"they" are all leaving facebook:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/magazine/30FOB-medium-t.html?_r=1
i don't really agree with those issues. don't do ratings and quizzes, don't say anything you don't want the whole stupid world to know, and just share events without necessarily saying whether you are going or where you have been. i never feel like we're co-stalking or co-ignoring.
the people who are lurking never really posted much in the first place. we've found no one has the time or energy to write to people directly, to all the people they wish to care about. honestly, we meet so many people in real life that it's overwhelming to know who(m) to maintain ties with, which kind, at what intervals.
that's how i feel anyway.
as for over-marketing, unlike the sexy "girls" who try to hook up with one on myspace all the time, the predatory marketing here seems fairly tame and infrequent. sure, i have nearly 300 "friends" at the moment, but many of us have career interests in common and live or are connected to the same accessible geography. we even see each other in person unless we live too far apart.
i appreciate hearing about web sites my cousin finds about advertising trends. i like hearing about healthy lifestyle choices people are making. peer pressure can be electronic and positive. some of us are stuck at computer screens wrecking our eyes and tendons for some cause that is really all for the effect of making some money to stay alive well enough to enjoy each others' company.
so we might as well "see" each other online during the computer-hours of life and get a head start.
the way the article plugged for twitter and ignored myspace was interesting, wasn't it? the way it undermined most of its own arguments for why people are leaving facebook was a little dull. the way i'm on linkedin but never go there because it's so ugly makes me guilty of being a lurker too.
show me a social networking tool that requires no maintenance (ie: no need to be profitable in order to compensate someone to spend time working on it), and then we'll have something to discuss. people want to keep in touch. if they want it without advertising, they should get together and build that. is twitter like that?
(republished from Facebook notes, 9-2-09)
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3 comments:
I hadn't read that article; thanks for posting it. I also hadn't noticed that "they" were leaving in droves. I wonder if it's the "coolness" factor rearing its head--now that grandparents and great aunts and uncles are on FB, how cool is it for teens and college students? Once it's mainstream it's no longer hip, cool, dope, or whatever the term is these days.
the article seemed unbalanced. i would have preferred some commentary about why people stay in addition to the apparent flight. and as for the advertising, i rarely read. boring, boring. like the right side of yahoo mail--i know it's there; i just don't look.
i don't find twitter very interesting--maybe because i do the same things eight hours a day, five days a week. so my tweets aren't really worth posting. i haven't found anyone worth following that makes me want to get on all the time and see what he or she is up to. and i can't figure out how to tweet from my blackberry wannabe--the freeware i downloaded was apparently a trial only, crashed my system twice, and frankly isn't worth the stoplight time. fb is more reliable, imho.
and maybe that's precisely why it is apparently experiencing a backlash. it has become (gasp) part of the establishment.
was "invited" to be friends with a few people who drop by my site. that involved joining (i know, duh. but, really, i had no idea. my expectation was that i'd proffer an e-mail addy and that would suffice - the magic of facebook would auto-listserv me. or something...) consequently i now have four new friend who tag my "wall" with, mostly, ther tweets, which i also abstain from...
haven't written anything on it yet and open that closet door but once a month.
dunno - maybe if i had people far away who didn't write letters?
I admit I pretty much only use Twitter to put mini-posts on my blog since I have it doing a feed into my blog sidebar - so I can do little whines and groans and more personal stuff there that I try not to do (to varying degrees of success) in the main blog. Yikes to Myspace - one of my nieces has a page on there and I literally blushed when she showed me it. (Sure, factor in that she's 27 but in my head she's still 9; that notwithstanding, can you say "Raunch"?) sigh.
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