OK, sorry if this comes across ranty. I am CERTAINMENT in a ranty mood. >:O
I have decided to renew my interest in facebook. I have had several accounts for years and years but never used them, closed some, and mostly just kept one, unopened, for years, for the purposes of getting invited to Events. My friends always act happy to see me when I show up at parties, but they are (mostly) far too lazy to actually call or SMS me! ;P
Now, I have decided to give a certain project a bit of a boost and re-enlist. However, being a Super Freak, I have a lot of rules which ordinary FB users have long since abandoned.
Primarily, I am in search of an Android (CM7/GBread) app. However, a Win7 app would also be helpful. This app should enable me to share links I find in my RSS reader to FB, with a thumbnail, and preferably a comment. It should also let me select different friend groups to send each mail to. Finally, it should not rape my privacy. In other words, it should be like g+, only smaller filesize, with actual friends on it and raping my privacy less if possible. XD
Free would be nice, but I could pay if it's worth it.
Things I have tried (and why they FAIL):
Let's start at the beginning. Well, Androidwise. The social internet used to be better when mostly techies were on it, and back when I didn't have the inkling to share articles with non-techie friends, doing all this was great. A bit fractured, and non-mobile, tho... ^^;;;
OK so originally there was Google Reader. It was brilliant. You opened your news, it managed hundreds of RSSes pretty brilliantly, and you could divide your friends into interest groups and share with them based on interests. Hundreds of messages going back and forth each day, keeping up -- not on what some morons at techdirt or slashdot thought was HAHAHA HILARIOUS TEH BALD MAN HAS FALLEN DOWN -- but on what you and your intellectual peers really felt was urgent to share.
Of course, Google is run by paranoid suits now, so they killed their best product and rolled out G+ about a year before it was finished. G+ works ok enough, but with one big exception -- there is now only one big difference between Google social services and Facebook. It used to be that the really smart people could keep their lives compartmentalized and carefully managed by using a variety of google and other services, and googs realized this and made their services follow open source standards for compatibility. Now of course they see that the real money is in lock-in. But they have no customers and no third-party developers. So they give up their one advantage, replace it with essentially no advantage, tie you into the world's biggest ad network, and wtf are we supposed to do? Move back to facebook, obviously. The real kick in the balls came when, after faithfully persevering with g+, sharing stuff with almost nobody, the newest version of the app is TWENTYEIGHT MB. 28! On my 196 MB phone. wtf! Also the new layout is attractive but more difficult to read -- pointless.
I thought about twitter. Twitter has a lot of smart people sharing links at high speed. However, almost none of my REAL friends and family are really twitter users, so... at least it's better than g+? Wait, no it isn't, because there's no friends-grouping, right? And who wants to read what people are sharing 140 characters at a time? With no thumbnail? Ridiculous. OK for listening to how your family or your crush's day went, but not great for learning stuff.
So, bring on the facebook app. No. Do NOT. Facebook wants your everything. They are not content to stop at your soul. They want your phone number, they want your contact list, they want your device info, etc. They want permission to integrate all these things before you even install the app. I don't roll that way, so screw that.
Friendcaster, Buffer, Seesmic, all have dodgy privacy policies, and the best of these, Buffer, despite having a VERY spare client, is a rather expensive fee service with heavy restrictions on free users. If you're down with $120 a year, Buffer seems like an excellent program and has the very cool feature of buffering your links and sending them out through the day, at times you specify. It's a tight little system, supports a small handful of popular services... very cool, very expensive.
So now I'm down to my current solution, TweetDeck. It's terrible, really, but it's the best so far. It's owned by Twitter now so at least the most important bit, the privacy policy, is as solid as they come. Features... there are none. The Android app fails in every area that the desktop app gets right -- loses sync quite often, the layout is very restricted, there are even fewer options, etc. It does do one thing -- it shows up in the share applist, so I can do half of what I want -- share links with a thumbnail with FB friends. It does not allow for granular friend selection or group selection. It also displays things Twitter style, kind of ugly if you ask me, but not too bad. At least it doesn't add any Shared via AppWhoWantsYourSoulTM garbage. It's not brilliant though. Even the desktop app is spare to point of being shocking. It's not like the app is small and tightly coded, either (happily, the Android app is not too terrible in this regard, <2 MB). It's just a stylish lump of minimalist blah. The desktop version completely fails to replace Facebook the web page, which is something I am still eager to do. However, the Android app is halfway there.
TL;DR anyone have any recommendations? ^^;;; I am willing to give rights to edit pages and posts. I am willing to give full network access, but not to ads, and not to my phone info and contact lists and preferably not my camera and a bunch of other garbage. It just needs to show up in the share list.
I have decided to renew my interest in facebook. I have had several accounts for years and years but never used them, closed some, and mostly just kept one, unopened, for years, for the purposes of getting invited to Events. My friends always act happy to see me when I show up at parties, but they are (mostly) far too lazy to actually call or SMS me! ;P
Now, I have decided to give a certain project a bit of a boost and re-enlist. However, being a Super Freak, I have a lot of rules which ordinary FB users have long since abandoned.
Primarily, I am in search of an Android (CM7/GBread) app. However, a Win7 app would also be helpful. This app should enable me to share links I find in my RSS reader to FB, with a thumbnail, and preferably a comment. It should also let me select different friend groups to send each mail to. Finally, it should not rape my privacy. In other words, it should be like g+, only smaller filesize, with actual friends on it and raping my privacy less if possible. XD
Free would be nice, but I could pay if it's worth it.
Things I have tried (and why they FAIL):
Let's start at the beginning. Well, Androidwise. The social internet used to be better when mostly techies were on it, and back when I didn't have the inkling to share articles with non-techie friends, doing all this was great. A bit fractured, and non-mobile, tho... ^^;;;
OK so originally there was Google Reader. It was brilliant. You opened your news, it managed hundreds of RSSes pretty brilliantly, and you could divide your friends into interest groups and share with them based on interests. Hundreds of messages going back and forth each day, keeping up -- not on what some morons at techdirt or slashdot thought was HAHAHA HILARIOUS TEH BALD MAN HAS FALLEN DOWN -- but on what you and your intellectual peers really felt was urgent to share.
Of course, Google is run by paranoid suits now, so they killed their best product and rolled out G+ about a year before it was finished. G+ works ok enough, but with one big exception -- there is now only one big difference between Google social services and Facebook. It used to be that the really smart people could keep their lives compartmentalized and carefully managed by using a variety of google and other services, and googs realized this and made their services follow open source standards for compatibility. Now of course they see that the real money is in lock-in. But they have no customers and no third-party developers. So they give up their one advantage, replace it with essentially no advantage, tie you into the world's biggest ad network, and wtf are we supposed to do? Move back to facebook, obviously. The real kick in the balls came when, after faithfully persevering with g+, sharing stuff with almost nobody, the newest version of the app is TWENTYEIGHT MB. 28! On my 196 MB phone. wtf! Also the new layout is attractive but more difficult to read -- pointless.
I thought about twitter. Twitter has a lot of smart people sharing links at high speed. However, almost none of my REAL friends and family are really twitter users, so... at least it's better than g+? Wait, no it isn't, because there's no friends-grouping, right? And who wants to read what people are sharing 140 characters at a time? With no thumbnail? Ridiculous. OK for listening to how your family or your crush's day went, but not great for learning stuff.
So, bring on the facebook app. No. Do NOT. Facebook wants your everything. They are not content to stop at your soul. They want your phone number, they want your contact list, they want your device info, etc. They want permission to integrate all these things before you even install the app. I don't roll that way, so screw that.
Friendcaster, Buffer, Seesmic, all have dodgy privacy policies, and the best of these, Buffer, despite having a VERY spare client, is a rather expensive fee service with heavy restrictions on free users. If you're down with $120 a year, Buffer seems like an excellent program and has the very cool feature of buffering your links and sending them out through the day, at times you specify. It's a tight little system, supports a small handful of popular services... very cool, very expensive.
So now I'm down to my current solution, TweetDeck. It's terrible, really, but it's the best so far. It's owned by Twitter now so at least the most important bit, the privacy policy, is as solid as they come. Features... there are none. The Android app fails in every area that the desktop app gets right -- loses sync quite often, the layout is very restricted, there are even fewer options, etc. It does do one thing -- it shows up in the share applist, so I can do half of what I want -- share links with a thumbnail with FB friends. It does not allow for granular friend selection or group selection. It also displays things Twitter style, kind of ugly if you ask me, but not too bad. At least it doesn't add any Shared via AppWhoWantsYourSoulTM garbage. It's not brilliant though. Even the desktop app is spare to point of being shocking. It's not like the app is small and tightly coded, either (happily, the Android app is not too terrible in this regard, <2 MB). It's just a stylish lump of minimalist blah. The desktop version completely fails to replace Facebook the web page, which is something I am still eager to do. However, the Android app is halfway there.
TL;DR anyone have any recommendations? ^^;;; I am willing to give rights to edit pages and posts. I am willing to give full network access, but not to ads, and not to my phone info and contact lists and preferably not my camera and a bunch of other garbage. It just needs to show up in the share list.
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and you can only edit posts to include more lists in desktop facebook and it's kind of a pain even on a real desktop.
