Technology Tool Tarnish – Facebook, Twitter, and Google

Facebook is the company we increasingly love to hate – but boomers still ‘like’ it. Rant on. So much negative press, well deserved, about Facebook lately, including the lawsuit about knowingly duping children playing games. Then there was the Pew Research estimated number of deleted accounts (mostly young people) and no small deal, even a big security breach.  Clearly this is a company with management issues – and someday will either fail (unlikely), be broken up, or be regulated, even in the US, which has for some unknown reason done nothing to date, unlike privacy actions taken in Europe.   According to eMarketer, though, baby boomers are still big users – of the 76.4 million of them, 31.9 million are using Facebook. Hopefully not trying to stay connected to teens – who are departing for other platforms like Snapchat, according to eMarketer, including Snapchat. On the positive side, Snapchat is not yet owned by Facebook – which will be combining Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp into a single platform by 2020.

Twitter – is it relevant in the older adult market segment?  Is it relevant at all? So aside from US political tweets, which dominate our attention, Twitter itself is hardly a fact of life for Americans, and certainly not for older adults (though they may see plenty of tweets displayed on newscasts).  According to this recent informative summary about Twitter, 80% of its actual users are outside the United States; boomers and seniors are generally not interested, but heads of state are very interested (no kidding). And as all can see, political Tweets are reported minute by minute in the national TV broadcasts, so there’s no need to log on to see them. Sigh. But here’s head-scratcher – 75% percent of B2B businesses market on Twitter. One wonders – to whom? And do their customers see these Tweets? Not if the half-life of a tweet is 24 minutes.

Google – is it a verb or a monopoly – and what is ‘Truth'?  By now, you have seen a bit of controversy over ranking search results in favor of Google’s partners, over the right to be forgotten, or other anti-competitive behavior or privacy issues. To catch up, read about the antitrust complaint from DuckDuckGo. But is there really an alternative to Google, now that it has become a verb?  Go Google that – or go the extra inch and create a shortcut to DuckDuckGo or Microsoft Bing. Take a look at a not-so-brief history of Google issues or read through the angry view of Yelp’s CEO Jeremy Stoppelman.  It is intriguing that the term ‘fake news’ is associated with politics – ironically spawning websites to rank news source credibility. In fact, fake, overstated, or manipulated information is the lifeblood of the modern Internet. Forrester once said that the Internet Changes Everything but today, it should be Absolutely Anything Changes the Internet.  

Some skepticism is in order.  We can always second-guess the so-called ‘information’ served up to us on the Internet. But how many of us take advantage – and check multiple sources or use multiple search engines?  We wait and watch the flap in the EU, hoping that some subset of privacy protection will extend to us – not just a box you must check acknowledging that “This site uses cookies” to help track what you have viewed.  We can Clear Cookies on our web browsers, but how many of us do?  Having to re-enter information is an inconvenience. We like the fact that browsers remember who we are and our last interaction. Rant off.

category tags: 

social media, computers, internet and social networking

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from Tips For Aging In Place https://www.ageinplacetech.com/blog/technology-tool-tarnish-facebook-twitter-and-google