the demise of Facebook
I hate social networking.
Not because I'm opposed to the concept, but because of retards, weirdos, groupies and attention seekers. These are a curious lot who will wander from one social network to another looking for attention by creating, joining and advocating "groups" based on as mundane of subjects as their favorite flavor of ice cream. A race for artificially large "friend" lists ensues, and all usefulness of the relationship network of the social networking site is lost. But I'm not writing this post to whine about these people. I'm writing to protest their onslaught on Facebook.
I'm not a member of Orkut, never was and never will be. Neither did I ever join Myspace or the dozens of other social networks popping up every week. Why ? because by the time I got interested in social networking, the retards had already entrenched themselves there. I realize the power and usefulness of the social network and the only network with some sanity left was Facebook. So I joined. It was wonderful.
Back then, Facebook revolved more around the 'Me' than the 'Us'. There was more emphasis on a detailed and flexible user profile and all connections and relationships were based on real world ones. Networks and groups were based on Location, School, University or Workplace, all concrete bases for expressing relationships between people. The result of this 'restriction' is that the a person's profile and identity is much more 'authentic' than other social networks. This basically stopped / slowed the onslaught of people flooding in and creating ad-hoc groups and identities and lead to a far greater confidence in the system. A clean un-intrusive, no-nonsense interface and clever use of AJAX led to a very user friendly experience. All was good in the land of Facebook.
And then Facebook opened its gates. Ever since the site opened up its API to third party developers, there's been a flood of countless useless apps. The retards are flooding in and Facebook profile pages are beginning to resemble MySpace ones. People have dozens of apps on their profiles, most of them useless. The site has become slow, and there's now a deluge of useless notifications generated by applications being used by friends in my list. There are 'Walls' and 'Super Walls', people 'Poke' and 'Super Poke' each other for no productive purpose at all. Friends lists have started to grow into the hundreds, and Facebook has started turning into Myspace.
I simply adore the profile management capabilities of Facebook and I'm slowly trying to consolidate all my online profiles into one place. But the way things are going, I'm not sure how long my last online social refuge will last.