Re: Of digests and the Eye of Mordor (FB)

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On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 3:13 PM, Tom B <kaladorn@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> 4. As for FB generally, I'd rather suck hot plasma and have the
Kra'vak
> spawnlings feast on my still-living innards. FB's entire value
proposition
> is YOU. And they aren't paying you for the privilege.
> Social networking in most of its current forms is corrupt and provably
so -
> follow the money trail and what the company providing the service uses
to
> generate revenue....
>

FB isn't very good for discussion forums. There's no archive, there's no
way
of searching for past comments, there's no threading. FB isn't a
replacement
for an email list or a web forum.

What FB is good at doing is acting as a sign post for a business. It's a
good way for a company to tell its fans what it's doing in short,
succinct
posts. The company I write RPGs for uses FB for this. For actual large
amounts of content and for discussions, the FB page points elsewhere (to
the
web site, the Wordpress blog, the forums).

I'm on FB to keep up with friends, but I also have a (very, very small)
number of RPG fans who want to know what I've been up to, writing wise.

FB is so big that it really behooves you, if you're running a business,
to
have some sort of presence on it. An example would be to set up GZG with
a
FB page, and then Jon could post convention and sale information on it.
There is a growing number of people who go to FB first in order to find
information on a company.

For discussions, though, you need something else, like a mailing list or
a
web forum. Where FB could help with that is by including the information
necessary to connect to the mailing list or, if it moves to one, a web
forum.

The problem with mailing lists is that people are slowly sliding away
from
email as the primary form of internet communication. I'm seeing a trend
where my friends and family are communicating with me through FB rather
than
by email. It's too early to claim that email is dying, but it's no
longer
hard to imagine that email in its present form is probably doomed.

Added to that is that mailing lists are no longer all that common. Most
people have never joined one. For most "regular folk", the general
distrust
of "hackers on the internet" could trigger a "flight" response when they
come across some weird "subscription service". Think about how something
with the word "listserv" or "majordomo" might appear to someone who
wasn't
even born before the world wide web.

I prefer mailing lists. I would probably participate less if we moved to
Yahoo, because I'd have to go off to Yahoo to check the list, rather
than
have it come to me. (Yes, I know, you can have Yahoo send you email. I
stopped that for all Yahoo groups I was on when Yahoo would suddenly be
unable to send me email and would then suspend my account in the group
in
question until I proved I was still interested.) The downside of the
mailing
list is that it's probably never going to be much bigger than it is
right
now.

-- 
Allan Goodall		 http://www.hyperbear.com
awgoodall@gmail.com
agoodall@hyperbear.com