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elfsAs a Facebook developer, at least for the time I worked at Indieflix, I have access to things most people don't. Like the Facebook timeline.
I enabled it tonight, and I have to say that I'm completely, totally underwhelmed. Really. Because the Facebook Timeline is just that-- a date-oriented view of the data you've given to Facebook. It's simultaneously creepy and banal. The more I looked at it, the more I realized I didn't like it, and the more I understood why.
It didn't tell me anything about myself as a human being. It knew facts and figures, dates and times; it tracked the miscellaneous things I'd like over the years. As Open Graph gets more important, it'll start to track all of the places I go and things I do on the web, most of which it'll do without my knowing (or, really, caring) all that much about it, all in the service of making me a better product to sell to advertisers.
You know what doesn't do that? Livejournal. Or any blogging platform, really, where what you do is talk about your life. It's about the person you always wanted to be.
Facebook, crushingly, only shows you the person you've been. It's for people who have only a TL;DW (too lazy; didn't write) with which to look back on their lives.
I enabled it tonight, and I have to say that I'm completely, totally underwhelmed. Really. Because the Facebook Timeline is just that-- a date-oriented view of the data you've given to Facebook. It's simultaneously creepy and banal. The more I looked at it, the more I realized I didn't like it, and the more I understood why.
It didn't tell me anything about myself as a human being. It knew facts and figures, dates and times; it tracked the miscellaneous things I'd like over the years. As Open Graph gets more important, it'll start to track all of the places I go and things I do on the web, most of which it'll do without my knowing (or, really, caring) all that much about it, all in the service of making me a better product to sell to advertisers.
You know what doesn't do that? Livejournal. Or any blogging platform, really, where what you do is talk about your life. It's about the person you always wanted to be.
Facebook, crushingly, only shows you the person you've been. It's for people who have only a TL;DW (too lazy; didn't write) with which to look back on their lives.
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no subject
Date: 2011-10-01 05:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-02 06:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-02 04:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-02 05:24 am (UTC)Nonetheless, I'm not interested in a system that captures ephemera, yet claims to be a comprehensive record of my life. Livejournal, and Usenet before it, were comprehensive records, rather than ephemera.