If you look me up on Facebook, you won’t find my profile. I did have one until recently, but now it’s gone. Goner than something that’s very gone. Deleted, in fact, not just deactivated.
I really had fun on Facebook for a while, and saw a ton of value in it. It seemed like a very good vehicle for keeping up with what friends are doing, and an even better way to shamelessly promote yourself and what you’ve been up to. Want to show off your latest vacation? No problem, upload some photos. Want to feel incredibly popular? Invite all 400 of your facebook friends to a facebook event for your birthday.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t take advantage. I like taking photos when the creative urge overtakes me, and I use Flickr to put them somewhere public. Unfortunately, there’s almost zero overlap between my Flickr contact and my real-life friends, so the chance of any of my actual friends seeing my new photos on their own quickly approaches zero. I always felt like a bit of a tool emailing or IMing links to Flickr to my friends. Conveniently, my Facebook friends list is a superset of my real-life friends, and Facebook handled the notification of new photos FOR me, so I could self-pimp without feeling bad about it.
Of all the web 2.0 / social-network shenanigans and sites, Facebook seems to have the most penetration into every-day life in Toronto. If I lived in San Francisco everyone I know would have a twitter and a pownce account, but that’s not the case. Facebook rocked for me because literally EVERYONE I knew under the age of 30 had an account. It was as common-place as sliced bread. It was a given that if you met someone new at a party, you could friend them on Facebook and keep track of them. Mention any other web 2.0 sort of site around most of the people I know in Toronto, and you’d get a blank stare back.
So given all of the utility and ubiquitous-ness of Facebook, why did I delete my account?
The problem with Facebook is how closed it is, and how it totally and completly owns your social network. Information goes in, and it don’t ever come back out. Everyone has a Facebook account now, but how long will that last? What happens when your social circle moves on? It comes down to owning your identity, an idea championed by Joshua Porter and others at Own Your Identity. The data I put into Facebook is unarguably mine. It’s my contacts, my relationships, my notes, my photos, my writings, but as soon as I post it, I lose almost all control.
To me, the ideal solution is to host my content wherever I choose and to bring it together in a way I like on one site that represents me. This blog is hosted on wordpress.com, my photos are on Flickr, my professional persona lives on LinkedIn. In so far as there is a comprehensive online representation of Zvi Zemel, it exists among those and a few other sites. What’s missing is a good way to bring it together and show it off to my real-life friends.
I’ll write more on that topic later.
5 comments
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July 17, 2008 at 10:40 am
Mario Bourque
Ya. I’ve thought about it too, but recently I discovered networking with groups and events. I’m not particularly concerned with what X is doing (I have twitter for that) and I don’t care about all the apps; however, I do like the actual networking with groups & events (particularly with the UX peeps).
July 17, 2008 at 11:02 am
Shaun Bala
I would argue that you don’t lose control. You exercised your ultimate control by deleting your account. The only thing you cannot do is export. You can restrict the hell out of your account. You can opt out of pretty much everything. You just can’t export all your contact’s info and accounts into another network. The argument the folks at FB are making is that you don’t really own your friends data. If you export it out and then your friend blocks you tomorrow, who’s protecting their extracted info. Extracting our own posts, and pictures is arguable. FB’s interests are to keep information in-house because that’s how they remain valuable.
yes it’s closed, but by removing yourself from the equation you’re just closing yourself off. Save a massive exodus to another network(to where, I don’t know) what are you going to do? Other than to help you leave what’s the point to the openness? Should a company who’s value is based on building its userbase assist you on the way out?
July 17, 2008 at 11:47 am
zvisus
Shaun, some very good points. I want to address some of them in a later post, but I’ll touch on it here.
FB is expected to increase its value, but I think there are a lot of ways to do that and they don’t all require lock-in. There are a few websites that “play nice” when you leave and let you take all your content with you. WordPress, for example, let’s you export your content to XML so that you can hopefully import it somewhere else. Forcing user lock-in is kind of a cheap and dirty way to increase your company’s value. It does NOT increase value for the user.
I’m still trying to understand what the alternatives to Facebook are in terms of presenting my data. Friendfeed.com seems to be one alternative, but as always, Toronto is to web 2.0 society as the boondocks are to urban society, and so Friendfeed.com is mostly useless up here.
July 20, 2008 at 1:10 pm
Miriam's friend, Lily!
Maybe you should create or web design a site that is better than facebook. Afterall, facebook is just a trend. People are looking to move on to bigger and better. Maybe you can make it happen rather than blab on and on about why Facebook is unworthy of a zvi zemel. You should definitely do it.. you could potentially make lots of money too.. and become even more popular… And the best part is… well, you know, Miriam will love you more! : P (just kidding!)
September 16, 2008 at 4:47 pm
Nik Vitas
Ha ha ha ha…. you deleted it cause you don’t have any friends!!!! Thanks for getting me through university…friend!