Ben Brown, Internet Rockstar Feverish Velocity

Word!

For connection sake I’d like to keep my profile up but I would like it to view-only. I’d like to be able to deactivate individually Facebook communication tools, such as messaging, app announcements, etc.

I’d rather people email me directly instead of thinking they deserve a response because they sent a message to twenty facebook friends at once.

Social Software, in the end, really reduces what is required to make a contact or connect with lost friends, but if all that is going to be used for is to receive bulk messages from those people, I’d rather not we connected at all.

Meeting is important, but quality relations is what makes a meaningful relationship.

Also, ben, on a personal note, you must know I really like you if I went through process of registering for your blog just so I can leave a comment. I know how it is with comment spam, but 9 times out of 10 I don’t comment if I have to go thru reg process. I’m not sayin’…..I’m just sayin’…. ;>

OK Ted, you win. No more registration required to comment.

I agree with your vision of the internet, and I think people too easily discount the long-term community potential in blogs and other small sites… I still have high hopes in the development some kind of federated community affordances that will let people benefit from network effects even in the context of a small website or blog or something.

At the same time, though, I think that part of the genesis of the problem you describe is in fact one of the reasons Facebook has done so well. It’s a feature, not a bug, that there is a cost to adding more friends. The fact that the news feed gets more and more noisy as you add friends ensures that there’s a bit of pressure to NOT just add anyone you come across to your friends list. To me this is the thing that distinguishes Facebook from earlier social networking sites - it is very expressly not just about collecting unknowns or barely-knowns as “friends”.

I often think that the pundits and people like you and I who have seen all of these networks come and go since the beginning sometimes miss what it is about these kinds of software that people who are newer to the whole thing get about it instinctively. I know that the thing about Facebook that is different than every other social network since Six Degrees is that it is the only one that is bigger among my non-net-worker friends and acquaintances than with “the regulars” I’ve seen and befriended on all of these sites since the beginning.

Being more selective doesn’t totally cut down the noise, but it does help a lot and I think lets one use Facebook as just one software tool among many - in other words, to make it work for you, not against you (notwithstanding all of the crap vampire-like applications).

for the most part I agree with everything you said.

as far as you “”losing friends” I think that depends more on where you are in life. I hate to say it but you (and I) are old because we are over the age of 16.

in High School there is a different dynamic going on and kids who are over scheduled and don’t have time to “hang out” with friends any more are spending more and more time socializing online. And in those cases a teen who is not participation online does miss out on alot of the socializing that happens in school. I think think this need to be online dissipates as they enter college and the real world and they are more in control of their own time.

so different people can have different needs.

I second Ted.

I quit MySpace in May of 2006 after many of my circle of acquaintances seemed to forget how to use email, didn’t notice that I logged into MySpace about once a month, and then would get very mad at me for not replying to their email (really it usually was a bulletin to everyone) or seeing their invite. Many of these folks were intelligent folk who got so caught up in the MS system that they forgot how to communicate without it. I decided to not participate.

I quit Facebook about 6 weeks after joining, as I could not see how it was fun. It just seemed yet another white & mid-blue tedious thing to check to see if I got a message, of which most of the time the person could have reached me faster via email/phone/IM/twitter.

Ben - thanks for the post, particularly this bit - “If we’re going to be spending a significant slice of our days, every day, using this software, we should be choosing software because we enjoy it and because it adds real value to our lives.”

;o)

Ben, these are valid critiques of Facebook, but they’re also critiques of social networking sites in general, to varying degrees.

Your assertion that Facebook becomes less useful as more people join is, to my ears, a rephrasing of a common gripe with Friendster: “friends” were a quantity, and the ostensible object of the game was to accumulate as many as possible. So the person you sat next to in fifth grade suddenly became your “friend,” even though befriending that person added no value for either of you. In other words, if social networking sites decrease in user value as they grow, it’s only because they make it easy to widen your definition of “friend” little-by-little.

The pervasive, under-the-radar advertisements don’t bother me; they feel more like a search for a business model than a user-shirking money-grab. But there’s a lot of gray area there and reasonable people can disagree.

(But, yeah, I’m going to go Count Chocula on the next person who sends me a vampire bite.)

=)

While I certainly think you have a lot of valid points, I think part of the issue is not only what Andrew says in terms of friends becoming a competition, but also that Facebook makes it impossible to really differentiate groups of people that easily. In real life, not everyone you know is a friend, but on Facebook, they’re either your friend, or they’re not, and because people find it hard to turn down a friend request, the network they have online often ends up somewhat meaningless. That on it’s own screws up the signal:noise ratio, but then the people you’ve added discover whatever random ‘application’ is popular that week, ads get dropped into things, and that ratio becomes even more ridiculous as your “news” feed devolves rapidly into 90% crap.

Having said that, I think a lot of what drives use of Facebook is fundamentally how your life works. If you’re in school/college, you’re around an insane amount of people with a hell of a lot of stuff going on, and Facebook, if you’re careful as to how you use it, *is* insanely useful. I’m not saying it’s perfect, and certainly stuff like Beacon unnerved me, but at least for the time being, Facebook’s usefulness to me as a student clearly outweighs it’s various annoying tendencies.

Also, if you’re really tired of the zombie crap, the iPhone version of Facebook works perfectly in a normal browser, allows you to do most things you can do in it’s big brother, and has no ads or any zombie crap. At least not at the moment…

I’m seriously considering writing a full-length article in response to the above. I agree with what’s being said, but I have something else to add to the conversation. I joined Facebook when the floodgates were opened to the masses and have since seen a steady uptick in the number of annoying app messages that appear in my newsfeed. While I agree that the quality of Facebook is degraded by this noise, there is something about Facebook that I have not found elsewhere. I have found real value in the virtual friends I have made there. Facebook has brought to me an amazing amount of intelligent people with intelligent things to say and share. It’s partly a side-effect of running the AAAS science-themed group– this gathered in one place people with more serious and professional profiles who became my “friends”. Part of Facebook’s success here also lies in the (now overcrowded) newsfeed, that serves as a dashboard of sorts for all the latest information being generated by your friends. I agree that if you are not selective in whom you allow into your circle, you will be bombarded with junk. But if you surround yourself with people who are worthwhile listening to, Facebook gives you the ability to aggregrate in one place what they all have to say.

plz see

http://www.flickr.com/photos/thelastminute/1529829880

I totally acknowledge the value Facebook can deliver to someone in college or High school. However, it seems that there would be much more value had the network remained closed, allowing those school networks to develop in their own contexts instead of being blown open and intermingled with the worthless babbling of silicon valley deebs.

@ Alison - Its great that you can connect with the AAAS people. I hope that the money-hungry folks who run Facebook don’t one day decide that they needs to monetize the site by making people like you pay exorbitantly to continue using the site or to extract your group out of their software. And what happens when you want to add custom functionality for your community members?

I agree that my complains can be applied to a lot of social networks when they reach a certain scale. I am picking on Facebook here because it is the most recent and most notable example of these problems, and also because I think it is going to get much, much, much worse.

Oh, I agree that my poor group is ripe for the pickin’. Even within my own organization people are chomping at the bit to throw marketing and advertisements their way. It has also crossed my mind that someday, poof, Facebook would change the rules and either I or my group members would get screwed. AAAS isn’t ready as an organization to create its own platform yet. For now, I’m content to learn what to do and what not to do from Facebook. I’m not yet convinced that trying to run our own social network is the solution either. While we would retain control of the content/community (important to us), we would be faced with a number of hurdles — programming talent we don’t have, reluctance to join yet another social networking site, a slow initial launch period until we gain critical mass, etc. Maybe the answer lies in something that hasn’t been created yet — a way for people to aggregate updates of their friends that is platform independent and free from commercialization. But then, what pays to get that done? And is that even possible to achieve? The IDEA behind social networking is still good… try not to get too jaded! :)

Ahoy! Pretty awesome conversation going up here! :)

“Maybe the answer lies in something that hasn’t been created yet — a way for people to aggregate updates of their friends that is platform independent and free from commercialization. But then, what pays to get that done? And is that even possible to achieve? The IDEA behind social networking is still good…”

Couldn’t agree more. Unfortunately it seems everyone just wants people to aggregate data on their site :\ (with Google positioning itself to be the aggregator for all as its OpenSocial partners). Perhaps building on some P2P network might relieve the costs of maintaining a free service as user resources are used. :)

I still believe in the social software - the kind which gets you laid :D not the kind that gets you spammed and wrecks your real social life (I’ve talked about a pratical example and exploitable example here: http://do.sheeptalk.org/?p=45&language=en).

And following up on the title…
… I sure hope they we’re doing base jumping! ;)

Great post Ben/ What is it *for.” You ask the right question. I am still on facebook but it is more and more what myspace is: a place you need to be as a performer, to easily invite people. The best personal element is reconnecting and finding friends from college and seeing quickly what my pals are up to. twitter does that better/more succinctly than facebook for me but many people in my life are not as geeky as I am and do not use twitter.

I agree with the sentiment in this post and that Facebook kinda messed up their brand on their own. Opening the network for everyone to join wasn’t the problem; opening the network and offering an API that spawned such madness as vampires and superpokes and superwalls was where they screwed up.

In a sense, MySpace’s network is much smarter than Facebook’s. At least on MySpace you can make your page look pretty (or pretty ugly) with your own customizations; on Facebook, your page looks ugly, period. You’re spammed with notifications to all manners of applications that are ultimately out of your control. I leave my status message at “stop inviting me to your applications; I hate them, they suck, die die die,” or something to that effect because it’s frustrating having to deny them all the time.

To Facebook’s credit, they make it easy to deny them all, but there really is no satisfaction when you know you’ll come back in a two weeks and have to update your status and do it all again.

Also, the best parties are still text-messaged, or word-of-mouth, Facebook invites be damned!

Hey Ben,

It’s nice to read of someone voting with their feet and keeping things more local. I completely agree that what you get is of higher quality, and you get it in a much more satisfying way i.e., from a grocer who KNOWS it’s a good apple, and WANTS to tell you rather than someone on an aisle who THINKS it’s a good apple and HAS to tell you.

This is something I often write about - how to add real value, keep the signal:noise ratio in check. I’m part of a company called Naked. We’re a startup building a social network/messaging service, only we call it Open Messaging. If you’re interested there’s a link to the main document on it in the sidebar of our blog (www.nakedyak.com)

Your move out of Facebook and the things you write about in general are a great way to start the year!

~biff~

Given the non-stop marketing that is life today, a social networking site seems a strange place to draw a line and say “no, not here.”

Mostly, though, this is either a strangely bad choice of words or revealing:

“I try to buy my groceries local. I try to buy locally crafted goods and support local businesses - not just to be a good neighbor, but because the goods and services I receive are generally of a higher quality. They are made by real people instead of by factories.”

Real people work in factories. FYI. A lot of folks forget that. Don’t be that kind of folks.

I’ll pass on commenting on the ever-present authenticity narrative. Except to note that this sounds a lot like Republican versions of privatizing social change, making it all about “personal choice.” I read that sort of stuff all the time. It makes me think Clinton was actually completely effective in destroying the Left and making us all Republicans at heart.

I am a new user of Facebook and have few business observations. One of Facebook’s ad models is to match keywords in an email exchange, replicating Google’s paid search model. For example, a friend of mine sent me an email through FB asking me a business question regarding a Men’s grooming line he is thinking of starting. The next thing I notice on my FB page is an ad for a “rolling shaver.” It was kind of creepy on the privacy side, but it occurred to me that it isn’t the same thing on the user-viewed advertising side. When a user enters a search query in Google, the user is in an “intention” mode: he or she is looking for either (a) information about a topic, or (b) information about a product. In FB, the “intention” is to connect with someone, not seek information about a product. So FB’s attempt to replicate Google’s keywords success, seems to ignore the contextual difference between the two: (1) the user did not enter a keyword in FB, and (2) the user does not have a product intention in FB. FB says it has 150 million ‘active users’ a month worldwide and it’s been reported FB has approximately $300 million in revenue. That’s $2 of revenue per user per month. This doesn’t appear to be a great model. Because FB is private I have no idea what its operating costs are but even at a 25% net income level FB is making 50 cents per user per month. Perhaps the revenue model will kill off FB not user dissatisfaction?