“The disillusionment with Facebook has come in waves. An early faction lost faith in 2008, when Facebook’s beloved Scrabble application, Scrabulous, was pulled amid copyright issues. It was suddenly clear that Facebook was not just a social club but also an expanding force on the Web, beholden to corporate interests. A later group, Harmsen’s crowd, grew frustrated last winter when Facebook seemed to claim perpetual ownership of users’ contributions to the site. (Facebook later adjusted its membership contract, but it continues to integrate advertising, intellectual property and social life.) A third wave of dissenters appears to be bored with it, obscurely sore or just somehow creeped out.” –Virginia Heffernan, NYT
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(Not directed at you in particular. I have had these exchanges with people like Gluck and Marchesano on FB):
Oh, puh-leeeease. Save me from the “I am so bored with [fill in the latest Web 2.0 trend]“. Or, “I have better things to do than waste time on [fill in the latest Web 2.0 trend]“. FB is fun. If you take it seriously enough to worry about contracts, EULAs, and Scrabulous, then it’s you that needs to get a life, not the rest of the people there.
If you don’t like it, shut up and go away.
It’s the old “Use the off button” argument.
Well, to borrow your term, I long ago “used the button” and dumped FB, mostly for privacy reasons rather than any sense of…blasé. I therefore found that article interesting. Did you read it?
You know how these social trends go. My basic take on it is it is going the way of Myspace, which someone I know noted that it is more or less a “snapshot of the web in 2003″ and is now largely dead but for bands and tweens, etc. Cameron Carpenter has a huge Myspace following.
One thing that irritated me was that I could not entirely delete my account rather than deactivate it. The awkwardness of denying friend requests, de-friending (don’t you love how FB made “friend” a verb?) and the level of, shall we say, social “exposure” was more than I wanted to deal with. It also came at a time when I was making a personal decision to withdraw from certain other online social activities (the pipe organ forums) and I know that’s something you in particular had no stomach for.
Of course I realize these statements might seem ridiculous coming from someone who has two websites and still uses Twitter. One of the sites is a requisite, and the personal one is really nothing more than an online scrapbook. And as time goes on I think more and more about dumping Twitter.