Subscriber Reviews

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"Let me be harsh..." - by Sandis on 07-APR-2010
Reviewer Rating:
Let me be harsh...

If this book was to sell me social media then it failed miserably. Perhaps the cultural diference is at play here (I'm not American) but I still fail to see what's so great about so called Web 2.0 apps. Didn't we have Usenet, mailing lists, forums an other tools before? New flock of apps look nicer and are a bit more convenient individually than their old counterparts however colectively they are much more inconvenient. New "killer" app crops up every 15 minutes but since the backends are locked you can not move your stuff over there so you have to use a lot of social media apps at the same time to cover all of your friends (which is huge inconvenience at least for me). Now how this is supposedly better than the old model where the system spoke one protocol but was not controlled by single entity this book didn't answer.

One could argue that these are mere techicallities, but one can not deny that "previous generation" apps were more local, more special interest, where most readers were also at least to some extent contributors. This book teaches how to "scale up" and make things polished, impersonal, targeted at masses not individuals. Isn't this the opposite of what social media should be about?

Also this book failed at addressing some of the huge disadvantages of makeing your life and thoughts completely visible to everyone on the Internet. Or did the auther pretend that there are none?

To sum up this book is like mirror of social media - some helpful tips here and there, but mostly shallow, empty, useless.
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