Down Right Now
Here's a userful (yep, I mean it that way) site: http://downrightnow.com
The site will tell you if your favorite social apps are "up" or "down," thus answering the age-old question, "Is it me, or him (them)?"
Just recently I was unable to get Facebook to respond (I still have no idea why, and I still have times when it behaves very strangely - white spaces where posts should be, and churning, churning, churning rather than simply updating. I am sometimes told that a service has stopped responding, do I want to discontinue it, and I usually opt to.
I have read other reports of similar misbehavior on the part of particularly Facebook, so I am left questioning if it isn't a problem relating to Facebook's new inline ads - some of them video. Video seems to argue with web services as often as not.
This leads neatly into my next topic: auto-play video on websites. Often, the tricky advertisers delay the autoplay until you have been engaged with the page's content for a while, and scrolled far enough away from the ad that you will be subjected to at least 20-30 seconds of it before you can find it - and then good luck finding the scrubbing controls to shut it down. Nine times out of ten, you'll try to locate them, only to click on the ad itself, and be thrown into the ether of whatever website the ad is linked to.
Yes, it's easy enough to shut down the site and go back to what you were doing, but it is annoying.
I don't have a solution for advertisers, or the websites that are offering content and hoping that advertising will pay to keep them alive. The model worked nicely for television for many years - but that was in the bad old days of three (max four) stations and the novelty of the medium as a whole.
Those days are over, and if anything, we're over-saturated with options. Books, ebooks, on-demand, DVDs, theaters, streaming video, the Internet itself, not to mention social sites that can eat up huge portions of your day if you're not vigilant. Having to "put up with" ads is simply a thing of the past.
Personally, I lean toward "native" content, but even that is being eyed fishily by search engines as being spurious, so while it may at least offer genuine value ("native" content is material that is product or service related, but not specifically an ad for the product or service), it may also get a website blacklisted.
It's an interesting problem, and one I'm sure that will continue to play out for a long time to come.
The site will tell you if your favorite social apps are "up" or "down," thus answering the age-old question, "Is it me, or him (them)?"
Just recently I was unable to get Facebook to respond (I still have no idea why, and I still have times when it behaves very strangely - white spaces where posts should be, and churning, churning, churning rather than simply updating. I am sometimes told that a service has stopped responding, do I want to discontinue it, and I usually opt to.
I have read other reports of similar misbehavior on the part of particularly Facebook, so I am left questioning if it isn't a problem relating to Facebook's new inline ads - some of them video. Video seems to argue with web services as often as not.
This leads neatly into my next topic: auto-play video on websites. Often, the tricky advertisers delay the autoplay until you have been engaged with the page's content for a while, and scrolled far enough away from the ad that you will be subjected to at least 20-30 seconds of it before you can find it - and then good luck finding the scrubbing controls to shut it down. Nine times out of ten, you'll try to locate them, only to click on the ad itself, and be thrown into the ether of whatever website the ad is linked to.
Yes, it's easy enough to shut down the site and go back to what you were doing, but it is annoying.
I don't have a solution for advertisers, or the websites that are offering content and hoping that advertising will pay to keep them alive. The model worked nicely for television for many years - but that was in the bad old days of three (max four) stations and the novelty of the medium as a whole.
Those days are over, and if anything, we're over-saturated with options. Books, ebooks, on-demand, DVDs, theaters, streaming video, the Internet itself, not to mention social sites that can eat up huge portions of your day if you're not vigilant. Having to "put up with" ads is simply a thing of the past.
Personally, I lean toward "native" content, but even that is being eyed fishily by search engines as being spurious, so while it may at least offer genuine value ("native" content is material that is product or service related, but not specifically an ad for the product or service), it may also get a website blacklisted.
It's an interesting problem, and one I'm sure that will continue to play out for a long time to come.
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