Earlier this year, I went from checking into my Facebook every 5 miniutes to maybe once every 2 months and here are the top 5 reasons why:
5. No more over-share - I don't want to know what you had for breakfast or how drunk you got last night. Nor do I need to listen to you fighting with your boy/girl-friend. Have some self respect will you?
4. Overloaded interface - when I started using facebook, it was actually useful. Now it's as filled with all the bands, causes, quizzes and assorted other random junk that stopped me ever getting into MySpace.
3. Being invited by "friends" - I no longer have to wrack my brain to remember whether or not I liked that person from primary school that just friended me and I don't have to feel unaccountably guilty when meeting someone for the second time because I rejected their friend request 5 months previously.
2. No more Hobo-Vampire-Farms - I used to spend a lot of time harvesting, feeding, attacking and such... then one day I thought to myself, "WTF and I doing!?!". (It would be a different story if I could actually grow Hobo-Vampires IRL)
1. FREEDOM!!!! - I've got so much extra time now. It's amasing! Seriously, count up the amount of time you spend being on MyTweetFace and then ask yourself how much you actually get out of it... I think you'll find the result depressing.
I think the only thing my Facebook site is still used for is as a place to house is my relationship status and all those embarassing party photos. Quite frankly, I'm relieved to be out of it and if you need to contact me, send an email. If you don't have my email and don't see me often enough to ask for it... why do you need to talk to me?
In the News
Large Hadron Collider creates infant universe - pretty cool... begs the question of when they'll package it as the latest and greatest virtual pet.
Chernobyl plant life adapts to high radiation environment - Nature is truly amasing.
UFO's monitoring US nukes - I don't know what's more troubling... that ET is watching or that they let so many of these people work with nuklear weapons.
Panasonic announces new robots - from a hair-washer to a bed that folds into a wheel-chair... awesomeness!
Mexico to secure an entire city with biometric scanners - Maybe it's easier, safer and more convenient than carrying around ID, credit cards and bus passes... but if anyone tells me to have a Joy-joy day, I'll scream. (note: that was a movie reference)
I hope the five of you that read this blog are still enjoying it :) Tell your friends! post a comment! Peace.
-Odd
"Privacy is dead, and social media hold the smoking gun."
- Pete Cashmore, Mashable CEO
- Pete Cashmore, Mashable CEO
I get what you are saying.
ReplyDeleteJust over a year ago I deleted my Facebook account and I created a new one, I moderated friend requests better, and when when games or silly apps show up in my new feed I block them.
I find it a nice way of communicating.
It has advantages over email as you cannot get spam from people you don't know.
Also makes a great address book. it syncs with my phone, so if someone changes their phone number I automatically get the new one.
Okay, so now to add to some of your points..
I do feel it is over used.
I am not interested in quizzes, mafia wars or babe of the day.
I don't want to see friends tagged in comic pictures.
There is a lot you need to mentally filter out.
Facebook has the advantage of being something you can use as much or as little as you want to, you just need to find a way of using it in an uncluttered way.
you can ever keep people in groups, and set certain groups to not show in your feed, because you don't care what those people are up to every second of the day, but you still might want to keep them as a friend so you can keep contact details for when you do need them...
fine lines...
... and it's a great place to post a link to your blog. ;)
ReplyDeleteJen: ^^ it is that
ReplyDeleteJonathan: Good points, but any decent email client can do all those things... and how much time do you spend filtering all that incoming junk? At some point it becomes more effective to subcribe to what you want (via RSS/twitter/buzz) than to filter the hell out of a giant stream of information.
Different strokes I guess... You're just more organised than I am ^^
The RSS method makes more sense to me, and not long ago I thought that that is the way it would go.
ReplyDeleteIf you broke Facebook up into individual pieces, i.e. Twitter for status updates, flickr/picasa for photos, blogs for notes, foursquare for location stuff, google calander for events, etc you could still do everything facebook does with more control, and more choice in what you get from each person.
I really thought that is where we were going to end up, but now I can't see it anymore. "The masses" are happy with Facebook, and where the masses are will be how we do it.
We can set it up the other way, and I guess in a sense you already have, if you are blogging, and maybe you have a picasa account you can use for sharing holiday photos with family, and then you can link it all together with something like friendfeed, but unless most the people you know are doing things that way you are just putting energy into a system that will not give you anything back.
That is of course if you want to see status updates from all facebook friends you might have. four years ago we would not have dreamed of ever wanting something we now cannot live without.
Ah, Jonathan...
ReplyDeleteYou words, crafted from Truth and Logic, are the sword that pops the bubble that is my hope of ever outrunning the masses...
...to one day return and lead them to a better place...
...unfortunately, my version of a better place doesn't include adverts...
...
I'm rambling aren't I? Back to the point, you're right... but I can dream of freedom ^^
Nothing wrong in dreaming of a better world.
ReplyDeleteA world where no single social network hold the people at ransom.
A world where people can move freely from site to site, profile to profile. Where seamless syndication exists functionally.
A world that allows you to fine tune your online presence, privacy and security.
RSS is a start.
XMPP is a start.
Free (libre), Open standard is the only true way.
nicely put.
ReplyDelete