Jason's Notes About Stuff

About a month ago, before the big Cambridge Analytica scandal , I wrote that " Facebook is over ." My feeling was strong enough that I divested all FB holdings the same day. Glossing over the details at the time, I simply stated that Facebook had "lost its way." After posting, several of my friends and relatives (on Facebook, of course) suggested that I should create the Next Facebook . Funny enough, I'd already been there and done that. My reply: " I started a project called "FriendPortal" in 2003 that was to be a simpler, better alternative to Friendster. Before I could finish it, some scrappy Harvard kid beat me to the punch. Somebody will make the "next" Facebook. Odds are decent that it won't be me  :) " I thought it would be interesting to go a bit more in-depth on this topic. History Lesson In my mind, the first modern "social networking" site was Friendster (2002). It was quickly followed by M...

Alright folks, I'm calling it. It's quite sad, but as of 6pm Pacific on Feb 21, 2018, Facebook is officially over. Soon it will join the ranks of MySpace, Friendster, Slashdot, Digg, Orkut, and Google+ as dusty old sites that nobody really uses anymore. It had a good run. For a while, it was the perfect way to keep in touch with friends and relatives, but somewhere along the line, it lost its way. And unfortunately, I don't see a simple way back. Let's hope they can prove me wrong. But otherwise, I'm looking forward to seeing what's next. What is next? Twitter? Snapchat? Instagram? I feel like they're all mostly dead too. What's coming down the pipeline to help us all connect online? Or are we all slowly moving back to our smaller, more manageable offline groups? RIP Facebook, 2004-2018

A million dollars isn't cool , but do you know what would be cool? If you could target posts to your friends the same way you with Facebook ads. When you " boost your post " from a Facebook Page, you can target your audience by Location, Age, Gender, and Interests. The interface looks like this: I think it would be really interesting if you do something similar when you created a personal post.