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Franzen's a big Mets fan.
Sometimes I go to Chris' FB page just to look at photos of him and think, "wow, that guy even *looks* like a dork!"
Oh, it certainly has social components. But, the purpose of BBTF seems to be to debate and argue baseball (and other varied topics of interest) with a relatively intelligent group of widely divergent views. The social component is almost incidental, or even accidental. I'm glad I've met some of the people here, but the BBTF experience wouldn't be changed at all for me if I never met anyone.
You can't debate - even if you've never seen them IRL - without meeting them.
I don't know, I guess I have a different definition of met. I've met you in real life, but you're really a totally different "entity" on here. I don't think I've met the online Sam.
But anyway, here's my personal Facebook story:
About five years ago, an old college acquaintance connected with me on Facebook after we had been out of touch for years. We exchanged a couple of messages (we were now working in the same field), and then decided to meet up for a drink. Five years later, we're happily married. So all you curmudgeons who don't like social networking can go #### yourselves; I think it's great =)
It has the potential to end careers. If you're a public person, it's always possible that an offhanded statement gets you in big trouble. You are "on stage" all the time. My guess is that Senator Grassley doesn't really think President Obama is stupid, but he sure said it on Twitter.
This is a good reason for a public person not to be on FB. It's not a good reason for them to find everyone else's FB usage disturbing.
Not really. There's just less left up to you to read into me in person than there is me-in-here.
Also, in person, my charm and charisma come through a lot clearer. Also, the fact that I'm hilarious.
And pretty.
Same thing happened with a former co-worker of mine at the newspaper here. Except that the old acquaintance was from high school. They got married last fall. And are already divorced (or at least have filed; I have no idea if it's gone through yet because he's not an FB friend).
OMG -- Tim McCarver is right!
(Why, yes, I have 3 cats & no children. Just a coincidence, rest assured.)
So, block the people that post stuff you don't care about. I don't have many (perhaps any) friends on facebook who sometimes interest me and sometimes annoy me. Pretty much they do one or the other. I block the updates from the annoying ones. But, having moved very far away from where I grew up, I like to keep up with stuff back home and get in touch when I go back for a visit. So, I keep them around for contact.
67. Sam Hutcheson is the Rickey Henderson of... Posted: April 09, 2012 at 07:28 AM (#4100828)
People using social media to complain about social media gives me the lulz.
This. I sometimes wonder if some of the folks here realize that BTF is a social networking site.
Just to fourth or fifth this sentiment. The vast majority of BBTF looks like a complete and dorkish waste of time and effort to most people. But, it has value to you (us), so, to you (us), it's great. If you don't like facebook, don't go on facebook. If you don't like Twitter, don't follow Twitter. If you don't like Dickens, don't read Dickens. It's really not a difficult concept to follow. Treat the internet and stuff in it just like you treat anything else. A tool to be used or not as you see fit. How it fits in your life is no different than fishing, books, baseball, wood-working, scrapbooking, TV, movies, etc.
If you're on facebook, and not enjoying it, consider leaving. Or just don't update. Use it as an address book with photos.
Hey, if your facebook friends aren't intelligent and diverse, it's not our fault.
I saw Barry Bonds hit his 755th HR at Petco Park. Dial called me within moments, asking, "Are you at the game?" It made a cool moment even more memorable.
Did Kevin call?
+1
I keep a lot of FB friends around simply because I'm certain I'm the most entertaining thing they've got going on right now.
Not to pile on, but this. Its the Buzz Bissinger argument all over again. Most people are stupid, and a small fraction of people are really fascinating, brilliant, and/or hilarious, and this is true no matter whether its TV, Facebook, Twitter, BTF, or real life.
Farmville and the like are really just the day-time programming for FB. It's like soap operas or Oprah or Ellen. Or Fox News. Or Spike TV. It's real easy to not watch.
This is why I wish FB would adopt that circles thing Google Plus has (or do they? I don't play around with FB enough to find out). I post pics of my kids all the time. I know the guy I used to crack jokes with in 11th grade English class probably doesn't care, but my grandmother, who can't leave her apartment much and doesn't get to see them, does.
Also, for those of you complaining about your feed, you CAN block game notices like Farmville (just right click one of the notices). You can also block users without unfriending them for that FB friend that always posts about her cat.
I think a lot of social media backlash is because of (a) the narcissism; (b) the stupid things people write; but primarily (c) the fear that social media is getting too large, to the detriment of real life, causing our real life interactions and experiences to suffer. I'm not sure if there is any weight to that concern, or that social media contributes to it anymore than the internet in general, but I do understand it.
Well things are about to get good. Joe Biden is now on Twitter.
QFTT. And if you doubt this, please friend me for access to the photo galleries of Whisper Wilson, the best cat on earth :)
I enjoy Facebook. I post sparingly and very predictably (usually what I'm currently reading). I block the games and nonsense. With about 220 friends from a whole bunch of walks of life, I get a lot of news of the world there - if Davy Jones dies, where else would I first read about it?
The larger question is...is real life for most people any better than Facebook? Again, I think people worry too much. Facebook is new and exciting and, while I think it will always be part of modern life now, the way phones and tv's etc. are, I think it will recede a bit in importance as the novelty wears off. We'll all be talking to our Iphone 7 Bestfriend Model in a few years anyway and people will seem so, so boring in comparison.
If all the posts from your friends are dull and insipid, consider getting some more interesting friends. Or, at the very least, utilize the ability to block people and features (the stupid games) that annoy you. This is not hacker level stuff. It's very basic customization: akin to programming your favorite radio stations or creating bookmarks in your browser.
Or just contemplate the old saying about birds and feathers and then become depressed and kill yourself. Speaking of which, have we had a webcam-ed onto FaceBook suicide yet? That seems like some wacky modern thing that should have happened by now.
I'll play!
-Interesting news article
-Cool photo by professional photographer friend
-Easter pics of family
-Someone complaining about allergies
-Link to uninteresting news article
-Link to funny website
-Link to interesting event
-Easter pics of family
-Link to interesting news article
-Someone announcing its their kids birthday
-Someone lost their ipad (one of my good friends from law school, but dear lord she posts the most banal #### on FB)
-BTF link!
I've hidden a few people whose updates were too mundane and plentiful to endure and it really does help. I still live in the city where I grew up and went to school, so there's always the risk of running into someone after you delete them, which can make for an awkward path crossing.
I think I've only actually deleted a handful of people and that's generally only when I know I'll never see them again and find their updates consistently dull. I've actually been deleted by probably 10 times as many people as I've deleted over the years.
But people take FB, and more specifically, deletion so seriously. I've got a couple of friends who are no longer on speaking terms because one of them deleted the girlfriends of the others, which in turn, led to them deleting her. Better just to tuck away those people who annoy you if you ever plan on seeing them or someone very close to them again.
Sometimes, it's because you don't want to notify certain people of the news via Facebook. When my F-I-L died, I posted a status of "Well, this sucks". I didn't want to tell my family on Facebook; I wanted to contact them individually. But I also felt the need to post something.
I posted much more detail in the Lounge, because none of my family hangs out there. So I was able to kill a couple of hours while I couldn't possibly get back to sleep.
(1) No one cares about your health condition (unless it's cancer).
(2) Your children are not nearly as cute as you think your children are.
Don't know if it was FB, but one freshman at Rutgers web-camed his roommate engaging in a gay tryst prompting the tryster to jump off the George Washington Bridge. The web-cammer just got convicted.
Yes, there was something like that recently I believe.
There's no evidence that the suicide was related to the Twitter events. (And there's no way that guy should go to prison for that.)
One of the best wrong-number calls I ever got was a message from a guy at Dodger Stadium, trying to call his friend between the Wallflowers and Rolling Stones sets.
Sounded like he was having a damn good time.
(1) No one cares about your health condition (unless it's cancer).
(2) Your children are not nearly as cute as you think your children are.
These aren't facebook rules. These are life rules. Except that no one cares about the cancer, either.
Want to be interesting? Don't ever talk about your health or kids unless specifically asked to.
Especially fans of last-place teams you just swept.
Now, I check it at a rate of once every couple of days. I don't use it much, except to post a funny news article once in a while, talk to friends, see some funny stuff other people have posted, and occasionally get some "breaking" news.
My wife uses it more frequently to talk to her mom and other family members (in that regard, its more convenient than getting phone calls from mom 3-4 times a week and works better than standard email), she periodically tries to play those stupid games, share pictures and stories of raising a toddler with all of our other friends/family members that are concurrently going through that, etc, etc.
It can be a great tool, but it's become way overdone and ingrained in the culture now. For example, I'm going to play volleyball this evening at a park with a friend and the new girl he's been seeing. I just talked to him this morning to confirm the time/place via text. 20 min ago he sends me a Facebook invite to join the "event". Keep in mind I know no one else who is going to be there besides him, so why in the #### do I need a Facebook event invite? The only thing that's going to do is to open up my Facebook account to be seen by a bunch of people I don't know, and let my wife see the pictures of all the women that's going to be there.
I think the biggest thing is not thinking of stuff like BBTF and facebook as not being "real life". I use an alias, but, to me, I'm myself here and on facebook (where my real name is used). If I wouldn't say it to your face, I don't say it online. If I wouldn't read it in the newspaper, magazine or book, I don't read it online. It's simply an extension of real life that enhances my life experience.
If you view it as something other than "real life" suddenly you either lose yourself or lose the opportunity to experience greater community.
The even better thing is that it lasts awhile, allowing one to go back to funny posts several months later.
I know where you live.
I was on FB, I had an iPhone, I did twitter, I did Google+, etc. But I pretty much stopped all of it a year ago (except for BTF, this is my only social networking site besides very occasional appearances on Sons of Sam Horn).
FB I didn't like for a long time even while I was using it. I watched the Facebook movie and thought, even if this is just a character, why do I freely give anything to that guy? I mean, FB pummels you with ads, follows you everywhere you go (Tell your friends you bought, 1Q84!). I just dropped it, unceremoniously, and no one noticed. I was pretty active too.
I got rid of my iPhone, for reasons that I've detailed here before. Google+ just wasn't worth the effort, AND I started finding pictures of my kids that I had marked private all over the place on the internet. Clearly Google+ did not respect my privacy. That, and G+ was a lonely place.
Finally, reading twitter is like trying to drink from a fire hose. It's ultimately frustrating, even as an aggregator. Every link takes you outside twitter, and it's hard to find anything like a conversation there.
Friendship is *about sharing*. Just manage your FB so that you are sharing with who you want to be.
Didja know that Chief Jay Strongbow just died? That he was an Italian from Philly?
I like hipster snooting about not being on it more than I really have any strong dislike for it... 4 or 5 years ago, I apparently registered - because I still get occasional 'friend' requests - but I've never been on it and have no idea how to even access it... I presume there's a retrieve lost PW feature; FB has not yet reached the state of omniscient sentience where it will just read my biometrics or something and immediately start berating me for not being on it, right?
Have you read the pre-season predictions? From everyone, including Mets fans? I'm playing with house money. You're all doomed.
Anyhow, I joined up with Facebook, er, I guess now two years ago+ and even THEN I was a holdout. A friend, two years younger, in his ####### thirties, had dropped dead of a heart attack and all the plans were being made that way. Following that I re-connected with a female friend on the same - through a random post she made - with whom I am now blissfully living.
It's full of annoying people and cryptic crap and song-quoters but I don't mind it.
I still only call people for their birthdays, though. I have my limits.
Sounds like a normal Mets financial status to me.
My buddy calls this "vaguebooking" and its clearly trolling for sympathy. "ASK ME ABOUT MY DAY!"
“There is nothing in my view more disturbing than social networking — nothing,” McCarver said.
Nothing more disturbing? — Nothing?
And then he kills you.
I feel the need to point out the fact that the full extent of your trolling wit on FB, in regards to the alleged sweep to open the season, involves commenting on a post *I* made that reads "The Braves suck. That is all."
I feel the need to point one reason I am so wittily trolling you on FB is that you made some truly dissimilar posts regarding where the Breaves would end up in BTF's season prediction thread.
In other things that annoy me about Facebook, my aforementioned now-deceased EX-parrot friend's widow and sister have kept his FB profile open. Also, they hate each other. If I hadn't liked the guy so much and known him since I was 15, it would be hilarious. As it is, it was enraging. I managed to de-friend his corpse's (well, ashes') FB page without tirading on their grieving. But I wanted to.
Facebook has it, but it's not as simple as Google Circles. The circles idea was truly a great one; I really wish Google+ would catch on. The hangout thing is cool too.
But yes, you can do it on facebook, you just have to create "groups." I am actually pretty careful whenever I post an update or some pics, etc, I pick which "groups" I share them with -- "Close Friends," "Family," "People I trust," etc.
And yes, the term "social networking" is another annoying marketing buzzword that means nothing. Anyone who's been on the Internet has probably been "social networking" for 10 or 15 years. The big difference between FB and the phpbb forum you posted on in 2001 is the lack of anonymity. For years the mantra was "never use your real name on the internet." Facebook completely defied that.
1: Parents of young children do not care , their kids are cute and they are going to talk about them
2: Parents of young kids tend to think that others' kids are cute too (maybe not as cute...)
It's funny, I figured that out about Sam from some random thread before I actually met him.
Haven't met you yet, but never though you were psycho. If you follow through on the beer invite, you'll have a chance to prove me wrong.
A former co-worker of mine insists on posting photos of his twin daughters pretty frequently. They look like small gorillas. Which is to say like his wife.
Dear god.
My cousin's is still open going on two years. I posthumously offered up a comment about how great it was that Larkin (my cuz was a lifelong Cincinnatian) made the HOF. My Aunt gave my comment a Like. I didn't wish him a Happy Birthday though, that seemed a bit creepy.
1) Loathe stories about how "smart" someone thinks their kid is.
2) Have 100% confidence that I'll be one of those guys if I ever have a kid.
2: Parents of young kids tend to think that others' kids are cute too (maybe not as cute...)
Yeah, you all gotta stop that.
1) Loathe stories about how "smart" someone thinks their kid is.
2) Have 100% confidence that I'll be one of those guys if I ever have a kid.
I think I'm far more likely to be hyper-critical of my kids. Hopefully, I'll get a chance to find out.
people who post pictures of their ugly ####### tattoos. Ugh.
With the injuries, I think the Mets have as good a shot as anyone in that division, or the Central division, or heck, the West division.
More to come....
My wife and I have a 4.5 month old boy (our first). My wife has many, many, many FB friends, and many of those have young kids. Honestly, I don't care about those other kids and don't think they're very cute either.
That's just a FB thing, though. If we're real-life friends, I'll probably like your kids too.
One of my favorite recurring Facebook happenings is when it randomly tells me I should friend John Brittain.
Take it away, Milo.
I don't understand the overloaded friends list of people you don't give a #### about.
They're not mutually exclusive. You can be hypercritical to their face, and talk them up behind their back, thus creating maximal damage to all concerned!
Some men endure existence. Others live their lives as performance art. It's not my fault you're a sheeple.
ooooooh, good idea! I mean, if you can't f-up your own kids' lives, whose can you f-up.
Juan Miguel González Quintana's?
It's not that you don't give a #### about them, just that you don't give a #### about the crap they post. You may still want to keep in touch, and FB is a great mechanism for contacting someone whom you seldom need to contact, but that doesn't mean you want to see pictures of their kid or read their daily horoscope or some other donkeyshit.
What I don't get, is what advantage FB offers over simple email?
I... don't understand how this relates to what you quoted.
It's not that you don't give a #### about them, just that you don't give a #### about the crap they post.
I guess I sort of think these are not different. YMMV, I would imagine.
1) People often have many emails, and change frequently.
2) I change computers frequently, and can't be bothered to maintain an "address book"
3) Many people, especially people under 30, don't check their email much anymore; why check email when I can check facebook?
4) Even if they do, your email has a 50/50 shot at getting lost amongst the spam; facebook messages (as of April 9, 2012) don't have spam.
FB is mass-mailings for the 21st Century, without looking like you're sending spam email.
I find the opposite is true. People get emails sent right to their phones now and so check it much more than they used to.
On a daily basis my best friend's wife posts details of some coupon or another that she has used to get some great deal. Another good friend posts every time he plays a word of a certain number of points in "Words With Friends" (it's probably a setting in the game). In both cases I love seeing pictures of the kids and being kept up to date on their lives but this sort of stuff is uninteresting to me.
It's a pretty useful medium when something important is happening. My friend's dad had a serious medical scare about a year ago (he's fine now) and it was an easy way to get word out to a large number of people and keep them in the loop without having to type out 75 e-mail addresses or something like that.
It depends.
That's certainly true of tech-savvy folk, but your average user probably has no idea or care on how to set up email on their phone.
I think most people know how to set up e-mail on their phone and failing that, they know someone who will set it up for them. My mother is technologically impaired but she's got an iphone and an ipad and thanks to my brother and I she can do all the basics including e-mail on the go. Setting up e-mail on an iPhone is pretty easy with most of the basic services and I suspect that is true with the various Apple competitors.
For those under 18, this isn't really true.
Sending an email is downright quaint in some circles.
It's a question of "want", too...
I just recently took the plunge of setting up my work/Exchange account on my iPhone (previously, I just had my personal account on it) and I'm still not quite sure if I'm going to keep it... I get upwards of 200 e-mail messages a day, and even with fetching set to passive, having Exchange synched to my iphone sucks up a ton of battery very quickly. There are a myriad of other annoyances, too -- my company maintains an inbox size limit and I get tons of documentation, PPTs, etc sent to me that I usually just detach and store - but I can't do this from my iphone (easily, at least, I don't synch to my work laptop).
Text messaging, best messenging. I have friends, close friends, that I only interact with via text message or face to face. It's been years since we've spoken on the phone or used email.
You can get facebook messages sent directly to your phone as well.
What I don't get, is what advantage FB offers over simple email?
Facebook/Twitter lets people choose who/what they want to pay attention to. It takes the onus off of the author to direct his posts -- I know that anyone who reads the posts is doing so because they actually want to read what I have to say (or at least, don't dislike me enough to ignore me). For example, when I was organizing a charity fundraiser, I felt fine posting status updates about it every week or so for a few months. But I only felt comfortable emailing my friends about it once or twice.
The newspapers and forums that have adopted Facebook logins instead of anonymous commenting have improved 1000%.
This. My friends' kids are cute. All the people I barely know have ugly kids.
God, we get enough email already don't we? I would hate to get emails anytime a friend of mine took a picture of their kid. Facebook is great in that you only go if you want to see what's up with everyone, and you can easily scroll past the posts you don't care much about. Facebook is voluntarily. Email is more or less required to be checked every so often.
God I hate text messaging. Unless you're in a meeting, or some other place where you need to be quiet, it's f-ing useless. And then, any decent phone has email nowadays.
If you want to tell me the plans have changed, call me. You have an Eff-ing phone in your hand. If you have lots of detail to convey, send an email, not some abbreviated gobbledy-gook.
It wasn't so long ago that you'd get emailed every time someone replied to or messaged you. It resulted in spammage.
There was a NYT article a few years ago that detailed a study about the use of email vs. facebook. Teens and college students declared that email was how they communicated "with old people." Email might as well be parchment or a scroll to kids now.
That's a feature, not a bug. If it's just pictures of their kids, they'll only send it to grandma, and auntie, not the whole damn world.
I'm am 100% resolved never to join FB.
I find text messaging to be great and it's the one thing I really miss about my iPhone, being able to send complete sentences in a text message (and no abbreviations). Of course, we're all English Ph.D's, so we usually converse in complete sentences. But sending a text in T9 is brutal. I'm forced to do all execrable things that people do in text messages: "u" for "you," etc.
Also, I found that when I had the iPhone I was always checking my email, obsessively even, but I would only respond to it when I got to a computer with a keyboard. I could type really fast on the iPhone (I had almost religious faith in the keyboard algorithm Apple developed), but not as fast as I can type when sitting at a real keyboard.
Edit: I want to emphasize how great the keyboard software is. It is perhaps the greatest thing that Apple ever invented. It gets more accurate the faster you type.
1) Does that still happen as frequently? The people I communicate with over email have kept the same ones for a long time and/or have their old ones forward onto their new ones. You can add multiple accounts to your gmail account, and even choose which one you send as on a message-by-message basis.
2) Most email web clients manage that for you. They just remember everyone you send to/receive from, and will match it as you type in a name.
3) I think this is completely opposite the truth, especially with smartphones being so popular. Everyone with a smartphone receives emails as if they're texts these days, essentially.
4) This one, I think I do agree with, if you're talking about the kind of stuff that people post to facebook (pictures, announcements, etc.)
And while I don't agree with your four reasons strongly, I do agree that there are some big cases in which facebook trumps email.
1) Active vs. passive, from the sender's point of view. With email, you have to specify which friends you want to notify. On facebook, you can just post messages to a wall.
2) Active vs. passive, from the receiver's point of view. You don't have to receive emails from all your friends with pictures, announcements, etc., the moment they post them. Rather, you can log onto facebook at your leisure and see all your friends' updates then.
3) Wider reach. This kind of goes with my (1). If you want to let people know about something, you can post it to your facebook wall and give everyone the opportunity to read it. You run the risk of forgetting to include one of your friends on an explicit list of email recipients, however.
This explains the growth in "work spam" -- large listed e-mail that grow into unwieldy threads because people don't understand that "Reply to All" need not be the default.
Every day you become more of a caricature of yourself. It's like I could tick off the boxes of the kinds of things someone like you is supposed to believe, but no one would ever believe someone like you could exist. And yet there you are, fervently believing the things the profile says you're supposed to believe.
I email, text and use FB and G+ a lot. I talk on the phone with my mom (who has taken up texting lately) and for conference calls. My phone's voice mail tells people exactly how pointless it is to leave me a VM, because I'm not going to listen to it anyway.
I used to have a boss who was extremely difficult to get in touch with. We would email, call, leave voicemails. But we'd never get a response. One day someone sent her a text, and blamo! she responded immediately. From then on, it was texting all the way. And she became a much more responsive boss.
Thank you!
It's one of the most useful new means of communication out there.
I understand not liking to communicate via text, but to pretend it is useless is a joke.
You left out quite an important bit of that article:
Overall email usage hasn't really changed. Usage of email via a computer has dropped, but usage via mobile devices has climbed.
------
Both texting and calling have their place. I'd much rather receive a text if plans change and there's a concrete decision, e.g. "meet at 7:30 now instead of 7:00" or "I'm bringing John with me, so we have five for dinner instead of four now". I'd much rather get a text, which I can read when is convenient for me, as opposed to a phone call, which is much more of an interruption of whatever I'm doing at the time (e.g. at work, riding the train, going to the bathroom).
For more ambiguous changes, a phone call works better. "Mary doesn't want to go for sushi anymore" will necessitate a back-and-forth discussion, which is much easier to do via a phone call.
I have the exact opposite opinion.
Why are you calling me when you can just send a text? You have an eff-ing phone in your hand.
Phoning someone is almost rude these days. A text message is passive, polite. I'll send you a note, you'll read it when you have a chance. You'll reply when you get a moment, or maybe you won't. Whatever. Phoning someone is jumping up and down screaming "PAY ATTENTION TO ME NOW!! PAY ATTENTION TO ME NOW!!" Don't phone me unless it's important or we need to have a conversation.
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