Saturday, March 31, 2012

Don't log off

BBC Radio 4 - Alan Dein attempt to cross the world on a series of late night excursions via Facebook and Skype.

This is not how Facebook works!

If you create a Facebook profile with nothing on it apart from a message on your wall with just a message to call, then nobody will see it. You need to "seed" it with some "friends". Without this seed it will not grow organically.

Once you have got friends that are interested in this sort of arrangement, i.e. talking to strangers for no other reasons other than that they are located in another part of the world, it will grow exponentially. So much so there is no way that you could even hope to talk to all these people.

Facebook works on the fact that it is communication between people that already know each other. Well, at least initially. After a while your "friends" will maybe connect with you other "friends" and it will snowball.

Seems to be a long winded way of describing the concept of a VPN.

This is good. The more people are made aware of how the Internet works a true picture of how governments and LEAs monitor communications will develop. Not that many users will understand.

I downloaded episode 2 (the only one that seemed to be indexed by get_iplayer.exe) - I will try again later for any other episodes.

2 comments:

George said...

Please can you give me the download link?

Polstead said...

Has anyone else wondered if these conversations are for real? Alan is now on his 3rd season of "#dontlogoff".

I can't help feeling that Alan just manufactures the Skype conversations. It does make an interesting radio programme though.