God dammit, I don’t want to join Facebook. I mean, yes, I have a profile. But as you may be able to tell from the listed interests, it’s not much of a serious effort. I’ve been mildly horrified to see friend requests begin to roll in from people I know.
I just don’t see the point. What’s it supposed to do? Keep me up to date on my friends’ activities? Let me post photos? Or share links? Get mobile updates? Plan events? Bah! I’ve already got technologies that I use for all this stuff. There’s no reason to reroute all that activity through the blue & white blandness of a cocky thief.
Alright, that’s a little disingenuous. I can think of one reason: now that folks use the internet professionally, they probably now want to retreat into a lower-stakes setting. I guess I can understand that. But it still seems like a pain in the ass, and the idea of “poking” and giving $1 virtual gifts sends me into a blind rage.
UPDATE: I guess I should finish the point I intended to make. One of the things that Matt “WordPress” Mullenweg said during his presentation at SXSW was that he foresaw the future of personalized online presences being grounded in individual online sites, not gigantic networks like Facebook and Myspace. Obviously he’s got a vested interest in pushing this vision, but I agree with him: the big networks won’t last forever. Right now they can offer ease-of-use and a critical mass of users that makes finding your friends easy. But they don’t have a monopoly on the former (WordPress and blogger are great counterexamples) and userbase size isn’t an advantage that lasts forever — ask Friendster. The fad value of these sites will force the market to perpetually refactor itself, fragmenting a little more each time.
The logical end point is for everyone to be running their own relatively-open site, free from the shadow of corporate hosts. Open formats will let your site talk to everybody else’s, keeping you apprised of what your friends are up to. It’ll be great.
In fact, it already IS great, since our little bloggy universe already uses these technologies across our constellation of personal sites. That’s why I think Facebook adoption is silly: it’s a step backward.
With all of that said, I don’t want to let pig-headedness cut me out of connectivity — I’m sure I’ll put in a mild Facebook effort. But does it really not have RSS feeds?
I’m with you on this one. I finally created a Facebook account a few weeks ago, but after I did, the idea of going through all of the social networking stuff for the nth time filled me with despair and I shutdown my browser and didn’t do anything with it. That said, I imagine I’ll get around to at least filling out my profile one of these days when I’m bored.
there are rss feeds available for the status and notes parts of facebook (which you can enable or disable, depending on how comfortable you feel having them available). i imagine rss feeds for the general newsfeed feature aren’t terribly far behind, but i’m sure one of the reasons that it’s taking longer than it should is that the facebook folks are grappling with the privacy aspect of it – some of the information people post on facebook is of course very private, and not something you would necessarily want available on a public rss feed.
then, of course, you have the problem that probably the vast majority of facebook users don’t know what rss is/how to use it, so if they were to just all of a sudden allow rss feeds without walking a lot of users through it, i can imagine a lot of people would be pissed when they realized what was happening and what kind of information would become public.
but one of the really great things about facebook is the incredibly detailed levels of control you can have over the privacy of every aspect of facebook (notes, pokes, who can see what changes you’ve made in your profile) who can even find you in searches), so once they figure out a way to introduce an rss option and explain it in a digestible way to users, i’m sure they’ll implement it.
but what i would really like them to do is just go ahead and introduce rss, but have the default be that your rss feed is disabled, and those who want it to be public would have to go through the steps to enable it.
but one of the really great things about facebook is the incredibly detailed levels of control you can have over the privacy of every aspect of facebook
It’s not totally intuitive how to change these settings, and even if it only requires a modicum of effort to figure it out, there’s only so many modici I’m willing to throw into a site that I only ever joined in order to see what it was.
The problem with Facebook is that it’s not funny. It’s so fine controlled and presents information in such a distributed catalog way that it’s hard to use it to be witty or cut up, and really, what’s the point in these social-networking sites if not to perform?
do you prefer myspace? i’m perfectly willing to believe there are two general camps of social networking folks – one who get sent into a blind rage by myspace, the other by facebook. i find myspace too chaotic and hellish and not at all intuitive or doing the innovative things i think the facebook folks are, but i know bajillions of people adore it.
as for the facebook privacy levels, it’s listed under the My Privacy on the sidebar. i like the multiple levels of control, whereas on myspace it’s just either your profile is wide open, or shut off to only your friends. but i can see the multiple levels of privacy control kind of being enough options to be confusing.
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