friendster considered harmful
Geek
So I logged on to Friendster today for the first time in ages. It's crazy how little I want to use their web site.
First off, where are the RSS feeds? I don't have time to check billions of websites every day to see if there's a new article I'm interested in, a new message for me, or whatever. This is why I set up my own planet, so there is only onel place I need to go to see if anything interesting has happened. If you don't have an RSS feed, I don't have the time to go to your website.
Then there's the ads. I know they need to do something to stay alive, but come on. There are graphic banners, text, those annoying flash ads (if I see one more flash ad for smilies I'm going to punch a hole through my monitor) and even the new breed of popup ads that can defeat Mozilla-style blocking. What the hell is with that? For a web site that lives or dies by the number of people using it, they are sure doing a lot to stop people wanting to go there.
The other annoying thing about their advertisements is that they are inconsistently placed on different pages on the site. I need to expend effort on everything on a page to determine if it is trying to sell me something. Especially because they use text ads that are styled to look like any other section of the site and are positioned all over the place. This is not what I call a good user experience.
So, I doubt I'll bother logging on again unless I get another email from them because after all, I don't need to find someone to get laid, which everyone knows is their only real use case. :)
Comments
ITS EVIL!!!!!!!! SO SO EVIL!!!!
Posted by: jess on February 24, 2005 03:45 PM
> the new breed of popup ads that can defeat
> Mozilla-style blocking.
(This has nothing to do with your actual post, but since you mentioned this...) Can someone explain the concept of these unstoppable popups to me? Say I'm a browser, and I want to stop popup ads. Surely I just decide to _never call_ the pleaseOpenANewWindow() function, right? What do these ads do? _Talk me out_ of that decision?
Posted by: Paul Hoadley on February 25, 2005 05:56 PM
There's something fatal about having belonged to a "Scene" at one point in your life. And even having appalled every hipster (or as we refered to them "Scenesters") makes no difference.
I think its a cultural difference. When one turns 18 in the states one moves as far away from their parents as possible and enters a universe that is defined by other equally cluless teens and early twenties types. In such vacuums of reality some very healthy underground cultures are born which have none of the pain of real life.
When these "scenes" dissolve and we enter the working class and lose all of the hopes we suspended in our own teens-and-early-twenties-sub-culture we, of coarse, are nostalgically appalled by our own doom.
There's something intrinsicly sad and yet hopeful about the commodification of our nostalgia which Friendster represents.
It's flattering that our sadly mortal "scene" lives on in virtual space. And the Ads and crappy interface aren't bad, they are flattering.
Popular culture is CRAP, it always has been. But its fun. I don't pop onto friendster often. But every few months I have a dig around and encounter new facests of my past that have been dug up by a crappy interface fueled by the crappiest advertising mechanisms the internet has to offer.
One has to shudder at the metadata that this database offers. Detailed social meta mapping the use of which we can't even imagine. But like television, the internet's successor, anybody truly cool can't help but give into it's charms.
Posted by: Andrew on February 25, 2005 09:54 PM
There's something fatal about having belonged to a "Scene" at one point in your life. And even having appalled every hipster (or as we refered to them "Scenesters") makes no difference.
I think its a cultural difference. When one turns 18 in the states one moves as far away from their parents as possible and enters a universe that is defined by other equally cluless teens and early twenties types. In such vacuums of reality some very healthy underground cultures are born which have none of the pain of real life.
When these "scenes" dissolve and we enter the working class and lose all of the hopes we suspended in our own teens-and-early-twenties-sub-culture we, of coarse, are nostalgically appalled by our own doom.
There's something intrinsicly sad and yet hopeful about the commodification of our nostalgia which Friendster represents.
It's flattering that our sadly mortal "scene" lives on in virtual space. And the Ads and crappy interface aren't bad, they are flattering.
Popular culture is CRAP, it always has been. But its fun. I don't pop onto friendster often. But every few months I have a dig around and encounter new facests of my past that have been dug up by a crappy interface fueled by the crappiest advertising mechanisms the internet has to offer.
One has to shudder at the metadata that this database offers. Detailed social meta mapping the use of which we can't even imagine. But like television, the internet's successor, anybody truly cool can't help but give into it's charms.
Posted by: Andrew Yo on February 25, 2005 09:57 PM
Oops I didn't mean to post twice.
Posted by: on February 25, 2005 09:59 PM
Don't worry andrew, i usually post 3 or 4 times on mike's weblog about completely unrelated topics. sometimes, as with this post, there is no actual topic or point. i think mike likes it because it keeps him relevant. In any case, it's part of my cultural heritage to be self righteous and pedantic.
Posted by: martin(e) on February 26, 2005 10:10 AM
Jess: There there.
Paul: The trick is to allow "legit" popups - ones that are activated by a user action, say clicking on a link (not that I'm advocatig that webmasters actually do this), while blocking the ads. Moz for example blocks calls to window.open() from window "load" event handlers.
So these popup ads have clearly found a way around the countermeasures. For the first time in my life I'm seeing popup ads, dammit!
Andrew: No offence dude. :) I was diss'ing their user interface, not the community. Maybe I should have called the post "friendster marketdriods considered harmful" but that lacks the same incendiary feel: Everyone knows marketdriods are considered harmful.
Martine: Right on!
Posted by: Mike on February 26, 2005 06:58 PM
but it is evil... *wibble*..
Posted by: jess on February 28, 2005 08:09 AM
Alert! Alert!
It was nice while it lasted Mikey. Up the countermeasures and set your phasers to "intestinate".
Posted by: Joel on March 1, 2005 01:43 AM
POG ON!!!!!!!!
Posted by: POG on March 5, 2005 09:25 PM
POG ON 4EVA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Posted by: POG on March 5, 2005 11:45 PM
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