facejournal and sleep

[jazzfish]

cleolinda explains just what the heck is going on with LJ and Facebook and Twitter: basically, LJ's owners figure the number of people coming onboard LJ through Facebook and Twitter will outweigh the number of people fleeing to other sites such as Dreamwidth. And the fleeing users were the ones who were disabling all the useful (for advertising) privacy-invasive features anyway, so they won't be much missed.

(There's also a side trip through the creepiness of Facebook's new "Stalk this person" feature. Which just ick no. I anticipate that by this time next year I'll have done what I can to purge my Facebook account as well.)

---

Still tired. Still writing up Key West (it was awesome). Likely to go home and faceplant for eight hours and wake up around two in the morning. Sleeping on planes works better when you can lean back in your seat, and when the guy next to you doesn't insist on trying to ram his elbow into your ribs, and when the flight doesn't arrive 45 minutes early thus shorting you out of three-quarters of an hour of uneasy but still much missed sleep. Bleh.

(Lessons learned: first, stay the hell away from Airtran. Second, with transit costs BWI may not actually be all that much cheaper than National. Third, do not rely on transit to get home from BWI.)

Comments

[rbandrews]

In reverse order: I've had two good experiences and one very bad one with Airtran. I think the secret is to get first class seats. You board first and get free liquor, which makes the interminable wait on the runway less irritating. Also the seats lean back, and if you get there early you're very likely to get row 1 (so plenty of leg room).

I saw an article once (and here it is, thanks Google) about a guy who made a Facebook targeted ad to send a message to his wife. He was able to target an ad to exactly one person using Facebook's advertiser controls. It was rather creepy.

[jazzfish]

I just got stuck at the very back of the plane. At least I wasn't in a middle seat at the back of the plane. And you may be right about first class being better, but I'm not willing to pay that much money for six hours of slightly less discomfort. (At least I don't think I am; I've never checked to see what the price difference actually is.)

ick ick ick Facebook ick ick. Estimated time to account purge dropping.

[rbandrews]

Airtran charges $25 to upgrade to first class for one leg, and you can pay it at check in (in fact, I think you can only do it there). It's totally worth $50 to me to not be stuck in the back of a plane for six hours. : )

And yeah, I deleted my Facebook account (which was unsurprisingly hard to do; you have to put in a request and then log in for two weeks, which means not touching anything that will automatically log you in) when they made the profiles public by default. I think that they do not fully understand why their business became popular. Facebook was the social network you wouldn't get fired over. Now stuff like this is possible, and creepy.

[tango.livejournal.com]

I've done well with AirTrain, what about them bothered you?

[jazzfish]

Partly their 'assign seats at checkin,' because I have a strong preference for window seats. Partly their horrid 'checkin at airport' setup, because I have a strong preference for not checking in to a flight until I'm actually there (preprinted boarding pass is one more thing to leave behind by accident). Partly their habit of not giving me the can of Coke when they give me a drink: yeah, I can probably ask for it, but, seriously, people? It's all minor annoyances, and rbandrews may be right when he says that first class is better, but I'm not willing to pay for first class. (At least I don't think I am; I've never checked to see what the price difference actually is._

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

For future reference it counts as "checked in" if you check in 23.5 hrs ahead and then don't print until you get to the airport.

[jazzfish]

Hm. That still requires wading through their line of customer "service," which was only "kind of bad" at BWI and "awful" at SeaTac, because they have no automatic checkin machines. At least, not in those places, at least not that were functional.

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

yeah, but especially if you're not checking bags it's not nearly so bad as what happened to me, where 40 min before my flight it turned out they had given my seat away for not yet checking in. (you can pay extra to reserve your seat ahead of time and not be vulnerable to that.)

Also, you may well have managed to keep track of the printout, by, say, putting it in your wallet?

[jazzfish]

*blink* Ick ick ick. Honestly, I think the main reason I don't check in ahead of time is inertia: it's not part of my travel routine and I am nothing if not a Creature of Habit. That's enough of a horror story that I may start checking in beforehand.

... you can /pay extra/ to have them not give your seat away? Yeesh. That's skeezy even by airline standards.

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

Technically you're supposed to check in 45 min ahead. by the time i found my way to figure out how to check in without bags but at the airport it was less than 45 min.

I don't actually know that it would have made a difference to reserve the seat, but you /can/ pay extra to have 12A instead of choosing what's left at checkin time.

[tango.livejournal.com]

Picking seats in advance has always been an option for me, but at the moment I can't remember if that was through their website or Travelocity.

I'm not sure if booking as first class is worth the cost, but I've found the $50 at-the-gate upgrade to be worth it - just be warned that it's per leg. If you have a layover, 1st class might not be available the entire trip. Even if it is, it's $50 per hop.

As for handing the can of soda over, does any airline do that without being asked? I've only flown on Southwest, Delta, and AirTran recently, and only once each on the first two.

[jazzfish]

Orbitz wouldn't do it this time and I tend to book through Orbitz for convenience. I don't think they've let me pick seats for AirTran in the past either. Hrm.

$50 might be worth it when I'm trying to sleep through the redeye back from the west coast; otherwise, meh.

As for "Would you like the cancer[1]," USAir (I think?) did for the flight to and from Miami, and I think United does as well, and I tend to fly United a lot.

[1] "The can, sir? Would you like it?" See "Up In The Air" if you haven't yet.

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

why is orbitz more convenient?

[jazzfish]

Because it's where I'm searching for tickets to start with, and there's no price difference so I'm too lazy to navigate a different site's search engine for what may or not provide me with the same cheap and well-timed ticket I just found.

[jsciv.livejournal.com]

Minor tangent. Andy S. alerted me to this movie. LOVE IT!

[jameshroberts.livejournal.com]

I've stopped using ExpediOrbiTravelocity to actually book tickets. I use them to search, but I always book through the airline itself.

The last time I booked through a service, the airline canceled the flight I'd chosen and rebooked me on another set of flights. But (we'll say) Orbitz also noticed the cancellation and then "helpfully" changed my itinerary again. This time with an extra plane change. There were, however, much better itineraries available, but Orbitz wouldn't give me that without charging a change fee. I had to call up the airline to switch to it. Orbitz then switched it _back_ to the bad itinerary, and I had to get it fixed again. I finally got them to explain _why_ they kept giving me the weird flight plan. They said this was the only way to ensure that I'd still be going through Salt Lake City. It took a surprising amount of effort to explain that I didn't give a good goddamn which airport I changed planes at; I really only cared about the origin and destination.

It worked out and everyone was _trying_ to be helpful, even if they failed. The real problem is the booking agency and the airline not communicating and overriding each other. By booking with the airline, I reduced the number of people that can screw things up.

I've also had issues with my employer's travel agent (whom we're required to use for business travel). They booked my flight twice last year and canceled the duplicate ticket. However, they wouldn't refund the extra payment, and gave me an unusable credit on the airline. Our travel office eventually ate the cost and reimbursed me, but I'm sure we wasted more money in staff hours sorting this out than the ticket was worth.

[jazzfish]

... wow. That's an impressive level of helpfulness fail.

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

I have friends who booked through orbitzthingie and when their flight was canceled they didn't hear about it. screwed up their honeymoon.

[jsciv.livejournal.com]

Some airlines will sell unused first class inventory at the gate for anywhere between $25 and $200 (depending on the airline and the length of the segment to be flown), but they also give free upgrades to elites so unused inventory can be rare. I don't know about Airtran's policies.

Honestly, it's nice but I can live in coach too. I'm making a mileage run in a couple of weeks to get myself some transatlantic upgrades, so I guess you could say I'm willing to pay for business class at least, but domestic, as long as I manage a window I'm good. I am, however, long past the point where I know any tricks that don't involve "because you flew last year enough to get status, you have fewer problems in the air this year"...

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

Re 'stalk this person' I can just as well go to someone's page and read there. I guess the difference is that you'll get it in Notifications, but there doesn't seem to be any further difference.

I've got a few friends who seem to do nothing other than play games, with once in a blue moon an actual update. And if I go to their page I'll have huge amounts of gamestuff to scroll through before I get to anything of substance. If "subscribe" lets me choose which types of posts I get notified about I'd be all over it.

[jsciv.livejournal.com]

There's a lot of this that makes me wonder if people just never really understood the implications of posting on the internet before, honestly. You give up a certain amount of privacy in posts you make to ANY online service, and you give up control of that information to all who consume it. People are overwhelmed by the amount of information they have to consume, and now that several sites are making it easier to find, relocate and consume information about the people you specifically WANT to follow, the privacy "implications" are changed?

[mikailborg.livejournal.com]

I'm with you on this. Facebook has been a valuable tool for me: I have kept up better with many important-to-me people using it, and even rekindled friendships I thought were gone.

I does have its drawbacks, but some of them I can turn off, and others I can avoid by thinking for a moment about what I'm about to post. I'm satisfied for now.

[jazzfish]

There's some of that. I'm not /too/ concerned because I'm one of those who goes in and re-locks down everything they decide to make public as soon as I find out about it... but there's always the possibility that I missed something.

And, yeah, I'm trusting them to not make that information available to the whole 'Net, because when I signed on with them it wasn't.

[rbandrews]

I'm trusting them to not make that information available to the whole 'Net, because when I signed on with them it wasn't.

THIS.

It's not that making it available is bad, it's them changing the deal after the fact, with an opt-out setting.

Say I told someone "hey, I've got a copy of all the friends-locked posts you've made over the years, and I'm gonna re-post them publicly tomorrow, but if you ask real nicely then I won't". The proper response to this is not "gee, I guess I shouldn't have posted on the internet things I want to keep private".

[jsciv.livejournal.com]

Huh? I don't follow the analogy. LJ isn't making any motions toward removing the account locks on content.

[rbandrews]

My comment was in response to a comment about Facebook, not Livejournal. Facebook made all profiles default to publicly viewable, which is evil.

If you're going to change the way privacy works on a community site, don't. If you can't do that, then at the very least make it opt in, so doing nothing means nothing changes for you.

[jsciv.livejournal.com]

Well, two things:

1) LJ hasn't done this and people complaining that their trusted friends can now repost to facebook is more of an indictment of the trust of their friends than of LJ (though FB has been widely panned on its privacy policies long enough that I thing that it IS valid to say "you should have thought first"). My remarks are and have been consistently about LJ and the extreme reaction that I feel has been stronger than warranted.

2) Given the number of people I know whose names I just typed in and got bupkis on that link you posted (even people who I know wouldn't know enough to change defaults), the case may be overstated.

[(Anonymous)]

I wasn't replying to your remarks; I replied to a comment about Facebook. Why are we even talking about this?

[rbandrews]

I wasn't replying to your remarks; I replied to a comment about Facebook. Why are we even talking about this?

Sorry, that was me; new phone hadn't logged in yet. About the search thing, if you don't find that creepy then I'm not sure we have enough common ground to even talk about privacy.

[jsciv.livejournal.com]

It's downstream from my remarks, which was my context. :)

If we get onto Facebook then yes, I agree about their fluid definition of "privacy" being a problem. The specific comment was on that site: if I want to try and be a creepy stalker site then people trying my site should at least hit someone they're interested in stalking while visiting it! :)

But now that I read the thread back I see that my context wasn't clear so it's probably worth dropping for another thread.

[jazzfish]

It doesn't worry me much for me, except in terms of FB continually deciding to default more and more of my information to "public." I catch most of those, I assume, but I may have missed something in there, and there are a handful of people I'd prefer not to be all that visible to.

It's more worrisome in principle, because FB seems intent on slowly making "nothing is private" the new norm.

That's a pretty reasonable way to use "subscribe to person." If only "hide application" hid them from everywhere, not just from your news feed...

[tam_nonlinear]

At this point I'm more than a bit adverse to Facebook, so something that encourages people to migrate from there to LJ does not make LJ more appealing to me. Thanks for the DW invite code.

[jazzfish]

You're most welcome; I'm happy it's gone to good use.