New Habits, Old Grudges
I’ve developed a somewhat grouchy habit of measuring the character length of particularly nice, minimalistic prose (witty one-liners, brief stories, etc.) to see if they would work with Twitter. I’m finding a trend that most really entertaining or informative quick thoughts tend to align around the 150-200 character range, of course comfortably out of Twitter’s bounds.
Of course, “Going to the store now… running low on milk!” works just great. No problem there. Tweets are just so cool, it doesn’t really matter what they say.
Shell has apparently recently enabled a new multi-tier web filtering architecture. You have a few things like, say, a gaming website or something, that gets an “What you think you doin’, homes?” sort of outright denial. They’re not as bad as KISD’s old “BESS” system that would block things just based on having “game” in the URL. This was of course a false positive machine. Something educational like Conway’s Game of Life would never get through.
But now, they have a second-tier filter, devoted to things such as Facebook, which now says “Business purposes only, are you using this for business purposes?” and you have to click a little button that says, “Yes, I am prepared to lie and say that I am using this for business purposes.” Or something like that. I neither read the announcement nor clicked the button.
It’s high time for companies to realize that “business purposes” should include reinforcing sanity and keeping plugged in to the world outside of work. Especially for someone in my situation, but for anyone that is true. And imagine how much unofficial, undocumented recruiting work goes on between new hires and people still in college (still a pretty major demographic on Facebook, of course; who else has the spare time in those quantities and regularity?).
Shell got pissed that employees started using Facebook instead of the internal social networking platform that was installed by IT on our intranet. What’s it called? MyShell.
I understand. The employee time lost on Facebook is probably out of control. Especially now with the chat functions. They can keep you on the page not clicking on ads all day.
There is nothing at all wrong with MyShell, except, as the ghost of Academic Decathlon whispers in my ear, the value of a network increases exponentially with the number of its nodes. It’s hard to recreate Facebook. I mean, look, probably half or more of Facebook’s active members actively and passionately carp about how terrible Facebook has become, but virtually nobody is willing to jump ship and swim elsewhere.
Why? Simply the threat of say halving one’s personal network would be devastating to the utility of a service. This is what made what the news and other media “portals” did with social networking so obscenely short-sighted and greedy. The very idea of joining some “MyFoxNews” network with two of your friends and tweeting back and forth in a virtual environment not big enough for Barbie and Ken after a donut run is completely absurd.
Just like owning a stock, or joining a country club, or buying a gaming system, getting into anything that costs a limited resource (money, time, …) requires faith.
This is why you see the “fanboy” concept arise on the Internet. Fanboys fanboy in an attempt to build their network up. If you joined Facebook early on, you became Facebook’s personal PR guy, drumming up business, building friend counts, posting on everyone’s wall, etc. Because you want it to work. Otherwise, you screwed up and will have to start over somewhere else.
So, I remember Gabe and Tycho talking about how absurd it was to troll boards arguing about the relative benefits of different game platforms. True enough regarding the trolling, but it’s really just the unconstructive alpha male version of trying to get your friends on the boat. You don’t want to hear that the Genesis has better graphics, because clearly Mario is better than Sonic. What you’re really saying is you want to have everyone playing your game because it’s more fun that way.