Facebook launched in 2004 and was originally only for use by students of Harvard University in the United States. It subsequently expanded to be open to the public and is, by most accounts, a storming success. According to data from Fastcompany.com Facebook has nearly 20 million active users and has over 30 billion page views per month. It is the biggest photosharing site on the Internet. Mark Zuckerberg the creator of Facebook has become a wealthy man off the back of the millions of members.
Never being one afraid of a little controversy I surely fly in the face of Web 2.0 convention when I say I hate Facebook. Why? I (hopefully) hear you ask.
1. Exclusivity
I know a lot of people who use Facebook. A lot of these people use Facebook to post their photographs. Unless I am a member of Facebook I can’t view them. The web is jam packed with web sites (Flickr and Picasa to name two) that are designed to share photos and a membership isn’t required. I see the requirement that I join Facebook to view my friends photos be completely unreasonable.
2. Friends
My friends are the people I spend time with. I don’t want to be “friends” with thousands of people. Nor do I want to keep turning down offers of friendship by people I don’t know and don’t want to know.
I understand that one of the ideas behind Facebook is to reunite old friends from school, college, university, work etc. If I was friends with these people wouldn’t I still be friends with them. Why would I want to start some sort of friendship with people who I didn’t particularly like back then and have only one thing in common with?
3. Too much information
I don’t want my life available to just anyone. Sure I have a blog but I control what information appears here and how it comes out. The blog is the mouth piece for my ideas. It isn’t about me so much about what I think. Facebook presents you to the world. Sure you can control how much information is available publicly but isn’t that removing the whole point of the site? Fortunately (boringly) I don’t have many (any?) skeletons in my closet but would you want to make it that easy for people to stalk follow you?
Also, who owns the information on there? What are they doing with it? What agencies government or business are able to access that? Call me paranoid but I think that our governments know too much about us already.
How secure is this information anyway? If it can be built, it can be hacked and what warranties does Facebook offer that if my information is used by a hacker?
4. It’s about the money, stoopid
Facebook as a thing is worthless. The revenue model is non-existent. Basically the company is sitting on an advertising market. Leveraging that, such as in the case of Beacon, is going to upset people. People don’t like ads but will tolerate some of them. Like a lot of Web 2.0 Facebook relies on advertising revenue. Zuckerberg and co. also realise that if they were to start charging a fee for Facebook people would leave in droves.
5. Microsoft
Microsoft announced on October 24, 2007 that it purchased a 1.6% share of Facebook for US$246 million. Aside from overvaluing Facebook at US$15 billion (revenue stream?) and proving that Web 2.0 is a bubble like Web 1.0 I want to limit my association with the bloated behemoth that is Microsoft.
6. Think different
When everybody is walking one way. I like to go the other. People tell me “Everyone is on Facebook”. Strikes me as a good reason not to be. I like Twitter, for example, which requires little of me and is obscure enough to keep most dickheads out. Facebook is passé.
So I’ll leave Facebook to the rest of Generation X and Y. I like generation U much better.
