I posted a small gripe over on Twitter. Of course, the business involved scans for all mentions of their name, and they responded. I’m now involved in a back-slappy back and forth which passes for customer service. I wish I’d never said anything.
Since Google+ opened up I’ve been posting all around the place. I wasn’t happy with G+ so I reopened a Tumblr account with the thinking that it would be less friction to post to that site using their iOS client than it would be to this site while I was on holiday in the USA. That never became an issue however, as I didn’t blog about anything on my trip, and all photos were uploaded to G+ anyway.
On the plane home I finally got myself to watch The Social Network. When I wasn’t spotting all the reused music in the soundtrack, I was growing more and more weary of the whole idea of Facebook. I signed up for it years and years ago, when it was still restricted to “.edu” addresses. There were maybe 5 other Flinders students I could find. It was nicely laid out, it was blue and white, and it seemed like a decent place to keep a profile. That’s about the extent of thought I put into it.
It wasn’t the scummy behaviour by Zuckerberg and Parker as portrayed in the film that tempted me to finally delete my account (that would be ludicrous, since a dramatic film is hardly a reliable source of character), but the greater discussion and portrayal of what Facebook is meant to be. Facebook wants to be everything. I don’t want my everything to be on Facebook. I don’t want it to be on Google. Or on Apple’s iCloud.
I don’t begrudge people their willingness to relinquish some of their privacy in order to gain the convenience of socialising on these services. They’re comfortable with that, and that’s fine. I’m not comfortable with that. So why the hell am I still posting anything to Google+?
I was going to hold off on rebuilding Dumbland until Marco Arment released Second Crack, and build it off that. He’s still taking his time getting it to a point he’s happy with. I’m considering trying to build something similar myself in the meantime. It’s been too long since I’ve exercised my meagre coding skills, and while I have a general idea of what’s involved there are a few points which should be suitably challenging to keep my brain ticking over.
So this has been rambling. Oh well.