58 posts tagged “facebook”

An interesting little application on Facebook:

 
Gender breakdown: 43% female / 57% male
Relationship status: 58% single / 42% taken
Political breakdown: 87% democrats / 13% republicans
Geographic distribution: 34 countries, 30 states
Most common zodiac sign: Libra (99 friends)
Favorite music: Jazz (27 friends)
Favorite TV show: Lost (22 friends)
Favorite movie: Shawshank Redemption (17 friends)
Favorite book: (14 friends)
Favorite activity: Reading (32 friends)

No book was listed, which might mean 14 of my friends are illiterate.
   The sample was my c. 1,300 Facebook connections, and I imagine it only took information where it was available.
   A lot of it was expected: as someone who has been to two dozen countries, having contacts in 34 sounds reasonable. I have been to 10 US states, so having contacts in 30 also sounds reasonable. I have noticed I have a lot of Libran friends, long before Facebook came along. I am surprised about Lost, since I have not watched it since the second season; as well as The Shawshank Redemption featuring on 17 friends’ lists.
   What was a big surprise was the 87 per cent Democratic proportion. I admit to having many leftist ideas, but in other respects I am quite centrist. I have friends on both sides of the political divide, as the comments on this blog alone illustrate. I figured Dems would outnumber Republicans, but not to a nearly seven-to-one ratio.

The good news: Facebook, last week, stopped accusing me on a daily basis of copyright infringement, but I had to battle them for over a month to get the warning removed.
   The bad news: the site still doesn’t really work. Funny, it worked in 2007.
   For instance, I was surprised to note that comments made by both myself and one friend, Gary, had disappeared from my wall earlier today:

Gary didn’t delete them, and neither did I. Facebook also removed status updates I manually typed into the site.
   To double-check, I put an s after http in the status bar. And everything was back again:    Considering the Facebook logo is still missing on the standard server, along with the bottom bar, then I can continue to deem the website incompatible with Firefox on Vista. This is one heck of a buggy site that seems to get worse by the day.

Wow, I guess no one uses the Twitter application on Facebook any more. I know I had signed up, but given that it stopped working today, then this does not surprise me. Facebook must be peeved off if it reports that the plug-in has a grand total of zero users:

This is unheard of: a form on Facebook actually working.
   As some of you know, since August 3, I have been battling Facebook over its false allegations about copyright infringement that appear on my home page there. The copyright owners have never complained about the videos that Facebook deleted, which according to Facebook itself, is a prerequisite for deletion. (This raises even more privacy concerns: who is making the call on things I am uploading, if the copyright owners have not complained?) I have filled out the form protesting my innocence—effectively getting Facebook to comply with American common law about the presumption of innocence—multiple times daily. Each time, Facebook says there is an error submitting the form. (I know this after over 50 submissions.) Sometimes, it will give me a link to a DMCA form, but filling that out results in nothing, either. I just get taken back to the home page, with no acknowledgement, confronting Facebook’s accusations again (the following is an earlier screen shot):

   However, the DMCA form worked this time, by some curious twist of fate: Note that there is still no Facebook logo on any screen on the site that is not delivered via the secure servers.
   The lesson seems to be: if you submit a form sufficient times, Facebook eventually accepts it. However, ‘sufficient times’ is defined as ‘around 60’.

The top nav bar returned to Facebook today, sans logotype. As did the now-familiar accusation against me for copyright infringement, even though Facebook removed this on the 17th and, as I mentioned, reinstated the very video it wrongly removed on the 3rd. As before, there is no way to file a counter-notification either with the form linked from here, or a second DMCA form linked when the first form’s submission results in an error.
   Facebook must have a manual at its HQ entitled How to Piss off Your Users. Wrongful accusations will do it.

   If I goofed as much on a site, I’d be ashamed to show my logo, too.

I can get on to the ‘Compose’ page on Vox tonight. Just that it takes about four or five minutes to load.
   On the theme of computer bugs, here’s one from Facebook today. I just love how the Cities I’ve Visited application is now called Cities Ive Visit:

Oh yes, the ads are IP geo-targeted (bad), the Facebook logo remains missing, the white on pale blue text up top is unreadable, and the bottom toolbar has still not returned. Oh, the application doesn’t load anyway. Go Facebook! Nice to see its 2009 standard has been maintained.
   How about this one? This is from Wikimedia Commons, where people upload their images here so others at Wikipedia and other sites can use them. A noble effort, but the usual story applies. You know, the one where I said 90 per cent of the car pages on Wikipedia have major factual errors? That the service reflects opinion, not fact? Above is a prime example of why Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons need to be taken with a grain of salt. This is supposedly a page about the Hyundai Sonata Y1. The only problem is, none of the seven cars shown is a Sonata Y1. They are all Y2s. To a car enthusiast, this is like calling Queen Elizabeth II ‘King George VI’.
   What is sad is that there are a few uploaders who are generous enough to provide their material, but relied on the first erroneous uploader and assumed (s)he got the category right.

First Twitter died for nearly two days. Facebook has been progressively dying, first removing its navigation bars, then its logo, then making false accusations, and now removing all the contents of my home page. And today, I see Vox has begun recommending splogs on my blog:

   I have reported many of these and tonight, I am just too tired to. Hopefully someone else can take up the baton for the time being. Vox is pretty good at dealing to these.

I know former Alaskan governor Sarah Palin has had nearly 800,000 people join her Facebook page, which is a very impressive number. I didn’t expect to see this wall message:

After dinner, this ad on Autocade still made me hungry. Since I have never heard of this brand Down Under, I thought the Dove soap people had diversified, but it turns out it’s part of the Mars company.

   And the reason I am surfing around is that Facebook is dead again, after Twitter was dead for over a day on Sunday and part of today: I suppose this home page design is better than being falsely accused of copyright infringement every day by Facebook. But it’s not too different, in terms of usage, to when my laptop is switched off. Facebook versus switching off the laptop—it’s actually quite a hard choice.