An interesting story of someone's disenchantment with Facebook. His story certainly speaks to me, even if his ultimate solution is not Amplify (though perhaps it could be!).
I am leaving facebook or at least I am going to concentrate my social activity somewhere else. Most people leave because they are worried about privacy violations and similia but I don’t really care about that. I am well aware that my credit card companies, my banks, my favorite grocery stores¹ and my postman know more about me than facebook does – and more importantly they know things I never actually told them directly. So facebook privacy invasion is the least of my worries.
I am leaving simply because I realized facebook didn’t evolve at all during the five years I have been using it but my social needs did.
I joined facebook to keep in touch with old friends (the second most common reason after getting laid, I suppose) but eventually found myself trapped in a network of people that I barely knew or didn’t know at all, sharing mostly contents I really don’t care about or that were trivial to find. I interact regularly with probably less than 10% of my facebook friends and it turns out it’s not because they posted a new picture of a cat doing funny things but because they shared interesting reading, worth following or commenting. I figured that if this has become my main use of facebook, than the platform is badly flawed for that use. As people say when they split: it’s not you, it’s me.
Seeing how things are going, it doesn’t look like facebook is interested in targeting my needs. None of the points here above had been even remotely addressed since I joined (2005). They had half a dozen of UI changes, a little more power in grouping people and a myriad of flash games. No effort versus organizing contents the way I need, really. So Long, Facebook (and thanks for all the phishing.)
Yes I could do that. I could just get rid of that 90% of people I care little about and my signal to noise ration will get better. But I doubt it would work fully for I noticed that even that 10% of people I follow is posting less and less or even disappeared in the past months. I presume it’s because they are experiencing the same frustration so there is no good in having only interesting friends who are hardly active anymore. I am feeling so it’s better to leave the sinking ship.
Hello Google!
So, where to concentrate my networking now? Looking at the four points above, it seems that what I miss the most is the possibility to organize and search for contents and not for people: “search” and “contents” being the keywords here. What is a good internet company specialized in searching contents?
Here we go, Google. To be honest, I tried a couple of alternative before. Never been a fan of twitter but I figured I should give it a try. I also gave a chance to friendfeed and delicious. None of them did it for me: again way too much noise. Then I took my virtual ladder and climbed up to my virtual dusty loft where I restored a completely unused Google buzz account and a Google Reader account filled with bold numbers.
Buzz gives me the chance to share status updates and pics if I want; Google reader the opportunity to organize my readings and the tools to discover new contents and people, based on my interests and likes. Also the environment seems unfriendly enough to attract the people I care to meet. The only problem so far is very few friends of mine use any of the two. In fact, if you are reading this post most likely is because you have been shortlisted to be one of those I want to bring with me (congratulations) and I am trying get you to use your buzz and/or reader account.
The good thing about the new combination is that in fact they are split tools with different purposes that cover different needs. The former is a bit more facebook like and it’s about sharing your status, pictures and such; the latter is mainly a way to organize your readings on the web that also happens to be socially integrate so that you can actually share and discuss with other people what you find. So, it’s completely possible to just use the Reader without joining yet-another-social-yadayada. That’s how you do it:
I think so. It seems Google and I share the same outlook on what I need and how has to evolve. There are only a couple of things that worry me: first, the Android app for Google Buzz sucks big time and this may be a sign that they are not investing so much in this direction as I wish they were. But that may be not necessarily true: at the end of the day, most of the Google developed Android app still suck² yet there is no doubt Google has no plan of dropping Gmail or the Android market. The second thing that worries me is how Google wave was handled and failed. Buzz didn’t have the publicity it deserved and Google profiles never really took off. Yet, the tool is really nice and worthy and that’s why I am writing this, to make my friends aware.
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