Bryan Pieper's Blog : Facebook

Have you been on Facebook recently and posted a topic only to have someone post a reply that is completely unrelated to the topic at hand?

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This kind of thing drives me crazy. I will post a topic or status update and out of nowhere, you get a reply from someone looking to have a separate conversation.  

I love the threaded concept of conversations, because it keeps things organized. This is the same reason I prefer Gmail to the other webmail providers. The conversations are organized. With hundreds of new status posts running through your news feed each day, it is hard enough to keep up as it is.

So please, if you must post something off topic, start a new post, post it on my wall, send me a message or ring me on the chat window.  It will make the chaos that is Facebook, well, a little less chaotic.

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Have you been this person lately?

Last weekend, we went to Disney World. As usual, we packed the Mac Book with every intention of connecting to the World Wide Web at many points during the weekend.

We arrived at the resort on Thursday night and found a note in our room indicating that the internet was not going to be available starting on Friday. At this point, I was thinking to myself, “not a big deal.” Not a big deal, because I thought there might be another network in range.  As it turns out, the building we were staying did not have internet at all since it was very new. Not only that, there were no other networks in range. Bummer!

Have you ever had multiple friend requests by the same person on Facebook?

The other night, my wife Beka, mentioned to me about how she was annoyed by an individual that kept sending her friend requests. Of course I smirked a little because I am one who ignores friend requests from people for various reasons. 

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I do not abide by the “everyone’s welcome” policy on Facebook. Primarily, if I have never met you in real life, I will not respond to your friend request.  I’m not interested in building a friend list to say, “hey look, I have a bazillion friends!” 

So please, if you send someone a friend request, give him or her time to respond. Not everyone is on Facebook everyday. There are many times when someone just does not want to be your friend on Facebook.  Move on and please do not send multiple friend requests to one person.

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What do you think about multiple friend requests?

Happy New Year! May you and your family be blessed in 2010 and the years to come! To start off the New Year, I wanted to list off some random thoughts in the tech and online world that have impacted me.

Do you own an iPod, iPhone or a Mac? A decade ago, that idea that one would choose a Mac over a PC was unthinkable. In 2000, I was a PC (and a Linux geek). Today, I am still a Linux geek, while I use a Mac at home and at work. 

The Mac and OS X transformed the consumer computing experience. This transformation has inspired a decade of new ideas and devices making Apple undoubtedly the most influential brand.  As I wrote earlier about the Apple Tablet, it could easily alter the mobile computing space again. Would Windows 7 be what it is today if it wasn’t for Apple?

Online search has changed dramatically. Yahoo is no longer numero uno. Have you used a metacrawler lately? Do you need to “Google it?”  We will see what Bing does this coming decade and what comes about from real-time search.

Google announced yesterday that they are combing relevant results with the real-time web.  The results include data from Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca. 

Here is a sample result showing real-time data:

This has been talked about around the blogosphere for the past few months. Glad to see this incorporated in a way that doesn’t exclude the relevant results. To see more trending topics, check out Google Trends.

On a side note, Bing has had a twitter feed for a little while.  Haven’t found it to be any more useful than the existing twitter search functions.  What do you think?

I was reading Seth Godin’s blog the other day and was intrigued by his take on Dunbar’s Number. It got me thinking about the real value of a your friend/follower/network beyond 150.

According to Wikipedia, Dunbar's number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships.

When Dunbar came up with this number, the idea of Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace and Twitter did not exist. What you are your thoughts and what is your tipping point?