Healthiness and Socialism

Well. I really, really, really didn't expect this. We're at the end of Day 4 of the detox, and contrary to what every fibre of my being was telling me on Saturday morning, I'm actually quite enjoying this healthy eating lark. The meals have been small, but regular (breakfast, morning snack, lunch, afternoon snack, dinner), and generally quite tasty. Think steamed white fish (tilapia) with roasted sweet potato and red onion, or mixed rice (brown and wild) with kalamata olive pesto, or any number of brilliant soups.

I've also just been for a swim for the first time in months, and by god did it ever hurt. I pushed myself to do the full kilometre and am sitting here on the sofa feeling my shoulders turn slowly to stone - tomorrow might be a bit of a challenge, I reckon!

The weird thing, and possibly the most surprising thing, is that I've stopped craving things. Well, I've still got that ever-present background hankering for a kebab from our local place, but that's understandable. As long as I live I reckon there'll never be a time when I'm not secretly thinking of a kofte kebab from there. But on the whole I'm not missing anything except the odd glass of wine, and even that isn't that much of a problem.

Next week I think we'll roughly continue in a similar vein, although not quite as rigidly perhaps. Who knows, this might be a bit of a lifestyle change.

Which brings me to the book I'm reading: Orwell's England. I'd never paid much attention to Orwell, save for the obligatory reading of 1984 and Animal Farm, but I'm really warming to him. He's fairly disparaging of everyone in equal measure, but there's some fascinating insights into the English (note, not 'British') class system, written during the Second World War, when a quiet revolution was rumbling to its conclusion. His description of England is brilliant:

"England is not the jewelled isle of Shakepeare's much-quoted passage, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relatives who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control - that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase"

We as a nation have definitely moved on, but I think some of the sentiment still holds true. Anyway, enough for today.

Facebook: on the way out?

Don't get me wrong, I love Facebook as much as the next person. It's helped me get back in touch with loads of people I'd drifted away from and it's generally lovely and a nice place to spend a few hours a week. However...

I don't know about anyone else, but I've noticed things slowing down a bit on FB. Not everyone's as active as they used to be - I know I've certainly stopped the poking and vampires and group-joining, and my homepage feed suggests many of my friends are doing the same. There's always going to be a usage profile like this with social sites; it's the ones which settle down into the background fabric of your life that win out - I say this but realistically haven't experienced it yet.

So, that's the user perspective: the honeymoon is over, boredom and real life sets in. Now two points from a business viewpoint, neither of which are news particularly but hey, it's my blog and I'll regurgitate hackneyed viewpoints if I want to.

1. Their business model just doesn't work. It's based on advertising revenues and yes, a normal revenue model would go through the roof given their traffic stats. However, not only do they have one of the lowest click through rates I've ever seen, their much-vaunted targeting is non-existent and they're massively overcharging for the privilege. There's a limit to how many £300k cash dumps a marketing budget can take before someone starts asking for proof of ROI.

2. They're on the verge, within a few hours I reckon, of being bought. Microsoft and Google are both in the running, but strong rumours suggest that MS is a front runner with a $15bn deal. Although Mr Zuckerberg will only get a tiny slice (if you call $240m tiny, it's still only a 2% stake), so it looks like Steve Ballmer had him over a desk.

Now, the cumulative effect of these two things is this. As a $15bn new toy, it's got to be made to work. So it'll be monetized in different, more aggressive ways. The problem with this is that the relative advertising quiet was / is one of the things that makes Facebook a nice place to be. Given that I'm getting bored already, it won't take many poorly targeted advertising gambits to make me pack up my vampires and head over to Orkut or something.

All that said, I'd genuinely love it to stick around. Partly as I do find it useful, partly as making something as genuinely Web 2.0 as Facebook work as a business would prove that the internet is evolving in a solidly commercial way. And that would make a web professional like me sleep soundly at night.

Next post will be back to rambling nonsense about shoes or something, I promise.

Happy Birthday!

Apparently, blogging is ten years old this year (at some point). Which makes me feel not only tremendously old, but way behind the curve. Thanks be to the Lord for the lovely new Super Furry Animals album to keep my spirits up. Despite the fact that I'm at work at 0800 and alone in the office, for the sole reason that the Kiwi gets up early and thus so do I.

Does get me thinking about the whole blogging thing though. Bloggers always used to really get on my nerves - all that baseless ranting and opinion-mongery - but I came to see it as a way of documenting your own personal experiences for your own record, plus that of those close friends and family you might invite to view.

Personally, I reckon that it's purely the high profile of the medium that's giving it a bad name. It's an open, public media platform, available for free (which is a first in history), so naturally those with an axe to grind will get on board and grind away in full public view. The sort of nasally self-righteous muppet who's more than happy to proclaim forth on any topic in any situation for a bit of attention. Who tends to start sentences with 'What I don't understand is...' followed by an inexpert and poorly-informed view of why they know better than a multi-million pound corporation guided by hundreds of years of direct experience.

So unfortunately the loudest voices in the blogosphere (can't believe I actually used that word) are consequently the most idiotic. It's a shame, really. They're spoiling it for everyone else.