Posts Tagged ‘Social network’

Teens “dislike” Facebook. Now that’s not a headline you ever expected to hear.

Posted: November 11, 2013 in Popular Culture et al
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failbook

Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em.

The age-old aphorism wasn’t originally meant to describe teenagers, but it could. This article from Yahoo neatly captures a problem the granddaddy of all social networks — Facebook — seems to have. Facebook has turned in impressive financial numbers lately, and its stock has soared by more than 80% so far this year, to around $48. But company execs alarmed some analysts recently by acknowledging that teenagers are falling out of like with the site that seemed like a phenomenon when teens first discovered it. (Maybe that’s why two key FB execs unloaded hundreds of millions of dollars of stock in the last couple of days? Ed.)

This is not the age group for a new technology company to piss off.

This is not the age group for a new technology company to piss off.

In a way, that’s a good problem to have. Many companies covet the cachet (and potential future customers) that come with a high proportion of teenage users. But old folks, no matter how uncool, tend to be the ones with money to spend today. For a while, Facebook had the best of both worlds:  A robust teenage audience that kept the vibe young, plus enough oldsters to justify high ad rates and juice profits.

There’s now a lot of competition, however, and Facebook is apparently losing teenage users to trendier networks such as Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram (which Facebook owns), Tumblr (owned by Yahoo, which published this story), and lesser-known online hideouts.

To figure out why, I asked my two teenage kids (who in turn asked a few of their friends), plus a few test subjects recruited through Twitter. Here are the five biggest problems they have with Facebook:

Parents. Apparently they’re ruining everything on Facebook. “If you want to comment on something funny, and you see that somebody’s Mom already commented on it, you don’t want their mom to yell at you,” my 15-year-old son told me. Yeah, that’s a bummer, I consoled him. Many parents, of course, fear their kids will be stalked, bullied or somehow abused via Facebook, so looking over their kids’ digital shoulder is just another way of protecting them. I’m willing to go out on a limb, however, and bet that some parents simply think they’re cooler than they are, and would be crushed to know their teenage kids don’t consider them the best companions, even online.

It’s not just parents. My 17-year-old daughter told me about a friend with an aunt who routinely lurks around her niece’s Facebook account. “Every single photo that [my friend] is tagged in, she’ll write a paragraph about how beautiful [my friend] is. I’m just like, ‘okaaaaay….’” my daughter told me.

Too much pointless stuff. If you ‘re a forty- or fifty-something Facebook user and you’re wondering what all that clutter on the site is about, you’re not as out of touch as you think. “Facebook has 100 things on the newsfeed we just don’t care about,” one of my daughter’s high-school friends explained. Examples: ceaseless invites to play Farmville or other games you may not be interested in, or prompts to answer “questions about me.” Renaud, a 19-year-old Facebook user at McGill University in Montreal, finds that other networks, with far less clutter, are now better at what Facebook used to be good at. “I feel that instantaneous reactions (or what used to be Facebook status) are now more compelling on Twitter, pictures are more fun on Instagram, funny pictures and videos are more tailored for your interests on Tumblr or Vine, and messages on the wall of a friend have been replaced by Snapchat,” he wrote.

Too many ads. Teenagers, not surprisingly, are hip to corporate exploitation. “The biggest problem is the ads,” one of my son’s friends emailed. “Yes, they are needed to make money, but Facebook no longer seems like a social networking site first. It seems like a gold mine for companies to place ads and is straying from its actual purpose.” Particular gripes: Ads that pop up in notifications, and others that scroll down the page right along with the cursor when scanning the newsfeed, as if there’s no escaping them.

It’s vapid. “Everything on Facebook is to gain likes,” another of my daughter’s friends complained. “It’s like a popularity contest. It requires a lot to maintain, like having a good profile picture that will get a lot of likes.” My son said one of his biggest aggravations, after parents, is people — OK, girls — continually asking him to like their status as part of “truth is” requests, whatever those are. “It just fills up your timeline with really stupid stuff,” he said.

Fake friends. In case you’re wondering, adults aren’t the only ones who find it weird to be “friends” with people you’ve never met. A teenager at my son’s school said one of his biggest issues with Facebook is that “it’s normal to be friends with people you don’t know.” One of my daughter’s friends agreed: “I’m friends with people I don’t even know on Facebook, so my newsfeed to me is sometimes just pointless,” she said. “I explore the lives of strangers, and it is a complete waste of my time.” Maybe teenagers and their parents aren’t so different after all.

Meanwhile, we are not expecting anyone at the Wellthisiswhatithink ranch to be cured of their FB addiction anytime soon, but we are also quite convinced that it’s time for The Next Big Thing. Overdue, in fact. And when Facebook dies, as it will, we trust they realise it was because of their own idiocy – filling a social network with ads, push-posting endless amounts of what people don’t want to see, and worst of all, banning people for spamming when they weren’t – by computer, with no human appeal. Zero customer service. it is a matter of time.

Fifty Shades of Guaranteed Box Office Success

Posted: September 3, 2013 in Popular Culture et al
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Wellthisiswhatithink has a confession to make: we have not read Fifty Shades of Grey, nor its sequels.

Charlie Hunnam

Charlie Hunnam

We have nothing, per se, against Dominant-Submissive kinkyness if it’s what floats yer boat, we just simply can’t abide poorly-written prose.

Dakota

Dakota Johnson

There’s too much good prose we don’t get time to read as it is. Let alone finding time for our true love, poetry.

So many people whose opinions we respect have assured us that the series is awful that we really can’t be bothered to set ourselves up for disappointment, no matter how many bedside tables the books have ended up on, discretely hidden beneath the Sunday papers.

(The same is admittedly not true of our TV viewing habits. In Chez Wellthisiswhatithink, we breathlessly await the next in the Spartacus series, which presumably will be called something like “Spartacus: Sorry, The Hero Died In The Last Series, So There’s No Attempt At A Story, Just Plenty Of Tits and Blood All Over The Screen”. Hoo-hah. I strongly suspect the next series of Game of Thrones, with half the cast now slaughtered, will be similarly enjoyable.)

However, despite our misgivings FSOG (as it is known by the cogniscenti) has captivated its (mainly female) audience, and I suppose anything that prompts people to read is a “Good Thing” (capital G, capital T), and anything that simultaneously encourages people to be less uptight about sex is a “Very Good Thing” (capital V, G and T).

(Actually, contradicting ourselves promptly, we admit we even quite enjoyed the Twilight saga while conceding to anyone who asked why we had our head buried in them that the books were not great literature. Then again, and that said, we could hardly turn a page without wanting to throttle the ever-more-pathetic Bella Swann, a desire which transferred instantly to her on-screen avatar, Kristen Stewart.)

We will also, Dear Reader, gloss over the fact that fire brigades everywhere are being called to suburban homes to free people who have locked themselves to the bed in handcuffs and then forgotten that they’ve left the key out of reach. (Hang on a minute, guys. Aren’t you supposed to be doing this with someone? Ed.)

Such is the price, one supposes, of life imitating art, imitating life, er …

Anyhow: on effort alone we should say “well done” to authoress EJ James, who must be, by now, a very wealthy lady indeed, and get onto the point of this story.

The point of the story is that after months of fevered speculation, we now know the two major leads for the much-touted movie, at least.

Johnson and Hunnam

Johnson and Hunnam, er, again. Cute, huh?

Dakota Johnson, who appeared in The Social Network and 21 Jump Street as well as the Fox show Ben and Kate, has been officially cast as Anastasia Steele. Her male counterpart, Christian Grey, will be played by none other than Charlie Hunnam, star of Pacific Rim and Sons of Anarchy.

The film is set for an August 2014 release, with a screenplay by Kelly Marcell. Despite the story obviously including a vast raft of sexual matter, the team working on the movie are determined to ensure it achieves an “R” (not “X”) rating in North America.

While women have been breathlessly awaiting the identity of Christian Grey, almost as much interest has been generated by the choice of Ms. Johnson to play his submissive virgin lover.

Her first notable screen role was in the multi-Academy Award-winning 2010 feature The Social Network and subsequent films include the upcoming feature Need for Speed, 21 Jump Street, and Universal Pictures’ The Five-Year Engagement. She also starred as Kate in the Fox Network comedy series Ben and Kate, which aired during the 2012-2013 season, and is currently shooting the feature film Cymbeline.

Former model Johnson is the daughter of Miami Vice star Don Johnson and Oscar-nominated actress Melanie Griffith, and had her screen debut with her mother in the 1999 film Crazy in Alabama.

Anyway, they’re both very pretty, which I’m sure is all that most of the audience will be worrying about. When it comes out we are equally sure it will mercilessly panned by critics, and go on to make squillions.

The roles were apparently two of the most desired of the current season, and the producers have received some praise for casting relatively un-known actors (we did say, relatively) to do the heavy lifting for the forecast blockbuster.

Meanwhile, other producers will have to wait awhile before capitalising on the young talent’s sudden super-stardom.

Word is, they’re going to be tied up for a bit.

(Sorry. Ed.)

Facebook responds to consumer pressure as revenues are targeted

Posted: June 29, 2013 in Business Management, Popular Culture et al
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Not always, but often.

Not always, but often.

Regular readers of Wellthisiswhatithink will know that we have weighed in before about the disgraceful standards of material that Facebook allows to be posted on its pages.

In one case, companies dropped advertising because Facebook allows content that promotes violence against women while banning women’s health adverts, in another situation Facebook refused to remove content that jeopardised a police case against a rapist and murderer.

Facebook photo sharing

That photo you don’t want your future employer to see? Checkout our story on FB photo sharing now.

We have also pointed out how questionable Facebook’s privacy settings as regards photographs are; and if you use Facebook, you need to read this article.

Anyhow: much as we enjoy using the platform in general, in our view, some of the content on the massively popular site is morally questionable, and quite possibly illegal in multiple domains.

And we remain of the view that they need to review their general terms of service urgently.

Especially as entirely innocent posters frequently get banned because someone tags their post as Spam merely because they disagree with it – a phenomenally common cause of complaint, against which there is no appeal that we can discern.

(If you don’t believe us, hop onto Facebook now and see if you can find a link to customer service that doesn’t just direct you to a bland series of FAQs, or even, yet, a customer service email address or – gasp – phone number. If you make any progress, let us know …)

Banned Facebook content DOES include images of breastfeeding, apparently, as this Australian mother discovered to her cost.

Banned Facebook content DOES include images of breastfeeding, apparently, as this Australian mother discovered to her cost.

In fact, Facebook is now so large that they seem to handle such matters automatically by computer rather than with human intervention, and in our experience there is no way to get such bans rescinded.

So much for free speech.

I have seen complaints of such bans from all sides of the political and social spectrum, from extreme left to extreme right and everything in between, and from non-political posters who simply add material that someone or something in Facebook apparently decides is offensive.

Many posters simply migrate to a different Facebook name in order to keep posting, (the same problem afflicts Twitter), and it’s clear the problem needs resolving urgently.

If someone comes up with a social network with real customer service Facebook and Twitter will go the way of MySpace and others, taking investors with them. Anyhow, here’s the story of one lump of pressure against Facebook that did win out – because it targeted their revenues, of course.

Facebook removes ads from controversial pages to avoid boycott

Social media pressure increases against, ironically, social media providers.

Social media pressure increases against, ironically, social media providers.

Some recent consumer pressure on FB advertisers has produced rapid and meaningful results.

What is becoming increasingly fascinating to me, having spent a lifetime in marketing, is how social media pressure can now bend corporations – even bend social media providers – to its will, and with some ease.

Clearly, the days of companies blithely acting in defiance of popular will are declining.

This from the Technology correspondent of the BBC:

Facebook has announced a major revamp of its advertising systems in an attempt to deal with concerns about offensive content.

There will now be new restrictions on where adverts appear on the site.

Marks and Spencer and BSkyB were among companies to suspend advertising after complaints that adverts had been placed on pages with offensive material.

The social network is now planning to remove any advertising from many of its pages.

Facebook’s move follows complaints about a Sky advert promoting an M&S voucher.

The advert was placed on a Facebook page called “cute and gay boys”. The page featured photographs of teenage boys.

In a blogpost on Friday, Facebook said: “We recognize we need to do more to prevent situations where ads are displayed alongside controversial Pages and Groups. So we are taking action.”

‘Gold standard’

The company said that from Monday it will implement a new process to determine which pages or groups should feature adverts alongside the content.

There will be no adverts on pages that feature any violent, graphic or sexual content, even if such content is not in violation of the company’s rules.

According to one source, Facebook will create a “gold standard” of around 10,000 pages that are deemed suitable for adverts, and then inspect other pages to see if they can be added to the list. All adverts will be removed from other pages.

A spokesman said this would be a labour-intensive process but we take this” very seriously.”

BskyB said it looked forward to discussing the new measures and would keep the situation under review.

M&S had asked BSkyB to remove the advert, and it suspended some of its own advertising campaigns on Facebook.

BSkyB suspended all of its advertising on the social network, where it has been a major customer.

Misogynist content

Both companies had said they were keen to use Facebook again, but needed to be sure that their advertising would not appear next to offensive content, or material that might reflect poorly on their brands.

Speaking before Facebook announced its policy change, a spokesman for BSkyB told the BBC: “We have asked Facebook to devise safeguards to ensure our content does not appear alongside inappropriate material in the future.

“We will review the situation in due course.”

Sources at Marks and Spencer said Facebook had been taking the issue very seriously at the highest level.

In an additional statement, an M&S spokeswoman said the company did not “tolerate any inappropriate use or positioning of its brand and has very clear policies that govern where and how our brand is used”.

She added: “We take any suggestion that these policies are not being adhered to very seriously and always investigate them thoroughly.”

Earlier this month, Facebook was forced to act against misogynist content on its site after protests from women’s groups led some advertisers to suspend campaigns.

Now: if we can just get rid of Rush Limbaugh …

Other stories:

Sexism protests target Facebook

Facebook bows to anti-hate campaign

Facebook hate speech row: Sky joins ad boycott (guardian.co.uk)