Facebook is Worse than AOL

tomuarm.jpg

Devin Troy Strother, Please Don’t Shoot Up the Dancehall. From The Armory Show 2010 preview.

“Facebook’s coming at it from a corporate position. It’s basically like AOL in 1997 — everything is there and there’s no need to go anywhere else. I don’t know if they’re even considering what users want anymore. It’s all about how to maximize revenue and all that crap. It’s wanting to be everything to everybody possible so they won’t have to go anywhere else.”

– Matt Haughey. (via.)

Facebook is worse than AOL. It’s like a neverending digital teambuilding exercise. But instead of trailing a rope course or catching blindfolded people leaning backward, participants post pictures of doppelgangers and list “25 things” about themselves.

I really dislike the term “walled garden,” as it brings Frances Hodgson Burnett to mind and people imagine something privately enjoyed rather than simply restricted access. Don’t confuse this with invite-only message boards or mailing lists that make the Internet wonderful. To end the confusion, lets call the good places secret gardens.

Back in the day, AOL had a lot of secret gardens. According to my friend Erin, there was a Spin magazine message board frequented by established rock critics that was at an off the index location. A lot of corporations and publications created “channels” which would include chat rooms and message boards. These were about as successful as the businesses with Second Life presences. But some users would take over the dead space and make it their own. Several online friends and I once claimed the message boards for a Canadian radio station long after it was launched and quickly abandoned. Likely the citizens of Second Life do that with virtual ghost town storefronts.

It’s a little surprising Facebook isn’t used more like a message board or a mailing list –most people seem to use Ning or Google Groups for that purpose. The problem is something that tries to do everything can’t do anything well. Anyone who remembers Usenet or even the AOL message boards knows that as soon as posts dropped to one or two a week, the whole thing died not long after. Constant updates keep a social network alive.

I don’t have a problem with secret gardens on the Internet. Actually, just about everyone I know is on some kind of private invite-only mailing list or message board. But a walled garden leads to a number of complications. In 2007, Jason Kottke called Facebook the New AOL, referring their platform:

What happens when Flickr and LinkedIn and Google and Microsoft and MySpace and YouTube and MetaFilter and Vimeo and Last.fm launch their platforms that you need to develop apps for in some proprietary language that’s different for each platform? That gets expensive, time-consuming, and irritating. It’s difficult enough to develop for OS X, Windows, and Linux simultaneously…imagine if you had 30 different platforms to develop for.

As it happens, we already have a platform on which anyone can communicate and collaborate with anyone else, individuals and companies can develop applications which can interoperate with one another through open and freely available tools, protocols, and interfaces. It’s called the internet and it’s more compelling than AOL was in 1994 and Facebook in 2007. Eventually, someone will come along and turn Facebook inside-out, so that instead of custom applications running on a platform in a walled garden, applications run on the internet, out in the open, and people can tie their social network into it if they want, with privacy controls, access levels, and alter-egos galore.

This sort of reminded me of Alex Payne’s The Case Against Everything Buckets. Someone smarter than me about these subjects could probably make a comment about how this is happening with mobile apps right now. Android developers, for example, fear that too many differentiated models will make their job harder. I’d love to see data on how many users don’t install Facebook apps at all. Or never use them. Or only use them. For a lot of people Farmville is Facebook.

My real frustration with Facebook has to do with context collapse. This was exactly why I was slow to sign up for the service. I can’t remember exactly when I did, maybe 2006, but I used the email I have just for online shopping and mailing lists and never imported my gmail contacts. I knew then I wanted it to be as small a part of my life as possible. Why? Because my friends weren’t on it, but a bunch of professional acquaintances were. And also because of the poke feature. danah boyd’s Facebook vs MySpace class distinctions was very apparent, as I was living in Chicago, and had few friends affiliated with universities, but old work colleagues from DC were all there. Even today, many of the musicians and artists I knew there still favor Myspace, but is there a 4.0 average student alive who doesn’t Facebook?

And when I heard about the “poke” feature that did it for me. It indicated the creators just weren’t serious about making something that could be more than a place for goofing around in a perplexingly formal way. “Poke” is the dumbest and worst feature ever invented for a social network. Even worse than that “suggest a match” thing on Friendster back in the dark ages (I still turn bright red and wince thinking of the time a less than socially savvy pal suggested a match for me with the person I had a crush on at the time.) I don’t really like when people lay out “best practices” for social networking like, “oh, she doesn’t @ reply enough people on Twitter.” And “netiquette” very often neglects the fact that introvert/extrovert classifications also exist in the digital world. But no, there’s never a good time for a poke. (Why stop with the poke? Why not call me and hang up before answering? Why not send me a blank email with no subject? Why not blank @ me?)

Rule of thumb on who to listen to in social media: ignore every non-artworld person talking about “curation” and instead subscribe to the feeds of those blogging about “filter failure.” (More on this in an upcoming post.) Facebook epitomizes filter failure for me. Yes, there are ways to segment information and keep groups, but there aren’t very good ways to keep worlds from overlapping. Facebook isn’t a more neutral LinkedIn and Myspace. It is the collapse of LinkedIn, Myspace, and a bunch of other networks, while many people want these worlds compartmentalized. I mostly avoid Facebook the same way that I’ll get drinks on a Monday night with colleagues, but not on a Friday or Saturday night. This generation blurs the line between work and play, but there is still a line or else you’re not getting the best out of either.

Now, this is my experience with Facebook. I don’t doubt there’s value to it for lots of people. I like it as a visual rolodex, and if I were a heavy user, I can see the advantage of adding just about everyone you meet at a conference or class as a “friend.” But mainly my use of Facebook is transitionary. I import my contacts to newer, hopefully better social networks as they come along like Foursquare or Quora.

That being said… add me.

Previously: The Overexamined Life: Finding Bits of Ourselves in Digital Ghost Towns

Posted by Joanne on Feb. 8, 2010 Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

  • jeffbaij
    ughhhhhhhh, get. over. yourself.
    or write articles about how you are so pissed that people listen to the black eyed peas and not xenakis.
    or articles about how people watch michael bay movies and not truffaut.
    you think the world is one way, but its the other, and you are the one who "doesnt get it".
  • edgarquix
    wow. You actually made no case at all. FB is such a big target, and yet.....you whiffed. But I did learn that your friend was on a message board with actual rock critics.
    Imagine the brain power!
    why did sullivan link to this mess?
  • teapotdomescandal
    great post.

    Some people have claimed that Facebook has become the "3rd place" of our era. Do you agree?
  • georgedrake
    This post takes Facebook way too seriously. It reminds me of the newspaper articles of the nineties and early aughts about the evils of the internet and how stupid it all was, filled with half-wits, teeny-boppers and child molesters.

    As for Poke, it's just a way to say "Hi." That's it. Few people use it but what's really interesting here is that by your own words at the end of your way-over-the-top rant against it (" But no, there’s never a good time for a poke. (Why stop with the poke? Why not call me and hang up before answering? Why not send me a blank email with no subject? Why not blank @ me?)") you're admitting that you didn't know what it was. Until this moment, reading this comment, you didn't actually know that to "Poke" meant to say "Hi." That's pretty embarrassing. And if you did know, which I'm sure you'll claim, why then be so against it? Do you get angry with friends in the brick and mortar world when they say "Hi" to you? If so, why? You must be one of the first people on Earth who believes saying "Hi" is a bad thing.

    Otherwise, most else of what you're saying here may be right or wrong but who can tell? No standards of exemplary argumentation have been applied. You fall into the common fallacy of non-critical thinking by believing simply saying something makes it so or appealing to invented authorities is argumentation. For example, "many of the musicians and artists I knew there still favor Myspace."

    And? That's not an argument. That's a non-sequitorial non-statement. Your implication is of course that Myspace is better because... well, because many musicians and artists you knew somewhere else favored it. Sorry but that's not going to hold up to even grade school debating standards.

    I look forward to your future posts on apps, as the myriad of useless apps on Facebook clearly brings it down but please, make better arguments and use examples and evidence. It will probably surprise you to know that I agree with you there and elsewhere which is perhaps why this post has me slightly peeved. There's a statement by Daniel Dennett that goes like this: "There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear."

  • JooLeeBee
    A poke isn't a kitchy way to say hi. It has no meaning or purpose and thus its use/connotation is typically localized. In my neck of the woods, among my peers, its usually only what creepy people you haven't seen or heard from since grade school do to make contact.

    To assume a blog post has to be logical, in a technical sense, is ridiculous. Facebook isn't that serious, neither is blogging and no neither is the internet. These things change the rules for a time and usually things change again before a solid argument is possible to make.
  • tomshoemaker
    Facebook is the opiate of the masses
  • liface
    Great post. Facebook sucks.
  • papakila
    THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CENSORED ON FACEBOOK!!!

    Sorry for the capslock, but it deserves attention. I posted a link to this article this morning on my FB wall, and tonight I tried posting it to another wall, of a fangroup against FB apps, and it wouldn't allow me to post the link. The message said it was reported as abusive by FB users. Guess the gardeners are peeved. Someone peed on the petunias. The kicker was the button that read "Okay", which I had to click in order to use my browser again. It's not "Okay". Not at all.

    Change title to "FACEBOOK IS WORSE THAN COMMUNIST CHINA"!!!
  • Appropriate that this comes out when it does, just around the time that Google adds Buzz to make my Gmail into yet another everything bucket. The more I unlink accounts, the more I like each account. No one buys hundreds of swiss army knives for their homes, why do social media companies keep trying to sell us those for their products?

    There's a fair bit of Buzz angst in my gReader friend group. On the one hand, there are new people angrily asking why we're showing up in their inbox all the time. On the other hand, my little group of friends is trying to decide what to do about all the new follow requests over the past few days. Transitional pains, but it may well be that our use of gReader for how we liked it will survive the change.

    Here's a data point for you about Second Life: because of building permissions, it's much more difficult to take over a ghost town than a message board. And because you have to pay rent to keep the Sim alive, most of the corporate presences just shut down entirely. So for the most part, those things just disappeared into the sea.
  • barryfandango
    I was halfway through the post before I remembered Facebook Apps. I'm a medium-heavy user and I've never installed one, they're a garbage dump! I use all of the core features pretty equally though - status, groups, photos, events, walls, and messaging. For some of my less technical friends, *facebook is email.*

    It's useful if everybody you know is already on there. And if you live in the GTA like me, which last I heard is the global leader in FB penetration, *everybody* you know is already on there. No other network can claim to have every member of my extended family, graduating class, and circle of friends.
  • *poke* *poke* *poke* *poke* *poke* *poke* *poke* *poke* *poke* *poke* *poke* *poke* *poke* *poke* *poke* *poke* *poke* *poke* *poke* *poke* *poke* *poke* *poke* *poke* *poke* *poke* *poke* *poke* *poke* *poke* *poke* *poke* *poke* *poke*
  • Note: You write 'Rule of thumb on who to listen to in social media: ignore every non-artworld person talking about “curation”,' and in your about blurb you have 'A collection of interesting ideas curated by
    Joanne McNeil.'
  • and i blog about art. your point?
  • knguyen
    As usual, I think you're right on the money.

    But actually, I don't think the "poke" feature is the worst feature of all time. (It's not the best either.) It's one of those strange things that was created without purpose. What does a poke represent?

    I had a friend at Brown who said that a poke essentially meant a booty call. It was an unwritten rule at Brown. I'm not completely sure if that's true — and I certainly don't know of that being true anywhere else — but I think that it's interesting example of how users can imbue a meaning or purpose to a function that has neither.

    Plus, the notion of the Facebook poke as a booty call button is hilarious. Harlots!
blog comments powered by Disqus