Posted by Ellie Mirman on Wed, May 14, 2008 @ 10:26 AM
The blogosphere / social mediasphere has a lot of angry and irritable people. Well, the world has a lot of angry and irritable people. And the Internet makes it that much easier for them to crap all over the rest of us.
This blog post may be in the form of a rant. I apologize. I guess I'm one of those angry and irritable people? No. I don't think so. I think I'm one of the wimps who gets upset when someone unnecessarily freaks out at me online. And then go write about it on my own blog apparently. Hah.
I love how the blogosphere / social mediasphere is very informal - it feels like a real, regular conversation (and it is). But I guess when you take it too far, you end up with someone flaming another person, and someone else flaming the flamer. Does a simple comment actually need to turn into an argument (or a rant of a blog post)?
I'm still getting the hang of commenting on blogs and forums. Knowing myself, I'll give myself a bit of time to get over my wimpiness and then I'll try again. It would just be nice for peple to recognize that there are real, live people on the other side of the computer screen.
Posted by Ellie Mirman on Thu, May 08, 2008 @ 07:49 PM
I read recently that, though facebook continues to grow at an incredible rate, that the overall activity level on facebook is actually declining - one example data point: the number of active users has declined 27% since January.
Some potential reasons? @Scobleizer says it's because the early adopters are abandoning it. Others might suggest it's related to the aging demographic of facebook and maybe us recent graduates have less and less time to log in to facebook (true, we have less time, but we do it anyway). Or, consider this:
Lately facebook has been cracking down on more spam and has been trying to improve the user experience, but I would watch out: recently I got warned for spamming on facebook. What? I was just creating an event. And suddenly I've got a flag on my account that I see every time I log in, saying "your account could be disabled!" I was flagged as a spammer while doing my regular activities on facebook. Awesome. Thanks, facebook. I thought you guys were smart enough to tell the difference between real spam and an active user. Not only have they cautioned me to slow down my activity on facebook, but this also makes me pretty unhappy and I am trying to avoid any "overuse" or even "regular use" of the site. Do you realize you're encouraging the drop in active users, facebook??
I've heard of lots of cases of people's facebook accounts getting shut down for spamming lately. I get that this is part of improving the real user experience, but facebook may be doing a sloppy job. I emailed back and forth a couple times with their support team but didn't get further than "watch what you're doing, don't overuse your account." Thanks, that's really helpful.