To my everlasting disgust I finally caved in and signed up to Facebook today. My singular reason was that a friend of mine has just moved to North America (to complete his years-long transition to the dark side) and he’d stated his intentions to publish most of his personal stuff there rather than blogging about it, so with much grumbling I now have a placeholder account to let me peer into that little den.
Now that I have my own account rather than peering quizzically at other people’s (over my horn-rimmed spectacles perhaps, as is implied when people hear I don’t use it), I still say Facebook has so few new ideas that it’s absolutely criminal that it’s valued so highly. It does the job sure, in a vaguely pedestrian way, but I see nothing more than a few tiny refinements on what everyone else has already done a ton of times before. I still reckon it’s on borrowed time until someone else does something sexier and the student population move on to the next fad - just like they did the last 2 or 3 times. I’ve lost count of the number of social networking sites I’ve been invited to over the years (since about 2003/4 when they started getting popular), and after having gone through temporary membership of a few by 2005/6 I just got totally just bored with the whole thing. Now that I’ve finally joined Facebook, I’m fully expecting one or more of my friends / family / contacts to invite me to join the next thing that ‘everybody’s using’ in about 6 months - that’s normally how it works. Yawn. I certainly can’t be arsed to obsess over the content of my profile all over again. No, I’ll stick to LinkedIn where I can actually derive some (small) tangible business benefit, and my blog which I control and is thus doesn’t have to be moved / recreated every time fashion changes. And no, I don’t feel the need to start twittering, we all know where that can lead.
But the thought of being a part of something that that pompous, vacuous git Zuckerberg benefits from - ugh. I think I need a shower.
May 7th, 2008 at 11:18 pm
lol - I joined by pressure from friends and people at work. Twitter is my friend, it’s how I keep all that facebook and myspace stuff reasonablly up to date without ever logging in to those sites - I hope I’m don’t tweet like how it’s depicted in penny arcade though
Linked-in, as you say, is more for business contacts. I know of people who got work via that linked-in thing.
May 7th, 2008 at 11:46 pm
Sorry buddy! I did actually publish the first chapter via email to a bunch of people rather than Facebook! But photos will probably be up on FB.
May 8th, 2008 at 3:38 am
The power from twitter comes from its ability for ‘famous’ or well known people to keep their fans involved in the process of doing whatever they are doing. I have to admit, the primary reason I would love to have someone like you (Steve) on twitter is the insight it could provide on how you work. To most people it would be boring to see
“found a bug”
“think I fixed it”
“nope, still there”
“damnit wheres the caffine”
type updates, but it would also be interesting to people like me. That said, often people who work in Technology fields just arent interested in typing out their daily lives
May 8th, 2008 at 5:03 am
Steve, I really like that image associated with the post. Is it available for use? (I am considering making a facebook bumper sticker out of it)
May 8th, 2008 at 8:23 am
“[...] on twitter is the insight it could provide on how you work” - stalker alert!
But Steve is 110% right on this one!
The world needs to do some more REAL work, rather than share pics of kitties on FB and at the same time announce it on Twitter…
But I don’t know, all these social crap apps seem to work so It must be a primordial human need at stake here.. like murder is:)
May 8th, 2008 at 8:41 am
@Joseph: I don’t know what the original credits for the photo were, I just found it on the net and Photoshopped it. I certainly don’t have any qualms about you using the end result.
@John: two things make me avoid twitter - firstly that it seems exceptionally self-absorbed to give a blow-by-blow account of your day on the Internet. I think I’d need to be living the life of an international super-spy to feel that’s remotely justified (although of course then I wouldn’t be able to twitter about it, and in any case, I’m sure even super-spies have slow days, and twittering about them would shatter the fantasy; I mean who wants to hear James Bond tweet about having to go out to buy bog roll?). Secondly, I really can’t be arsed
May 8th, 2008 at 9:10 am
Hehehehe…Steve Im sorry mate but this one made me smile
May 8th, 2008 at 11:53 am
Yeah I’m on there as well…
Only joined a couple of weeks ago, mainly because Roz is on there, don’t really know why, but what the heck!
May 8th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
What in the world is this “facebook”…? Honestly, never heard about it, never used it and nobody mentioned it in my surrounding. Strange, sometimes things are really missing me…
May 8th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
@SunSailor: that’s the best thing I’ve heard all day - at least Germany is safe from the blight (for now).
Another thing to celebrate: when I mentioned to my wife that I’d joined Facebook, she cast me the most whithering, derogatory look and said ‘ugh, why?’. This is why I married her
May 8th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
Now go and find the OGRE group which has been there for years now I think.
I love the edited image. The dude’s only a year older than me as well.
May 8th, 2008 at 11:39 pm
Love that picture! Only a twat could become a billionare from a crappy website. I signed up a while ago and then spent the next little while wondering why I bothered. Waste of time if you ask me.
May 9th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
Sigh.
I’m not a big Facebook user, but I applaud the idea of one social networking site becoming mainstream and the defacto standard. I hope Facebook stays around - mostly because I barely use it but don’t want to have to migrate to some other site if or when it becomes popular.
I don’t mind social sites in general as a way to connect with family and friends. I can see why someone might think the people running the site are idiots and I definitely don’t think that Facebook is worth billions, but I don’t see why Facebook is a bad thing either.
It’s possible that another big social site will spring up and everyone will migrate to it, but I doubt it. Everyone and their dog has heard of Facebook now, even people who don’t use computers often like my mom and grandparents, because their kids are on it.
I post videos of my kids up on Facebook because their grandparents live thousands of miles away and don’t get to see them, but are on Facebook. They get a notification when a video goes up and can post sweet comments about them.
Of course - hell that’s just the Internet in general right? I could have posted them to Youtube. But they don’t check Youtube and at least I know that the videos are only visible to friends and family that I’ve authorized. I keep my circle fairly small on Facebook.
May 9th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
You’re never going to get a single social network standard IMO, not while it’s a competitive market. My prediction is that Facebook will eventually get bought by a big faceless corp who will then be forced to try to exploit it to make their shareholder’s money back, beyond what the users will like and they’ll move on. Again. It’s happened with Orkut, MySpace and any number of others.
Here’s what I think will work long-term - giving people control over their own data and communications, and not some central corporation. I agree with the principle of sharing information easily, but not having to do it via a corporation which is *required* to find ways to exploit your data and behaviour for money. Here’s my idea - a piece of open source software that is provided by default by your ISP on the server space they have to maintain for you anyway. You use that area to build up a profile, pictures, whatever, and the data you choose can be exchanged and browsed freely by your friends in a peer-to-peer, decentralised fashion, similar to how IRC works. Information is encrypted if you want it to be. No central corporation gets to your data, and you don’t have to move it / re-enter it when fashion changes, or you start not to like what the corporation is doing, because it’s yours.
Facebook is just yet another centralised website looking for a funding model and it’s been done too many times already. It’s single grace is that US students adopted it by the truckload and thus ‘everyone’ uses it (hyped), the critical mass argument. It’s mostly a case of timing rather than excellent ideas - it was in the right place at the right time with the right set of tiny enhancements over what had happened before. It’s just a matter of time until cracks start to open over the hosting corporation’s need to make money and users personal rights IMO, or fashion changes, and the whole cycle of finding the next cool thing starts all over again. Until we actually truly empower regular individuals to control their own data easily and stop giving it to middle men to pore over, trying to find a business model, we’re doomed to see this repeated ad infinitum. I don’t think it’s a particularly good model long term, personally, unless you like entrusting your data to the likes of Zuckerberg (and I sure as hell don’t, the guy’s a complete tool).
I think the really exciting aspect of ‘the cloud’ is not how many corporations can sit there suckling on users data, but how users can form decentralised, locally controlled systems that co-operate using the internet as a medium.
May 9th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
I believe most people are only concerned with what their friends are using, how easy something is to use, and cost. Privacy is only a minor concern to most people as long as basic privacy laws are being upheld.
I don’t see a decentralized social networking system working unless it was completely prolific (set up by an ISP just like email accounts is like you suggested) but not only that - transferable across ISPs when you move from one ISP to another.
I guess we’ll see about another social networking fad jumping to the fore. Who knows - personally I think it’d have to be exponentially better than Facebook and MySpace to gain critical mass. It’s analogous to someone trying to take on World of Warcraft with their own MMO and hoping to win - the best you could do is hope to gain a small percentage of the market.
May 9th, 2008 at 5:42 pm
“transferable across ISPs when you move from one ISP to another.”
Absolutely. I actually can’t believe that this far into the Internet phenomenon we still don’t have something like this - to my mind, I should be able to package up everything associated with my ISP and take it somewhere else, offline or whatever, for mail, calendar, address books, photos, and social network kind of information. I guess because it’s the central corporates that can make money from this, it’s those models which are the most common right now.
“Privacy is only a minor concern to most people as long as basic privacy laws are being upheld.”
Maybe in the US. Over here in Europe (with our stronger data protection laws) privacy is a seriously big deal and is only getting more publicity as the years go on. Barely a week goes by without a new identity theft scare, or report of corporations ‘losing’ personal data to third parties. Facebook has already had a couple of breaches, I’m sure there will be more. And bear in mind that more and more people are wanting to back data up on the Internet, and are thinking about hosting their data rather than keeping it on local hard drives etc. I think the market for persistent, secure (encrypted) storage ‘close’ to the home but still hosted is growing, and it makes sense to consolidate all that with mail, calendar, photos etc etc. We’re just not there yet, so Facebook exists as a separate store of informatino because people don’t have their own reliable and easy to use publishing mechanism. I don’t think that’s going to prove to be a permanent thing.
“personally I think it’d have to be exponentially better than Facebook and MySpace to gain critical mass”
That’s really my point - Facebook isn’t radically better than any other social network before it, and yet it managed to grab market share over the encumbents at the time. If Facebook can become the favourite based on a small margin of functional difference, so can any other one. They did have timing on their side though so you might be right that the inertia is higher this time, we’ll have to see.
May 9th, 2008 at 7:38 pm
amen sinbad, amen. too bad you cant beat the market