Now I hate online advertising as much as the next man, but…
I find myself clicking on Facebook adverts, the targeted ones they have down the right hand side on some pages. I mean, they really are targeted quite accurately. How about this one which I saw the other day??
That’s just an example of a few I’ve seen and this particular one couldn’t be targeted better. Facebook knows I run Linux because it’s probably listed on my profile from when I first set it up.. My eye was immediately drawn by the Tux icon. I keep seeing more and more adverts which are of interest or are relevant to me on the side of Facebook, which proves that “social advertising”, or whatever they want to dub it, is the way forward. To get me, someone who actively blocks adverts online, clicking is an achievement in itself. I’d say the money the company spent there was well worth it despite me not buying anything from them.
Having spent some time studying marketing at university, it’s quite clear to me that Facebook and the like have an edge over other advertising mediums because they can deliver adverts to those who are most likely to click them.. In fact I’d much rather see adverts which might be relevant to me, even if I don’t click them, than this random flashing distracting nonsense which you see on most websites.
Been meaning to write something about this for a while now.. and it’s based on the following observation: I don’t log into MSN Messenger much any more. When I do, I don’t use it that much.. Pidgin will sit there idling, with my “away” or “busy” status showing… Back in the day, it used to be something I would log into as soon as I logged onto my laptop, see who was online and probably start a conversation or two. Years ago, in what I would describe as the MSN glory days when I was still using Windows, I had Messenger Plus! installed to totally customise my MSN experience and I would at times have upwards of 30 contacts online on an evening and be talking to several of them at once. Not so much these days.
Is this typical IM conversation a familiar scenario to you?
“Hi.
Hey.
How are you?
Fine thanks, you?
Yup, fine.”
……
And what’s the point of even bothering with that??
Is instant messaging itself dying?? A lot of people now prefer to write a message on my Facebook wall or send me a message (which is essentially an email) via the same website. It doesn’t have to be instant any more.. It’s fine to post a Facebook message and wait for a reply. If people do want an instant or near-instant response they know to SMS me. The fad of being able to instantly communicate with other people via the Internet seems to me at least to be well and truly over.
Has instant messaging died out completely then? No, definitely not. I wonder if it’s just the demographic similar to me, those who have embraced Facebook and now use it for most of their online communication. I still idle in a fair few IRC channels, mainly ones related to open source projects I have an interest in and on the whole the channels I’m in now are used regularly…
So IM is not dead but it would be interesting to see what MSN traffic has been like since Facebook has really taken off.
Time for the first of many rants on sionide.net, inspired after finding this rather interesting little gem on Facebook…
http://www.facebook.com/mobile/?phonebook
and I wish more people knew about it! I don’t know how many times I’ve been invited to those ridiculous groups where some bumbling fool has lost or had their mobile stolen or dropped it down the toilet and so requires everyone’s phone numbers. If you ever want to have a drunken laugh prank calling people at 4am, go on Facebook search for “phone numbers” and narrow the search to Groups only. Displaying 1 – 10 out of over 500 group results for: phone numbers Yes, people actually post their supposedly private phone numbers on publicly available web pages?! Dial 141 followed by a random phone number and tell whoever picks up they’re an idiot for posting their number on Facebook.
Years ago, you’d need to purchase an odd looking gadget to backup the contents of your sim card. These days, phones are smart, they can connect to the Internet and back themselves up! But I appreciate not everyone is going to bother with backing up.
So if everyone used the built-in mobile phonebook feature of Facebook, put their mobile numbers on their profile and restricted that information to Friends Only (assuming, of course, people don’t actually friend randoms) then the world social network would be a much better place.
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