Also – the Internet in one word: “Meow”
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The Internet
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I’m embarrassed to say this was an actual string of thoughts that I had a few days ago when I couldn’t log in to Facebook.
Summarizing a century of “Awwwwww”.
This is just another proof that no amount of disk space would ever be enough for mankind.
Is anyone else here sick of getting promoted posts on their Facebook feed, instead of getting authentic content posted by friends and pages that you like?
Not too long ago, Facebook adopted this policy that resulted in showing you only a fraction of the content your friends post. A lot of content – content which may have interested you – is missing from your feed.
Speaking as a Facebook user, it’s a bummer because I may be missing interesting content and updates that my friends are posting.
And speaking as a Facebook page owner, it’s a bummer because only a fraction of the people who like my Facebook page gets to actually see each of my posts.
Instead, I’m getting promoted content shoved to the top of my feed (as a user), and being constantly asked for money to promote my posts (as a user and a page owner).
Facebook obviously made this change because they expect that people and pages will pay them to promote their contents. Now look, it’s totally fine that Facebook wants to increase their earnings, and it’s also OK to allow users to promote posts for money (to an extent). But for a social network, screening content from your users is… well… stupid.
That’s my opinion. What do YOU think? Let me know in the comments.
The Internet Map (http://internet-map.net/) is a cool new website which maps the top 350,000 sites on the internet by similarity and popularity. According to Gizmodo, ”each site is represented by a circle whose size depends on the amount of traffic, and the space between each one is determined by the frequency with which users jump from one to another.” Furthermore, websites are clustered together according to their content. Quoting Ruslan Enikeev, the site’s developer:
As one might have expected, the largest clusters are formed by national websites, i.e. sites belonging to one country. For the sake of convenience, all websites relative to a certain country carry the same color. For instance, the red zone at the top corresponds to Russian segment of the net, the yellow one on the left stands for the Chinese segment, the purple one on the right is Japanese, the large light-blue central one is the American segment, etc.
Importantly, clusters on the map are semantically charged, i.e. they join websites together according to their content. For example, a vast porno cluster can be seen between Brazil and Japan as well as a host of minor clusters uniting websites of the same field or similar purposes.
Being a typical Generation-Y narcissist, I immediately rushed to check where C-Section Comics is located. Here are some photos (click each photo for a larger image):
C-Section Comics is a relatively small planet, orbiting the gas giant Reddit (that’s the giant light blue planet left of us).
Zooming out, we could see that we are located in a cluster which (as far as I can tell) contains mainly geeky image based sites. Geekologie and Dorkly are geek blogs (lots of tech and gadget related stuff), while Threadless.com is a “design a T-shirt” site which contains lots of geek designs.
Zooming out farther, we are now viewing a cluster which mainly consists American image based sites. 9GAG, Reddit, Tumblr, Imgur, Flickr, etc. (I’m not really sure what “American” means here – 9GAG for example is based in Hong Kong. I assume ”American” indicates where the majority of the website’s crowd comes from).
You can explore the map yourself and find where your favorite sites are located by visiting http://internet-map.net/
And if you find any interesting insights, please share them with the rest of the class.