I wrote this document as an explanation to my friends as to why I'm not eager to invest my content in Facebook. If you're not really that interested in topics around communication media, privacy, and social interaction (I hope you are, they're enormous fun to talk to people about), I recommend you just read the Short Version and skip the rest.
A close and honest review shows that Facebook doesn't really add that much value to my life. Besides, now I have a blog that doesn't really add that much value to my life. But it's mine. ;-D
Stepping away from Facebook does put de facto communication barriers between me and my friends. I'm not so wild about that. But I think it's the prudent thing to do until the Social Networking silly season ends.
The internet is really all about publishing - making things public and available to other people. Internet concepts of Forums, Message Boards, Chat Rooms, etc. are all public venues. In some cases (such as e-mail) we can publish to a very limited audience. It's a useful way of thinking about the internet (better than as a series of tubes, anyway) when looking at what is possible and at what is offered by current services and platforms.
When we do stuff on the internet, we're always either publishing some sort of content or consuming it from someone else who is publishing. The old mantra of websites used to be, "Content is King" - that is, if you provide good stuff, the world will flock to your site and make you lots and lots of advertising dollars. Sites that have forums are offering us a place to publish commentary on issues and topics that we care particularly about. It's a little bit of a stretch to think of a forum flamewar (for example) as a publishing activity, but if you think about it, it does make sense. Actually, calling it a conversation is probably more of a stretch. We don't usually stand up in a crowded public place (a restaurant or library, for example) and hold an argument at the top of our lungs.
If it's acceptable to think of the internet as a publishing medium, it's worthwhile to look at a few classic situations which we're familiar with. Let's examine a few:
Talking to people is something we have done since birth. It's very intuitive for us (not necessarily easy or fun, though). When we sit down and chat with someone, it's relatively safe and secure. We have complete knowledge of our environment and of our audience's demographics (hey, it's Fred!). Most of the choices we make about what kind of information we release are not conciously or analytically made: we're just talking. Good times.
Most of the decisions we make are sub-concious and don't involve any real work on our part. There's a very intense (for lack of a better word) social interaction occuring - a continual flow of signals and information, both verbal and non-verbal. Once the coffee shop sit-down ends, there's no record of it, beyond the memories of you, Fred and the coffee-shop guy.
In person we establish trust with a high degree of precision and (usually) a high degree of accuracy. We know who to trust, with what, and when. Barring running into someone who is skillful at misdirecting trust (a con-man or a poseur or Machiavelli), we generally perform pretty well at making trust decisions among people who we meet in person. We have a wealth of information at our disposal for decision making (most of it happens intuitively) and a reasonable amount of practice - which means that we make better decisions.
Writing an e-mail isn't that much different than writing a letter. There is of course, the issue of immediate delivery, and the security issues which stem from the fact that the document is electronic rather than on paper. I would identify perhaps four major differences between an e-mail and a coffeeshop (or spoken conversation) when looking at how they serve as a publishing mechanism.
It's no surprise that we generally don't use e-mail for intense social activity. It's not at all a suitable medium for it. It's a much better medium for disseminating information that should be public (logistical information, newsletters, etc). It's a far superior medium for instant, low overhead communication and discussion. The fact that there is a permanent record of a conversation is neither good nor bad, but it does change how we approach communication. It allows us to look up things that people have said previously. It allows us to quote people verbatim and to republish with total accuracy what someone else has said.
The existance of a digital copy of a conversation should, in some situations, make us very uncomfortable. There are certain kinds of sensitive information that we don't necessarily *want* a permanent, easily copiable record of.
It should be noticed that we hardly *ever* establish any sort of trust based on an e-mail correspondence. This wasn't always the case, but in the early days (years, actually) of e-mail adoption people learned the hard way that *anyone* could send you e-mail, and that it wasn't a good idea to trust random e-mails which arrived in your inbox, regardless of the nice things that they said ;-) These days, when we write e-mail, we abandon any hope of using e-mail as a basis for establishing trust, and simply 'borrow' our pre-existing trust relationships, built by our reliable people skills.
Blogging is very similar to e-mail in important ways. It produces a permanent electronic record of content. It offers mechanisms of a similar quality for tracking friends and acquaintances. It shares the similiar ease of publishing.
However, blogging operates strictly in a fully public context. Blogs may restrict people from commenting, but content is fully public and discoverable. It is impossible to blog to a limited audience. When you blog, you blog to a fully public audience, and it's not your fault that most people just don't care what you're saying. Not caring is a very different thing from not having access to information.
Because blogging occurs in a public context, it's much easier to be aware of issues of trust and privacy. Blogging doesn't require strong trust relationships, because it's so impersonal. Blogging is also a passive form of communication. People may choose to be notified of new posts or information, but you're not active in pushing it upon them. A passive comunication model has some distinct advantages over an active one. While active communication such as e-mail (you push a message to them, you are active in your communication, and they are disturbed by it) is very good for logistics and getting things done, it doesn't scale up very well. A passive communication model scales very nicely, because you are no longer spamming people - you're just putting information out to be consumed by people who care.
Yes, Facebook is pretty shiny. I'm not immune to glitter and the thrill of publishing stuff worldwide. Who is? But is it really all that different from more traditional internet media?
What are the primary differences between Facebook (or other social networking platforms) and older communication mechanisms?
I've struggled at length to explain why I've had so much fun on Facebook. It took some thought to arrive at where Facebook was actually different from the kinds of internet services I'd used previously. The first real difference was that Facebook constructed a social graph of my friends (and their friends) which I could explore. Facebook made it very easy to find people (old friends, acquaintances). It's hard to express how much of a breath of fresh air this was, compared with the patchy, out of date and incomplete nature of my e-mail address book. Ironically, Facebook boot-straps it's social graph for new users by screen-scraping their e-mail address books (a nasty tactic that is probably against your web-mail service's terms of service, but everybody does it). Once constructed, a social graph is a very powerful tool in making communicating with people very easy.
I now have instant communication access to people who I've never had instant communication access to... Instead of sending out mass e-mails, "Do you have xxxxxx's address?" things are now very simple. The connectivity offered by Facebook is a new phenomenon to many people (it was to me) and the social graph is a beast that's not going to go away any time soon.
Facebook nicely integrates services together. It offers "poor man's" versions of traditional services. Messaging is like e-mail but nowhere near as powerful. (Most people never use the advanced features of their e-mail anyway). The wall is kind of like e-mail, kind of like a very slow IM conversation, without the need for both of you to be online. I'd describe it as non cluttering e-mail. Facebook also features limited versions of blogging and link sharing.
All of these services, however, are very well integrated together. More importantly, they are powered by the promise of limited publishing. More importantly still, they are powered by a near comprehensive social graph of people you care about and who care about you. You feel that you have the ability to share stuff with just the people you want to see stuff. This heightened feeling of privacy allows a much deeper level of social interaction. Sending stuff is a lot easier than e-mail or blogging. It's quick and painless.
Because it is built off of a passive publishing mechanism, Facebook is attractive to people. People have become royally annoyed by Appliciation spam precisely because it violates the passive premise. People want to be free to browse exactly what they want to browse, and not be annoyed with the task of filtering active content foisted upon them (can anyone say, e-mail?). E-mail doesn't fit the bill because it's not passive. Blogging doesn't fit the bill because you can't publish to a limited audience - it's fully public. This means that you are severely limited in the quality of social interaction you can establish. Publishing passively allows you to publish a much broader range of stuff to a wider potential audience.
Facebook blends passive publishing of nearly everything with the necessary active feedback mechanisms to make communication private, effortless, and fun. Facebook provides incredible variety in the kinds of things that are published. Videos, photos, events, groups, status updates, activities, friend and relationship information... Facebook has it all to be passively browsed, and commented on with a well place message or wall post. In comparison with blogging or e-mail, Facebook offers more information (not just text authored by a person) to serve as the basis of a social interaction.
Facebook makes all of this easy with a simple, clean interface, and a relatively unobtrusive ad system (which previously didn't exist at all).
The single largest beef I have is that Facebook tricks people into thinking that they're operating in a private context when they're actually not. If you know that you're involved in a private communication where you actually *are* (coffeeshop, e-mail to an extent) you're generally ok. If you know that you're involved in a public communication, you're also ok (blog). But if you think you're involved in private communication when you're not (and on Facebook, you're not), you're in trouble from a privacy perspective.
This isn't a Facebook issue - this is a general internet social networking issue. The risks of digitizing detailed social information are relatively unexplored. The problem is that people nearly always socialize in a private context, where there is no permanent record of it, and where they have near total control over who observes interaction. However, Facebook encourages private style activities in a public setting, which is dangerous. I think social networking will always be dangerous.
Even if Facebook provides near perfect and extremely fine grained privacy and access settings, they'll be mostly useless, because people will ignore them. This problem will never go away. It will never go away, because people are used to making subconcious social decisions which require *no* concious effort. When we socialize, we depend on a veritable mountain of intuitive and painless decisions which guide our social activity. If you try to model our social relationships and activities with any serious degree of accuracy, the result will be a model that is painfully complex, difficult to understand and still hideously incomplete.
The more accurate your privacy settings are, the more tedious they are to set and maintain. Are you really going to set fine-grained access settings for each one of your friends (I have just over 100 on Facebook)? Are you going to sit down on a monthly basis and adjust them according to friends you have argued with or fallen away from? Are you willing to try and explain to marginal friends why you've offended them by cutting them off?
Content checks in, it doesn't check out. Facebook has been called this by some pretty smart people and I tend to agree with them. E-mail and blog services (good ones, at least) allow you to export whatever content you create. Facebook locks in everything you write and post. Facebook makes some pretty outrageous claims to content in the Terms of Service. You can check in content, but you can't take it out. The best thing you can do is delete it. Since your role online is one of an independent publisher, using Facebook's services, this is a pretty unimpressive relationship. I'm voting with my feet.
Facebook has lost my trust. They've lost it by outrageously poor privacy settings. They've lost it by pulling shenanigans such as Beacon. Trust is a hard-won commodity.
Early adopters pay a hefty price. They bear all the risks and growing pains - they pay all the costs of rookie design mistakes. When it comes to social networking, I'm going to say, "No Thanks". Right now, the risks are poorly understood. The potentials for serious abuse are poorly understood. The technology behind the phenomenon is highly dynamic. Whatever the social networking platform of the future is, Facebook (in it's current form) isn't it.
No, not *you*. ME. I'm concerned about me and where Facebook fits in to my own personal activities. You'll have to perform your own cost-benefit analysis (yes, I'd previously dodged the term, but that's what this is). This section talks about how Facebook fits (or doesn't fit) with my normal activities and socialization.
The problem (if it is a problem) that I run into is that most of my internet needs are met by the more traditional (although it feels wrong to use this word in the context of something internet) services. Knowing everything my friends are doing is a new experience, but I'm not sure if it's a necessarily positive one. Facebook exposes corners of people's lives that I (quite happily) didn't know before. Sometimes ignorance is bliss. The old ways are better; we never had these problems before.
Personally, I like to talk to people. I enjoy focused conversation that helps me know and understand someone. This kind of interaction is more suited to a blog or a detailed e-mail conversation than it is to Facebook. It's best suited to a face to face conversation (although this is impossible to arrange with some of my friends. On Facebook, I never installed any of the apps or played any of the coffee games. I wasn't very active.
The connectivity provided by Facebook is quite valuable. The social graph service it provides, the person finding ability and the associated sense of closeness were all welcome changes from my previous internet experience. Now that my Social Graph is nearly fully constructed, however, I can maintain a Facebook account stub and take advantage of Facebook's social graph features.
I've wanted my own website and blog for a long time. I finally bit the bullet and set up the Happy Moron; I think it scratchs my itch for passive publishing and feedback.
Being inactive on Facebook will disconnect me from people. Facebook's popularity means that it has become something of a de-facto standard for sharing information, event invitations, etc. By moving published content to a separate blog I've effectively set up a convenience barrier for people who want to contact me. I'm ok with this, largely because
Basically, not using Facebook will mean that I'll have to work harder to communicate with people and vice-versa. That doesn't really bother me, because there's value in the effort. Yes, I'm a jerk. I'm forcing you to write an e-mail in order to talk to me. I don't care (hey, I'm a jerk!)
I'll use Facebook for the social graph and the event information. For everything else, I'll pass.
My Facebook profile will be a stub - no photos, wall, profile information, etc. I'm not convinced that people are able to behave responsibly in the privacy context that Facebook fosters. I feel that some serious early adoption pains will be felt in the social networking world, and I'm willing to wait them out on the edge.
Eventually things will settle down. Some form of Social Networking will probably play a role in the social environment of the future. People matter; people have always mattered, and everything that we do stems from that. Logistics and support will always remain simply that, no matter how shiny or instantaneous they are. I don't have any pangs of conscience about evaluating shiny tools to find out how much actual value they have. Even if they're shiny. Facebook doesn't add much to traditional services; I can live without it.
I don't trust the platform, I don't trust the model, and I don't see how it has ever made my life better in any way. Apart from allowing me to write long, tedious and egotistical essays.