Leni sets off on her travels this week! She will be keeping in touch via some kind of blog. Maybe even via Posterous!

This has long been a favourite Dylan song. Like this locally videod version a lot.

After the plethora of nonsense yesterday about the new Facebook interface I was taken to an article about whether or not Google+ was failing so I thought I would have a look at my Google+ account again.

Using one person's experience of a service is of course by no means scientific and I only have about 50 connections on Google+ as I never really got to grips with it. However a few of my connections are real social media junkies, I mean real junkies with thousands of Twitter followers and Facebook friends, some of whom were extolling the virtue of Google+ as a great new platform.

So I checked Google+ for the first time in a few days just now. The same post was at the top of my timeline as it was the last time I checked. I assumed I was seeing it wrongly but no the last time any of those people posted anything was on the 15 September. Nothing new since. This tiny unrepresentative snapshot may mean nothing but I suspect it really means that Google+ is dying rapidly.

This post has been prompted by the astonishing level of negative response to today's changes to how Facebook works.

This is written for people who use FB via their computer not mobile.

The first very powerful change is the introduction of lists that are worth having. Lists have been in FB for ages but until these changes the only real use for them was to block people from chat. Now you can categorise all your FB friends into as many lists as you want. FB provides some lists (for me Family, Close Friends and Haworth Area) and starts to populate them for you. You can add and delete people from these lists. You can also make more lists to add people to. So for instance I have music friends on FB. I might choose to post a piece of music to my music friends only, knowing that they are likely to be interested in that while other friends may not be. This is more control than you had before. Your lists are all findable on the left hand column just below Favourites.

The other use of lists could be to use them as a way of limiting what you see in FB. Click on any list and the centre column fills with a feed of items just from people in that list. It's almost like a mini self created group. Very handy. This is more control than you had before.

Subscribing to people. In the past you could hide posts from people, apps, pages and groups that you didn't want to see in your news feed. You still can - it is called Unsubscribing now. It looks to me as if the settings from before have simply been transfered across from the old system to the new one. At the top right of any post there is a little down arrow. Click on this and you get a whole bunch of options of things you can do with that post, that poster or that app. This is at least as much control as you had before.

On the top right of your screen there is now a scrolling update of items from everyone in your feed. If you want you can grab the grey bar on the right of this list and use that to scroll down to see earlier items. If you hover over these items a pop-out box will show the whole item including any photos, videos or links that it contains. Added to that you can easily comment, share and link to that item right there in that box. If you are using a mouse with a scroll wheel try poping out one of these boxes and then use the scroll wheel. Yes that's right you can now scroll as far down the list as you want with the scroll wheel. This is way better than any way you had of seeing all items in your timeline before the changes.

I post a lot of pictures to FB. If someone I don't know likes or comments on a picture now FB tells me who they are connected to and therefore how they found the picture. That is more control than you had before.

Email notifications. FB now sends you a lot less email by default than it did before. That has to be better than it was!.