I love Facebook. If you’re on my friends list, you know I use the heck out of it. I post links to things I find interesting 5-10 times daily — indeed, things that are fully-awesome — all in the hope of building a list of wonderful things that may entertain and amuse a few of my friends as they stumble along their way.
But, I didn’t always love Facebook. There was a time, many moons ago, when the thought of sharing life stories and whatsits, reconnecting with pre-school crushes, dealing with “pokes” and likes was downright repulsive. I signed up for an account early and deleted it after only a few weeks.
I’ve been back in the Facebook fold for a few years now, and by all rights, I’m what you could call a “heavy user.” Today, I have over 600 friends and manage a half a dozen Facebook fan pages for various projects and clients, and manage dozens of interactions each day with old friends and new. And this morning, two of my closest friends looked me square in the eye and told me they were planning on closing their Facebook accounts.
* stunned silence *
And so, I thought it appropriate to share my own thoughts on the Facebook frustration and maybe, just maybe, build something of a case for the importance of Facebook to emerging communication patterns in social groups, or, “Why Facebook doesn’t actually suck, and why should should not quit after all — in parts.”
1. You are not the problem. Farmville is the problem.
The economic model that sustains Facebook contains two important features. First, advertising. The wealth of information that Facebook harvests on all of us is based on our own profiles; which bands we like, which movies we love to quote, when our birthdays are and where we live — it’s all there for Facebook to eat up, digest, and regurgitate in the form of tasty advertisements that appear on our home pages. The concept has a pretty bow on it: thanks to all this information that Facebook has about us, the ads we see are hopefully better targeted to us and our interests. It may seem a touch Orwellian to imagine all this data crunching going on about us in the back rooms of Facebook, but the net result is twofold: smarter and better targeted ads for consumers, and cheaper ad buys for businesses. The same thing is going on right now on Google, Bing, Yahoo!, you name it. By in large, it’s a good thing.
The second part of the Facebook economic model is the application space, and this seems to be where I hear a lot of folks loosing steam when it comes to Facebook. “All my friends are just playing stupid games. The whole thing is so impersonal. My wall is cluttered with Mafia Farm requests…” And so on.
True and true. The application development space on Facebook serves a special place for running the business, and providing a continuous revenue scape for this free service we use, but the requests and wall posts can certainly get annoying.
Pete’s Take on Problem 1: Hide and Seek
First, look at the ads. Just glance at them. If one of them makes sense for you, click on it. This way, you’re taking a few seconds of your time online to support the economic engine that drives Facebook.
Second, hide stupid stuff. When you hover your mouse over each post on your main newsfeed, a little button appears in the top-left margin of each post that says “Hide.” Do that. For every Farmville request and Zombie attack and Mafia job request, you’ll be able to remove that content from your wall. It’ll even give you a choice: if Dave sends you a Mafia job request, you can choose to hide all posts from the Mafia Wars game, or all posts from Dave all together. That is, if you don’t like Dave all that much. You gotta have choices…
It won’t be long before you find that you are curating a perfectly clean newsfeed that has only the information from your friends, colleagues, fan pages, and groups that you want to follow. In itself, this has the power to completely change your Facebook experience, freeing you from that sinking, suffocating feeling that comes from a wall full of nonsense.
Coming up … Part 2. Facebook Lists: they make you pretty and smart!