Tag Archives: Facebook

Films & Television

The Social Network

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Near the end of The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg is worried that the legal proceedings are making him look like the bad guy. So the young lawyer played by Rashida Dati (whom my wife and I have come to know from watching the US version of The Office) assures him that whenever emotional testimony is involved in a case, she automatically assumes that 85% of it is exaggerated and 15% of it is pure perjury. As strange as it seems, all clues point to the writer deliberately inserting this phrase to refer to the film itself.

I’d put off watching this for a very long time even after reading numerous favorable reviews of it. I kept thinking, “It’s a movie about a kid in college building a gigantic social networking website. How entertaining could it be?” I was wrong because this turned out to be one of the most riveting and entertaining films I’ve watched in recent memory. But a quick check on Wikipedia suffices to reveal that it achieves this by the simple expedient of taking tons of liberties with the facts. Even its writer Aaron Sorkin admits that he wanted to tell an interesting story first and foremost and this film isn’t meant to be a historically accurate documentary.

Continue reading The Social Network →

Fun

Using Facebook at work sets off alarms

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It’s an accepted fact of modern office life that staff will often browse sites like YouTube and Facebook at work. Sure, some employers hate it and try to block such sites from the workplace but in general, I think that employers should acknowledge that trying to force staff to use every second of their working time only on official tasks is a poor strategy. It makes more sense to gauge the effectiveness of staff, especially in roles where a significant amount of creativity or independent thinking is required, through concrete goals and performance targets while allowing employees to manage their own time as they see fit. In some cases, using such banned websites may actually be helpful to some people in their jobs so a blanket ban is just a hindrance.

One employer however has hit on a novel strategy. Instead of directly blocking offending sites from the office computers, the employer puts such sites on a watchlist and then triggers ear piercing alarms whenever an employee in the room browses onto a site on the list. According to the blog post, this allows employees who legitimately need access to these sites to continue to use them but publicly shames employees who are just goofing off at work. The Freakonomics authors seem to think that this is a pretty smart idea but judging from the comments posted in response to their article, the vast majority of people don’t agree.

Games

A CCG on Facebook?!

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Barely two weeks ago I wrote a post bemoaning the low quality of the hugely popular games on Facebook. So coming across Warstorm is kind of funny. To be fair, it’s not actually on Facebook itself, though it does offer the option of signing in through that social network and using it to connect with your existing contacts. It’s basically a simplified collectible card game with a focus on building and tweaking decks. The mechanics are streamlined and simple enough that the duels play out automatically and you only get to watch what happens. All of the decision-making takes place only while constructing decks.

The game itself is free to sign up for and to play, and there are single-player missions to do that will earn you packs of cards as rewards. But if you want the really good cards you’ll have to pony some real, hard cash. It’s pretty obvious that this is an absolute necessity if you want to have any hope at all at competing against other players. For example, two cards can have the exact same statistics, but the good one will have a drastically lower playing cost than the bad one. No prizes for guessing that the good cards only come from the packs that you have to pay cash for, as opposed to the free “Novice” packs that you get for completing in-game objectives.

It’s not a bad little game but it won’t win any prizes against the real CCGs. I notice that Magic: The Gathering is enjoying a bit of a revival recently, probably due to the release of the Xbox Live Arcade version of the game with pre-made decks. So you want to have a small taste of what CCGs are like without needing to pay any money upfront or are just feeling a little bit nostalgic about your Magic playing days, checking Warstorm out won’t be a bad idea at all.

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Games

Facebook games

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I’ve had a Facebook account for ages myself, but never did anything with it until recently. A thread on QT3 about the growing popularity of games on Facebook and the serious sums of money this new niche is generating prompted me to go check it out. It so happens that a few people on QT3 are actively involved in making these games and even established games companies are looking into developing applications for Facebook.

After checking out a few of them, it’s clear that there’s barely enough gameplay in them to actually qualify them for being called games. Two of the more popular games, Vampire Wars and Mafia Wars, both by zynga for example, are basically identical with the main differences being their themes.  Another game I checked out, the relatively new Vikings, Pirates and Ninjas tries to ape fantasy MMOs, except that everything is simplified and doing quests just takes clicking a button. Above all, everything is stupidly repetitive with next to variation at all.

Still, this clearly hasn’t stopped them from being popular or earning a great deal of money, which confirms the suspicion that all gamers really need is to see the numbers on their screen constantly increase. I suppose that aside from their accessibility, the close integration that they have with Facebook effectively means lots of free advertising and allows players to pretend that they’re meaningfully interacting with their friends. These things aren’t really going to hold my interest for any decent length of time, but the really sad part is that most Flash games offer much more gameplay and some are really quite innovative, but none can match the earning power of these Facebook games.

Fun

Facebook makes you dumb.

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It’s official because a report from the Ohio State University has concluded from a study of 219 US graduates and undergraduates that students who use Facebook had a significantly lower grade point average than those who did not.

FACEBOOK users may feel socially successful in cyberspace but they are more likely to perform poorly in exams, according to new research into the academic impact of the social networking website.

The majority of students who use Facebook every day are underachieving by as much as an entire grade compared with those who shun the site.

Of course, this is a ridiculous assertion because it basically boils down to the same thing: students are easily distracted from studying. If it weren’t for Facebook, the students would probably be playing video games, or partying or doing something else.

Or check out this alternative explanation from Chris Matyszczyk:

But I have a suspicious and entirely unscientific feeling that all this research may tell us so far is that bookwormy, people-uncomfortable types do well in school tests.

So nothing’s changed, right?