Withdrawing from Facebook?
Marhsall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb doesn’t trust Mark Zuckerberg’s explanation of why Facebook is defaulting more towards publicness:
What makes Facebook think the world is becoming more public and less private? Zuckerberg cites the rise of blogging “and all these different services that have people sharing all this information.” That last part must mean Twitter, right? But blogging is tiny compared to Facebook! It’s made a big impact on the world, but only because it perhaps doubled or tripled the small percentage of people online who publish long-form text content. Not very many people write blogs, almost everyone is on Facebook.
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The company’s justifications of the claim that they are reflecting broader social trends just aren’t credible. A much more believable explanation is that Facebook wants user information to be made public and so they “just went for it,” to use Zuckerberg’s words from yesterday.
I have no special insight into Mark Zuckerberg, but it’s plausible to me that he’s trying to be an idealist without recognizing that his self-interest is distorting his vision. (Who does?) And, yes, the state of his mind does matter, even if it’s not knowable.The presence of so many of our friends at FB creates an almost inescapable social gravity. But, if we begin to think that FB is not trustworthy or on our side, we will be more open to enduring the cost of switching platforms.
Meanwhile, I’m on the verge of taking drastic action with my own account. I made the early mistake of saying yes to everyone who asked to be my friend, primarily because I am pathologically adverse to rebuffing people. Not a good thing. As a result, only a tiny percentage of my FB friends are actually people I know. So, FB for me is all maintenance and no benefit. And I only do the maintenance about once a month. So, I should either nuke all my friends and start over (is there a one-click way to do that?), or I should “delete” my account and register under a different email address. Or leave and not come back.
Any advice?
Categories: social media dw
I share your pain, and have no idea what to do about it. I have about a dozen “friend” requests sitting in my inbox now (or, my notifications box … or whatever arbitrary page FB has that stuff stashed on) from people I can’t recall ever meeting. Plus some in my “friend” list that I may have met, but only once — so why do I want to keep up with them, or have them listed among my “friends”?
This conflation of “friend” is FB’s single worst architectural feature, imho.
I have only around 100 friends; I hide “non-friends”, games, etc agressively; but signal to noise just keeps getting worse and worse. I changed my birthday to April Fool’s day (can’t wait to get all those bday wishes) because I want my (advanced) age known, but feel that your full DOB is too good a piece of information to scatter to the winds.
Additionally, I don’t think that the FB infrastructure is scaling — very slow today for instance. I have been predicting for the last couple of months that 2010 will be “the year when everyone left facebook”.
Please keep us posted as you try to return FB to net usefulness for you — good luck.
http://suicidemachine.org/
Nice timing ;-)
From a demographic perspective, Zuckerberg is right. The next generation of young people–ostensibly his core audience–has proven time and again that their expectations of privacy are much less restrictive than the other two generations (Boomers and Xers). I don’t know if he’s got alterior motives, and I’m not sure I like the new settings, but he could make a very good case, by the numbers, for pushing Facebook toward more publicness (is that really a word?).
I may have a solution.
Since FB allows us to create lists and set restrictions, everyone who I do not know personally goes into a restricted list. They can still contact me and see a number of updates which are more public. But close friends and family see almost everything that I publish.
It’s not about cancelling them out, is leaving them room to interact with you and not to know that today you woke up in the worst possible mood and are dying for a cup of coffee.
If Facebook is not providing you with the type of connections that you find useful in your life, then my suggestion is to deep-six Facebook. If participating in Facebook is not leaving you space to reflect on the effects of Facebook, then my suggestion is to deep-six Facebook. If, however, your problems with Facebook inform your current endeavour with respect to “overload” then it may merit setting up a well-polished mirror as you do your monthly maintenance…
I am not on FB, but my wife just hides friends those folks she would like to delete but does not want to offend. The only problem is the iPhone app does not have a similar setting.
If anyone at FB is reading this, please please add the hide friend feature to the iPhone app and use a the site’s hide list :-).
I use 2 fb account
one is my personal one, where I have only friends
and even there I let only those who I am in touch with to show up on the reel
the other is for a project I m developing, mostly a gathering tool for people to know what I am up to
only 40 people overlap these 2
so my advice would be
change your name on fb, something like joho or whatever
open a new one with your name and just add those you might really want
all while we all wait for another better solution, that for what I can see doesn t seams to be google wave
my 2 cents…
Thanks for the advice so far. Still not sure what to do. The segmenting into lists makes sense, as does Gianluca’s idea of setting up a separate account, but I’m not sure I’d use FB even if the social network reflected my actual social network. It would certainly be more useful than it is now.
Ok, I’ve created a list. Anyone have ideas about what would be a useful and reasonable set of restrictions/permissions for people I don’t know but who have read something of mine they liked? That’s the vast bulk of people currently listed as my “friends.”
BTW, it took me a bit to find where you set permissions for lists: http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy§ion=profile
first ban pictures ! is the only thing you might want to share with selected few hundreds
but if you ever go trough a body scan, please ban me too :)
Having too many friends — what a nice problem to have. Maybe you should run for Congress.
How sad that even as I wrote that last line, I thought how bad it would be for someone with your intelligence, wisdom, and humanity to have to deal with the train wreck of an organization that makes our laws. Sorry I’m too obsessed with our dysfunctional government to address your personal dilemma.
My own experience of Facebook is the pleasure I get from seeing pictures, comments, etc., from younger members of my extended family who are too busy or preoccupied to take the time and trouble to communicate with me directly. Being able to comment allows me to remind them that I care about them. Inevitably, the older generations care more about the younger than vice versa.
David, I routinely cull my friends list. Perhaps you just need one big session to “unfriend” a bunch. Not sure that changing accounts is the right thing to do, but it’s an option. Facebook is for my friends, some of whom are work related, but most of whom are not. To get maximum pleasure, I have to drop people who don’t meet my selfish criteria of interest or special connection. I’ll friend just about anybody, but I’ll defriend them in a heartbeat, too.
[...] I spotted this post by David Weinberger on his JoHo the blog about the Facebook conundrum. What he says and the reader [...]
So far, I was accepting almost all “friend-requests” on Facebook (with the only exception to people that were hostile to me :-) ).
Of course, I had privacy concerns, of course I first wanted FB to be a place just for people really related by interests, real-life frindship etc…
But, at some moment in time, I discovered a value of hearing all these voices that I would rather ignore in the physical world, and value to reach people with some of my thoughts, that would (maybe) have ignored me (in the physical world).
I guess, somehow unconsciously, I avoided to be in the “information cocoon” (using Sunstein’s term).
That very thought gave me some comfort over my concerns about FB….