I joined Facebook on June 7, 2007. It was a great time to discover what had been just available to College students. But what excited me the most was their approach to social media: they weren’t just a destination, they had become a platform.
Today that platform has become a vacuum of activities that happen in many other external services, like Spotify, Twitter or the Wall Street Journal. But those services are becoming too much half and half in my Facebook News Feed coffee.
According to Facebook’s IPO filing, they have lofty plans to connect the world: “There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future.”
An article on the Guardian challenges that statement in not so romantic words, saying that Facebook should simply say the truth:
We help people connect in safe, convenient and innovative ways. In doing so, we’ve built a business of historic proportions. We make money selling advertising that is finely tuned to reach our users in cost-competitive ways. Because we believe in Facebook’s unlimited potential, we will manage ourselves for the long term rather than for short-term profit. We have built an ownership and control structure to accomplish this goal.
I believe the IPO will increasingly transform Facebook in a data-mining company that sucks everyone’s social graph for their own monetization goals, and will surely become more and more aggressive as stockholders usually request from a public company.
I refuse to be the cow to be milked to fund that business.
It’s a mystery to everyone how Facebook selects items to show up on the News Feed. But I seem to have received the worst part of the algorithm. I was careful to use Facebook for my real life friends and family. But I never saw them posting anything. Is it that I don’t have the right family and friends? Should I move to Silicon Valley to make social-media-active real life friends? Or is it that more and more Facebook falls into the 80/20 rule: 20% of the people post and 80% are stalkers? There is talk of Facebook fatigue:
The latest data shows Facebook Fatigue is spreading in the US from the early adopters who it identified as “disengaging” in the GWI.5 report. Declines in social networking activity such as messaging friends fell 12% over the six waves of research, searching for new contacts fell 17% and joining a group 19% among all Facebook users in the US.
To spice up my New Feed, I decided to follow a handful of people whom I have established “web friendships” on other social sites like FriendFeed, Twitter and Google+.
Now my feed is dominated by these people and I see even less of what my friends and family post. The Facebook “subscribe” feature has allowed it to become more like Twitter (with asymmetrical relationships) and thus, a platform for broadcasting. Again, not so much connecting. I think Twitter already does that and much better.
These days the main form of communication between me and my family is WhatsApp. We are also giving a chance to Path, which has already done a much better job with their mobile application than the crappy thing Facebook calls their mobile app.
Influential bloggers, like John Batelle, are crying out that all these silos like Facebook and Twitter are destroying the ecosystem that the original web was.
Then there are unsettling things like the fact that Facebook never deletes photos. They are working on a solution to erase them — in about 45 days.
But very much apart from that, I think Facebook, for me, has failed in its mission: it no longer connects me to the people that matter to me.
So, is Facebook still working for you?
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