I can safely say that I wouldn’t choose Payoneer as a payment service. As I told in their forums today as a last resort, after already spending hours (in the plural!) on this.
This has been deeply frustrating and here I am telling the story for the fifth time, since Payoneer stores none of my requests in the support centre.
Today I received an email saying a payment was coming from a company that I work with. The problem: the bank account on file is out of date.
There is no way I can make any changes.
You may think that I can go to the settings on my account and do the edits there, but this particular account is not recorded there. So how can I remove or correct an account that is not even shown on the Payoneer website?
No matter which option you select from payoneer.custhelp.com, youāll get an automated response that is completely useless and irrelevant.
The emails read, āIf this response does not resolve your issue, visiting our Support Center is the fastest way to find a resolution,ā which is a complete and utter lie, since you cannot file a single support request. After youāve typed out your story for the umpteenth time, support never receives a thing. You just get another automated email with useless information. When you look under āMy requestsā, you find that Payoneer never recorded what you wrote. This must be the quietest support centre in the world.
When clicking on the link when the websiteās advice is useless, you get a 404 that reads, āThis site has been disabled for the time being.ā
They keep sending me to pages that I have already seen and can do nothing with. This has been the worst payment website I have ever had to deal with, as they keep sending you round in circles and nothing ever gets resolved. Itās out of sheer desperation Iām on a public forum in the hope someone knows how to do this.
I’m not kidding about their website. Here are some fun pages it’s led me to in order to resolve my query.
At least Twitter works. Google, as usual, doesn’t.
I had a check to see how Lucire was performing in a Google search yesterday and noticed there was a Wikipedia box to the right, and a message saying that if it was about us, I could ‘claim’ the box. I clicked on the link, and as Google knows my email address is associated with Lucire through its search console, it verified me. ‘Congratulations, you’ve been verified’, according to the Google website, and I could ‘Add or change info’, with a ‘Review info’ box that I could click on.
Actually, it’s just a coloured rectangle. Clicking on it does nothing.
Maybe it’s my privacy settings, so I used my fresh, unblocked, Google-can-plant-what-it-likes Chromium browser. I log in as me on Google. And here’s what I get.
Another variant is the below:
āThis account doesn’t have permission to publish on Google Search.’ Um, it does. You just told me I did.
The box remains claimed but there’s not a damned thing I can do.
Long-time readers will remember my pointing out many years ago how the Google Dashboard isn’t accurate, especially when it comes to arithmetic. Nothing has changed.
Google says I have one task. Well, I can’t, since I’ve never used it. Click through: I have none, and Google returns a ‘Get started’ page. Google says I have two albums. Again, impossible. Click through: I have none. It says I belong to one group. Click through: zero. I’m honestly astonished at how bad they are. If you can’t do maths, you probably shouldn’t be working with computers.
Finally, I see Facebook has forced a lot of people to change to its new template. I actually don’t care what the UI looks like, as I’m not there sufficiently to care. And I bet that if you were Māori, you’d want to have the old template back, since you can’t type macronized vowels. The macron just winds up on the baseline on any Chromium browser.
One friend tried to replicate this on Windows and couldn’t, so this might not be a universal issue.
The font being called by the stylesheet is Segoe UI Historic. I have it installed, and it’s not something I’ve ever edited. I will point that that, according to Character Map, no macronized vowels are visible in the relevant Unicode range, though I haven’t opened it in Fontlab to confirm. If the browser has to substitute, that’s fine. But what font (indeed, which of the Segoe fonts) has macrons on the baseline? It appears to be Microsoft’s Segoe, so if it’s not a Facebook linked font (the code inspector suggests it isn’t), then we can point the finger at Microsoft for a buggy font on a standard Windows 10 computer. Either way, someone in a Big Tech outfit goofed.
I had bookmarked this on my cellphone but because it’s my cellphone, it takes a long time to get it on this blog. I have to remember to grab the phone, then look up the post. But it’s your regular reminder that Facebook usually does nothing, despite saying it actively takes down hateful content. As I noted on The Panel in late August, eight copies (I believe in part) of the Christchurch massacre still exited on the platform as of March 15, 2020. The lies are laid bare once more.
Two people murdered by a white supremacist called to arms by a Facebook post Facebook refused to take down is an āoperational mistakeā.
Genocide. Subverted elections. Holocaust denial. A live-streamed massacre. What evidence do we need? https://t.co/qRaPgV1OeX
As a company, they also take their sweet time in removing bots. Here’s Instagram in a message to me on August 27 (it’s not the only 2018 report they responded to that week):
Iāve done several Zoom meetings since the pandemic was declared, and two Google Hangouts. While Iām not thrilled at having to use two companies with patchy (to say the least) records on user privacy, the meetings (three for Medinge, one for another board I sit on) have been productive, and the only bottleneck has been, of course, Google.
Iāve never known what to do with those meeting.ics files that come in but I assume they are digital diary entries for those who donāt like paper. But I can open them in a text file and figure out when meetings start and end and with whom Iām having them.
If someone sends me a Zoom or Google Hangoutsā link then Iām all good, as I can head straight there and attend the meeting. But for one organization, which has been on Google for longer than Iāve been on their board, Iām expected to get this from the ICS file itself. Fortunately they have an excellent secretary and convener who sends me the link privately since Iām the only one out of the 10 or so who attend these Google-based meetings who canāt figure out how to use this technology.
Apparently, for everyone, they receive the email and they get a Google Hangout link inside a Calendar entry like this:
and for me, and Iāve spent two hours on this, this is all I get:
I can tell you itās not inside the ICS file. Thereās no link at all.
Before you say, āJack, you have non-standard privacy settings on your browser and computer,ā let me answer that now: Iāve downloaded a fresh copy of Opera with no privacy blocks whatsoever, and instead of retrieving the ICS from my usual Eudora email client, Iāve gone into Gmail, where theyāve sent the same invitation, and pretended to like Google and tried to do everything within their ecosystem. This is my only Gmail account, which we are all required to have on this board.
Iāve opened the email containing this link. If I click on āAdd to calendarā, I get the screenshot of mine above. Next to the meeting.ics attachment is āDownloadā. If I click on that, I download exactly the same file I had on my regular email, with no Google Hangoutsā link. Surprisingly, there is no way to add an ICS file from Gmail to your Google Calendarānot even a customized right-click optionāwhich must rank as one of the stupidest things that Google could do if they expect us to use their products as a suite.
There is no obvious way to open meeting.ics from within Google Calendar. However, you can import (Settings, then Settings, then Import/Export) the file, and the result? Same as before.
Our notifications are sent through a service called Our Cat Herder, and when I click for the full meeting details, I just get taken to that site, again with no Google Hangoutsā link.
I get that our brains are all wired differently, but there must be a simple, logical explanation on why everyone else can see this link and I canāt.
I realize that when I spot something Google does, and write about it on this blog, I usually go, āThatās dodgy. These guys are a bunch of wankers,ā and 99 per cent of people go, āThatās dodgy but Iāll put up with it because free stuff,ā so I know we are different. However, Iām struggling to think how anyone has managed to navigate Gmail, Google Calendar and all their non-search crap to find this link.
Iāve asked the person convening the meeting to show me in person how they get to their Google Calendar window after we come out of lockdown, but I really have clicked everything under the sun in Gmail, Calendar, Google Account, my profile, and anything else they let me access. I spent 90 minutes one morning and another half-hour today: two hours of letting this Big Tech crowd know all about my computer and invade my privacy. It just cannot be done. Except logic tells me if nine other people can, then their brains must be wired so differently that they are clicking on something that I obviously cannot see. That Google has made it that invisible or that illogical to my 1 per cent brain. But, Gmail users, what else should I click on? There isnāt anything else. I’ve clicked on everything that’s obvious and even on things that were obvious dead ends.
Above: I’ve clicked on what I thought are the obvious links, so where’s this mystery Google Calendar file that reveals a Google Hangouts’ link?
But logic also says that if we are all receiving the same emails and the same meeting.ics file then why are they different? Even the time is different (theirs is 4.30 to 6 p.m., mine is 4.30 to 6.30 p.m.) as is the title (theirs has the name of the organization in it).
This is yet another case where Google doesnāt work. Iāve written plenty about why this companyās products are bad for us, their record of censorship, their exercise of a monopoly, their taking and exposure of user data, and their general incompetence. We all know about their failure to be transparent, especially with the one product which makes the most moneyātheir (independently unaudited) advertising. Recently I wrote about how Google Drive does not work, and now you can add Gmail and Google Calendar to the list. Conclusion: this hodgepodge of services is a waste of time. Like Microsoft Word, I’m glad I didn’t get laboured with them early onāand know to stay well away from them in the general course of my work.
I wanted to see what TV1 news (I can never remember its official name with all its rebrands over the yearsāis it One Network News, TVNZ1 News, One News, or something else?) had on GM’s decision to shut Holden, but I missed both the six o’clock and the Plus One screenings. I headed online with some trepidation because I recall that I could never find the most-watched programme on the channel on previous occasions. This time I decided to document my attempt.
Usually I would get stumped by the log-in process that made me lose my place, so this time I decided to log in first.
Nowhere to be seen. Ah, but it’s a TV1 show, so what if I go to the TV1 page?
Nope. Under news and current affairs, we have Breakfast, Seven Sharp, Fair Go and Te Karere. There’s a 1 News link at the top, what if I go there?
No joy, at least not for the full six o’clock broadcast. I did spy a Kiwi category, and surely TV1 news is Kiwi-made. Let’s see ā¦
Apparently only the Tonight and Midday bulletins count as Kiwi-made.
Despite my searching for it around 8 p.m., it wasn’t under ‘What’s new on TV’ either. Something that finished broadcasting an hour ago isn’t new.
By this time what I do is go on Twitter to ask for help and eventually someone finds it for me, which isn’t the most efficient way of doing it, but in the past that’s how I’ve solved it.
Tonight I put news into the search box and got it there after doing all the above, but why does TVNZ make it this hard? It’s their flagship news programme. And Conan Gorbey on Twitter found it for me tonight. Thanks, Conan!
I wonder if itās time to return to Firefox after an absence of two years and five months. After getting the new monitor, the higher res makes Firefoxās and Opera GXās text rendering fairly similar (though Chrome, Vivaldi and Edge remain oddly poor, and Vivaldiās tech people havenāt been able to replicate my bug). Thereās a part of me that gravitates toward Firefox more than anything with a Google connection, and I imagine many Kiwis like backing underdogs.
Here are some examples, bearing in mind Windows scales up to 125 per cent on QHD.
Vivaldi (Chrome renders like this, too)
Opera GX (and how Vivaldi used to render)
Firefox
Opera renders text slightly more widely than Firefox, but the subpixel rendering of both browsers is similar, though not identical. Type in Firefox arguably comes across with slightly less contrast than it should (especially for traditionally paper-based type, where I have a good idea of how itās āsupposedā to look) but Iām willing to experiment to see if I enjoy the switch back.
In those 29 months, a lot has happened, with Navigational Sounds having vanished as an extension, and I had to get a new Speed Dial (FVD Speed Dial) to put on my favourite sites. FVD uninstalled itself earlier today without any intervention from me, so if that recurs, Iāll be switching to something else. I donāt like computer programs having a will of their own.
A lot of my saved passwords no longer work, since I change them from time to time, and it was interesting to see what Firefox remembered from my last period of regular use. Iāll have to import some bookmarks, tooāthat file has been going between computers since Netscape.
The big problem of 2017āFirefox eating through memory like crazy (6 Gbyte in a short time)ācould be fixed now in 2020 by turning off hardware acceleration. Itās actually using less right now than Opera GX, and thatās another point in its favour.
I also like the Facebook Container that keeps any trackers from Zuck and co. away.
I did, however, have to get new extensions after having resided in the Vivaldi and Opera space for all that time, such as Privacy Badger.
If I make Firefox the default I know Iāll have truly switched back. But that Opera GX sure is a good looking browser. I might have to look for some skins to make common-garden Firefox look smarter.
Surprisingly, Vivaldi hadnāt notified me of any updates for monthsāI was on v. 2.05, and had no idea that they were up to 2.10. Having upgraded manually, I noticed its handling of type had deteriorated. Here is one paragraph in Lucire:
My font settings had also changed.
Coincidentally, I downloaded Opera GX last night to have a go, and it displays type in the way Iām used to:
Since both are Chromium-based, and Opera is sensitive about privacy as Vivaldi is, I decided to make the change and see if I like the new browser better. I was used to Operas of old being independent, not Chromium-based, but the good news is I could use the same plug-ins.
Iām missing Vivaldiās easy screenshot process and its clipping (Opera GX has something similar but introduces an extra step of saving the file) but so far the browsers arenāt too different in terms of everyday functionality. Opera GXās extensionsā window isnāt as well organized and I have to scroll to tinker with the settings of anything later in the alphabet.
The unchangeable dark theme takes a bit of getting used to (but it matches my laptop, so thereās that), and thereās a GX home page thatās superfluous for me.
I donāt need the built-in ad blocker out of principle, but I do have certain anti-tracking plug-ins (e.g. Privacy Badger) that I was able to install from the Opera shop without incompatibility.
Hard-core gamers may like the CPU limiter and RAM limiter, to make sure the browser doesnāt eat up capacity for their games. Itās not something I need concern myself about, but I can see it being handy. I remember when old Chrome (many years ago) and Firefox (more recently) began eating memory like crazy with my settings (no idea why), and this would have been useful.
But as someone who reads online a lot, itās important that type is properly handled. I donāt know what Vivaldi has done to its type rendering, and thatās probably the biggest thing that tipped me in favour of change.
The descent of software seems to be a common theme among some companies. You get good ones, like Adobe and Fontlab, where (generally) successive versions tend to improve on those gone before. Then you get bad ones, like Facebook, which make things worse with each iteration. Facebook Timeline launched to much fanfare at the beginning of the decade, and I admit that it was a fantastic design, despite some annoying bugs (e.g. one that revealed that Facebook staff had no idea there were time zones outside US Pacific time). It was launched at the right time: a real innovation that helped boost my waning interest in the platform. But then they started fiddling with it. I equated it to what General Motors did with the Oldsmobile Toronado: a really pure design upon launch for 1966, with that purity getting spoiled with each model year, till the 1970 one lost a lot of what made it great to begin with. Donāt get me started on the 1971s.
Facebook had, for instance, two friendsā boxes when they began fiddling. The clever two-column layout eventually disappeared so what we were left with was a wide wall, a retrograde step.
Theyāve spent the rest of the decade not innovating, but by seemingly ensuring that every press announcement they make is a complete lie, or at least something not followed up by concrete action.
When they bought Instagram, they began ruining it as well. First to go in 2016 were the maps, which I thought were one of the platformās best features. Instagram claimed few used them, but given that by this point Facebook owned them, any āclaimā must be taken with a grain of salt. Perhaps their databases could not handle it. Back in the days of Getsatisfaction reports, there were more than enough examples of Facebook’s technical shortcomings. In December I had to replace my phone after the old one was dropped, but now Iām wondering whether I should have spent the money getting it fixed. Because the new phone is running on a skin over Android 7, and it looks like Instagram doesnāt support this version, as far as videos are concerned. So you could say that videos are no longer supported. Since December Iāve had to Bluetooth all my videos to my old phone, peer through what I could make of the details on a dodgy screen, and upload that way, if I wanted a proper frame rate. User feedback on Reddit and elsewhere suggests the cure is to upgrade to Android 8, not something I know how to do.
It might have been a bug, or it may have been a case of trialling a feature among a tiny subset of users, but for ten months I could upload videos of over eight minutes. As of February 2019, that feature vanished, and Iām back to a minute. I notice others now have it as part of IGTV, but I canāt see anything that will allow me to do the same, and why would I want vertical videos, anyway? God gave us eyes that are side by side, not one above the other. Frankly, when youāve been spoiled by videos going between eight and nine minutes, one minute is very limiting.
Now I see with the latest versions of Instagram that the filters donāt even work. For the last few versions, no preview appears for most of the filters; and now itās constantly āCanāt continue editingā (v. 90) or āYour photo couldnāt be processed correctlyā (v. 89).
Instagram is a steadily collapsing platform and I shudder to think what itāll be like when they get to the 1971 Oldsmobile Toronado stage. I almost wonder if Facebook is doing the digital equivalent of asset-stripping and taking the good stuff into its own platform, to force us into their even shittier ecosystem. At this rate, others like meālong-time usersāwill cease to use it and go with the likes of Pixelfed. I stay on there because of certain friends, but, like Facebook, at some stage, they may have to get accustomed to the notion that I am no longer on there for anyone else but a few clients. And they may bugger off, too, sick of every second item being an ad. Weāll have foretold this bent toward anti-quality years before the mainstream media catch on to it, as we have done with Google and Facebook, and all their gaffes.
Tumblr is dead, long live NewTumbl.
I came across NewTumbl (formally newTumbl) a few days ago, after finding my Tumblr feed just wasnāt what it used to be. Itās not that the dirty pictures are goneāI only ever followed one blog where the images might be considered sensualābut that the energy was. Those friends whose posts interested me werenāt posting much any more, and it wasnāt just them: my posting had diminished significantly. Platforms, I imagine, have a shelf life, and when announcements such as Verizonās last year, which became known, perhaps incorrectly, as Tumblrās āporn banā, it was bound to affect the platform. It was the language that opened Verizon up to ridicule: apparently, they had a problem with āfemale-presenting nipplesā, and some innocent content was flagged for removal.
What Verizon had really underestimated was that among the adult imagery were communities that were having free and safe discussions about sexuality, and sex workers themselves had a place where they, too, could post. It wasnāt an āadultā site per se, considering the overwhelming majority of the content was family-friendly. That perhaps kept the place relatively safe: you could have these private discussions while coming across general posts featuring interesting photography or good political viewpoints. Tumblr also hadnāt descended into the political divisiveness that plague platforms such as Twitter.
I liked Tumblr for many reasons. It became a fun place to post interesting graphics for me, and to put anything that I didnāt want to structure into long-form thoughts. It was image-based. Every now and then I would put up a quotation. The Font Police blog is still there, with over 20,000 followers.
I liked the fact that for years, someone would get back to you when you posted a query. This was true even after Yahoo acquired it.
But during the Blogcozy experiment, which sadly resulted in that platformās closure, I cut down my time on Tumblr, because I had found a more suitable place to put those brief thoughts and to share with friends. Had Tumblr been a greater draw, I wouldnāt have considered it. After Blogcozy closed, I didnāt really resume my Tumblring to the same extent. Social seemed to be dying, since it was being run by Big Tech firms that lied as their main position. Even if Tumblr was more honest (and it was), the age of social media seemed to be at an end.
I may have been wrong, because since posting on NewTumbl Iāve been impressed by the sense of energy there. Yes, it has attracted a great deal of the adult posters who left Tumblr. But if you donāt want to see X-rated stuff, you say so in the settings, and adjust to M (for mature), O (for office), or even F (for family). You won’t see anything coarser than what you chose (with the occasional exception when posters did not have a clue how the ratings’ system works). The interface is familiar-but-different-enough for Tumblr users and Verizon lawyers. Yet it goes beyond what Tumblr does, with the smart use of Interstate as the body typeface, and photos in multi-image posts actually appear in the order you load them.
Itās not perfect: I couldnāt link a video but I could upload; and I managed to stumble on a 404 page by following links, both of which Iāll report, since they make it so easy to do.
But hereās the really good thing: the transparency. One of the main developers, Dean, talks to users and provides feedback. Heāll even post when an error occurs during developmentāthatās something youāll never see Facebook do when its databases die.
He and I have already exchanged notes via DMs after I joined for two days, and I said I saw so many parallels between what he was doing and what I saw with Tesla when Martin Eberhard was running it (transparency over ego), or even in the days when Jerry and David were building YahooāIām old enough to have been submitting sites to them while they were still being run out of a garage. Thereās an exciting sense with Dean and the small NewTumbl crew that theyāre building something useful for the world, celebrating free speech and humanity. Am I being overly optimistic? I donāt think I am: I enjoy the UI, I like the openness and honesty, and these are just what the tech sector needs. I see a draw for spending my time here even though I have zero followers to my blog. The buzz feels similar to when I discovered some sites back in the 1990s: it seems new and exciting.
Itās also rather nice being the first person to populate some fandom hashtags, though I was second for Doctor Who, and for anyone ever searching for The Avengers, they will see, rightly, a photograph of Diana Rigg and Patrick Macnee.
Iāll see you there at jackyan.newtumbl.com. Lucire also has a NewTumbl at lucire.newtumbl.com.
Above: The one thing I posted to Tumblr that went viral, in 2011.
I came across a thread at Tedium where Christopher Marlow mentions Pandora Mail as an email client that took Eudora as a starting-point, and moved the game forward (e.g. building in Unicode support).
As some of you know, Iāve been searching for an email client to use instead of Eudora (here’s something I wrote six years ago, almost to the day), but worked with the demands of the 2010s. I had feared that Eudora would be totally obsolete by now, in 2018, but for the most part itās held up; I remember having to upgrade in 2008 from a 1999 version and wondering if I only had about nine years with the new one. Fortunately, itās survived longer than that.
Brana BujenoviÄās Pandora Mail easily imported everything from Eudora, including the labels I had for the tables of contents, and the personalities I had, but itās not 100 per cent perfect, e.g. I canāt resize type in my signature file. However, finally Iāve found an email client that does one thing that no other client does: I can resize the inbox and outbox to my liking, and have them next to each other. In the mid-1990s, this was one of Eudoraās default layouts, and it amazed me that this very efficient way of displaying emails never caught on. I was also heartened to learn from Tedium that Eudora was Apple co-founder Steve Wozniakās email client of choice (āThe most important thing I use is Eudora, and that’s discontinued’). Iām in good company.
However, this got me thinking how most users tolerate things, without regard, in my opinion, to whatās best for them. Itās the path of least resistance, except going down this path makes life harder for them.
The three-panel layout is de rigueur for email clients todayāall the ones Iāve downloaded and even paid good money for have followed this. Thunderbird, Mailbird, the oddly capitalized eM. All have had wonderful reviews and praise, but none allow you to configure the in- and outbox sizes. Hiriās CEO says thatās something theyāre looking at but right now, theyāre not there, either. Twenty-plus years since I began using Eudora and no one has thought of doing this, and putting the power of customization with the user.
But when did this three-panel layout become the standard? I can trace this back to Outlook Express, bundled with Windows in the late 1990s, and, if Iām not mistaken, with Macs as well. I remember working with Macs and Outlook was standard. I found the layout limiting because you could only see a few emails in the table of contents at any given time, and I usually have hundreds of messages come in. I didnāt want to scroll, and in the pre-mouse-wheel environment of the 1990s, neither would you. Yet most people put up with this, and everyone seems to have followed Outlook Expressās layout since. Itās a standard, but only one foisted on people who couldnāt be bothered thinking about their real requirements. It wasnāt efficient, but it was free (or, I should say, the licence fee was included in the purchase of the OS or the computer).
āIt was freeā is also the reason Microsoft Word overtook WordPerfect as the standard word processor of the 1990s, and rivals that followed, such as Libre Office and Open Office, had to make sure that they included Word converters. I could never understand Word and again, my (basic) needs were simple. I wanted a word processor where the fonts and margins would stay as they were set till I told it otherwise. Word could never handle that, and, from what I can tell, still canāt. Yet people tolerated Wordās quirks, its random decisions to change font and margins on you. I shudder to think how many hours were wasted on people editing their documentsāWord canāt even handle columns very easily (the trick was usually to type things in a single column, then reformatāso much for a WYSIWYG environment then). I remember using WordPerfect as a layout programme, using its Reveal Codes featureāit was that powerful, even in DOS. Footnoting remains a breeze with WordPerfect. But Word overtook WordPerfect, which went from number one to a tiny, niche player, supported by a few diehards like myself who care about ease of use and efficiency. Computers, to me, are tools that should be practical, and of course the UI should look good, because that aids practicality. Neither Outlook nor Word are efficient. On a similar note I always found Quattro Pro superior to Excel. With Mac OS X going to 64-bit programs and ending support for 32-bit there isnāt much choice out there; Iāve encountered Mac Eudora users who are running out of options; and WordPerfect hasnāt been updated for Mac users for years. To a large degree this answers why the Windows environment remains my choice for office work, with Mac and Linux supporting OSs. Someone who comes up with a Unicode-supporting word processor that has the ease of use of WordPerfect could be on to something.
Then you begin thinking what else we put up with. I find people readily forget or forgive the bugs on Facebook, for example. I remember one Twitter conversation where a netizen claimed I encountered more Facebook bugs than anyone else. I highly doubt that, because her statement is down to short or unreliable memories. I seem to recall she claimed she had never experienced an outageāwhen in fact everyone on the planet did, and it was widely reported in the media at the time. My regular complaints about Facebook are to do with how the website fails to get the basics right after so many years. Few, Iām willing to bet, will remember that no oneās wall updated on January 1, 2012 if you lived east of the US Pacific time zone, because the staff at Facebook hadnāt figured out that different time zones existed. So we already know people put up with websites commonly that fail them; and we also know that privacy invasions donāt concern hundreds of millions, maybe even thousands of millions, of people, and the default settings are “good enough”.
Keyboards wider than 40 cm are bad for you as you reach unnecessarily far for the mouse, yet most people tolerate 46 cm unless theyāre using their laptops. Does this also explain the prevalence of Toyota Camrys, which one friend suggested was the car you bought if you wanted to ātell everyone you had given up on lifeā? It probably does explain the prevalence of automatic-transmission vehicles out there: when I polled my friends, the automaticāmanual divide was 50ā50, with many in the manual camp saying, āBut I own an automatic, because I had no choice.ā If I didnāt have the luxury of a āspare carā, then I may well have wound up with something less than satisfactoryābut I wasnāt going to part with tens of thousands of dollars and be pissed off each time I got behind the wheel. We donāt demand, or we donāt make our voices heard, so we get what vendors decide we want.
Equally, you can ask why many media buyers always buy with the same magazines, not because it did their clients any good, but because they were safe bets that wouldnāt get them into trouble with conservative bosses. Maybe the path of least resistance might also explain why in many democracies, we wind up with two main parties that attract the most votersāspurred by convention which even some media buy into. (This also plays into mayoral elections!)
Often we have ourselves to blame when we put up with inferior products, because we havenāt demanded anything better, or we donāt know anything better exists, or simply told people what weād be happiest with. Or that the search for that product costs us in time and effort. Pandora has had, as far as I can fathom, no press coverage (partly, Brana tells me, by design, as they donāt want to deal with the traffic just yet; itās understandable since there are hosting costs involved, and heād have to pay for it should it get very popular).
About the only place where we have been discerning seems to be television consumption. So many people subscribe to cable, satellite, Amazon Prime, or Netflix, and in so doing, support some excellent programming. Perhaps that is ultimately our priority as a species. Weāre happy to be entertainedāand that explains those of us who invest time in social networking, too. Anything for that hit of positivity, or that escapism as we let our minds drift.
Justin Timberlake may have played Sean Parker in The Social Network, but he’s had a real-life social networking role to play as an investor as Myspace (sans intercapitalized S) showed off its new look yesterday.
And I like it.
After being frustrated with another attempt at ordering photos in a Facebook album (viz. it doesn’t work any more), seeing that fan page views had gone way down (as Facebook forces us to pay for promoted statuses), and noticing that I was largely using Facebook as a glorified version of Digg, it dawned on me: there must be a better way. As I told Facebook in a survey tonight:
These are actually reasons to leave Facebook or to find an alternativeāand right now, the MySpace reboot is looking way better. Facebook is little more to me than a glorified Digg now where I share some bookmarks, but not where I share my real statuses. And we all know what happened to Digg.
It’s a slight exaggeration as some of my closer friends get some status updates, but the majority come via Twitter, and that’s plugged in to my Facebook. Twitter, too, no longer has the effectiveness it once had in itself, unless you are directly contacting someone.
About the only newer (2007 and on) platform I get any pleasure out of is Tumblr, but that’s not what I call a social network.
It’s funny, because one year ago, I was raving about Facebook Timeline. How Facebook gave me instant gratification through “likes” and how it looked so clever. But then, as with the Oldsmobile Toronado, designers tinkered with it. They added unnecessary features, such as the second friends’ box. Anything that was ingenious about the original Timeline, such as the way it could guess your most significant past moments, disappeared or was pushed downāor rendered useless. The fact that fan pages still don’t update on the 1st of each monthāa bug that existed when Facebook first created Timelineāsuggests to me that the company doesn’t really care any more about the user experience. It’s all about the money, and when that happens, the lovin’ feeling’s goneājust as it had with Google, which I also used to rave about.
While the pundits are saying that Myspace is great because it focuses on music, they are missing the other angle. Based on the preview, it’s a visual delight. It makes updating your social network look good, and you have a fleeting moment of pride as you see the next status go live. We’re so spoiled with technology now that we like those experiencesāand the new Myspace user interface, created by Australian firm Josephmark, captures that part of us. I can dig updating in News Gothic.
Freed from the clutches of the Murdoch Press, Myspace might come good againāat the perfect time as Facebook fatigueāand even a bit of Twitter fatigueāsets in. I never thought I would say that.
I just hope the new management keep the website clean: don’t do a Facebook.
And I still have more friends on Myspace than I do on Google Plus, so I am starting from a bigger number than I did on Facebook all those years ago.