I took out the trash today, and I'm on fire

[venta]

Bloomin' 'eck. In an attempt to be down with the kids, I have bravely attempted to interact with the Facebook page that an ex-member created for my dance team. She told me the password when she left, but every time I've logged in, I've immediately run away screaming.

Today I have boldly grasped the nettle, accepted some friend requests, updated my status, and even commented and liked some stuff. Holy crap, it's confusing.

Also: Usenet had cracked comment-threading well over two decades ago. Why do we still have to put up with an impenetrable jumble of comments? It's like the Ancient Brits deciding when the Romans left that they didn't want any truck with this foreign-fangled central heating nonsense, thank you very much.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001767268566, by the way, for people who are into that kind of stuff.

Comments

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Also: Usenet had cracked comment-threading well over two decades ago.

No, no, you're misunderstanding how things work on the internet.

0) Some new type of application is needed.
1) Some beardy Scandinavian makes a text-only version which does everything perfectly but is bastard hard to use and virtually undocumented.
2) Five years later, some student puts a menu-driven front end onto the original, making it semi-usable. A couple of obscure features are lost.
3) Someone in California writes a new (still free) version from scratch. It isn't as good, but has a graphical UI, so people actually use it. Lots of the more powerful features are now gone, but nobody much cares because nobody used the older versions.
4) A startup company forms to make a commercial version. It's objectively worse than all previous versions apart from being really shiny and having a non-zero marketing budget. It gets some press coverage and suddenly it has 10M users.
5) Industry pundits declare the application to be important, so competitors enter the market. Almost all useful features are stripped out and actively annoying stuff aimed at "monetization" are added.
6) Time magazine and The Economist finally notice the application and declare it to be the future of the human race. People's pets and grandmothers start creating accounts. The resulting vast system is useless for anything except propagating itself.

So yes, Usenet > BBS > LiveJournal > FaceBook > Twitter. The only question is what the next even-more-useless system will look like.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Or possibly: all these systems are equally useless, but you harbor nostalgic delusions as to their usefulness roughly in proportion to how old they are.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

It's not an age thing, because G+ comes second after LJ.

Look, someone's done proper science to prove it and everything: SCIENCE!

;-)