You almost had me...
...until I looked at the date. Phew!
Facebook's upcoming Android announcement could see Zuckerberg & Co. take over smartphone homescreens, making the social network an ever-present companion for people with a thirst for e-validation. The company will announce on Thursday an HTC phone that comes loaded with a Facebook app that supplants the traditional smartphone …
It will be getting removed from my mothers phone if this is real.
Don't think Google will let it happen if it was just pushed to everyone with a homescreen replacement by default. (Or even offering next time you press the home button).
I am surprised we ended up in this situation. (If Murdock had said in all his owned media that Facebook is only used by young kids and the people who pray on them before it got big (When he owned Myspace) it would never have happened like this it is somewhat out of character for him maybe he is just getting too old).
You have to admire the Zuck, he has conned millions of people into believing that you have to post inane, uninteresting, incredibly dull self-important detritus of the minutiae of your life to achieve a sense of affirmation from like minded people who also post inane, uninteresting, incredibly dull, self-important detritus of the minutiae of their lives. While this goes on he harvests your details and sells this information to the highest bidder....
What a salesman, he was even able to convince normally intelligent people to buy into his dream...
I posted about the birth of my newborn child on there as a way to announce to people who I don't get chance to stay in contact with as often as I'd like, but might be interested.
Would you like to tell me and the rest of my family how inane, uninteresting, incredibly dull and self-important the birth of my first child is?
Please continue, although your soapbox looks a to be giving way under the weight of that chip upon your shoulder AC.
So would I, I'm adopted.
None of which detracts from the fact that having a child is a stupendous act of vanity (asuming the world wants or needs replicants of you is pretty self-aggrandizing) regardless of it being a biological imperative. As humans we are advanced enough to choose whether to have kids or not, so the biological imperative argument doesn't hold water and shoving pictures of your spawn all over Facebook and then bleating about them in a comment is pretty much the definition of vanity. "look at the mini-me's, LOOK AT THEM!"
"As humans we are advanced enough to choose whether to have kids or not, so the biological imperative argument doesn't hold water...."
Hmmm, tell that to the nutter who kills his brother or beats his wife/girlfriend. In each and every one of us, at the base of this cold, calculating exterior beats the heart of an animal, barely coping to contain those raw natural tendancies to eat, crap and breed. We're simply monkeys with technology, nothing more.
Rather like my conversation with my (richer, younger) brother.
When he announced his wife was pregnant, I remarked that the last thing the world needs is more people.
He replied, "well, it needs more people like us".
Did the newborn baby give consent for the pictures to be online?
I dont not envy the children that have been born in the last few years, there lives are documented online and they will grow up knowing there are pictures of them on the internet.
Since when did having children, buying a new car etc etc become a show off item, rather than something that is special and personal and a rather private matter
quote: "Would you like to tell me and the rest of my family how inane, uninteresting, incredibly dull and self-important the birth of my first child is?"
Depends, I have another 369,999 parents to congratulate for the birth of their children on the exact same day (and a similar number for the previous day, and for the following day, e.g. more than one million in 72 hours). I'm sure your news was much more intelligent, interesting, incredibly keen and modest than any of those hundreds of thousands of similar births, though :)
Disclaimer: I do have a facebook account, but rarely log on more than once a month, if that. All the stuff my friends post tends to be full of inane drivel, sprinkled with the odd meetup request that I'd already heard about face to face. When IRL conversations regularly contain the words "did you see X on facebook?" you have to wonder what has happened to the art of conversation... :/
"You have to admire the Zuck, he has conned millions of people into believing that you have to post inane, uninteresting, incredibly dull self-important detritus of the minutiae of your life to achieve a sense of affirmation from like minded people who also post inane, uninteresting, incredibly dull, self-important detritus of the minutiae of their lives."
He didn't have to convince anybody. Most people are already like that.
Don't you get out much?
Right now the Facebook app is the one thing on my Android phone that is always half-baked. It has "Network errors" when nothing else does, it uploads photos that never arrive at Facebook, or which are posted four times. It hangs for endless periods.
In short, it sucks.
On top of that, Facebook is a company that I really don't trust, and I've long since stripped any "real" information out of it, and refuse to let it connect with any other site or app.
...the Facebook app has the ability to read settings for the HTC Launcher, the stock Android launcher, and the Touchwiz launcher – this, Android Police believes, is a smoking gun that indicates the app may become available as a standalone app in the Google Play Store as well.
Aha. I'm betting that the next "upgrade" to the Facebook app will try to tie it so tightly into the Android OS that it will be nearly impossible to sandbox. That's the moment when it will disappear from my phone.
This is why I'm planning to ditch my Mac and move to a Linux desktop - the latest two generations of OSX (Lion and Mountain Lion) come with Facebook integration out of the box.
Even Snow Leopard had 'Share' options helpfully bundled with certain apps, but these were easy enough to rip out when you know how to find and inspect .plist files.
Not sure this really is an April Fools', because Facebook put out their "New home on Android" announcement quite some time ago. In any case, the FB app on Android is buggy, unusuably slow and generally a total car crash. If they can't sort that, then any such venture is DOA and a waste of everyone's time.
The re-written/re-issued iOS app, however, is honestly excellent. Slick, fast and generally very pleasant to use.
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It already integrates far too much into my HTC One. For example if I go to my Gallery I'm presented with all my friends photos like they are in my Gallery. Very annoying and tricky to remove. I'd much rather the standalone app than this rubbish that can't be removed without skills to hack apart Android. Shame on HTC's part.
The current android Facebook App requires permissions that it clearly can't justify - along with the snafu whereby it rewrote everyone's address books I have to wonder if anyone actually uses it rather than just the smart phone browser to access the website like they do on their computers.
I already don't understand people using the FB app. It's a massive resource hog and it does the same stuff as visiting the page, only with more noise.
Even my friends that have a total disregard for their own privacy have stopped "checking in" all over the place due to that guy (you know the one) starting to turn up in places where they've just announced they're enjoying a quiet meal or pint.
I've got no problem with FB as a tool for posting nonsense about what you've been up to, and sending inconsequential messages about the place, but given their blatant (and financially motivated) disregard for privacy I really can't see why I would want anything they wrote being allowed to run on my phone, let alone take it over entirely.
What is worst about the App is that you cannot uninstall it even on current phones without rooting them. It's a resource hog and I don't want it installed, let alone running. No I wouldn't buy any smartphone that was based on Farcebook, and if they keep this up I may well do what several of my friends (real friends) have done and shutdown their account. Have a website and an app by all means but don't try and force it on people who don't want it. All you do is alienate them.
"Have a website and an app by all means but don't try and force it on people who don't want it. All you do is alienate them."
It's the in-thing, didn't you know? There's symmetry there- google forcing you to join their unloved social network to post app reviews seems to exist in the same circle of Heck as a phone with facebook tentacles in every orifice, whether you want them or not.
You can disable built in Apps on Android 4.0 and later. (At least AOSP or GED Android).
Settings -> Apps -> All -> Appname -> disable and then reboot (Anything that is a system App you get disable instead of uninstall).
This is on my Xoom with USA stock rom might be slightly different on phones. (Or disabled by junk overlays.)
This just in
Experiment Shows How Facebook Can Spread Racist Thoughts
By Tom Jacobs, Pacific Standard
"Heavy Facebook users are more likely than those who log on occasionally to react positively to racist remarks."
I know it's fashionable to believe this, but the reality is vastly different.
G+ is a hotbed of intelligent conversation, and the Android app is truly awesome.
The problem is, too many idiots that think you can sign up to G+ and then sit there and wait for people to interact with you. Social loners if you like, sat in the corner of the room wondering why nobody is engaging with them.
If you add yourself to some decent circles in G+, then it's truly awesome experience.
Well Google want you to use Chrome, trust your documents, email and life to Google+ and use them for search too.
That is pretty much most of your online life... ALL your online life if the site you visit also use Google Ads since they can track/trace you there too.
So yes I'm in IT but sorry, I'm not going anywhere near personally. Not because I have any privacy issues (though privacy is nice) but because I don't want to give all that information away for free. What I'll do if/when they require a G+ account to search I'm not sure yet.
For the IT hardcore rather than trendy there's Diaspora which has excellent privacy but it's such an obscure/bizarre setup and frankly such a daft name that I've little chance of recruiting my friends/contacts to it.... shame really for the sake of a name !
American media is taking all the BS this world and sticking it aggressively into people's heads. FB is taking all the BS from people's heads and broadcasting it to the world.
There fixed that for you. All the major American broadcasters are guilty, not just the one that jumped off the cliff to the right instead of following the rest off the cliff to the left.