I recently read Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook written by Dan Yoder, and as with all articles I read it thoroughly before passing judgement, though it did feel paranoid and biased even with the little disclaimer at the beginning.  So after taking some time to absorb his opinion I realised mine hadn’t changed, I didn’t disagree with all the points but did feel it certainly wasn’t a balanced view.

In this post I am not going to analyse each of the ten reasons individually or too closely, this will just be my opinion as a user, consumer and social being.  Just in case you haven’t read Dan’s full article (link above) I have listed the ten reasons here for easy reference.

1. The Facebook application itself sucks
2. Facebook doesn’t (really) support the Open Web
3. Facebook makes it incredibly difficult to truly delete your account
4. Facebook is not technically competent enough to be trusted
5. Even your private data is shared with applications
6. Facebook is a bully
7. Facebook is pulling a classic bait-and-switch
8. Facebook has flat out declared war on privacy
9. Facebook’s CEO has a documented history of unethical behavior
10. Facebook’s Terms Of Service are completely one-sided

Firstly, I am going to cover the repetition of reasons five, seven, eight, nine and ten.  Basically these five reasons are at the centre of the ‘paranoia’ I spoke of earlier; they state between them that Facebook is changing its terms of service so that it can share your data, making it publically available while at the hands of some unscrupulous overlord (when you say it like that you can see why I use the word ‘paranoid’!).  My issue with this perception is that Facebook is a business that offers a service for free, obviously they need to monitise this and as user data is a growing market I think they would be foolish not to focus on its potential.

So let’s take the supermarket Tesco for example, they have been collating shopper buying habits now with their ‘Clubcard’ points system for some years and I suspect they aren’t just collecting this data for the fun of it; surely it stands to reason that if they know what you are buying  they can target you more effectively and increase their profits.  My point is that either Tesco get our data and hit us or another company collects the same data and sells it to someone else, one way or another they will find the information they want.  In addition, if this data is being used for the hard sell of products then doesn’t the user simply need to become more aware and less gullible.  In addition to this, who is to say that collection of user data is a bad thing, companies selling you things you need so you don’t need to shop around may not sound that bad to some shoppers, or am I missing something?

We should also bear-in-mind that Facebook is a huge brand, like Microsoft if it steps out of line or tries to monopolise the market it is big enough to be noticed by all the authorities that matter, and they are not stupid.

Can Facebook be trusted technically and does it really support the open web?  These two views seem to me to be biased as I am pretty sure there are many other big brand names whose websites are like Swiss Cheese technically, and i don’t think it is alone in its fear of the open web, just look at the newspaper industry, the fear of not making enough money will always win unfortunately.

For balance, I do think the interface could be more intuative and stable, and if account deletion is as difficult as Dan states then this is a negative.  However, I do have a number of friends who have decided to leave Facebook for different reasons than Dan states but they didn’t seem to have any problems leaving at all!

In conclusion, Facebook has been a revolution for people in all walks of life.  It has helped millions communicate with family and friends from all around the globe, it has broken down barriers and given those who can’t get out a window into a social world; if it wasn’t Facebook offering this service and sharing the data it would be some other organisation and many already are.  Even in the last few days Facebook has announced a new simpler way of checking the privacy settings on all accounts, that certainly sounds like a company trying to do the right thing to me!

I was contacted today by a colleague for whome I had recently designed a static banner, she requested that I animate it, when I asked why an advert with one simple message needed animating she told me that during a presentation to her superior she was reprimanded and told it should have been! – I was stunned that a senior member of our company should have such an uninformed view of online advertising, and worse still be preaching it to their staff!

As a fairly experienced designer of adverts from print to web I understand the balance between customer satisfaction and user response quite well, I also have equally successful examples of both static and animated artwork; unfortunately sales teams don’t have this wealth of experience and prefer something esthetically pleasing or dynamic to wow a client and make the sales pitch that much easier for themselves, while I sympathise with sales teams wanting to keep their task simple in difficult times I can’t help feeling that it’s ignorance that makes the pitch difficult, not the dynamics of the advert.

Let me explain why I feel ignorance is the issue – Banner advertising has been around for a number of years now and web users are more switched on than ever before, at the same time various web browsers along with off-the-shelf software make it relatively simple to block banner advertising, one click and a web site’s ads are gone which is not good news for companies that have a banner advertising website model!  This is where the ignorance of sales people and teams starts to become a real issue, their need to keep the sale simple will inevitably damage advertising effectiveness as users either stop visiting your site or just simply block your advertising content.

My ethos is ‘less is more’ – yep not the first time you have probably heard this, but as far as I can tell there are three clear types of banner advert -

1. The adverts with one clear message and minimal text
2. Adverts for brand awareness only and again minimal contact copy
3. Those with a few clear key messages. 

 For me the first would be static this is because the simple message is the important part of the advert, it needs to be on screen for as long as possible giving the message the best chance of being absorbed by the user, while the second is using general content with no clear call to action, this naturally could use subtle animation to draw the users eye without distracting them too much (colour blends and changes would work well), the third where content is an issue I would use interactive animation i.e. when a user rolls over the advert an extra element is presented. 

Using the correct advert type for the content you are presenting is key, but because of the fear some businesses have of the Internet coupled with a lack of understanding the industries most in need of these revenues may simply cut their own throats.  Many web design blogs and websites have adopted the static advert model and seem to be making money, maybe the media industry should pay attention to this!

To prove that this can be successful Fusion Ads delivery network deals in only static advertising and currently delivers over 20,000,000 page views per month to its design network – Seems this is working quite well and may just be worth keeping an eye on.

I think some animation is necessary and sometimes you simply cannot get around it but it certainly shouldn’t be the industry standard.  If you have to animate an advert to make the sell then the advert is probably not going to succeed!

Slowly advertising is going to change and banners will disappear, so adapt now it will make a huge difference to the future and life of all online services.

See related article – http://nasarik.com/is-it-too-late-to-save-the-web-from-over-the-top-advertising/

This is an unusual post for me, on-the-whole I like writing tutorials or web design posts but something recently has affected me on a personal level and I feel I need to vent my frustration.  Six years ago my wife and I lost a son and since then we have tended his plot with tasteful and appropriate items, each year changing the toys for something a child of his age would love, that was until the local council ordered this to stop!

I wouldn’t wish the loss of a child on my worst enemy, the pain I felt at the time was unbearable and to be honest still is, as time has moved on I have learned to hide it behind a thin vale of composure.  What has made this pain easier is knowing we can bring him with us in our lives, for birthdays and Christmas’ we take him a gift and a card, at Easter a small chocolate egg, we’ve even talked about leaving a beer or two for him on his eighteenth and as long as we are alive we would keep this tradition alive. 

Now after six years the local council have asked for this to stop as they can no longer get their mowers between the graves!  Sorry did I hear that right, the last time I looked they had started bunching the baby plots so close together we could no longer stand in front of our son’s plot, not without standing on the very ground he lay beneath or on another poor child’s resting place.  For the first few months of the warning we ignored it hoping that the Council would realise their decision was not only wrong but ridiculous, but no, they have stuck to their guns and now we are being told that all items will be removed and stored for collection, only allowing us to place items on the stones themselves.  As you can imagine this has caused great upset for my family and I as well as others who have their loved ones buried at Fleetwood Cemetery and who have kept the plots in a neat a tidy state, this in turn has forced those aggrieved with this decision to call a protest which I will be attending.

If Fleetwood Cemetary was full of unkempt graves with no passion for those who have gone then the Council would simply tend them, but because we obviously care so much for those we have lost, and show it, we are being penalised!  I have been visiting Fleetwood Cemetary for the full six years my boy has been there, all the baby graves have been kept beautifully ranging from plain grass with flowers to others similar to ours, so this decision by the council confuses me.  Are we not making their job easier rather than harder?

I will join the peaceful protest tomorrow to support all those who have lost, whether it will make any difference I don’t know, all I know is losing a child really brought home to me what the meaning of  life really is and the sometimes over-the-top passion and commitent for my five year old daughter is because of that realisation, so is it really too much for me to ask to leave those toys and eventually those beers for my son.

If you have lost and are being persecuted in this way please get in touch, maybe if we all shout together and loud enough local goverments will have to listen.