Jordan Polan-Clarke | Shelly Palmer Digital Living

About Jordan Polan-Clarke

Jordan is Shelly's Executive Admin. She has a degree in journalism and started her career as a desk assistant at CBS Network Radio where she learned to be a proper news junkie. In her spare time, you can find her upside down practicing trapeze and right side up at the best comedy shows in Brooklyn. You can reach her on Twitter @jordopc

Can we please stop doing this?: Making Up Facts About Apple Products That Haven’t Been Announced Yet

ipad-announcement Why does everyone care so much about the non-information that came out regarding the iPad 3 this week? To me, the amount of hype seems disproportionate to what actually happened. I get this feeling a lot when it comes to Apple.

I don’t mean to imply that I don’t understand the significance of Apple’s actions and announcements; they are the biggest tech company in the world and its products have been life altering for millions of people, including myself. I am all for good products that make technology accessible for the technologically challenged.

We should be paying attention to a company that is widely cited as having more money in the bank than the United States government, but why spend so much time speculating about something that we don’t have any information about yet? In this case, all Apple did was send out an email invitation to an event on March 7. Making something out of nothing is a regular habit of the 24-hour news cycle, but I can’t think of another case where consumers eat it up as much as they do as with Apple stories and I’m just not sure I quite understand why.

The silliest part is how disappointed people get when the announcement isn’t what they predicted it would be. Complain they might, but thousands of people will still stand in line for hours to be the first to drop hundreds of dollars on the third iPad, regardless of its features. Apple would have to screw up pretty badly to stop that from happening.

It’s fun to guess about and hope for certain features and I am all for Apple changing the world again. Let’s just wait until they do to obsess about it.

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Can we please stop doing this?: Connecting to Facebook

I joined Pinterest this week! Yes, you can now follow me on the fast-growing, lady-centric, thing-collecting social network under the name JordoPC. That’s not why I’m writing this though. I’m writing to ask a simple favor of websites and social networks: Can we please stop connecting everything to Facebook?

After waiting twelve hours for my invitation (one does not simply sign up for Pinterest) I arrived at the sign in page to find this:

I was annoyed to learn you can only sign up if you choose to connect to your Facebook and/or Twitter accounts, which I have no interest in doing. On the Facebook front, I don’t want to spam my friends’ newsfeeds or have Pinterest suggest I follow that girl that I haven’t seen in 15 years. I also don’t want to hand Facebook an easy way to know even more stuff about me. On the Twitter front, I almost exclusively follow news organizations and comedians and if I want to see if one of them has a Pinterest account, I will check for myself, thank you.

After whining for two minutes, I gave in. I signed up using my Facebook account and disabled the connection as soon as I could, but not before Pinterest posted to my timeline a group of people that I unintentionally followed during the sign up process.

My point is this: Among users of Facebook who’ve been on the site for several years, there is a growing amount of dissatisfaction. I would argue that they are on it because it’s still better than not being a part of the largest social network, but that increasingly, users don’t know what to do when they get there. After a few recent changes, I no longer understand why certain posts from certain people show up on my newsfeed in the order that they do, and when the posts I see are things like “Guy you met once at a party just read ‘Dow Closes at 4-Year High’ on WSJ” and I can’t click the link to the news story because I don’t have the WSJ app, I care less and less about returning to Facebook multiple times a day to see what’s going on with my friends.

Based on the amount that the people I actually care about are posting (i.e. hardly at all) I’d say others are feeling the same way.

While brands probably think it’s great that I see their name ten times a day on my feed and believe it’s an excellent plan to get me to interact with them, I mostly just feel annoyed by looking at things I don’t want to see. I am irked by the feeling that I’m allowing Facebook to know more and more about me by letting them see what I do on other sites. As Shelly says in his blog “Google = Skynet … Yikes!,” it’s not because I think they’re doing anything bad with the information… yet. But my instinct is to opt out where I can and increasingly, I can’t. I don’t want to live in an Internet so fluid that information spills over everywhere in a way that I can’t easily trace or understand.

What about you? Are you tired of seeing things on your Facebook newsfeed from other sites? Do you like having your online accounts connected? How do you see this changing and how do you want it to change?

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