When I tell folks to check out Life On The Road, the typical responses, after they read a few posts, are wow, right on, OR no – that’s just not right, OR hey, what does THAT have to do with trucking. Well, I was surprised last night when a Facebook “friend” asked me what my piece on the US Postal Service had to do with trucking. Honestly, it never occurred to me that someone might think that the post office is not all about trucking.
As I said in the piece, the post office has the largest private fleet of vehicles in the world – the majority of them trucks. There are thousands of OTR mail contractors and owner-operators running nightly between every major marketplace in the country. Remember the classification “air mail” – now better known as “express mail” – most of that freight moves by truck and not airplane. So, when I do a piece about “our” postal service for Life On The Road, it is very much all about trucking.
OK, with that out of the way, I want to cover a couple of things that have been on my mind lately. Let me first say, that although I expressed my doubts surrounding the “value” of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, I do recommend that you sign up and try them out. I find Facebook incredibly “starchy” – meaning that it is very uniform, almost what I would characterize as totally “North Korean”.
You do it there way or the highway. Creatively, Facebook is totally bla and boring. I just don’t see why it has to be so all alike. I will never take the time to learn HTML or any other coding nonsense. I shouldn’t have to. That’s for developers and programmers. They live in a world unto themselves and that’s the way it should be. You don’t want to see the mechanics behind the “magic” at Disney and neither do I.
So, when Facebook says that I can “improve” my page, wall or profile and to do so I have to go to their developers page to download some goofy code and then insert it somewhere – well, they can take their code and insert it right where the sun don’t shine. I don’t care if the entire planet uses Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg is not Steve Jobs.
Apple designs products and its services with people (being user-friendly) first, Facebook is set up to please Mark Zuckerberg. He continues to make billions off the basic concept he stole from his fellow Harvard classmates. It’s time to go creative.
I deplore when something – anything – is not flexible. When there is a drop-down option with a bunch of creative offerings (the LIKE button, for example) on Facebook and all you have to do is click on a box and it happens, I and hundreds of thousands of Facebook users will be overjoyed. On the other hand, if and when I’m “invited” to try Google+ and I like it, I fully intend to bid adieu to Facebook.
I have to add one more thing to add regarding Facebook. I now know that programmers and developers cannot explain anything to anyone. Here’s the proof. Have a problem with doing something on Facebook? Google the question and most likely you will be “referred” to a YouTube tutorial or instructional video. Play any one of them, recorded by a twenty-something something who thinks they have a life, but don’t, and you not only learn nothing, you will be more confused then ever.
I watched about three yesterday and the problem/question they were supposed to solve wasn’t even addressed. It was both pathetic and hilarious. The average person – me – just does not care about source code, imbedding, HTML or any nonsense. I don’t care how the car runs, I just want it to start when I turn the key. I want to “socialize” – write – create – learn – NOT worry about opening the Facebook (or Twitter) hood and “tweak” it’s performance. I want solutions easy, simple – explain things to me like a kin-dee-gaaa-den-a.
This is the time when someone I know reads the post and says, oooo, Marshall, you sound sooo angry. Maybe I am. I don’t want my Facebook page to look just like Oprah’s or Evan – Kevin Lockridge’s or even our Life On The Road page. I have more friends by the way. Nanny – nanny – boo – bo! You see what this is doing to me? I’ve written 720 words and I have even begun to talk about what I had wanted to cover. Now I’ll have to wait until tomorrow. And don’t tell me that this didn’t have anything to do with trucking – there at least 50,000+ OTR truck drivers on Facebook. That’s my research not theirs. Be safe out there – and please “friend” me on Facebook – don’t care so much about Twitter right now. LOL. Don’t you just love Seesmic?
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