Hard News: The price is that they get to watch
105 Responses
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I checked my Google Ads Preferences. It thinks I'm a male aged 45-54. That's very depressing.
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Amy Gale, in reply to
Female age 65+ who is interested in fishing, baseball, and formal wear, apparently. I won't be preparing for my new computer overlords any time soon.
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What a bore! Landscaping? I have never searched for landscaping. Manscaping maybe.
Arts & Entertainment - Music & Audio - Rock Music
Arts & Entertainment - Music & Audio - Rock Music - Classic Rock & Oldies
Arts & Entertainment - Music & Audio - ... - Indie & Alternative Music
Arts & Entertainment - TV & Video - Online Video
Computers & Electronics - Software - Open Source
Home & Garden - Gardening & Landscaping
Internet & Telecom - Web Services - Web Design & Development
Online Communities - Blogging Resources & Services
Reference - General Reference - Dictionaries & Encyclopedias
Reference - Language Resources - ... - Translation Tools & Resources -
Clearly Google projects a much more trustworthy brand than Facebook.
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At the moment, I seem to be being bombarded by ads for something called 'late at the museum'.
Seems a bit dodgy to me - I reckon it's probably one of those Nigerian 419 scams.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
Seems a bit dodgy to me – I reckon it’s probably one of those Nigerian 419 scams.
Now you mention it, I do have a remarkable business opportunity for you.
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kaffeeklatsch...
‘late at the museum’
Latté, surely?
Some kind of whirled cup event maybe?
Anyway, the late are usually in a mausoleum...
:- ) -
Andrew C, in reply to
Has always come down to business models. If you’re not explicitly paying for it, you *are* the product.
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I really hate Facebook but only because it is so totally user-unfriendly. I shut my account down because I loathe it so much. Does that mean that my business is going to fail? Is there really no hope for any enterprise if you don't join Facebook and have lots of friends and likes? Guess I'm on the way out after 20 years and several economic downturns and upturns. Sigh.
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Sacha, in reply to
Heh. Whoever first noted that was astute.
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Gareth Ward, in reply to
FB’s always had odd notions about what its users want. Does it not occur to them to ask us?
From the few articles I've read on Zuckerberg, I'm going to say no. He seems to genuinely believe that the minutiae of life digitised to friends and possible service providers makes for this extraordinary new way of living. And there is certainly upside potential, I just think they've rose-tinted it to themselves.
What is most revealing is that when talking about the positives it's always "you get all this without even thinking" (e.g. personalised recommendations, interesting photos, targeted offerings) but with the negatives it's always "you CHOSE to do this". Which is it, actively conscious decision or passively opaque magic?
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JacksonP, in reply to
passively opaque magic
For some reason I just found myself singing;
And you may ask yourself, "How do I work this?"
And you may ask yourself, "Where is that large automobile?"
And you may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful house"
And you may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful wife"Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again, after the money's gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground -
Hello Ctrl-Shift-P - the shortcut for Firefox's private browsing feature.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
I really hate Facebook but only because it is so totally user-unfriendly.
This is what puzzles me. I basically find Facebook a somewhat confusing pain in the ass, but LOTS of friends of mine who are far less technically adept than me use it constantly. It clearly fills an important role for people in letting them share thoughts, feelings, news and funny pictures.
I've actually been quite enjoying browsing Facebook via Flipboard on the iPad, which changes the balance and makes it much more about the media people are sharing.
But what does puzzle me is my Facebook-using friends telling me they don't understand Twitter. Yes, there are a few technical and cultural things to grasp, but compared to Facebook it seems quite simple.
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Lucy Stewart, in reply to
Female age 65+ who is interested in fishing, baseball, and formal wear, apparently. I won't be preparing for my new computer overlords any time soon.
Basically, Google thinks I am my father. Or possibly grandfather. Hard to tell.
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Oh, also, I was wrong in the original post about Facebook overtaking Google as top NZ On Screen referrer. Facebook has grown hugely in the past two years, but Google remains the top referrer by some stretch.
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Top 10 NZ On Screen referrers after Google.
November 2010:
Facebook.com (5016)
wikipedia (1064)
scoop.co.nz (965)
stumbleupon (816)
twitter (643)
orcon (382)
spareroom (246)
vidohe (193)
doc.govt.nz (157)
thestandard.org.nz (137)September 2011
Facebook (5913)
stuff (1490)
wikipedia (1190)
nzherald (1150)
twitter (920)
stumbleupon (682)
scoop (654)
lexpress.fr (644)
real.nzonscreen (523)
publicaddress (448) -
James Butler, in reply to
This is what puzzles me. I basically find Facebook a somewhat confusing pain in the ass, but LOTS of friends of mine who are far less technically adept than me use it constantly. It clearly fills an important role for people in letting them share thoughts, feelings, news and funny pictures.
If you do nothing on Facebook except post pictures and browse through the news feed, and don’t give a stuff about privacy, then it is easy to use. If not for Hanlon’s Razor, I would suspect that they do this deliberately so they can tell tech-savvy people and concerned journos, “Hey, if you care about these things, do this, this, this and this, and hey presto!”, while continuing to give the vast majority of users the experience that works best for Facebook’s nefarious motives.
But what does puzzle me is my Facebook-using friends telling me they don’t understand Twitter. Yes, there are a few technical and cultural things to grasp, but compared to Facebook it seems quite simple.
When I turned off my Twitter->FB feed recently (reluctantly; some of my most interesting social media interactions have come from FB friends commenting on my tweets), and posted a brief note saying “Hey, if you miss me, follow me on Twitter”, one of my colleagues was a bit miffed, saying she didn’t understand how to use Twitter. This from a software developer who specialises in machine learning and genetic algorithms. Not quite sure what to say to that.
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One thing that I wish I could control in FB is how I get all the feeds I’ve “liked” totally overwhelming my friends’ updates and posts. Why oh why are they all together? It would be so easy for FB to put them in a separate tab. I don’t want to block or unlike the feeds I’m getting, but they’re not the reason I’m on FB! Friends should be first, or they should be separate.
And this “top story” business makes the whole thing look like scrambled eggs. At least reverse chronological order was predictable and consistent. I don’t mind complexity if there’s a reason for it, but this is just a muddle.
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
Phase book...
but LOTS of friends of mine who are far less technically adept than me use it constantly. It clearly fills an important role for people in letting them share thoughts, feelings, news and funny pictures.
It's just digital scrapbooking isn it?
and saves on postage writing to people...(i'm not technically adept and don't use FaceBook)
do they have a cemetery section?
A PastBook if you will
I can see a scenario where "immortal epitaphs/profiles"
could take off - though its size could start getting into
Torchwood's Miracle Day territory...
Zombie servers in the wilderness...
what becomes of the use-by-data...maybe Facebook can recreate people from their online presence
and synaptic choices and processes - in fact how do we know anyone else is out there, really? -
Lilith __, in reply to
digital scrapbooking
Does anyone here use Pinterest? I have several friends who are already totally addicted.
I've got reservations about how pictures get taken out of their original context and away from their maker (and potentially in violation of copyright, although I don't know the finer points of how that works). There is an source attribution in there but it can take several clicks to find. -
JacksonP, in reply to
maybe Facebook can recreate people from their online presence
and synaptic choices and processes - in fact how do we know anyone else is out there, really?You've just nailed it. Mark Zuckerberg is actually Iain M. Banks and Facebook is just part of an elaborate plot detail for his next Culture novel;
Surface Retail.
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... all this is just the stuff that Google makes publicly searchable, or ‘universally accessible’. It’s only a small fraction of the information it actually possesses. I know that Google knows, because I’ve looked it up, that on 30 April 2011 at 4.33 p.m. I was at Willesden Junction station, travelling west. It knows where I was, as it knows where I am now, because like many millions of others I have an Android-powered smartphone with Google’s location service turned on. If you use the full range of its products, Google knows the identity of everyone you communicate with by email, instant messaging and phone, with a master list – accessible only by you, and by Google – of the people you contact most. If you use its products, Google knows the content of your emails and voicemail messages (a feature of Google Voice is that it transcribes messages and emails them to you, storing the text on Google servers indefinitely). If you find Google products compelling – and their promise of access-anywhere, conflagration and laptop-theft-proof document creation makes them quite compelling – Google knows the content of every document you write or spreadsheet you fiddle or presentation you construct. If as many Google-enabled robotic devices get installed as Google hopes, Google may soon know the contents of your fridge, your heart rate when you’re exercising, the weather outside your front door, the pattern of electricity use in your home.
Google knows or has sought to know, and may increasingly seek to know, your credit card numbers, your purchasing history, your date of birth, your medical history, your reading habits, your taste in music, your interest or otherwise (thanks to your searching habits) in the First Intifada or the career of Audrey Hepburn or flights to Mexico or interest-free loans, or whatever you idly speculate about at 3.45 on a Wednesday afternoon. Here’s something: if you have an Android phone, Google can guess your home address, since that’s where your phone tends to be at night. I don’t mean that in theory some rogue Google employee could hack into your phone to find out where you sleep; I mean that Google, as a system, explicitly deduces where you live and openly logs it as ‘home address’ in its location service, to put beside the ‘work address’ where you spend the majority of your daytime hours.
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
Go ogle le go-go Lego o g...
Google can guess your home address, since that’s where your phone tends to be at night. I don’t mean that in theory some rogue Google employee could hack into your phone to find out where you sleep; I mean that Google, as a system, explicitly deduces where you live and openly logs it as ‘home address’ in its location service, to put beside the ‘work address’ where you spend the majority of your daytime hours.
...and if you have a home wireless network, I guess it has a picture of your house as well from its Google Earth street view cameras, that gathered all that information as they took the pictures - one does hope that Google Space isn't covering the approach of the Mothership and attack force as they now know everything about the planet and where everyone is...
or am I a paranoid android to fear the coming of the paradroids? -
..and then there's this - search engine poisoning
- to contend with as well...
sigh, I might just go read a book.
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