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razorgirl_au posted this vid a while back, so I thought I'd do some testing of FaceBook, because while I can see the point of the criticisms, I think they're a little overblown and exaggerated.

I created a new user, one Professor Frogmorton Wembley (I was listening to I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again at the time). I gave him a photo and one friend, me. Then I found a picture of him, and stuck it on a photo album on my own FB account, and tagged the photo with the good Professor's name. So far, so insidious: a respected member of the academic community's name potentially dragged through the mud by unwanted revelation of his ignominious past as a work-experience beefeater (if you're on FB, go check the photo and you'll see what I'm going on about).

But... Frogmorton got an email as soon as I tagged him. I logged back in as Frogmorton, and untagged the photo. This removed the link, and what's more made it impossible for me (as me) to tag him again. Once a photo is untagged, its unwilling subject is protected from all future tagging.

So: immediate warning, easy option to remove tags, and all that's left is a photo and a bit of text, which has no more Google-juice than any other web page.

So yes, there's the opportunity to do unpleasant things with FaceBook, but I'm afraid the grievances as presented here are more than a little overblown. Must Try Harder.

(And meanwhile, there's a lovely piccie of razorgirl_au in that photo album, that really captures her true personality. I'm hoping she'll pop in and untag it too, just to confirm that the facility does exist, and hopefully to reassure her that it's not as bad as the video says.)

Three stories of software reliability:

Steve Yegge talks about the death of XEmacs and the future of GNU Emacs. As a long-time Emacs user (I wish w3 mode would work properly so I didn't have to use any other software) I've tried XEmacs once or twice, for extended periods, but I agree with Stevey: it's flakey. Best to let it die.

Via Proggit: the story of a software project that's had one bug in the last three releases. Never mind your medication management software; if this stuff goes wrong, people die and they burn up in the process.

And some less impressive news: FaceCrack has a messaging feature now. Tiny little windows, weird delays, crummy UI. This is what you get for foisting your alpha versions on the user base: they realise how clueless you are. It's cute, but it could be done much better by someone with the ability to write a spec and do prototypes before they release version 1.0.

The latest episode of Doctor Who was a great one for answering questions. How does the TARDIS's translation effect work when you play silly buggers with multiple languages? How does the Doctor decide to save London from the farting politician aliens but not to save the Titanic from the iceberg? And why, apart from the need to avoid endless socratic monologues, does the Doctor bother bringing brainless English twittettes with him everywhere he goes? All answered rather neatly, and I find myself doing something I was certain I wouldn't: liking Season 4, because of, not despite, the presence of Donna "Tegan Rides Again" Noble. She still irritates me on occasion, but that's fading, because she also works as a character, and her relationship with the Doctor is already so much more believable than the last couple of Mary Sues. This is turning into a superb season, already. Freaky.

(James Moran, the writer of that ep, also did Torchwood's Sleeper, a good solid episode spoiled -- literally -- by its title. He's no Moffat, but he's one to watch.)

Meanwhile, the other question that's been answered is: what is FaceBook good for? And the answer is: organising brunch. Admittedly we didn't see many people today -- just me and thelancrewitch and the two younger munchkins, our gracious host uniqueid and frodolover, and a late arrival from the Sugar Fairy herself, Gerrie. uniqueid's green eggs and ham went down a treat: the BatPup went from "ooh, yuck" when she saw them to stealing them off everyone's plates in about pi seconds flat. And Gerrie brought evil chocolate sauce (of which I did not partake - I don't eat chocolate) and plenty of stuff to soak it up, of which my pick was the fruit salad with a dressing of unusual gorgeousness that included balsamic vinegar! Must get that recipe.

Next Brunch will be back at our place, I think, in two or three weeks. Does anyone have a preference for a date? All are welcome; if you're on FaceBook, contact me (I'm on there as Eric TF Bat, because that's my name) and I'll stick you onto the invitation-only "Brunching Canberrans" group. If you're not, I've created canberrunch (sorry - 15 character name limit) which will hopefully do the same thing. Let me know if you want to be added to that the usual way -- "friend" it, and if I know you I'll make you a member. With any luck, we'll be able to get some serious brunching done. Yay!

Garth goaded me into joining FaceBook, the social network that’s supposedly taking the world by storm, just the way MySpace did last week and YouTube did the week before. I did a little rummaging around people’s friends lists and tweaked my profile here and there, but I have to say I’m generally unimpressed. Little things annoy me, like the way you can’t delete an “application” from your home page (it gives an error and won’t delete, so you have to do it from the Applications page instead), and the way it reformats a phone number into the US-American xxx.yyy.zzzz form, which makes Australian mobile numbers look stupid. It just seems to be clumsily written and poorly designed. It’s really just the LiveJournal profile pages without the LiveJournal.

(And don’t get me started on the WereWolf application! I come from a respectable line of Lycanthropes stretching back to the original emigration to Earth from The Old Country (which is what we still call 82 G. Eridani IV) and I resent the co-opting of our cultural identity by these h. sapiens upstarts. Not that I expect much support from the supposedly equal-opportunity Terrestrial institutions, many of whom still can’t past the Blood Danube incident of 1854, which was grossly misrepresented by local authorities. But I digress.)

So: FaceBook. Poorly structured, hard to navigate, gimmicky and dull. Someone is working on the ultimate social networking application that will take the intertubes by storm, but this isn’t it. Too bad, so sad, pass the salt.

Crossposted from fLog.