It has been a very long day for me, thanks to Facebook. For some time now, I have been quite dormant in Facebook. In fact, last week,, I did not not log in at all and even missed Linda's birthday! And when I finally logged in, I discovered to my horror that FB had already converted my page to Timeline. I started cleaning up m stuff a few months ago but slackened so the past few days have been spent deleting or minimising my past posts to only me and hiding it from my Timeline. Having been on FB since June 2007, it has been a long journey to wipe clean my slate and I have only a few more months to clean up before I am done. The only reason why I still maintain my account is to keep in touch with my former students and friends. Hence, I have not had the time to write anything today until now. If you have not cleaned up your Timeline, it is advisable to do so for many reasons as explained in IT sites.
Like many other FB users, I am very annoyed that they changed it without my consent and only gave me seven days to clean up my timeline.
Just the other day, another friend felt that FB will go the same direction as Friendster. I would not be surprised if this were to happen.
Of course some argue that there is such a thing as settings but then, it is a pain to adjust the settings for every single post. Even deleting the posts is a time-consuming process because when you click DELETE, another pop-up window asks, "Are you sure you want to delete this post?" and then you have to click YES, wait for the window to reload and continue.
The lack of respect for customers' feelings/preferences/wishes has always been an Achilles' heel for big corporations. Recent reports indicate that the Timeline will be rolled out to most members by fall.
As for me, I regard Twitter as the safest social media at the moment. Messages are brief and achieve the aim of the message without trimmings. In fact, I only read twitter headlines now rather than reading almost every single news item of major portals like I used to.
Take care and do the needful. Next post will be coming up after 45 minutes (I hope).
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walla I wonder if USM has done any study on the evolution of virtual personae. In the past we had only a physical world. Now a virtual world sits next to it. Everyday we transit from one to the other.
If you observe animals carefully, say cats, they seem to be telepathic amongst themselves. There seems to be a clustered meow-less communication of their brain waves.
There may come a time when we can progress from real to virtual to mind worlds. Enhanced thought waves can then ping back and forth between two peoples. Extending the idea to its logical end, one person may even be able to make another person feel something by just transmitting a thought into her brain.
Then all the webified modes of how we can today communicate to one another in accordance to our virtual personae may be rendered superfluous by such a highly customized commoditization (oxymoron) of our expressions.