Now Facebook’s annoyed William Shatner

He may be everyone’s favourite eccentric granddad, but the OG Captain Kirk isn’t such a fan of Facebook after trying out their Mentions app and finding it lacking.

In the first content post on his new Tumblr, Shatner Specials, the actor/singer/gravel-voiced icon details his experience of using the iOS app, which (ironically given his impassioned cover version of Pulp’s Common People) is only for the rich and famous.

As the name would suggest, it’s similar to Twitter’s functionality, allowing users to easily see what others have been saying about them and focusing on transmitting information and opinions rather than having to talk to relatives and look at their baby photos. (A rumour started by me that ‘Famous people – you’re self-obsessed, try this!’ was its original slogan has yet to be denied.) It ties in with Facebook’s increasing focus on moving its services to individual apps, rather than one multifunctional one that crashes all the time.

But Shatner bemoans the fact that it’s less feature-rich than the Pages app and he’s clearly irritated by the very thing Mentions is named for, noting that, ‘your phone spends the next hour sending you notifications of every person who makes a comment’.

He’s also unimpressed that the app demands its users follow another celebrity in order to get started. After rejecting its suggestion of George Takei (seemingly because it’s too obvious), he followed Robert Downey Jr. then hid his updates because he doesn’t want to follow anyone new, however Iron a man he may be.

Although he says he’ll keep the app on his phone he concludes with his bafflement at the idea of it being celeb-only and calls it ‘ill conceived’. Maybe he’d have liked it better if he hadn’t muted RDJ?

Image via  Keith McDuffee’s Flickr.

 

 

 

Diane Shipley