You said before you're not even registered with Facebook so how could you know? All you're doing is stereotyping.
That doesn't even touch on the various reasons I finally decided to "leave" it (deactivate my account).
I don't have an account
now, but I did. I decided to deactivate it for the many "stereotyping" reasons I gave.
I would call it successful. When you have 1/14 of the world's population on your site, let me know.
Non-sequitur. You're saying that because I don't have a site that is as popular/more popular then facebook I have no right to criticize either it or the users they have, or the habits and trends t hat have emerged on it. That's nonsense.
Also, Facebook has a modest 800 employees. Google has 20,000. Think about what Facebook has created contrasted with Google in relation to the timescale and number of employees.
non-sequitur pragmatic fallacy. I didn't compare Google to facebook, I compared facebook to ID Software; or, more precisely, I compared the book "The Accidental Billionaires" to "Masters of Doom". Truth be told, I haven't read the former, nor have I seen the movie, but to be quite honest, I don't think the story sounds very interesting. There aren't any programming geniuses like John Carmack involved; they don't have creative minds like John Romero and Tom Hall. They aren't pushing the limits of anything, despite what anybody might seem to think. Employee-wise, ID kept to less then a handful of employees for 15-20 years, all the while churning out the titles that are well known today; and the backstory behind the development of each one is quite engrossing. Moving from one game to the next, it's clear they were building upon what they had. With facebook, it's more "we started this site in college. it got popular. Now we are rich." There weren't any good or bad business decisions to be made. Game stories and engines and the respective hardware to run said engines didn't need to work together perfectly. They simply got lucky, that's all.
Anyway, now for more specific critiques supporting my previous claim of how it "Basically it turns people into farmville/mafia wars/etc addicted idiots who apparently don't realize that almost every single successful facebook game is based on older games. Only on facebook would you become "friends" with somebody because you both have an affinity for raisin bran muffins."
First; that "status" update. <Name> is <insert text>. People put the damned stupidest things there. In fact, one can say the facebook status update created it's own spin-off, twitter. But that's another topic altogether (and I'm not sure if twitter was even started after FB or not). In any case, there are two kinds of FB users in this regard:
People who update it once every few months, or make it reflect larger projects (sensible).
People who will change their status when they go to change the cat litter, change it when they come back, change it when they go to make themselves coffee, change it when they use the washroom, etc etc. These people appear to constitute the majority.
I also found the use of the word "Friend" rather liberal. As I sort of pointed out with the "raisin bran" quip, they sort of trivialize what a friend really is. to me, the word "friend" conjures up a real sense of mutual affection. A good number of the people who tried to add me on facebook I hadn't met- anywhere, let alone in real-life. They didn't even count as "People I know", much less "friends".
Another major issue I have with Facebook is that Your Facebook membership serves only to make the owners rich with your self absorbed content. You get nothing for your work. (if you are crazy enough to call it work, I guess). There is no revenue share for your content, your life, your posts. They put ads on your profile and bank the payback. They get it. You don't. They are making money off of you, that's how they got rich "by accident" it was by realizing that even though directly asking somebody if they would do work for free would almost certainly give a negative response, proper motivation can make all the difference, and they reaped the benefits. There is no linkback, SEO benefit, no way to build something better and money making outside of Facebook.
Nobody is going to hire someone from Facebook. "Hey check out my wall. I need a job, man".
And the biggest thing I can't stand about Facebook and the entire concept of Social Networking?
It's a gigantic waste of time. So many people spend HOURS on the bloody thing each day- and why? What do they get in return? This is what confuses me, as I just noted, those hours spent on facebook tweaking your profile and playing the various facebook games and so forth essentially constitutes free content for the site to put ads on. That's pretty much all facebook is, really; and this is shared by many social networking sites. You can't just have pages filled with ads, you need some content. It's a free content generator. for them to frame with ads. (which even in the last bit while I had a FB account was getting worse).
Before I even joined facebook, I was under the impression that all social networking was effectively pointless. After using it, my opinion has only been further enhanced in that sense. What I see as pointless, is social networking for the sake of social networking. That is what facebook is.
Take.... oh I don't know- Flickr. Flickr is about photos (See, already has +1 on facebook, since it's not pointless); but, you can establish relationships with other users of the site, who are described as "Contacts" (see, avoids the f-word!). The positive of this is that you can have a single view where you can see photos recently uploaded by your contacts. You can also choose to determine individual Contacts as being "Friends" or "Family" (to be fair, I think facebook has something to this affect, but I can't remember) you can then share individual photos and albums with no one, with everyone, just with your Contacts, or just with Friends and/or Family. The distinction between Contacts, Friends, and Family is very helpful, I think—it gives you a much more sophisticated level of control over your privacy. On Facebook, someone is a Friend, or they're not. There's no in-between. (again, my info might be out-dated on that).
Clearly though, my point here is that Flickr
has a Central goal; to share photos. The Social networking stuff is extra; you can choose to engage in it or not. Facebook, on the other hand- what's the point of it? Some have told me it's so you can "reconnect with people you've lost touch with" And to a degree I can understand that. But the thing is you add them as a friend, they are all "OMG it's been so long" etc you have a short conversation, and that's it. maybe every few months you exchange a few words, and you realize that the reason you lost touch was because your interests had forked away from each other, or something along those lines. (this is taken from personal experience, YMMV of course). Basically, the whole "reconnect with people you've lost touch with" is an admirable goal until you realize that obviously you lost touch with them for a reason; if it was really important to have kept in touch, you would have. It's not like exchanging E-mails or IMs or something are that difficult. In any case, Facebook's real purpose is- of course, Social networking. I find it comical that Facebook, despite the fact that it's sole purpose is to aid your relationships with people, doesn't even have the same "relationship management" that Flickr has (again, info may be outdated), where the social networking is (or was) secondary.
Anyway, mostly I'm just pissed off that the facebook history where Zuckerberg even said it wasn't really very interesting got a movie made out of it whereas Masters of Doom, which would have made a freaking awesome movie, got passed over in the interest of simply doing something contemporary that most people would recognize. Oh well.
