I got my Facebook account in 2005 when I was a college freshman. At first it was amazing, then they opened it up to high schoolers which was okay, but not really what I wanted from Facebook. Then they added things like the Friend Feed which bombarded you with "Your friend [name you know] just added [someone you don't know or care about}." Which was okay, but then they opened the gates and suddenly all your coworkers and anyone you've ever talked to for more than 3 minutes is now adding you.
I think for me, the longer I've had my Facebook, the less useful it has gotten and the less time I've actually spent on it. It's like talking in a room with everyone you've ever met listening in. It's unnatural. I think Facebook's market will eventually fragment-- LinkedIn being the first chink in FB's armor, I imagine the next will be a college exclusive network like how Facebook got started.
I had the exact same experience as well, and then I discovered the "hide" button. I developed some rules and then spent about 20 minutes every day for a week hiding people who didn't fall within those. Examples of my rules were:
1) If I don't remember who you are, hide.
2) If I knew you in elementary/middle/high school/college and I don't think I'll ever see or speak to you again, hide. (This would cover people who don't share any of my interests, etc).
3) If you spam my newsfeed with "Farmville/Which Twilight character are you/I have a secret to tell you" sort of apps, hide.
4) If we have nothing in common, and I don't think anything you're going to say in the future is going to be interesting/have a real impact on me, hide.
There may be one or two more, but those were the core ones. After applying these rules, I found Facebook was SO much nicer and more fun to use, and there was none of the social stigma of "unfriending" people.
The hide is useful, but the unnatural part is the "everyone you ever met listening". The great thing about Facebook when I started was it was like blogs or photo sharing, except that everyone was a trusted, real-life friend. Facebook was like sharing photos, jokes, and stories with your circle of friends.
Now that everyone and (and every company) are on facebook, I'm more comfortable back on a blog, where there isn't the illusion of anything but talking to the internet.
You can still do that now. You just need to make groups of your different friend groups (family, real life friends, high school friends, work friends, etc) and share what you want with those groups only, depending on what it is.
This takes way too much work. As someone who was using Facebook for several years before friend-groups, it was going to be an unreasonable time-sink to sort all those people after the fact.
Someone using facebook AFTER the were introduced definitely should use them.
No, not just people that aren't your friends. If I was your friend and found out you spent time 'fine-tuning your facebook friends list', I would think you were a petty time-waster.
Well, speak for yourself. I, and many of my Facebook friends, have gone on deleting purges before and I've never seen that reaction. The main fear seems to be upsetting the acquaintances that you unfriend.
If you're going to spend time on Facebook at all, it's worth the time every now and then to make the time better spent. They even have a page called "edit friends" where you can just go down your friends list ticking the X button to unfriend them.
facebook gets much better when you unfriend lots of people. fred wilson has his "only bar mitzvah" rule and only has ~80 friends. i still have around 600 down from almost 1000.
Same with Twitter and reducing how many people you follow. I do think with Facebook there is some social pressure to have many friends, especially for younger people.
|I developed some rules and then spent about 20 minutes every day for a week hiding people who didn't fall within those.
Oh believe me, I used the hide feature ASAP. But your quote above is my point, I shouldn't have to spend 2+ hours customizing Facebook. Everything should have been opt-in to begin with.
That's why I have friends lists. Just some weeks ago some girl I didn't know that happened to be the designated driver of the group of friends I was with on the new years eve sent me a friend request on facebook.
I don't want to be rude and accepted it, but she went to my list of people that I don't consider friends, but people that at some point in my life I had some interaction that as now ceased. That list doesn't have access to my photos, only some personal information and the majority of my status updates are invisible to them unless I explicitly set otherwise.
So yeah, they're my fake friends. If your friends list is already big setting this up and checking if there are no backdoors into your information will be painful, but I think it pays off. I did it mostly because I didn't want to bring the family and friends sides of my life together in a single website, with all the potential problems that could come from that, but I ended up creating more than just the friends and family lists.
Funny thing, right now Facebook privacy is more about protecting your information from your "friends" than from the outside world.
I have the exact same feeling about Facebook. I was appalled when they originally let high school students into the gates. The exclusivity was what made it so cool to be a part of. However, I never felt that it has become less useful, it just took a second to adapt to the new environment that it periodically throws at you. Perhaps if you do the same (take advantage of group privacy settings) you can weed out the junk and use it as it used to be?
Do you really think LinkedIn is a chink in Facebook's armor? I question how many people regularly use LinkedIn as opposed to those who just update when their job title changes. All Facebook needs is for an intern of theirs to add a couple more features around the career section of people's profiles and LinkedIn is toast.
The transaction is very clear for linkedin, not so much for facebook.
LinkedIn gives recruiters in various companies and consulting industries a way to find passive candidates that they will not be able to find on a job board like dice, mosnter, career builder, etc.
Passive candidates are ones that are not really looking, they have the skills that the recruiter is looking for, but candidate needs to be convinced to take another job.Passive recruting tools is a huge need right now, especially for areas and industries with labor and talent shortages, ie high level tech jobs that is being talked about now.
So think of how large websites like career builder, monster, the ladders, etc are.They for the most part offer actively looking candidates. Linkedin is the only player offering a database of passive candidates that you can get in contact with, build a relationship with and track.
LinkedIn is in control of a segment of a very large market, with a very definsible competitive advantage. They won't be a game changer or the next google, but they will be positioned to make a lot of money in the future. LinkedIn provides a legitimate solution to a legitmate demand and the demand is huge.
Also, a lot of the high level tech people i've spoken to do want to keep work and personal life seperate or keep facebook life and linkedin seperate.
I'd venture to guess that nearly all LinkedIn users are on Facebook, but I don't think the opposite is true. Along with that the information recorded under both sites overlaps quite a bit. At that point it's just a matter of how and to who you show your information on Facebook. I don't think Facebook is the least bit worried about LinkedIn.
Hours spend doing social networking things on sites other than Facebook cost Facebook money and relevance. Also, plenty of "important" people avoid Facebook like the plague because it's a time sink, so there is plenty of pull in the other direction.
Linkedin does a very good job of keeping me engaged.
When any of my contacts update their info, it sends me a weekly email. I like that. (And when I click on a link in the email, the web page HIGHLIGHTS the changed sections. I love that.)
The interactions on Linkedin, although fewer in number are of higher value.
And they charge to contact people outside your network. I think this is fair and lucrative to them. This seems like a steady source of income.
All in all, I'm impressed with Linkedin. They've avoided becoming sleazebags and managed to remain useful.
Facebook Purity can go a long way to helping with this sort of stuff too. It started life as a Greasemonkey addon (and still is available in that format) but is now also a native FF addon and Chrome Extn.
Same situation for me, which is why I much prefer to use Twitter these days. It's considered downright rude to defriend someone on Facebook, but on Twitter, you really only have to pay attention to the people you care about. It feels a lot more "opt-in" than Facebook in this way.
Also, I really don't care about people's virtual mafia's and pictures where everyone is obscenely drunk.
the more features they add to facebook, the more noise it seems to generate, and the more the signal gets lost. the problem is the noise is put there by facebook to try and keep people glued to the site, because the more updates you need to chew through before you get to the interesting content the more time you spend on the site, and the more time you spend on the site, the more dollars they can get for advertising. anyway the only way to get rid of all the noise is to use third party filtering, my weapon of choice is FB Purity its a browser extension available for all the major browsers it gives you options to filter out the noiser functions and components of Facebook, and also gives you a word or phrase filter, so you can specify the textual content that you wish to hide from the steram. Its a great add-on, highly recommended for people that want to tame their noisy news feeds: You can get it here: http://www.fbpurity.com
> Which was okay, but then they opened the gates and suddenly all your coworkers and anyone you've ever talked to for more than 3 minutes is now adding you.
That's exactly what I hate about FB. These days, I just keep my profile so that people can contact me, but never log in to.
I think for me, the longer I've had my Facebook, the less useful it has gotten and the less time I've actually spent on it. It's like talking in a room with everyone you've ever met listening in. It's unnatural. I think Facebook's market will eventually fragment-- LinkedIn being the first chink in FB's armor, I imagine the next will be a college exclusive network like how Facebook got started.