As If Facebook Did Not Suck Enough

I'm sure you have heard of the Instagram thing, where they came out with new terms of service which said that they could sell your photographs, and you did not get anything.

It's a classic Facebook move, but it really does not bother me, because I don't "get" instagram.

If I want to funky things to photos I snap with my camera phone, I'll do it on my PC on an old copy of Paint Shop Pro.^*

That being said, I really don't get Facebook either.  I appreciate its huge user base, and I signed up so that I could mirror my blog there, boosting eyeballs.

In the process I did reconnect with a bunch of old friends, but again, that's largely a function of the user base, not the site.

One of the problems is that it appears that every upgrade makes the totality of the experience worse.

The latest innovation is that Facebook will be adding auto start videos to its video feed:

Get ready for video ads in your news feed.

Facebook is set to unveil a new video-ad product in the first half of next year in its largest attempt to date to attract big swaths of ad dollars from TV advertisers, according to several industry executives who have been briefed on the company's plans over the past few weeks.

………

In what's sure to be a controversial move, the visual component of the Facebook video ads will start playing automatically -- a dynamic known as "autoplay" -- according to two of the executives. Facebook is still debating whether to have the audio component of the ads activated automatically as well, one of these people said.

On the desktop version of Facebook, the video ads are expected to grab a user's attention by expanding out of the news feed into webpage real estate in both the left and right columns -- or rails -- of the screen. Facebook is also working on a way to ensure that the video ads stand out on the mobile apps as well, though it is unclear how exactly the company will accomplish this.

I guess that they decided that the whole anal probe ad server thing just wasn't evil enough.

I do not get it. Are already running their server farms on power generated by incinerating harp seal pups, and claiming that it was "green" energy.

Isn't that evil enough for them?

Damn, he needs to buy a white Persian cat and a bond villain lair, and be done with it.

^*BTW, a big f%$# you to the folks Adobe^® who bought the makers of the program, JASC, and shut them down a couple of years later, because they did not want the product, a fairly capable and easy to use image editor, they just wanted to shut down a competitor.