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William Shatner reviews Facebook Mentions
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- freakyterrorist 12y agoI can't believe Facebook would force celebrities to follow other celebrities, It seems like their contempt for users is universal regardless of how important you may be.
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- alttab 12y agoAnother way to put it is Facebook knows getting you to click a couple of buttons to "get started" is something a very very high percentage of people will do to interact with facebook, especially if they've already gone through the friction of downloading the app.
- Alupis 12y agoExcept in this case, it prompted Shatner to leave a soso-to-negative review of the app and service.
- MasterScrat 12y agoExactly. If there's one app where they shouldn't uselessly annoy users just to boost their statistics, it's in the app targeted at influencers.
- Jedd 12y agoBeing important != being a celebrity.
- freakyterrorist 12y agoCelebrities are important to Facebook, enough so in fact that they made an entire app for them.
- Jedd 12y agoA small part of Facebook is dedicated to celebrities -- the bulk of it is dedicated to (people like) me. QED ... :)
- justbaker 12y agoCelebrities are important?
- beartime 12y agoNot many other users of this app feel this way
- adamnemecek 12y agoRight, which is why it's titled "William Shatner reviews Facebook Mentions".
- oh_sigh 12y agoIt would be titled the same even if a lot of other users felt that way.
- JacobAldridge 12y agoI wonder if the George Takei suggestion was intelligent situational awareness ... or if everyone has him as the first suggestion because he's basically the platonic form of a Facebook celebrity?
- ck2 12y agoIf you are not aware, Shatner doesn't like Takei.
- qbrass 12y agoIf it wasn't a Facebook app, I wouldn't expect it to know that.
- Aqueous 12y agoAnd Takei doesn't like Shatner.
- Udo 12y agoI didn't know that, so I dug around for the cause. From a recent NYP article: Takei married his husband in 2008 and Shatner became enraged when he claimed he wasn’t invited. He ranted against Takei in an online interview. [...] Shatner called Takei’s wedding a publicity stunt and hypothesized that their feud stemmed from Takei’s unwillingness to playing second fiddle to Shatner on “Star Trek.” It seems to be mostly based on petty, even comical stuff like this. This may sound paradoxical, but as someone who always had a lot of respect for both of them, this is disappointing and a bit of a relief at the same time.
- pessimizer 12y agoThat wasn't the cause. According to Takei, they didn't get along even during Star Trek. "Petty, comical stuff" is what the media narrative consists of because they're two amusing personalities, and we want to be amused by them. Also they're two old men who wouldn't have spoken for the last 50 years if it weren't for an avalanche of fan-cash that has forced them into continued contact and some civility.
- personjerry 12y agoFacebook Mentions seems like an ill-conceived way of making a move against Twitter.
- higherpurpose 12y agoFacebook has probably had a less than 10 percent success rate with product launches in the past few years.
- joshmlewis 12y ago> I’m already following those who I want to follow - why insist I follow that short list of others? Money. Edit: If you think about it, it's a poorly implemented solution to some problem. What was the problem?
- bignaj 12y agoI remember back in 2005-6 when I thought that News Feed, Events and other stuff introduced to Facebook was a bunch of cluttered junk. If I could have seen into the future then... the horror, the horror!
- batiudrami 12y agoEvents is pretty much the only thing Facebook has going for it now.
- retroencabulato 12y agoEven Facebook events now seem tacky for anything other than massive events in my social circles.
- darrenf15e 12y agofb paid him
- skizm 12y agoWilliam Shatner is 83. That is amazing to me. I hope I'm that with it and well put together if I make it to 83. I suppose being worth $100 million doesn't hurt, but it still gives me some hope.
- bambax 12y ago> William Shatner is 83 Median age for FB users, it seems.
- chmars 12y agoDo we know that William Shatnet wrote the text himself? It seems unlikely …
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- sanswork 12y agoWhy? He occasionally gets into flame wars on reddit. Maintaining a blog doesn't seem that unlikely.
- easytiger 12y agoSaw him on stage about a year ago and he was the most lucid and sensible person there (of the 5 other captains). Avery Brooks certainly was not with it at all.
- runn1ng 12y agoHm. I would guess Patrick Stewart would be more lucid and sensible, since he is still an active actor.
- toyg 12y agoBecause actors are famous for being "lucid and sensible"...? (This is not a dig at Sir Stewart, I'm just pointing out that the two concepts "working actor" and "lucid/sensible person" are not necessarily linked -- as demonstrated by Brando, Depardieu etc.)
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- HBSisBS 12y agoThings against Facebook rarely fail to rise to the top of HN. Anything not favoring Facebook gets up here quickly. Why am I surprised.
- kyrra 12y agoThere are a lot of Facebook employees on HN, just like there are a lot of Google employees here. Those employees will do some level of astroturfing. Unless HN prevents us from voting on topics where there is a conflict of interest, it's hard to keep the bias out.
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- Kiro 12y agoWhy would employees vote up negative articles? I think you misread what HBSisBS said.
- bitJericho 12y agoEmployees vote up anything related to their employer.
- r00fus 12y agoFacebook has made a lot of questionable or incite-ful moves lately (Fwd.us, Slingshot, many acquisitions without a coherent vision) while it's quality and usefulness to many has become of marginal importance. This isn't 2009/2010, where Iranians and Tunisians were using FB to coordinate peaceful protests. Instead, fear of the encroaching security-industrial-complex revealed by Snowden has people concerned about posting stuff to FB.
- HBSisBS 12y agoFwd.us is questionable? I'd like to know a solid reason other than "get foreign workers bs". Also note that fwd.us has nothing to do with Facebook. Its a personal initiative.
- moron4hire 12y agoAre new users joining Facebook? I hear from more and more people that either they have left or "wish [they] could", if it weren't for "everyone" with which they wish to stay in contact[1]. I myself deactivated my account 6 months ago. The only time I regret it is after I've been drinking and want to troll someone. So actually all around a good thing. Are new people actually, really, honestly joining Facebook? I know the "delta new accounts" number is positive, but do they represent real people, rather than just spam bots? I just have this feeling that, given a certain plateauing of new users, there comes an associated stagnation of follow-actions. No, I certainly don't have data to this issue, but I know that I personally only spend effort following people when A) I first join a site, or B) I think there is a good chance the person will follow me back[2]. So, for your everyday Joe-blow user who has is more than a month old, it seems like they are either already following William Shatner or never will. My own observations in blogging have been that engagement with users is highly dependent on novelty. You either grind out finding new followers who haven't experienced your content yet, or you post radically new things all of the time--which could backfire and alienate your established followership, though honestly by that point they are probably ignoring your posts. Either way, you write off anyone who has been following you for more than 6 months. 90% of the time, that person is unretrievable. I guess I just see followers as a limited, unsustainable resource, sort of akin to oil, except much easier to deplete. But it seems like Facebook, et. al., are banking on it being more like solar. IDK, I've seen reports saying FB has 1.3 billion users. There are only 7 billion people in the world. Do I really believe FB has almost 20% of the entire world's population? Do I really believe they could get more? [1] Apparently "everyone" doesn't know how to use email or a telephone or text messaging. [2] Incidentally, a policy that works for about 50% of cases. And for 90% of people, they will be unfollowed within a week, regardless of whether or not they follow me back. I don't need their crappy animated GIFs of Sherlock or Dr. Who clogging up my dashboard.
- morgante 12y ago> Are new users joining Facebook? Yes. > I guess I just see followers as a limited, unsustainable resource, sort of akin to oil, except much easier to deplete New people are born every minute. Facebook has reached a massive scale, at which scale nearly everyone in the world has heard about it and will join at some point. Also, FB really isn't built around following the way Twitter is. If all you did with Facebook was interact with your friends, that'd be just fine (since they can always inject business ads into that stream).
- nsxwolf 12y agoThere's an Internet for celebrities and an Internet for the rest of us. Facebook has this. Wikipedia has notability requirements. Twitter has verified accounts, which only celebrities can have because no one gives a shit if your account is real or not. The Hacker's Manifesto is a bit turned on its head.
- flycaliguy 12y agoThat is just the difference between a producer and a consumer. These sites need content for the consumers so they provide services to the producers. It's completely uncontroversial if you ask me. I can't comment on Wikipedia.
- edmccard 12y ago>Twitter has verified accounts... Which is something else that William Shatner has strong opinions about: http://mashable.com/2014/06/24/william-shatner-twitter-verified/ http://mashable.com/2014/06/24/william-shatner-twitter-verif...
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- ecocentrik 12y agoThe Internet for television and film celebrities is a walled echo chamber by design. The tools written for them are probably not useful or necessary for anyone not interacting under the same volume conditions with the same level of technical proficiency. I expect social apps for celebrities to interact with thier audience typically have: a simplified/focused interface, filters for negative comments and spam, filters to resort the most "pr friendly" content to the top, an enhanced search interface to quickly filter content according to their current promotional/contractual obligations (allow easily responding to a comment about new movie x, when most of the comments are about 20 year old movie y), ml tools to track diehard fans, some kind of secondary user interface for thier assistant or PR manager to play puppet master or perform additional filtering and prepping... In the end, these entertainers are paying for their "enhanced access" and tools by using them to promote the services that are building tools for them. Hence, Cap'n TJ Hooker's tumblr post about a fb service.
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- coldtea 12y agoIs that really Shatner writing that? The level of technical understanding, including jargon (even trivial and casual to us, like "header image"), and familiarity with posting (custom screenshots, etc), is phenomenal for a celebrity, and at that age! That's Denny Crane level cool!
- elmuchoprez 12y agoI saw his one-man show when it came to town about a year ago. After watching him alone on stage for 90 minutes, I have no doubt that he is still "with it" enough to not only comprehend modern tech (if that's what we're calling Facebook), but to provide this level of insight and understanding.
- hrrsn 12y agoDenny Crane? Denny Crane!
- snorkel 12y ago... and was I ... the only one ... reading it to myself in the Shatner voice???
- pimlottc 12y agoI thought this was going to be a tumblr where William Shatner critiques the actual FB posts that mention him.