Alan Is Good

(A good video to play/listen to while you read this)

Bite The Hand That Tweets

Nine Inch Nails vocalist Trent Reznor explains in a recent message board post that he’s done with online communities and social networks due to a large amount of negativity and trolling directed toward him.  Apparently there was an unmanageable amount of hateful comments and replies posted to Reznor on NIN.com and Twitter that set him off and resulted in his Twitter ‘vow of silence.’

Reznor explains, “The problem with really getting engaged in a community is getting through the clutter and noise. In a closed environment like nin.com a lot of this can be moderated away, or code can be implemented to make it more difficult for troublemakers to persist. It’s tedious and feels like wasted energy doing that shit, but some people exist to ruin it for others – and they are the ones who have nothing better to do with their time.”

While the moderators of the NIN boards were doing a good job deterring trolls and hateful posts, it’s the nature of the troll to circumvent and persist despite active policing.  Nine times out of ten, if you ask an internet troll, “Why?” the response is, “To waste someone else’s time.”  Sad, but true.

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Unveiled sometime in the past 24 hours, Tom’s latest trick is the new integrated MySpace IM.  I know it’s not like that anymore, but I still like to imagine MySpace president Tom Anderson and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg viciously coding away night and day to vanquish the other.

The custom IM friends screen looks a little something like this: 

And when you pop the chat window out:

10 Cool Things About MySpace IM 

1. Easily turn off that annoying “pop” sound 

2. Pop-out window chat function 

3. Ability to go ‘invisible’ or ‘hidden’ and still chat

4. Bulk add/Bulk remove friends for customized friend IM list

5. Easy to add individual friends to IM list/Block list

6. Option to chat with ‘Everyone’ (strangers)

7. Uncluttered layout for multiple chats

8. Epic smiley selection (including pirate)

9. Option to hide the MySpace Chat bar

10. Option to disable MySpace Chat completely

I bet my social networking wrestlers would have loved to use this as fodder earlier this week.  MySpace quietly unveiled the integrated MySpace IM sometime in the past 24 hours, and it resembles closely the ‘new’ Facebook Chat we were treated to earlier this week.  (MySpace previous released their IM service as a program you download, install and use just like AIM – only it was horrible, unlike AIM)

Copying Facebook?

Well, Shabooty thinks so.  MySpace IM functions the same way – see who’s online, chat them up, some of them may have the “inactive” icon next to them (it’s a moon on Facebook Chat), and at first there’s an annoying “pop” sound whenever someone enters/exits/IMs you.  Some people may see it as a copycat move, or that it’s too little too late, but I disagree.  Copying Facebook would have been releasing an inferior integrated chat service that everyone finds annoying and opts to avoid, and then two months later fixing all of the problems even though you’ve lost everyone’s attention.  MySpace always had a silently weak chat service, and then they quietly launched that lame IM service you can download, but those were betas that no one noticed (and probably weren’t harmed by negative feedback).  I think their foray into the “all up in your face” IM world is far more polished and was arguably executed better.

Facebook made some good changes to their chat earlier this week, but I still have issues with their approach to the integrated chat.  I feel like Zuckerberg’s over-thinking it.  

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