I wonder...
...what they were expecting?
Facebook's app that takes over mobile phones has been met with a flurry of negative reviews, as people complain at just how much Facebook Zuck & Co. have put into their phones. The "Facebook Home" app became available to download on select Android devices on Friday, and at the time of writing had a rating of 2.4, with almost …
God no,
A home screen that rolls inane, uninteresting, insignificant and boring updates from uninteresting boring insignificant self important peoples lives who live with this false belief that their egotistical self importantance is in anyway of interest to the rest of us.
This is what happens if you are bad and go to hell when you die......
Purgatory......
"Remember, you can be friends with whoever you choose, if you choose those people, then more fool you."
From what I've seen in friends and acquaintances FBs, even if you only befriend interesting people, Nobel prices and porn actresses , 99.99% of their updates end up being junk, leaving you in a big stream of crap with only the very occasional pearl. The culture of being always 'in touch' that is inherent to FB seems to suck human brains dry in a short time.
My hope is that this 'always in touch' shit is only a temporary fashion.
'Stop hitting yourself'
Unless they know actual Nobel prize winners or porn actresses then what they are following are public feeds of public people. If you want interesting updates from real people:
A) only befriend people in reality who you actually want to be friends with.
B) only befriend people on Facebook who you are friends with in reality.
Most people seem to instinctively grasp the former, but a lot of people (like you and your friends) seem to struggle with the later. I don't eat food I hate, I don't sit and watch TV I don't like, I don't read Barbara Cartland so why would I follow the feeds of 'uninteresting, boring, self-important people' on Facebook/twitter and then complain about the content of the channel which I have crafted for myself.
Off to do something I want to do, and as far as possible, avoid doing things I don't.
Well, excuse the pedantry but apparently purgatory is a state granted only to those who die in grace. It is a temporary state but it cannot lead to hell.
In a way it may be what graceful souls experience temporarily before uninstalling and hence going to non-FB heaven. But to me that looks like the very definition of hell.
inane, uninteresting, insignificant and boring updates from uninteresting boring insignificant self important peoples lives who live with this false belief that their egotistical self importantance is in anyway of interest to the rest of us.
Is Stephen Fry on Facebook as well, then?
@jonathanb 1800GMT
"Everyone with an android has a g+ account"
Not true. I've been using Android handsets since the Moto Droid came out and do not have a G+ account. I've stopped reviewing apps because I refuse to join G+ just to voice my opinion. I find that a rather annoying attempt at cross-pollination on Google's part.
Facebook use might not be compulsory, but it"s various apps are usually pre-installed on every phone you get these days (and normally can only be removed by rooting the phone!).
The worry for all of us is that on the next phone you buy, this piece of cr-app might be pre-installed on the phone. Combine that with a waz to prevent people rooting their phones and what are you going to do?
The worry for all of us is that on the next phone you buy, this piece of cr-app might be pre-installed on the phone. Combine that with a waz to prevent people rooting their phones and what are you going to do?
Easy... don't buy it. If manufacturers or operators see that Facebook-riddled phones don't sell, they won't stock any more.
Their record shows that anything Facebook is going to be invasive. I don't condemn Facebook outright -- it's useful to me as an effortless way of keeping in contact with friends/family overseas. I can see that people much younger than me use it to organise their social lives -- particularly as this generation seems more group-oriented and less concerned about privacy. Where I differ is the cost -- I avoid using the mobile phone unnecessarily, let alone paying inflated data costs for something as marginal to me as Facebook. My teenage lifestyle may not have been quite so frantically mobile -- but we managed to organise ourselves even before we could afford a landline.
Who pays (inflated data costs) per megabyte for data access in this day and age, unless you're roaming, granddad?
Assuming you're UK based, virtually every tariff I can find comes with some kind of data allowance, 250MB per month at minimum, which would suffice for the bulk of light users.
'merikans don't travel to foreign parts these days. They think that everyone on this planet is about to kill them all (or so their TV Propaganda would have them believe) so roaming charges are not really an issue.
Data limits... that is a whole different ball-game. I'd fully expect this to blow many users limits easily and then it will hit them hard in the pocket.
US phone plans are not much more than a joke when it comes to data limits unless you are willing to virtually sign your life away.
15Gb for £15 (or thereabouts) a month is hard to beat. There are countries where it is beaten but compared to the US, it is an absolute bargain.
anon because I spend half my time in the US. My Dual SIM phone is a godsend but the US bills are frankly astronomic when compared to the UK.
"15Gb for £15 (or thereabouts) a month is hard to beat. There are countries where it is beaten but compared to the US, it is an absolute bargain."
Holy Carp! I had no idea the shaft was that big. 12Gb costs us poor 'merikans $120 or, effectively, 6.5 times as much.
oy...
That pretty much sums it all up.
It seems to be exactly what it was intended to be - something to attract die-hard facebook users, not something to attract the outcasts into the fold.
The real test will be when sufficient numbers of the true targets get their hands on it. Then we'll see if Facebook have judged their users right.
Oh looky, Facebook story, and the predictable "Facejunk is rubbish, only has idiots on it, why would anyone want to stay in touch with their friends using it?!?!?!" comments.
As usual, ignoring the fact the "idiots" on it are people YOU choose to be friends with.
........sort of guy and people I care about get e-mails, phone-calls and even something so impossibly old hat as a (yes I know, you can scarcely believe what you are reading here) hand written letter. In fact I even go as far as taking the radical step of actually spending time in their company (steady on now, you will scarcely believe this) face to face - I'll bet you are positively aghast to hear that, something so not this century.
Friends are people I know, people I care about, people I trust, people I want to spend time with. Acquaintances are people I sort of know, people I care less for (I might not risk my life for them), people I might eventually trust, people I might have the odd pint with.
What are Facebook "friends" ?
An example of mine would be is true of a guy I have met twice in my life, once on a mutual friends stag do and the second time at the weeding of said friend, he posts things I actually want to read, and have chats with him about said things, he is a Facebook friend, although I’m pretty sure if I died tomorrow he wouldn’t notice.
The opposite is true of one of my girlfriends close friends, who is one of those people who takes pictures of her dinner with instagram, and tags herself everywhere (ummmm #nice coffee (pictured) @Starbucks)
Wow, I did not know you could get coffee at Starbucks, or in fact what coffee looks like, and it’s a good thing you have that vintage brown filter on, making the whole picture lack detail and add more brown, personally I think there was a lack of actual brown colour in said picture of brown coffee and brown wooden table with brown pastry with bits of brown chocolate in beside it.
Unfortunately this person would notice if I stop ‘following’ them and it would actually affect my relationship with them in real life.
Well there are settings for what shows in your feed so you can keep the annoying poster(s) as friends but stop their posts showing in your feed. Filtered to status updates, photos, comments etc... unfortunately shared/reposted crap isn't a specific category but it someone is resharing too much you won't see their status updates or whatever anyway so may as well filter them out completely !
Here you go, I even googled it for you... http://en-gb.facebook.com/help/335291769884272/
It's dead handy :)
its like having a personal assistant, who's also a wold class stalker, in your pocket. you can just stalk people when you dont even want to. when you wake up in the morning. when youre on the train. when you take a sh$t....
i think all of the creepy people should have this
Touchwiz is bad enough (compared to blonde haired, blue eyed Aryan Android) but at least it does some things well. Just because users might want advanced Facebook functions live on one of their own screens doesn't mean they also want to change how they make phone calls, send SMS messages and all the other smart things a smart phone does. Seriously, a much better widget would have sufficed.
I hope Facebook Home is easy to get rid of and I do feel for the poor idiots who buy the HTC First.
"Dont need widgets.. but I would love to see folders in the future, and maybe custom short cuts on the lock screen."
Ok so the new fullscreen Home widget that seems to run only FB sub-widgets is all this person wants, I get that. The whole concept of folders and short cuts on the lock screen thing strikes me as a bit off. Isn't that like saying they don't want a lock screen and just want to go straight to the original home screen? To top it off, if the new FB Home is the new lock screen aren't they just saying they want the old Android back but without a lock screen and with a Windows 95 style active desktop?
"If you want interesting updates from real people:
A) only befriend people in reality who you actually want to be friends with.
B) only befriend people on Facebook who you are friends with in reality."
This doesn't help one bit. I don't use my facebook account for anything but single sign on (no facebook friends), but out of my friends that DO use facebook, I've SEEN their feeds. In person? Perfectly interesting people. On Facebook? It's like the worst sterotypes of how worthless facebook is, all rolled into one. Any little boring thought that pops into their head, updates on what they ate for lunch, what the weather was like, if the elevator took an extra moment to show up, and on and on. Just terrible. (Note to any friend that sees this -- I didn't mean you, I meant all my other friends, I suppose. Yeah.)
You've got to be kidding me right? Only a moron would install this garbage on their phone! Its bad enough dealing with their screwed up, not to mention constantly hacked, network from our regular PC's, much less letting them spam our phones so we can't access anything. Facebook is failing and they are doing whatever they can to try and save themselves! Google+ is going to wipe them out and they know it.
Since Facebook became fairly mainstream it's been used as a way to keep in touch with friends and family. What's happened in reality is a lot of people add random people they used to be friends with in primary school, people they didn't like, half the workforce from every job they've ever had and now people that aren't true friends or family now represent the majority of a friends list on a Facebook account. For the benefit of this post I will assume that this is around 75% particularly in accounts which have over 200 friends! Lets think about this now, your friends you see fairly often, a few friends may have moved away so you might chat through FB to catch up once in a while, same goes with family this makes up about a quarter of your Facebook users, these people that are more important than anything else, who you see or talk to regularly because they matter and the people you would share things with that you wouldn't put on FB. I ask you this....... Why the hell would you wanna put this rubbish on your phone which puts all the other unimportant people in your life at the forefront of your phone? Making it harder for you to keep in touch with the real people that you want to phone and talk to that really matter!!!
I agree with the previous statement, I just hope this being involved in everything is a fad that will dry up soon, I can’t listen to the radio, watch TV or drink a coffee or on the loo (Are we a nation of folders or scrunchers? I’m taking a dump leave me alone!) without being told to get involved, or ‘like’ us, even Question Time has a pointless twitter angle that does nothing but waste time while David Dimbleby tries to comprehend what the words he has been told to say mean, when they are talking about a defence issue, I want to hear what the guy from the MOD has to say, not what Bob from Swindon thinks, I know Bob, he’s an arse.
Facebook is going to swallow itself in advertisement and pointless crap until people get sick of it, give it 5 years and we will have a ‘facebook blocker’ along side pop-up blockers and spam filters.
Then maybe, just maybe one day conversations will not be interrupted with ‘oh yeah I saw that on Facebook’…
Rant over