Spitelords Sticks & Stones for the Mind

Farcebook

Back when the blue and white fort that is Facebook opened it’s doors to the underlings of the world, us non alumni, I suggested to my friends that this was just another fad, “Forget it” I said “It’s MySpace for snobs and MySpace is for idiots as it is”.  Pretentious certainly, but wrong?

Anyone who has been a participant of the churning Internet for any significant amount of time will have seen many such services come and go; various acquaintances jumping from the last stagnating service to the shiniest new one, beckoning to follow them each time.  But some people just get tired of this continual slog of new passwords, configuring yet another list of contacts and preferences.  Was it not the point of whatever was last that never again would another be needed!  Never is this the case and the pursuit of that ideal is futile.

So although I tend to shrug off the majority of such online services unless particular potential is evident I rarely do so without at least having a fist-full of facts first.  You see, I had a Facebook account set up quite early on, shoving my hand into the bag to see what came out.  Quickly it became apparent that the service was as worthless to me as suspected and I promptly deactivated the account.  Well, recently I have grown kind of sick of people telling me I can see the latest pictures of whatever on ‘their Facebook’ as if it was simply issued at birth or some damned rite of passage.

Despite the sarcasm of that statement I must accept it has become ubiquitous amongst the people I know, people usually resilient to the wealth of trendy pan-flashes you see now and I am curious as to why.

There is the saying “One hundred million people can’t be wrong” which is a stupid saying and I am entirely certain they can be, but that does not stop me wondering why so many of them are content to keep being wrong.  Over and over again.  I wondered what made people check back to this silly site on such a regular basis despite it’s incredible failure to do any one thing particularly well.

With my account reactivated I am going to give it one more try, because I am entirely capable of being wrong too.  So from this point on is a relay of my poor reasoning and spiteful judgement on something I don’t like anyway.  I had about 50 contacts, some are genuine friends and others were simply people I know.  And that is how I will distinguish between them from here on, friends and contacts.

It would of course be absurdly arrogant of me to claim that one of the most popular destinations on the Internet is without value, but I will.  Sort of.  It certainly serves no purpose for me, but that is perhaps because I am willing to spend time making use of more open but less intergrated services to deal with things like sharing links, thoughts and pictures with my friends.  Perhaps I just have more time.  Later on I will highlight some of the alternatives for those interested.

I think its fair to call Facebook a successfully executed oxymoron as the social capabilities of a password protected community are going to be limited at the best of times and downright pointless at the worst.  It does not take long to become utterly sick of being sent Facebook links along-side messages that new photos are being shared by friends.  You know, you sent me the email so why not just send me the pictures?  Why not, since you are ok with signing up for arbitary services, sign up for a photo sharing service like Picasa or Flickr (since stupid names are the trend) and then let everyone else see the pictures without having to also swear an oath to a website we do not want to have anything to do with.  I might be interested in your holiday pictures but believe it or not I am not interested in a registration form to see them on a website that is not even very good at showing them anyway.

Conceptually an in-box for all those little updates of friends is not bad, it works for e-mail and it works extremely well for RSS news headlines but clearly there are problems in this particular execution.  When you have too much input there are usability issues as the influx of data outpaces the users ability to process information.  The design here is such that you have a cascading page of updates from the people you wish to be informed about and with a moderate amount of input from a reasonable number of subscriptions this should be a feasible method if you check in every now and then.

Reality according my contacts however is far from this ideal with the upper limit of “friends” for at least one person being as of right now 501.  Lets be honest, that is just not true.  As popular and as plesant as this person may be they do not have five-hundred-and-one friends who they need to keep tabs on.

Even the mid ranges are around the 120 to 200 mark and unless all those people only ever update their status with actual news on their lives like job interviews or contracting H1N1 Influenza (actual updates from two of my friends) then the flow of data is going to be absurd.  And if the idea is to keep track of events in peoples lives then this is entirely not the way to do it.

People update far too often about far too little.  I care abut my friends but there is no need for me to know what sort of fast food they are thinking about ordering right now.  It Does Not Matter.  To me, or anyone!  But such data is continually being added to the ever growing slew of text and imagery that must be waded through should you wish to see if anything actually did happen to someone you know.

If you need that sort of information vomited without mercy into your life I suggest you read the associated press news feeds on celebrities, it will contain equal amounts of pointless bullshit but will be written by people who know how to tell a compelling story.  I like my friends, but most of them are not what you would call capable reporters of even their own lives.

From my somewhat half arsed observation it would appear that Facebook is entirely no good at far too much.  There is certainly a lot on offer much of which seemingly useless.  Share pictures?  It does that.  Plan events?  Yeah!  Browser based gaming?  Sure.  Oh, it does all of that and more.  Badly.

Upon first appearance Facebook looks fairly clean and efficient though this is something of a mirage, coming into sharp relief once the cryptic messages flood in.  I understood the concept of ‘my Wall’ but perhaps not well enough?  The Wall page is where you land upon logging-in and is the central focal point for all subscribed information, though when told I had been left a ‘Wall message’ the only way I could find this demonic scrawling (from my demonic sister) was to click on the notification link because I could find no navigational method to visit this fabled Wall Message page, which I can only assume exists at all.  And if a long time Internet user assumes this then it probably should be true.  I don’t think it is terribly arrogant to expect certain navigational norms to exist on the worlds most visited websites.

There are plenty of other complex websites out there which have ease of navigation for their services through clean user interface design, function hidden from a glance but available on demand.  Think Google, Youtube or Amazon.  Facebook certainly offers a lot of tools to users though navigation I found to be clumsy and unintuitive.  It was unpleasant to use.

One colleague while kindly obliging my needless and no doubt annoying questioning told me that they simply found Facebook handy, and I am inclined to believe that because not everyone has the time to maintain frequent contact with their friends.  For those people I can understand that any convergence of communication tools is probably quite nice.

These are not the people who confound me though, it’s those friends who have been hardcore Internet geeks for a good portion of their lives and who show no sign of letting up any time soon.  What do they get out of it?  What does Facebook do to enhance them?

You may assume that such people – people such as myself – have zero social activities to keep track of and in light of that any tools for doing so would go largely unappreciated but this is not a universal truth of the tech crowd anymore, if it ever was.  If anything we are the people that not only have active social lives but also know the best tools for organising them.  For every one function Facebook attempts to provide there is a plethora of other better and more openly accessible tools available.  The only caveat is the willingness of the users to try them.

What I am apparently incapable of understanding is the willingness of people to rely on something that is not very good at doing any of the things it is being used for.  That people are willing to eschew quality in favour of … nothing?  I can find no actual aspect of Facebook that warrants the ridiculous levels of devotion it has found in the lives of so many people.

Not just limited to applying its uniform dullness to people however I am sure that I am not alone in my utter disgust at seeing the number of bands whose World Wide Web domains now redirect to Facebook or MySpace.  Over 1,000,000 of them according to the propaganda.  How fucking depressing.

There is very little appeal to the personality stripped landing pages on these servers and zero artistic value in them due to the cookie-cutter pre made look.  Once more referring to the official hype you can “Add a Bio and Band Photo” which strikes me as underwhelming in an almost calculated way.  Yes, I do think it is reasonable to assume the marketing trolls would wish to eliminate all individuality from bands in the same way pop music is committing genocide on talent with tools like Auto-Tune and Beat Detective.  It’s easier to sell a defective product when every other option is equally as bland and I imagine this excites them in some way.

You do not have to be a fan of Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) to appreciate the man has a firm grip on communicating with his fans and allowing for all sorts of online interaction.  Facebook is one part of this for the fans who want it that way, for other people there are other options.  And options are usually good for all involved.

The primary function of Facebook as far as the end user is concerned is to share information with and receive similar updates from friends.  Communication, planning events and playing games online.  As I have made clear thus far I believe it does none of these things well, which is a statement based on ample use of other such online services for a number of years.  So included with this needless bitching I include some alternatives.

If you want to bash out some thoughts for public viewing or shared only with certain others then why not use something like Livejournal or Wordpress?  Both allow for simple publication of nicely formatted posts in a weblog format that may contain links, videos, audio and pictures with all sorts of other options.

So you want to share photos with people?  Try signing up for Flickr, Picasa or Deviant Art.  Free accounts with optional paid upgrades for massive storage and other functions.  High quality websites with clean design for the single purpous of showing your pictures.  Multiple viewing methods with slide shows, GPS meta-data support for geo-tagging and high quality commercial print options.

Got an event to plan?  Google, Yahoo!, Windows Live and many other popular e-mail providers also have fully functional and robust calendars with options to have e-mail and sometimes SMS reminders and event updates at no charge.  You can invite people to events and they can reply with yes, no or maybe without having to have an account themselves.  Built in discussions, map support and all number of other genuinely useful tools.

Want to play free online games?  Take a look at Kongregate or IGN’s up-to-date listings.  And never forget Newgrounds is where all these web based flash animations and games started back in 1995 and is still probably one of the best around with hundreds of talented people creating original content on a daily basis.

If you want to subscribe to news and the updates of friends then all you need is an RSS client such as Google Reader to keep a subscription list of automatically updated information that you can sort, search and filter just like you do with e-mail.

All of these services and the many others out there are free and the best part is they specialise in what they do which means they do it well.  All of the services I named will only require you to be a member, not your friends who would rather see your information without having to sign up for yet another website to do so.

And so it feels something akin to a gasping act of desperation that I trot this now overly contrived word-pony out to dance at you because I so badly wanted to just close the account for good.  I am loathe to have people who have known me for over a century suddenly think that Facebook is now an acceptable way to contact me.  I have gone to great lengths over those years to consolidate my online availability for my cohorts convenience but some of them are too quick to assume change is afoot, that I have finally joined in their high tech game.  No, I know what I am missing out on and can happily continue to do so until the authentic replacement for e-mail and WWW forums come to be, what and whenever it is.

I have tentative interest in Google Wave for now because true communicative advancement comes with open and agreed standards, not passwords.  I have interest, but not hope.  Not yet.

The final aside for this dreary topic, should you wish to do so there is an option to delete rather than deactivate your account.  Deactivation of course will leave everything in place for you to come crawling back because you just could not go a week without the overflow of anti-news.  So I am happy to instruct you how to delete the account for good which is supposed to wipe clean all the pictures, comments and other things you leave in their hands with a deactivated account.  And all you have to do is go to this URL while signed into your account:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=16929680703

In a final slice of irony though, should you visit that page without being logged into an account the first thing you will see is “Sign up for Facebook to join How to permanently delete your facebook account.” Which I think is absolutely fantastic.  So at least this needless debacle ended on a joke.