{"id":814,"date":"2011-09-23T18:20:39","date_gmt":"2011-09-23T06:20:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.c2s.co.nz\/blog\/?p=814"},"modified":"2011-12-22T13:54:15","modified_gmt":"2011-12-22T00:54:15","slug":"leaving-facebook-for-google-and-why-facebook-is-broken","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.c2s.co.nz\/blog\/leaving-facebook-for-google-and-why-facebook-is-broken\/","title":{"rendered":"Leaving Facebook for Google+ (And why Facebook is &#8220;Broken&#8221;)"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"8781ca4f97038dd0d58a1ad8af045721\" data-index=\"3\" style=\"float: none; margin:10px 0 10px 0; text-align:center;\">\n<script type=\"text\/javascript\"><!--\r\ngoogle_ad_client = \"ca-pub-6411751809866006\";\r\n\/* BlogHorizontalSlim *\/\r\ngoogle_ad_slot = \"6442664612\";\r\ngoogle_ad_width = 468;\r\ngoogle_ad_height = 60;\r\n\/\/-->\r\n<\/script>\r\n<script type=\"text\/javascript\"\r\nsrc=\"http:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/show_ads.js\">\r\n<\/script>\n<\/div>\n<p>Cross-posted to Google+: <a href=\"https:\/\/plus.google.com\/107713928526758699946\/posts\/JGUnGXWGYsr\">https:\/\/plus.google.com\/107713928526758699946\/posts\/JGUnGXWGYsr<\/a><br \/>~<br \/>So I thought considering I&#8217;ve recently switched to using Google+ as my primary social network that I&#8217;d try using it as a blogging system as well. Makes sense seeing as most of the time my blogs are just rather long status updates, or tutorials on things.<\/p>\n<p>So, I&#8217;ve been angry with Facebook for quite a while now, in the literal sense of the word. I&#8217;ll start by explaining that my best mate started dating this girl at the beginning of the year (New years I think). Naturally within a month, I&#8217;d added her on Facebook. Because of her privacy settings, I could see everything she had previously posted as soon as I requested to be her friend, even though she didn&#8217;t &#8220;approve&#8221; me for another month or so. I just couldn&#8217;t reply.<br \/>That&#8217;s fine.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;but then it&#8217;d been a few months and I&#8217;d not seen a single post from her. I have less than the &#8220;500 friend threshold&#8221; that Facebook limits you to, in terms of being able to see updates from your friends in your News Feed, so the theory is that unless I block somebody, I should see 100% everything. But I don&#8217;t.<br \/>My friend was telling me about how his girlfriend had posted something, and how he replied, and there was a bit of banter going on back and forth between them the night before. That was odd, considering that night I basically spent on Facebook while doing some web design. I saw everything on Facebook. I jumped on quickly and checked, and sure enough, I checked through the previous 48 hours worth of posts, and it wasn&#8217;t there. I went to my mates girlfriends Facebook Profile page, and sure enough, he was telling the truth!<br \/>It was simply not there in my news feed.<br \/><!--more--><br \/>So I logged a bug.<\/p>\n<p>Didn&#8217;t hear anything back.<\/p>\n<p>Same deal a month later, I noticed it with my brother-in-law. Logged another bug. They basically came back and told me &#8220;Check and make sure they&#8217;re not blocked, and that you&#8217;ve got the max friends set to 500, and it&#8217;ll work&#8221;. I went back to them and said &#8220;He&#8217;s not blocked, and I have 300-400 friends. Well under the limit&#8221;. They basically denied all responsibility saying it was my issue.<br \/>Whatever, losers.<\/p>\n<p>Then about 2 months ago I noticed that I&#8217;m now seeing things my friend say to other &#8220;groups&#8221; that I&#8217;m not a member of. One of them is involved in a Uni group, another one in some political movement group. Another in some enthusiast \/ hobby group. I don&#8217;t care about either of those, and some nights I get more of those than actual legit &#8220;stuff&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>So now I know they&#8217;re not showing me things that I want, and showing me things I dont want. Not impressed&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>It then got real bad when I was contributing with The Edges recent promotion &#8220;Lost in a Box&#8221; (See www.lostinabox.co.nz ). They have one of those &#8216;shoutbox&#8217; style widgets that they use to communicate with the people stuck in the box, as well as all the other people viewing the cameras. I setup a fan-site, which was cool, and I was trying to tell other people about it using this shoutbox widget on the website, but my messages were only being seen by a few people. I tried both including the &#8220;Post to my Facebook Feed&#8221; option, and without it.<br \/>Nothing.<\/p>\n<p>I logged in to Kristys PC (My wife), right next to me. Couldn&#8217;t see either comment with or without the &#8220;Post to my Facebook&#8221; option ticked.<br \/>Jumped on our guest PC which has no Facebook account. Tried again. Still couldn&#8217;t see anything.<br \/>However, I know it was going through because I had two people respond to me. So after posting around 20 messages, I had two replies.<\/p>\n<p>This was 3 weeks ago.<br \/>By now, I was really angry with Facebook. So I jumped on another browser on my PC, went through the signup with an alternative email address on Facebook, and made another new account.<br \/>I went through and mirrored all my privacy settings 100%, just to make sure I wasn&#8217;t being a moron. Then I jumped on The Edge website again (So this is about 10 minutes later since my previous tests) and made a test post under this new account.<\/p>\n<p>Immediately, I saw that post on my other browser as my &#8220;main self&#8221;, I saw it on our Guest PC which had no Facebook account logged in, and I also saw it on my wifes&#8217; PC. I also had the people inside the box see it and they thought it was cool, and I had around about a dozen replies in this shoutbox widget to my one single message that mentioned this website I had setup.<br \/>Basically, this new account worked, whereas my account didn&#8217;t. My settings were identical in terms of Privacy, so why could only some people see what I had been saying? None of the people were people I knew that replied in this shoutbox widget.<\/p>\n<p>Something&#8217;s wrong, really wrong, and basically Facebook don&#8217;t care enough to fix it<\/p>\n<p>Then we get to the changes which happened in the last 48 hours.<\/p>\n<p>So picture me, already pissed off enough coz I know that Facebook aren&#8217;t showing me everything that I want to see (When I&#8217;m supposed to see everything from every single one of my 380-odd friends). NOW, they have a good excuse not to show me things, but it gets worse, I now see everything that my friends do.<\/p>\n<p>This is bad in a few ways:<\/p>\n<p>1) It&#8217;s a bit of a privacy issue. Granted it&#8217;s theoretically possible for me to actually go into peoples walls and see what they&#8217;ve done for the most part, but it&#8217;s not right there in front of your friends all the time. If I&#8217;m trolling on a group page, why would my friends care if they&#8217;re not in that group? If it&#8217;s with a friend we both have in-common, then that might be a different story, but for the better part it&#8217;s not. Where&#8217;s my option to turn this off so my stuff isn&#8217;t there in front of everybody? I can turn off my friends things, one by one, so I don&#8217;t see them. But that&#8217;s the wrong way, it should be the other way around.<\/p>\n<p>2) I don&#8217;t actually care. I don&#8217;t want to see everything my friends are doing with people I don&#8217;t know. If I know them, then maybe, coz they could say something like &#8220;Hey are you going to see Basshunter in concert this Saturday?&#8221; so I could join in and say &#8220;Hey yeah I&#8217;m going!&#8221;, that&#8217;s different, but when it&#8217;s with people I don&#8217;t actually know, usually about things I have no knowledge of, will never attend, and don&#8217;t actually care about, then I don&#8217;t wanna see it!<\/p>\n<p>So as you can tell, I&#8217;m upset, I don&#8217;t like Facebook, I think it&#8217;s going to get worse with this &#8216;Timeline&#8217;, and I&#8217;m going to be using Google+ as my primary social network from now.<br \/>It took me 2 years to switch to Facebook from Bebo (I downloaded my entire account history a few months back and saw the time between my first 5 posts was 2 years), but I did it. Same for when everybody left MySpace for Bebo prior to that. It took a while, but it happened. Now it&#8217;s going to happen with Facebook too.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve really begun to notice a whole lot of &#8220;cool&#8221; things about Google+, more every day, including things as I write this post. So here, I&#8217;ll list them:<br \/>1) When sharing or mentioning links, you have control over if it displays a &#8216;summary&#8217; of the page (A brief snippet), a preview picture, or even the link at the bottom of the post entirely. You can have a combination of preview picture or snippet, or neither, or just one, whatever. It&#8217;s cool, it&#8217;s just one nice little extra good feature<br \/>2) There&#8217;s no limit to the amount of images I can upload. Choice, I can upload everything I take a photo of on my phone, and it&#8217;s a backup! AWESOME!<br \/>3) Instant Upload &#8212; I have 1GB a month on my phone. I don&#8217;t take a lot of photos, but when I take it and I wanna share it, I want it to be easy. It&#8217;s cool coz now lets say I&#8217;m at the Zoo taking photos of Giraffes from my Cellphone. Some are blurry and dont look good, so I won&#8217;t share those, but by the time I get in to either my phone or my Desktop PC, or my Android Tablet, the photos are all already uploaded so I can just tick the ones I wanna share, who I wanna share them with, and I&#8217;m done! It&#8217;s fast, easy, and I love it!<br \/>4) I&#8217;m not bombared with stupid &#8220;&#8230;likes the awkward moment when (insert not really awkward moment)&#8221;. If you wanna +1 something, then you can +1 it, and I don&#8217;t care coz I won&#8217;t see it, unless you specifically &#8220;share&#8221; it. If you start mass-sharing things, then I&#8217;ll happily just block you.<br \/>5) Spam. Yeah it happens here, but the controls are so much easier, as well as reporting spam, even on a per-comment basis. <br \/>6) Circles, they&#8217;re easy as to setup, they&#8217;re flexible (You can be in multiple circles, for example your &#8220;workmates&#8221; can also be in your &#8220;mountain biking buddies&#8221; group). If you don&#8217;t want that control, then cool, lump everyone into a single group and call it &#8220;everyone&#8221;. Yeah I&#8217;ve already pulled up people for trolling on this, like Mauricio Freitas (Yup, he tried trolling on his first day on G+, the cheeky sod got pulled up on it and threw a sookie lala and blocked me :: <a href=\"http:\/\/min.us\/lUMIkzwpaCnPq\">http:\/\/min.us\/lUMIkzwpaCnPq<\/a> ). Granted Circles are not for everybody, but that&#8217;s cool, if it&#8217;s too much work for you then that&#8217;s fine, you&#8217;re lucky because Google cares enough that you don&#8217;t have to put people in individual circles.<br \/>7) Fine-grained profile \/ privacy controls. If I only want my family to see my cellphone number, then choice, it&#8217;s dead easy. Up until recently, the Facebook controls have been terrible, and they still leave a lot to be desired in a lot of ways. In Google+, its easy to edit your profile and who will see it. Dead easy!<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;and that&#8217;s only the beginning!<\/p>\n<p>So yeah, I reckon Facebook is going downhill. It&#8217;s not going to disappear overnight, but Google+ is certainly where it&#8217;s at. It takes a lot to convince people to jump ship on social networking fronts (I know, I&#8217;ve done it twice before this with Bebo and with Facebook), but I think it&#8217;s worth it. As I said, it took two years for me to leave Bebo for Facebook, but somebody had to sign up first, someone has to be the &#8220;first out of your friends&#8221;, why not make that somebody you? Eventually, people will start to join, you&#8217;ll see \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n\n<div style=\"font-size: 0px; height: 0px; line-height: 0px; margin: 0; padding: 0; clear: both;\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Cross-posted to Google+: https:\/\/plus.google.com\/107713928526758699946\/posts\/JGUnGXWGYsr~So I thought considering I&#8217;ve recently switched to using Google+ as my primary social network that I&#8217;d try using it as a blogging system as well. Makes sense seeing as most of the time my blogs are just rather long status updates, or tutorials on things. So, I&#8217;ve been angry with Facebook [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[358,251,76,357,356,359,360,348],"class_list":["post-814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal-rantings","category-product-reviews","tag-circles","tag-facebook","tag-google","tag-mauricio-freitas","tag-news-feed","tag-privacy","tag-social-networking","tag-trolling"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWi3e-d8","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.c2s.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.c2s.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.c2s.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.c2s.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.c2s.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=814"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.c2s.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":816,"href":"http:\/\/www.c2s.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814\/revisions\/816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.c2s.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.c2s.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.c2s.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}