Thursday
May272010
Gr8 stuff, thanks 4 the #FF!!
May 27, 2010 
For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about with this title, you must have been in the ever so lucky and heavenly circumstances to be able to avoid social networking sites or in permanent hibernation for the past two years. You know them, you've heard of them....; twitter, facebook, my space, bebo, turbo, furbo, crazy-oh, absurdio and so on... the list is endless....
To put it straight forward, they annoy me! Highly and utterly. Honestly, I hate them, all of them!! With a true gut feeling I might add. Yet, if I have to believe the marketing guru's I cannot live without them either. I was told that every self respecting business owner has at least two social networking accounts running. So here I am, unhappily marketing my way around on both facebook and twitter.
I still have no clue how the facebook interface works, and now I am beyond trying to figure it out, too. Mind you, this has nothing to do with the 'certain age' part of my being, but everything with a great effort of the facebook team to make their interface as user unfriendly as possible! Man, do they succeed in that!!! I am at a stage now that whenever I have a really nice photo for exhibition I post it on facebook, but for the rest I couldn't be bothered.
Twitter is even more annoying! Twitter is a so called 'microblogging social networking' site, meaning that you have to tell what you want to tell in 140 characters, spaces included!!! Why on earth would anyone, who takes marketing seriously to level up his business and create a network of people that are interested, stuff a message in a 140 character sentence, links to the website included? Of course, eventually people get very inventive and start using abbreviations through an API in a creative way to get some context that makes sense at all. I mean, all of you know what I am saying here:
"I'll C U all l8r, I have 2 go 2 the shop to get groceries be4 I start dinner, U R all welcome @ my place @ 7 and BYOB."
Seriously, instead of watering your followers mouths so they will #FF you or RT your content, by writing to them you will cook them a nice dinner, it is more likely you put their appetites off and have them not expect too much out of it at all! And that is what annoys me most about these sites, the jargon used. I simply hate the dilapidation of the language people use. What is wrong with writing decent sentences? Children are even incapable of spelling correctly these days, all because of MSN messenger services. I know my spelling is not always flawless, but in Dutch, my native language, it certainly is, and at least I am making a good effort in English.
Quick twitter tutorial:
- follower: someone who is dying to read all your micro blogs and therefore adds you to their lists of 'friends', even if you only blog what you are doing every moment of the day.... ('going to the toilet now', 'back from the toilet now', 'hope i don't need to go to the toilet soon', etcetera)
- API: Application Programming Interface is an interface implemented by a software programme which enables it to interact with other software. Basically it never does what you want!
- #FF: Follow Friday. On twitter every friday you get other peoples attention by putting a hash key in front of the names of twitter users you want them to follow. This is called spamming, but legal spamming, I guess....
- RT: is a RE-tweet. If you find someones tweet interesting, I have no idea why, because a message of maximum 140 characters can hardly be interesting, you can retweet their information by puttin #RT in front of it, so your followers can read this not-to-be-missed piece of information.
And now, instead of microblogging my way out of this article, I am going to tell you exactly what I am going to do next in a proper sentence, and leave the twittering to the creatures most likely to do so in the first place, birds! So here it goes.....
我感谢大家阅读这篇文章，祝你美好的一天！
Reader Comments (16)
I've enjoyed blogging for over five years now but have studiously avoided these others until recently when I joined Facebook and Twitter. I get on fine with Facebook but could't get on with Twitter from the outset so I don't bother. I do wonder if the fact that I rarely use my mobile phone and never text anybody has anything to do my lack of enthusiasm.
I agree with your sentiments towards jargon, bad spelling and so on, which at times either baffles or appalls me.
I love the robin photo! I see robins every day either at home or often close to when I'm working on the allotment. They certainly put a smile on my face with their twittering.
I read it all and I hope you'll have a nice day too.
I also totally agree with everything you have written today!
I'm not sure whether I'm laughing here..or crying. Sometimes I too wonder if this is what our world has been reduced to. A couple of daily tweets..a few random notes on facebook??? And someday all of these social-networking marketing gurus will look back and wonder what this was all about..because they'll be on to something else.
You've said it all - and so perfectly!!! Thank-you!!!
This is it, 2010 ! ;-)
Love the picture!
Love robins and your image is so beautiful! Really enjoyed the read :) I've been having mixed feeling lately for social network sites... I'm starting to hate them too! I confess I can't but feel a bit stupid every time I use Twitter. Lol!
Your image is, of course, incredible, Marion, as we have learned to expect from you. You do have your way of presenting things, I must say, hammering a nail on its head. I have never opened a Twitter page, so that one I can check off the map. Facebook is something for which I HAD to register because of family groups and even my high school class nearing it's 50th anniversary. So I've been sucked in. However, I still do not understand it or trust it to this day. I just don't get it! When I hear that others are in the same boat, I have faith in myself again...that I'm not just an Old Fart. (sigh) So thanks for your rant.
BTW, if I ever write Dutch half as well as you write English, I will be in heaven! Gefeliciteerd.
I think there is a quit Facebook day coming up!!! I'll tweet the info if I figure out my password!
LOL
Love this - have a great weekend.
Kath
I've never opened a facebook page, and have no real inclination to open one. We were discussing it in work and one of my colleagues described it as getting on a train and everyone there knowing who you are, who your friends are and what you've been up to. That doesn't appeal to me.
Twitter is definitely not for me - apart from the length of time I take to text anything, the lack of punctuation and the use of abbreviations would finish me off!! If I have any kind of compulsive behaviour, it's definitely around apostrophes, full stops, commas. I don't claim to always get it right, I just have to use them. Hugh Laurie said in an interview that he thought twitter was fine as long as you write everything down and don't send it :)
Beautiful picture, and the background is lovely.
I don't use Facebook, Twitter, or any of those other social networking sites. I get weather as a text on my cellphone, and probably about twice a week I text my wife (wow, that somehow sounded dirty!). At home, no cellphone (we live out in the boonies and the cellphones don't even work there).
People seem to now have a fascination with being connected 24/7; sharing info that never before would have been shared, but doing it in the most impersonal way imaginable. The jargon used in texting is now appearing in regular written type elsewhere; incredibly I have even read college term papers and resumes that have this bastardization of the English language plastered all over.
Personally, I hope a lot of these things will eventually become 'untrendy' and fade into history. I somehow doubt it, though, and that's just gr8.
No one noticed the Chinese?? I am really surprised that neither of your comments actually refers to that, hahaha!!!
Thank you so much, all of you, for agreeing in your own ways with what I wrote. That is real boosting my confidence. I'll twitter about it! For sure!
Hey I did answer on your Chinese sentence *lol* but I answered in English ...perhaps that doesn't count :-)
有一个愉快的周末！
I couldn't agree more about all of that social networking stuff. Who the heck wants to know that I made brownies today and had chicken noodle soup for supper? No one, but that's the kind of stuff that gets shared. Ugh. My son did talk me into starting a Facebook account for business purposes, but I don't really post anything there - guess I should. I rarely post anything on my personal "wall". Whatever! I was reading the comments and knew by Frida's answer that she knew what you said in Chinese. I'm too lazy to translate. :) Great post and image, Marion!
Ahhhhhhhhhh, sorry Frida! My bad!! I didn't realize it was an answer indeed.
I noticed your Chinese, but I couldn't read it! I could read your twitterspeak, though, and that scares me a little! I was told, by the gurus of which you speak, that twitter is a must, so I am there, and occasionally I find it fun, and I have found a few "friends" who do more than recount their daily movements, they find a way to write bits of poetry in 140 characters. I have tried to figure out facebook, as I was also told it is a must, and like you, I am lost.
But to the message beneath your message, the deterioration of language, that is one of my pet peeves in life. And I worry what it will be like after another generation... Your photo makes my heart flutter, er, twitter.
I don't have the right software or whatever - on my computer your message below your blog looks like this 我感谢大家阅读这篇文章，祝你美好的一天！!!
i can so relate to this post!!! :) i just don't really get it...facebook i have joined, but i never do anything with it...and it mystifies me how some people play out their entire lives on it, every thought and moment recorded for all to see. i'm not saying that it's bad, i guess it just doesn't appeal to everyone. i was a later starter to this blogging thing too, but so far so good :)