"users (sorry, people)"
Products!
Ex-Googler, Facebook COO and mouthpiece Sheryl Sandberg claimed this week that some users (sorry, people) actually think that Mark Zuckerberg's free-content ad network is the internet. This shocking assertion came as Zuck's Number Two defended a bullshit report from consultancy firm Deloitte, which claimed that Facebook's …
Dey is be famous! This means one day dey will be rich!
QED
If there was any doubt that most people utter morons, the Internet has dispelled that doubt. Most of the knowledge of the human race is now available at our fingertips and yet people are still incredibly, incredibly stupid.
Maybe in another generation the Internet might help change all that. Sometime after WW3 I think.
Get out of here, gramps!
This one I repost regularly, it's from October 11, 1994 (Newsgroups: comp.society.folklore, Subject: Re: Folklore and stories re: excessively clueless for-profit users). I wonder whether facebook gets complains about various content on the 'net from obsessive-compulsive content correctors?
"One guy posted a MAKE.MONEY.FAST slime to a few groups, and I sent a message to his postmaster, and attached a curtosey copy to the poster. I get a message back a few hours later, with NO quoted material in it, systematically responding to everything I wrote. He (she?) said that if I reported it to his postmaster, he thought it was very unfair. He was a newbie and didn't know, blah blah blah. Then he asks for the address of his postmaster, so I give it to him. Not long after that, I get _another_ message saying that I shouldn't expect to keep my account for very long because he (she?) reported "my abusive attitude and harrasment" to his service's support. (AOL) I sent another reply back explaining the fine points of the net. I don't know if he ever responded to that; I set slocal up to kill his messages."
I'm not surprised eBay is losing money, its website has turned into a bloated POS. From constantly showing spurious "Sorry, can't perform that action", to the ongoing attempt to turn it into a "Shopping Destination".
For example, changing the "Saved Searches" link into "Searches you follow". WTF? Saved searches = searches that I saved. What the hell does it mean to "follow" a search? There are a million similar tweaks that don't add any functionality and just obfuscate the true meaning, all in the name of making it more "social". They should concentrate on making the best tat-selling site instead of trying to compete with the likes of Amazon.
/rant over
That's how I've been calling Facebook for years. It was designed to be exactly this. There was nothing innovative in FB, just you got it in a single place with a dummies-oriented interface. In turn, it allowed its users to easily gather all the information they needed about products (aka Facebook 'people') without having to correlate them from different sources. FB was successful because of this. People who had troubles to use the different services available on the Internet, found FB, the Microsoft Works of the Internet, a simpler solution designed for their low skill level. From Zuckerberg perspective, it was a winning move. He's a dummy enough to understand what dummies want. Sometimes being clever doesn't help you to go far, you easily forget a lot of people aren't.
Of course they think FB is the net.
We all surely have had my experience of staff calling me to say that "The internet/email is broken" and found that the whole machine was blue screened/frozen/dead. It's the same thing.
And needless to say they've never asked the person on the next desk if they had the same problem.
Most of the users (sorry, idiots) that I deal with use Google to get to Facebook. To them, Google IS the Internet. Facebook is a part of Google.. err.. sorry, Internet. So when Google crashes, the Internet is down. When Facebook crashes, Google is down. It took me awhile to learn the lingo. Like the big box isn't the computer, it's the hard drive. The screen isn't the monitor, it's the computer.
And no amount of correcting their nomenclature will change them. What's really scary is that this is what they will teach their children. We're on the long (well, maybe not so long) slippery slope to hell.
Maybe once. Today for many Google is the home page, FB is the Internet. On phones, where the seasrch engine is embeded and not so visible, FB is "the Internet" even more.
The problem for Google is that you enter "Google" (the search engine") and then get out to land somewhere else, and for the "average social product" that's FB - where he or she stays much longer.
That's why Google tried its Google+, etc - to retain p(roducts)eople inside its network when it can track them. Ok, GMail and YouTube allow for a lot of tracking, but not that kind of DPI - Deep People Inspection - that FB allows.
Sure, if Google doesn't work on their PC to access FB they think "the connection to the Internet is broken", than they see that FB works on the phone and they still think the "Internet works". If Google works but they can't access FB, than the Internet is really broken... especially since they "can't do nothing".
I've always pointed out that the "Internet" is not the "WWW" nor other types of applications or protocols running OVER it. But whenever I say the "Internet" is just a trasnport layer designed to shuffle TCP/IP packets around people stare at me as if I'm a green alien just arrived.
That also explains the overuse of HTTP as a transport protocol instead of TCP/IP itself, and all the silly ideas to try to overcome the limits of the former and make it as useful as the latter (like WebSocket and other stupid, useless technologies). But that's a lost fight...
"People will walk into phone stores and say 'I want Facebook'. People actually confuse Facebook and the internet in some places."
Or they are obsessed with Facebook, and actually only care if the phone can use Facebook, not any other web site (or the rest of the internet for that matter.)