[mdlug] Facebook was Re: Google Wave invites

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Sun, 2009-12-13 at 11:19 -0500, Peter Bart wrote:
> On Fri, 11 Dec 2009 11:06:32 -0500
> Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam at opengroupware.us> wrote:
> > On Fri, 2009-12-11 at 10:44 -0500, Peter Bart wrote:
> > > On Fri, 11 Dec 2009 10:07:50 +0100
> > > Rich Elswick <painbank at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > Farmville seems popular now.
> > > Still Facebook. FWIW I think ranks as the most
> > > useless !"@#¥^~%$&*?)(/\ ever. Sorry
> > Yea, "popular" and "useful"/"productive" are not equivalent.  
> 	Now, why are the owners of such "popular" time wasters multi
> millionaires while so many very useful application developers
> languish?  Not that everything in life must be usefull and productive,

Same reason actors, or musicians, or all other manner of useless people
get paid more than actually important people.

People are more willing to pay for something they like over something
they use.  Don't even get me started. :)

One of the reasons I resigned myself to non-millionare status a long
time ago. :)  None of these things are interesting.  There is nothing
new or novel about FB.  What it does is nothing beyond what a BBS did
ages ago.  Coding FB would be *boring*!  It is just a matter of
right-place-right-time, there were many FBs before FB and many at the
same time as FB that have all been relegated to the dust-bin.  What
annoys me most is the founders of FB, and like sites, are heralded as
'innovators'.  Bogus,  they were the equivalent of lottery ticket
holders.  They didn't create anything new.  Society was ready to plunge
into a new [to them] form of media muck and FB was in the line-up of
candidates (as was friendster, myspace, etc...)

>  but some of these things just complicate my life! If one of these so
> called "applications" doesn't perform as expected it's immediately the
> computers fault. Which then becomes my problem, even if it's at the
> very rock bottom of my list. I wonder sometimes whether some of the
> slowness; of these applications; is due to them not being able to
> collect the same amount of information as from a Windows system. 

Dunno,  I use FB only from openSUSE/GNOME/Firefox and performance seems
very good.  It is a rather chunky and JS heavy interface;  and rather
badly coded according the web devs I know [and respect, which is a small
subset of web devs].

> > Most of the social-networking hype, is just that: hype;  a passing
> > fad. Yep, I'm a geek who works in IT, and I mean that.