Wednesday 12 May 2010

Web 2.0 madness

Web 2.0, the all singing, all dancing, way to throw your personal life around the internet.
Oh gods.

Now call me weird, but I don't like this. I don't like, or want to be convinced to like it. It's impersonal, among other things.
I admit to having used Facebook once. Just once. And now I'm gone from there, after digging around for a permanently and completely delete my account option. I found it, by the way, thanks to a blog around the interwebs. If only I could find it again...
Anyway.

I'm going to pick on Facebook because it annoys me the most, was the single biggest source of blatent spam ever to (dis)grace my inboxes, and gets the most attention.

Here's a short list of why I detest it:
-No, I do not want to know about every thing every one who I ever knew is doing right down to every single stupid little badly made and worse looking web app game. Farmville, I'm looking at you, ever since my own mother signed up to the website. That was the final straw for me.
-No, I do NOT want you to tell every website that even has a single bit linking to Facebook everything my 'friends' think of it. I'm web savvy. I know what a blatent threat is when most people think it's legit. I don't care to have people tell me what to think about it. I get to decide that, no one else.
-No, I DO NOT want you to plaster every single bit of information over the web for me. Google Buzz, I'm looking at you as well here - both the implementation of Buzz and the so called 'privacy' reform that showed everyone's everything to the entire world were badly thought out, stupid, brainless and full of sheer wrongheaded idiocy.
-And finally no, I DO NOT WANT to have to put up with potential employers stalking through my profile, and picking out some message I put there years ago, citing it as a reason not to employ me. I have enough trouble as it is without people stalking me.

That's just a few reasons. My main reason for refusing to use FB or sites like it, making an exception in the case of Twitter, to which I tweet very rarely, and use it more like I do RSS feeds (More on that in a bit) just to keep up with things, my main reason is the impersonality of it. If you want to get to know me, don't get to know who I am online. Come and find me, ask me if I can spare a few minutes, and do it in person, damn you. And not over the phone. If people try that, they'll be in for a surprise, because as far as I'm concerned, a phone call is just like saying, 'I don't want to meet you, just talk to you'

/end rant.

In COMPLETELY unrelated computer news now...

Farewell Ubuntu. Goodbye to your arbitrary decisions without consulting your users, to your dreadful Ubuntu One that Dropbox beats hands down, to your iTunes like plugin for Rhythmbox, and many others things. I grant that it's not a bad distro for those new. But what I get out of my Arch Linux install is unparraled except by Gentoo, and as said before I don't have the patience for that.
Arch doesn't modify applications or set them up with what was somehow decided as 'the best defaults that are better than the package maintainer's ones' like Ubuntu does. I can choose everything. True, it's a bit more work, and I still have the odd problem like getting Samba to work, but I like that. I can see everything, I can learn a lot more.

Have you gathered that I now dislike Ubuntu and like Arch? I thought you might have.

RSS feeds aren't something new, but they're something I've never really bothered with until recently. I used to have a long list of websites I visited regularly, and most of them didn't have updates.
A lot of them had the orange RSS subscribe icon though, so I gave in, installed Lifera (The unstable version, naturally) and subscribed to all the regulars that had them, found a few more interesting feeds, stuck it on an hourly update, and lo and behold, updates. So much easier.
It's cut a huge chunk out of how long it takes to run through regular stuff. If you haven't tried RSS feeds yet, and like me you keep watch on a lot of things, see how many of them have an feed you can subscribe to, and find out just how much time you can save. Believe me, it's one thing you'll wonder how you did without afterwards if you're anything like me.

Well, that's all from now. There's other news, but it's not computer related, and it's more personal stuff, which as I said, you want to know, become real life friends.
So rock on people.
/me out.