Feh. I am in Facebook Jail again. It really irks me that Facebook constantly prompts you to send friend requests to other users then penalizes you for giving in once too often to their truly incessant recommendations. Apparently they ‘noticed’ that I have been sending friend requests to people I don’t actually know. I can’t help but wonder who might have complained about me, although I know it is a question best left unasked. Even more annoying than not being able to send friend requests is that I can not comment in Facebook group chat windows– those sometimes wonderful and sometimes annoying bottom of the screen pop up windows where I sometimes enjoy chatting with groups of friends.
A discussion on a friends page the other day reminded me that I never did hear back anything from diaspora, a user controlled social network that was going to free us from the tyranny of Facebook and Google, which both very effectively leverage a high cost of quitting a free service business model to keep literally millions of users locked in to their products. Ubiquity is an almost insurmountable disadvantage for any direct competitors, and anyone who has ever tried to create from scratch a social network will be aware of what a huge challenge it always has been. One friend remarked to me that he only believes it could be done at this point within a carefully chosen very narrow niche. So while I am sad that we will not all soon be moving on to a better and more user centric environment, I am hardly very surprised that diaspora apparently never got off the ground. Though I frankly disagree with my friend who stated that diaspora lost their chance because G+ beat them to creating a much better network. (I personally am still waiting for Plus to go the way of Buzz and Wave. I am a contrarian ;)
I don’t ever actually try to be mysterious or confusing in these posts, although I know that sometimes, some of my readers just don’t quite get what I am trying to say. Sometimes I believe this is through the limitations of language, particularly when the language I am speaking is a second language for someone who is more comfortably fluent in another mother tongue. Other times I suspect it is a question of different communication styles, or occasionally a question of someone who does not follow the contextual links in paragraph one, and thus really doesn’t get the references in paragraph three. I am however genuinely humbled by all of the comments, rebloggings and other sharing my posts have received. And I am genuinely grateful to each and every one of you who read my posts.
