Pinterest II

[quinara]

So, I got my invite... Apparently I have to sign up with either a facebook or a Twitter account. No possibility of creating an independent account. 'But we will ALWAYS let you control sharing', I am promised

Comments

[fenchurche]

That bugged me too... although I ended up just attaching it to my Twitter account, since I rarely use the thing except to read what other people are tweeting. I think your idea of setting up a new account is a good one. Kinda wish I'd thought of it.

[quinara]

Heh, I still need to work out whether I'm going to do that, because I seem to be very much in ranting mode about this - I've just attached a rather angry edit to this post, which came about from going to the Twitter app page.

Although, yeah, I might actually, despite everything. I still think pinning stuff could be fun; it's just annoying that it's forced my hand as far as getting Twitter is concerned. All I want to do is collect some pictures, not tweet about them as well! (I will be straight onto the settings to see how much of the automatic bits I can disable.)

[brutti_ma_buoni]

You can disable pretty much everything, thank the lord. When pinterest first boomed, my timeline filled with endless automatic tweets, but that phase has mostly passed.

And very much with you about the curse of joining up the web. I got spotify before you had to have a FB link and I would *never* get one now. FB above all, actually, because it's very much designed for real name interaction with bloody everyone. But FB gets bigger so others think that's the model to follow.

I had this with work where they opened a locked flickr group for photos of past staff, which was a nice idea and I provided some content for. But my flickr account is in this name, linked to my RL name yahoo account (careless of me, but there you go). The last thing I wanted was to give work this name, ffs. So I created yet another bloody yahoo id just to get a flickr account to join a group containing a hundred or so images. On which I've never commented, and of course now I've lost all the passwords and account names and... argh.

[quinara]

I think I've managed to turn everything off that I can, though I did go through a moment of incandescent fury as Twitter tried to hook me up from people off my Yahoo contacts list. None of that information is public, at least on my part - thankfully it seemed to shut up a bit once I said that I did not want people to be able to find me via email address.

It's all ridiculous, isn't it? I run most of my life through my Yahoo account, which has two alternate addresses - one for fandom and one for RL. I've slipped every now and then (usually because when replying Yahoo's forgotten which address things were sent to - and my fandom address is my default), but I'm fine with that because it's my own error. It's the way you can't use anything without carefully negotiating between automatic link-ups... Grrr!!

But, look, it is a thing of beauty!!

[petzipellepingo]

I really cannot bear this creeping process of people joining up the web. It's all to create richer baskets of demographics data to raise the price of advertising, yet the whole thing is so disingenuously presented in the patronising idea that people find it too complicated to have multiple log-ins: 'we require facebook and Twitter to make it easier to find people you know and reduce spam,' it says. I mean, come on: I don't want to find people I know and your site is proper bugged if your small start-up is getting so much spam that you have to piggyback off the user-screening of something so widespread as Twitter.

"nods"

Even the local newspaper requires you to have a Facebook account in order to comment on stories, it's just getting idiotic.

[quinara]

I barely ever use my facebook account and I'm really starting to think about deleting it out of spite... I know this is the way the net is heading, but I've spent too many years carving out an alternative identity online to appreciate people trying to force me to use my real name on every silly pastime.

[bogwitch]

Yeah, my refusal to join Twitter or Facebook is starting to shut me out of things too. What gets me is not so much the joining up of the net, but the handing of control to so few companies - which is similar to my refusal to deal with Apple. It's like all those people who were up in arms about governments trying to use legislation to control the web have just rolled over and handed it all to Facebook and Google instead.

Why people want to be found online so easily boggles me, there are so many people I want to avoid<.i>.

[quinara]

Agreeeeed. The worst thing I find is Google, where it already went in one fell swoop after they changed their privacy rules. Now I have to sign out every time I finish using GoogleDocs just so it doesn't track the videos I'm watching on YouTube. I don't want to leave a path for advertisers to follow - it feels like people are sticking cameras on my feet and watching what I look at on my way into the shops.

I hate the idea of people knowing where I am and what I'm doing, which you get if everyone's tracking your auto updates to facebook. LJ, thankfully, is still set up perfectly that you can lurk/disengage without any effort at all, for however long you want - on facebook I'm basically waiting for them to have a status bar saying exactly where you are on the web at any given moment, so everyone can see.

[bogwitch]

Yeah, I need to do some work and disengage myself from Google, who got me by stealth. I was also a bit annoyed I had to have a Google email address to use my phone. I already had one I didn't use, but that wasn't the point.

I dread to think what advertisers think they can sell me based on the shop sites I visit, but I tend to forget I'm being tracked because I use so many ad blockers I rarely see them.

I think all this openess will backfire bigtime one day.

[quinara]

The phone thing annoyed me - a lot. Especially when it wouldn't accept my yahoo address (a valid account on Google docs), sent me to a sign up page - and then decided, against my explicit wishes, to connect the two addresses with Yahoo as back up. When the email came to my Yahoo account about my new Google account I clicked on the button saying this wasn't me, but I think it's basically ignored that, because the Google account's Google Docs page is still the same as mine. I hate the arrogance that comes with them assuming because they know I'm the same person (probably through IP?), it's perfectly secure for them to connect things. Maybe I shouldn't have used the same name with both, but I didn't realise that was my problem

[curiouswombat]

Ah well - no point in me even thinking about it then - I have neither a twitter account nor a facebook one... And for as long as is humanly possible I intend to keep it that way.

[quinara]

I've toyed about Twitter, because there are a few things I look up on there from time to time (it was good during the high points of the Leveson Enquiry and the Apprentice feed can be amusing), but I've yet to decide if I'm going to do anything with the account I've now made for Pinterest. The worst thing was that, when you sign up, the default is to let people find you by email address, and it somehow meant that people I did actually know via email popped up as suggestions for who I should follow... And that is the last thing I want when I sign up for a new service. I don't want a product I don't know to seemingly have inside information as to what my identity means in other contexts.

[daiseechain]

Facebook. Fucking Facebook and competition entries.

Have no interest in joining FB but used to enjoy entering all sorts of pointless competitions to win fridges and shoes and trips to Japan and the like, and they all, all, now want me to enter on FB. Why?

So yeah. Right there with you on the creeping interconectedness of sites.

[quinara]

Grrrrrr! What a pain in the backside. I hadn't noticed that particular part of the creep, but that is massively annoying.