Has everyone moved over to Facebook?

I don’t know about Facebook, but over on Myspace they copy stuff from A2K -

Ruben Andrian
blogs.myspace.com/poorhawaiian
Monday, September 11, 2006

Whilst digging in a 4,500-year-old burial mound at Xiaguan in Yunnan province in central China, a parchment was found sealed inside a clay vessel for its owner to take with him on his journey to his ancestors. The parchment talks of a traveller, getting lost on a mountain, and whilst seeking safety sees two old men sitting by a fire next to the entrance of a cave. As he approached, he overheard the last part of their conversation, and he later recorded it thus.


Mr Riddle puzzle me in and puzzle me out.
Riddle me dark from the cave to shout.
The question is easy the answer is not.
It lives in the future that has yet to arrive.
I would if I could I could not and died.
Had I have lived I would have not lied.


Mr Puzzle riddle me left riddle me right.
Puzzle me bright from the fire to light.
The answer is easy the question is not.
It lies in the past that time has forgot.
Do I just jest or do I jest not.
I know the truth do I or do I not.

What was the question and answer?


Then, a year later there was a book about it!

China: a cross-curricular theme - Google Books Result
by R.I.C. Publications - 2007 - History - 101 pages
The world's first riddle? During the excavation of a 4500-year- old burial site at Xiaguan in central China. a sheet of parchment was discovered sealed ...
books.google.co.uk/books?isbn=1741266629...

It even quotes OCCOM BILL’S answer! Heck, the guys famous in China.
Even though even in those distant days; there were some dissenters!

The original by the way was published on A2K…

The worlds first riddle!
Discussion by Tryagain on 12/20/03 3:21 PM Replies: 11,562 Views: 253,900


Where A2K leads " others are sure to follow and copy.

Ps. Deb’s it could have been me!

sure you get the games! I learned about some of them from you - but I think you're playing them from a disk and I'm playing them online.

I'm all about the noisy, shoot-the-ball games.

Just ignore the invites to things. I've learned that some of them can be deleted in clumps. I used to spend way to much time ignoring one thing at a time. It does take a few minutes to figure out what invites can be ignored in clumps - and some have little notes asking if you want all invites from that application ignored - hell yeah.

That's a key to sanity on Facebook. The incessant quizzes, games, when's your birthday requests (it's on my profile guys, just look if you are that interested) and group invitations (no, I don't want to join that obscure group that I don't even understand, and that is going to die off as a fad in a few months or have the title changed into something to embarrass you) is one reason why I don't really use Facebook and why Twitter, which doesn't try to be an app platform and focuses just on the plain communication and has a much better signal to noise ratio is taking off (and it's why Facebook started copying Twitter when they couldn't buy them).

Facebook is great for getting in touch with people just because they are all there (especially in some countries like Canada), it's a network effect, but once I connect with them I want to take things to email, etc so that I can spend as little time on Facebook as I can.

The whole idea of trying to become the next application platform (they see themselves in a competition with Google for the very internet) is supremely annoying to people who aren't addicted to Facebook. I don't go there to play mafia wars or find out which cartoon character you are, or whatnot but that's still the majority of what I see when I log in (usually just to accept a friend request and move on).

I still hope that they social network cycle continues though, and that Facebook isn't here to stay as the top social network dog. It used to be stuff like Friendster, then MySpace, then it became Facebook, and now I hope Twitter's meteoric ascendancy means that the next iteration isn't going to be Facebook. While I cheered Facebook killing off the eyesore that was MySpace it's still worse than something simpler like Twitter, and more of a walled garden than the open internet-wide social networks that folk like Google are promoting.

It would be great if open social (not a network itself, but a protocol that seeks to open this up and make it cross site) really takes off as the next wave, and makes the social graph span the whole internet.

It's nobody remotely associated with A2k.

Kudos to roger...

on facebook, I'm still wavering. I've been just about to, just about to, just about to get involved and still pause. The whole friend monitoring thing repels me.

But that was before I saw, just before my computer zotzed, that facebook was going to nab photos of its members from flicker, et al. ****'em, ****'em, how dare they?

Naturally I haven't read about this in a few weeks, due to computer tharn, but I'd be interested.. I found that photo snatching totally obnoxious.

Also..

Much as I might be glad to see a friend or two from the past, I'm now more iffy than ever re fb.

Am I being too reactive?

But wait, I am glad to see Marty back. I took her original post as mulling. A lot of people did have trouble at the change of site and Marty is a busy person who was confronted with it. Someone like me... I read all the preliminary posts about the changes (yes, years).

I'd have to say, I dunno. Phoenix has historically had a thread about where are a2kers about once a year, or maybe twice, since the beginning. Msolga does that too. (I like both of them, the worriers.) We come and go, and new people show up.

Consider the circle game, or whatever the J. Mitchell song was.

Yeah, it repelled me too. So instead of denying anyone friendship, I started out accepting everyone - most of the time because the name was vaguely familiar - I'd recognize the last name and think - one of my students- and then I'd remember that the first name of that person was Jeremy and not Stephen with that particular last name, and by that time I had this whole list of friends who I had no idea who they were!
I asked my daughter why people I don't know would ask to be my friend and she said - 'To make it look like they have more friends....' What a sad thing - I'd like to call it a joke, but it's a sad commentary.

I have a good friend who loves it and he's actually always sending me interesting quizzes and surveys to take (he actually IS a friend and knows what would interest me) and I haven't been able to figure out how to do the things. Go to your homepage - click on notes - cut and paste ....blah, blah, blah....why can't you just type on the damn thing where it is?

I have so little understanding of the whole set up that the other day I was on my daughter's page and I was asking her as she was sitting in a chair across the room - who is ______? Who is _________? reading off the names and she said, 'Mom, that's MY page - I didn't log out....those are MY friends -you're not even on your own page...

Yeah - as soon as I reconnect with someone I actually want to talk to - I give them my personal e-mail. Sane, quiet, private conversation. And truthfully, I've found that all the people I've wanted to keep in touch with - I pretty much have anyway- so facebook doesn't really fill a need for me.

What does that mean ?
If u don 't give Facebook your face,
it tries to find it somewhere else and post it against your will ?

The Canadian government went after FB on privacy issues and won.

http://www.priv.gc.ca/media/nr-c/2009/nr-c_090827_e.cfm

FB has posted the information on the site

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=152142804637

I've 2 questions, (1) what is the revenue-generating model for Facebook and Twitter? Those servers and the software must cost a lot of money; and (2) the real-time functions seem to be written in Erlang. Do you know if it really runs fast on multicore processors? How about the new language Carl Sassenrath now has out in beta? Either of these new languages should run lots faster than Java, but it's hard to quantify by how much. Thanks.

There may be some lonely people out there who wish to pad their friendship list, but... There are a fierce amount who are their trolling for info. Facebook has had problems with identity theft.
I don't have many apps for that reason.
Don't put your birthdate or at least your full date on facebook. Don't put where you live.
You can separate people too by the ammount of info you want to divulge.Don't admit people who you barely know unless you have ulterior motives such as a business or a need to promote something. Set up two accounts in that case, one for personal and one for your other endeavor.
Facebook is a tool. But like a hammer, you don't go out and hit everything. Be selective.

Their current model is to borrow money and hope they make it to profitability without going bankrupt.

Neither are profitable right now and are going through millions trying to get there, Facebook has recently begun to experiment with their own ad platform, and Twitter is going to experiment with services to power users.

This model is normal for venture capital funded startups, and is how Google, for example, got where it is. However these social networks face a big challenge, because so far nobody has found the secret to monetizing them. Google didn't actually find theirs either, but someone else (Overture, which is now part of Yahoo) did and it happened to work very well.

Google made an ad deal with MySpace and tried to figure it out the monetization of social, but was unable to crack that problem (which is a very fundamental one of it being very low quality traffic) and they are a lot smarter and more experienced than the Facebook folk. Without the existing advertisers Google has Facebook and these networks face a much larger problem. Facebook folk see themselves in direct competition with Google, and Google isn't really worried about them for this very reason.

This will be their core challenge and they will have to develop completely innovative advertising (the kind of world-changing advertising that search advertising was) to become wildly profitable. Social network traffic is very very worthless with all current advertising methods. With search, you capture people with intent. For example, if I 'm searching for "lawyers in <city>" then an ad for lawyers in said city will convert very very well in comparison to someone browsing Facebook who sees an ad for lawyers in the city. Social networks don't tend to have good content to target ads to, or users who are looking for anything commercial on the social network, so they face enormous challenges to the kind of profitability that their investors are counting on.



Neither site uses Erlang. I believe Facebook uses mainly PHP and Twitter Ruby on Rails.



Usually, the way to scale when you get that size is to use lower-cost commodity hardware and scale laterally. This means using more machines in parallel instead of more powerful machines (which is scaling vertically).

I don't know what processors they use, but if I had to guess they would be looking for a sweet spot where the processors are cheaper than the top of the line ones.



I don't know anything about the language you are referencing, but the speed of the language is a very small part of the challenge, the real bottleneck is almost always the datastore (e.g. database) and when you reach a certain point the only way to scale is to "shard" the data and put it on multiple servers.

It ends up being a software challenge instead of a hardware challenge and is all about parallelization, distributed caching (Facebook has huge memcache implementations) and basically being able to divide the work on to separate machines.

Tks very much. I'm following these languages in particular because parallelization may at last be getting forced on us - Moore's law is slowing down - and this particular programmer is the first to introduce a genuinely parallel multitasking OS back in the '80s. It's very hard to estimate how fast his new code runs - hard for me, at any rate - but for apps requiring lots of handshakes etc it looks like it should be 10x faster than Java. Would be most grateful for any feedback / update from you. Btw, speed does matter for communications, eg, real time is important, as is security. Tks again.

Thanks for the heads up Ceili - I wouldn't have thought of that. I'll have to tell my kids the same thing.
I've just sort of let my page go and die. In fact, I'm feeling guilty that I haven't responded to my SISTER!!! who sent me an invitation to join our family group and my niece who invited me to be her friend.
I mainly keep up with stuff through my daughter who shows me all our family pictures on everyone elses pages when she logs in to hers.

Even without Moore's law raising the ceiling, it makes sense to parallelize due to cost. It's much cheaper to go lateral on commodity hardware than it is to just get more powerful servers once you have any scale at all.

I know that speed in important, but it's just that the differences in overhead and differences in speed bewteen programming languages is usually much slighter than anything else. So in most cases, the language used doesn't really matter that much, the bottlenecks are rarely in language execution time.

Of course, at some level they can be, and an interpreted language might be the bottleneck where a compiled language won't be, but that is an exceedingly rare scenario.

If you are learning about this kind of thing, this is a good site to start with: http://highscalability.com/

Tks, I'm not a hardware / software person (other than designing the purely mathematical models) and work in finance-related apps. But the sums at stake now are colossal - e.g. see the code workaround required for Skype to operate properly, if its founders win the patents lawsuit against eBay. Btw, the IM function on Facebook really does run on Erlang; Ruby is very fast, but I think Carl's new R3 (beta) will leave it way behind.

I don't have the article saved - because I lost saved articles in my recent computer crash - but my memory is that if you have a Flickr account, or that of other online sites, let's say with your real name, and have a FB account under that name, they will pick up your photos from Flickr and deposit them in your FB acct. Don't trust me since I read about this new plan of theirs about three weeks ago and haven't tried to verify it. If my understanding of what I read is true, I find that infuriating..

you can also load your flickr flix here --
http://blog.able2know.org/2009/01/26/dev-updates-lastfm-youtube-and-flickr-on-your-profile/

Sure, but that would be ME doing it, not the FB site itself.

I don't know for sure, but I'd find it very very unlikely that Facebook is doing that without users initiating it.