All of life has been utterly, profoundly changed thanks to Facebook...

http://realdanlyons.com/blog/2011/09/23/all-of-life-has-been-utterly-profoundly-changed-thanks-to-facebooks-new-changes-and-nothing-will-ever-be-the-same-and-all-i-can-do-is-sit-here-and-weep-at-the-beauty-and-magic-that-mark-zuckerber/

by thedoctor • 15 years ago

175 69 15 years ago

realdanlyons.com

dasil003• 15 years ago

Is this funny? Seems a bit pointless to me, but maybe no more so than any of the other schlock people are writing about FB these days.

majika2• 15 years ago

Yes, it is. The blog seems to be The Onion of the tech world.

zalew• 15 years ago

and that url is huge

gpjt• 15 years ago

It's by the guy who used to do the Fake Steve Jobs.

technoslut2• 15 years ago

You are discrediting The Onion. They have eerily posted articles that have later come to fruition.

flarg• 15 years ago

"Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life."

No thanks.

kennu2• 15 years ago

I think Facebook's new features are good. They made me realize how much of my old crap (status updates, comments, etc) Facebook has stored. So I deleted everything older than one month, using the new Activity Log view and some Selenium scripts.

tommi• 15 years ago

I'm sure you didn't delete those. You only hid them from the timeline. There's a huge difference.

I have hid many the old stuff too, but sometimes, especially with timeline transition, few old items kept popping up and wouldn't hide until fifth or so times clicking the hide button.

kennu2• 15 years ago

I didn't hide them, I clicked "Remove Post", "Remove Comment" etc. for each. Of course, Facebook probably archives them somewhere anyway.

jarek• 15 years ago

For what it's worth, I routinely delete status updates and have never had one come back in a redesign. Other activity might not be as fortunate.

sek• 15 years ago

Same experience, i think they delete nothing at all.

vimalg2• 15 years ago

I did the same for my posts and photos, except it was the final act BEFORE i deleted my Facebook profile 3 months ago.

Its not like i trust Facebook to honour the deletes, but one must try one's best.

sandroyong• 15 years ago

...more so for the people who collect user's personal data. Funny, I haven't had that many telemarkerters since FB. Yes, we are all that much more connected (whatever that means; I don't use FB at all so I wouldn't know), but there must be a better way than to dump our personal lives into servers 'out there'. I hope 'profoundly changed' means that it has taught some of us to think twice before we give out our personal data. Startups around FB have benefited from its existence, so I should balance my comments with some positives. A debatable issue that will surely continue...

technoslut2• 15 years ago

I have no problem with Facebook or how they monetize their business but I know the average user aren't aware of it and they should be.

What I also I hope is that algorithms get better so it can know how a photo, video or post should be shared so the user won't have to think about it.

Tichy4• 15 years ago

The biggest irony in my opinion is the existance of the "mute" feature on facebook. I am not a FB user, but apparently, the more you share, the higher the likelihood of somebody muting you.

So in the end we will share everything with our friends, but our friends will only pretend to listen.

majika2• 15 years ago

Technical solutions, such as the friend muting, can't solve cultural problems - of which Facebook has aplenty.

MySpace was destroyed by cultural problems. The technology wasn't at fault. If it was populated with HN-types, we'd see clean typography and beautiful blogs - not the epileptic-fit-causing profile pages that caused everyone to migrate to Facebook.

Culture is the difference between MySpace and Tumblr.

Building a community is everything. That's my thesis, at least.

gambler• 15 years ago

Technical solutions, such as the friend muting, can't solve cultural problems - of which Facebook has aplenty.

Very, very true.

I would even expand on this. Problems people encounter online can be divided into technical, social (involving groups) and interpersonal. Problems from one category cannot be effectively solved via methods from another. Attempting to do so inevitably results in many undesirable side-effects.

Raphael• 15 years ago

MySpace had a great community. The software was slow and ugly. Now it's faster and a little less ugly, but the community is gone.

william42• 15 years ago

No, the difference between MySpace and Tumblr is that the latter has a dashboard that gets rid of everyone's theme and by extension their autoplaying music, etc.

saturdaysaint• 15 years ago

The technology wasn't at fault.

Myspace could have survived myriad cultural problems on the strength of their once unparalleled social graph if they could have kept pace with Facebook's technology. Facebook had many things right - the news feed, valid identities, speed - that would have required Myspace to essentially start from scratch to even emulate. Myspace tried, but couldn't pull it off.

So my argument is that Facebook has room to experiment in areas where tastes may differ (i.e. culture) as long as they have great technology and an adaptable design. If the timeline/ticker turns out to be completely overwhelming and they see usage drop, Zuckerberg could practically issue an apology, flip a switch and basically turn Facebook back to yesterday's Facebook by Monday. As their experiences with failure (Beacon) and success (the news feed!) have shown, there's way more upside than downside.

Terretta• 15 years ago

Sometime try listing Tweets by geo proximity when you're downtown. The MySpace culture is alive, well, and on Twitter in numbers that far outweigh the "HN-types".

Twitter seems no worse for it, and a failure to cater to elitists wasn't MySpace's problem either. MySpace, AOL, Yahoo, HP -- their problems are cultural, but not their users' culture, their managements'.

hugh3• 15 years ago

Yeah, one day I figured out that I'd already muted about half my "friends". Of the remainder, most never posted.

But the remaining folks are largely my real friends, so it all works out.

rhizome• 15 years ago

So in the end we will share everything with our friends, but our friends will only pretend to listen.

It's not pretending if they've muted you, you're being ignored. Which is not a bad thing, noisewise, it natural and to be expected, but that's besides my point.

My point is that you will always have a default friend who wants to hear everything you share, a friend who will never mute you, never block your Zynga Blogville updates. No, it's not me, nor is it Tom Anderson; your default friend is Facebook itself. FB will always listen to you and will always want to know about everything you do.

shabble• 15 years ago

I wonder how long it will be until Facebook itself can be called as your character witness? Not as mere physical evidence of things you've said or done, but an analysis of all of those events over time and the phychological profile that they imply.

hernan7• 15 years ago

    "It's not pretending if they've muted you, you're being ignored."

But does FB tell you when somebody mutes you?

Tichy4• 15 years ago

Now that you mention it - I always thought Google might be the first company to create real AI. Now I realize that Facebook might be in the game, too. Then it really could be your friend.

busyant• 15 years ago

For me, the best way to use Facebook is to "mute" everyone. Family, friends--everyone.

It has the following advantages: - No one knows that I've muted them. - I'm still on Facebook, so if people need to contact me through that medium, they can still do it. - If I'm really curious about what anyone has been up to, I can still look at their page - No need to log to procrastinate because I never have any updates.

Kind of perfect, for me at least.

napierzaza• 15 years ago

If this keeps happening, you'll start asking someone about their early life and they'll just suggest you add them on Facebook and read about it yourself.

I had a similar experience talking to a friend who had just started blogging. We hit a discussion point he had apparently already covered and if I just read it instead of talking...

Facebook should just be there to remind you of people's birthdays, but it doesn't really do that very well either.

Astrohacker• 15 years ago

Funny. I just disabled my account this week and don't have plans to go back. Facebook never made much of an impact on my life and I've finally decided the loss of privacy is no longer worth staying on.

Edit: Now after having read the post I realize it is sarcastic. So maybe I'm not so different after all.

suivix• 15 years ago

I tried this too, but got pulled back from all the websites and apps that need Facebook logins.

darksaga• 15 years ago

Interesting. I have a fake Facebook account, but I never like or recommend anything using any of the Facebook tools on every website these days. I've bee using the same account for years and all the information is completely inaccurate.

I'm wondering how much longer I can go before I get cut off.

reinhardt• 15 years ago

I found out my blatantly fake account was disabled this week, after more than a year of using it. Oh well, (almost) nothing of value was lost. Wondering if I can make a new one (also fake, of course) with the same email.. probably not I'd guess.

sologoub2• 15 years ago

Reading this article was very very painful... and honestly, everyone here is hitting the nail on the head - they are just exposing how much info they are collecting about people. Facebook is the next Experian/TransUnion/Equifax. In the past (I worked in corp. security and investigations) you had to go to ChoicePoint and have law enforcement-like credentials to get a good background profile and picture of someone else. As more and more of this info is aggregated by Facebook, investigators will go to them for a much richer profile that could have ever hoped for.

Onion really has a great parody of this: http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-dramatic...

felipemnoa2• 15 years ago

My gut is that this is just a trend right now. Eventually people will pull back once it gets old. And trust me, things get old. Remember chat? Everybody was crazy about it. There have been many trends that have gotten old too. Just like in fashion,music,video, trends change.

hackinthebochs• 15 years ago

I'm not sure what you mean here. Chat isn't "old", its just taken for granted now. What's more likely is that sharing every bit of irrelevant data about your life will go the way of chat, in that it becomes so commonplace that isn't not even thought about anymore.

ajslater• 15 years ago

And no one's "pulled back" from chat. Now its ubiquitous and how many of us conduct all communication at work and much of personal communication.

itswindy• 15 years ago

"All of life has been utterly, profoundly changed thanks to Facebook..."

Ummmm...not mine. I use it sometimes but total posts under a dozen. Google knows way more than FB about me but that's changing little by little.

jcfrei2• 15 years ago

is this guy tripping or what? facebook extended a few features (eg. not just liking, but reading and eating and whatever) and introduced timeline, which is gonna be quite creepy for all those very active facebookers out there. seriously, what's the big deal?

translocation• 15 years ago

If I'm not mistaken, the linked article employs the rhetorical device known as sarcasm.

The point being that Timeline is not, in fact, a world-changing feature.

jcfrei2• 15 years ago

dang, you're right

ltamake• 15 years ago

Did you even read the whole article? It has a sarcastic tone.

ams6110• 15 years ago

And fairly well done, as the first few paragraphs have you thinking he's being straight.

jawngee5• 15 years ago

I understand the article is sarcastic, but let's look at what Facebook actually is doing for humanity: recording the individual histories of hundreds of millions of people. From a wide angle view, this is pretty significant.

Imagine if you had the capability of examining your great-great-grandfather's life at the daily level. How amazing would that be? To localize this, imagine yourself in your 80's being able to zoom to any day of your life at any point to relive and review how you thought, what you thought at that particular moment.

This is what I use Facebook for. Sure, I use it to connect with my friends, but I also use it so that when I'm knocking on death's door, I'll have something concrete to look back at that is more stable than my ailing memory will be. I'll also be able to hand it down to my spawn and their spawn.

I've always considered Facebook a new kind of public utility, just as revolutionary as the post office used to be.

gaving• 15 years ago

Wow. Just wow. :/

jawngee5• 15 years ago

Why the long face?

aw3c2• 15 years ago

In the old days people wrote diaries. That way they could choose whom to share their story with, they could burn them or they could hand them to their spawns.

jawngee5• 15 years ago

I don't see how that is any different with the privacy settings in Facebook.

And I think it's superior to a diary in that it's not only recording my thoughts on something, but also the minutiae of my day to day, whom I've associated with and my interactions with them, etc.

I'm a little surprised at the responses my original post received actually. Am I the only one that uses Facebook for this purpose?

fadsdie• 15 years ago

Why do you think Facebook will still exist by the time you die? If you want to keep your data for an extended period of time, it would probably be better to do it yourself.

jawngee5• 15 years ago

You can download all of your data from facebook now. It's a link at the bottom of your account settings. Only thing of importance missing is your comments you left on other's status updates. To think if Facebook bit the dust that someone else wouldn't do something with that data is almost unthinkable at this point.

cubicle672• 15 years ago

the likelihood is far higher, however, that in just 20 years time all the history you've entered into facebook will be gone. Not sure facebook see themselves as a public service, and I'm very sure they're not inclined to spend huge amounts of money archiving terabytes of dead people's data indefinitely

jawngee5• 15 years ago

20 years ago, a 40MB hard drive was "standard". I'm sure they'll go the way of the floppy in 20 years.

The storage situation in 2031 would be pretty mind boggling.

cpeterso2• 15 years ago

> let's look at what Facebook actually is doing for humanity: recording the individual histories of hundreds of millions of people.

And selling the data to advertisers.

Tichy4• 15 years ago

Are the timelines public, or friends only? If they are friends only, I hope my great-great-grandfather could befriend me from the grave somehow.

veyron2• 15 years ago

I'm sorry, but I feel I need to ask: am I alone in not using Facebook since graduating college? Every time I see an article, every time I watch the news, I get the impression that Facebook has somehow weaved itself into our daily lives, yet the only times I think of Facebook is when someone posts an article like this on HN (and yes I'm aware the article is sarcastic, but there are many more articles which are serious)

calebmpeterson• 15 years ago

I'm in that same boat...

veyron2• 15 years ago

I figure its worth asking:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3034871

henrikschroder• 15 years ago

Remember that Facebook started out being available only at US colleges, and the users that got in then will have different usage patterns than those of us that got in later when it was generally available. My friends on Facebook are real friends, family, coworkers, and classmates from high school and university, so it's not just a subset of people I want to stay in touch with, it's pretty much all of them.

njharman• 15 years ago

Even though sarcastic and well-played this is just more hype. It should not be encouraged.

scrame• 15 years ago

Prediction: Lyons will soon start a "Fake Mark" account.

pumainmotion• 15 years ago

The best way to deal with this new 'release' is to just ignore it. Can't believe the amount of attention this has garnered. We all need to wake up.

All of life has been utterly, profoundly changed thanks to Facebook...

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