Technocrank

I’m not in love with Twitter like some – it’s fine.  It’s a thing.  But I think I just coined a name for people like Maureen Dowd who rail against Twitter without a clue.

Slashdot has recently had a few posts involving Openfire and I just have one question: what the heck is Openfire, exactly?  The Openfire website doesn’t tell us anything other than it “is a real time collaboration (RTC) server”.  In the Openfire Support forum, somebody asks this question point-blank and the only useful answers tell the person that they don’t need Openfire.  Can anybody shed any light on this?  Is it just an instant messaging/chat server?  Does it burn coal or use nuclear energy?  Will your attractiveness to the opposite sex increase exponentially?  Come on, how hard can it be to have a Features page?

This isn’t so much about Openfire specifically, but just poor website representation of a product.   This actually happens more often than I find believable.

I don’t know if people still use Last.fm.  I think they do.  At least, that’s what Last.fm’s statistics claim.  Anyway, if you’re an artist or label and you’ve been trying to upload new tracks you’ve probably found recently that their import engine has been sucking lately (i.e. completely fubar’d).  Uploaded tracks won’t appear, or if they do the actual MP3 file is missing (“We don’t have a copy of this track, why don’t you upload it” – yeah, I did – 5 times).  Frequently, after uploading (which depending on your upstream bandwidth can take a while) you get kicked back to the upload page.

Apparently, it’s a known problem and they’re trying to fix it, although their forums are somewhat unhelpful.  I’ve yet to see anything actually completely fixed, though.

A few weeks back I was thinking about converting a Facebook Group I have into a Page.   So I was looking through the Facebook “Help” pages and wondering if there was a mechanism for doing this.  There was.

In fact, Facebook would do it for you.  I put a request in for them to do this.  I waited and having not heard back from them in these weeks, I thought I’d check up on it.

Turns out, now:

We’re no longer able to convert Facebook Groups into Pages. You’re welcome to create a Page and notify your Group members that you’ll be using the Page instead of the Group going forward. If your Group has too many members to send them a message, we unfortunately aren’t able to provide you with any other solutions for how you might contact them about this change.

It’s pretty obvious that a Group admin would especially be looking into an automated option if the Group had a lot of members.  It’s doubly irking that there’s no indication as to what motivated their change of heart.  Was it technical?  Or was it sociological?

Anyway, I’m now wondering if I should bother since apparently there’s no way to invite “Fans” to your Page whereas there still is with Groups.

I found this Adobe Gripes Tumblr blog via Create Digital Motion.  It’s your basic public rant forum about expensive software that’s failing; filled with rage and expletives.  I can’t decide if it’s hilarious or depressing.