Sharing is Caring.

Since I started using Twitter my time spent on Facebook naturally decreased but recently I’ve all but stopped using Zuckerberg’s networking behemoth entirely. It got me thinking about why I’d stopped using it and the more I thought about it the more obvious the answers were. I don’t think it’s one specific reason but a collection of several…

There’s the the new Timeline feature which is a bit of a pain but I don’t think that’s the reason. When I first got it imposed on me I didn’t know what to do with it, but in time I figured it out and I don’t actually mind it that much. However the timeline does ruin the pages (or likes) feature as I’ve seen working in small businesses trying to build up their social network presence. It is abysmal for them and I’m still surprised it hasn’t been modified yet…

I think what annoys me the most about Facebook from an individual standpoint is the endless obsession with sharing everything. I mean, don’t get me wrong, sharing is great and all but I am getting a little fed up with being encouraged to do so all the time by Facebook. Tell us where you are! Update your status! Tell the world what you bought off Amazon! It’s all a bit bizarre…

@Spoilers.

I’ve been a gamer for quite a while now. The Super Nintendo was my first home console and I can still remember the anticipation I felt when a new game was about to be released on it.

Back then games catalogues were immensely smaller and the only real way to find out if a new game was good or bad before was to buy gaming magazines that’d give you a score, detail the positive and the negative points, show you some snapshots of the game and leave you to make your own decision.

Oh how times have changed.

Twitter Etiquette

I joined Twitter at the beginning of this year to see what all the fuss was about and it didn’t take long for me to see just what I‘d been missing. All this tweeting, following, and hash-tagging has gotten me fairly addicted a mere nine months into my Twitter career.

I quickly learned that this thing was much better than Facebook. Since having Twitter my status updates have dropped by around 50%. I sometimes don’t even log in at all. For a start, with Twitter you follow people who are interesting, you don’t have to put up with that guy you went to school with who you barely spoke to then let alone now.

Extra! Extra! Tweet all about it!

Journalism is an ever evolving profession that is becoming increasingly competitive day by day. Technology has changed the way that we receive our news. Gone are the days when the only sources were the broadsheets and television news bulletins. Now there is rolling news broadcasting around the clock, countless digital radio stations, and of course the internet.

The world wide web has changed the way journalism works. The scope has suddenly been vastly expanded with users able to access their news wherever and whenever they want to and even broadcast their own news.

Privacy vs. Freedom of Speech.

It was revealed yesterday that the footballer who holds one of the famed super injunctions is attempting to sue the Twitter users who have been revealing his name on the social network site.

Well good luck to him, because he’s going to get nowhere.

Twitter is a United States company operating in the state of California, therefore they are not under the jurisdiction of the high courts of the United Kingdom. Even so, the high courts have given Twitter seven days to reveal the names of those pesky users who’ve been committing that heinous crime of saying whatever the hell they want.

You see Martin Harris, you really had a wonderful life.

It was revealed this week that there will be a sequel to the popular action movie Taken starring Liam Neeson. Of course Neeson will be back to find them and kill them…again. There’s currently a movie out in the cinemas that resembles Taken; it also stars Liam Neeson performing in a kick-ass role. It’s called Unknown.

Unlike Taken though, Unknown has a bit more of a well thought out plot. Sure Taken is good, but in the end of the day, there’s no twist or anything you just watch Liam Neeson’s daughter get kidnapped and then witness him hunt down the abductors and kill them. Simple as that. With Unknown there’s a lot more thought put into it.

Ryan Babel #idiot

Upon watching the FA Cup match between Manchester United and Liverpool at the weekend you may have heard the commentator say the following when Ryan Babel came onto the pitch:

“Here’s a real chance for Ryan Babel to impress his new manager, all be it they’re down to ten men and a goal down, but it’s still a great chance for him.”

I’m sure he’s impressed his new manager no end! Because yes, as you might have heard, after the match, in which Liverpool lost 1-0 thanks to a dubious penalty and a stone-wall sending off, Ryan Babel decided to log in to Twitter and take his frustrations out on referee Howard Webb.

“And they call him one of the best referees? That's a joke. SMH”

Along with this outburst he posted a link to a mock-up photo of Howard Webb in an old United kit clearly stating he felt the experienced official was a biased referee. He couldn’t even be bothered to Photoshop the latest kit onto him, what a muppet.

What went through his head? What imbecile writes that on Twitter and goes into enough thought for a picture and thinks they’ll get away with it scot-free. Ryan Babel apparently.

Obviously he didn’t get away with it and the FA have charged him with improper conduct, and rightly so. If you ever find yourself on Ryan Babel’s twitter page you’ll see that he’s been banging on about being sent to Twitter jail. Maybe it will do him some good, if he spent more time actually training than tweeting nonsense all day long he might actually become an average player yet!

But that’s not even the worst thing, what’s annoyed me the most is the fact that the PFA have actually defended him! No! You just don’t do it! Gordon Taylor, a man so out of touch with the game he still thinks managers are allowed to smoke in the dug-out, has come out and said Babel shouldn’t be reprimanded:

“So long as it's not vitriolic, so long as it's taken in the right way and it's a little bit of fun then we've got to be able to smile at these things.”

This guy’s a bigger idiot than Babel. First of all Gordon, a quick definition of the word vitriolic from Chamber’s dictionary: extremely bitter or hateful, especially with reference to speech or criticism. Yeah, I think we can just about say that Mr. Babel had a slight bitterness to his apparently innocuous tweet.

I highly doubt Howard Webb will see the funny side to it to be honest Gordon. He’s a professional referee and calling him biased is pretty much the worse thing you can say about him! That would be like calling a fireman a secret arsonist! I’m sure you wouldn’t like it if someone questioned your professionalism Gordon, how would you feel if someone said you took a bung from a multi-national news corporation? You wouldn’t be seeing the funny side to it would you?

Football is currently the worst sport for showing disrespect to officials. Referees in football get nothing but abuse from fans, players, managers, and journalists, and yet funnily enough without them we’d have no game to play at all. Players show no respect for match officials, swearing at them, surrounding them, slating them before and after games. What message does that send to the young kids out there? It’s alright kids, abusing the referees is just part of the game, according to Gordon Taylor it’s all a bit of fun!

In rugby the referee stands at about half the size of the cauli-eared behemoths running around the field and yet they command more respect than a football referee could ever dream of! Players address him as Sir, listen to what he has to say, and take decisions on the chin, whether they’re right or wrong. So why is football so different? Well youngsters playing football aren’t being taught to respect the referees while young rugby players are. That’s where it has to start, at a young age. Teach them to respect officials no matter what, their decision is final. If it’s gone against you, man up and get on with it. But that’s easier said than done when every Match of the Day interview is filled with one manager praising his team whilst the other bemoans the referee.

Ryan Babel’s tweeting is but a drop in the ocean. But that ocean is made of tiny droplets that over the years have created a mass of water so big it will probably never be able to be drained.

Babel’s not the one to blame here, he obviously thought it was okay to do what he did. He has since apologised on Twitter, it’s unknown if he has apologised to Howard Webb directly though. The people to blame for all this are the FA, who year in year out allow this to happen, and the morons like Gordon Taylor who apparently say it‘s alright.

And they call him chief executive of the PFA? That's a joke. SMH

You used to be cool.

Happy New Year one and all! Yes 2011 is now in and already the all important questions are being asked. Is this the start of a new decade or not? The BBC seems to think it is, so maybe we celebrated the millennium a year early, or perhaps the last decade was eleven years long instead in some sort of weird baker’s decade. Who knows.

The most important question we want answers for is this: what exactly are we calling this year? Twenty eleven, or two thousand and eleven? See, last year didn’t really make its mind up on what it wanted to be called, and I was kind of hoping this year would be a little less indecisive about it. But no one seems to know.

When people talk about the London Olympic games they say twenty twelve, so is this what we’re supposed to adopt? I’m so confused! Do we have to suffer with another year of indecision only for 2012 to put its foot down and demand the word twenty followed by the next two digit number? I sure hope the world doesn’t end otherwise that would be really annoying.

So yes, whatever it’s called, the new year has officially begun, it’s always quite a mixed occasion looking back at the year that has been and looking forward to what we hope to happen in the year to come. And what would New Year be without a song and dance and of course, the good old resolutions!

Every year I get asked what mine is and every year I tell them I don’t have one, mainly because I’m obviously perfect and wouldn’t need to change my life in any way, but also because it‘s a stupid and pointless thing to do, shouldn‘t you just be making positive changes all year round? I digress. However, this year, just to keep it fresh, I decided to make one. The resolution was simply this: to get with the times.

It’s been about a month now, and I’ve been avoiding it. That’s right, the new Facebook profile. Oh it fills me with such sorrow just thinking about it. I used to love Facebook it was just so handy to use and so very tempting to sit and waste time on. But now, now it’s just plain awful. Of course, Facebook has had many a facelift over the years it’s existed, and by-and-large I’ve liked the changes that they’ve made. But this one feels like such a step backwards.

Ever since I laid my poor innocent eyes on it I was disappointed, I didn’t have to change mine right away, but the knowledge that one day I would have to pained me greatly. So yes, on January 1st, New Year’s Day, I decided to do it, I mournfully changed my old faithful Facebook profile to the new one.

And I hate it.

Alright, I don’t hate it, it’s a step back but I’m slowly getting used to it. It’s pretty much the same only now it’s become less accessible. On new Facebook you have to literally press ‘status’ to post a status, or ‘post’ to write on someone’s wall; the tabs are now aligned vertically down the left rather than along the top, along with your friends; there are mini-pictures along the top putting less value on a profile pic and more on random Mr Men charts you happen to be tagged in; it looks really cluttered; and the text, don’t even get me started on the text. It’s tiny! I’m considering going to the opticians it’s that small!

There’s no one big thing I dislike, just a mixture of small changes that has me miffed. I just want it back to how it was, it was better, at least that’s my opinion. The main annoyance of all the wee ones is the unfortunate existence of advertisements.

Facebook used to be cool. Remember that scene from The Social Network? Facebook without ads is cool, with them it’s not. Now, Facebook has had averts for a while but four of them down the right hand side of my profile? Is that really necessary? It’s slowly getting full of them now, and it just adds to the all round tacky aura that it is recently getting. Seriously not cool! Timberlake was right.

Facebook is useful to me, so I’m not exactly going to get rid of it because they changed the layout. Unlike everyone else who sit and join groups in some sort of pathetic protest against a layout change, I don’t really care that much. I’ll deal with it, and so will everyone else. Until they change it again of course, then I’ll be out on the streets!

You may think my resolution madness would stop there, and it would be a reasonable thought to have, it is quite a lot of effort for one year. But no, I went one step further! Zuckerberg probably didn’t intend for this to happen, but upon looking at the new Facebook in the past month I’ve been considering its younger sibling and all round nemesis, Twitter.

Now, I’ve never understood Twitter. I’ve been on it a couple of times, on a few profiles and whatnot, and I don’t get what’s happening on it. Anyway, as of the first of this month I have taken the horrible plunge into the deep end and I can safely say that I still have no idea what is going on! Like a floundering child with no arm bands I’m attempting to navigate around the site trying to figure out how to do it and what it’s for.

From what I can tell it’s like Facebook, only it’s just purely status updates from the users, and you can talk to these users (I think) by putting an @ symbol before their name in one of your tweets. Maybe. I haven’t done that yet. It’s all a bit strange, when you view a profile I never know who is talking, it’s just @this and @that followed by RT and the hash key. What’s the hash key all about? Is that so you can fax the user? Still none the wiser on that one.

Regardless of the confusion, in terms of coolness Twitter kicks Facebook’s ass, maybe it’s the lack of adverts on it, I’m not entirely sure, but there is definitely something about it that makes it cool. If Facebook is like that advert where a grandfather gives his grandson a Werther’s Original, then Twitter is that James Bond-esque Virgin Atlantic advert.

Your social network’s either got it or it hasn‘t.

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If you want to check out or 'follow' my twitter page my name is crumpledpapyrus or @crumpledpapyrus, I'm not totally sure... here's the link: 

http://twitter.com/crumpledpapyrus

The Virgin Atlantic ad is below, because it's cool.