you can. You're holding up the worst examples and defining the entire site by those examples.

- not everyone who uses Facebook is addicted to it
- not everyone uses Facebook as their AOL-like "internet for dummies"
- not everyone strives for the highest friend count possible

Like I said before, Facebook is nearing 300 million users (if they haven't reached that already). Not all of them use it the same way.

Anyway, I know I'm not going to change your mind on the service. You're not going to hear it, but it's not the evil thing you think it is.

By the way, has anyone seen Facebook Lite? (lite.facebook.com) It's a great streamlined view of the site, without a lot of the crap that's been added over the years.

A surprising number of countries are compatible with U.S. CDMA handsets.

Now that 3G GSM is really just a CDMA variant, we might finally see some measure of infrastructure convergence. I won't predict how many years that will take.

It's the fact you are always 'right' and anyone who disagrees with you is 'wrong' and is an idiot. Also the fact the design and implementation of any product or service is wrong. We had a guy at work like that and the common consensus was that he had some form of mental abnormality. I've just got tired of reading it day after day over multiple threads. BTW, if by the truth you mean your comparison of the UK with a penal colony then you're wrong. It's your opinion, and that, in my opinion, doesn't count for shit.

I really and truly hope I never get to meet you in person, you really are the biggest self-important prick I've ever had the misfortune to come across and I feel genuinely sorry for your friends, family and anyone who has to deal with you on a regular basis if this how you act outside the BBS.

This is last you will hear from me on the matter.

I had a look at it when I came across an article about it on the BBC News website. Given I don't really use the extra applications that bloat out the normal site, it may very well become my default way of looking at it.

Belize does. I had to switch from AT&T to Verizon because our village only gets coverage through Smart, a Belizean provider that is CDMA only.

I can switch my phone between providers when going back and forth to Belize by selecting NAM 1 or NAM 2.

You know... I have to admit that I can't help but think the same of you, every time you make snide posts like this. We get it... you don't like Bruno, you've blocked him. Can you drop it, now?

Not liking is a little mild, but yes, you're correct.

I will do my best to bite my tongue in future, but sometimes I just can't help it, he makes it so easy.

I do value your opinion on the matter and I know others share it and will use it as lightly and productively as they might use some other more specialized site. But the potential for the things I mentioned and that you summarized quite well, is alarming. And believe it or not, quite common.

Even if I hadn't been paying attention to the news reports on the matter in the past two years, just going by the few people I know that use it and people I know of through other people, there are already examples of some of the problems I mentioned closer to home than I would have previously anticipated. Anyway, I know some otherwise pretty normal people that use Facebook in some pretty strange (maybe "bizarre") ways. Even one who I'd say neglected her kids because of it (and more to that story which I won't get into).

Most of these social sites at one time or another were more popular in some centres than others. Facebook was enormously popular in the Toronto area long before it hit it big elsewhere. Shockingly disproportionate stats from what I remember. It got to such a head that any office having anything to do with the government of Ontario or the municipality of Toronto blocked it. This was already quite a few years ago.

Anyway, they're just not my type of site, just like back in the day I didn't frequent the "hot or not" sites (there's probably a module for Facebook that does that too right?) I prefer to see friends in person when we can. Things like photos get sent via email to some people and put on a photo sharing site. Of course my wife puts photos onto Facebook.

Thanks for the kind words. I'd be insulted if you didn't think that of me.

I think a lot of wives use Facebook. None of my friends use it but all of their wives do. My wife is like my Facebook liaison she tells me what's happening on there so I don't have to look at it.

I don't think anyone has actually mentioned the best announcements of the past two weeks. Or maybe I'm just forgetting since I'm somewhat tired tonight.

Anyway, Logitech announced their new Squeezebox products, Radio and Touch (officially) last week. They both looked good right from rumor through to leak. They looked great when reading the announcements and specs. They look even better after reading more about them in the forum (which I don't frequent very much at the moment).

The Touch pretty much adds at least a base implementation or the underpinnings of everything I mentioned in a couple of posts about a possible future SB4 a couple of years back. It's going to run a "TinySqueezeCenter" which will allow you to play music off a connected/external USB device and/or SD card. That's a great addition that's surely going to help push this product into the mainstream.

It could also be a hacker's delight because of its full USB implementation and sizeable (for this type of device) LCD touch screen. And for Matt, it plays Pandora and you can even publish real-time liked tracks to Facebook. You can actually view your Facebook page(s) on it as well.

The Radio product is like a smaller Boom with the addition of a small color LCD. I think I'll be getting one of those to use as an alarm clock in my bedroom. It's $100 cheaper than the boom at $199 and a lot smaller. It doesn't come with a remote, but I do have an extra one lying around from one of my classic SB3.

Logitech is really whipping out some good stuff lately. This, coupled with the announcement of what I believe is their best remote to date, the Harmony 700, leaves me wanting to open my wallet to them again.

I think that's a bit of a generalization.

More accurately, I think that women in general are better at keeping in touch with people, so they're just that much more likely to use Facebook as a tool towards that goal.

Personally, I use Facebook to keep in touch with people I wouldn't otherwise. There's an argument to be made that it might not be worth keeping in touch with those people if I wouldn't without a tool like this. To that I say that there's all sorts of levels of involvement that we attribute to people we know and see regularly, and Facebook just extends that scale down past people we couldn't involve ourselves with before.

For example, if it weren't for Facebook, I wouldn't have found my good friend from 5th-8th grade. A British diplomat's kid, he had to move back to England when the family's stint was over. We lost touch. Thanks to Facebook I was able to find him and instantly catch up before I even got a chance to call him, and find out that he'd gone to college in Texas, moved out to San Francisco, is getting married, and just got a job coding for Digg.com.

Granted, I understand your points, Bruno, but I really think that for every person you're talking about, I could give you at least one of the people I'm talking about. Frankly, at best I think that can extend to anything, not just Facebook.

Anyway, enough about that.

Sadly, I've never been super excited by the Squeezebox products. It might just be the size of the place I live in. It's two stories, but still pretty small. If I want to listen to music anywhere on the first floor, I fire up the home theater with the Tivo that's connected to my music collection in the office upstairs. If I'm in my office upstairs...well I just listen to it on my computer with my beloved Klipsch speakers. That only leaves the bedroom, where I just don't listen to music.

And if I need to listen to music on the go, I just use my G1.

Facebook appears to me to be the modern AOL. A nice, self-contained multiverse, where people can go to avoid the wild and wooley real internet.

Oddly, the only people I know who use it, are women.

Cheers

But AOL was sold to people who didn't know better -- who hadn't even seen the real internet. I use Facebook because I have seen the wild and woolly real internet, and Facebook's better -- at least, it's better at the things it does. It's the best way to share photos (with friends and family -- for sharing with the whole world you probably want Flickr or Picasa), it makes much more sense than Twitter for twittering-type behaviour (manually clicking on "@jonrosenberg" links to follow conversation threads?), and the on-site "webmail" messaging facility is policed and so is spam-free. And the fact that all these things are neatly integrated with one another is a big plus, too.

I don't pay any attention to the vampire sorority crap, but then I don't pay any attention to World of Warcraft either -- or to soccer, for that matter. In each case I accept that some of my friends, otherwise perfectly sensible, do pay them attention.

There are still things you'd need the real internet for -- Facebook's blogging support isn't as good as Blogspot's, and it's discussion-board system isn't as good as the one this BBS runs on -- and maybe one day Google Wave will come along and do all of these things better still, but for now it's a pretty essential helper for long-distance friendships, and there's a whole bunch of people outside my immediate social radius who I'd be interacting with a lot less, or not at all, without it.

Peter

Peter, your points are all completely valid and absolutely make sense. The same with Matt's. But I do think that you guys (and even some people I know that have similar usage patterns and motivation) are the exception rather than the rule. And keep in mind, that at least in my case, when I criticize Facebook, I'm talking about the platform and its creators rather than its users (unless I mention them specifically). So I still maintain that it's an AOL-like destination. Now some movie studios are picking up on it and are starting to do thing like include "Facebook keywords" in movie advertisements.

I'll say it again, Twitter is the most over-hyped POS to have hit the net in... Forever. It was first picked up by people who were definitely web savvy. But by people who use words like "meme." The internet stuffy crowd, the folks who seemed to be trying to make themselves into the internet aristocrats in a way. Now it's being picked up by everyone. Their site is a usability nightmare and just completely useless for an outsider. As soon as you use Twitter for things like replies it becomes totally impossible to follow. It was designed as a one-stop shop for mini RSS-like announcements and now people are using it as a replacement for Instant Messaging in some cases.

Matt, if you don't like having a system on all the time to use as a server for music, then something like the Squeezebox might not make sense for you. I think however that you're one type of potential customer that Logitech really needs to hone in on. Someone who has heard of the product, knows about what it does and doesn't have an immediate desire for one. If you set one up and used it for even a week, I'm sure you'd be converted. They need to achieve that traction without having people have to borrow units ahead of time.

Now I have thoughts of getting a Squeezebox Touch into a car...

Andy mentioned it in the General section of the seemingly long forgotten empeg-car section. It's an interesting idea. Although I'm now very much attached to the bluetooth integration of my current HU so that would have to be bodged on somehow for me to think about buying one.

I utterly dislike facebook, but I do use it - a bit. Some of my friends use nothing else, so it is a useful way to keep in touch with them.

But I'm not a woman - honest!!

:-)

On Facebook: I find that a large number of my friends, men and women, use it. The UI is pretty reasonable for the things it does.

On Twitter: All the ugly @ and # syntax to work around the lack of forethought by the developers really pisses me off. On the other hand, custom Twitter clients like TweetDeck do some pretty cool things.

I find both Twitter and Facebook to have real value for odd things. To pick a random example, a Houston local microbrewery does one limited edition beer every year. You buy it on the day it comes out, and after that you'll never find it again. They were regularly tweeting all day about which supermarkets still had some left. To pick another example: at many technical conferences I attend, people will tweet with a hashtag for the conference (e.g., #usenix). You can set a search on that, and then you'll see chatter about the conference while you're there. This works remarkably well, although nothing terribly deep went by.

Standing back a few paces: "Microblogging" is definitely with us to stay, but I figure Twitter and Facebook will at some point both collapse in their heaping lack of profitability. Hopefully by then, there will be some sort of IETF microblogging standard that would allow you to run your own server and interact with others in some vaguely standard way that, so far as most users is concerned, looks and feels just like the centralized web sites, despite being a widely distributed system under the hood.

Why not supply this info on an RSS feed that interested parties can subscribe to? Twitter really just brings this capability to one centralized server and with a strict character limit. It's nothing new and nothing remarkable. What likely puts me off the most is the kinds of press it gets. And that every time you hear someone talking about it it's with some kind of smarmy attitude. The self-important blogger type.



Again, unless you're envisioning a number of features that haven't been mentioned, this can be done right now with RSS. And there are even a number of decent clients for publishing and subscribing/reading.

The main thing that RSS lacks is any notion of push (i.e., a traditional pub/sub model). A student and I worked out a clever solution to this, he built a complete working prototype. See also, Open Microblogging.

In short, what you want is a whole lot like an RSS feed, but with additional infrastructure to handle timely push notifications. And, while you're at it, how about decent crypto for authentication, gossip protocols for scalability, and on and on.

You might be interested in this.

Some people have found awesome uses for Twitter. One of the stores around here uses Twitter to announce shipments, sales, remaining stock on limited items, legislation that is either up for votes or has been passed/defeated, etc. I find it really nice to see what they just had delivered or any unexpected specials.

That's a cool name: pubsubhubub. Their system is all about adding publish-subscribe to existing Atom/RSS feeds. That's nice. What you miss is the microblogging metadata (one message being in response to another, topic hashtags and widespread discovery of people using those tags).

Tim, the places you mentioned are using it like RSS but with the Push ability Dan mentioned. It doesn't sound like they're using it to blog nor to IM or carry on conversations of inane topics. Which is good and shows a very typical and valuable role for this type of tech.

I can definitely see the benefits of a syndicated publishing protocol, but I really dislike the fact it's using a centralized and proprietary server. But that and other merits aside, it's the "hype" that I've disliked the most. It's not a panacea for all communication issues on the net nor is it the second coming of Christ as some media outlets would have you believe.

RSSCloud is another solution to the open microblogging problem. It'll be interesting to see what happens to the character limits once it's not being enforced by a third party.

Am I too cynical for seeing that as a good thing?

I agree with your dislike of inline metadata as used with Twitter. However, that doesn't mean that we should exterminate the metadata entirely. We should instead hang it off the side. Hashtag-like things can exist just like blog entries with "topics" or other group-like tags. Similarly, the fact that one microblog entry is responding to another can be explicit as well (perhaps requiring some sort of adaptation of pingback/trackback).

Of course, once you get rid of Twitter's length limitation, these "microblog entries" can be as long as regular blog entries, and that's not a bad thing at all. It does mean that any dedicated clients you've got need to be smart about hiding some of the text (as, for example, Facebook does with its "more..." button). One nice feature is that you solve the annoying problem of comments. Today, you never know where to look for comments. Twitter @replies? Facebook comments? FriendFeed comments? Google Reader comments? Too many comments! Now, comments are just another kind of microblog entry (kinda like tweets) but you wouldn't have to see them if you weren't following the original conversation (kinda like just about everything else).

Oh, the other thing (used a lot with Twitter posts) are URL shorteners. Arrrgh! They're fine if you're trying to rick-roll someone, but I want to know where I'm clicking to, not see a bunch of garbage characters.

For a perfect example of the uselessness of twitter and replies and URL shortneing, see the Twitter feed of the otherwise excellent Strobist Bog: http://twitter.com/strobist

Looking at the iPod range I am suprised at the price gap between the Shuffle and the Nano. The Shuffle starts at $59 for a 2GB and rises to $79 for a 4GB, the Nano is $149 for 8GB and $179 for 16gb.
Has the Nano always been at the $150 price point?