Tag: Facebook

Facebook Android app update is insane …

… even for me.  I’ve been saying for a while that the privacy is pretty much dead, but this new update of Facebook Android app is asking for way too may permissions even for my taste.  Some of the things that it “needs” now are: access to make phone calls without user intervention, accessing information about other running applications, and drawing over other applications’ screens, so you won’t even know anymore who is responsible for what you are seeing.

When I got an update notification, I thought, at first, that that was a mistake of some sort or a really late and lame April 1st joke.  Albeit it’s not.  Even Slashdot runs the story.

For now, I’ll hold the old version.  Maybe Facebook will rectify this new change.  If not, then I’ll get rid of it and go back to Twitter and, possibly, Google+.

If you have the data, use it!

Spending quit a bit of time on the web, I’ve boosted my tolerance levels to bad design, horrible user interfaces, and twisted logic.  However, there are still things that annoy the crap out of me.  Among the two most frequent are these:

  1. Google throwing me into Greek language.  Yes, I do live in Cyprus, where Greek is an official language.  However, Google knows damn well, that I don’t speak it.  Every single time I was given a choice, I’ve switched back to English. I have automatic translation of Greek to English set in Gmail, Google Reader, Google Chrome and Google Nexus, all of which are linked and synced to my one Gmail account.  Why do I still see Greek as the default language every other week?  This is getting retarded.
  2. Facebook can’t figure out the gender-specific language.  Even though it knows the gender of the user to be female, it still sends me notifications like “Olga commented on his Wall post”.  English is not even my native language and I am getting annoyed by this.  How you guys can look at this every single time and not catch is beyond me.

The steam is out, I feel better now.

OneAll Social Plugin for WordPress

OneAll Social Plugin for WordPress

In addition to the usual suspects of Facebook and Twitter, this one seems to also support GitHub, LiveJournal, WordPress.com, LinkedIn, and a few others.

Facebook post has a shelf life of 18 hours

Once in a while people ask me why do I still have my own, personal, standalone blog instead of just posting to some social networks.  There are a few reasons to that, and one of the is the life span of the post.  Blog posts live practically forever.  I think, I’ve even mentioned before that the homepage of my blog is not even in the top 5 visited pages of the site – older posts, sometimes even from years ago – are staying at the top of the chart.  With social networks, posts disappear pretty quickly.  None of the social networks that I’m familiar with – Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and others – provide any decent way of working with archives.  They are more focused on the “now”, and I’ve known it for years.  But it’s always good to find a confirmation of your own beliefs.  Today, via this tweet, I came across this blog post that references the study that states 18 hours is a shelf life of a Facebook post.

This might come as a bit of a shock to brands who pour their heart and souls into putting together the best Facebook posts that will get people talking and sharing for days. A recent study shows that the average shelf life of a Facebook post is just 18 hours. We thought we were in a 24/7 culture when it comes to online, but even 24 hours it seems, is now a bit of a stretch.

The findings come from a study by OMD, who studied how long people continued to actively engage with a post after it was made.  Off the back of the announcement that pages will only reach about 16% of their fans through postings, this is particularly unwelcome news.

Social networking reshuffled

OK, now that I’m almost sure that new setup for social networking works, I can give you guys an idea of what I had and how I changed it.  In case you’ll notice any differences between this description and the actual behavior, or if you have any suggestions on how to improve things, please let me know.  Without any further ado …

In my previous setup, I used Twitter as my social glue.  Everything was synchronized with Twitter – my Google Reader, Evernote, delicious, a few RSS feeds, Foursquare, Flickr, YouTube, etc.  Periodically (once a day until recently, now weekly), my tweets were automatically aggregated into a blog post using Twitter Tools plugin for WordPress.  This allowed me to make sure that I had a record of my online activity synced back into my own blog, something that I own, cherish, and backup.

That setup had a serious drawback.  Not everyone is on Twitter.  A lot of people are using Facebook these days.  And while in my previous setup there was an automatic push of tweets to Facebook, it wasn’t ideal.  Tweets are more limited than Facebook posts – in length, previews, and formatting.  Which means that even though something was synced to Facebook, I wasn’t taking a full advantage of Facebook.

From now on I have a different setup.  I’ll still use Twitter as my social glue, but I won’t be limiting myself to only Twitter.  I will push content independently to Facebook and other social networks when appropriate.  I will try to keep Twitter in sync by posting directly to several social networks simultaneously.  My tweets will still be aggregated at my blog on a weekly basis.  But there won’t be any automatic synchronization between Twitter and Facebook anymore.  The con of this setup is that not all content will get pushed everywhere. But it is, I think, fairly compensated by a pro of having tailored content and format for each social network.

Either way, nothing is set in stone yet. And even if it was – things move and change way too often, and I’m just trying to keep it real.  Let me know if notice any issues with these changes, and, especially if you know how to make things better.

P.S.: Yes, if Twitter and Facebook had better integration in terms of links, photos, videos, and locations, none of these would have happened.  “Blame Canada!” (c) South Park.