Archive for the ‘Facebook’ Category

LinkedIn Ad Casts Me As Google Employee

Sunday, December 2nd, 2012

LinkedIn’s ads which autopopulate people’s profile information into the ad can be jarring. Here’s one which gave me a shudder — it portrays me as a Googler!

Personalized Ad on LinkedIn

I don’t see myself as an employee of a huge, publicly-traded company since I was with Verizon years ago, so the ad was pretty disturbing to me! I just wasn’t ready to see that! It’s possible that (more…)

Facebook’s New Place Discovery Feature – A.K.A. “Spam Your Friends”

Monday, September 26th, 2011

Facebook has recently been rolling out new features and layouts, willy-nilly, risking the ire of many users who may be getting upgrade fatigue.

One of the many changes I noticed was a new feature intended to leverage users into promoting “great places” more when they “Like” a location:

Facebook's new Friends Discover Great Places Feature

Wasn’t just having Likes appearing on your wall page sufficient endorsement of a place? Now the service is trying to get you to push status updates for some places when they’re liked, and this just seems overly… pushy.

Is this what they intend to replace their becoming-deprecated check-in service feature? If so, this is particularly lame.

The “Like” activity itself is a form of endorsement and needs no further embellishment.

Oh, Facebook – Why Must You Rehost Wikipedia?!?

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

In a move perhaps inspired by Google Map’s adoption of Wikipedia content and Google’s overall preferential rankings of Wikipedia, Facebook has been testing out articles that are highly similar to Wikipedia’s. In fact, Facebook’s article pages have actually sucked in Wikipedia’s initial article content for topics in a great many cases I’ve seen thus far:

Wikipedia articles on Facebook

From my perspective, this sort of breaks one of the great benefits of hypertext that made the internet great: linking to source content. (more…)