Day: February 4, 2017

Goodbye old century! 

The new net of Facebook, less creativity, and ‘socials’ is here.. the ghetto of socials..

Take this news for instance: IMDB is announcing on its site that a primary reason so many have visited and stayed through the years is going away. Their message boards are over February 20 ..

No love is in the air after Valentine’s Day.

From the announcement: 

IMDb is the world’s most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content. As part of our ongoing effort to continually evaluate and enhance the customer experience on IMDb, we have decided to disable IMDb’s message boards on February 20, 2017. This includes the Private Message system. After in-depth discussion and examination, we have concluded that IMDb’s message boards are no longer providing a positive, useful experience for the vast majority of our more than 250 million monthly users worldwide. The decision to retire a long-standing feature was made only after careful consideration and was based on data and traffic.

Increasingly, IMDb customers have migrated to IMDb’s social media accounts as the primary place they choose to post comments and communicate with IMDb’s editors and one another. IMDb’s Facebook page (http://ift.tt/1ulSoDG) and official Twitter account (https://twitter.com/imdb) have an audience of more than 10 million engaged fans. IMDb also maintains official accounts on Snapchat (http://ift.tt/2kxzCzS), Pinterest (http://ift.tt/1QJ17hJ), YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/imdb), and Tumblr (http://imdb.tumblr.com/).

Because IMDb’s message boards continue to be utilized by a small but passionate community of IMDb users, we announced our decision to disable our message boards on February 3, 2017 but will leave them open for two additional weeks so that users will have ample time to archive any message board content they’d like to keep for personal use. During this two-week transition period, which concludes on February 19, 2017, IMDb message board users can exchange contact information with any other board users they would like to remain in communication with (since once we shut down the IMDb message boards, users will no longer be able to send personal messages to one another). We regret any disappointment or frustration IMDb message board users may experience as a result of this decision.

IMDb is passionately committed to providing innovative ways for our hundreds of millions of users to engage and communicate with one another. We will continue to enhance our current offerings and launch new features in 2017 and beyond that will help our customers communicate and express themselves in meaningful ways while leveraging emerging technologies and opportunities.

I have long been interested in the changing and twisting habit of NET goers.. When I was young it was AOL messenger, chat rooms, and really brilliant people in message boards espousing their beliefs on just about anything.

Those days are gone.. being anonymous is gone.. your name in bold print is here.

And with each shut down of old style technology, the ghetto of social media breeds bad habits.

Sorry to say, but keep Facebook. I know I’m on it.. 
Twitter and Instagram too.
But the real debate and fun was on 20th century internet websites that are dying every day.

Goodbye old web.
Welcome to the devolution of conversation inspired by corporate elites who save every keystroke and sell it.