All good things must end?
Posted By Ing on July 1, 2010
A couple of changes to ol’ Blog Ing…
All the links that go someplace other than my domain and website are now in Sidebar #2 on the far right. And the Pandora widget, which used to occupy that space, is no more.
It’s a bit like the end of an era. Things is different all over.
I don’t listen to Pandora nearly as much as I used to, the widget has been making my site slow to load, and I’m not so sure I want to recommend it to everybody anymore. (Besides, who am I kidding with this recommendation thing? Like I’m some arbiter of internet applications?)
And then there’s the Facebook integration. See, I already hate Facebook. It’s a giant time suck (I have time management issues as it is), I only really communicated with people I can talk to outside FB to begin with, and the whole Facebook enterprise now exists so that third and fourth parties can access and profit from my information.
Suddenly Pandora, and who knows how many other sites in the future, have access to everything I’ve ever put into Facebook. (Not much comparatively, cause I’m paranoid like that, but still…)
But I can see what my Facebook friends are listening to! They can recommend music to me, and I can share mine with them! If I don’t participate, I’m missing out!
Uh, no.
Of all my Facebook friends (the aforementioned people I already was connected to before FB came along), exactly two like anything near the same type of music as me. Of those two, only one is on Pandora. And that one person rarely actually uses either Pandora or Facebook, as far as I can tell.
So, to recap…
Annoyance factor: huge.
Benefit: none.
And there’s also that thing where Pandora plays audio and video ads in the music stream now. I understand that they need the $$ to keep the music flowing. I appreciate the good times and all the great music. But a little bit of my soul dies every time I hear an ad instead of the music.
But hey, if I could make bank with it, I’d have ads on Blog Ing in a heartbeat.
These days, it’s like that almost everywhere on the internets.
Sad.
It’s a shame about Facebook. The way the casually treat our privacy as their property, and hide it behind a confusing barrage of privacy “options,” is disturbing. Google is almost as bad. That’s really too bad about Pandora, too. I have always loved the concept, but I never really have a chance to listen to them. I can’t access streaming content at work, and I can’t really play my favorite music at home due to the little ones. And now I probably will never use them again. I hate advertising so much. It’s exactly why I never listen to the radio. I have to seriously consider whether Facebook is worth it.
I still listen to Pandora a bit, though not nearly as much as I used to. I can still get it to play the types of music I want and occasionally discover cool new stuff, so that keeps me coming back even though the ads suck a lot of joy out of it.
Facebook gives me the creeps. I already didn’t like the place, but what really torched me was when they activated their Open Graph, and you had to manually opt out of sharing with their first 5 web partners. I haven’t deleted my whole account (yet), but I haven’t been back in months, and I don’t intend to.
I read a quote on a tech blog or article somewhere that pretty much sums it up. Basically, the guy pointed out that free social networks inevitably tilt toward exploiting their members, because unlike other situations, where some sort of product changes hands — money, credit, access fees, etc. — in a place like Facebook, *you* are the product.