Facebook: It Will Pass (or The Web is Not Only 3b5998)

Driving home late last night I was listening to a radio program about whether there is such a thing as the Zeitgeist and how we recognise it.
This made me think about Facebook and the current obsessive coverage that the site gets from the blogosphere and whether we really are seeing something that will grow to become a key part of the internet, or whether it's just a case of zeitgeist mania.
 Following the launch of the Facebook f8 platform, discussion of MySpace (the previous zeitgeist candidate) has dropped to zero (does it still exist, has anyone been over to look recently, maybe we should send a searchparty out just in case) and Facebook has become the dominant theme. Far reaching claims have been made for the power, beauty and all consuming glory of Facebook, including that it's become the operating system of the internet, that it's the new Google and that it will be bought for $6bn by Microsoft. I'm not going to argue about it's potential value, anything that claims our attention and obsession the way Facebook has no doubt has a huge value. But I'm interested in the value to you and me, to the millions of individual users. I love hanging out on Facebook, but I'm not sure I've found out what it does yet. And it seems the more I look, the less I find. I'm beginning to get the feeling that Facebook is only fun for tracking the now, the mememe moment. It's great to see all your friends arrive and add friends and add applications and ... then?

As Facebook continues its march to total world domination, for the record I'd like to articulate why I don't think it's going to happen. It's a zeitgeisty thing - we're all talking about Facebook so we're all talking about Facebook. But can Facebook sustain our interest over the next year?

The Web is something rich and strange and Facebook not something rich and strange.
Back in 1988 before the Web arrived we used to play a lot of image based games around the internet, passing encoded images back and forth and basically working hard to make some sense of this dark network where
no-one could see anyone else. From that point on for me the internet and the web have been a rich and strange playground where each new person, each new application, each new network, added something
unknowable to the sum total of where we worked and played. Facebook doesn't really do any of that. It's a nice tidy 'burb where everyone has more or less the same house, same garden, same car, same attitude.
Sure, we can all add friends and join networks and add applications, but it's always clear that there is no curtain behind which strange things might lurk. Facebook is the uber controlled environment - useful and wanted by many, but not pregnant with potential.

There are only so many new people
Facebook is experiencing a huge wave of migration. This is held up as proof of the genius of Zuckerberg, and indeed in many ways they have played a blinder. From a closed College based network, they have taken a gamble to open up to anyone and everyone and seen it play off bigtime. The viral nature of Facebook is supreme, with member get member raised to a new artform. I've read dozens of articles about how all of someone's friends have arrived in Facebook in the very recent past, usually in a great splurge of arrivals as a single outrider reports back to the group that, yup, it looks safe in here and there are lush pastures for the cattle. Then everyone else takes up residence, and as they overlap with other social groups, the process repeats itself. There is something engaging and exciting about arriving in an easy to understand social network, with tools to explore and people to Poke (ooh, the underlying sexual thrill of it all, it reminds me of my first disco, I didn't know what that was all about either, but by god it turned me on). Face it, when someone invites you to join Facebook and be their friend, its a cheap thrill to sign up and be that friend.

Call that a network?
I live in Brighton & Hove, East Sussex, UK. So for some reason that's my network. It has 54,384 members who, I guess, live in Brighton and Hove. The total population of Brighton is 247,820, which means my network contains approximately one sixth of the entire population of this town. There are only 117032 15 to 44 year olds, which means that almost 50% of them are members of my local network. Huh? I mean, this is some kind of groovy town, but I find that rather unlikely.
More to the point, what the hell am I supposed to do with a network that includes every single sentient being between the ages of fifteen and forty-five in my town? I see I can go to a costume making event at 2pm or *GUILDFORD MONDAY NITE* at 7pm (that's Guildford, not Brighton, but hey). Popular in Brighton and Hove includes the facebook wide food fight and Brighton's Largest Water Fight. The Discussion Board has 164 discussion topics, starting with 'How Many Ways To Say I Love You?', but frankly life's too short. And then there's The Wall. 754 posts starting with a bit of spam from Ben Williams.
To say the will to live deserted me at this point would be an exaggeration, but to say the will to live in Brighton and Hove fled my feeble frame just about sums it up. Why am I in this network? I am a sophisticated online denizen, I partake of and participate in hundreds of online societies and fora of all kinds. Some are good, some are bad, some are essential to life. But none are as depressingly pointless as this all consuming Brighton and Hove Network.
And yes, I know I can change my regional network, but what exactly would be the point of that? I quite like seeing my local friends' faces peering out at me from the sidebar - but that's not quite enough to make it worthwhile.
I guess this approach worked quite well when it was a college based network, but imagine what it is like to be a London or Shanghai network member - they've elevated inanity to a whole new level.

Give me my tools back
I'm used to some level of sophistication in my toolset. I don't mind using your online tools, after all, it's your community. But ffs, all I can do in my Groups is write on the wall? And then you can write on the same wall back to me. I can upload photos? Every time someone does something, I get sent an email without the content. There just are no sophisticated tools in Facebook - everything is like a shallow version of what we're used to on the outside. For sure, the apps have started to put some depth back into the system, but it's hard to imagine that we'll en masse abandon our email and our IM and our other contact and memory tools and use the stubs that Facebook offers. Not for a while anyway, we'll get disillusioned and wonder off as our attention drifts.

Did you know there are other colours?
I know this will sound very shallow and pathetic, but I really can't imagine living with 3b5998 only for the rest of my life. As someone who was working with the web when there was not even any right align, let alone fancy layouts or the CSS wonders we see today, it pains me to have to use such a limited interface. With respect, it is the sort of interface that the East German government would have commissioned for their citizen network if they had lived to see in the true glory of the web. Where I come from we call this colour Navy Blue and with good reason, children grow up to hate it. Allied to the fixed layout, 3b5998 is the antithesis of everything that design stands for and everything that the web has taught us - that we are individuals and that we make and remake our environment to work with our needs and desires. Even Google, that great interface reducer, has relented and offered multiple funky interfaces to their start pages. So what's with the fascist control freakery? Don't you trust me to change things the way I like em? think I might, like, go mad with funky colours? So what, that's my freedom.

All this is not to say that I don't enjoy Facebook - it's been a blast. I've got on with it so much better than I ever did with MySpace. It's calm and clean and pleasant. It's just that, after a while, I start to wonder where all the there is. What can I actually do with this stuff, apart from add my voice to a list of comments on a wall and show off my nous by adding new apps, knowing that all my mates will see me adding it. Then I can have a little thrill when I notice them in return joining my Groups or adding my apps. See, it's a bit ego driven, but after the thrill comes not very much at all. So here's to a long life for Facebook. Facebook has become the zeitgeist for a few months. But our attention will wander. It's not Google. It won't change our lives. It won't become the centre of all we do online, adding a new layer of amazement. Google did that. Facebook is just another thing to play with.

Comments

[Ian Delaney]

Good reminder, Ivan, of some clear lessons from history.

A couple of things:

It wasn't really made for the 'be-all-and-end-all' social network it is often heralded to be. It was built for groups of college students to "hook up" (in the parlance). I'd argue that's it's great for that sort of scenario.

The widgets thing seems to me to be a bit of red herring. Every day we all see @X,Y, Z" installed "widget1" and the next day we see that they've uninstalled them again. I think there's still a big learning curve ahead on widgets. How to make them properly useful so that they add to the network's features rather than occlude them.

[Will McInnes]

The single best post on Facebook yet. Classic Pope.

[Will McInnes]

The single best post on Facebook yet. Classic Pope.

[Kelly]

Nice post! You have said it very well. Keep going.

[Ivan]

@Dennis, I didn't say the design sucked. I wanted to point out that all of Facebook is shallow and can't possibly be the social operating system when there's a rich and strange internet out there. Sure, in the manner of AOL things can be popular in transition, but that doesn't mean we have to all drink the Kool Aid every time. I am utterly convinced that FB will burn through it's fifteen minutes of fame and go back to being one of the others, just as both MySpace and Netvibes have among the chattering clases in the last few months.
Apart from that, I'm not sure what you're trying to say? Sure UI isn't everything, nothing is everything.

[Dennis Howlett]

There's nothing new here. Sorry. I think the naysayers miss the whole frickin' point. First, when will tech people learn - we're in the fashion trade. Get that and everything else follows. This is a v 1.0 service. It has huge business potential but is unlikely to be the intranet portal that business will favour. Doesn't mean the metaphor is poor. Just that it's not that well executed.

Ivan says design is sucking. So does Twitter but despite the best efforts of Pownce and Jaiku, Twitter is the rocking streamed IM thingy many people love to use. UI isn't everything. Not by a long way.

But then I've just read Plaxo is coming out with a FB killer next week. So...another week, another cool digital T-shirt to wear.

[Paul Murphy]

Very well said, Ivan.
P x

[Paul Murphy]

Very well said, Ivan.
P x

[lawrence]

Just a fantastic post.