Facebook Is Useless

Facebook is the most useless piece of software I have ever seen. It doesn’t do anything. It sucks resources into a black hole where, in many cases, whatever goes into it disappears. (On this blog and my other blog, you can always search through it and find things that are several years old. Try to find your status from two years ago. Let me know how you make out with that one after you’ve clicked on “Older Posts” a gazillion times. Try using the search feature…it ignores your page completely.) If you want to keep up with what others have said or done, you have to check in often because if you don’t you will quickly get confused by the extraordinarily stupid way it notifies you of stuff done by others. There may be ten items on the “Notifications” list. You look at the first one and…what happens? The little red Notification turns off. Does that mean you have looked at all ten things? No. What if you forget which one you just look at? How do you then pick up where you left off?

Let’s look at some of the fun activities on Facebook…such as “Liking” something. What does that really mean? Well, we like something because we geniunely like something. But other times we “like” something because we don’t wanted to be perceived as an incentive clod. Maybe someone’s status says “I just won the lottery!” and you really want to click on “F-ck You! I should have won the lottery” but there is no such choice. Maybe the status says, “My brother was just decapitated and we can’t find is head.” Is clicking on “Like” really appropriate here? Should there be an “OMG!” or “WTF” or “I’m So Sorry To Hear That” thing to click on? What other fun activities are there on Facebook? Well…you can join a group. Now you’ll get MORE notifications about things that people may like or things they may have posted. (“Hey Joe? Did you know that Obama is such a socialist that unemployed Farmville Farmers are getting welfare?”)

We should not forget the all important concept of “Friends,” which can be defined as “strange people you don’t know but they seem to know a lot of your real friends so you should be friends with them too even though if you met them on the street you’d never look at them twice.” Of your four hundred and seventy two “friends,” which ones have you gone to lunch with? Which ones have you exchanged private emails? Very few, I would assume…yet they are still your “friends.”

The worst thing of all about Facebook? There is no real possibility for self-expression. Sure, you can change your profile picture ad nauseaum. You can decide to use their new profile page layout but…can you change the page background? Can you rearrange the order in which things appear on your page? Can you do ANYTHING to get rid of the nauseatingly bland colors? The answer is NO!

Now take a look at some of the profiles on Myspace (see below). You can personalize the way it looks. You can have your profile page reflect YOUR interests. Admittedly, Myspace has some of the same issues as Facebook. You can’t differentiate friends from acquaintances and so on. (I’m tickled pink that Pink was one of my “Friends” on Myspace…however…we have yet to go out to lunch together to discuss the latest in politics or the music business.) But Myspace provides a lot of entertainment: video clips, music, games. And, unlike Facebook which is trying to be slick with its little advertising based on your precious personal information, on Myspace there is no doubt that there is advertising.

But let’s step back a moment. I want to make clear that I am not promoting Myspace over Facebook. Yet when comparing the former to the latter, it becomes obvious that Facebook could have had a more open architecture. But Myspace is certainly no panacea. The problem is that both Facebook and Myspace are, inherently, uninteresting. While Myspace offers the possibility of creativity, neither one compares to the creativity that we find in personal websites. Instead, our creativity is being reduced (emasculated? desiccated?) and shoehorned into the uninteresting software capabilities that underlie Facebook and Myspace. What we are doing is, not expecting (or asking) more of the software. Instead, we are altering our definitions of reality to conform to the software’s capabilities. We are narrowing our choices. We are narrowing our possibilities. By allowing the software to define what is a “friend” instead of allowing our REAL experience of friends dictate the standards that the software needs to meet, we are left with an empty definition of “friend.” What if, instead of lowering our standards of “friend” we instead demanded that the software meet OUR definition of friends? At the minimum, then, we would not be leaving snarky comments on each others walls. Instead we would have real-time interactive audio/video where friends appear at designated times and discuss whatever they want to discuss (or share music and so forth). Wouldn’t that be a more realistic digital simulation of what it means to have friends?