Monday 31 October 2011

always on facebook.

A brilliant ad from Oglivy India for Vodafone Essar, depicting the website we all love to hate.

                                           

The ad cleverly enacts the past fad on our favourite social networking site - Farmville, Superpoke and Mafia Wars, not forgetting the tendency of people uploading their baby pictures, or of parents sending friend requests (my advice: keep them pending).

Are you one of those people that have an obsessive compulsion to check your notifications (or your farm) first thing in the morning? Always on Facebook, day and night?

There should be a rehabilitation center for Facebook addicts. In retrospect, it's a pretty serious disease. My sister had a friend in school that would check his Facbook on Macbooks when he was visiting the Apple store o_O It's become the norm to enter a store (for me, Ikea, Raymond's) or hotel (all the way up in the Czech Republic) and catch the person behind the desk on the dreaded site if employers didn't have the hindsight to block it.

Before privacy settings changed the first time around, user profiles were open to everyone, bringing out the stalker in us all. Don't deny it. You know you checked out pictures of people you had no idea existed, atleast once!

I must admit, I was an addict too. I still am, although the drug has changed.


On Twitter, I am a recluse. I enjoy my anonymity immensely. It's a relief not having every single person you ever met on earth on it since you were a toddler, instead to follow people you wish you could meet (Shashi Tharoor for one. Michael Owen for another. I don't follow League football but the bloke sure can tweet!). No bombardments of ridiculous games like 'It Girl' (??) and Pillow Fight!

Do you remember what Facebook first looked like? It had all your apps on your profile page.
Following the recent changes on Facebook, quite a few of us have been very vocal about our dislike of the drastically altered News Feed. I'm definitely not a fan of the Ticker, but it's a boon for business pages: fans interact on a page and their friends are updated of the activity on that page immediately, playing on the friends levels of boredom, piquing'their curiosity to pull them in too.

A survey held by Mashable a week after the F8 conference recorded people that were unhappy with the changes at a whopping 74%.
Users say Facebook me no likey
Not that Facebook cares.

But no matter how much we gripe about it, on Facebook we stay. After all, like the guy in the ad says, where else would we be? Soon, we'll have embraced the Ticker and wonder why Zuckerberg didn't come up with it earlier.
Though honestly I find that hard to believe. I pay no heed to it now - my mind has put a permanent strip of tape on that part of the screen, like Youtube sensation Julian Smith suggests here:


If he reshot and updated this video, I bet he'd feature another 25 things.

What do you think?

(Recovered from within the spiraling depths of my drafts)

2 comments:

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Go on. You know you want to.