ORDER! ORDER! HE made the internets stupid!

It’s been too long since I’ve updated this blog, internets, but I don’t really plan on apologizing for that today. Instead, I’m going to don the rant pants and do some serious bitching. Here’s the short version: Facebook is stupid, twitter isn’t worth squat, and Hulu is about to get one less user. Whew. Now onto the long version.

Facebook is still hard to use. They’ve added a new feature where you can have a live feed roll down the page in “real time,” except it’s not real time. As a fairly adept internet user, I’ve usually got a minimum of four tabs open, one for each service and then random site hopping. If you are on another tab, the facebook timeline doesn’t update. You have to actually go back and make sure the site is the focus before it will do anything. You can tell that the idea of the “live feed” came from the Friendfeed guys, but it looks and feels like the Facebook guys are the ones who implemented it. Granted, the Friendfeed guys ARE the Facebook guys now so I’ll rephrase: Good idea, shitty implementation.

They’ve also removed cities from networks. So I guess the only networks I *can* have are schools or jobs? I question the usefulness of networks now, especially now that friend lists are becoming a big deal. Also, what good are networks in a twitter-ized environment anyway?

I heard somewhere that Twitter was worth billions. I kind of wish *I* had thought of a service with poor uptime and a shitty API so I could be worth billions too. Oh yeah, they’re coming out with lists, a feature that every other service has had for some time now. Hell, even twitter clients have list-like features.

You’ll remember a blog post I made awhile back bitching about users who couldn’t be bothered to pay the small fees from Pandora. Yeah, those people are still tight asses, but there’s some news that might make this “pay for online content” debate a little bit more complicated. Hulu is expected to charge for their content by 2010. I think this is a fairly retarded decision, considering the fact that the service isn’t out of it’s infancy yet (my opinion). Also, for a service like hulu to start charging, it needs to change the way it’s delivering it’s content. First of all, to me, pay for online content means zero advertising. It also means the service (like the article says) needs to extend beyond the website and extend *reliably*. Also, this eight day delay between episode air date and hulu release would have to stop. In fact, I would say that Hulu should just release the episode as soon as it airs.

Now, there was mention that there could be a tiered pricing scheme, which would make this into a less-sucky idea. But I’m going to put it out there that there won’t be much to the free tier. Sorry, but at this point, I see no reason to move to Hulu from Cable, or to even pay for both. Cable sucks, but at least it’s reliable and it won’t buffer if your connection isn’t as stellar.

Ugh.

Naturally, I didn’t quit either of the services, choosing instead to adopt Johnny Worthington’s idea of “going down with the ship.” But things had definitely changed for me with the news. What was once a blossoming service with immense potential became a cancer patient with but a few months to live.

I don’t really want to spend any more time talking about this, because I still need more time to think. But I feel like I’m about to lose something big here, something that I put a lot of my life into.