Facebook: The Next Google?

In short: no.

I’ve seen blog posts and Slashdot articles aplenty which hold Facebook up as a future competitor for Google in advertising, and I’m not buying it.

I’m not ruling out that Facebook may take the crown for Most Likely to Watch You Sleep From a Satellite someday; nor that it may provide a platform full of useful, ad-supported applications to rival Google’s own applications. What I’m saying is that in all my years of Googling — more than half its lifetime — I have yet to see Google’s main page come down.

It is so reliable, in fact, that — and I’m sure I’m not alone in this — I use it as a test when I suspect I can’t connect to the Internet. More than that, while I know its apps have suffered from less stability, they are stable enough that I’ve never encountered a proper error while using them. This, of course, doesn’t count errors resulting from my various wireless woes.

Facebook, on the other hand, throws up AJAX errors for me every few weeks. I’m sure this is because that’s how often they tweak their system, but it still represents a failure in testing. It’s not as though these are odd things I’m doing, this is while trying to post on someone’s wall or return a poke — not even the mutated, third-party versions! Worse is that I have now been unable to reach the Facebook home page twice in the time I’ve been using it, which is 3 years, tops. May not seem like much, but like I said: I’ve never seen Google go down.

So no, Facebook doesn’t have what it takes to take big G.

 

Unstoppable Force vs. Immoveable Object

Okay, let’s get this part out of the way first: I think people that want to have a same-sex marriage are stupid. Specifically, I think that their insistence on sticking with religions which, as a matter of policy, condemn them in the afterlife as abominations is stupid. That said, their stupidity pales before the pure idiocy of those religious fanatics which created and now back those policies in the first place.

Seriously, if you think that no one has tampered with the bible to suit their own agenda in over 2000 years, you’re deluded.

In the end, though, what will happen will only surprise the people who fought it, and that’s that same-sex marriage will have the support of nearly everyone. It’s not so different from women’s rights, except that it’s a much smaller group suffering.

That’s exactly what it is: people suffering. And just as with any other form of persecution, I’ll be glad when the rest of the world wises up and ceases to condone it.

 

List Surgery

Media reports say Ontario will join Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia and Quebec in banning cellphone use while driving. (Emphasis added)

This is exactly the exception which ensures that the comma-before-and philosophy is better. I’m more than aware of the fact that natural languages aren’t defined by their precision, but there’s no reason not to attempt to root out ambiguities when they’re this easy to remove.

Let’s try this way, instead:

Media reports say Ontario will join Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, and Quebec in banning cellphone use while driving. (Emphasis added)

Now any reader, not just Canadians, can identify that Newfoundland and Labrador is a single item, whereas Nova Scotia and Quebec are separate. Was that so hard?

 

A Proposition on GUI Volition

There’s an oft-revived debate about the term “user friendly.” The concept — as championed early on by Apple, and taken up hastily by Microsoft — tends to mean easy to learn. The other side of the coin, as iterated by developers mostly, is that it refers to the the capacity for an application to increase its users’ productivity.

For those of you who haven’t seen the demonstration, the Mythbusters crew’s paintball painter is a great analogy for this, in physical terms. They created a pressurized, canvas-sized rack of tubes which each fired a paintball such that the resulting splatter painted a slightly pixelized version of the Mona Lisa. This falls into the first category: it creates an identifiable image, and requires only a single button to function. The alternative, a set of oil-based paints and some paintbrushes, is near-limitless in its ability to capture your imagination, but first you have to know how to paint.

With another image-based reference: MS Paint, PhotoShop, I choose you! A five-year old double amputee could use Paint and create the same quality of work as anyone using a mouse with their hands. It’s next to impossible to create anything of beauty with Paint. On the other hand, you couldn’t go a day without seeing an image that’s been created with PhotoShop, unless you’re willing to replace your eyes with bloodsucking leeches (or politicians, mirite?!). Yet as my sister could tell you, using a high end program like PhotoShop is next to impossible if you don’t already know what you’re doing.

So next time I hear a designer arguing with a developer over usability, I’m going to throw them both into the chokey and make them eat disgustingly moist chocolate cake until they realize that there’s rarely a need to choose: just create a basic and advanced mode.

 

It Begins

Today I bring news from the front,
So excuse me for being so blunt:
His acceptance was read,
“Bring it on, Bitch,” he said,
So let’s kick it off with a punt.

Dear Skyye, your blog is well-read.
Your subject has draw, it’s been said.
But how will you fair,
Now my reader’s aware?
(I warn you: it’s flesh she’s been fed!)