mattiv.com
web design | Matti Vähätalo
Names. Millions of them, and they keep haunting me…
I’m bored of balancing between my different social bullshit networks: Facebook, Orkut, Twitter, different blogs, YouTube, LinkedIn, Flickr, Couchsurfing, forums, Jaiku (oh, that’s gone now… thanks, Google!)… I would love to go for the new, but how the hell I’m supposed to keep up with the new bullshit services when I already have too many accounts in the old ones, and still only those 24 hours a day? So now there are the social dashboards! Something that should save me from this overwhelming amount of bullshit. Praise the lord for TweetDeck, Seesmic, FriendFeed, Ping.fm and the like!
But no… Now the problem with FriendFeed is that my friends should also sign in, although they already have an account in Facebook, Orkut, Flickr, Twittr, LolFag, MySpace, AdultFriendFindr, OmgLolr, iOneMore and WhatEvr.com. And after signing in to FriendFeed, I have to upload a foto and write my description… C’mon! I’ve done it already in all of those services, why don’t you just go and look up there? Then it shows that I currently have three friends in FriendFeed, with none of them being really a close friends of mine. But I have hundreds of friends in all of these different services! Again: How the hell I’m supposed to keep up with the dashboard service when I’m already busy keeping up with all the bullshit social networks I’m in! I’d love to just have a simple iGoogle app (yes, at least I’m stuck with only one iGoogle, even though I also have Netvibes), that would gather all recent events in all my networks, tell me what each one of my friends ate for breakfast in one simple feed, and an option to post a twit and update my Facebook status and Orkut-whatever, the same text in each of them. Or upload a video in YouTube and at the same time post it in all of the other services (if I wish, of course).
Then it comes to Ping.fm. I still don’t know what my friends ate for breakfast. It’s a one-way dashboard, which helps me post the same “today I ate spam, sausage, bacon and spam” to more than one place (and, interestingly enough, to FriendFeed), but in order to see my friends’ responses, I have to login to each site… That’s nice, isn’t it! And this is not all: I can only post a “status update” or “microblog” or etc. So I can’t update both my Twitter and Facebook through this? So still, I only have to do unified Twitter/Facebook status updates the “old-fashioned” way. I mean, everything I want is a good, simple and robust interface that sends info to all these sites up and down.
Oh, sure, there is Seesmic and TweetDeck… More names, more names… If it wasn’t enough already, at least now I’m getting all mixed up. And then… They are standalone desktop applications? Hey, isn’t that a bit 90’s! Give me an online service for that or at least a Firefox plugin to do the trick! I don’t always use the same computer, you know…
I want to have the same friends in all of these different services. I’m following only like 3 people in Twitter for the mere reason that I already have most of my friends in Facebook telling me what they ate for breakfast, so I don’t have the motivation to waste time searching for their Twitter accounts. And I haven’t added any new people in my LinkedIn for ages… I’m quite a social person and get friends easily, so whenever I find new friends, I need to add them as my friends in 10 different services? God help me…
I would love somebody to tell us that “this is the one service everybody should use”. I just love how wild and open the Internet is, but to be honest, sometimes I want that Kim Il-Sung to be there, pulling the brake and guide us. Or at least some kind of online crisis to kill 90% of the less popular bullshit.
If I were the president…
I hate thinking. Why don’t you just make Internet proprietary and tell me what my friends ate for breakfast? Right now, I signed up for FriendFeed with high hopes, but ended up tweaking my profile and thinking that I should have more than these three friends. Sounds like just another Facebook to me. Tell me I got it wrong and it really saves my day!
Whatever… The worst part is that many of my friends have a real life so they don’t show up actively in any of those services. This means, I still have to meet people face-to-face and drink beer, or make phonecalls to know what they ate for breakfast – just because they are not in GoogleTalk, Facebook chat, MSN or Skype… Sigh. And with all this mess and the million options, I don’t see those people turning their social life online. It’s already way too messy and time-consuming for the ones “in it”. Mostly, people look for the simplest option, so give them that and stop the buzzword bullshit!
Tags: Facebook, FriendFeed, iGoogle, Ping.fm, Twitter
