Let’s get this out of the way early - I hate Facebook. Not because of the implementation, but because I hate everything Facebook stands for, in exactly the same way I hated the last hype-cycle of the Internet age, and every predecessor to Facebook that has been flavour of the month this time around. Here’s my reasons:
- It’s fundamentally a total waste of time and resources - social networks generally are of course; they’re just a great big hole to piss your time into for absolutely no measurable return. The idea of building a great big list of imaginary friends, very few of which give a flying toss whether you live or die, is ludicrous in its narcissistic inanity. I do use LinkedIn, but only for recording my business contacts - it’s my virtual Rolodex. Social networks where connections have no purpose other than allowing you to claim that you have 200+ friends is just a shameful pile of wasted bits on a massive rack of disks, that must wish they were being put to use doing something worthwhile.
- It has no business model, and yet is supposedly worth $15bn - the whole Web 2.0 hype annoys the hell out of me just as much as the dot com bubble did ten years ago; listening to journos, marketeers and commentators blather on about Facebook, you’d think it was a massive value proposition. But it’s highly questionable whether there is any genuine business model there, beyond advertising - and that will only last until everyone gets bored and moves on to whatever is the next big inane waste of online time, just as they have done many times before. Each time Facebook tries to create a more robust business model, they screw it up and find it’s incompatible with their community. What exactly do they have? A few nice ideas but most of which are pretty low-hanging fruit, a small inventive leap made possible by the general march of online technology, and absolutely nothing to stop someone else doing much the same thing but with a new twist in a years time which decimates their user base as they flock sheep-like to a new pointless fad.
The whole thing is just a big overhyped gimmick in the very worst model of the dot com bubble, and now the whole Web 2.0 bullshit (where the techniques are all fine, until they’re hyped to the extent you’d think the cure for cancer will be implemented via AJAX). I can’t wait for the whole house of cards to finally come crashing down to Earth in a huge reality check, just like it did in 2000, but I have my doubts whether anyone will have learned anything, so many times has this cycle been repeated now.
Anyway, now Facebook is asking its users to translate the site for them. Because obviously that’s better than, you know, paying someone to do it - like most real companies do. While this works for open source / volunteer projects, why the hell should anyone further prop up Facebook’s ludicrous ‘valuation’ by doing stuff for free for them? How bloody stupid are they?
*note: yes, I’m aware of the irony of slamming Web 2.0 on a blog, thankyou.
January 24th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
I think you’re missing the point on the first part here. This isn’t MySpace all over again.
I, like many people, have only added real people I know from either work, social or family. I can keep in contact with these people, put photos of them up and share and disseminate information to them.
For me this is really useful as I have real friends scattered across the globe. Without Facebook I’d probably have not know about births, breakups, marriages and other important life events.
The next time I bump into them, and I will, I won’t put my foot in it and will have plenty to talk about and congratulate them on.
Likewise if I want to disseminate a piece of news about myself I can put it up there. Sure I could put it on my blog but most people I know have never read that and the people that do are more interested in technical content…
[)amien
January 24th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
We’ll agree to disagree then. I see very little substantive difference between Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Orkut and all the hundreds of other social networking efforts that have come and gone. All that differentiates them in practice is fashion and few very small incremental innovations.
The are a bazillion ways to share content online, you’ve just chosen to partition your observable life a particular way, which presumably works for you because a large portion of your family/friends have bought into the whole Facebook fad but haven’t used previous tech. Personally, Facebook doesn’t let me do anything I can’t already do, it’s just more popular with the masses. That isn’t inherent value, IMO, that’s just reaping the benefits of herd behaviour. When those herds go somewhere else, so will the value.
January 24th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
“note: yes, I’m aware of the irony of slamming Web 2.0 on a blog, thankyou.”
LOL, that’s big screen entertainment, thanks for that laugh!
January 24th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
I have to agree with you Steve. My wife and I signed up for Facebook out of interest. I think after two days we stopped logging in. We use email and the phone to keep in touch with people we care about. I also used LinkedIn for work related stuff. I don’t care if someone posted a stupid message, picture or video to someone else who happens to be in my friend list. I don’t want to know what they’re doing right now. And I’m not going to waste time telling facebook what I’m doing right now. I didn’t used to get facebook. Even now I still don’t. Where’s the point, where’s the value and where’s the business model apart from advertising? I guess you’re right Steve that this might be the pre-cursor to the dot com bust part 2. And web 2.0? Phooey. It still uses http, it still gives a crap user experience through pull technology and it still sucks, no matter what web version it is advertised as. I too don’t like Ajax et al.
yours in disgust
V. Meldrew
January 24th, 2008 at 5:53 pm
Well, I actually like AJAX when it’s used well, it’s definitely a big improvement on the UI end - although it causes massive headaches for people wanting to make accessible websites, you essentially need 2 entirely different versions. I remember the old debates we had at work about just simple things like using Javascript to display client-side error messages, and you hit problems with things like screen readers (for the visually impaired) which can’t handle that. So many people don’t bother about that, but it’s possible to get sued for creating a non-accessible website. I think the only real option is a dual-mode interface right now.
So AJAX is ok by me, just don’t tell me it’s a whole new paradigm that will change the world, if you don’t want my cup of tea in your lap. It’s the same with virtualisation - it’s all good tech, but it’s doing exactly the same thing as the mainframe system I worked on at the start of my career did. It’s rather amusing that Microsoft, who were basically the advocates for having lots of separate dedicated (cheap) servers as opposed to large mini/mainframe machines, are now going back to the exact same model they were uundermining previously. A chunky machine with VMs I can turn on and off and which share resources efficiently eh? Yep, that’s a mainframe
January 24th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
I actually use it to organise dates for things like rehearsels as they’re only managed on facebook. I also use it to play scrabble and spy on other people and find out what a friend are up to (there’s sarcasm in that, believe me).
I do laugh at social networking in some respects because people make their social website their image. Everything they stand for collaborated into a single web page. Whilst I use it, I don’t necessarily agree with everything on it.
I think it’s more for the youth of today anyway. MySpace is BS all over.
Steve’s Social Networking Angst!
January 24th, 2008 at 9:18 pm
Couldn’t agree more. $15 billiion is beyond ludicrous. The american gold rushes will never end.
January 25th, 2008 at 1:44 am
Don’t get me wrong here, I hate Myspace as much as the next guy, and know very little about Facebook, but isn’t LinkedIn, which both of us happen to use, almost the exact same thing as this? Slap a different name on it and change the mission statement, goals, tagline, and description on the top of the page, change the logo and it seems to be the same. There isn’t a fundamental difference between that or any other Web2.0 thing out there, at least with the tech behind it. Its a page (php or otherwise) that stores data (in a database) which can then be searched and shared. The sharing is the whole point. On that level, your phpbb over on Ogre3d serves a similar purpose.
On the other hand, I will agree that the “purpose” for things like facebook do seem shady to me. Its obvious that some capitalist wants to make money off of people, so they provide something which they hope people need, in hopes that they will be able to get money out of it.
On the domain I purchased for my family site, I run WordpressMU, which gives us each our own blog. Then, I hacked the front page to display the latest posts from each member’s blog. Then, add some Gallery2 for pics, and thats covered. Next, since its just us family, I figured if we actually wanted to discuss something, forums would do. I added phpbb3. Then, I added pligg and scuttle. We don’t use pligg yet, but I was entrigued by what it could do.
Let me add here that scuttle is my favorite part of Web2.0. I have modified my scuttle install to add screenshots of the pages, and will be adding a Furl-like page archiving feature soon as well. The reason I mention this is that I don’t want my favorites on Delicious, or something else. I don’t want to share mine. I don’t want others’ crap, and more specifically, the crap that BOTS put on there to taint my clean, perfect set of favorites (which is well over 1000 now).
Why am I mentioning this? Well, because I think Web2.0 has it uses and merits. None of what I mentioned above was available before. You could say with all of that, that I am recreating something like facebook, but privately, just for my own family. I agree that the way some people use facebook is really terrible, but what are the people who are not members of my family supposed to do if they want to keep in touch with my wife, for example? I don’t let them have blogs and post things on my family domain. There needs to be a place to do it, because, believe it or not, some people use facebook for good things.
And that brings us to the crux. There is good in most everything, but its the way in which it is used that can make it bad. On the same token, parents nowadays are afraid of video games. You and I both know that [some] video games are great, but whats to stop someone from posting a blog about how next-gen games (read: videogames 2.0) is the worst thing to happen to the world and that there is no real business model behind them? It all depends on how you look at it.
That’s my 20 cents (this was just going to be 2, but ended up being much more
)
January 25th, 2008 at 7:03 am
Re the $15b valuation, isn’t this based solely on extrapolation from Microsoft’s purchase of a measly 1.6%? Hands up who actually thinks that MS (or anyone else for that matter) is going to pay n times this amount for the next 1.6n percent? It was a blocking tactic to stop Google …
Re Social Networking in general, I love Dimitri Martin’s parody on the “phenomenon”, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpcvR1tIBfQ
January 25th, 2008 at 8:31 am
I think the valuation is quiet silly and i am sure that it will be a waste if a new fad comes along and people start pouring time into the new social networking site..
it can be a waste of time, sure, but i find that (unlike myspace) it is a very useful way of keeping in touch with my friends.
The reason is that facebook provides summaries of your friends activities and lets you know things of interest. Myspace would require that you go and seek out this information by pouring over your friends profiles.
As for your argument, sure we have email and could create our own blog (and hope people find and read it), and we could create our own photo gallery (and tell people when we have uploaded some new photos) and periodically email all of our friends with long emails and hope that they have the time to reciprocate. We could email our friends about important events and social outings like a BBQ and keep track of who is coming and hope there isn’t something else on.
But for me it is nice and easy to just have the one place, where 90% of your friends exist, can easily share photos without needing to tell other people you have shared photos, and message and chat without needing to know peoples email address, see an aggregation of activity from everyone without seeking out the information yourself, see who is going to a social outting and organise it and discuss it in a shared space that is accessible from anywhere..
I don’t have the time or care to setup my own photo gallery, and then email everyone about new photos.
I don’t have the time to organise a BBQ via email/phone and ensure that everyone knows about the details and is coming along. It is also nice to know when you friends are already attending some other event.
Hmm I’m ranting on, I think that depending on how you use the facebook, it can save you time and increase communication between friends. Some of the apps on facebook like pirates, surveys, likeness, ninjas, blah blah then yeah, its a waste of time, who cares about that shit. But you can ignore those.
That’s my thoughts anyway..
January 25th, 2008 at 9:52 am
Ive got to get my say in for FaceBook and help defend it a little - Josh Stewart is right on the money. I hated the look of mySpace and the other social network sites, but I joined FaceBook due to my sisters persistance.
Within the space of one month I had hooked up with many people I never thought I would see again, people that I last saw over fifteen years ago in Botswana and South Africa. Many are now married with kids, living in America and Australia - basically everywhere. I actually met up with old Highschool friends in November by spending a weekend in Newcastle, it was great, and we had organised it on FaceBook. I have another big reunion coming up too. The way friends are linked from person to person makes it really easy to find old friends.
Basically this wouldnt have been possible with out these social networking sites. Facebook in particular (actually I havent used any other) is excellant as it is PRIVATE, and only the info you choose goes out to the public. If your not in a network, only your friends that you have added can see your details, and it means one place to keep my home address and telephone number up to date for the people that matter.
My university mates mostly live in the big cities like Manchester and Leeds, and FaceBook makes it so easy to organise and plan events (birthday parties, music gigs etc) that its almost like my online social diary.
I get all of this and I havent spent a single penny or any effort in tracking old friends down. The site is clean and uncluttered compared to the look of others (MySpace!) and is configurable in how it is layed out and what plugins you have installed (think of igoogle). You decide what sort of news you receive on your update feeds, and you can reject invitations from people to install plugins (e.g. Pandora radio!) if you wish. I am currently drawing up plans with a web designer friend to develop the first Facebook plugin to use Ogre.
Ok, yes theres lots of stuff out there like it, its nothing new, and its nothing I couldnt actually develop myself given the time. However, even the amount of advertisement you are subjected to is surprisingly minimal, and for a site as powerful and free as this I fail to see how it can be such a bad thing.
So for your point “It’s fundamentally a total waste of time and resources”, I completely disagree.
And as for “It has no business model, and yet is supposedly worth $15bn “, well, I dont really care how much money some company is willing to put up for Facebook, and I dont understand why it gets you so worked up? But then again Im just a sheep, what do I know?
January 25th, 2008 at 10:17 am
@Erik: perhaps it’s related to how you use it, but the ‘tone’ of LinkedIn is very different, being simply a business contact management system and thus serving a legitimate purpose. I don’t expect to get ‘poked’ my business contacts to ’see what’s up’ for example - if we talk, there’s a purpose. Same with community forums - you’re there because you’re discussing some specific issue related to that subject matter.
I was trying to say in my post that I don’t disapprove of the techniques that underpin ‘Web 2.0′, I disapprove of both the term and the hype that surrounds it. It’s as assinine as calling a coloured crayon ‘pencil 2.0′ and lauding it as a new paradigm. It’s useful tech, but I wish people would keep it in proportion.
@futnuh: yeah, you’re right - but it’s exactly this kind of hyperbole and over-extrapolation that I think underpins the whole of Facebook and drives me nuts.
@Josh: I’ll put you in the happy user camp then
I’m sure some people get real benefits from Facebook, but most people I’ve met that use it just seem obsessed with their friends count and can’t give me a solid reason why they couldn’t do what they do with it somewhere else. Facebook is just a simple aggregator - everything it does is possible elsewhere, they’ve just put it in one place. RSS feeds solved the problems of notification years ago, and choosing to hide your page / details from people until you approve them - wow, big innovation there Jack. My problem is that I can’t think of a single useful thing that Facebook does that hadn’t already been done elsewhere, it’s just that Facebook put it all on one site and got a bunch of publicity, and thus benefits from lots of less tech-savvy people already being on there, marvelling at a ‘new world’ which is basically exactly the same as the ‘old world’ but with more marketing. I really find it incredible that such a ‘phenomenon’ has grown out of something so ridiculously simple, and that’s why I think all it takes is someone with more marketing muscle to steal Facebook’s thunder, because there’s absolutely nothing there that can’t be recreated by someone else very, very easily. Hence the valuation is just a bunch of smoke and mirrors.
At the bottom level, the only core thing that separates MySpace and Facebook is that the latter decided to keep pages private to your network of friends. That’s it. Even that wasn’t a new idea, again it’s just Facebook that got the ‘buzz’ behind it for some reason I find hard to explain but probably has a lot to do with US college students, who for a long time were 90% of its population. Fashion. I’m looking forward to the wind of fashion changing again (which is inevitable) blowing Zuckerberg’s house of cards away.
January 25th, 2008 at 10:33 am
@Paul: I just find social networks generally irritating. I’ve been a member of several over the years, and I still can’t figure out what’s so great about them. Everything people have listed here as a benefit of Facebook is possible elsewhere, but the difference is that a company is getting a stupid amount of (mostly imaginary) dollars for doing it, and is able to collate a bunch of personal information from a staggering number of people, and abuse it at times (see the Facebook Beacon debacle) in the pursuit of that elusive profit.
If people really want a more structured way to share things with their friends/family online, someone needs to invent a distributed, independent platform that is as easy for non-techs to use as Facebook but doesn’t put all your data in the control of a company. The control you have over your personal information in Facebook is an illusion, they still hold the keys and this is the USA after all, with their total lack of data protection laws. The technology is there to do it, the question is how to make money out of that. One of my major problems with Facebook is that the techniques to make real money are often at odds with respecting users personal data.
January 26th, 2008 at 1:45 am
Hey, I thought I was the only one who hated Facebook! Cool!
A few old friends from high school came out of nowhere and demanded that I join their Facebook or whatever. I dismissed it - and continue to dismiss it - as a waste of time.
My online “social network” is and has always been my IM contact list and the forums and blogs that have earned a place in my bookmarks.
I just hope hating Facebook doesn’t make me old or something… it’s not true! I’m still in my 20’s! I do things for the LULZ and call the Web the INTERTUBES!
January 26th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
Here is an interesting article relating to facebook… kinda of a worry, or at least food for thought.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook
@Steve: happy user… mostly. I am finding now that many of my friends are starting to become annoyed (like I am) with all the spam and silly applications. Many of us are reworking our facebook pages to be very minimal and reducing the amount of information we share on there.. Its nice to keep stuff private.
January 26th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
Actually one of the big benefits for me in using facebook, is that I can remember the names of acquaintances and friends of friends etc.
I am normally very very terrible at remembering names to the point of embarrassment. But with facebook, it is easier for me to put names to faces. Like the name of your friends new girlfriend or the name of that girl that you always see at the pub every Thursday for the last 6 months, who you will hug and spend an hour chatting to every time, and she knows your name. I hate to have to say “hey.. you.. there.. ”
Twice now, I have actually logged into facebook on my mobile while out with friends because I couldn’t remember the name of my brothers friend who I have known for 5 years. Does that make me a bad person?
@Frenetic: I prefer the term HYPERPIPE
@Steve: Aggregation and notification are technical problems that have been solved and facebook does nothing new technically. But the problem is not technical, it is getting all of your friends to agree and use a common tool that provides that aggregation and notification of a common set of online social tools.
There was some news recently where people are getting banned from facebook, for using a script to crawl over their own data and extract it back from facebook. It isnt a two way street for that information, because you can put it all in, but they dont want you to take it back. I wonder if it was google doing it, that they would have an open API that allowed for your own data to be shared back and forth without restriction.
January 28th, 2008 at 6:12 am
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