You’re probably already aware that Facebook severely limits user participation but it can a lot worse: it can turn into a digital prison.
That’s right, people, Facebook isn’t as friendly or “cool” as they claim to be.
On the one hand, the Facebook service invites you to create a profil, build up pages and join groups but what happens if you’re asking to connect with too many friends or post several [non-spam] messages in group boards, in a short period of time? Well, you get warned, which restrains from participating in “your community” furthermore until they decide you’ve “learned your lesson”. Then, if you wish to exchange information actively again, you can get your account deactivated.
Now, losing your account at Facebook means that you can never log back in again with your email address of contact data, which forces you to forge an alternative identity to connect back with your “friends” and “groups”.
That’s very scary.
Why?
Because Facebook has all the tools in place to repress free speech and freedom to associate.
Right now, if you post between 10 and 20 messages in various groups you’re a member of, you’re likely to get warned.
If you’re actively campaigning for a cause, it’s NORMAL to post between 10 and 20 message on various like-minded group boards but for Facebook, that’s seen as ABUSE and their “monitoring system” locks up your account, akin to a digital prison.
And the scariest part is that Facebook can lower the “abuse and threat” threshold to just a few message a day, if that suits them. So if a civil emergency were to pop-up and you’d want to warn everyone of soemthing big coming their way, Facebook would NOT be the place to do it because they track and penalize those who use their system too “actively”.
Nobody knows for sure how the decision to warn a user happens.
Like all such “threat detection management systems”, the “recipe” to pinpoint the “abusers” is private and therefore, cofnidential. However, countless users have been warned and deactivate so their experience speaks volumes about the real consequences of using Facebook too much — even though nobody know exactly how much is “too much”.
For all these reasons and others, you need to think up alternative ways to connect with “your community” that doesn’t involve going through Facebook.
It’s easy for you to join and use Facebook, that’s a given but it’s a dangerous proposition because the moment you’ll need to communicate actively with the people who matter to you, like in a crisis, that digital “control matrix” might restrict you from doing so, if it’s in their interest to do so.
Since a growing number of serious publications are identifying Facebook as a CIA front, everyone should be very concerned about this huge digital holding ground which can morph into a prison, in the blink of an eye.
If you’re under the impression Facebook is a “cool” place to hang, think again.
Every single thing you do on Facebook is stored for near-immediate analysis and archived indefinitely without the right, for you, to know exactly what those archives hold, regarding your historical use of their “service”.
Orson Well’s Big Brother, in his book “1984“, was childsplay compared to the level of mostly cloaked tyranny Facebook brings about.
Each time you post a message, even a mere blurb or reply, you’re scrutinized and “evaluated” by computer algorithms with a wide set of limitations regarding what you can say, how many times you can say it and of course, who you’re allowed to say it to.
Facebook is nothing short of a control grid.
If you want to stay free, you better find alternative ways to gather online with likeminded people because Facebook, despite its friendly facade, is a huge spying system where nothing is left unchecked.
As soon as you want to participate in many groups, Facebook quickly tags you as an abuser.
Imagine if you had anything of significant importance to tell the entire world — Facebook would systematically prevent you from saying it to more than roughly 5 or 10 “groups” and would probably go as far as cut off your account because your side of the story is deemed “abusive use of their service” even though you’re using the network in a perfectly legitimate way.
If you want to build bridges which can’t be cut off by Facebook, network elsewhere, period.
You may think Facebook is just a joke but it’s not. It’s meant to isolate you within the little (or big) group of “friends” you’ve managed to build up and the system presents everyone else as a potential threat to your privacy while they’re spying on you, all the time. Isn’t that utterly ironic?
Whatever you post on Facebook, keep in mind that it’ll go through some artificial intelligence system and everything you say there can and will be held against you, when whoever has access to that data think it’s time to make a move on you.
Please people, be very careful with Facebook, it’s way more dangerous than it looks.
Wether you’re looking to promote your own customized clothing store, your affiliate network or best of all, your own online web services store, you need to have as much visibility as possible.
One of the many ways you can get visible in front of lots of targeted people is to use your Facebook account to create a “page” where other Facebook members can become fans.
Just point your browser to http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php and follow the easy instructions from there.
Any average web user can create Facebook pages, it’s nothing you should be afraid of, from a technical standpoint.
You may create as many pages as you desire but having fewer of them will leave you more time to develop them to their full potential. There are different options for pages and you can tweak them in such a way that you could be the only one with a permission to post messages but that’s not going to get the crowds excited so consider that, for all useful purposes, pages are “small social networking circles” within the entire Facebook system.
While your main Facebook account might be a natural gathering ground for your friends, the pages you create will ideally target a given theme and as such, Facebook members from all over the world will have the opportunity to become fans for them without actually becoming your “friend”.
Most Facebook members who operate a small company, wether it’s full or part-time, will consider creating a Facebook page for it. That way, they’ll be able to promote without cluttering their main account’s message stream with pitches like “I sell the best vegeterian pizza in town so get me to prepare a bunch of them for your next office party” which the “friend circle” might feel is a bit awkward. Within the context of a page, however, it’s perfect!
Facebook provides extensive instructions for pages but you either “get it” or you don’t. If you don’t, pay somebody else to make you shine instead of doing things halfway and being stuck with no fans after several months of “operation”.
Pages in Facebook are free but you’ll probably have to spend some time building your pages up.
So go ahead and promote anything you need more people to know about!
There used to be a time when forums were “it” and now, they’re barely getting any action, at all.
What happened?
I’ll tell you what happened: social networking.
Consider the following open source forum scripts, for PHP / MySQL:
…and many others.
These forums represent the finest codesets for forums and yet, even though web publishers release a steady stream of forums using these technologies, people don’t care, anymore.
The average web user is so caught up in social networking, immersive online gaming and shopping at ebay that saving time to exchange with other people within a forum has become awkward. In just a few years, web forums have gone from “top of the mountain” to “barely visible”.
Web publishers are the very first to notice this as it’s becoming virtually impossible to launch new forums unless sizaeble traffic can be diverted there for long periods of time while new posts are being artificially seeded daily, for several months. Other than that, even well thought up forums will wither and die, with one (1) member [the admin] and tens of “spam commenters” who registered with a “@mail.ru” email account but never confirmed their membership, past that.
Since open source or commercial forums seem incapable of integrating serious social networking features (and looks), people who used to post in forums will just drift away, towards other venues which center more of the action around them instead of around the community (or the “cause”).
People like to look at themselves in mirrors and social networking is akin to that.
Forums, however, focus on resolving issues, debating and sharing information instead of valuing, for instance, the name a particular individual gave to his new puppy (or some other mundane and generally worthless rant).
Without saying that forums always featured top-notch content, at least there was some kind of “moderator” oversight. That’s all but gone with social networks so even though people have an open mic to their world (and “the” world), they’re not always coming off as intelligent, interesting or engaging. In fact, most of the social networking going on is basically digital rubbish which fades fast, without anybody actually noticing it.
Is social networking, as a technological system and social phenomena, a sort of “dumbing down” process, for the web? I wouldn’t go that far because bright people are still online and kicking but overall, social networking tends to isolate people within their groups whereas forums provide large swaths of information to all members (and generally, all visitors).
Perhaps forums will bounce back and evolve into something even more powerful than social networks but for the time being, forums are losing the battle.
Dear Visitor,
With over 20 year of hands-on experience in computer sciences, over 10 years as a web developer and domain name expert, I've learned a few things about how to make serious money, online.
In this blog, you'll see how you too can multiply your revenue with a rock-solid, reliable and easy to implement web services reseller storefront.
Having your own online store makes sense.
Thanks for taking the time to envision a richer, happier you.
