Sep. 2nd, 2010 02:38 pm
F@¢€ß%k, one year on
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muckefuckFrom the moment last year when I leapt over the cliff after all the other lemmings, I've had this post in planning. Originally, I was going to mark an earlier anniversary--say four- or six-month--but the dates kept slipping by before I noticed.
The joy of being a late adopter is that I had a pretty good idea what I was getting into. By September of last year, the social pitfalls of FB had been hashed out pretty thoroughly in LJ. The Twittery nature of comments, the abundance of distracting chaff, the awkwardness of having all your circles of acquaintance collapsed to one, the joy of receiving Friend requests from people you wouldn't spit on on the street--all of this I was prepared for.
So I was actually more surprised by the technical drawbacks. After only moments of wrestling with the interface, I was already asking myself How did this ever manage to attract a half-million users? It wasn't just the lack of features that at this stage of Internet development I'd come to take as standard (threaded discussion, anyone?), it was the overall bugginess of the site. I think I got a "can't connect" message within my first hour of usage. And other bugs--like lost comments--still surface regularly. Sometimes when I page down, earlier entries start loading automatically, sometimes I have to click on the link, and sometimes there is no link and I have to reload the page or log out and back in again.
Other puzzling phenomena: Why does scrolling accelerate so rapidly? Unless I make frequent pauses, I'm days in the past before I know it, when all I want to see if what my friends said yesterday. And why, when you click on an internal link, does hitting the back button put you at the top of your news feed instead of where you were when you clicked the link? I can't think of another website I use regularly that does that. These combine to give me the feeling that the Zuckermenschen are trying to discourage users from ever looking back at all.
But enough quibbles: how well does it perform its primary function, i.e. social networking? I'd say the jury is still out. On the one hand, I am in touch with several interesting people from my past I never would be without it. On the other, this hasn't resulted in much of the way of renewed contacts. Exchanges (whether through internal mail, chat, or what-have-you) tend to peter out pretty quickly; only one had led to a phone call, and I'm pretty sure I had his e-mail address anyway. I can think of a sole person who's actually gotten together with me due to an acquaintance struck up on FB.
But the primum movens for getting me onto the site was seeing photos of my nephews et al., and that's worked out well. Certainly, it's an overwhelming improvement over Snapfish and I even prefer it to Flickr. (Though I can't imagine either of those sites being as heinous about mining my data as the Douchebag You Can't Block.) I haven't tried uploading photos myself (and I'm not sure I want to, given DYCB's claim to own them if I do), and I scarcely comment beyond the occasional trite aperçu.
In sum? If the goal is to make FB indispensable, it's failed miserably. On the other hand, I haven't yet reached the tipping point where it's more trouble than its worth. (Though if my more privacy-conscious Friends there begin jumping ship, I'll be soon to follow.) And as for drawing me away from LJ, I'm posting here more now than I was when I joined the Great Timesink, and I plan to keep that up.
The joy of being a late adopter is that I had a pretty good idea what I was getting into. By September of last year, the social pitfalls of FB had been hashed out pretty thoroughly in LJ. The Twittery nature of comments, the abundance of distracting chaff, the awkwardness of having all your circles of acquaintance collapsed to one, the joy of receiving Friend requests from people you wouldn't spit on on the street--all of this I was prepared for.
So I was actually more surprised by the technical drawbacks. After only moments of wrestling with the interface, I was already asking myself How did this ever manage to attract a half-million users? It wasn't just the lack of features that at this stage of Internet development I'd come to take as standard (threaded discussion, anyone?), it was the overall bugginess of the site. I think I got a "can't connect" message within my first hour of usage. And other bugs--like lost comments--still surface regularly. Sometimes when I page down, earlier entries start loading automatically, sometimes I have to click on the link, and sometimes there is no link and I have to reload the page or log out and back in again.
Other puzzling phenomena: Why does scrolling accelerate so rapidly? Unless I make frequent pauses, I'm days in the past before I know it, when all I want to see if what my friends said yesterday. And why, when you click on an internal link, does hitting the back button put you at the top of your news feed instead of where you were when you clicked the link? I can't think of another website I use regularly that does that. These combine to give me the feeling that the Zuckermenschen are trying to discourage users from ever looking back at all.
But enough quibbles: how well does it perform its primary function, i.e. social networking? I'd say the jury is still out. On the one hand, I am in touch with several interesting people from my past I never would be without it. On the other, this hasn't resulted in much of the way of renewed contacts. Exchanges (whether through internal mail, chat, or what-have-you) tend to peter out pretty quickly; only one had led to a phone call, and I'm pretty sure I had his e-mail address anyway. I can think of a sole person who's actually gotten together with me due to an acquaintance struck up on FB.
But the primum movens for getting me onto the site was seeing photos of my nephews et al., and that's worked out well. Certainly, it's an overwhelming improvement over Snapfish and I even prefer it to Flickr. (Though I can't imagine either of those sites being as heinous about mining my data as the Douchebag You Can't Block.) I haven't tried uploading photos myself (and I'm not sure I want to, given DYCB's claim to own them if I do), and I scarcely comment beyond the occasional trite aperçu.
In sum? If the goal is to make FB indispensable, it's failed miserably. On the other hand, I haven't yet reached the tipping point where it's more trouble than its worth. (Though if my more privacy-conscious Friends there begin jumping ship, I'll be soon to follow.) And as for drawing me away from LJ, I'm posting here more now than I was when I joined the Great Timesink, and I plan to keep that up.
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no subject
That's half a billion. :-)
I suspect that the original answer (especially for the student population that pioneered it) was: because they were coming from MySpace.
These days, it probably also helps that for all its faults, it's easier to use from a smartphone than, say, LJ. Thanks to dedicated clients, which exist because it's the 800-lb gorilla and LJ is a backwater, rather than any inherent virtues of the platform. But such is the snowballing nature of network effects, while they last. The good news is that nothing in this vein has yet lasted forever. Someday (one hopes) Facebook will join MySpace and AOL as a suitable subject for a period retrospective.
no subject
I have to admit that it works better for getting pictures to people, especially on mobile platforms. (Even the paid Flickr app I have for Android is mediocre, and Steve Jobs' no-Flash policy means I can't pull up slideshows on my mom's iPad.)
But I hate-hate-hate the idea of giving my pictures to Facebook, so I'm dragging my heels on that. (Though some of my pictures have wound up there anyway, since I'm not inclined to start waving copyright claims at my relatives, especially over pictures of their kids. :-) ) Flickr's terms have been very good about keeping rights issues clear, and Facebook has generally been equally bad.
I wouldn't go so far as to call it indispensible, but it really has put me back in touch with cousins I like and don't see often enough. (Of course, we should do the actual human contact/letter-writing/etc. thing, but the fact was that we didn't.) Turning all the privacy settings up to eleven means that I'm not getting many friend requests from That One Guy. (If anything, I sometimes wonder if I should make more of an effort to find people I unintentionally lost touch with-- but even with a way-below-average friend list, the updates tend to scroll past faster than I can keep up.)
That said, I don't trust it as far as I can throw it. (Even before a carelessly-clicked link announced to my parents and school-aged cousins that I liked Smoking Hot Bartenders, with links to pictures of same. :-) ) I stay away from games and apps, treat opportunities to log into other sites with my FB credentials as if they were radioactive, and since that last incident I've been opening FB in a separate browser in
Porn ModeInPrivate Mode to prevent it from setting and reading cookies from other sites.And I eagerly away the day when an account on Facebook is as ubiquitous and high-tech as an account on Prodigy.
no subject
FB mystifies me. I put its popularity down to a collective neurosis about the web fragmenting us all socially. It does nothing I want and then sells whatever data I feed it... So I don't feed it. I am an anti-user. Which may explain why nobody long-lost has found me there. Or my friends are just smarter than me about social networking sites.