A Facebook group has been making noise in Canadian politics, and I decided that what the hell, I’d sign up, too. I have a Facebook account, but I’ve never spent much time there.
Today when I clicked the bookmark, I could tell I was signed in, but when the page stopped loading, 95% of it wasn’t there. I got the top of the header and some links that didn’t change anything. After reloading a few times, checking to see if I had blocked any content in my browser (I hadn’t), I eventually decided that FB must have changed it’s code to the point that it no longer worked in my browser of choice. It doesn’t happen a lot, but it does happen. I loaded Firefox, browser preference #2, and pasted in the link to my facebook page. This one loads, but not before a couple of very annoying popups soliciting me to make changes to my permissions in a process which clearly deliberately designed to be confusing and to hide the options facebook didn’t want me to pick. I click through two pages of these before it will let me see my page.
On my profile page, I see a stack of friend, cause, and something else requests, none of which I am even slightly interested in. Ads flash at me, so seeing the X in their top right corners, I click to make them go away. Popups pop and try to interview me about what kind of advertising I want to see. I decline to be interviewed about my advertising desires. Just like telemarketers, everything on Facebook has to be told ‘no’ multiple times before it will Leave Me Alone.
I see a search box and try to search for the group, using a fairly distinctive keyword in it’s name. Facebook’s search shows me a whole lot of things that aren’t it. Eventually, I have to use google to look up the group’s name in full before facebook’s search will let me find it. I join, and then think “this is just annoying. Why am I bothering? This site is less and less inviting every time I log in”.
As far as I’m concerned, Facebook is over the shark.
It peaked last summer anyway. I don’t know what’s the next big thing. Display issues and weird episodes of missing content have been a feature for months for me. I haven’t cancelled yet, mostly because of younger family friends who still use it.
I truly enjoyed re-connecting with school-era chums and met up with some in real life. It was worth it, but I have always been skeptical knowing that they had to figure out how to make money wi’ it.
So Weeks, do you think all those folks who have been enjoying this new means of keeping socially connected with distant friends & relations will happily let it drop like a pet rock or a Hummer, because it’s passed its peak? I mean, people ditched Hummers, but that’s because they had better ways to accomplish the same thing.
Facebook is one big, fat piece of software that lets us use our computers as windows to the world, socially, in a way that we couldn’t before.
Facebook may not be the ultimate forum to do this, but I suspect that calling it a fad may be overlooking the tendency for channels of communication to expand, rather than contract.
The other side of it is the snowball effect. I’ve been on Bebo, Tagged, MySpace, Hi5 and others, at specific requests from people. If there’s only one other person you know on it, it’s not much of a network. Microsoft having two different MySpaces, one for Musicians and one for Civilians is strange, but not as strange as the fact that they don’t talk to each other! How networkish is that?
Facebook finally became the one that I had more than one actual friend on. Word gets out. Other friends join, including one or two that I recall saying “I’m on I’ll never join Facebook.”
It’s its size that makes it more useful.
In my case, it’s beyond the signal-to-noise tipping point. These days too much of what I have to do there is noise for not enough signal. They’ve chased me off by becoming a drag.
I’ll leave the minute amount of info I have up there, and scan the emails the site sends when someone’s trying to reach me. If something exciting happens I’ll get word, but I won’t bother with anything else.
That particular forum is a fad, imo.. Using the net in that general way you describe is modern communication. It seems like before FB, MySpace was the big one. What happened to that? Is it just as big? I don’t really know because I never used that one but my sense is that FB replaced it, that’s all. And I can’t see why that won’t happen to FB.
Simon is the bellwether here and is making the legitimate point that this particular forum is building up on negatives. As I stated before, I have always been skeptical about FB because in a way, it was something for nothing, and I know that they have to make money, sooner or later, and I am not going to like however that is accomplished. My accumulated experience with the Net overall is that it’s good for a while, then gets crapped up with something. Search engines used to answer my questions. Now, they sort of answer my questions, but not before issuing a barrage of marketing appeals first by selecting my search terms. To me, this specific principle is played out in a thousand ways on the web as we go forward/
The fact that your photos become “property” of FB once you post them bugs me, but I pushed forward anyway. FB has been responsive in some ways to these concerns, but I still wonder if someone won’t have a better interface down the road. I still refuse to participate in any of the games, and extra-site interfaces that ask you to agree to yet more terms of surrendering your info to play along. No, I don’t play Farmville, nor accept virtual coffee, flowers or Mafia wars… I don;t even want to know what that’s about, but I’m old and cranky, so…
FB would probably be a dying fad if only kids used it. But now their parents and grandparents use it and these people will probably keep it alive in some fashion, even if the cool people have moved on to a place where they can talk about their boyfriends and girlfriends and post pics of puking in the street without Grandma being able to see.
Facebook is a dying fad. Already. It got a longer run than its replacement (Twitter) is going to enjoy, but from now forward it’s going to steadily shed users, month in and month out. It won’t be obvious because Facebook will try to keep all the abandoned or neglected profiles up, but fewer people will spend less and less time there. It’s going to join a long line of websites which have done the same. Anyone remember classmates.com? Are you still getting those plaintive emails, forlornly trying to make you think that there’s a party going on there that you didn’t know about?
How true is that. I recently re-signed up after a two year absence (in order to make a protest against the government - I won’t go in to details) only to find all the crud that I had posted two years ago was all still there and hadn’t been deleted when I ‘deleted’ my account. Not a happy bunny, I can tell you.
Forums aren’t the same kind of phenomenon. They’re too decentralized and they’re too democratic. No one says “what’s your profile on phpbb?” Yahoo tried to capture the forum audience, but open source software (of which phpbb was only one among several) and cheap and easy hosting broke Yahoo’s grip.
So, do you think people will segue in the direction of mostly live-person contacts, and not concern themselves with staying in touch with the ones they’ve been communicating with through the tubes? Or will it be a different kind of forum, limited by paid memberships?
Will people use an open, busy, and sometimes aggravating forum such as FB to make initial contacts, then invite each other to smaller venues?
Will we connect page-to-page, like on FB, but with the actual pages being our own (sometimes paid subscription) urls?
I do see how FB becomes a little more like your (formerly) favorite coffeeshop which has become too popular…is hosting too many sing-alongs…is plastered with too many flyers and free newsrags, etc.
They’ll continue online much as they already are, but not on facebook. There’ll be a brand new coolest ap since funk along shortly. Facebook will limp along, dwindling gradually toward the midden where ICQ, eGroups, Yahoo Messenger, classmates.com, MySpace, Delicious, alt.anything, newsgroups, AOL, “portals”, Compuserve – and a whole heap more we’ve already forgotten – now lie.
Once again, I agree with Simon. As to this Forum, I would make this note: last summer, when FB was peaking, perhaps in my age group come to think of it, I found myself posting some of the kinds of things I might post here, there. It’s a tiny bit easier to say “what you think” in a type-in box, than make a thread, especially if the thought doesn’t necessarily warrant a thread. But I have found my particular FB account pretty inactive, except for a few compulsive friends or family members. And the responses aren’t as interesting as they are with this community, frankly. And I find myself returning here more. I am still grateful for re-connecting with school chums, but it didn’t have to be FB. And I found out that some of them were once members of Classmates, as Simon mentioned.
And yes, I have a cousin who died, and her account is still up there as active including photo, leaving me in the quandary of de-friending her or not, which might cause a ripple of pain to her already devastated mate (it was a very untimely and surprising death). Yes, he needs to get on with life, but I don’t want to be pouring any unnecessary salt. And, for all I know, he did close the account (based on comments above). But I sure don’t feel like asking him.
I’m not on anything. It all passes me by. I’m just on this, the poly-thingie and a couple of music boards that work like this. I don’t understand how anything else works or why it’s needed. I don’t know what tweeting or blogging means. I did sign up for Facebook years ago but never did anything at all, and couldn’t even work out how to log into it. Eventually, with considerable difficulty, I managed to unshackle myself from it. I’m thinking of joining YouTube to put some of my playing up there but it’ll take me yonks to work out how to do that. Oddly, I don’t appear to feel miserable.
Hardly, if Steve has adopted “Diogenes” as middle name!
From Diogenes life:
When asked how he wished to be buried, he left instructions to be thrown outside the city wall so wild animals could feast on his body. When asked if he minded this, he said, “Not at all, as long as you provide me with a stick to chase the creatures away!” When asked how he could use the stick since he would lack awareness, he replied “If I lack awareness, then why should I care what happens to me when I am dead?”
Er, I think I meant poli…