1. Facebook misrepresents relationships
   It’s clear that Facebook was designed by a young person with borderline Aspergers. Relationships are black and white, you’re either a Friend or you’re not, and they’re symmetrical – information has to flow both ways. The real world doesn’t work like that, I have real friends, family, casual acquaintances, people I like to keep up to date on but who I’ve never met, and people who like to follow me but who I don’t know. I interact with every one of these groups of people differently, and very often in asymmetrical ways. The concept of a ‘Friend’ who I’d share private information with online is completely unrealistic. I know Facebook bolted on ‘lists’ but everything is totally hobbled by this misguided overarching ‘Friend’ concept.
2. Facebook’s signal-to-noise ratio is unmanageable
   Whether it’s automated posts from games & other poorly considered apps, or just people pouring every trivial little element of their life into it, I was drowning in trivia in a few months to the extent that it was a chore to keep up to date. This is a function of the people you’re connected with of course, but here’s the problem – because of the way Facebook simplifies relationships, you can’t really do anything about it without offending someome, because:
3. Facebook creates social awkwardness
   Because Facebook only recognises one type of connection as pointed out in 1, it makes managing your information stream impossible without offending someone. For example, I may very well have real friends / family who I want to connect with, but who I don’t necessarily want to listen to 24/7 because they have .. ahem.. ‘very poor communication filters’. That doesn’t mean I don’t like them, we just communicate very differently. Sure, I might want to dip into their updates every so often, but I don’t want to have to wade waist-deep through their posts every time I go online to find the gems from people who are better at filtering themselves.
   On Twitter, I just unfollow people who I don’t feel like listening to every day, and trust others to RT things that are good (I can always re-follow later). They don’t get told, and generally it’s not considered offensive. Conversely unfriending someone on Facebook is equivalent to saying you never want to speak to them again – it was literally easier just to close my entire Facebook account than to deal with it any other way. Sure you can create a Facebook group, but since groups are visible to all, creating one called ‘People I like in person but who are kind of annoying online’ isn’t going to avoid the problem.

So I went with Twitter because it basically sidesteps all these issues by being public (lack of ‘pretend’ privacy leaves no-one under any illusions about appropriateness), asymmetrical (I can follow someone without them following me and vice versa), and easily managed / filtered without offence. I largely had given up on a ‘rich’ social network that worked the way I wanted, because everyone else seemed to swear by Facebook’s way, which I hated.

Then, last week Google came out with Google+, their latest answer to the problem. Invitations are hard to come by, they’re still in limited testing, but I managed to sneak in before they closed a loophole, ironically via friends on Twitter. I didn’t expect to like it – I expected another Facebook – but I was wrong. Key to what makes Google+ different is that it doesn’t use the concept of ‘Friend’, but instead uses a core concept of ‘Circles’. Google have done what Facebook have refused to do, and have recognised that relationships aren’t binary, aren’t always symmetrical, and are all different. Circles can be used to filter the things that you post into groups of people who can see it, but just as importantly to filter incoming posts too. Most importantly, the person can’t see what Circle you’ve put them in! So if you like the person in real life, but find their online posts a bit vapid, you can put them in a circle that you don’t have to read as often, and they don’t have to know. No-one has to get offended, and you get to keep your stream sane. Perfect.

So far, I like it – it’s taken the best bits of Twitter (control without offence) and Facebook (rich media platform) and slapped them together. Of course, there’s the question of whether people wedded to Facebook will switch or not, although for me that’s a moot point since I already ditched it, so any people on it that do come across to G+ are a bonus, but I lose nothing if they don’t. Twitter users seem to be quite eager to adopt it, probably because they’re natural early-adopters and appreciate the Twitter-like circle setup for the same reasons I do.

And it’s for that reason that I think Twitter has most to fear from Google+. Facebook will probably trundle on with all the people who don’t particularly care about managing their streams in an optimal way and don’t feel a need to switch. Twitter though is used by a lot of people (like me) who are a lot more picky about this sort of thing, and those are exactly the people for whom Google+ will resonate the most. Right now, the main limiting factor is that there are no native tools for Google+, and using it on a phone or iPad is still a bit clunky compared to the kind of optimised native tools you can use for Twitter. But that’s coming I’m sure.

I haven’t even talked about the group video chat, or the really nice photo viewer, how Google+ notifications appear when you’re on any Google site (search, GMail, Reader – a huge advantage for adoption), or how they’re iterating really fast on this. In all, I think it has great promise to be a social network that doesn’t annoy me – yet. One of the big challenges as they develop will be how they handle bot-posting from the inevitable games and other applications once the API is released (I hate it when people hook up everything under the sun to auto-post to social networks, and I unfollow them on Twitter even if they’re friends). We’ll see.

What’s happened in the last couple of years is that Twitter has risen inexorably in my daily usage due to being genuinely useful as a networking aid, while Facebook has not fared that well at all. I tried posting updates to it from Twitter for a while via Selective Tweets, which led to a considerable blip in my Facebook usage (even though I wasn’t using the site) but honestly I can’t be bothered with it anymore. And not just because of the rubbish that sloshes around Facebook.

Facebook is ‘sold’ on the idea that you can realistically make / be friends with people, or even keep in meaningful personal touch with people you do genuinely know, via short messages and photos on an online service. My personal opinion after trying to use it as such for a while, is that this is a massive crock of elephant dung. Relationships are built on meaningful contact, and Facebook provides – is only capable of providing – only meaningless, trivial contact. Of all the ways you can keep in touch with people, it’s about the very worst you could possibly use, IMHO. It’s convenient, sure, but convenience doesn’t make for good personal contact. Honestly, if you can’t be bothered to make the effort to meet someone in person or talk on the phone (and home video calls aren’t that hard in the 21st century), then really you’re not that bothered about keeping in genuine contact with them. It’s better just to be honest – you’re kinda interested in knowing what’s up in their life, but not interested enough to have coffee with them, or otherwise make any genuine time for them.

In this context, Facebook is a fallacy. The whole point of Facebook versus Twitter or any other public internet medium is that Facebook is ‘private’ (barring any changes in rules they might feel like making to make a buck on your data of course). But if you don’t care enough to speak to someone other than in Facebook, and vis-a-vis you’re not really that much of a friend, then why would you want them to know things you wouldn’t post publicly? This is behind many the Facebook fo-pahs that seem to crop up with increasing regularity. Twitter is honest about the level of interaction  you’re having with people. Facebook tries to make you think it’s more significant than it is.

Maybe you’re a highly gregarious person who genuinely has over 100 real friends that you’d share your private information with. Maybe you feel that personal relationships are upheld and maintained by Facebook messages. I don’t, and I’m going to stop pretending that it’s serving a useful purpose in my life. I have a small collection of friends and family with whom I exchange information by meeting and speaking to them – these are the only people I’d consider exchanging genuinely personal information with. There’s a second much larger collection of people whom I don’t meet personally but who I’m interested in keeping in contact with, and by and large they’re all on Twitter – which also does a far better job of delivering that information without bombarding me with all kinds of other nonsense. There’s really no useful middle ground for Facebook to fill, for me. And using Facebook as a supplement with people I already know? Frankly it’s far more entertaining to talk to them about their week’s exploits than read about them on Facebook – in fact Facebook can take the wind out of a good anecdote

Really, you should never post anything on the Internet that you wouldn’t mind being public, since Facebook hardly has an unblemished record for actual privacy (whether that’s via Facebook themselves, or friends or friends-of-friends). I think that a lot of people use Facebook like I use Twitter, except there’s far more scope for dangerous misunderstandings about what is appropriate to post. I think non-digital social protocols dealt with sensitive & private information much better, and that online services are best used only for non-private things. From now on, that’s what I’m going to do, and I’m not the only one.

And in fact, it’s actually been very useful. I’ve almost stopped blogging about Ogre work unless there’s a significant event or something I feel needs greater analysis, because my Twitter feed is a better way to get the word out about things. It’s also been useful to get feedback on certain technical issues and to keep up to date with what other people are doing. Specifically, I tend to only follow people who post about things I’m interested in, rather than just because I know them.

And this tends to work well – I’ve found that Twitter users, or at least the ones I follow, in general tend to automatically filter their content to things that are actually interesting. This is in contrast to Facebook, which is so chock full of the utterly banal that I lose the will to live every time I try to catch up with the feed – there are usually some things in there I’d genuinely be interested in, but it’s so full of crap I can hardly face spending the time to find it. Much of that is due to its insistence that I’m somehow interested in the events of all the Facebook games people are playing, when in fact I couldn’t give a flying toss what new fish someone has just unlocked in some ridiculous mini-game. I’m close to just deleting my account and forgetting all about it – if you want to be social, grab a coffee / drink with me sometime or something – at least then you’re unlikely to keep interrupting to tell me what your level is in FarmVille.

Computer systems are tools, and can be used for good or ill. I’ve come across lots of people that use Twitter in a genuinely useful and non-intrusive way, and I try to do the same, and as such it’s made a firm place for itself in my day – something I would not have taken for granted when I started using it.

Here’s a tip: if you want to connect with me or anyone else on an online system, at the very least email me to introduce yourself first, or include in your friend request why we might know each other already, or have something in common. I’m fully aware that I ‘know’ far more people than I realise half the time, since I talk to people every day in forums etc via the obscurity of nicks. And if we haven’t spoken before, that might be ok too; I like ‘meeting’ new people, but you really have to talk to me first.

Just firing a friend request at me with no introduction is akin to throwing your business cards at random strangers in the street; it’s just not polite. Going through introductions might seem old fashioned in today’s fast-moving world, but it really does break the ice and makes the difference between a genuine friend request and a ‘stalking request’.

LinkedIn I like, because it sticks to the point. Every business person needs their Rolodex, and that’s what LinkedIn is – a business tool. It doesn’t claim to be central to your life, or that you can build / sustain real friendships there or other such twaddle. The focussed nature of it means there’s less noise, so it’s easier and quicker to get what you need. Contacts there are not personal, they’re a reference for it you’re looking for work, a contractor, a partner etc – which is appropriate for the medium in a way that personal relationships are not. I don’t feel the need to constantly update it or prod my contacts, or keep track of all their statuses; it just does what I need and gets out of the way.

I’ve avoided Twitter because again, it just looked like a way to pour time down the toilet. It seemed like blogging without the in-built filter that says ‘is this worth blogging about’?. Besides, I already actively participate in forums, mailing lists, blogs etc – I really didn’t feel I needed yet another dimension to have online discussions in. And I don’t really want to tell the entire world what I’m doing at any one time – I strain out the small number of actually interesting things already and post them up on this blog, and the rest of the minutae rapidly decreases in value the more degrees of separation away from me you get; so in fact real-world communication works far better as a filtering mechanism for that. Clay Shirky described why information filters in the real world have historically done a much better job with these kinds of things.

However, I decided to open a Twitter account anyway, but only for a very narrow subset of ‘what I’m doing’ – that is, what I’m currently doing in core Ogre. Obviously I blog about that sometimes, and I post in the forum for things that people need to know about, and keep the roadmap on the wiki up to date, but sometimes there are low-level things that don’t warrant that, but people are still interested in. I used to use IRC for this, but over the years drifted away from it, as it was too time consuming to loiter in channels for extended periods looking for topics in real-time, and people just bombarded me with questions all the time anyway so it was a little too much like hard work. So, for things that don’t warrant a blog or forum posting, I’m going to try to keep Twitter informed. There’s also a widget on the right there.

The focus will be kept deliberately very tight – so nothing about my other work commitments, personal life etc are going on there. If any of those things merit comment, they’ll get a more considered entry in my blog. Consider this a sort of ‘pre commit log’ of sorts! If I continue with it, anyway…

I was also very interested to see from his links in that article that some in the open source community are already forming plans to address it. It’s early days yet, but I look forward to a day when we can have all the convenience of sites like Facebook provide without having to cede control of our data to a centralised corporate entity searching desperately for a way to dissect that data & our browsing behaviour for revenue opportunities.

It’s funny because when talking about this issue to a friend recently, I made the comparison between sites like Facebook now, and the ‘gated communities’ of AOL / Compuserve in the past, before the Internet took off. They too used their sealed community to generate revenue, but when people finally had the option to become free of that and get the same functionality, users deserted in their droves to the liberated environment of the Internet. Tim used the same analogy in his article, so maybe I’m not crazy after all.

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.