Friday, March 26, 2010

improvements needed on facebook (or whatever replaces it)

  • Allow me to filter out the Virtual World games
  • I want to know how you are doing. I don't care about your virtual farm or mafia world.

  • As soon as you add a friend, you should be prompted for the name of a group.
  • Everyone is not the same sort of friend. "Friends" belong to different interest and social groups. I like hearing about all my facebook friends. I don't need to remind those in California to go to our town meeting. There are friends to whom I'd like to chat about a Tim Burton-esque moment, and many facebook "friends" whom I would not want to bother with that stuff.

    Thus whatever replaces facebook will be something with a natural easy interface for adding friends to appropriate groups, and easily sending messages to groups. Some "friends" would be in several groups, of course.

    I should be able to sort them into privately decided on groups. I should also be able to define public names for groups into which my "friends" can sort themselves. All of this should be extremely easy to do and not require me to read directions as to how to do it. It must be intuitive.

    When you "confirm" someone as a friend, you should get a popup asking what publicly-defined groups you'd like to be in. For example:

    • Margie's Movie and TV Discussions
    • Guinea Pig willing to read Story Drafts
    • Tell me about the kids. Photos please.
    • All the minutiae about your day, really.
    • Issues relating to our town's public schools
    • People who might buy my sculptures

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Democracy makes 49% mad

All this talk of "the people are against this" and this bill is being "shoved down our throats" ignores the fact that there was an election, and a majority of the people voted for the Democrats. Health Care reform was a major platform under which the Democrats campaigned. We got what the majority voted for. That's how democracy works. When I compare expenditure on Health Care to that on a bloody unnecessary war entered into by our previous, Republican, Administration, I'd say the Democrats are wiser at spending our money, and lives.