ugh. this new "facebook for iphone" shit is just horrific. it was bad enough losing 50% of the page to ads, now we just lost another 25% to a sneaky ploy by facebook to get pages to prominently display likes as ads along the sides.

i think this is sort of facebook admitting that people don't actually click on likes, meaning the medium really isn't useful to advertisers, meaning their entire reason to exist is up in the air. the increasingly aggressive nature of facebook advertising is a function of the inefficacy of advertising on social media. but, facebook seems to be run by legitimate Corporate Idiots, and it's consequently likely to get worse. i do predict that the ads are going to be what turns facebook into a ghost site in the end. if it's not already halfway there.

i like the rss capabilities. i repeat that it was the rss, not the people, that dragged me in - and late at that, not until 2010. and, so long as "content generators" (which in my case mostly means show promoters in the detroit/windsor area) continue to use facebook, i'll continue to use it as well. the corollary of that is that so long as people go looking for these sorts of sites, i feel i should maintain it.

but, cutting me down to 25% of the screen for my actual content is too much. to me, that makes the site unusable. i'm going to be converting this page (and the rest of my facebook pages, too) into an rss dump over the next few weeks, by emulating the timeline page at my appspot site.

there's another benefit to getting off these scripted sites, which is that they badly waste hardware resources. i shouldn't need 500 mb of ram to fully load this page back to 1981. it can be easily reproduced with an html table and an iframe in a way that could be loaded easily on a 386.

i'm going to leave the rss dump because people are going to keep checking the site for these sorts of things for the near future, but also because facebook could still turn things around. but, for right now, the future of facebook seems to be a dead zone of advertising scripts, where corporate servers communicate to each other across a barren landscape.

don't look for a replacement, either. the era of a centralized internet was thankfully short lived. the initial nature of the internet as decentralized and targeted to specific interests seems to be reasserting itself. that's something to be excited about.

for me, as a musician, that means the replacement ought to be something like spotify. it's not clear yet which network is going to win out. but note that there's a paywall there, which means i'm not interested. soundcloud is awful. so, i'd like to see bandcamp increase it's networking aspect. however it stabilizes, that's where the future is. and, likewise, expect a gamer network and a fashion network and a ...

the model to look towards is something like youtube, which will probably not be supplanted as the video networking site (unless it fucks up like facebook has). in the end, i think google did get it right, but not the way it meant to.

so, i'm not signing off, but i'm mutating outwards; i'm realizing this host is dead, discarding the exoskeleton and growing into a new one.