The New Media Wars

Facebook vs Blogger. Facebook wins that in one sense. It loses in another.

Blogger vs Wordpress. Same conundrum. Blogger is better for instant publishing, wordpress is better for everything.

And if I posted that on Facebook, criticizing Facebook's latest new way of operating (their revisions are huge and jarring), I could expect Facebook to remove my ya ya yaing about them. At least that is what a friend said happened to her reactions to Facebook's new features. Maybe, maybe not.

Facebook is useless for art or idea development. They retain indefinite copyright on what you post there. Yuck. Read their terms and conditions.

When it comes down to privacy and copyright anything is better than Facebook. Here you are publishing actual details of your actual life, your connections and your hopes, and hopefully not your trade secrets or finished works of art.

It is like open book email. You must beware who you connect to unless you are a celebrity and have a public persona. But people seem to survive without being too concerned and not much goes wrong.

Facebook is very nosy - it wants to know which Rock Star you want to be so they can tailor which house ads you get to see. It is the pinnacle of intrusive marketing. Extremely smart to give you the ads you want rather than go for exposure with its mountain of failed impressions(google's only real mistake was to emulate publishing in this way).

The reason FB is successful is that is an approximation of real social connection. It is well exposed to quiet media giants enslaving your attention to their ideals. It is civil, people behave well and it is accurate. In the same sense that Wikipedia is accurate. A wall is a wall, with all its graffiti. Your own garden wall is something that you grow plants on (the Myspace model, and moreso youtube - most comments are garbage, so why engage?)

The hybrid to watch is Twitter. This models more truly the incidental nature of the web and the independence and fleeting nature of throwing your words into the cosmic pile. There is sufficient lack of focus on the author, more focus on the posts and where they lead. With Google Chrome you soon are overwhelming your machines memory with links to some interesting things.

FB does that too. Myspace is more like an arcade of your own talent. Leads nowhere. The page is the destination, and everyone else plasters their ads on it. You are the free entertainment for Rupert Murdoch to sell ads.

So what does this lead us to? Social Networks are at an evolutionary stage. Another new entrant can still upset the jelly wobbling it's evolving ways. It is still amorphous because it does not really have a formalised way of succeeding. Like most things it is also transitory and will be outmoded by more refined communication.

As drivers in vehicles are starting to discover by rapid elimination, cell phones and control on the roads do not go hand in hand. I also believe that cell phones and the billions being ploughed into linked advertising campaigns require a social network to survive. And if that is the driving force behind a social network then are we not engaging in a collusion of mass delusion? My phone told me I wanted an ice-cream and the company hired the best psychologists to make that desire nearly unbearably linked to my subconscious sexual instincts.

For this reason, I feel that the current trend of "smart marketing" will go the same way as "smart drugs" - people will realise they were better off without them.

If I want to have an ice cream, I want it to be on a hot summers day - not late at night.

And if a driver is controlling a car I do not want then to receive a text message. It would make a whole lot of sense for cars to have a mobile receptacle that creates limited call time hands free with verbal dialing (but car firms have no money for R&D).

The next big social network development - the one that could transform the way we think and survive Facebook is Google Wave.

I just got invited to Beta Test it. More soon.