Peanut Gallery

The other day I came across an interesting opinion piece. Full text here.

One thing it didn't quit get right is that there is one other way for the auction to end; the "winner" must outbid the "loser" by a dollar and hope that the other side is rational enough to see that this way both sides go home to lick their wounds. In the grown-up word this is known as a compromise. Unfortunately, with the conflict in Iraq neither side will allow a compromise to expedite the ending of this vile affair.

At this point pulling out of Iraq would be disastrous for two groups of people; the people opposed to whichever force gains power in Iraq if it is indeed a violent force, and the Bush administration for losing their prize. So with the only sure losers being the ones that started this whole mess the chances of things ending cleanly are gone for good.

Also, the troop numbers from the "surge" in Iraq are now going to be reduced to pre-surge levels. The program wasn't effective according to officials in Iraq but the military claims it was; the administration gains from this ploy. By reducing the troop levels now there is effectively no nominal change in troop levels yet it looks like the administration is actually listening to reason and reducing the troops in a withdraw plan. The cynical part of me wonders if the surge was designed to never succeed at all but rather to allow a win to be claimed followed by a reduction in troops, filling both sides of the chart for voter approval.

Take your artificial win if you must Mr. President but grow up and stop throwing our soldiers into a cruel situation to die just to appease your stupidity.

Critical Mass

Brief musings on Critical Mass.

I find it interesting that at least 3 arrestees have been removed from the Public Information Report.
Also of interest is the fact that only one victim is cited and one police victim. Both victims of Disorderly Conduct. Yet several people were arrested on weapons offenses. Also, only one witness.
The most common charge was Rioting.
Police action for the time being is further investigation.

Not trying to make a point, just thinking out loud but how does an alledged riot get only one person's attention, harm only two people, and result in records of exactly who the police were attempting to arrest that supposedly sparked this riot being completely incomplete?

Mark Zuckerberg Or: How I Learned to Stop Caring and Not Love the Facebook.

What I am going to attempt to brief describe are present problems with Facebook, and how this social networking site is flawed to the extent of becoming unusable for small-town college students.
Disclaimer, any evidence given is based on my own experiences, your life may vary, satisfaction not guaranteed.

Let's take what we know, facebook is a social networking site that was originally a college exclusive and then opened to the wider population. It is in a direct compitetion with friendster, Hi5, myspace, and other "general use" social networks.

All of these general use social networks use the basic idea of a profile page. A user is free to modify large amounts of this profile page but in the end the same goal is for them to convey fairly basic ideas about a person. They also all offer varying degrees of "privacy". More on these ideas later.

So here is the main point, from it's original use for small-town college students, facebook has lost usability. River Falls is a small town, it is far enough away from the Twin Cities that you can not simply take metro transit in for social happenings. With respect to this the opening of facebook to the larger populous, the addition of global groups, and the back-lash to the news feed have all had horrible effects on building a facebook campus community.

Opening facebook has had the affect of raising security concerns while at the same time alienating the previous core-user base, the college student.

Global groups have resulted in lowered membership in local groups, this directly effects small campuses where members of a local group would recognize other people from the same group, now with it being common for groups to be over several hundred members such an event is rare if not outright impossible.

There was tremendous backlash to the addition of the facebook newsfeed. Because of the factor of the newsfeed itself not providing aggregation for all of one's friends' changes and the backlash which resulted in many users disabling the newsreeder from ever displaying an update in addition to limiting profile access even more the present state of facebook is created.

Presently facebook is a collection of profiles linked through real life acquaintances and online groups. Profiles are generally banned to anyone that is not a friend of the profile and thus losses it's usefulness. Your friends already know the info in your profile, it's pointless. The security options have resulted in greatly reduced usability for the whole of facebook. The online groups are limited discussion areas where people across the globe can interact. Unfortunately, you will not go out and party tonight with someone in Detroit unless you are already in Detroit.

Because of these global tie-ins, facebook has become a social network that promotes a pseudo-social user base. The users are encouraged to trade ideas across the globe while overlooking their current location and the community suffers.

I don't think there is anyway to reclaim facebook for the campus community. I don't think facebook is in anyway more special or unquie than myspace or vox, or friendster, or hi5. I don't think I have much use for facebook anymore. I had some great times with it two years ago when it was a campus only thing, but it feels my time with Facebook is past and nothing will bring it back.