If you would like to keep in touch, try one of these
For close friends, people I've met personally who would like to keep in touch, pass on news and so on, there is the Social Proximity forum, where we can retain social proximity even if we have to keep physical distance because of geography or diseases like Covid. See here: Social Proximity.
For acquaintances, including online acquaintances, who would like occasionally to chat about anything and everything, there is the Off Topic forum, where nothing (well, almost nothing) is off topic. See here: Off Topic.
And for those who prefer more focused discussions on particular topics, there are these:
- Christianity & Society -- Christianity in relation to current affairs, politics, social justice, arts, literature, culture, war & peace, including mission, evangelism and missiology
- Inklings -- Christianity and literature, especially in relation to the Oxford Inklings (C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams Tolkien et al, and similar authors. Share what you are reading or writing and what you think of it.
- Orthodox Mission & Missiology -- Mission, evangelism and mission history of the Orthodox Church any time over the last 20 centuries.
See here for more contact info if we lose touch via Facebook, or this blog.
What is happening to Facebook?
The people at Facebook decided to give ity a "new look, which for many people turned out to be a bad User Experience (UX).
Their new user interface seems to bear a remarkable resemblance to the old MySpace one, which Facebook displaced.
As a result several of my friends have already left Facebook, or threatened to, and a lot of other people will be using Facebook a lot less than they used to, including my. This morning I wanted to take a quick look at Facebook to see if any friends had any messages for me, and to look at a couple of interesting articles that frioents had shared, and I had shared too to be able to find them again, when I didn't have time to read them than. But Facebook would not let me. First I had to "Get Started" on their new interface, and they would not let me do anything else until I had done that.
I really didn't have time for that crap, so I closed Facebook and went to Twitter. It showed notifications of "Recent Tweets" -- in other words, nothing to see here, move along, nobody has interacted with anything you tweeted. So move along I did.
And now the people who run this blogging platform have threatened. like Facebook, to replace the current usable user interface with a slow, awkward dysfunctional one, so any time I post anything here, I'm aware that this blog post may be my last.
The people who write the software for these things seem to think they can improve things by adding bells and whistles and taking away pistons and cylinders. They go for eye-candy and glitzy layout, relying on the speed of modern hardware to cover for their lack of programming skills.
The trouble is that those of us who can't afford to buy the latest and greatest hardware have to put up with software that slows to a crawl. and "minimalist" icons that are so mall and faint on the screen that you need a magnifying glass to see them. So eventually we just give up.
So I'm reminded in many ways of the old Queen song, and that is my message to any of my friends or former friends who may be reading this:
Do you hear my call, though you're many years away?
Do you hear me calling you?
Write your letters in the sand
for the day I take your hand
in the land that our grandchildren knew.
No comments:
Post a Comment