How to Fix Facebook?

How to Fix Facebook? We Asked 9 Experts
The New York Times

Technologists, academics, politicians and journalists suggested ways to improve Facebook — as a product, a company or both. Read the full story

Fixing Facebook is easy: We all decide that a social network service is something that we're willing to pay for.

When we are the customers, the company will care about our needs. As long as we aren't the one paying the bills, why would we expect the company to care about our needs?

The fact that you may be thinking that this is not an easy solution is exactly the problem. The problem isn’t Facebook. The problem is us.

Customer versus user

I really appreciate Reeder and Feedbin because I know I can leave them at any time and, when I come back, they’ll still be in the same state. They’ll still know what I’ve read and what I haven’t. They’ll show me things in order instead of via some “top stories” silliness.

The thing is, I shouldn’t appreciate those things. That should be expected. These things were mastered decades ago. Yet they are beyond Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google+.

Of course, the biggest difference is that I am a Reeder customer and a Feedbin customer. I pay them. While I use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google+; I don’t pay them. They won’t even let me.

Classic Doctor Who on Amazon Instant Video

I have edited my “Classic Doctor Who on Netflix and iTunes” article with a separate list of episodes available on Amazon Instant Video. It looks like they have five serials that aren’t available elsewhere.

The trouble with online conversations

Twitter, Facebook, G+, blog comments, web forums, &c. None of them seem able to handle one very important thing that NNTP clients did since the 1980s: Keep track of what I’ve read & what I haven’t.

The Twitter iOS client does a decent job of remembering my position in its time stream. That position doesn’t sync between my iPhone, my iPad, & the web site, though. Twitter is also not a great medium for conversation in many other ways, though.

Some web forums make an attempt at it, but I haven’t seen one that does it well. Although it has been a while since I was keeping up with forums.

Classic Doctor Who on Netflix and iTunes

A little project I finished up today. I tried to find all the classic Doctor Who serials available through Netflix (streaming) and iTunes and sort them in chronological order.

Classic Doctor Who serials on Netflix and iTunes

The file is in CSV format, which any spreadsheet app—like Numbers or OpenOffice† or Excel—ought to be able to open. (If it matters, the character encoding is UTF-8.) It has the...

• Number of the serial
• The title
• Which Doctor it features (this is blank for multiple Doctor episodes)
• Whether it is available through Netflix or iTunes (or both)
• What story arc it is a part of
• And any notes I thought to make about it

Note that, in general, you don’t really need to watch them in chronological order. Although, I think it is still nice to know the order. The story arcs are probably best to watch in order, though.

You might think that it would be in Netflix’s, iTunes’, and the BBC’s interest to make this kind of information easily available and up-to-date. Instead, all you can do—as far as I can tell—with Netflix or iTunes is search for “Doctor Who”, pick the classic serials out of the results, and cross-reference the titles against Wikipedia or another list of the serials. The BBC seems uninterested in letting you know that these are available via Netflix or iTunes much less giving you any guidance about this subset.

I didn’t include Amazon streaming since I’m not set up to use it yet. There are some episodes on Facebook, but I haven’t gotten that working yet. If there are any other ways to stream classic Doctor Who or purchase them as downloads in the US, I’d be interested.

†Is OpenOffice still the open source “office suite” of choice?

Update (31 March 2013): I put together a list of episodes available on Amazon Instant Video. Tomb of the Cybermen, Robots of Death, Horror of Fang Rock, Earthshock, and Vengeance of Varos appear to only be available through Amazon. (I didn’t recheck the Netflix and iTunes episodes, so what’s available there may have changed.)

Addicting games & computer engineering

Cracked.com has an article on 5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted. I think this is a bit sensationalistic, but some interesting things to consider.

Now this may seem completely unrelated... From Google’s blog, Helping computers understand language:

An irony of computer science is that tasks humans struggle with can be performed easily by computer programs, but tasks humans can perform effortlessly remain difficult for computers.

I wouldn’t call this “irony”. Rather, I think I’d call it the fundamental truth of computer engineering. Our task as engineers is to enable human and computer to work together. The computer should be doing the parts of the task that computers are good at, and the human should be doing the parts of the task that humans are good at.

The thing that is odd to me: It seems like a lot of games are getting people to do exactly the sorts of tasks that I’ve dedicated my professional life to automating so that people don’t have to.