Read the article at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/23/facebook-global-takeover-f8-conference-messenger-chatbots and discuss it. Present your personal experiences.
Owls are nocturnal creatures. They’re wide awake at night and they sleep during the day. If this sounds like bliss to you, then, like about 20 percent of the population who find themselves most active at around 9 pm, you may fall into the same category as our feathered friend. Night owls often have difficulty waking up in the morning, and like to be up late at night. Studies of animal behaviour indicate that being a night owl may actually be built into some people’s genes. This would explain why those late-to-bed, late-to-rise people find it so difficult to change their behaviour. The trouble for night owls is that they just have to be at places such as work and school far too early. This is when the alarm clock becomes the night owl’s most important survival tool. Experts say that one way for a night owl to beat their dependence on their alarm clocks is to sleep with the curtains open. The Theory is that if they do so, the morning sunlight will awaken them gently and natura...
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But even if people could hang out in virtual space, they'd never abandoned real life.
As for Virtual Technology plans , even in its early stages it looked promising but problem with it is price of hardware not only Oculus Rift is expensive as it is but it requires pretty expensive computer system to run. Availability and price take huge part in technology being popular and those 2 are not strong with Oculus Rift as of now.
Actually I'm old-fashioned person and I'd like to meet my friends in real life from time to time.
I really don't like the fact that they are working with virtual reality. VR's potential is enormous, it can be used as effective tool in all kind of industries, e. g. medicine, military; science or just be a nice entertainment device. Yes, it can be also used like a close-to-reality messenger, as it was described, but in my thoughts, if it is Facebook, who will be the first company owning such technology, the whole concept will be doomed. They are going to buy all possible competitors, like they are doing nowadays.
To finish my statement, I want to say that Facebook should be slowed down. The lack of competiton allways kills the motivation to move on and create something new, and you can already see the signs of that in some parts of the monstrous web creature called Facebook.
Why do people still use LinkedIn then? The target for this company is strictly businesses and professional networks. If we think about nature and all the different tentacles of Facebook, this business strategy seems to be a jackpot. FB integrates many business features in it as well, but many people still think that it's still what it was meant to be at first - fun social network used to communicate betweek friends, which doesn't sound that professional.
To summarize, I think Facebook really is a behemoth which is constantly evelving, but even with its' extensive reach, it is still leaving some areas for others to starts some great businesses in.
Personally I will remove my account on Facebook. Unfortunately all my friends have Facebook. I use Facebook for communication and I think that without it I will know much less. Lately Facebook blocked my profile because I use unreal name and td me if i wanted to unblock I must send my identity card. Is it a joke? I sent different argumentation but I lost my account.
Using googls VR on Skype is very good idea. Personally I think that VR is the future and develops very fast.
-Education
-Testing
-Communication
- ...
Especially for the disabled people!
But Zuckerberg is more concerned with profit, not development or assistance people.
Zuckerberg sees that nowadays most popular are mobile devices, and all users(clients) prefer using smartphones rather than computers. But he does not have any mobile application, so he begins to buy any companies which have applications for mobile devices. Zuckerberg understands, that if his company has mobile application, it has more potential in marketing.
About people being used as a resource in social networks, I can say the following: today the artificial intelligence is one of the most popular technology in our world and massive data collection is the basis for the development of this direction, so the using a human as a resource for collecting and analysing data is quite logical from my point of view.
On the other side, it is very dangerous that in these days exists such big corporations. They store a lot of information about us and we never know when they use this against us. Facebook tries to involve in multinational politics and they uses their power to fight agains worldview which conflicts with their own. We can realized that you can't say something like: "I don't want economical imigrants in my country.", "I think that abortion is a crime" but when you want to have a group on facebook which slander values which are important for a lot of people then it is not a problem for facebook's censors.
To sum up, I think that we should be conscious that Facebooks tries to affect on us not using messanger or features like VR because such solutions are a normal technical progress and it is clear for everyone. However, they want to be a monopolist and subordinate us to their services - they try to affect on business and human worldview. What do you need more to rule the world?
It's still convenient but also... scary.
On the one hand you want to show your friends pictures from your trip to Bhutan but doing that you are giving another information to Facebook- what do you like to do in your free time, with who, where and etc. The question is: what is Facebook going to do with that kind of data in the future?
About VR: Well... meeting friends through facebook? Really? Im not really into talking to funny, colorful and virtual humanoids. It can be fun for a while but it is so flat and meaningless.
Secondly, the artificial intelligence is getting to know us better and better by gathering different information about our interests,preferences etc. To my mind, it's a some kind of interference in our private life, because it happens without our acceptance. Every day I get a lot of ad just because I clicked once a page.
I'm even more concerned about such connection to facebook, because as programmer I know that everything in the internet could be hacked. So what if in one day someone will hack facebook. There will be chaos in the world. But maybe it's only my opinion.
Actually I'm not using facebook on daily basis. I have empty account for connecting apps I've created to facebook API, but that almost all. Sometimes I'm using messenger to have conversation with my friends, but I know, If one day I won't use facebook anymore I will deal with it without any regrets.
Personally, I don't like the way facebook is changing. Messenger really annoys me with its complexity. It tries to be an app like snapchat, which might be good for a teenager, not for me. I don't like Facebook's main site look, previous versions were better in my opinion. Unfortunately, all my friends are on facebook, so to keep in touch with them I can't really delete my account there.
Facebook is strong because of the people that are building the website. Personally I don't care that much since I'm simply not interested in anything they're doing. It's only sad to see how they're buying out every single competitor that can even remotely hit their primary target, which further enhances its monopoly and lack of any good alternative. Fortunately this doesn't consider me.
Also, it seems like they know very well that the main reason why people keep using Facebook is chat option. That's probably why they give it so much attention by extracting it to different platform and improving it quite rapidly but still concentrate on ads in main platform.
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Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
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This exchange clearly shows that he didn't care about others' privacy back then, did it change, are we safe now? Well... if we overlook that probably a bulk of facebook earnings come from selling personal data of its users to various legal and/or shady customers and believe Mark that we should have hope instead of fear, while he, himself is one of the biggest control freaks that have ever lived, buying 4 properties, worth $30M, neighboring his newly bought house just to demolish them, then and only then I think we are just fine. At least for a while, until the world changes and a new bidder comes a long to get a hold of our lives.
Some sources:
http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims-wont-help-facebooks-privacy-problems-2010-5?IR=T
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/zuckerberg-demolish-30m-real-estate-keep-things-private-n580216
About researches related with recognizing people's gestures and expressions - it's not normal if somebody scans your behavior in a conversation, but, from the other side, if you just want to understand in what mood your friend is, it's ok to use it. Perhaps this technology could be used in negotiations to gain some emotional advantage over your opponent, but I guess we'll newer know because without lenses with augmented reality this technology is useless(except some online conversations like Skype)
It is almost like a scene from "Archer" TV series (Kyrylo mentioned the show below) in which Dr. Krieger's anime hologram girlfriend was so real that NY allowed him to marry her.
As for Facebook's CEO dream, it paints a fairly grim future. Orwell's vision of the future is in comparison a Disney fairy tale. I can just hope that the lack of serious theoretical developments in AI for the past 30 years will slow down Facebook's progress. AI and NLP are not magic boxes and are in fact much more limited and challenging than what media presents.
They say "imagine Skype in 3D", but we are still waiting for Skype 2D to work properly :)
As for Virtual Technology, well... I currently have an opportunity to work with it. It's fun and all but it still has much to achieve. There are two main problems.
First it needs VERY powerful hardware to work properly.
Second moving in VR is problematic because you can literally puke if donewrong. Of course there are special platformsthat allow movement in place but thay are not cheam. Check out for example Virtuix Omni (http://www.virtuix.com/). Looks fun yeah? But it's quite big... Still not discouraged? Check the price. Not so fun anymore huh?
Future will show if it's gonna be a good decision or not. For now VR is way to pricey.But future is limitless...
To use facebook's services one has to keep a critical mindset. This quote from the article pretty sums it up:
"And the Facebook experience is sanitised, shielding users from the big bad internet with strict rules about what content it deems appropriate."
So a monopoly on the internet content sounds scary. Lets keep a healthy balance in visiting facebook and the rest of the internet.
This is great tool to connect people from all over the world. However we have to be careful because we give Facebook a lot of our data, which they can easily sell to another companies.
I think the strongest side of this company is resource management. Their employees make right decisions.
They have a great strategy and experience in what they do. They know what we need. That's why facebook is the biggest social network.
The way how they treat their competitor, shows their power.
If they see any threat on the market they try to buy this brand
or clone technologies.
In my opinion, Facebook will continue to dominate the market.
The question is, will somebody stop them?
But the truth is that Facebook is dangerous. People, me included, are sharing their private infomations, photos, important events. If we don't set our private settings then everyone can see it and, maybe, use it (Even if we do that, Facebook have access to that data so they can share them with other companies without our permission or knowledge).
Idea of VR environment sounds fun. I have experience in this technology. Although price of hardware is a disaster.
Other case are all that tricks that are used to increase the merchant capacity. I think that a few decades ago that things that are happening now it could be a scandal... but nowadays it's normal and quite moral. So maybe now it make us shocked but maybe one day it will be normal... Who knows..
Actually it's terrifying how Facebook is dictating the innovation strategies. "When Facebook announces new features, publishers scramble to rearrange their own priorities for fear of being relegated by Facebook’s algorithms". In my opinion this trend will be almost impossible to stop as Facebook has grown so big and strong in its category no other company (platform?) can be considered competition.
Using VR on Skype is a very good idea. There was a boom 20 years ago with PowerVR but current technology has way more potential to grow.
I remember, when my friends told me to create my Fb profile and I was like "Nah, I don't need that thing." but now I'm
using it in many, many ways. For example to comunicate with people, to be up-to-date with profiles which I'm following or
to advertise my own business. Is Facebook big? Of course it is! Even my grandparents know what Facebook is about.
On the other hand, Facebook is like data mine. They know nearly everything about us and they are selling our personal data.
Did you know that Facebook will use our facial expressions to show us adequate adverts? If you look sad, they will show you something to make you happier. I heard about it on Youtube's channel called Techweek. I think it's a little bit too much...
However it is good that Facebook develops and invests in new technologies such as VR. The question is whether humanity is able to use such technologies wisely and VR will not become another tool for manipulation?
I don’t mind Facebook becoming enormous reseller almost monopolist of online shopping. There will always be place in market for other canals of distribution. Facebook is ideal place for selling goods by companies that have little presence on market. Behemoths like Coca-Cola, Jonson&Jonson, Nestle will never make use of this feature on this platform. Small manufactures and artist is where this model of selling thrives. With very little efford they can reach to millions of people that are interested in their products.
The problem I have with Facebook is the way it's gathering data. I don’t like being spied on. As example problem that had when I was buying present for my girlfriend. After purchase, there were ads of this product across my whole Facebook feed. Needless to say, it wasn’t a surprise to her what I bought for her. I would like to be informed that I’m being spied on and if I don’t want to be I would like to have ability to turn it off. Ads need to be transparent in way they appear in my FB feed.