Goobi's Soggy Shit

Dear Facebookers,

I hope you’ve been having fun on the world’s most popular social network. I must admit, after learning to ignore useless apps and hiding unwanted nitwits from clouding my news feed, I’ve been enjoying myself as well. But this is not about how lame facebook is, or how awesome twitter is. Those are two cold truths you will never realise, and I’m okay with that.

This is about Facebook, and how it’s treating your privacy. More importantly, why you should give a fuck.

Most people are narcissistic attention seeking gargoyles, who’s sole goal is to get their activities seen by as many people as possible. Myself included. And Facebook seems to be the best place to do that. Had a wild party last night? Upload that album to Facebook and get a hundred likes and comments. You will of course complain about the number of notifications you had to deal with the next day, but deep down you’re smiling. Smiling wide.

Facebook wants to help you attain your goal, but trust me (rather, don’t trust them) they don’t really have the same intentions in mind. If Google wants to control you from the outside in, facebook has been going from the inside out. Here’s a chart that illustrates facebook’s privacy settings.

But it’s a win-win situation, right? After all, Facebook is showing more of you, to the whole world. That’s a good thing. Fulfills that narcissistic ideal I pictured above. Wrong. Facebook wants to sell your privacy to advertisers. This is not traditional advertising, where the ad is brought to the user. It’s the other way round, and in its creepiest form. Imagine a company knowing where you’ve been, what you’re planning on doing, what you like, your location, your phone number, your relationship status. Facebook isn’t concerned with your life getting fucked. They’re worried about posting good quarterly results and they’re using your data to get to that.

You’re on some blog. It was just a meaningless gif of a cat jumping about. It has Facebook’s new ‘Like’ button. Little do you know, the website owner has been given the right to publish posts directly to your News Feed. There’s talk that if you like an ad on Facebook, the advertiser gets more than just access to your News Feed. A car company knows that you (the individual you) likes that particular car, and know your lifestyle, relationship status, and phone number, and could keep their call centres busy ringing your phone. This is right now, and without your permission; they aren’t going to hesitate in giving out more info in the future.

Let’s not forget about collateral.

You say something about your work. Your boss isn’t in your friends list. But he’s in your friend’s friends list. Taking into account Facebook’s new default privacy settings, he see’s your status. You’re fired.

Some guy is stalking you. He sends you a friend request. You ignore that. He befriends a friend of yours, and inadvertently gets access to all those pictures you’ve uploaded to facebook. Fuck that. With the default privacy setting for new users, a stalker doesn’t even have to sign up on facebook to see those pictures.

When it comes to Facebook, you have an illusion of privacy, while all your information is really shared across the web. When you say something, you think you’re saying it to your closest friends. When you upload something, you don’t realise the whole internet can see it. And you have a right to believe so. It was like that when you signed up two years ago. Just that Facebook got greedy, and decided to pull down the curtains without asking anyone.

Facebook of course offers you a way out. You can customise the hell out of your privacy settings—there’s so many of them. And that’s the problem. There’s so many of them! Take a look at Facebook’s privacy settings. There are over 50 settings spread across 6 categories. Compare that with Twitter—public or private (and no sheepish fucking around thereon). You might argue that this gives you more control. Bullshit. It’s meant to confuse and tire the user into succumbing to their corporate plan—the sellout of your privacy. Moreover, there are things that are beyond your control. Like how all those Like buttons are popping up on various websites, without your explicit permission.

You might say I’m a lunatic proclaiming an apocalypse because a light bulb went bust. Truth is, even Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg thinks so. “A small fraction of our 400-million-plus active user base.”, says Zuckerberg. Yes, he’s not concerned about what I’ve just said. He’s just concerned that a small fraction of his userbase is aware of it. The tech community of course doesn’t let things slip by. The last time when Facebook wanted to legally own all your data, they fought back, and Facebook returned ownership rights. Now I, along with many others, am quitting facebook. I doubt it’s going to have an impact on Facebook’s hold over the internet, but it’s the least I can do.

Now I’m sure you won’t leave facebook no matter what. All I ask of you, is to be aware. Do consider going through your privacy settings thoroughly. Don’t allow permissions to suspicious applications. Consider the implications of your actions. Be smart. Trust your friends, but keep an eye out for when they might not really be your friends. And if you have to Like something, like this ‘note’. That’s safe (for now).

This is going to be my last post on facebook. I might return some day. Probably not. I really am going to miss all those Likes and comments. :-*

January 27th: Steve announces the iPad. My mind is hooked.

March 12th: The pre-orders start. I, of course, am in India and can’t do anything about it.

April 3rd: I wrote about it. Possibly the worst day of my life. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as when I crashed the car and had to deal with a bitch and a half, but it was pretty fucked up. I couldn’t stand it. I closed twitter.

Ankur had offered to get me an iPad at the beginning of May. I took this as my only opportunity. I said yes.

April 5th: I meet Preshit on chat. We both need to get one. “Who’s gonna send it?”. The search begins. I hit up a bunch of contacts from the US. All of them agree. Internet friends FTW! (Just so we’re clear, I would have done the same). This one guy though—I won’t mention his name though—was so cool about it, I was surprised, really. I can’t describe the exact transaction, but it can only be described as angelic.

We were getting two iPads. 16GB. Wifi only.

Two hours later: The money was sent, and the iPads were ordered for.

Days go by: We watched, as the parcel travelled from China to the US, marveling at how nicely it adds to the carbon footprint. Fuck the carbon footprint, I want my iPad! Within 3 days, the iPad was at this guy’s place in—let’s not get into specifics here. Within one hour, it was in the hands of a FedEx employee, and so the tracking began. Paris. Paris, how happy I was to see thy name in the tracking page! Another two days, and it was in Bombay.

Bombay: Why did I choose Bombay? Goa is a terrible place for business. People are lazy, shit never gets done, and I was pretty sure the package just lie there in the postage office—unless of course FedEx imports their staff from some place else, which I doubt. I regret this error in judgment.

That morning, I dial a number.

“Hello”.

“Hi”

“Tell me something.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Come on. Fucker. Give me the news.”

“You know the feeling, where you’re placed in a big room”. I didn’t really know what he was talking about, but I acknowledged it with an “Uhuh”.

“Well that’s exactly what I’m feeling like right now.”

I knew he was going to get the iPad before me. I knew I’d have to wait another few days before I got mine. But going through this, just like the iPad, is totally different from what your mind imagines. I hated the prick.

That evening, I get on chat. I’ve assumed that the magical device has already been posted and had been jerking off to some iPad porn. You know, photoshopping busty babes into an iPad frame.

“I couldn’t send it. Apparently, the courier companies do not accept packages containing electronics if it’s between two individuals. A company has to initiate it.”

Suddenly it became how whorish those busty babes looked. Fuck this, fuck the Indian postal system, and fuck the goat. Another day wasted. I waited till the next day—didn’t sleep lest I should miss out on the opportunity—and arranged for a courier to pick it up from his place. Fuck the goat and hammer it with a rubber duck because the pick up never happened and my iPad was still in the hands of a slippery serpant. I mean, this was just plain torture.

I’m thinking of my options. At one point I almost jumped into an overnight bus to Bombay, but decided against it. I haven’t travelled by bus in almost 10 years now. I’m sweating (although mostly because it’s very hot in Goa). I try calling up random people who’re in Bombay. “Are you coming to Goa for the weekend?”. On any given weekday I’d have gladly taken a shit at their doorstep, at night, but today they were the best of friends.

I consult with my father, who’s the resident expert on all things. He suggested Preshit should dump it into a bus heading for Goa, and I pick it up here. It’s actually a little more professional than that, but that’s essentially the action. I could have caught a train the next day, but decided against it, since I wanted to go back again on the 23rd of this mont—

“What the fuck is wrong with you, you fucking ingrate?!”, says mother. Well, those aren’t exactly here words, but if I had to convey such emotion, those are the words I’d have used. She doesn’t swear, ever. Good for her.

“If you’re going on the 23rd anyway, why not wait till then? What’s so important?”, she continues.

“Imagine the time you unleashed your first kid onto this earth. Well, imagine yourself back then; I’m sure you regret him now. Back then, what if the nurse said you couldn’t see him for 8-9 days?”, I asked. She tried to contradict, but I was firm. You can’t fuck with a fanboy and his iPad.

A few hours later, and I had scrapped the send it by bus plan, and had booked my ticket to Bombay. It all happened so fast.

I tried to sleep, but couldn’t sleep. I tried watching a film. I don’t even remember which one it was; I was so distracted. Coldplay sounded like a bunch of village idiots banging on church bells—how garish those songs are. I hardly ate any food; mostly because it’s hot and I’m not really a food enthusiast. I don’t know why I’m filling you with unrelated jabber, but I think it added to the discomfort I was going through.

For instance, one evening, for two hours, I was caught waving the mosquito bat around. You know the electric tennis racket, which zaps the motherfuckers. It’s fun, I must admit, and for a few moments I was lost in the zapping. It didn’t last long though. The mosquitos didn’t last long either.

April 17th: I board the train. The super fast Shatabdi Express, and even though A/C, it only had chair cars. I write this. I sleep. Try to, at least. The train is fast.

2 a.m., April 18th, 2010: iPad.

When the internet came along, every two bit designer wanted every new feature on their site. DHTML? Fuck yeah DHTML I want some of that shit. Gimme some of that javascript. Fuck yeah. Check out my Geocities page, and sign my guestbook. Then came along Blogger, Wordpress, and now people have taken to Tumblr as the next blogging platform. Tumblr does have its downsides, and Wordpress still is the biggest CMS on the interwebs. Its use scales from a small blog, to a full blown website. This is made possible by the thousands of features it ships with, along with thousand other plugins you can install. What this results in, is an explosion of power, that’s extremely easy to wield.

If there’s any indicator of where design is going to be, it’s the Mac community. Developers and designers are the first ones to display the future of design, and what they’re all talking about now, is minimalism. The future of design is not in the designer’s ability to incorporate features, rather, it’s their ability to remove features. It’s not about adding what’s important; it’s about throwing out what’s not important. Tumblr has got a lot of things right with its themes. They’re simple, focus on the content, and are perfect for personal blogs. But, Tumblr lacks in features and making your own theme can be quite a pain, which is why I’ve stuck to Wordpress.

A while ago someone asked me to do a piece on how I redesigned this blog—speaking about my previous design. I don’t think the sh.it was my ultimate design, in that I still found some glaring errors in it presented (hence the new design). But I did do some things right that time. I totally obliterated categories and tags. Understanding your content and audience is key to any design. The sh.it is a narrative, so there’s absolutely no need for categories or tags—anywhere. Even if your blog does have varied sortable content, with a readership that would sift through it, placement of tags makes a huge difference. They’re useless on the home page, but for individual articles it makes sense to have them running along the footer, defining the article and encouraging further exploration. Some argue that it defines the content. I’d say it’s meaningless clutter. Categories on the other hand help sort content. Unlike tags, it’s not so easy to create a new category, at least mentally, so they stay organised.

When we redesigned Beautiful Pixels, one of the things we changed was instead of automatically generating categories listing, we decided to go with a static list—a list of icons it was. The point is that we already know the type of content we’re producing, and having categories like “Misc” just don’t help in navigation. Nobody in their right minds would ever click on the Misc category in a list. Even when defining categories, we’ve trimmed down on SA by about 50%. The result is a much more focussed list—although still not focussed enough. The thing about categories and tags, is that they make sense to you, but not to your reader. Put yourself in the reader’s shoes. When was the last time you navigated using categories? Instead of categories, how about a list of featured articles. Your best work will obviously attract more clicks. And your goal is to enable readers to find your best work.

Search is another thing a lot of people give a lot of importance to. I for one can’t remember the last time I searched for something on a blog. This is mostly because Wordpress search is a fucking turd, but even otherwise, I think Google.com is a better way to search for content. This is especially true of personal blogs, like this one. But a search bar is important. You’d want to enable your readers to be able to find articles they might have read in the past. I took my search bar, and shoved it right at the bottom. Unless you need it, it’s not there.

One thing you need to pay close attention to, is link dilution. There’s always a treshhold after which links do not make any sense. Having fifty recommendations in your blogroll leads to not one of them getting clicked. Inversely, you can’t have just one link. You can’t have two. Isolate what’s most important, most common to your kind of content, and recommend it. Again, decide whether you even need to have a cloud of links pointing to other peoples’ sites. More often than not, you don’t need to.

I didn’t want to be very specific about what you should do or should not do. It all depends on the content, and the audience. If your readers are largely IE6 users, god bless your soul. For the new design, I’ve used web fonts with CSS @font-face; the titles and sub-text treated with Yanone Kaffesatz. I wish I had used some Ajax or CSS animations, but apart from pop ups for the thumbs above, it just didn’t make sense.

I hope you like the new look of the sh.it. I think it combines good typography, whitespace, and the ability to present large images without ruining the design. The general look is inspired by Made by Sofa’s redesign, which is one hell of a job by Jorn van Dijk. I did not work very hard on this one, though. It’s been minimally tested to work right in Safari and other webkit browsers; it should work in Firefox; Internet Explorer users can suck my brother’s dog’s loose balls. Big thanks to Ole Teucher for his invaluable feedback. If you’re ever on the lookout for a nazi of any kind, they don’t make em better than the Germans. I’m sure there’s a bunch of things broken; I don’t want to hear about them. Also, I don’t think I’ll ever go back and fix my earlier articles, which now feature a warped look. My excuse is that I’m looking forward.

As always, thanks for stopping by.

I know. I know. There are way too many of these ‘how to tweet responsibly’ articles out there. Mine isn’t going to change a thing.

Fact is, I needed to explain all this to a friend of mine who recently joined twitter (and is making an ass out of himself), so why not put it in words. There’s a shit load of Don’t in here, so if all you’re going to do is point out the negativity, I advise you to bend over and stick a carrot through the hole facing the sky. On to twitter…

Retweet Responsibly.

People don’t know how to retweet. You may say, just use the twitter retweets feature, which is fine for some cases. But other times you want to own that piece of news, so you retweet traditionally. Here’s the syntax.

If it’s a piece of news, send out the news first, then add a slasher “/via” followed by @whoever. So, “Michael Jackson has risen again! http://link.me/xhs5y /via @jerkoff” is the right way to go. Always put the content first, and then the credits. Why is it important who you or your followers who you got the information from? But you do want to credit the source, so the via link is apt. RT is just in bad taste.

But what about if there already is a “via @firstperson” in that tweet? I’ve seen so many cases of “RT @someone Here comes the news http://link.me/sexdoll /via @else”. Please don’t treat your followers like shit. In most cases, I’d say give credit only to the person you got the retweet from, not the original source. If you do want to give credit to two sources (never more than two though), add use the slasher and tack em on, like “/via @dumbass @goobimama”.

Sometimes, an ultimate original source will tweet a link. Like for instance, TUAW tweets a link to one of their articles. If that’s the case, you don’t need to add the “via”, because you’ve already credited the source with that link. I would recommend that you change the words though, so it’s more personal.

When it comes to quotes and funnies, instead of using the RT syntax, append the Twitter handle at the end of the tweet using a hyphen. “I vote for world peace — @brandonpittman” is way better than using via or RT. Although, I’d say funnies belong to the original author, so it’s best you just use the new retweet feature.

Avoid Twitlonger

I’ve seen so many people make me hit the unfollow button because they were too lazy to edit their tweet. If the tweet is over 140 characters, don’t tweet it. Just don’t.

The only time Twitlonger is appreciated, is when replying to someone and the answer is too long to be covered in two tweets. It should be at least more than 300 characters to make any sense. For the rest, take heed to Aayush’s advice on cramming your tweets into the 140 character space.

Don’t use hashtags unless you know what the fuck you’re doing

“This #ipad makes you look #cool. #mac #apple” in fact makes you look stupid. Hashtags serve two purposes: to add a tag categorizing a tweet which otherwise doesn’t contain that tag “I’m leaving now! #pakapukutweetup” would being all tweets related to Paka Puku tweetup together. They don’t work for broader untracked subjects—things like Apple or #India. The other use, is sarcasm, satire, and humor. as Patrick does it.

You’re not stupid, are you? No wait, don’t answer that.

Follow Friday

I get the idea behind follow Friday. It’s about recommending your favourite twitterrers so others can enjoy their tweets too. What I don’t get however, is this large scale back scratching that goes on every Friday. I’m even willing to entertain a meaningless tweet with a bunch of people thrown in tagged with #FF, but when I see more than one in a row, I immediately unfollow. There’s absolutely no excuse for that kind of rubbish.

For what exactly are you trying to achieve with a #followfriday? I can bet you not one of your followers will follow someone from an #FF tweet. I don’t, and I don’t even get new followers from such tweets. It doesn’t work. The only way you can truly recommend someone, is by sending out a single tweet explaining why you think that person is great.

Don’t use yFrog

Use Img.ly, or Droplr, or Cloud (if you have an invite), or even trusty old TwitPic. yFrog is the ugliest image host you could find, and I despise even seeing the link in my timeline. Curse @Tweetie for defaulting to yFrog, which inadvertently leads to me sending out a yFrog link once every few. Using a better host not only reduces clutter, it also makes your images look better. I say Img.ly, because not only is it the best looking one out there, they’re also the most innovative of the lot.

Don’t ever fuck with my timeline

Whenever you’re going to do something, know that it’s stupid, because that’s what you’re good at. So take a step back for a moment, and think about me for a change. Will I benefit from seeing those >140 characters? More often than not, it’s going to be a big no. Do I think I’m as stupid as you to believe I’ll win a MacBook Pro by tweeting about it? Do you really think I’m interested in seeing pictures of your cat? Of course, your timeline belongs to you, and you should post whatever the fuck you feel like. Just don’t overdo it, because you know, the big bad wolf has a habit of dropping in unexpectedly.

And you thought the day would never come! Yeap, the shits have been reloaded with new pixels. All thanks to some stable internet and constant flow of coffee by the white guy, I got around to theming not just this blog, but the Tumblog as well. Let’s just say I hate theming in Tumblr and I probably won’t attempt it again.

Anyway, that’s it for now. Short post this one. Unless you wanted a long one, which I won’t provide. Comments sort of appreciated, that is, the positive ones.

PS: I’m sure there are huge ass bugs, it might not display properly in Firefox and the whole of Windows, but well, as long as I have screenshots to prove it works in Safari, that’s all I care for now. Will fix the rest later.