If it’s not so evident from the past few posts, I’ve fallen off of the Facebook
bandwagon. Don’t take it the wrong way, I think they are still brilliant,
pioneers and thought leaders, but the foxes are unfortunately in the hen house.
In the beginning, I connected with friends and acquaintances, shared photos and
random flotsam from the web, and Facebook was great about letting me know what
people were up to. Now that my group of ‘friends’ has grown, and my friends have
added their own applications, the updates have gotten fairly noisy.
“Joe Smith has been SuperPokin’! Joe has dropped knowledge on Shirley.
Throw firecrackers at, give rice cake to, or throw Manning to Joe! ... OR
SuperPoke back!”
or
“Dave Jones challenged your movie knowledge on a quiz called "Name of the brands
from logos.". Dave's score was 100%. Can you beat Dave's score? >>”
How do I benefit from these notifications? I don’t. They do nothing but advertise the applications, trying to borrow credibility from their association with my friends. They are quickly becoming a disincentive to adoption- an annoyance that not only makes me not want to install the application, but to avoid Facebook altogether.
So what’s really going on here? The “mini feed” which Facebook essentially invented, is now being diluted and polluted (sounds like a soundbyte from Johnnie Cochran). Diluted because the meme is being adopted by every other social network and application, and polluted with unnecessary tidbits that reduce the utility of the feed. I’m hoping Facebook will respond appropriately and provide some sort of spam filter on the mini-feed, or figure some way to reduce the chatter…
For now, I’m moving to twitter.
UPDATE: Looks like Facebook is listening...
